Posted: December 1st, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Marketing, Tips, Tricks, How-To's & Top 10's | Tags: burnout, customer service, overload | 3 Comments »
You know you’ve levelled up when you suddenly grasp an adage.
“Social media doesn’t scale,” they say.
That means “the more attention you pay to social media, the more social media demands your attention.” Growing an audience means there’s an audience there to serve.
I'm running so many social media accounts, when my phone buzzes my Pavlovian response is to projectile vomit :/ Thought it was just me. RT @ running so many social media accounts, when phone buzzes Pavlovian response is to projectile vomit @ I feel "better" knowing at least 1 other person is barfing on their phones ;) Tks for the cheerup. Get it? It’s what he does. Michael‘s Pavlovian response to someone suffering* on Twitter is to give them good “customer service”.
We’re like shoe salesmen that assure you the leather will stretch in the width (though not in the length. But you know that).
*Don’t call Kids Help Phone. It’s just been a long (but awesome) week or two. I’m in the middle of a book, which is a pretty epic project as I’m sure you know/can guess.
Posted: November 30th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Brand Journalism, Social Media for Nonprofits | Tags: celebrity, Handcraft Creative, livetweeting, Tactic Intertactive, United Way of Winnipeg, Will Arnett | 2 Comments »
Working with United Way of Winnipeg, I get to meet a lot of amazing people. The most famous, kind and tall, for sure, was Will Arnett.
Here’s a bit of the experience.
Oh hey, Will Arnett is here. Like, right here. Insert the shaking of ice-cold hockey-rinky hands. Will very gracious & down to earth. Plays sledge hockey with the Sledgehammers.
Tactica and Handcraft shoot a PSA for United Way with Will & the kids.
Will Arnett just said "social media". Tee hee. 
Dudes pictured: Ray, Will, Kevin & Ian. Photo by Doug Little, who’s adorable.
Historical background: Will’s grandpa, William Palk, was Winnipeg’s first United Way Campaign Chair (the person responsible for raising all the money for our city every year). Will donated Jets tickets to United Way to distribute to deserving kids, carrying on his grandpa’s work here.
And the livetweeting part? The Trendsmap has spoken:
Posted: November 26th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Tips, Tricks, How-To's & Top 10's, Winnipeg | 1 Comment »
Did I just spot @ on @ campus?! Here’s a shot by Winnipeg creative chickie k*sara, embellished to detail how incredibly fascinating it is to see me give a talk. I look like I’m contributing something riveting, no?
And that hand gesture. What is going on?
Thanks Kenton Larsen, super cool teacher I never had, and great Peg bloggers James Hope Howard, Liz Hover, Alyson Shane & Shelley Cook for the coffee & the laughs. And the students for showing up.
Posted: November 23rd, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Advertising, Branding & Retail | Tags: copywriting, Method | Comments Off
Method Kitchen Lemongrass. Sounds refreshing, eh? Check out the crisp copywriting on the hang tag.
The stink? That is straight. Up.
In French they take les smells mauvaises even more seriously. They’re going to occupy that stink.
Posted: November 21st, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Brand Journalism, Interactive Marketing | Tags: balance, Google, newsjacking, search | 3 Comments »
More proof that David Meerman Scott’s newsjacking approach works just fine: my moral quandry over newsjacking has been the #3 & #11 Google result for “newsjacking” for 2 days. Feels a little keyword-stuffy, but the unintended effect is that I brought the ethical question up to the top of search, hopefully giving marketers pause to make sure they’re not being evil. 
I’m sure there’s another name for this tactic already (like “writing blog posts”), but it’d be a good way for brands to bury negative content about themselves on Google.
Ooh, I wonder if I have Klout in “newsjacking” now‽
Posted: November 19th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Brand Journalism, Interactive Marketing | Tags: black hat, ethics, journalism, media, newsjacking, PR | 47 Comments »
Newsjacking: a PR/marketing practice wherein a brand creates content around a current news story to “inject their ideas,” with the intention that reporters will find it by Googling keywords/searching hashtags & include it to flesh out their articles or present a fresh angle.
Black hat: achieving goals in an unethical or deceptive manner. For the purpose of this discussion, we’ll define it as “an ethical frowny face“.
I have no idea how PR people did their jobs before the internet, but nowadays all smart marketers newsjack a little.
We stuff craft headlines with current keywords. We comment on trending topics and hashtag our thoughts so they make it into the Main Stream. We raffle off tickets to our big deal sports franchise and run ads with our city’s celebrities, because they’re hot & they get people’s attention.
Newsjacking proper, as very recently coined in David Meerman Scott‘s new booklet Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story & Get Tons of Media Coverage, makes the riding-popular-coattails concept overt: when news breaks that you can connect your brand to, do it. Fast. Use search—journalist’s search—to get earned media.
For PR folks, it means no longer offering their clients to the media for comment, but preparing that comment immediately, garnishing it with a topical linkbait headline & letting Google bring the media to them. It’s earned media predicated on reporter laziness/desperation.
Does newsjacking feel a little too black hat to you? @ Newsjacking is not black hat. You're reacting to the name, not the practice. I’ve newsjacked.
I totally admit it, and it works. When Travel Manitoba released the ‘Manitoba Time’ slogan, I whipped up a visual reaction of a product: iPhone & desktop wallpapers. I even wrote an SEO-supercharged bald-faced lie as a headline, with a little asterisk to deflect culpability (I can do that; I’m not the media).
Just like David Scott said they would, a journalist jumped on the content & blogged about it. My site saw many a hit. Earned media crowned my work “clever” and “fun” (it totally is).
And this sort of newsjacking—cultural commentary, contributing to and expanding on a meme, idea or event—seems valid. The creator gives something back to the conversation.
But are we comfy with our news being padded with product placement?
I avoid tabloid journalism because bias makes me angry. I believe anything wearing the badge of ‘news’ is honour-bound to be fair, because people who aren’t educated enough to see through spin will take opinion as fact. And they’ll have few defences against subtle advertising.
@ I'm reacting (naively, I'm sure) to the idea that our news contains product placements. I know news and PR have a long relationship (but not enough about that relationship to write something glibly sarcastic. Put that in for me, willya?). The PR folks I’ve invited to comment have been rolling their eyes since the (coveted) second paragraph. “Erica,” they say gently, patting me on the head like a small, slow child, “things are the same as they ever were, just faster.”
It’s probably naive to think otherwise. I’ve been the subject of news articles and understand how crafted the images and quotes that go with them are. I know you need humans to make a good story.
So I ask my reporter friends to read between the attractively-spaced lines when you Google for a story. I know you need good stuff to get more eyeballs on your stories < sites < ads. But don’t get jacked.
I discovered David & his Newsjacking ebook on the Marketing Over Coffee podcast. Uneasy, I almost turned it off, but I’m glad I didn’t.
Posted: November 18th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Advertising, Branding & Retail | Tags: Ayn Rand, Benetton, John Galt, Lululemon, Moleskine, Parlour Coffee, values | 3 Comments »
Lululemon is a premium price point yoga supply company. They’re catching some public relations heat right now for decorating their retail bags with a catchphrase from Ayn Rand—a self described “radical for capitalism”—and her 1957 book Atlas Shrugged. Customers used to the brand’s “friends are more important than money” message are put off by the Rand reference.
Lulu’s blog offers an explanation for co-opting a capitalist slogan that the Globe and Mail counters.
“A Rand expert says the blog post displays a misreading of the author’s philosophy, known as objectivism.”
We can make the debate over the compatibility of Ayn Rand’s philosophy and Lululemon’s corporate values quite simple.
Lululemon’s stated values are in direct opposition to the philosophy of Objectivism and the symbolism of the John Galt bag.
No doubt founder Chip Wilson was influenced by Rand’s novel, which he read as a young man. He’s the 651st richest man in the world, valued at $1.9 billion by Forbes in March 2011. You don’t make that list without a profound commitment to capitalism.
While the John Galt bag certainly espouses Wilson’s personal ethos, it’s at odds with the one his company manifesto projects. The Lululemon blog can be read as a disingenuous attempt to explain away this misbranding, and they’ve alienated the chunk of their core consumer perceptive enough to note the discord.
If the bag’s purpose is just to “make people think”, it’s making people think about the wrong thing. When you’re hawking $100 yoga pants, it isn’t tasteful to call attention to capitalism.
Brand communications—whether advertising, social media or printed collateral—have to demonstrate at their core the values with which their customer wants to be associated.
That’s called branding.
Moleskine missed the mark with their recent spec design logo contest by failing to promote their customer’s values. Benetton stays on brand with its latest campaign, reinforcing a decades-old discussion about diversity.
And local coffee shop Parlour Coffee spoke their values in yesterday’s rebuff of Winnipeg’s transit hike, gaining them a top spot on local Twitter trends and firmly establishing their brand’s voice.
Wpg City councillors who voted for the public transit fare hike must pay $0.25 premium on all drinks purchased at Parlour Coffee. Sorry. [A nice followup would be offering 25¢ off their next coffee for the supporters who demonstrated their resonance with Parlour's values by retweeting the message for them.]
Posted: November 16th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Winnipeg | Tags: f-bomb, hilarious, MP, Pat Martin, Twitter | 2 Comments »
My friend Alyson already wrote about this, but there are just so many great Twitter things going on here at once (frank politicians showing their usual grasp of social media, you-never-know-who’s-listening conversations with a good friend‘s boyfriend who is either deadpan hilarious or actually related to my Member of Parliament…) I had to record it for posterity.
[He even hashtags the f-bomb tweet so no one following Canadian politics will miss it. Bwahaha.]
@ You should hear our family dinners... If this was an American politician, he’d be fired before he even figured out the rest of us could see his tweet. Here in Canada, I don’t think we mind. We’ll see tomorrow
Posted: November 15th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Sociology of Social Networks | Tags: sociality | 1 Comment »
With fewer IRL friends than ever, it’s geting easy to skip the step where we’re pleasant to each other.
Do you forget to start your emails ‘n’ such with a pleasantry—heck, a greeting—and just get right down to your transaction? I do it on purpose sometimes, in the interest of reducing people’s attention overload. Greetings are now implied.
The immediate and often character-limited access we now have to each other—texting, IMing and DMing our way into each other’s lives—is almost designed to be abrupt.
I just wanted to say hi because it's weird how empty of "real" sociality "social" tech really is. So, I hope you're having a nice day. Hmm.
@ I assumed you botched a direct message ;) Hi! Perfectly reasonable. But asks: is our sociality being distorted? RT @: @ I assumed you botched a direct message ;) Hi! I’ve met so many people on Twitter that I consider my ambient friends, but sometimes find my stream a fast and lonely place. Whoever’s there at the moment are the only people that “matter”, and conversations and connections evaporate. If you’re quiet for a day, no one seems to notice you’re gone. It reminds me of the sheer quantity & speed of humanity on a New York sidewalk.
So it’s nice—and surprisingly surprising—to just say ‘hi’ sometimes.
@ good morning! That was pleasant. :)
Posted: November 12th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Personalities, Sociology of Social Networks | Tags: Ashton Kutcher, marketing, PR disaster, Twitter | Comments Off
Backstory: Ashton Kutcher bumbles into a PR disaster via ill-informed tweet & subsequent perceived overreaction (said something dumb, decided to kinda quit social media for a bit til he recovers).
Why did Ashton temporarily drop out? 3 reasons why a very famous social tech investor would decide to stop expressing himself himself on Twitter:
1. Earnest Ashton feels the weight of his 8.3 million reach on Twitter & sincerely doesn’t want to spread misinformation.
2. Petulant Ashton has had enough self-inflicted humility and wants to stop getting yelled at by people less good looking and rich than he is.
3. Businessman Ashton recognizes that he’s damaging his brand when this kind of thing happens, and doesn’t want to risk getting fired from tv.
Turns out social media is hard. Opportunities to get eaten by crocodiles abound.
I'm just trying to be a good person.
Posted: October 28th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Visual, Art & Design | Tags: interrobang, special character, typography, ‽ | 7 Comments »
Now that we know there are special punctuation characters we never dreamed possible, people are wondering how we bend them to our will.
@ I knew the 'because' one!!! Hey wait a second...where'd you get the OMGWTF?! Is there an app for these?! The OMGWTF, or “interrobang”, as it’s properly known, is
…intended to combine the functions of the question mark (also called the “interrogative point”) and the exclamation mark (known in printers’ jargon as the “bang”).
—Wikipedia
Awesome, we need that! So how do you make this snazzy symbol‽ There are a few ways.
In documents
If you’ve got the font Wingdings 2, and it was certainly standard on my last 100 laptops, you can make it with the ` or ] symbols, like so.
On websites*
‽ Unicode decimal value
‽ Unicode hexidecimal value**
*I have no idea how you actually use this information.
**From Grammar Girl, wherein she also details when to use the mark, in case you’re feeling tentative with your new punctuation powers.
In websites
You most likely want to insert this bad boy cavalierly into a tweet, amiright? It’s stylish and saves a character in the precious 140. Here’s howsies:
Method 1: Copy & paste. Google “interrobang” and copy the first one you find. Improve on this by bookmarking the page so you don’t have to google.
Rating: ✭✭✭ Sorta slow and lame, but doable.
Method 2: Use a special characters browser extension. So far I haven’t found one that includes the effing ‽, but Fancy Characters for Chrome lets you paste in your own custom stuff, so do Method 1 to it & you’re all set. If you can find an extension that does it better, let me know in the comments.
Rating: ✭✭✭✭ Pretty awesome. Loves me my browser extensions for special characters—so l33t!
Posted: September 27th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Advertising, Branding & Retail, Interactive Marketing, The Mobile Web, Winnipeg | Tags: QR code, Winnipeg | 1 Comment »
Here’s what’s happening in mobile interaction marketing in Winnipeg right now. I missed a few—there was a pork one on a bus king I didn’t feel 100% comfy taking a photo of while driving, but you get the picture. Or, at least, these pictures.
My friend QR Code King Roger Marquis reminds us that mobile tagging is a link to a brand experience. In order to make it a positive one, I’d suggest using codes when your marketing question is “how do we get this in people’s hands/phones at this moment/place”, not “how can we use QR codes”.
Posted: September 26th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Platforms, Sociology of Social Networks | Tags: Facebook panic, nutty, scam | Comments Off
I’m not even going to link to accurate information about this. When is any message in ALL CAPS not nutty?
Hysterical delivery aside, why would Facebook reward you with a free membership if you warn others of the impending PRICE GRID by posting this as your status? And aren’t all the icons in Facebook already blue?
Sigh.
Posted: September 24th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Culture & Cultural Anthropology, Social Media Platforms | Tags: culture, Facebook, futurism, redesign | Comments Off
As our culture rapidly changes under the yoke of technology, as these changes are forced upon it, it’s heartening to see the subtleties of Facebook’s effect being discussed from the perspectives of sociology, psychology, marketing, & privacy.
Here’s some thinking on Facebook big F8 announcements. I know it’s a lot (though far from all) to take in, but hey, it’s a lot to take in.
Not Sharing Is Caring: Facebook’s terrible plan to get us to share everything we do on the Web (Facebook is Killing Taste)
Premise: Zuck wants you to share your every move, regardless of whether that move turned out to be a really good experience actually worth sharing. Frictionless sharing takes the curation element (or “taste”) out of your presentation.
UI implications: The news feed is now totally stories about your friends (status updates), whereas the minutiae of their liking & commenting has moved to the ticker.
Assessment: I don’t want you to know about every movie I watch, only the ones I liked so much I want to endorse them and thereby incorporate them into my personal brand. Media will become status, like wearing a logo, as a display of taste. People may be less inclined to experiment, because merely absorbing media now implies some sort of support for it.
What Facebook Open Graph Means for You
Premise: “You, the point of friction in their data mining, have just been excluded from the process.”
Assessment: I agree. Facebook wasn’t wringing every piece of information out of users, and information about users is the product it sells its customers, advertisers. The more it can collect about what you watch, listen to, like and use, the more money it makes.
Why Facebook Timeline Is Made For Its Youngest Users
Premise: Facebook’s Timelines is intended to facilitate the communication & sharing needs of younger users, and doesn’t really care if older folks want to ‘scrapbook’ (ie, blog) or not.
UI implications: Not everyone wants to blog or lifecast. Picking a header (‘cover’ picture) etc might be a little more tech/design-intensive than they desire, which may lead to a feeling of pressure instead of fun for some users (age agnostic). With customization comes a pressure to perform that some people might not appreciate.
Assessment: As far as I know, GenX is still the biggest participants on blogs, microblogs (Twitter) and Facebook. We’ll be ok, and the Millenials will too. Boomers who don’t work in the tech industry will not like any of this (UI changes or personal record). And GenZ? They could probably use a little MySpace. Expressing yourself is paramount in the Maslowian hierarchy of the young.
@ All interesting. Maybe younger gen is more willing to share in general, but less willing to share something out of mainstream? @ Our gen will be more consciously self conscious, but they'll have that judgement of their tastes built in to their DNA. Holy. What newsrooms should know about new Facebook stream
Premise: Getting content seen depends on quantity of interactions (like & comments). More frequent posting is going to be required to get in front of people.
UI implications: Stories need to gather the momentum of user approval before they join Recent Stories
Assessment: A commenter thinks the author of this post has it all backwards, and branded pages have a better chance of being seen in the timeline. I dunno. I can tell you that as a brand manager I was masterminding an inside liking job like no other on Thursday, trying to push my update into people’s streams. It didn’t feel good, but it did feel necessary.
As a page I feel like Facebook's new feed needs me to either create awesome content or drum up a whole lotta support to get posts seen. All Facebook thinks the ticker stands to be a huge force for branded page interaction, spreading social proof. This also benefits from grassroots liking, commenting, & sharing as every such action not only lends weight to GraphRank, but floods the ticker with evidence of how awesome your content is.
What Facebook Changes Mean for Marketers
Premise: Apps that provide real value, like Nike+ are going to be key; content is going to have to step up its game. Gathering likes means less than ever.
Assessment: The onus truly is on brands to earn a place in people’s lives.
@ I think the danger in what they're doing is it will force everyone to pump up the volume until its all too noisy... The Ultimate in Privacy
Premise: The ticker is freaking people out. The “please hide my comments & likes for me” status that’s going around tries to put the onus for your privacy on your friends.
UI implications: We need to either get comfortable with all our actions being visible, or leave the system.
Assessment: The way the ticker is set up, it’s a bit of a reality check into “Hey, everyone can see what I do on the internet”. They always could, but aggregating those actions and explicitly revealing them makes people feel kinda naked.
The ticker doesn’t follow normal conversational conventions (though it does lead to new person/topic discovery, which is what Facebook is trying to facilitate to combat social graph boredom and purchasable media sharing). So I sort of see the freaked out users’ impetus for wanting to hid eall that minutiae; it isn’t actually intended for everyone; it functions beneath status updates as a subtle communication upon which it’s a bit awkward to shine a light.
There’s a distinction to be drawn between inappropriate sharing and action aggregation. When you see the sum of your actions gathered and reported by an insensitive algorithm, it seems like an unfairly black and white overview of your character.
This is precisely why the likes Sponsored Stories, Klout and retargeting bother privacy advocates so much: they lack context. They paint a partial picture by which we are judged, but that we can’t fail to own because it is, after all, constructed of our data.
We’re All Doomed: Facebook’s Giant Reality Show
Premise: “The lines between entertainment and real life disappear, as people use social media to broadcast whatever they want. Criminals like thieves and murders are followed online, given TV shows, endorsement deals as we as a culture begin to lose grip of reality. A world where everyone’s a celebrity and anything can be entertaining leads to murders and suicides for fun as advertisers monitor in-depth metrics on what we view and how. Our social lives are put in digital pens that lie to us and tell us that we are all stars”.
Assessment: No surprise: “Heavy reality television (RTV) viewers not only spend more time on sites like Facebook, they also have larger social networks, share more photos and are more likely to engage in “friendships” with people with whom they have no off-line relationship, a practice known as promiscuous friending”.
A generation is going to grow up living very public lives, because that provides more accurate information for advertisers.
Facebook is actively gathering your life story: it just suggested I add a photo of the day I was born. http://t.co/p6SiEeBs @ and how do you feel about that? @ At the moment (I might change) like it's super cute, a fun thing to share & valuable to digitize (likely 2 b a real Polaroid) @ But is it there this memory should reside? If it does, does it become a more valuable, emotional platform for me? Update
More thought-provoking stuff people are sending me.
Logging out of Facebook is not enough (from David Pensato)
Facebook: “We don’t track logged-out users”
Facebook Changes Upend Advertiser and Agency Models
Facebook Disconnect Chrome Extension
Facebook’s Eerie Goal: Why Timeline Changes Everything (from David Pensato)
Facebook is Scaring Me
What Facebook’s latest updates mean for journalists
How Not To Make Music Social: The Way Spotify And Facebook Did It
Facebook confirms ‘Like’ data collection, will fix three cookie-related issues within 24 hours (from Nico Wlock)
No, you aren’t going to quit Facebook
Is Facebook trying to kill privacy?
The Pros & Cons of Frictionless Sharing
It’s the end of the web as we know it
The Problem With Facebook’s New ‘Frictionless’ Sharing
Facebook is getting too damn complicated
Posted: September 23rd, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Platforms | Tags: Facebook redesign | Comments Off
Facebook seems to have acted quickly to restore the essence of the ‘Most Recent’ news tab. I’m glad; I don’t want to miss less popular / frequent / interacted-with friends because they statistically uninteresting
I’m pretty sure this is new overnight, and if so, agile response to user feedback!
Posted: September 20th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Visual, Art & Design | Tags: filters, Instagram 2.0, iPhoneography, photography, review | 5 Comments »
It was with all caps I greeted the release of Instagram 2.0, so long had I, er, longed for fresh filters and possibly a selection of borders.
Of course, with change always come the pain of…change.
I'm sure you've heard this 10x today, @, but Gotham is a critical filter. Please work feverishly through the night on an update. Yes, my beloved Gotham is gone. All that remains of black and white filters is the sometimes tepid, low-contrast Inkwell. I’m thinking I‘m not the only photographer who’s going to choke on this omission. Apollo, another atmospheric beauty, is also missing.
Try making a shot this heavy without Gotham. Go on, try.
Instagram worked with @Colerise, a photographer who produces elegant, evenly-exposed shots to create the four new filters Amaro, Rise, Hudson & Valencia. His influence seems to have scaled back the drama. It may be tacky, but for some of us, loud is our aesthetic
The new option to apply borders or not is nice, but I’d go one further & allow them to be applied in either white or black. I stopped using the strongest saturation/contrast filter, Lomo-fi (any early favourite), because the black border drove me nuts.
The ability to rotate shots obviously rules.
Live preview is sort of neat, but I don’t shoot directly in Instagram anyway—it takes too long to fuss with choosing filters when the action is happening, and I save my bandwidth for late-night at-home wifi uploads. Often I preprocess in Camera+ or Photogene, and the absence of Gotham’s Brassaï-like drama, Apollo’s emo grit (and is it just me, or less juicy X-pro II?) is going to push me to that route even more often.
If your work is tied to contrasty black and white, maybe don’t update Instagram just yet. Or maybe the plan is to offer the old filters for a $0.49 in-app purchase after predictable user backlash—hey, well played, Instagram!
Take a look at
my Instragram work here. Criticism aside, I’m in their debt for helping me dust off the ole’ photography degree.
Posted: September 20th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Platforms | Tags: animated arrow, desperation, Google | Comments Off
An animated arrow now desperately dances for your attention when you visit Google. When did The Social Platform Wars get so clingy?
Posted: September 14th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Advertising, Branding & Retail, Social Media Marketing, Winnipeg | Tags: creative, design, marketing, meetup, training, Winnipeg events | Comments Off
Cold weather in Winnie means new toques, cute boots, and IRL schmoozing aplenty. Upcoming goodies:
GDC Manitoba‘s Pecha Kucha Night 7, Park Theatre
Thursday, Sept 15, 7:30pm – 11:00pm
TEDxWinnipeg, WAG
also Thursday, Sept 15, 5:00pm [sold out]
Winnipeg Design Festival: NEXT CITY, Gas Station Theatre
Friday, Sept 16, 7:00pm – 10:00pm
Girl Geek Dinners #16, Lo Pub
Monday, Sept 19, 6:00pm – 9:00pm
Advertising Association of Winnipeg‘s Media Planning Course, Red River College
Tuesdays staring Sept 20, day long courses
New Media Manitoba‘s Stop Being Stupid About Intellectual Property, NMM Training Centre
also Tuesday, Sept 20, 7:00pm
GDC Manitoba Presents Design For Business: “Branding Made Simple”, Millenium Library
Wednesday, Sept 21, 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Canadian Marketing Association (Manitoba)‘s Adventures in Marketing / AGM, Fort Garry Hotel
Thursday, Sept 22, 11:15am – 2:00pm
Winnipeg Social Media & Technology Group Meetup, Sant Lucia Pizza
Thursday, Sept 22, 12:00 PM
Arlene Dickinson Book Signing, McNally Robinson Grant Park
Sunday, Sept 25, 12:30 pm
Secret Handshake 18.0, Lo Pub
Thursday, Sept 29, 5:00pm – 10:00pm
Marketing & Technology Manitoba‘s ‘Making Social Media Work for Your Business’, Winnipeg Free Press New Cafe
also Thursday, Sept 29, 5:00pm
Canadian Marketing Association (Manitoba)‘s Digital Day 2011, Fort Garry Hotel
Thursday, Oct 20, 7:00am (jeez) – 5:00pm
I know this one’s in October, but I had to include it! I was asked to speak at it, and though I decided not to, it’ll be an amazing event featuring Amber Mac! You’ll wanna be there!
Posted: September 9th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Marketing, Tips, Tricks, How-To's & Top 10's | Tags: blogging, Creative Communications, Red River College | Comments Off
When you get chatty bloggers (like Alyson, Liz and James) together to talk blogging with students (like Kenton Larsen‘s Creative Communications class at Red River), they’re bound to skip some of the important stuff.
Like a clear understanding of the benefits of big undertakings like “be your own PR machine through blogging.” So here ya go, future communications professionals
Professional blogs are basically there to serve as an expanded resume, and it helps to know why you’re bothering to become a little publishing machine. What is it employers are going to see for all this effort?
Passion
Everyone can tell when you’re stoked about something (so write about stuff about which you are stoked. It’ll be a better read). Employers ❤ passion.
Insight
“Thought leadership” is the more grandiose buzzword for strong analysis. Tear something apart. Put it back together. Show me you saw beneath the surface, figured out a motivation, or connected some previously unconnected dots with your keen, keen mind.
Ambition
The fact that you bother to construct this whole persona, do research to impress me with your investigative skills, and make images to ease my understanding & please my eye says “hey, this person really wants it”.
Personality
An employer who wants to get to know the you behind the resume will know PDQ if your charming, quirky self is the right fit for their organizational culture. This can help you find a good corporate fit, so be yourself within the realm of good taste.
Skills
Posting struggles, successes, media you’ve produced, and plain ole’ writing shows me what kind of communicator you are. Visual skills translate especially well in the blog medium—cartooning, animation, slideshares, infographics. If you make it and it doesn’t suck, post it. If it does suck, ask for critique so you can improve.
Frequency
Besides showing your knowledge of subject matter, social media & communication, frequent blogging on topical stuff shows me you know what’s going on in your industry & you’ve got the commitment to prove it.
Connections
Comments show people are reading. Retweets show your stuff is worth sharing. Clips of speaking engagements or presentations demonstrate your ability to work a room.
Capability
On a meta level, outside the subject matter you blog about, you’re making it clear you know how to think like a publisher. Brand journalism and content marketing are a growing underpinning of social media marketing. The future employer is relieved to see you’ve worked out all your blogging disasters on your own dime
