Your chance to “Join the conversation!”

A fabulous little promotion is being put in place by the makers of the video chat software ooVoo. They are hosting a series of FREE 6-way video conferences with the “Who’s Who” of social marketing (Starting February 10th). Anyone is welcome to sign-up for these, however spots are filling up fast. This is a great opportunity for people to chat with the leading bloggers and authors in the field:

• Mitch Joel/Six Pixels of Separation – yep, that’s me
• Steve Hall/AdRants
• Bob Garfield/AdAge & On the Media
• Joseph Jaffe/JaffeJuice
• John Wall & Christopher Penn/Marketing Over Coffee
• iJustine
• Marshall Kirkpatrick/ReadWriteWeb
• Irina Slutsky/GeekEntertainment.tv
• Connie Reece & Susan Reynolds Every Dot Connects / Boobs on Ice
• Chris Thilk/Movie Marketing Madness
• Erin Kotecki Vest/Queen of Spain
• Dave Delaney/Two Boobs and a Baby +
• Jack Myers & Friends/Media Village
• David Meerman Scott/The New Rules of Marketing & PR
• Geoff Livingston/Now Is Gone
• Allan Cox/Your Inner CEO
• George Parker/Madscam
• Scott Sigler
• Chris Brogan
• C.C. Chapman
• Susan Reynolds/Boobs on Ice
• Laura “Pistachio” Fitton

I’m already fascinated with this application (which I will be using for the first time). The registration was a breeze and the simplicity of the website was great. However, what really caught my eye was the main feature of this chat tool, which is the ability to video-chat with up to 6 people at once (not bad for a free product). The promotion of this event , which is called “My ooVoo Day” has in my opinion, been executed perfectly as well. I’m guessing each one of the bloggers reached out to their blog/podcast subscribers, Facebook group members, LinkedIn contacts, and traditional mailing lists (which in aggregate is well into the hundreds of thousands of targeted marketing folk). The rest is word-of-mouth and viral. The benefit to the experts? Authority building amongst a tight-knit community (permanently stored on the web) and potential leads. The benefit to ooVoo? Hands-on demonstration of their free web application in action. How does ooVoo make money? My guess is Affiliate advertising.

When you let everyone play…nobody wins.

Here’s a great example of why targeting is so important. The ad below is from a rapidly growing job search website (The Ladders) that actually has a specific niche/target audience: “$100K + jobs” only.Contrast this to Monster.ca or Workopolis which are both cluttered with everything from Taco Bell positions to molecular biologist positions in Arizona.

Our organization recently had the privilege of working on a marketing strategy for the Staffing and Assessment Services Branch at the Public Service Commission. At one point the question came up of whether or not they should group their executive resourcing service with regular recruitment. I think you can guess what my answer was…

New “culture.ca” website loads up on Social Media…

After much anticipation, the Department of Canadian Heritage has finally launched a slightly re-designed, up-to-date and more “on-strategy” version of its “Culture.ca” website, (I should point out [in the spirit of full disclosure] that PCH/culture.ca was formerly a client of ours).

Culture.ca (as described on the website) is “Canada’s cultural portal, developed in collaboration with partners from the private and public sectors. Culture.ca aims to engage Canadians in cultural life by providing access to quality Canadian cultural content in both official languages.”

Put simply, it features links to the best Canadian cultural websites arranged by specific categories. The website makes use of numerous social media features such an official culture.ca newsfeed, a new podcast section, (where Canadians are free to submit their own podcasts if they want them listed), as well as a section listing recommended Canadian blogs on the topic of culture.

Now the only question is, is it all “sticky” enough for the intended online target audience? Some of you may be asking where’s the ROI here? This can easily be measured by monitoring feed subscribers, blog mentions and podcast subscribers before and after the launch by using basic free tools such as Technorati , Google Analytics and Feedburner. Of course, the numbers are meaningless unless they tie into your organizations overall objectives. In this case, one of the main objectives of culture.ca is to “engage” Canadians in cultural content and to provide a means to easily “find, share and explore” cultural content. I have a strong feeling they will soon see the fruits of their labour…