Kuala Lumpur & Singapore Social Media Workshop & Trip Debrief

Now that I’ve finally begun to adjust back to Ottawa time from the 13hr difference, I thought I’d share a few highlights from my recent trip to the other side of the planet. First of all, I’d like to start off by giving a big thanks to everyone at FIK International for inviting me down and being such gracious hosts. The venue, transportation, logistics, and of course the food, were all flawless.

Quick MARCOM 2009 Debrief

It has already been almost 3 weeks since MARCOM 2009 took place at the Pearson Convention Centre in Toronto. Surely enough, the last 3 weeks have been so busy that I never got a chance to share my experience with you. Here’s a quick summary.

What is MARCOM 2009?

Basically the only marketing conference that is dedicated solely to marketing professionals working in the public and/or non-profit sectors. It is run by a sister company of CEPSM (our organization) called CMG Canada.

Why did I attend?

Besides the fact that I was chosen to speak and thus had to attend, I really love how niche of a conference MARCOM is and how much subsequent value I always receive. Most importantly however, I love surrounding myself with people that are passionate towards their jobs. The vast majority of private sector marketing conferences are about marketing product/service “X” whereas MARCOM brings together people that use marketing to improve such initiatives as classroom literacy,  public transportation,  spousal abuse, foreign credential recognition, etc…

What did I think of the speakers?

This year the line-up of speakers was outstanding. I was able to attend the following:

Arlene Dickinson (Venture Communications/Dragon’s Den) –> How can not-for-profit and public sector marketing get the respect it deserves?

• Brilliant marketing mind
• Emphasized “strategy before tactics”, which is what I live by.

Michael Cleland (City of Mississauga) & Rupen Seonie (Environics Analytics) –> Moving beyond demographics to psychographic segmentation

• If you’re a marketer and you haven’t heard of PRISM C2 yet, get on it. It’s the most comprehensive segmentation of the Canadian population, period.
• If you have a database of your target audience (with postal codes), then you can overlay the PRISM C2 clusters and find out crucial psychographic info.

Wayne Carrigan (ThinData) & Jim Jeang (Canadian Blood Services) –> Email and social media: natural allies

• While I was skeptical at first as to what social media has to do with email, I did end up enjoying this presentation due to Wayne’s thorough knowledge of the email industry.
• Jim spoke to the “tactical” side of social media , focusing on the tools he used within CBS as opposed to more strategic elements I like to hear (i.e. determining the best ways to meet objectives and desired outcomes before jumping into tactics). That being said, it is always refreshing to hear about social media initiatives within government that have actually been implemented. I will be adding this to the Gov 2.0 Wiki for sure.
• Overall, both speakers were well prepared and placed a strong emphasis on measurement, which is always a good thing.
• Some interesting stats:
  • On average Canadians receive 130 pieces of SPAM per week
  • 2005–> mass email deployments
  • 2006–> email versions deployed to specific segments
  • 2008–> 1:1 dynamic deployment
  • Great CBS initiative: www.thankyourdonor.ca

Rahaf Harfoush (Obama New Media Team/World Economic Forum) –> Yes we did: Strategic insights from the campaign that changed history

• Rahaf gave a brilliant behind the scenes overview as to day to day life at Obama campaign headquarters and the many all-nighters that lead to such a tremendous victory.
• Be sure to check out the Barack Obama and White House websites.

Louise Clements (Facebook) –> Facing Facebook today: How to use Facebook to stay ahead of the game

• Louise has an extensive private-sector background in sales and has just been recruited by Facebook to lead the  Toronto office. She gave an excellent overview of the re-vamped Facebook social advertising platform (adverts), which to my surprise, few people even knew existed.

Brian Thwaits (Brainspeaker Inc.) –> Engage your brain!

• I highly recommend Brian’s new book, “The Big Learn” ,to anyone interested in the latest theories and studies surrounding left vs. right brain thinking. Great closing keynote!

Overall thoughts

Besides listening to speakers, I very much enjoyed presenting myself. I conducted a full-day “social media 101″ pre-conference workshop followed by a more advanced “social media research tools” presentation during the actual conference. For the latter, I paired up with Nick Charney from CPS Renewal who did a wonderful job tying everything in to a government work environment. I also had a chance to host two roundtable discussions, one on “government 3.0″ and one on “attaining senior management buy-in for social media engagement”. Both turned into rich discussions during which I learned quite a bit myself.

To sum up, I will definitely be coming back next year.

Long overdue Podcamp Toronto 2009 debrief

Just so you know, it bugs me like crazy not be able to dump my thoughts on various time-sensitive issues that occur on a daily basis. It’s unfortunately that time of year again when my post frequency is hindered as a result of “March Madness” (year-end for government clients). I am working with about six clients at the moment in addition to regular speaking engagement travel gigs. This is more than enough to eat up all of my time.  My “blog about this” list has accumulated over 60 items since my last post, however the #1 item I want to write about first is my great experience at Podcamp Toronto 2009.

As I usually do with my conference “debrief” posts, the following are essentially key items derived from my handwritten notes for each session I attended. The quantity of bullets under each post is not a reflection of the session quality but rather “new” things that I learned and/or people that I met. Sometimes a single item and/or contact can be extremely valuable to me. There is little grammatical structure to these bullets since they are meant to be a brain dump. So without further ado here are the sessions I attended…

Building Relationships with Word of Mouth and PR Practitioners While Maintaining Credibility with Your Audience – Anita Clarke, David Jones, Eden Spodek and Matthew Stradiotto, moderated by Keith McArthur.

My Two Cents: Walked in late, however it is always refreshing to hear what “hobby” bloggers have to say. I often find myself forgetting that most bloggers have personal blogs unrelated to their day jobs.

• Sysomos is apparently emerging as a competitor to Radian6 (which I use religiously)
• Blog pitching firms expect bloggers to show them their private metrics in order to gauge performance
• Quantcast Analytics is a very useful, publicly accessible analytics site
• Many “hobbyist” bloggers don’t care about analytics, trends, marketing space, etc…

Stalking Your Audience for Fun & Profit – Monitoring Your Community & Competitors – Sean Power on the O’Reilly book \”Complete Web Monitoring\”

My Two Cents: I was absolutely amazed as to how many great free monitoring tools I had not previously heard of. Sean did an amazing job presenting a massive amount of content in a short amount of time.

• I was told to watch the video “Website is Down” to get an idea of what IT guys do during their work day
• There is absolutely no privacy online…NONE, ZIP, NADA!
• Most visitor behaviour assumptions can actually be measured
• Monitoring 101: What did they do? Could they do it?  How did they do it?
• Minefield of buzzwords out there
• Key items to ask:
  • How did users get there?
  • Places and tasks: What are they doing? Where are they going?
  • Where did they leave? Why?
• Install Clicky –>Spy software analytics
• People do this: Consume, Click, Give Data, Navigate
• Neat metric: Percent of people that scrolled to the bottom of the page (Visitor attention vs. absolute scrolling reach)
• Install Clicktale & Crazyegg–>Real-time monitoring software examples, both track scrolling & fold.
• Neat metric: Blank fields left by user (if you have forms)
• Install Bitcurrent –>Replays user paths
• Need to start using the amazing exit survey tool called 4Q
• Install Monitorus
• Start using Google Sets
• Use SpyFu to find out what competitors are paying for various keywords
• Start tracking my TinyURL’s in Google (great performance metric)
• Use MyBlogLog to establish your identity
• Various additional Social Media Monitoring Tools worth using:
  • Google Alerts
  • Whatchthatpage
  • Roll Yo (your own search engine)
  • Bigboards (checks forums)
  • Search IRC
  • Twemes
  • Facebook Lexicon
  • TweetDeck
  • SiteVolume (site seems to be down right now – March 1st, 09)
  • Buzzfeed
• Download the Facebook Socialistics app to analyze your social network
• Use BackType to track comments
• Those interested in being part of the analytics community should look at becoming moderators on the web analytics list
• Platforms worth looking into: StatZen and WikiMonitor (?) to measure wiki metrics (Sean or anybody, I need a link here! Can’t find it using Google…may have written it down wrong).
• Look into Trendrr
• Use Compete to look at competitor traffic

How social media can be used to demystify public service institutions to encourage civic engagement - Jairus Pryor (Bank of Canada) and Audra Williams (Parliament of Canada).

My Two Cents: Walked in late to this one as well so I didn’t catch everything. However, I was very happy to see someone else speaking on public sector social media usage, albeit more so the political side. I tend to have an issue with political examples here in Canada since I find that simply using the “tools” doesn’t mean squat if your belief system and political culture are not in tune with the basic principles of “web 2.0″ (collaboration, transparency, 2-way engagement, etc…). Those of you wondering what I’m talking about haven’t worked with the Prime Minister’s Office.

• Conservatives tend to use more social media “tools” than the Liberals
• The Bank of Canada has a wiki, a fake blog, a Flickr account (for press to get pics from) and a Twitter account.
• Advice: “Once you have managed to start using a tool and bypassed the red-tape successfully, figure out ways to use the tool in new ways”
• Great quote: “What is today supported by precedents will hereafter become a precedent”.

Government 2.0 – A discussion on the expanding role of social media and government/citizen interaction, right here in Canada - Mike Kujawski (That would be me!).”

My Two Cents: Great crowd, although I wish I had more time allotted than 30 minutes. I was just getting started! Here is the link to the video of the presentation. I have no notes for this one for obvious reasons.

Making Traditional Media a Little More Social - Using Twitter, wikis and live-blogging at the Globe and Mail - Mathew Ingram.

My Two Cents: Great to see the person behind the Globe & Mail’s social media initiatives.

• Globe & Mail has created a real-time live-blogging widget (based on Cover it Live) that also captures Twitter & blogosphere discussion that is tagged appropriately.
• Good quote in the newspaper world: ” The people formerly known as the audience”.

A Social Media State of the Union Discussion - Collin Douma.

My Two Cents: Always a great open great discussion when Collin is moderating.

• There is still widespread debate as to the meaning of the word “podcasts” now that mainstream media is using it quite loosely.
• It is important for us social media folk to look outside the fishbowl of our own community.

My Two Cents: Solid presentation on overcoming barriers.

• Important to not use buzzwords among clients…focus on the purpose/benefits of the tool instead (e.g. instead of wiki say “editable, shareable document”)
• Look into the Society for New Communications Research.
• Good books: “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion“, “Made to Stick” and anything by Maslow.

Taking Control of Success - John Meadows, Steve Saylor, Keith Burtis and Katherine Matthews.

My two cents: Good open discussion on the various perspectives on “success” in the social media community. I mentioned the importance of setting objectives, which many “hobbyist” community members tend to forget…hence why they have a difficulty in measuring performance and defining “success” , which in my opinion is completely relative and dependant on your own personal objectives.

• Great quote “If you’re interested, you’ll be interesting”
• I should try out Batchbook

Lunch & Learn on the latest in mobile social media marketing - Robin Browne.