Archive for the ‘Communications’ Category

If you spent the latter half of your summer following Heather, Jens, Adam Gorley and myself on Twitter in hopes of a quick-fix for your BlogCampaigning cravings we’ve got news for you: We’re back to blogging here.

Jens was busy writing love letters to his girlfriend Jenna, but he also got a job at a video game design studio in Berlin. We’ll have a post up shortly about his experience writing a game design document.

Adam Gorley did some serious renovations on his house. I hear he even dug out his own basement. Has your editor ever dug out a basement? I didn’t think so.

Heather spent some time traveling, and got to see the west coast of Canada for the first time.

In May, I started a new job at Radar DDB. That’s been keeping me pretty busy, but not so busy that I didn’t also go to Las Vegas, New Orleans and Vancouver on separate mini-vacations.

I have no idea what Espen has been up to.

Thanks for reading BlogCampaigning, and stay tuned!

-Parker

I’ve met a Jon Gauthier a few times and while I  knew he was an entrepreneurial fellow, I didn’t know he was starting up his own courier company.

The company, Good Foot Delivery, “provides a personalized point-to-point delivery service on foot or via public transit as well as employment opportunities to people with developmental disabilities.”

I think this is a great idea, and while I don’t want to downplay the hard work that Jon probably put in to get Good Foot off the ground I also think its a great example of how easy it can be to get a project like this off the ground with the help of social media. Its great to see that Jon was able to use his skills to do something he was really passionate about while also giving back to the community.

Read more about Jon’s company, Good Foot, in the Toronto Star and then vote for them on the Pepsi Refresh Project website.

Keep up the good work, Jon!

-Parker

A few weeks ago, a young producer and musician by the name of Jeremiah Vancans sent me a song he thought I’d like, called “PR Girls”, that he produced for his group The Deli Boys.

From his description of the song:

“It talks about the large boot, small dog, fancy bag culture that has taken over the city streets across our nation. We recognized a type of girl that was repeatedly emerging from the deep jungles of urban culture. Owning the street with their over-priced bags, they developed their own language of terms by using weird melodic lisps and slurs. These women, no matter if they were in the Public Relations field or not, were dubbed ‘PR Girls’. This term catapulted the idea of writing and producing this song. We hopes you like.”

(If you’re reading this post via RSS, you might have to click through to listen to the track below.)

The Deli Boys – PR Girls

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

What do you think? Is this what you think of when you think “PR Girl”?

And on a related note: whatever happened to Kim Kardashian’s reality show about PR Girls?

-Parker

On Saturday, June 12, I uploaded a series of vintage NASA photos to Flickr.

I wrote a blog post about how I found the photos, Stumbled the Flickr set, and also emailed a link to the set to one of my favorite blogs, io9.

When I woke up on Sunday morning, the set had over 10,000 views. As the day went on, and I kept checking the stats, it continued to gain more views.

What happened?

io9 wrote about the photos, referring to them as “the motherlode of space porn” and linking to the set on Flickr.

That post received approximately 52 different tweets, while a link to the set itself has received almost 90 tweets.

Jens told me he was going to submit it to Boingboing and Reddit, but he was too lazy to do either.

According to a little search I did, it was also shared on Facebook 82 times, got 45 “Likes” and 35 comments.

Since then, 52 different people have added me as a contact on Flickr (you can too: I’m ParkerNow there as well). My photos have had over 50 comments and tons of them have been made favorites by other people. Even better is that some of the Flickr people commenting are incredibly knowledgeable about the photos and are adding information, like when the photo was taken and who is in it (as below):

Admittedly, the photos weren’t really “mine” to begin with (as various comments have pointed out, better quality versions of some of the pictures are available on the NASA website and are in the public domain), but I wanted to put them in a public space and the whole thing has turned out to be a pretty rewarding experience.

On a related note, this graphic of “Your Flickr Stats Explained” is pretty good.

-Parker

I have been given an amazing opportunity to guest blog with the CBC’s G20: Street Level blogging team. The blog launched yesterday and covers street level events and issues in and around the G20.

My main goal is to reach out to as many Torontonians as possible and listen to their experiences and insights surrounding this event. If you have a story to tell or want your voice heard let me know! Im hoping to hear from all sides and perspectives. Are you happy to host the G20? Has the G20 disrupted your day to day life? If so, how? What do you want to say or share?

Did you watch the Brazil/North Korea game today? I caught part of it while I was eating a late lunch and thought that Maicon’s goal was amazing.

Nike agreed and (not a brand to miss a beat) did an excellent job of capitalizing on it by posting an image of Maicon with the caption “Know Your Angles. Write The Future.” on the Nike Football Facebook page.

No kind of planning or content calendar can take that into account. An update like that with a response of over 1500 “Likes” on Facebook and more than 300 comments means that Nike is in tune with its audience and able to deliver what will create conversation amongst them.

In short, Nike knows its angles.

Between this and the previous post I wrote about the Pitch Perfect series of mixes, you’re probably thinking I’ve gone a bit nuts for Nike.

The truth is that I’ve worn Nike shoes for years (they fit my feet well), and currently have about four active pairs (cleats, indoor soccer, running, casual). If they’re going to keep me entertained as well, what’s not to love?

-Parker

I like my Android phone. It was the first phone on the market to use Android, and might be a bit outdated, but so far it always served my needs—at a fraction of the price of an iPhone. And I’m not the only one; in May, Android’s first quarter US sales surpassed that of Apple’s platform.

However, Testfreaks argues an excess of choice could cripple Android’s future potential: a variety of phones with an increasingly fast product cycle is causing “hardware envy”. Moreover, all these different devices run several Android versions (from 1.5 to 2.2) which makes it difficult for developers to create apps which fit them all.

As the article points out, given that all manufactures have access to the same Android OS, in order to stand out in a crowded market place, they must tweak it, with either hardware refinements, operating system supplements, or both. This leads to increased competition, even within some companies; can you actually name all of HTC’s Android phones?

On top of that, this already confusing competition is made even more complicated by the phone carrier ecosystem it is tied to. Once you buy a phone, you’re locked into a contract and have to keep it, at the same time new devices are coming out that you can’t have (unless you break the contract).

The smartphone maker, if they do want to update their device lineup, has to work with the carriers to determine who gets which device. The drive for each manufacturer to shine in the market creates a short device turnover period, and this is in contrast to wireless carrier contracts. The end result is that each new Android phone “style”, if you will, needs to be tweaked for each carrier.

The result is even more confusion on the customers’ part and a watered down brand. The Nexus One for example was not “the” Google phone but just another Android device. Moreover, developers find it increasingly difficult to develop apps, because each tweaked phone potentially means an incompatibility issue.

Google is aware of this. They ask developers to accurately list their apps’ requirements, and then try to make sure that the app won’t be accessible to a device on which it won’t run properly.

That certainly makes things easier; however, as the Testfreaks piece continues, a lot of apps rely on taking advantage of new features to achieve popularity (e.g., a higher screen resolution). Games are a good example, and so far the choice of games for Android phones has been pretty slim.

The iPhone, on the other hand, managed to establish itself as a major player in the mobile game sector. It is, more or less, like a console, offering standardized hardware and software. Of course there were changes, but compared to the multitude of Android devices, they were rather minuscule.

Apple’s phone is just one flagship product, which in a lot of countries was only available with one carrier. There is the AppStore and its near-infinite offerings over which Apple rules with an iron fist.

Yet consumers love it.

It is a smartphone that is successful because it breaks with the technicity of a smartphone. It reduces choice to a point where it can’t even multitask. I’ve used the comparison before with the iPad, but the iPhone is the Wii of the smartphone world. Your two-year-old kid can use it, not because she’s so smart but because of a break with a technicity that previously made smartphones appeal mainly to competent males.

To stretch the comparison a bit further, the PC used to be a successful game platform, but lost most of its momentum to consoles. Games on PCs are cheaper, they can easily be modified, etc., yet consumers stuck to consoles. Why? Because on the dedicated platforms, the games just work, there’s less choice, less hassle, less confusion.

However, the PC also offers a very good counter-argument to the claim that a plethora of hardware can cause problems in the marketplace. Microsoft was able to establish Windows as the market leader despite it being available on a variety of devices with a variety of processors, RAM choices and peripherals.

Steven Johnson quotes New York Times writer Robert Wright:

The more models of Windows computers, competitively priced, the more people would buy Windows computers. And the more Windows computers people bought, the more programmers would write their software for Windows, not Apple. And the more Windows software there was, the more attractive Windows computers would be. And so on.

And even though the changes in variations of the operating system are faster with Android, Google ensures that it works by adding forward compatibility (apps written properly for older versions also run on the newest versions) and asking developers to list their app’s requirements.

At the same time you also have to ask yourself what choice Google has. This is a company that, within the constraints of a corporation, is committed to democratic conduct and, as such, fuels innovation. This innovation is furthered by Android’s self-competition and a less esoteric app policy.

I believe that this is a model that can work. As a more “classic” tech consumer, I feel at home with Android; I appreciate the choice, the fact that (potentially) there’s something on offer for all sorts of consumers, and the chance to use a physical keyboard. I’m also pretty confident that if I bought a premier Android handset today, like the HTC Incredible, I won’t really need another device for the next two years.

What do you think? Where is the phone market heading? And what will Microsoft’s role be with their new Windows 7 phone platform? (Which handset manufacturers won’t be able to personalize to suit themselves or their customers.)

Note: this post has some spoilers about Ender’s Game, so if you haven’t read it yet, don’t read this post. Just go out and buy it and read it, because it’s amazing. But don’t take my word for it;  I mean, the 1986 Hugo Award and 1984 Nebula Award are hard to argue with. It’s not even that long of a book. You can probably finish it in a lazy summer afternoon at the cottage, if you put down your iPhone for long enough. You can buy it on Amazon right now for, like, seven bucks.

This weekend, I finished re-reading Ender’s Game for the first time since I originally read it ten years ago and was blown away by how well the author, Orson Scott Card, predicted the future from the early 80s.

I say the early 80s, but it could have been earlier. Card’s first version was published as a story in a science fiction magazine in 1977. He later fleshed this out to a full-fledged novel in 1985 (according to the copyright information in my copy of the book), and made some more minor changes in 1991.

And when I’m talking about how Card predicted the future, I’m not talking about Ender’s Desk (which is described exactly like an iPad) or even the Ansible, a device capable of near-instantaneous communication over vast distances (not that far off, really). I’m talking about how he predicted the rise of blogging and the influence social media can have over culture and politics.

While most of the plot of the book follows young Ender Wiggin, youngest of three children, as he goes to Battle School at the age of six to learn how to be the commander of a fleet to fight invading aliens, a sub-plot involves how his sociopathic, but brilliant, brother Peter, and more empathetic, but equally brilliant, sister Valentine, are left home on earth.

Under the leadership of Peter, the two of them start contributing to “forums” on the “nets” using pseudonyms, or characters:

“They began composing debates for their characters. Valentine would prepare an opening statement, and Peter would invent a throwaway name to answer her. His answer would be intelligent, and the debate would be lively, lots of clever invective and good political rhetoric. Valentine had a knack for alliteration that made her phrases memorable. Then they would enter the debate into the network, separated by a reasonable amount of time, as if they were actually making them up on the spot. Sometimes a few other netters would interpose comments, but Peter and Val would usually ignore them or change their own comments only slightly to accommodate what had been said.”

The next paragraph describes how Peter tracked how their work was being read and shared, and reads almost like a description of media monitoring in 2010.

As the two keep writing, their influence grows, their articles get syndicated, and they begin to get involved in serious policy discussions. Since its all online, no one knows that it is actually just two genius children.

Implausible? Yes. Impossible? No.

While I doubt that our global politics are being played like a game of chess by a couple of kids, I think Orson Scott Card’s prediction of the way an ordinary citizen can get involved via the internet and become a serious, real-world influence is a great bit of future-casting.

Reasons like that are why I love reading science-fiction, be it old-school Heinlein and Asimov, 80s cyberpunk, or the post-human stuff that’s all the rage these days. Science fiction is a framework for thinking about what could happen; it’s a way of looking forward to finding out who is going to be right.

Have you read Ender’s Game? Were Peter and Valentine the original bloggers?

Chris Thorpe, Developer Advocate for The Guardian presented one of my favourite sessions at Mesh this year. He spoke about The Guardian’s open platform program which opens their API, data, and content to developers. This is a stark contrast to the many newspapers in North America that have started charging for content, placing it behind pay walls and forms. Chris believes this will ultimately decrease their influence, reach and engagement, leading to lower traffic and ad revenue. He explained that the longer people spend browsing on your site, the more pages they view and the more likely they are to click through on ads, increasing revenues overall. If you block off your content, you can kiss those extra eyeballs and advert dollars buh-bye.

Before you get the wrong idea, Chris and The Guardian aren’t giving away the farm for free. They are implementing developer agreements (revenue sharing, syndication, etc.) on data and API codes to build businesses with developers. The four stages of newspaper production are creation, production, monetization, and distribution. Chris says to put a “co-” in front of each stage. Involve the public and the audience in the process.

Why is this a good thing?

First, it gets people engaged in the journalistic process, using the engagement of the audience and the readers to bring out more information and news. He cited the example of G20 “protester” Ian Tomlinson who was killed by police. The police told one story, but the pictures and video sent in by other protesters told quite another. Time has come for the public to take back some of its power in bringing truth and justice to the forefront. By empowering the world’s citizens and bringing them into the process, trust in mass media as a source, and newspapers as a medium, can be restored.

Second, it allows developers to use The Guardian’s data to develop new websites, microsites, and apps weaving The Guardian into their fabric. This will put The Guardian in front of new audiences and increase traffic to the newspaper’s website. It will also increase ad revenue and provide information needed for more targeted ads both on the partner sites and The Guardian’s own website.

Third, most developers are creative and entrepreneurial. By working with, instead of against, developers The Guardian will reap the benefits of new and innovative business models.



Chris sees The Guardian as an online business, not a print business, and he believes that in order to survive, news entities must restructure their business models to work with the online shift, not against it. He believes that by opening up their content and data, The Guardian can one day be the world’s leading liberal source. With already more than 40% of their traffic coming from outside the UK, this certainly seems to be within their grasp.

What do you think?

The Mesh 2010 Conference was in full swing last week. Overall, the organizers did a great job of gathering some of the finest digital marketing and social media minds under one roof to share, collaborate and learn from one another. That said, there is always room for improvement. Below are my Mesh Hits and Misses for 2010:

Miss #1: Swag bags x 2

I arrived at Mesh bright and early on Tuesday morning. After picking up my name tag and agenda, I was handed a big bag of swag. Two bags actually, one laptop bag (similar to the one I received last year) and a second smaller lunch bag. Both were filled with a bunch of swag that I’ll probably never use, and definitely don’t need. Not to mention I had also brought my own bag, so I was now left with 3 bags to cart around and no coat check or drop space to leave them in. I am definitely down with receiving free goodies from sponsors, but why not introduce the concept of digital swag (this being a digital media conference and all). It would have been so much cooler to receive a login and user code where I could peruse and select free digital gifties online. I wouldn’t have had to cart any extra gear around with me all day, and I would probably have actually made use of and paid attention to the sponsors’ freebies.

Hit #1: Keynotes

Great Keynote presenters and topics on Day 1! Day 1 was all about privacy and security. The first keynote was Chris Thorpe from The Guardian, who spoke about their decision to open up their content and data to developers. Great session (expect a detailed blog post in days to come). The second keynote was Joseph Menn, who spoke about his new book Fatal Systems Error, and went on to tell gangster stories of  digital crime lords—very cool!

Miss # 2: No visibility

You couldn’t actually see any of the presentation if you sat toward the back of the main auditorium rooms. Mesh set up large screens behind the speakers and then just projected the Mesh logo. Great as it is, it would have been so much better to project the speakers onto those screens. It’s so much more engaging when you can both see and hear the panels.

Hit #2: Food and drink

There wasn’t a break that went by that didn’t offer snacks, meals, drinks, and tasty treats. Everything from ice cream sandwiches to giant pretzels were supplied along with your choice of juice, coffee, and even Red Bull. Mesh organizers did a great job to make sure us meshies never went hungry or thirsty.

Miss #3: Sessions and Tracks

Mesh would benefit and keep people coming back for years six, seven, and eight if they divided tracks and sessions geared toward beginners and more experienced digital marketers. I totally understand the need to have 101 and base-level sessions, but unless Mesh sessions continue to expand and geek out as we do, numbers will start to drop off. One thing I heard from a five-year mesh goer was that the first year it changed her life, her entire career path, and way of thinking, but five years on the level of education she was receiving was really tapering off. DON’T LET IT TAPER OFF! Offer some more in-depth, geeked-out sessions next year!

Mesh Hit #3: Mesh Live

Mesh Live encouraged people to share their Mesh experiences, photos, and videos online, direct to the Mesh website. This feature was a great idea. Hopefully going forward there will be more photos and videos of actual Mesh presentations; sometimes it was hard to choose between sessions, and it would be amazing to have access to the sessions we missed (hint hint).

Did you go to Mesh this year? What did you think? Any suggestions of how to improve the experience for next year?