Well, I’ve been tagged by Sharon in a great little meme first thrown out there by Collin Douma.

The game is two come up with 5 great examples of social media use that our peers might not have noticed.

The rules are something like this:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. List five Social Media projects that deserve better exposure.
3. Tag EIGHT {as many as you’d like} “Social Media / Digital Experts” at the end of your post and list their names.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.
5. Tag your post “Five Gems” so we can search for all of these great examples.

I’m also going to go ahead an tack on what I think should be a 6th, rule, and that is that we should all tag our posts (and examples) as 5gems on Delicious so that they are easy to find later.

1. The CNW Group Social Media release announcing the CNW Group Social Media Release - Although a bit self-referrential, I think that this is an excellent case study in how a Social Media Release can be effectively used. People left comments, bloggers embedded the video on their site (due to it being educational, rather than advertorial in nature) and one site even used the CNW logo provided with the release. (disclosure: I work for CNW, and worked directly on this).

2. Journalist Source -While they aren’t using social media directly besides having their homepage built on Wordpress and using a Twitter account, they are providing a great service to writers (I’m thinking bloggers here) that might not necessairly have the kind of resources needed to research a story on their own and source experts.

3. MySpace - Look, I know that a lot of people don’t care about MySpace anymore because it is just full of retina-burning designs and emo kids. But ever since I started a music blog a few months ago, I’ve been all over MySpace. It’s where the cool stuff happens: the creative kids are on MySpace, designinging their own pages, seeing what they can do within the constraints of the site and promoting themselves. The boring kids are on Facebook, installing applications and de-tagging drunken photos of themselves.

4. I Like Totally Love It -My Blogcampaigning co-author Jens told me about this site a little while ago, and it is definitely worth checking out. I don’t really know how to describe it, but they are kind of a social-voting site for products and things that you want, or I guess, things that you, like, totally love.

5. Movember - Growing moustaches for charity…what a great idea, and they’ve really used the online space to build traction for this. I participated last year, but I can already tell that it has grown alot since then. (if anyone is doing it this year, let me know and I’ll sponsor you!).

I’m tagging Chris Clarke, Martin Waxman, Jessica Ayers, Michael Allison and Alecia O’Brien.

-Parker

This afternoon I’ll be joining social media vet Michael O’Connor-Clarke and Natalie Johnson, manager of Social Media of General Motors Global Technology Group onstage at the Albany Club in Toronto to discuss Using Advanced Technologies Effectively in front of members of the Canadian Investor Relations Institute.

From the event description:

Advanced technologies are revolutionizing communications in every field. Investor Relations is no exception. New technologies such as blogging, Web 2.0, RSS feeds, search engine optimization (SEO) and new channels such as Facebook, Google and Yahoo Finance are changing the way IR professionals execute their strategies. Join us as our expert speakers explain how best to employ these technologies to improve the effectiveness of your capital markets communications.

I think it should be a great talk, and I’m looking forward to a healthy discussion period with some of Toronto’s IR professionals.

-Parker Mason

The Toronto International Film Festival is known for its glamorous parties full of beautiful people from the worlds of the media and entertainment elite, and this is the first year that Thirsty Thursday is going to take place during the same week as TIFF.

While it isn’t an official TIFF event, it is still going to be pretty awesome.

For those of you that haven’t attended a Thirsty Thursday event before, the basic idea is that it is a casual get together for young people in Public Relations or Marketing.  It began as a few friends meeting for drinks, and has grown into a event to look forward to every month.

Celebrities you will see at this week’s Thirsty Thursday:

Chris Clarke (yes, the Chris Clarke who was quoted in the Toronto Star)

Jessica Sine (the face of Access CNW)

Amanda Laird (my colleague, who got her job as a result of this post on BlogCampaigning)

So get your life together and spend what could be one of the last nice Thursdays of the year swilling beer with Toronto’s finest young communicators on the rooftop patio of Pauper’s Pub (539 Bloor Street) at around 7pm.

-Parker

There are a lot of creative people in this world, and there are a lot of reliable people in the world.

There are far fewer people who are both creative AND reliable.

Mark Mckay is one of those people, and I recently had the good fortune of working with him on the video that accompanied CNW Group’s announcement about the launch of the CNW Social Media Release (if you haven’t seen the video, check it out now on the release here).

For those of you that don’t know him, Mark McKay was the fellow that did the video for the 2nd mesh conference (”The Wacky World of Web 2.0“), and he also hosts his own online-TV show called “Happy Hour with Mark McKay. If you watch MTV Canada, you’ll know that Mark has parlayed his online success into a regular gig television gig.

I’ve always thought he was entertaining, and knew that he was skilled at creating video content for the online space.

After working with him on this recent video project for CNW Group, I can also say that he is also incredibly reliable. When we first met to start the project, he gave me a time line of when he would have certain elements of the video ready, from a draft script to a rough version right through to the finished copy. We agreed on the timeline, and he kept right to it, delivering the final version when he said he would.

The only thing stopping me from recommending his services to other people is that I’m worried he’ll get too busy, and that I won’t get a chance to work with him again.

You can get in touch with him via Twitter, his website or his YouTube channel.

I’ve posted one of my favourite Mark McKay clips below.

-Parker

Yeah, after a few months of wicked hard work from a whole bunch of different people, the CNW Group Social Media Release has arrived!

If you’re not sure what a Social Media Release is, check out this video that CNW commissioned the amazing Mark McKay to do:

If you didn’t get it from the video, one of the solid points about the CNW SMR is that everything is embeddable. That’s how I got the above video into this blog post.

But what’s up with the little round face?

He is CNW SMR - the lines coming out of his mouth represent a message, while the ear represents the comments. Essentially, he’s a conversationalist, just like the CNW SMR.

It is also one of the first SMRs to truly offer comments on the body of the release. I’m not sure that everyone will go for this sort of thing, but I think that it is a fantastic idea. If one person has a comment (negative or positive) about your organizations announcement, chances are others will as well. With comments, that one person (or more than one person) can voice their opinion directly on the release, and you as a PR pro can also respond directly on the release. The advantage of being able to have an official reply in an offical place is obvious. (Oh yeah, these comments are RSS enabled as well, meaning that if you want to keep up to the conversation via RSS, you can)

In order to give you social media enthusiasts a better idea of how sweet the CNW SMR is, Todd Defren graciously allowed me to adapt a chart he created a few months ago that aimed to “untangle the various SMR offerings” from major wire services.

What else is cool about the CNW SMR? Well, you should check it out here and see for yourself (or check here for more CNW SMRs). You can also follow @CNWGroupSMR on Twitter to be updated when we issue new Social Media Releases on behalf of our clients.

The whole CNW team was awesome to work with on this project. Product Manger Duane Bayley has done a fantastic job (and if you have any questions, hit him up on Twitter) of working with the design team on getting all the elements right. CNW’s in-house graphic designer Kelly also did an amazing job of creating all those little face icons that you see on the release (I’ve also got a lot of respect for Kelly for being so patient with me and all my last minute suggestions).

I’d also like to give props to Mark McKay for making the kick-ass video above - he was truly a pleasure to work with. And thanks again to Todd Defren (and the SHIFT Communications crew) for letting us adapt their chart and Brian Solis for being a decent enough guy to provide us with both a quote and a photo for our SMR.

So what do you think? Is the CNW SMR the kind of thing you think you would use? Why or why not? Any thoughts on the topic that you can muster up would be greatly appreciated!

Feel free to comment on the release, email me directly (parker dot mason at newswire dot ca) or find me on Twitter.

-Parker

Disclosure: if it wasn’t already obvious, I work for CNW Group. However, this is a personal blog and the views expressed on it may not reflect those of CNW Group. Basically, I’m going to say what I want here, event if what I want to say has a lot to do with my work. Hey, it is my life and my blog. And Jens’ blog. And to a lesser extent these days, Espen’s blog. But you get the idea. Does anyone even read disclosure statements these days?

People have been saying that newspapers are dead or dying and although I agree, I can’t say I’m happy with it. As I’ve mentioned before here, one of my favorite things to do on an early weekend morning (or holiday Monday morning like today) is to pick up a copy of the The Globe and Mail and slowly read it over while having a latte from one of my favorite haunts in Toronto’s Little Italy area.

One of the articles that I read was headlined “Ads Critical For MySpace” (I’d link to it, but for some reason I can’t find it on the Globe and Mail website). I always think it is interesting to read about MySpace because with all the Facebook hype, we often forget that MySpace is more popular in the states, and will probably continue to be for a little while. The article talks about how MySpace now allows advertisers to more directly target users. It seems like a great idea, and similar to what Facebook offers, but I was surprised to read that some advertisers were worried that their ads might show up on MySpace profile pages that displayed risque photos. Is it a valid concern? Possibly. But one that advertisers are going to have to deal with if they want to display their ads in the highly personal world of online social networks.

Another interesting article in today’s paper was about an airplane that crashed in BC. Even though the plane’s transponder had broken, rescue workers were still able to find the crash survivors thanks to one of them being able to text a friend. I think that as cellular networks have greater range and phones start to come equipped with GPS as a standard feature, we’ll see them featuring more regularly in rescues like this.

Another article in the paper mentioned that another Cuban athlete had gone missing at an international tournament in Edmonton. While the article didn’t mention what type of tournament the athlete was competing in, it did say that Fidel Castro himself had written a column on the “World Wide Web” criticizing Edmonton for being a “dumping ground for Cuban athletes.”

I don’t really have an opinion one way or another about the legality of Cuban athletes defecting during mysterious tournaments, but I do question the author’s use of the term “World Wide Web.” Are we back in 1994?

Maybe I’ll make this “Weekend News” type of post a regular feature on BlogCampaigning. I find that I pay more attention to the articles I’m reading when I plan to write about them.

Do you still read paper editions of the newspaper? Or have you moved to completely online versions?

-Parker

Twitter’s downtime doesn’t concern.

I’m a lot more worried about the status of another online service: Beerhunter.ca.

The site uses Google Maps and information about the closing and opening times of LCBO and Beer stores in Ontario in real time. I told my roommate about it the other day, and although I question why he was trying to buy beer on a Wednesday morning, he described the site as “the most amazing and useful site for Torontonians.”

According to this news release, the site got 30,000 unique visitors in its first three days based on word of mouth (I might be slightly biased, but I have no idea they would use “PR News Now” to issue their release).

Come back soon, Beerhunter.

-Parker

That’s right, Toronto’s finest young communications and PR kids are getting together for a few extra-casual beers at the Green Room this Thursday at 6:30pm.

It’s always a great time, so check out the Facebook Event for the deets and sign up. Or just show up.  I might even shout you a beer.

See you Thursday!

-Parker

PS: Europe is about five hours ahead, so you better believe that Jess and I will be calling our blogmates Espen and Jens!

After reading an article Wednesday’s Globe and Mail about how Toronto Crime Stoppers is effectively using social media tools to both successfully solicit crime tips and to reach out to the community.

Through the work of Constable Scott Mills, they’ve set up a YouTube channel and a Facebook account. The YouTube channel has apparently already proved itself by providing a number of tips for a recent shooting.

The real test of whether or not a success is to see how long it continues to be effective. I also think that we’ll see a lot more of this kind of police work, and it will be interesting to see what kind of effect (if any) it will have on crime rates, especially considering that the criminals have already made pretty good use of these tools.

-Parker

Even if you’re not going to the CPRS talk with Giovanni Rodriguez at the Spoke Club on Wednesday night,  stop by Wellington’s on Bloor around 9pm. Giovanni will be there to have a nightcap with Third Tuesday Toronto.

See you there!

-Parker