EyeSee

As I look back on 2008 there were many interesting happenings in social media (new media).  There were many achievements with the steady growth of various social networking sites and launch of new sites.

However, the most important use of social media had to do with the past election down south, which caused quite a stir not just nationally but globally. People couldn’t stop talking about the election and wherever you were on the internet you couldn’t help but see Barack Obama. His ability to raise money and the large voter turnout was something that no other politician was able to achieve before. One of the biggest reasons for this was a very good web and social media strategy.

The basis of any web or social media strategy is to link specific goals to the interactions on the website and the social spaces. Integration of the internet into a hub, barackobama.com

Goals

The three major goals of the campaign were

• Fifty State Strategy
• Targeted the dissaffected center
• Focused on small donations

These goals were tied into the web strategy, new media strategy, traditional media and all three were interlinked very well.

Barackobama.com

A well designed and concise website making all campaign material very easily accessible to everyone. Great attention to logo and branding in general. The logo was designed by a company that did not traditionally design political logos, hence a fresh and clean look.

Call to action button, please donate, was easily found on the website regardless where you navigated, thus enabling small donations.

Downloadable campaign music, logos and tag lines, website and chat, widgets for updates to websites, posters and signs, support tools, flyers and documents, videos, desktop backgrounds and campaign forms.

MyBo

MyBO offered online tools for instant local organizing. This enabled people setting up campaign offices to do so very quickly and effectively.  This gave the opportunity for people to co-create and evolve the brand.  For example there were some fun events organized by people like a “yes Wii Can” Wii party and voting machines haloween event.

Personal Fundraising

The most notable feature of the website was the ability to raise micro funds. Small amounts of donations from many people. Thus the campaign did not have to rely solely on the large donations that were the norm in a traditional political campaign.

People prefer to donate to friends more than to charities and the website addressed this emotion.  Personal fund raising pages for people to keep track of the funds they raised.

Obama Mobile

GPS to find the nearest field office.  Custom ringtones.

iPhone App

iPhone application was sheer genius and had quite a few iPhone features.

Call Friends - a volunteering tool for talking to people you already know.  Your contacts are prioritized by key battleground states, and the abilito to make call sand organize results in one place

Call Stats - see nationwide Obama ‘08 call friends totals and find out how yoru call totals compare to leading callers
Get Involved - find and contact your local Obama for America HQ
Receive Updates - receive the latest news and announcements via text messages or email
News - browse complete coverage of national and local campaign news
Local Events - find local events, share by email and get maps and directions
Media - browse videos and photos from the campaign
Issues - get clear facts about Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s plan fo ressential issues facing Americans

Obama Store

A lot of swag.

Blog

On February 8th 2007 Joe Rospars announced that he was the new New Media Director and that he would be using the blog to communicate about the campaign, evolution of the website and more.  This particular post received 194 comments!!!

The Blog was hosted on the website which lends to a more personal touch. People could set up their own blogs on barackobama.com to chronicle their campaign experiences.

This blog became very popular quickly and it focused on the issues as well as the more personal side of the campaign.  You Tube videos as will as flickr photos were integrated into the Blog.

Posts that responded to what was being said in the blogsphere.

BarackTV

Videos of all off line events, debates, speaches that were posted on YouTube were easily accessible here.

Digital Landscape

Barack Obama had a presence on numerous social networks where a common look and feel was maintained throughout each of these sites .

It also has a RSS at multiple locations for those that like their RSS readers.

I will discuss his Social Media Strategy in detail in the next post.

If you are like me and looked at all the templates out there but can’t seem to find anything that would work for you it’s time to think, customization.

There are many ways to go about it but the simplest is to start with the default Wordpress template.

This template let’s you customize the header color.  If you want more then start adding widgets to take care of the little extras that you would like on the side bar etc.

Now I am getting pickier, I want the Blog to have the same header as the rest of the corporate website with a little twist on the color.  To achieve this I got the help from Rick the integration expert.

Pretty cool, huh.  This is a work in progress but just wanted to give you an update on the latest in the changes of the UI for EyeSee.

It’s the thing to say in the social networking world, isn’t there a service where I update my profile once and all the other profiles get updated?

AtomKeep claims to solve the problem.  They do support all the major social networkin or web 2.0 sites e.g. Linkedin, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and more.

They are in Beta so sign up and try it out. I do put the disclaimer that I have not tired them out. If you do, do share your experience.

I finally took the plunge a few months ago and signed up on Twitter. It’s as simple as

Q What are you doing?

A 140 characters to answer

Update

That’s it in a nutshell however it has some really cool features which I will share at length here.

This is what the home page looks like.

What are you saying?

This is where you say what you have to say about whatever you want to say.  The catch is that you have only 140 characters to say it in.  Click update when you are done.

It could be some thing serious like a product launch or just as simple as where you are having you next cup of java.  If you share a link, it does shorten the link, tinyurl, thus maximizing on the 140 characters.

Like most web 2.0 or social networking sites it’s evolved from a purely social to business related as well.  I find it very useful for following the latest product launches, news, ideas, information and whereabouts of people.

Someone mentioned that she turns twitter on her mobile when her spouse travels on business.  He is very good about posting updates like boarding plane, plane landed, renting car etc. It puts her mind at ease to know that he is ok.

If you like short and simple then twitter is for you.  It’s not for lengthy posts with comments.

Let’s explore the top navigation bar.

Profile

This shows every tweet you have ever made.

Find People

You have the option to invite people from other networks.  Once logged into your email it will go through the list and see who from your address book are already on twitter.

Select those that you’d like to start following.  Continue.

For those that are not there you can select people that you want to invite and click on send invites.

The other option is to invite via email.  Twitter will send an automated email inviting them to join, a standard in the social networking world.

At first I had a hard time with this feature as most people I knew were not on Twitter nor had the desire to be on it.  So using my address book from email did not work well.  As I started networking and hanging out in the Social Media spaces I found a lot more people to follow.

Settings

here are the usual Account and Password settings.  Fill out whatever information you want displayed.  If you are a very private person you do have the option of protecting your updates.  Note you will not be on the public timeline if you select this option and only people following your updates will see them.

Devices

Everything is mobile these days.

So do add this feature it will go a long way in sending those instant updates.

Notices

This is a great feature.  “Nudge me if I haven’t updated in 24 hrs” a txt to you phone.

@ Replies - this is very important as this is the filter for the volume of information you want to receive.

The usual email me for updates and newsletter gotchya.

Picture

Great to personalize your profile.  Note size only 700k.

Design

This is twitters attempt at customization.  This is definitely an area that needs improvement.  It’s best to select a current theme as attempts to customize fail miserably.

Now the Right navigation bar.

You will see you photo, name.  Below this you will see ….

Following

Tells how many people you are following, in this case I am following 105 people.  Clicking on this link will give you the listing of all of these individuals.  You do have the option of removing them or inviting more people.

Followers

Shows how many people are following me.  In this case 35.  Clicking on this link gives a full listing.

Updates

This indicates how many updates are there, 39.  I guess I need to start tweeting more : )

@Replies

This shows all the tweets that have been in response to my tweets

Direct messages

This is where you can send a direct message to the people following you. It has the usual Inbox and sent folders

Favourites

Star your vavourite twitter updates and they get saved here.  A great feature if you have you find a link useful for example.

Everyone

Well it’s what it is, everyone who is tweeting on twitter!!!!

Following

This shows a summary of the people you are following with the option of showing all.

Device Updates

This is where you set up you mobile device, got to add this to my to do list.

Well there you have it, Twitter 101.  So if you are not on twitter go ahead and try it out.  I will share my thoughts on the good, bad and ugly of twitter in the new year.

I am at The Code Factory listening to Radian6 talk about Social Media Monitoring and it’s importance.

The Motrin event of last week, Motrin baby wearing add,  is what we are discussing.  Within 24 hrs a mommy blogger in Colorado and was offended by it.  You are not a real mommy if you don’t have the baby near you.  Another blogger tweeted about it and within 24hrs 1500 bloggers, tweeters talking about it.  by monday the add was pulled from their website and cancelled the campaign.

Did Johnson and Johnson make the right decision to cancel the campaign based on the sample of 2000 complaining about it based on the population of 300000 don’t like it.

This is the importance of Social Media.

Here’s what people said about this add

Stephanies Video

swom

What’s up now

Crunchy domestic goddess

Radian6 social media monitoring tool has 9 languages currently.  It captures the entire social media space. Capture comment and tag are tracked.

• 90-10 million blogs are tracked
• youtube, google videos 400 video sites
• images
• mainstream news cnn.com, globe and mail. RSS feeds in title and commenting activity
• forums with RSS feed or board reader
• wikis
• twitter
• Proprietary web crawlerby domain, IP domain and where you are from on Blog
• A blog lifespan is three days
• Do not track mySpace, Facebook etc.. as this is private within the community

Set Topic Profile

Radian6 widgets

River of news - can set a date and timeframe.  Measurement perspectives are view count, comment count, unique commentors, engagement, view count. Weeding out spam comments.

Metrics

Gives the 50 most mentioned words.  It also has the ability to drill down on each word or words.  Open a River of news per word.

Can export data into multiple formats

Trending graph

Track if their launch is getting any buzz and what the buzz is about.  If there is an explosion and what it is about.  Can open up a river of news for any point on the graph.

Influencer weighting scale

on topic post, total comment count, total unique comment, average engagement, on topic inbound links, web count.  Ontopic inbound and outbound topic links.  Can get social profile.

User account $100 per month per user per subscription

$500 a month for upto 10k posts.

Open Source is another buzz word that has become a part of our daily vocabulary. When I think of open source I think of software development where the tools are free. This has lead to a lot of really great innovation as companies can now build products faster and cheaper.
The world today is all about sharing and the traditional model of making money by charging for the information has changed.

Open source has now gone beyond personal photos and videos. Open Source Learning is the new way to learn all you need is an internet connection and a computer.

In the past to get access to any university course material you had to sign up or audit the class for a fee. If you could not physically be present then there was no way to get the information beyond buying the expensive text book. Today forward thinking institutions are putting their lecture notes, exams and videos for free online!!!!

MIT Open Courseware is one such institution. Wow, in the past only the elite could get access to this information but now anyone who is willing to be self taught now has access. This is pretty powerful.
Moodle is a course management system that is absoloutely free!!! They are building an olnine learning community. It runs off one computer and is scalable to an institution with 200,000 students. It’s available in over 75 languages.

With the sharing of information happening for free so to speak, information is no longer power as anyone can have access to it.

Martini Tuesday was last night at the ARC Lounge. It was a success and a great time was had by all. BTW the ARC lounge has great martinis!!!

The discussion was focused on software used by the different entrepreneurs for managing their invoicing and payments. The general consensus was that packages like simply accounting and quick books were not user friendly and had more of a focus on math. MYOB for mac was great however they no longer support Canada for the new versions.

Kristina Mausser, of Digital Word talked about her woes with the invoicing and payment world. She had problems with clients not paying and hated asking for payment. She had an excel spreadsheet that she used to keep track of the payments. She charged a retainer up front and the rest at the end of the project. Looking for a solution she went to the web and found various applications. The one that appealed to here was FreshBooks, from a company in Toronto. They are an online invoicing and time tracking service.

This is a great service and if you are just starting out you can use FreshBooks for free for 3 active clients per month. For $14 a month you can have 25 active clients!!! If your clients are not web savvy you can “buy stamps” and have the invoice mailed to the client. To test out thsi feature Kristina had a dummy invoice mailed to her and sure enough it worked. She received it in the mail.

FreshBooks have affiliations with other companies like paypal. Reminders are sent automatically by the system depending on the preference settings e.g. 30, 60 or 90 days. Time spent on projects can be tracked.

Some additional cool features

• quarterly report’s sent out by the system
• GST is calculated automatically
• currency conversions
• expense trackingdata can be imported into packages like Excel
• customer support is great

So for all the entrepreneurs out there, if you are tired of keeping up with the receipts, project tracking and invoicing, check out FreshBooks.