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.

Monetizing your Social Media Passion was a hot topic at Podcamp Ottawa.  This session was facilitated by Robin Browne.

People generally made connections through Blog or podcasts.  These mediums were used to communicate their passion on their niche.  Although there were no direct monetary rewards for the time invested in publishing to these mediums they did get contracts due to fame in these respective areas.  Susan Murphy agreed with this but did state that she blogged because she was passionate about it.

Give away stuff for free became the common theme in this discussion.  The average person dabbling with Social Media did not generate significant revenues however the contract work came due to fame established with the respective audience following.

Freemium was the word of the day, this means some for free and some premium content.

Most people writing books did not make a lot of money as the Publishers did as the publishers take huge risks in producing and marketing the books.  A successful author in Canada sells on average 5000 books.

One way to get exposure is to comment on other blogs outside your circle of friends.  Check your Blog statistics to see how much traffic if any you get back from comments on other blogs.  Banner ads do work however most people don’t look at them and are not effective way to make money.

Kevin Kelly came up about his theory on how to make money on line.  A true fan will give you $100 a year for what you are selling.  If you can get a 1000 of these fans you can make a living.  Scalable to which city you live in.  Have a donation box as this works.

Mark Blevis shared his journey in monetizing social media.  He started out by  developing content, perfecting techniques in podcasting and story telling.  Attending events and recording them for his podcasts.  If you jump into this and want to make money right away it’s not for you.

He suggested getting comfortable with the equipment, settings, venus etc.  Learn little tricks, how to place it, edit etc…  Respect yourself, your guest etc….  If trying to market you abilities in content creation, production..  worry about all of this later.

Everyone has their angle but no direct method.  Trying to convince people that you are an expert.  Need to have an angle.  Invent a niche that you are in.  Place yourself at the top.

More tips

Social Media isn’t a product. but a vehicle to communicate to large amounts of people to share information, communicate etc. Use the tools to make yourself successful.

That idea of specializing is important.  General idea of joining communities and adding value.

An important part of your personal brand is to organize events that is key to your success.  You have to create the opportunities and not wait for people to organize them.

Nothing happens in isolation anymore.  It’s wide open.  Bring social media into your current job.

Communicate internally within the organization

The next Podcamp Ottawa session was facilitated byMaurizio Ortolani, who is part of the team at NAC that uses new media to build an online community.  He talked about Christopher Millard who produces the NAC podcasts.

They have about 4000 subscribers which translates to twice the capacity of the concert halls.  There are over 8000 downloads over the past 6 months.  The demographic consists mainly of older people who are the annual subscribers (seniors), high school and university students.  He alluded to having reached the glass ceiling with this and maxed out with web programs etc…  No increase in 12-16mths.

The older subscribers download the podcasts and burn them onto cd so that they can listen to them on their long drives.

As with any social media medium the podcasts are used to create events and vice versa.  Every few months NACO have a live cast, Chris Mallard hosts the podcast.  This podcast event is attended by 200 people. The podcasts are also used for regular visiting artists who can have pre. and post recording of events.

The most popular podcast to date is an interview with Peter Hinton from Due South, which resulted in 50k downloads!!  These podcasts are also converted into promotional cds’ as part of an incentive program to subscribers.

Jennifer Covert has taken on the role of e-marketing and she shared some of her adventures in this area.

This formed the basis of the discussion.

Charles Hodgson talked about how he had reached the glass ceiling with his podcasts, Podicitionary and had a breakthrough in the past month.  He attributes this to doing full text transcripts of his podcasts.  Link love, is another great factor in creating Google juice.  Almost most of his community are email subscriptions some are through itunes, direct downloads, stumble across due to Google.  He did turned on the Wordpress stats tracking.  He now has some sponsors and his subscribers are very positive about that.

A tip is to use Google to find podcasts as opposed to the search on iTunes.

People are more web oriented than podcast oriented.  Why use podcast as a word so come up with a new one.  Use audio instead.  It’s going to happen organically anyways.

70 percent on comuters.  LIsten to ipod who travel a lot.  Providing multiple channels to use the medium they way they want .  Don’t have to hand code the page anymore as the tools are out there.

Podcamp Ottawa started off with Jeff Parks giving yet another engaging discussion about podcasting.  He talked about his mantra of give it for free.  which has worked very well for him.

He has a vast collection of interviews which are popular globally, so popular that he has been invited to speak at conferences worldwide.  He does not charge for his guest speaking engagements and his only request is for his conference pass and his travel expenses to be covered. It’s an opportunity of a life time to speak to all these individuals.  His show is about the guest speaker and not about Jeff.  Conversation is more important than technical expertise.

The big question was how does he then pay his bills?  His popularity worldwide has lead to contracts which pay the bills.

He suggests focusing on the relationships and not the monetary aspects of podcasting.  This will translate into passion which in turn will lead to making an income.

Quote “Memory is more important than reality.”

This was the setting for the discussion that followed.

Kristina Mausser of Digital Word gave an example of a typical marketing budget.  Say a company has a budget of 10 thousand dollars they will typically spend about 7 thousand on brochures which don’t lead to any tangible business.  By using podcasting or other social media you can create build build a relationship with your niche market.

She spoke about her time as the head of a marketing department for a specific geographic region.  Her company printed borchures which were distributed within that region.  This resulted in no business at all.  She had to call the customers herself and develop the relationship with them by meeting with them in person.  When it was month end she would call those customers to make some sales.  So the key to her success was the relationships not the brochures.   So podcasting is another way to build a relationship on a much lower budget.

If you are passionate about podcasting then the value you get is enormous.

Jeff parks talked about his recent interactions with a Grade 6 class, they have access to the same info. as us, however don’t have the experience we have.

Make your podcast available in various forms to your audience and let them pick the medium based on their preference.  The french name for podcast is long and very technical so should the English term be used?  The consensus was to use the shortened form of the french phrase.

Another way to describe podcasts to people is using the term internet radio as that is very easily understood.

Kids in Europe and Asia have have multiple mobile devices and use it more than we do in North America, this results in them using mobile devices to find info. vs the web.

Most organizations have a mandate to deliver to larger audiences on a smaller budget so podcasting and social media fit within these budgets.

I am very thrilled to be attending Podcamp Ottawa this morning.  Only 30mins to go.

Here’s a sneak peakof the sessions

Conversations before Code - Jeff Parks

Social Media Monitoring Tips & Tricks

The most Intimate Medium - Hugh McGuire

Monetizing yoru Social Media Passion - Robin Browne

See you there

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.

Mark Jaquith came all the way from Florida to share his view of Wordpress Security.

Tips for better security with Wordpress

• Update to new release
• Use popular plugin
• Add this code to wp config
• Good password - has to be criptic, use shift key, different password for different sites, no personal info.. Check out Passwordone. Wytopia
• Use Subversion
• wp_specialchars()
• CSRF
• wp_nonce_field()

Great news, Wordpress is getting more secure with each new release.

My camera did not have batteries yesterday so I had a lot of short video clips that I will post once I have edited them. Today I have put the video aside and will share pictures with you.

Walking in …….

Who’s that?…

Mathieu ….

Another day of great presentations and discussions.

One of the biggest questions I was hoping to have answered this weekend at Word Camp Toronto is the advantage of using wordpress over Joomla.

I don’t have a clear answer as of yet and hope to find the answer by the end of this weekend.

Any thoughts on this?

The last event of the season by Third Tuesday certainly did not disappoint. Saul Cole and Michael Mc?Derment talked about their success with Freshbooks? which is a software as a service company that provides online invoicing and time tracking.

They shared some of their successes in using social media to not just communicate with their customers but to pay attention to them.

Saul gave his views on “Karma Marketing“.

Part of new hire training at Freshbooks, is to answer the customer calls, an excellent way to hear what the real life problems. This does not end here and every employee answers the phone on a rotational basis!!!

Freshbooks has a very creative team that truely thinks outside the box and comes up with innovative ways to market their product e.g. the hangover kits that were hung up on the door knobs of a couple of hotels one night.

It was great to talk to Saul at the end of the evenign and get his input on some of the projects that I am working on.