They were a great group who had lots of questions. Many of those in attendance had certainly experienced the let down that happens after you set up a Facebook page, get a few initial followers and then interest drops off when no strategy is in place to continue to engage fans of the page.

I also talked quite a bit about what to do when the shine starts to wear off the “Ooo! New Shiny!”. It’s hard for businesses of all sizes, but particularly small businesses with limited resources, to manage social media outreach when that is not your area of expertise. I commend all of the dentists and practice managers in my session today for understanding that they need to know more, and being open to hearing me bust some myths and shoot down the hype.

Here’s the slide deck to my session. It is applicable to most small and medium-sized businesses, not just dental practices. And, perhaps refreshingly, it stresses how to define your strategy based on your organization’s goals and objectives. Have a look and tell me what you  think.

Perhaps something drives you nuts, or, you really love something about New Twitter and want to give them a pat on the back.

Ou peut-être, vous parlez français et vous avez un problème avec leur support multilingue.

If you live in Montreal, tonight’s your chance!

Mark Trammell, Design Researcher for Twitter will be in Montreal tonight. Over the next few weeks he’s traveling and speaking with people about how they use Twitter.

Join us for a tweetup tonight from 5 to 7. Please RSVP here: http://twtup.com/c5hk8f

What really got my attention was how the video was presented and edited. It’s a great example of how a small business can think creatively to capture attention (it got mine at least, and possibly yours too) and become memorable. They took a straight up audio interview and created a video that stands out from the crowd. It’s funny, unexpected and very cleverly done.

interview with Julien Smith. Author , blogger, podcaster and all round nice guy.

Snapshot

If you’re in a small business, consider what Web Courses Bangkok did:

• thought about who would be prominent, interesting and relevant to their prospective customers
• arranged a long-distance audio interview
• enlisted a video editor to create something different, entertaining and informative (see update below)
• asked the interviewee to mention the video publicly
• ensured that social sharing options were available on their site
• had a presence on Twitter to engage in direct conversation

I was compelled to share the video on Twitter, Facebook and this blog because the approach was unique and creative. Ben Powell summed it up on Twitter:

Tell me, how have you made a splash for your business with something different?

Update: Ben Powell left this comment:

Just to add a little to your post if I may, we’re a small business without much of a marketing budget so we didn’t really have the ability to hire anyone to help, so we called in favors had to learn how to make a .gif, teach ourselves how to use video editing software… It was all done for the grand total of $0.

Small business dont need a budget to do something that has a twist on the ususal, just time and enthusiasm….. and a few skilled friends of course.

For those interested in discovering how Twitter apps can turbocharge your experience, here is the presentation.

Let me know in the comments if I’ve missed something that you love, or if you found something new that will make Twitter even better for you.

My favourite discovery

By far, the happiest surprise I found when researching the apps for this presentation was Quote URL. This app allows you to drag and drop the URL for individual tweets into their interface from your Twitter profile or from search.twitter.com. It then arranges the tweets in chronological order and presents you with a permalink. Now you can send someone a link to an entire Twitter conversation or commentary. Even better, the conversation becomes embeddable for your blog. No more cutting, pasting and manual linking. For bloggers, this will be a great tool.

Here’s an example.

1. 
   MarkGoren @AdeleMcAlear waxing poetic about Twitter at #smbmtl. 25 Aug 2010 from Twitter for iPhone
2. 
   enkerli Discussing Twitter penetration/acceptance with @adelemcalear. Twitter seniority (mine: feb 2007) Locate power in app. 25 Aug 2010 from Ping.fm
3. 
   lucaconti http://ow.ly/i/3phK @adelemcalear started her twitter presentation. Le Bistrote is full of people! #smbmtl 25 Aug 2010 from HootSuite
4. 
   MarkGoren Great refresher on Twitter by @AdeleMcalear at #smbmtl. Look for the deck on SlideShare later. 25 Aug 2010 from Twitter for iPhone
5. 
   MarkGoren #smbmtl – nice shout out to @RowFeeder by @AdeleMcAlear. She highly recommends it. 25 Aug 2010 from Twitter for iPhone
6. 
   sebprovencher Thank you @AdeleMcAlear for mentioning @neediumhq (http://www.needium.com) during #smbmtl! 25 Aug 2010 from web
7. 
   JumboJet04 @AdeleMcAlear great presentation today ! Thanks for the useful info 25 Aug 2010 from Echofon
8. 
   MarcSnyder @AdeleMcAlear juste realised I joined twitter before you did 25 Aug 2010 from web in reply to AdeleMcAlear
9. 
   MarcSnyder Excellent #SMBMtl de @AdeleMcAlear et @sebprovencher, avec @newraycom, @enkerli, @lucaconti, @valeriewindsor, @valeriewindsor notamment 25 Aug 2010 from web
10. 
    KaiDesignStudio @AdeleMcAlear Thanks for sharing about Tweeter apps @ Social Media Breakfast, learned a lot! 25 Aug 2010 from web in reply to AdeleMcAlear
11. 
    vandy_pants Really enjoyed my first #smbmtl today, with talks from @AdeleMcAlear and @sebprovencher. And now, back to school mode. Rats! 25 Aug 2010 from Twitter for iPhone
12. 
    mperron Great presentations by @AdeleMcAlear & @sebprovencher at Social Media Breakfast Montreal. 25 Aug 2010 from TweetDeck

— this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

Thanks to Jeff Taylor and Dan Maitland from Heelatch for the opportunity to speak to such a great  crowd. And thanks to everyone who contributed to the great Q&A afterward.

Be sure to check out Sebastien Provencher‘s presentation on the Group Buying industry. It was fascinating and enlightening.

See you next time!

Come catch me speak on making Twitter a more powerful tool for business at Social Media Breakfast Montreal, Wednesday, August 25th, starting at 9 AM.

Turbocharge Twitter with Apps

I’ll be speaking about Twitter Apps. Here’s the low-down:

With thousands of Twitter applications available, everyone has their favourites. If you use Twitter for business, we’ll look beyond the basics to introduce apps that will make your experience more relevant and valuable to your objectives. Whether your goals are competitive intelligence, lead generation, promotion, community building, monitoring or measurement, we’ll look at tools to turbocharge Twitter.

What Are Your Favourite Twitter Apps?

I’ve spoken on Twitter apps many times before, but the landscape changes so quickly that I’ll be revising and updating my favourites for this session. With so many tools available for such a wide range of purposes, it can be daunting to find your way through to discover the really useful ones. I thought I’d take a little survey at the event to see what attendees’ top 3 Twitter apps are and then share the results here on my blog afterward.

But why limit the survey just to attendees? Let’s share the love a bit. What are your top 3 favourite Twitter apps for your business? Tell me the ones that you find the most valuable, or that make the best use of your time, or that enrich your Twitter experience.

Feel free to share the survey with your network: http://bit.ly/SMBMapps

I’ll post the results right here on my blog after the Social Media Breakfast on August 25th.

Also at Social Media Breakfast

I’m honoured to share the bill with Sebastien Provencher, co-founder of Praized Media and the newly launched Needium. He’s also one of the world’s foremost experts on local search. Sebastien is so renowned that Google invited him to speak about local search to their staff last year. At Social Media Breakfast, he’ll be talking about the Group Buying phenomenon and what it means for local advertising. You don’t want to miss this.

Social Media Breakfast is also giving away two tickets to the upcoming Art of Marketing conference. (I’ve got some news regarding the Art of Marketing up my sleeve for you as well – stay tuned!) Tickets are valued at $399 each and the conference features a pretty stellar line up of speakers including Seth Godin.

Event Details

REGISTER HERE

Social Media Breakfast Montreal

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

09:00 to 11:00

La Bistrote

1510 Notre Dame Ouest

514.903.3858

View Google Map

Twitter Recommends Dead Friends

On July 30th, Twitter announced that it was releasing a feature to recommend friends to follow right on the sidebar of the site when you log into Twitter.com. It was only a matter of time before their Who to Follow algorithm turned up someone who had passed away.

My friend Dean Whitbread, @dfrw, alerted me this morning that upon logging in and seeing this feature for the very first time, he was disturbed to see his friend Ro, @lilyhill,  recommended as someone to follow. She had died unexpectedly of a stroke in May 2009. Two days later, Ro’s daughter used her mom’s cell phone to text a last message to the account to notify @lilyhill’s friends of her passing.

Continue reading Twitter Recommends Dead Friends at DeathAndDigitalLegacy.com.

The Advertising Equivalent of Live Blogging

The social media campaign to support Old Spice flew into overdrive as the team from Wieden + Kennedy and Old Spice holed up in a studio in Portland, Oregon with their writers, production team and actor Isaiah Mustafa. Their idea was brilliant: Produce personalized responses to @replies on Twitter, comments on the “Talk to OS Guy” tab on their Facebook page, YouTube channel and other places around the web and quickly post them to the Old Spice YouTube channel with supporting Tweets.

Today they shot and uploaded 89 videos. Yesterday it was 29.

Yes, that’s right, 118 personalized videos in less than 48 hours. Think of the marathon that the writers and production team just accomplished, not to mention the focus that Isaiah Mustafa needed to maintain character for so long.

Indeed I think @jordan_ferguson was right when he suggested on Twitter that July 13th be renamed Old Spice day.

Leveraging the Numbers

As buzz grew around the videos on Twitter, the heavy-hitters started commenting. Creating the opportunity to push more attention to the campaign, reply videos soon appeared for mainstream celebrities @aplusk, @ryanseacrest, @Allyssa_Milano and @rosemcgowan. Media outlets @TheEllenShow, Perez Hilton, @GQ, @Gizmodo and Huffington  Post received some attention. Even @Starbucks got in on the action.

Tech celebs weren’t missed either, with replies going out to Twitter co-founder @biz, @guykawasaki,  and three get-well videos for Digg founder Kevin Rose, ill with a fever.

Calculated responses to grab the most lift, for sure. But there were still one-hundred videos speaking directly to people with modest followings that were as well crafted and funny as any meant for those with big reach.

And, ultimately, none of it would have worked if the videos weren’t funny and inventive. The writers deserve kudos for their nimble feat which managed to make me chuckle throughout the day, despite being in the depths of a miserable summer cold.

Meta Moment

Things got a little strange when the Old Spice character sent a reply video to the actor’s own Tweet.

This type of engagement too.

Here’s one that the team turned around in a few hours that makes an interesting story for one couple.

More Spicy Goodness

All the response videos.

Did You Know and Boat are the two 15-second spots that compliment the two more well known 30-second spots.

The making of the I’m On A Horse commercial, including an interview with writers Craig Allen and Eric Kallman.

What do you think of the campaign? Have you watched any of the response videos? Share your favourite in the comments. (My fave is the one they made around a horse hiding typo.)

Update: I neglected to mention that the @oldspice Twitter account had approximately 7,000 followers on the morning of July 13th. Now, 24-hours later, their account stands at almost 35,000 followers, a 500% increase.

Update 2: On the morning of July 16th, @OldSpice has almost 72,000 followers.

Update 3: ReadWriteWeb has a piece on how the Old Spice videos are being made.

webcom Montreal

The of the highlight for me this coming week is webcom Montreal (May 26), where I’ll be speaking on Death and Digtial Legacy. Just look at the incredible line-up of speakers at this semi-annual event:

• Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia)
• Tara Hunt (Whuffie Factor)
• Julien Smith (Trust Agents)
• Jeff Pulver (Vivox)
• Seam Power (Complete Web Monitoring)
• Clara Shih (The Facebook Era)
• Chris Heuer (Social Media Club)
• Kristie Wells (Social Media Club)
• Connie Benson (Alterian)
• Shonali Burke (Shonali Burke Consulting)
• Sylvain Carle (Praized Media)
• Kim Vallée (At Home With Kim Vallée)

And a whole lot more…

Concurrent to webcom in the same venue, are two other conferences on May 26:

• WebTweet – inspired by 140 Conference
• WebCamp – unconference for web developers

The night before webcom:

• YulBiz meetup – May 25 – webcom special edition

Open Source Week

This is  also Montreal Open Source Week, a.k.a. MonDev. In addition to WebCamp, there are events happening throughout the week:

• Demo Camp – May 25 – Ignite!-style
• WebCamp – May 26 – concurrent with webcom
• Startup Drinks – May 26
• Make Web Not War – May 27 – Cross-platform conference

I can’t wait! See you there!

I live in Montreal, a serious hockey town. The Montreal Canadiens were founded in 1909,and according to Wikipedia, they are “the longest continuously operating professional ice hockey team and the only existing NHL club to predate the founding of the NHL, as well as one of the oldest North American sports franchises. The franchise is one of the “Original Six” teams, a description used for teams that were part of the NHL from 1942 until the 1967 expansion.”

Right now, the Habs (short for Habitants), are playing the Philadelphia Flyers in the Eastern Conference finals. The winner of this series of  games will go on to play the Stanley Cup Championship, the pinnacle of every hockey player’s aspirations and the stuff of dreams for boys with skates, most particularly here in Montreal. To an extent, Montrealers feel like they own hockey. It’s our game. It’s part of the lifeblood and pulse of this city and a unifying force between all cultures who live here.

Much to the chagrin of my friends in Montreal, I am not a hockey fan. This is close to sacrilege. I have nothing against hockey, I’m just not big on sports in a general sense. I ignore them universally.

But, it’s impossible to ignore when Montreal is in the playoffs: after each goal, there is honking in the streets, and shouting spills out of open windows as neighbours erupt in cheers or frustration over every point won or lost. Hockey playoffs in Montreal compel you to pay attention.

Twitter Hashtags to Track the Game

And so it was a few weeks back when I found myself checking Twitter for the Habs score against the Washington Capitals. At that time, I noticed several hashtags: #habs #gohabs #gohabsgo and #habsDC. I had assumed that the final one, #habsDC had to do with the fact that the game was against Washington and was played in DC.

So why is it tonight, when Montreal was playing game 3 against Philadelphia, the #habsDC hastag was the top trending hockey tag on Twitter in Canada?

Thinking back, while the Canadiens were playing all seven games against the Pittsburgh Penguins, the #habsDC tag was ever-present. I thought perhaps people who were Tweeting the Washington game simply didn’t bother changing the hashtag. However, I find that a bit strange. I know Twitter is new to many, but, you’d think there were enough users out there who would know to change hashtags and have that be of influence.

I went on the search for services that give more information about specific hashtags and found several (thanks oneforty.com!) According to What the Hashtag?!, the tag is defined at” Montreal Canadiens fans hashtag initiated by @DenisCoderre.”

Political Sports Fan

Who is hockey fan Denis Coderre? He is a federal politician with a riding in Montreal. Prominent in national politics, he appointed the Secretary of State for Amateur Sport for three-years and helped to establish the World Anti-Doping Agency in Montreal. He also accused NHL player Shane Doan of the Phoenix Coyotes of uttering racists slurs against French-speaking referees in a game in Montreal, resulting in legal action on each side.

Denis Coderre is also one the country’s most active and engaged politician on Twitter and will live-tweet Canadiens games with enthusiasm.

Let’s think about this for a moment: a politician’s personal hockey hashtag overtakes the more generic and natural #habs to become the top trending topic in Canada on the night of a winning semi-final Canadiens playoff game. That, in a city that lives, breathes and riots over hockey.

Extraordinary.

Manipulation or Enthusiasm?

As I was pondering this achievement aloud on Twitter, Habs fan and hockey blogger Kyle Roussel of Montreal took this view of the custom hashtag: “It would mean a lot more to the #Habs twitter community if he’d use the regular one instead of usurping one for himself.” Though, he did concede that no one forced the Twitter public to use one hashtag over another, he didn’t see the connection between a politician and a hockey team.

I suspect that the general cynicism that the public has about politicians leaves some with the feeling that perhaps Denis Coderre is manipulating the association with the Habs for his own personal gain.

However, I think that most people use the #habsdc hashtag without knowing that it references the politician. Geneviève Côté believed it it to be “DC to shorten Washington in hashtag and it survived when Pitt started.” After viewing the link I had to What the Hashtag?!, she replied, “I may be wrong… he’s a very good marketer, he may have used the DC synchronicity.”

Given his past, it’s likely that Denis Coderre is simply an enthusiastic fan who enjoys using Twitter in the same way that others do when they gather around a shared event.  When asked why he chose to start his own hashtag vs. using the more universal #habs, he responded:

@AdeleMcAlear simply because I enjoy direct interaction with my 10225 followers and it became a trend. No competition just fun and passion

What do you think? Is this a case of a politician riding the wave of a popular topic for his own purposes? Are Habs fans sheep for re-using a hashtag that they may not understand? Should Denis Codere be congratulated for achieving something that most marketers dream about for their clients? Are the Habs going all the way to the Stanley Cup?

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Just a few days short of its 4th birthday, Twitter marked a milestone of 10 billion tweets at approximately 16:54:11 Pacific Time on Thursday, March 4, 2010.

That makes approximately 6,925,208 tweets for each of the 1,444 days since Twitter was founded on March 21, 2006. Though, we know that most of those tweets have been in the last year.  In fact, was only 5 months ago that Twitter celebrated the 5 billionth tweet. Just last month Twitter reported that it was processing 50 million tweets a day. That represents 1.2 billion tweets per month and TechCrunch reported that January 2010 saw 75 million unique visitors to Twitter.

But who made the landmark 10 billionth tweet? I asked my friend @Kosso to check the Twitter API for me to find out. However, the tweet was made from a private account.

“One instance where I can say we should ignore our privacy policy: when big round numbers are involved,” proclaimed Twitter employee Doug Williams (@dougw) after the event.

And although we don’t know who made number 10 billion, congratulations will go to Brazilian Rafaela Marques (@lelamarques) on having number 9,999,999,999.

The Twitter team were excitedly watching the numbers tick over and tweeting up a storm to see if one of their own might be the one to score the 10 billionth. (Number 5 billion was made by @robinsloan, who now works at Twitter, as shown below.)

And then, when the moment came,

they celebrated (with a flurry of Macbooks).

The milestone was anticipated earlier today when TechCrunch ran a story highlighting the event and explained that GigaTweet‘s measurement was not entirely accurate. Even Twitter employee Ryan King (@rk) used tweet number 9,995,692,516 to remark:

But since the start, for those of us who’ve been around Twitter for a while, and those who’ve built businesses on and around the simplicity of 140 characters, it’s a time to cheer on the evolution and success of a service that has changed the way we communicate, changed lives and brought so many of us together.