I am heading up the great team in Montréal that specializes in providing social insights and measurement and I will be liaising with other Edelman offices to provide clients with analysis and insights that will help guide their business decisions. I’m happy to be joining the company that is home to my colleagues in social media – David Armano, Steve Rubel, Dave Fleet, Rob Clark, Zena Weist, David Almacy – and so many more bright people that I’ll be getting to know in the coming months.

But What About…?

With this announcement, I will be retiring my consulting practice. I want to thank my clients and partners for making the last 4 years so fulfilling. Thank you for your confidence and for entrusting your marketing and social media to me. I’ve learned so much from you.

A special thank you goes to A.C. Riley and Mark Goren for your unwavering support and for always putting a smile on my face, no matter how tough a day I’ve had. I’m privileged to have worked with you both and to count you amongst my dearest friends.

Of course, I am grateful to my family who took the brunt of my crazy hours (remember when I was working on an Australian clock for 10 days while still juggling day-to-day, or the all-nighters on deadline? #goodtimes) and the waves of unpredictability that go along with striking out on one’s own. I could not have survived and thrived these last 4-years without your love and support, and I thank you for always being there for me.

Thanks also to my friends and all the wonderful people I’ve met along the way who sent me leads, had me speak at their event, and gave me a leg up when I needed it. I do my very best every day to pay your kindness forward.

This blog will continue, though with an expected change in focus and updated look (like I haven’t got enough on my plate ).

My research and speaking on Death and Digital Legacy will go on a bit of a break until I get my feet under me at my new gig. I’ll get back to it as time allows. In the meantime, if you’re interested in the topic, please be sure to follow my buddies Evan Carroll and John Romano over at The Digital Beyond.

I will also continue to stay as active as I can in the social media and tech scene here in Montréal and elsewhere, including being a mentor at startup incubator FounderFuel.

Why?

Some people might wonder why I’m giving up the freedom of my own business. My answer is simple. As my friend Shel Israel wrote a few months ago, it’s time. For me, the writing has been on the wall for the last year and my feelings about the future of social media consulting were confirmed in conversations with at least a dozen of my contemporaries at SXSW last March.

I need a new challenge and I am ready to dig into a niche. It’s exhausting work to be a generalist in social media because the pace of change makes it extremely difficult to stay on top of every aspect. In my new role at Edelman Digital, I’ll be happily diving into monitoring and measurement, while swimming in analytics and influence. I’ll be unfettered by the need to know the latest Twitter management app or Facebook custom page tool. Sure, I’ll be interested, but it won’t be essential for me to know. Narrowing my focus will help to alleviate the inevitable social media burnout.

And, the great thing about joining a company vs. being a lone consultant is that I get to work with a team of smart people who are just as passionate about this space as I am. It’s lonely out there on your own. I’m looking forward to doing my best work because of the collaborative process that teamwork brings.

So, here’s to new horizons and the next phase of my career!

Canada boasts some of the highest internet penetration and social networking usage rates in the world. Social network users view social media as their online home—a hub for communication, entertainment and information.

The report also states that in some cases Canadians are adopting social media faster than in the US. It estimates that about 15.1 million internet users in Canada will have visited social networking sites at least monthly, up from 13.6 million in 2009.

The rankings of social networks by usage (via comScore) is not without some surprises, particularly Windows Live Profile as #2 and DeviantArt as #6.

More information about the report and additional stats can be found here.

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.

But nothing brings home the purpose of my research more than when I speak with the bereaved who are struggling with a loved one’s digital remains or those who are pondering their digital legacy while facing a terminal illness. It’s been a privilege and a gift to speak with them.

Like on this blog, I haven’t been posting much to DeathAndDigitalLegacy.com, which I launched in January. I make my living as an Integrated Marketing Consultant, which means supporting my clients is always my top priority. I fit the digital legacy work in around that schedule and makes for some long days.

In my limited time for digital legacy, I’ve given nine different presentations this past year, including speaking at the mesh Conference and webcom Montreal.

I was sponsored to attend SXSW Interactive to gather information on the developments in the area and attend sessions that were related. Of note were two stand out core conversations,  Your Online Identity After Death and Digital Wills given by Corvida Raven and Become Immortal: Understanding the Digital Afterlife presented by Evan Carroll and John Romano from The Digital Beyond, which was received the 12th highest feedback rating out of all the SXSW Interactive sessions this year.

With the rise of online social networks, mainstream media have picked up interest in what happens to our data when we pass away. In the last 12-months I was fortunate to receive quite a bit of media attention through interviews and speaking coverage. I’ve been quoted in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and on the IFC. Nationally, I have been featured in pieces in the Canadian Press, CanWest Global newspapers, the Financial Post, and GetConnected, a nationally syndicated technology radio show. There’s been lots of other mainstream media coverage, as well as legal, financial, technology and college blogs. (More clippings are listed here and here.)

I offer my sincerest thanks to everyone who has shared their stories with me and took the time over the last year for me to interview them about their experiences or expertise. You’ve given the fuel for my research. And my thanks to the media, bloggers and conference producers who’ve taken an interest, and especially to everyone who has come to my presentations – you’ve given me so much encouragement to continue.

Yesterday I submitted a proposal to speak at next year’s SXSW Interactive entitled,  Avoiding Extinction in a Digital Dark Age, and focuses on the archival and preservation of personal digital files, whether online or stored on hard drives and other media. This session is geared towards content creators and addresses individuals who are looking at ways to ensure their digital legacy survives file format obsolescence and storage media degredation. Voting, which accounts for 30%, will begin on August 9th. I’ll keep you posted and hope that you’ll help out by casting a vote my way.

I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished in this field in the last year and look forward to another year of exciting developments. My challenges will be to take the research and interviews that I’ve done and synthesize them into writing and presentations on a variety of aspects and approaches to the topic, while still keeping things hopping on the marketing consulting side.

I hope that you’ll come along for the ride.

Subscribe to: http://DeathAndDigitalLegacy.com
Follow on Twitter: @DigitalLegacy

I created this survey with Donna Papacosta, respected veteran podcaster and consultant, to learn more about what listeners like in podcasting. We hope that you’ll take about 7-minutes to check some boxes and maybe have a rant or a rave (there’s plenty of extra room for comments). Thanks!

Why We Created the Podcast Listener Preference Survey

As a podcast listener, I have definite likes and dislikes about what I hear out there. I’ve pondered (for far too long) about starting a podcast, so I’ve given much thought to what type I’d like to have – the format, the length, the style, the topic.

There are so many styles, so many different voices, and so many ways to share information. There are podcasters who feel their shows are professional if they emulate a radio style with announcer style intros. There are others who use a call-in show format. Some are vehicles for pure creative self expression. Some like to tell stories in the vein of NPR’s This American Life.

It got me thinking: What do podcast listeners prefer? What do they really like? And, what drives them crazy? I decided a survey was needed to objectively discover people’s preferences. Sure, individual podcasters may receive comments about their show through feedback channels, but it is limited to that podcaster’s audience and the information is not widely available.

Alan Middleton, Associate Professor at Ohio University conducted an academic survey a few months back (now concluded). However, it didn’t ask some of the kinds of questions that we thought were relevant for podcast producers. We think that the results from both surveys will be complimentary and will give podcasters a snapshot of podcast listeners as a whole.

Please help us spread the word.

A larger sample size will yield more reliable results, so we’d love your help to get the word out. We’ll share our results in September.

Here is a shortened link for your convenience: http://bit.ly/castsurvey

If you currently produce a podcast, we’d love it if you mentioned the survey to your listeners. You can request a copy of the full results by submitting your email address at the end of the survey.

Thanks for your help.

The survey closes July 31, 2010.

Go to the survey right now!

Watching the Chirp conference live stream on Justin.tv and reading the back channel #chirp tweets, conveniently brought together in one page on  TweetChat, it was difficult to keep up with the flood of information that was being made available. Twitter is so notoriously poor at communicating with their developer community and their users, that when they’ve seemingly turned on the fire hose of information, it’s a little overwhelming.

Here are some highlights:

Stats:
Registered users = 105.8 million
Monthly uniques=180 million
Daily signups=300,000
Posts per day = 55 million
Search queries per day = 600 million (the vast majority through the API)
Over 100,000 registered Twitter applications.

Geolocation:
Twitter is releasing Points of Interest, a geolocation tool tied to places. Instead of latitude and longitude, you’d have actual place names. They say that it will complement Foursquare and Gowalla, not compete with them.

Favorites:
A new API for Favorites will unlock interesting opportunities to manipulate more data. Will it be about influence? Will it be about topics and keywords? Who knows? Hackers will have 2 days to play with it during the conference.

Annotations:
This one is big. Twitter’s API will soon allow developers to add meta data to anything. The possibilities for applications to extract and manipulate data in new and interesting ways is huge. This will be opened up in the next quarter.

Resonance Score:
Marketers, PR folk, SEO/SEM practitioners and anyone else who’s in the business of increasing influence had best listen up. A Resonance Score is the Twitter equivalent of Google’s Page Rank. It examines tweets, favorites, retweets, link clicks, avatar clicks, hashtag reuse, etc. They have theories about how this will play out, but Twitter is going to roll this out slowly while they tinker with what it really means.

Promoted Tweets:
Announced yesterday this is Twitter’s long awaited revenue model. To start, Promoted Tweets is being implemented by Starbucks, Bravo and Virgin America. They offer the brands the opportunity to pin a tweet to the top of keyword search results. The Tweet is shaded to make it stand apart from the regular stream. The length of time it will stay in that position and the value of the tweet will be  tied to Resonance Score. At the start the costing is based on CPM but will evolve into ROI once Twitter understands Resonance Score better.

On Thursday, Starbucks is starting a campaign using Promoted Tweets that will involve giving free coffee to people who come in with a reusable tumbler. They addressed the difficulty of running promotions where they are speaking to an international audience. Starbucks stated that when geolocation can be applied, they will be able to refine their  messaging.

Twitter will be offering a 50/50 revenue split with application developers who opt-in to Promoted Tweets. Participation is not mandatory and 3rd-parties are allowed to have their own advertising models. However, Twitter is working on a policy that will prohibit the ecosystem from certain types of advertising that  would damage the brand integrity, for instance, having ads that were indistinguishable from regular tweets.

Now that Twitter will allow developers access to all that meta data through annotations, how will our data be used for targeted promoted tweets?

Mobile Apps:
The RIM partnered Blackberry app, released this week has resulted in 100,000 new users in 3 days; yesterday the Blackberry app was used on 1.7% of all Tweets. Twitter is also developing an Android app. These join the iPhone app that they released this week. These releases have caused their partners in the ecosystem to question their intentions in competing against 3rd-party development and the future stability of creating apps for Twitter.

User Streams:
Real time information being fed directly to you. No polling the system, no waiting, no rate limits. The API for this is being made available to developers for 48 hours to play with. (There’s a 2 day Twitter hacker event concurrent with Chirp.) Here’s a 3-minute clip from Ryan Sarver @rsarver detailing User Streams:

Watch live video from Bwana.TV on Justin.tv

Home for Devs:
During the conference, Twitter launched dev.twitter.com, the new home for developers to centralize and streamline availability of information and API documentation that will grow to replace the wiki and Google Docs. Documentation will now be generated directly from the code, rather than Twitter creating it manually (resulting in errors and a slow time to post.) The audience showed their relief and appreciation with the loudest applause of the day.

@Anywhere:
Also live today, the @anywere API will allow Twitter to be embedded into media outlets in an interactive way. The Guardian is incorporating @anywhere in their coverage of the UK elections as a way for people to connect directly with politicians.

Notes From the Executive:

• Evan Williams (@Ev) said Twitter was not a social network platform, but a “public interest graph” (as opposed to Facebook’s “private social graph”).
• Dick Costolo (@dickc) stated that Twitter is working on having syndication by the end of this year “or people back stage won’t be working at Twitter any more … including me.”
• @dickc also said that they’d release the number of active accounts from the 105 million registered accounts. But, he stressed that Twitter is often consumed on other sites by people without accounts.
• @Ev says Twitter will be releasing an integrated link shortener. They’ve been using one internally in their own DMs. (Uh oh Bit.ly!)

Misc:

• The Library of Congress has acquired every public tweet since Twitter started 4 years ago. They will continue to archive all public tweets.
• 30% – 40% of the audience indicated that they were hiring.
• Great quotes from Aaron Gotwalt of CoTweet: “Think big. Iterate violently.” and  “Central Pennsylvania: Silicon pasture”
• will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas took the stage to talk about how musicians will be developers, aggregators of people and content.
• @KaraSwisher did a great job moderating a panel of Twitter application investors, injecting humour and forthrightness into the afternoon. (She was the only woman guest on the stage today.)

Developers: The Power Behind Twitter

I’ve said it many times before: Twitter gets it’s real power from 3rd-party applications. Twitter application developers are the ones who are building the tools that add value to our experience and fuel the intelligence that we’re demanding from this otherwise simplistic platform.

So, show developers a little respect and love for all that they do for Twitter users. Coding takes fuel. Find out what kind of boost your favorite app needs. Is it vocal support? If they’re fledgling, maybe they just need to pay the rent, so pay for an app or give them a donation.

Lastly, please take a few minutes to visit oneforty.com. Started by my buddy Laura Fitton (@pistachio), it’s a tremendous resource for all things Twitter (and is one of the few female-founded start-ups around Twitter.) It’s like an app store where you can search for applications, read and leave reviews, and find just what you need from one of the 100,000 registered developers in the Twitter ecosystem.

Those of us who’ve been practitioners in social media for a while are familiar with it, struggle with it, scratch our heads and wonder how others do it: How do you keep everything balanced without burning out?

The number one question that I’ve had from people curious about starting in social media is always about the amount of time that is needed to participate. It is a time suck, for sure. That’s not to say it’s not a worthwhile time suck, because it most assuredly is. But, let’s be realistic, it does take time and commitment to keep all of those balls in the air.

As a sole practitioner, delegation is not always an option for me (yet). So, between maintaining business/social networks, keeping up with industry developments, creating content, doing client work, nurturing new business and collaborating on some exciting new service offerings, my plate has been full.

Let’s add some life to that too. There’s my my responsibility to being a full participant in my family, because they will always come first. And, the need to maintain a few offline friendships, hoping that those whom I don’t contact regularly are understanding. Notice here that I haven’t even touched on any “me” time for personal development. You know, like taking a course in juggling.

I was headed towards a lethal combination of entrepreneur and social media burnout. Not good when you consider that my livelihood is dependent on being a marketing entrepreneur specializing in social media.

Something had to give. Actually, a few things did. This blog was one of them. But the break from trying to do it all was good for me.

In the meantime, the folks at Hubspot have revealed what I always suspected  about how Chris Brogan can do so much.

Now it’s time to get back to this blog and other things left undone (thanking the Google gods for the Mark All As Read button). Learning to keep a balance and maintain perspective is an ongoing process. For those of you along for the ride, thank you for your patience.

If you have any tips or wisdom about balancing business, social media and a personal life while maintaining your sanity, please share!

• 1.1 billion people in the world don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. That’s 1 in 6 of us.
• Dirty water causes 80% of all sickness and disease in the world and kills more people than ALL forms of violence, including war.
• 30% of all freshwater people use comes from underground lakes and aquifers. To access this water, people need wells. This costs money
• $20 donation = 20 years of clean, safe drinking water to a person in Africa (among other places)
• 100% of all money raised by charity:water towards building wells, providing access to safe, clean drinking water.

charity: water for Twestival from charity: water on Vimeo.

Using Twitter as the primary means of spreading the word, the movement has picked up tremendous support with over 175 cities around the world signing up to host a fundraising event. From Christchurch, NZ to Hololulu, HI, the event hits almost every time zone on the planet. Want to follow the action around the world? Watch the video stream. Want to drink in the excitement from the Twitterstream? Then check out Twistori. They’ve generously surrendered their entire site to Twestival.

Closer to home, Twestival Montreal is going to be a blast! DJ Luv and DJ Maus will be sharing music duties, radio personality Winston McQuade is our MC, and we’ll have a photobooth set up for you to take home a souveninr of a great night. We also have a raffle with the grand prize of a trip to Vancouver courtesy of Air Canada and Opus Hotels.

I’d like to personally thank our sponsors for helping us put on a great event with special thanks to Aquabrass, Opus Hotels, Air Canada, Molson and Aquaovo. And my sincerest thanks to the volunteer team who have worked so hard and with such passion to make Twestival Montreal a success. It’s been a pleasure working alongside you.

If you’ve got a Twestival happening in your city tonight, I encourage you to go. If you are in Montreal, we’d love to see you:

Location: Suco Lounge in the Opus Hotel
(2108 boul. Saint-Laurent, enter through the hotel on Sherbrooke)
Time: 18:00 to 23:00
Tickets: $10 in advance (until 4 pm today) or $15 at the door

Now, in the realm of seasonal events, to me, none is more fun than Halloween. I like it more than Christmas and Easter combined. It’s hard to go wrong with an event focused on disguising yourself in a macabre or funny costume and being rewarded with candy. As a kid, walking around outside after dark in the crisp air and rustling leaves, traveling with a motley band of juveniles on the hunt for the house with the best treats, was pure magic. Halloween has no hand wringing over exorbitant presents, visits from strange, distant relatives, or tales of fictitious egg-bearing rabbits. It is the perfect non-holiday.

So when I saw the Tweet, “There’s still enough time to make your own Mac-O-Lantern this year“, I stopped dead in my tracks. My Twitter bud, @badbanana, a.k.a. Tim Siedell (he’s the fun guy who started the Friday Night Twitter Party), created this great project last year using a working Mac Classic and some spray paint. His Mac-O-Lanterns received so much attention, that he’s acted early enough this year to post downloads and complete details for others to make their own in time for Halloween.

Now, I could end the story there, but why? This is a perfect example of creating interest by giving something away, even if it seems like just a fun little project.

You see, Tim Siedell is the Creative Director and Co-Founder of Fusebox, a brand communications studio located in Lincoln, Nebraska, “about as far away from New York and Los Angeles as you can get at the same time,” he says on his blog. His company is all about using creative ideas and a different approach to make an impact for their clients.

How did I know that? Despite the fact that I’ve followed @badbanana on Twitter for about a year, and regard him as one of the most clever people I see in my timeline, I couldn’t recall ever having visited his blog (sorry, Tim). That is, until his Mac-O-Lantern Tweet pointed me to it. Once there, I was so impressed with the fun and creativity of the project, I delved deeper into his blog, discovering the link to Fusebox along the way.

Once on the Fusebox site, I was hooked into reading some of the best web copy I’ve seen in a long time. Great storytelling in a compact package. Not over-indulgent, not boastful and brash, but confident, approachable, pragmatic and client-focused. It is the antithesis to many over-the-top creative agencies’ web sites and a total breath of fresh, crisp, autumn air.

Fusebox is now totally imprinted in my memory and I am a new fan. All because of  a Mac-O-Lantern (that was created a year ago).

The lesson here is to give something surprising away to attract attention. But once you have that attention, make sure you have the goods. Don’t waste your opportunity to make a stellar impression, or the one giving you a chance may feel disappointed or deceived.

So, what will it be: trick or treat?

I’ll be nearby for Thanksgiving and would love to meet some of my Twitter friends for drinks and food.
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 (Election Day)
5:30 pm to 8:30 pm
The Irish Embassy Pub and Grill
49 Yonge Street (map)
416.866.8282

Please R.S.V.P. in the comments below to ensure you have a spot with the group.

I’m looking forward to seeing you in Toronto!

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