The first Social Media Breakfast Ottawa took place at the offices of Ramius Corporation this morning. It was a great inaugural event and attendance exceeded expectations. There always seems to be new people to meet in the Ottawa social media community.

The guest speaker was Adrian Salamunovic of DNA11.com, a company that creates custom art based on their client’s DNA — fingerprints, lip-prints, DNA samples, etc… (”From life comes art“). That means that each piece or art they create is unique to the individual who orders it.

Adrian’s talk traced DNA11’s creative yet simplistic approach to marketing and promotion that harnessed the power of social media to make inroads into mainstream media including Wired and Playboy — something he referred to as turning a spark into an inferno. In his talk he gave examples of how the fire can burn with both positive and negative results.

Simon Chen asked that I do a podcast of the event and I couldn’t resist. I thought I’d do something a bit different this time and dovetailed voices of the community with excerpts of Adrian’s speech.

For good measure, I threw in Stevie Z’s promo for Podcasters Across Borders at the end of the show. Don’t forget to register!

 

 How they started the fire [18:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Last year it was Quechup; now there is a new unscrupulous social networking site.  PAGII is spamming the contact lists of new registrants as a way of attracting more new people and artificially building its strength.  In the process, it’s upsetting a lot of people who feel duped by the lack of transparency in the registration process.

If you get an email from PAGII, ignore it.  It was likely sent without the knowledge of your friend.

Sociologist Sam Ladner was direct when she opened her session on reputation management and monitoring. “We won’t talking about reputation systems”, she said. “eBay reputations will not be part of our discussion. Read Bryce Glass’ blog if want to know more. He also has a Slideshare called Designing your Reputation System“.

In fact, Dr. Ladner led an amazing session in which she explored the meaning of reputation, attributes of reputation and the impacts and contexts of brand conversations that could be reputation impacting.

Despite the response of McNeil and the amazing brand-recovery case study that is the Tylenol cyanide poisoning incident of the 80’s, the company still took six days to respond. Can you imagine a six-day response time today? How would a six-day delay convert in a twenty-year span?

To setup the discussion, Dr. Ladner presented the three elements of the Looking Glass Self:

• We imagine how we appears to others
• We imagine how others judge that appearance
• We react to that imagined judgment

Consider that reputations cannot be managed. To help understand why, Dr. Ladner outlined the three key attributes of the Online Self:

• Hidden (online sources lack contextual cues)
• Digital (easily broken down, re-arranged, mashed-up and rearranged)
• Proliferating and Permanent-ish

What’s most interesting is where brand discussions are taking place and how that context affects the brand reputation and the opportunity of individuals and corporations to participate in that discussion (Forester Research and Statistics Canada):

• 48% of North Americans participate in social computing
• 30% of Americans have posted online ratings
• The average Canadian spent 35% more minutes talking on the phone in 2003 than in 1997

Dr. Ladner walked through a number of online tools and services that allow individuals and companies to monitor reputation.  There are several classes of tools available:

• Social Media analytics (Technorati, Google Trends, ePinions, etc…)
• Social Media observation tools (Neilsen Buzz Metrics, Cymfony)
• Social Media Response Tools (Umbria, TruCast)

Using examples that involved these tools, we learned of a number of studies in which included brand reputation of breakfast cereal based on health and nostalgic references, and brand reputation based on online attitudes on sustainability.  The examples were incredibly interesting and I would have been grateful for an extra hour to explore these examples in more depth.

Before leading a more interactive discussion, Dr. Ladner proposed some reputation monitoring best practices:

• Systematic (develop standard metrics, stick to them)
• Regular (measure at consistent intervals)
• Governed (assign accountability for metrics, create a task force)

We were all encouraged to use Google Labs to do our own research on reputation conversations, offering that we research Dell and Best Buy together over a period of time and look for when the Dell announcement on selling their computers at Best Buy.

We were able to wrap up with a more lighthearted discussion on the doppelganger effect.  I guess there are some advantages to having a one-of-a-kind name.

Note: this session will be available in slideshare.

Today’s second session was a conversation between Mesh organizer Michael McDerment and Garrett Camp. Garrett is a co-founder of StumbleUpon, a social sharing site bought by eBay in 2007 for $75-million.

StumbleUpon’s origins are in Calgary which makes it one of many Canadian web 2.0 success stories; stories that include Flickr and Club Penguin, both of which got their start in Vancouver. At the time of the purchase, StumbleUpon was looking for more venture capital to augment their $1.5-million in working capital.

According to Garrett, StumbleUpon is a tool that best serves visual content and websites. People can share their findings such as a site that a group of us found through StumbleUpon this morning that shows a collection of bad album covers.

eBay allows StumbledUpon to function as a startup within a large organization. This affords Garrett and the team the autonomy to self-direct their development in the best interest of the tool that they built and the spirit in which it has been embraced. It’s refreshing to hear stories about big companies buying startups and letting the founders continue with their vision.

Given my recent experiences with the Ottawa Web Weekend — which was largely about the coming together and collaboration of thirty-six strangers — I find it particularly interesting that Garrett felt he waited too long build the team out.  That’s significant when you consider the size of the eBay purchase.  His focus now is how to build the team, spread the knowledge and try to build the business to be strong in the same was as Facebook.

Garrett suggested that he’d like to explore social advertising which would target ads to individuals based on recommendations by their StumbleUpon friends. This presents a more obvious fit with eBay.

The session was dry and skewed, heavily, to venture capital and corporate purchase. The key takeaway from that discussion is that the money is in the United States.

First off, I want copies of the monologues by The Voice. Like day one, today opened with a great introduction which was both entertaining and shockingly realistic.

The first ‘keynote’ featured a discussion between Mesh organizer Stuart MacDonald and Lane Merrifield, Executive Vice President Walt Disney Internet Group, Co-founder and General Manager Club Penguin. Club Penguin is an online virtual world for children which boasts twelve million users and more than seven-hundred thousand paid subscribers. Where the free service is sustained by advertisements, the subscription service offers an ad-free environment.

There are many critics that claim Club Penguin indoctrinates children into the consumer culture. Lane defends the world by pointing out the lessons that can be learned about currency and the need to save money in order to buy what you want. Lane is quite up front that Club Penguin is not specifically an education experience nor is it meant to be. It’s a place for children to play online.

Safety is a high profile concern of Club Penguin. Personal information is blocked and there is a team of moderators that monitor and sanitize the environment of unacceptable content. Apparently ‘lollipop’ is on the chopping block at the moment. They measure their success by ‘reportable incidents’ and have never had an incident in which a child’s safety was at risk.

A lot of thought has gone into marketing the environment. Lane talked about the struggle that Club Penguin has gone through to describe itself. He rejects the idea that it’s a social network since they block all personal information. I wonder if a social network is defined simply by the presence or exchange of personal information. They ended up deciding to call the online world a virtual playground and established a mantra that drives their marketing decisions “if it doesn’t matter to an eight-year-old, it doesn’t matter”. The result is that they don’t participate in many conferences (Mesh being an exception).

The Disney part of the Club Penguin story is particularly interesting. Lane gave the impression that the purchase was not necessarily an objective and he spent time with John Lassiter to gauge how Disney treats their employees and holdings. More significantly, Disney has given Lane and the Club Penguin team the freedom to decide how their virtual playground will unfold without imposing Disney characters on it. Disney offered characters like Mickey Mouse and Buzz Lightyear if they were wanted. Club Penguin operates without those easy grabs.

Club Penguin is about the personal experience. Personal emails from the community are answered, personally, by real people on the team. That means that when they get a fractured email from a child asking a technical question and describing their character and that their character’s pet says ‘hi’, someone will reply with an answer to the question and will respond to the mention of the character and send regards back to the pet.

I’m a huge fan of case studies so I’ve been looking forward to this session by Mark Kuznicki and Sean Howard. This is one session with a specifically built-in audience largely of government employees, consultants to government and government relationship representatives of private sector companies (including what appeared to be a lobbyist-by-another-name).

This was the first session today in which the presenters asked each participant to introduce themselves and their work — which speaks to either the size of the crowd or the type of presenters they are.

When the Metrolinx (the greater Toronto Transportation Authority) posted an RFP for the redesign of its website, Robert Ouelette put the challenge to the Toronto blogging community: “what should the Metrolinx website look like?“. This led to the creation of Toronto TransitCamp, an event modeled after BarCamp to bring together the most passionate 1% citizens to engage with the Metrolinx and each other with the vision that the Transit Camp would not be a complaints department but a solutions playground.

The key drivers behind TransitCamp are that the current public consultation process is broken, the best ideas do not come from within anyone organization and Black Swan ideas always come from unexpected and unplanned places.

Here’s the best part — Metrolinx was invited and they came. In fact, a representative was in attendance of this session!

Metronauts was formed; a group of individuals engaged in a process that is still in its early stages. That is, they are still in phase one of a three-phase process. As such, final results were not available for this case study.

Metronauts identified three methods of gathering insights:

• Explicit: specific ideas and solutions offered by informed and engaged citizens

• Tacit: insights derived from observing the interactions and conversations of informed, engaged and enabled

• Latent: needs that are not known until they are seen for the first time

The BarCamp model was adapted for the purpose of achieving specific results. This includes an evolution to the law of two feet which permits those who are not getting anything out of a particular session to leave the session, to explicitly telling participants that if they are not getting anything out of a session that they are obliged to leave and find another session which will allow them to contribute.

Part of the process has been gathering tags that help participants to identify words that describe their TTC experience and associate elements that play into the importance of their TTC experience.

Metronauts has managed to create a safe third-space for all participants in the process. The means that the Transit Camp experience has been incredibly positive and productive and is leading to human-centered solutions that will benefit the service providers and consumers — crowdsourcing and collaboration at its best.

One of the greatest challenges is the control of communications from the government; public servants are not permitted to engage in the online dialog on behalf of the government. This can marginalize the commitment and transparency of the government in the eyes of the community. Success depends on the appointment of a community evangelist that can speak freely, with authority and without the continuous and per-engagement clearance of the legal department. Any organization that is committed to progress and remarkability needs to have its own RichardAtDell.

Note: this presentation will be on slideshare tagged mesh08.

Amber MacArthur led a talk about the proliferation of video content on the web called Video is Everywhere. The panelists introduced themselves and their roles within their organizations as follows:

• Dina Kaplan (blip.tv): original episodic content on the web and matching of content with revenue opportunities

• Andre Gaulin (CTV): tasked with bringing online social media craziness to television for CTV

• Guinevere Orvis (CBC): mobile and online strategy production; putting behind the scenes video added value content that doesn’t appear on television online

This panel featured a classic display of the perceived personality stereotypes.

Dina represented the excited and passionate, over-caffinated envangelist of a grassroots community whose passion to create great content is increasingly obscured by the ambition to convert user-generated content into independent wealth. Dina’s near message-track focus was on maximizing revenue opportunities by packing as much advertising into any available corner of a video clip. She also really liked every question (’That’s a great question”, “It’s a really interesting question”…).

In contrast, Andre explained in his calm demeanor how CTV is working with various production companies to bring terrestrial content to the web and web content to our televisions. When posed with the challenge of explaining why some US content is not available in Canada, he spoke at a high level explaining that rights and licensing is an extremely complicated legal are which involves different production houses with different requirements and licensing restrictions.

Guinevere summed up the session’s unique qualities  by eloquently pointing out that the three panelists represent three different approaches that won’t likely converge into a single model, ever. Where CTV is pursuing unique ways of cross-pollinating content from various media, CBC is on the cutting edge of exploiting new technologies to inspire custom content creation and distribution. Among their innovative initiatives (for a public broadcaster) is the distribution of Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister using Bittorrent.

Say what you will about the dinosaurs of broadcast media, their primary interest remains the creation and distribution of quality content using innovative and accessible technologies.  They understand the competitive nature of content creation and consumption. Meanwhile, the grassroots are giddy about the idea making a buck. (note: Dave Fleet suggests that a buck might be more than they will actually make)

I’ve seen Michael Geist speak on several occasions and each time, despite the overlap of the content, each presentation is engaging and fresh. (defensive clarification: There is a common thread in Michael’s presentations, which is a good thing. This presentation was loaded with new examples on a theme I have heard Michael speak about)

In today’s keynote at the Mesh conference, Mr. Geist provided a steady stream of relevant examples of sites, videos and blog posts that have been instrumental in spreading important messages and rallying people for issues in the public interest. There were also examples of the use of Twitter to rally for intervention of citizens in matters that involve local authorities, and mashups of technologies such as the use of Google Maps to geo-locate violent activities.

What makes digital advocacy effective:

1. organizing power (Here Comes Everybody)
2. online AND offline
3. mainstream media (what gets reported gets blogged, what gets blogged gets reported)
4. educate
5. bring to action
6. speed
7. new digital tools (thanks Dave Fleet)
8. localized
9. government 2.0
10. general purpose sites

In the conversation that followed, Michael defended the idea that a large online gathering (e.g. 40,000 people in the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group) is not necessarily representative of the interested population of subject matter experts and concerned citizens. Michael pointed out that any large gathering is representative of a larger group of people made up of different levels of understanding and experience. The groups are necessary to effect change.

The issues that Canadian citizens are up against are politics, not policy. Michael used the example of Canadian copyright reforms to demonstrates that, where once policy people informed and supported politicians in creating policies that would satisfy a majority of Canadians, politicians are now directing the policy people on what the policy should be and how it should be crafted based on external influences such as US government pressure. The missing ingredient seems to be public consultation, particularly with key stakeholders including the artists affected by the law.

Laws including the DMCA are based on projections of where the technology and society will go. This approach has hindered, not helped, advancements of technology and the arts. It has also created divides and distrust of governments and the key beneficiaries (such as record companies not artists or consumers, movie companies…) of the laws.

After a long and opinionated discussion about the political establishment, someone asked about the danger of online advocacy being co-opted by consumer rights instead of human rights. Michael agreed that duplicating the impact of the Fair Copyright for Canada would be difficult in any situation though there are great examples of digital advocacy. The impact is really up to the people the initiate and participate in various campaigns.

It’s hard to get people engaged. However, getting them connected in a social media community that targets a specific cause, that’s a start. There is a formula that politicians use along the lines of every single letter represents 1000 other citizens. The more people that become involved, the better chance we have as individuals to become groups that can effect change.

Last night’s Third Tuesday Toronto had a more relaxed atmosphere than the events I’m familiar with in Ottawa. Perhaps that was because of the size of the crowd (standing room only in a room with a capacity of 160) or maybe because I was sitting with the wild kids at the back of the room (Jay Moonah, Eden Spodek, Doug Walker, Dave Fleet and ring leader Collin Douma).

Michael O’Connor Clarke moderated a discussion on measuring social media with panelists Katie Paine, President of KD Paine and Partners and author of Measuring Public Relationships, Marshall Sponder, Chair of the Web Analytics Association`s Community and Social Media committee, and Marcel Lebrun, President of Radian6.

Most of the discussion centered around the need for metrics and how they should be presented to clients or management as well as some of the elements that can be measured.  Ms. Paine’s direct approach which includes the ‘Suckiness Factor’ boldly displayed on charts and graphs was by far the most interesting and entertaining.  I had hoped for more discussion on methods for collecting metrics and specific case studies on the collection, presentation and influence of metrics in decision making by clients.

The panelists’ parting thoughts on social media and metrics ensured that the evening wrapped up on a high note.

• Katie Paine: ‘measure how much social media traffic you get’
• Marshall Sponder: ‘listen about you’
• Marcel Lebrun: ‘listen about the marketplace’

I’m off to the Mesh Conference.  I hope to have the opportunity to blog during the day.

I have attended many conferences in the last few years. Each offered fantastic opportunities to network, learn and make new friendships. At the end of each conference, we head in separate directions and our connections migrate to the online world using tools such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It’s a model that’s worked well in many respects.

Compare those experiences to the one I had for the last three days at Ottawa Web Weekend. Thirty-six people of varied backgrounds, interests and experiences gathered and established themselves as part of a cohesive group with a common vision. Once we agreed on that vision — which, admittedly, had the potential to go very badly (thankfully, it was a very positive experience) — sub-groups were created and worked to complete individual component pieces of the goal.

Here is a model that dismisses the speaker-audience relationship and turns the whole event into a symbiotic learning experience. The project forces everyone to function in a team and (more importantly) to be part of a cooperative unit — it’s a very subtle yet important distinction. It’s community building at its best.

The strongest part of the experience is creating, debating and refining ideas with others. I worked with veterans and newcomers and learned as much from each.

My experiences were not limited to working with members of the marketing and business teams. I had regular dealings with the design team and some interaction with the developers. I made up for missed opportunities to work with others by taking time to speak with and even interview (for some podcasts) them during the occasional break.

There is a significant payoff: if successful, the project doesn’t end at the scheduled time. The group that, as we discovered last evening, realizes their goal will likely continue working together to further themselves and their project. That means that the real-life connections have longevity and additional meaning. The Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn connections reflect a real collaboration, friendship and (perhaps) a business affiliation.

After twenty-eight hours of working together in close quarters, the development and design teams demonstrated their achievements, and marketing, legal and business presented summaries of their plans. Then, something amazing happened. Everyone announced their intention to continue with the project and dates for our next meeting were kicked around.

When I think about the various conferences and events I have attended in the last few years, I realize that the Ottawa Web Weekend was by far the most educational, most innovative, most community-fostering and the one that will continue to deliver to and be delivered by everyone involved.

Note: more posts and podcasts — including the product announcement — to come.