One of the first duties one must perform as President is to set a theme for the year. I struggled with framing the various ideas I had for the theme though I knew, somehow, the ideas were all connected. Then, as I was going through my correspondence with Marcel — a Toastmasters colleague whom I nominated for a position of Sergeant At Arms (he was elected) — in the week following his death in a car accident, I discovered the theme in one of his emails to me. In accepting his nomination, Marcel wrote that he looked forward to “expanding my comfort zone”. That was exactly what I was trying to say.

The board accepted my theme and today, I announced it to the club. Although… I still haven’t selected a logo that represents that theme (does anyone have any ideas they want to submit?).

The best way to create new experiences and discover your potential is to stretch beyond the safe boundaries you set for yourself. What are you doing to expand your comfort zone?

In fairness, most podcast networks have had a difficult time making a success of themselves; the most public of these being Podshow which is trying to distance itself from its earlier mistakes as it goes through its reinvention as an entertainment company.

I believe that there are two types of networks in this space: the Rabbit Network and the Turtle Network.

The Rabbit Network seeks to build market share for financial reasons. These networks face two distinct challenges. First, the early adopters of new media (including podcasting) were hobbyists that struggled with the delivery and/or production of their content. This is in no way a knock at the content creators because most of the content that was (and still is) being produced was fresh and (in some cases) edgy. The content they were creating, though, was marketed to commercial interests that had a difficult time identifying any commercial appeal. This is particularly true where the second challenge comes in — the business model. It’s hard to convince potential sponsors and investors to take a financial risk on an unproven and relatively disruptive technology. The value couldn’t be measured so the potential sponsors avoided the risk. Traditional business models were used where new business models were merited. Because the big players preferred to play safe, the word about the podcasting didn’t move as quickly. This means that it was hard to establish, and ultimately appreciate, the value of the media.

Having said that, there have been some notable sponsorships. As Whitney points out, though, it is unclear whether the sponsorships were achieved based on genuine metrics. Regardless, there is data that suggests some so-called small scale podcasts have greater penetration and engagement than the shows that are getting the big sponsorship deals.

The Rabbit Networks usually make a big splash when they launch and become marginalized over time. Some people believe this is because mainstream media loses interest or that the latest and greatest Rabbit Network has come along to replace the one thatís making the same mistakes as its predecessors. Based on my understanding, the Rabbit Networks almost always disintegrate because of hidden agendas and lack of communication.

The Turtle Network is a group of like-minded content producers that band together in a show of support and to help promote one-another’s shows. There is no expectation of financial gain and in many cases the bond is a mutual (and sometimes vocal) disinterest in sponsorship and advertising. These networks have no specific goals and, for the outsider, appear to be nothing more than a public pronouncement of friendship and a way to help listeners identify content that the producer(s) enjoy.

It’s easy to be dismissive of the Turtle Networks since they never really seem to accomplish anything. However, their organic approach to building and engaging an audience, and their quietly-chug-away approach to creating programs, means that they serve a niche that will follow them and forgive them their absences and production mistakes. The Turtles survive because of their regular, honest and transparent communication.

Perhaps networks haven’t succeeded, yet, because noone’s figured out a way to cross-breed a Rabbit and a Turtle.

I have many highlights from the conference including the addition of the Jolts, the 90-degree turn of the room layout, the couches, the amazing presentations and the engagement and insight of the entire community.

As I sat down and considered all of my hightlights, I realized that there is a common thread in the changes that took place this year: ideas and attitudes. There was very little discussion about skills and techniques. Those details were hidden inside the more substantial dialog and didn’t need to be said.

It was time for that discussion. It was time to hear about the constructs and rules that we’ve been consciously and subconsciously operating on, and how and why to reach beyond them. It was time to hear about the elements that make an engaging audio program. It was time to hear about the balance of action and emotion, that the content is the audience and that PAB is very much about attitude.

It will be interesting to see how the participants and their content production will change over the next while.

1) Start thinking of the topics you’d like to hear or speak about. The speaking sessions this year inspired creativity and community. The presenters didn’t show us what to do or how to do it — they explained what could be done, why it’s worth exploring different approaches and to innovate on your own, and ways in which to move beyond the production and hosting constructs of traditional radio. I feel that there is so much more to explore and we’ll be looking to you to help us find those topics and speakers. You may be one of them!

2) Register early to reduce pressure on the organizers. PAB is a not-for-profit event. The conference is paid for by registration fees and a small number of sponsors and we don’t spend money we haven’t collected. It can be difficult to coordinate with the hospitality and catering departments of the hotel, the A/V requirements, swag, social events and related catering, etc… when we don’t know our registration numbers and revenue collected. It would be amazingly helpful if you sign-up and pay as soon as possible when we open registration.

3) Spread the word about PAB by showcasing its value. We spend a lot of energy organizing the event to make sure that we have the best possible speakers, topics, environment, etc… Partly because we’re busy and partly because we like to keep the event small, we haven’t spent a lot of energy on promotion. We count on word of mouth. While word of mouth by simply telling others why PAB is worth attending is extremely valuable, the greatest value is in acting on the things you’ve learned. What I mean is, more than talking about it, showcase the value of PAB in your social media and content production activities.

4) Send us your authentic feedback. We can only improve PAB if we know what you think needs to be removed, fixed or dropped added and what shouldn’t be touched at any cost. We’re not going to blast the community with a survey because surveys are generally structured around the vision of the survey’s creator not the needs of the participant. Please send us your thoughts in an email (podcastersacrossborders@gmail.com). While we may not be able to act on everything, we can at least guarantee that we will read and consider every comment, concern and suggestion.

5) Recommend sponsors or direct sponsors to us. We consider ourselves to be champions of the community, not salespeople. We look for sponsors that connect with the ethos and energy of the community and because they’re legitimately invested in helping advance creativity, innovation and thought leadership — not because they want to plaster their name on another event. And, as champions of the community, we want to limit the number of sponsors to a small and committed few. This means that our preference is for a small number of silver and/or gold level sponsors that believe in the event.

6) Keep following PAB and CPB. The PAB website will likely be dormant for the most part until we make decisions about PAB2009. Nevertheless, it remains the best site to follow for updates. PAB2008 conference audio will be published on the Canadian Podcast Buffet throughout the summer and PAB2009 announcements will be made on that podcast when decisions are made.

Photo: Christopher S. Penn

One thing that I have been thinking about is the lofty vision I had of PAB being the TED of social media. I am absolutely blown away by how the presenters delivered on that vision. PAB2008 was truly a motivational, inspirational and creative weekend.

Thank you to every PABster and PAB sponsor for making the conference necessary and possible. And, thank you Bob, Cat and Andrea for another great collaboration and for all of your amazing support and patience.

Expect some posts about PAB on my blog this week.

PODCAMP

Even within the PodCamp unconference movement, each event has its own style. PodCamp Boston 1 and 2 were strong in their efforts to promote community and the media of podcasting. PodCamp Toronto 07 and 08 catered very well to the marketing interest and had strong focus on podcast promotion and technology. PodCamp Philly had a decided education and community flair. PodCamp Ottawa was truly unplugged. Of course, these conferences had a lot of breadth of coverage in many domain areas and became the catalyst of conversation that stretches beyond what I mention here. What PodCamps have in wide-angle scope, they lack in specific depth of focus. Being a free event that is community organized offers the ability for the community to decide what it wants to share and that gives the movement a lot to grow on.

MESH

This event attracts a lot of key players from pop-culture, marketing, communications and social media. Mesh was packed from end-to-end with innovators and thought leaders who were excellent at delivering on the promise of the Mesh motto, “connect, share, inspire”. The panel discussions and keynote format (in which there was no real speech, but a discussion between a guest and co-organizer) offered the audience some amazing insight into some incredible projects and people. However, I felt that because there were so many panels and keynotes, there was little opportunity for many of the speakers to dig deep into their subjects and propel innovation beyond its current state. Those sessions where more a discussion of the past and present and offered little to push the envelope of innovation. For me, the best sessions at Mesh were those delivered by an individual or team that shared details of a specific project or idea. They made me want to get up and do more.

PODCASTERS ACROSS BORDERS

What started out as a grassroots event aimed at helping the community advance together in a meetup-meets-conference format has become something more credible and formal. Being a co-organizer, I am both proud and critical of our accomplishments to date. Our first two years were vastly different from each other and that has allowed us to examine the stuff that works (lots of engagement with the community) and the stuff that doesn’t (too much programming, insufficient breaks) and find a way to make the best of our event meet the stuff I love most about other events to hit one out of the park with PAB2008. My lofty vision is that PAB establishes itself as the TED of social media — a conference that changes the way people think in twenty minute segments and then offers a forum to explore those ideas as a group. I believe that this year’s program represents experience and a maturing of the conference and community. I’m looking forward to this year’s conference which we can almost start counting down to in hours.

PARTING THOUGHT

People often talk about the best part of conferences being the networking and socializing. In fact, I often hear of people attending one conference in particular (name withheld) just to socialize and have given up attending the sessions because, for them, the sessions lack substance. I believe that conferences should always excel at providing worthwhile networking opportunities, but never at the expense of offering high quality sessions and high quality speakers.

Turn your radios to CBC Radio 1 this Friday between 10:00am and 11:00am.

While I learned a lot about their approach from Saul during a lunch gathering, it was the insights that Mike and Saul shared at Third Tuesday Ottawa that brought it all together. They talked about driving from Florida to Texas in a van, stopping in fourteen cities along the way to dine and engage with customers. During that trip they unwittingly connected some of their customers to work on their own projects and engage in new opportunities. They talked about following their customers’ online activities (not in a stalking kind of way) and making sure to acknowledge personal and corporate victories, and do token gestures for people having bad days (sending flowers) or pining for something Canadian (shipping mustard and Triscuits around the world). In many cases, they use the phone, noting that email is an incredibly ineffective way to communicate.

If Karma Marketing is the umbrella to the FreshBooks approach, then two powerful statements offered by Mike outline an approach to make that happen.

• “I take care of my team; my team team takes care of our customers; our customers take care of our business.“

• “Engage in extraordinary experiences everyday“. There is a great blog post by Mike here that further explains his 4E philosophy.

The FreshBooks approach of having all new hires start by answering the phones and handling customer calls is a brilliant way to ramp up new hires on customer engagement and relationships, as well become familiar with the service that FreshBooks sells. It doesn’t stop there. Each employee does their reserve period on the phones on a rotational basis — like milu’im in the Israeli army.

As the evening wrapped up and people started to disperse, Saul joined the group I was with and offered some advice he suggested will save us spending $20 a year on a new Seth Godin book. “Be remarkable”, he said.

As I walked home, I remembered the book, Creating the Service Culture, which I’ve blogged about before. The premise of the book (written in the 1980’s) is that services and products are becoming more homogeneous so companies must distinguish themselves by how they manage their customer relationships. That sounds like FreshBooks.

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!

The event features guest speaker, Adrian Salamunovic, co-founder of DNA11, a company that pioneered the creation of personalized artwork from the DNA of its customers.  Adrian will tell the story of how buzz about DNA11 spread from blogs, to magazines, to TV and mainstream media.

At the time of this post, there are seven spaces left for the event.  You can register here.

See you on Tuesday.

For most of the week I’ve found it difficult to breath and sleep knowing that I will never again have the opportunity to exchange ideas with Marcel. I’ve been fluctuating between coherent and confused states of mind. I’d guess that this is what all of Marcel’s friends are going through. I can’t imagine what his family is going through.

Today, the Toastmasters club of which I am a member (Causeurs Sussex Speakers) gathered at our usual meeting time to support each other. It was amazingly therapeutic to be with my good friends, each of whom Marcel took specific time to get to know. We shared stories, laughed and cried. I had two stories in particular I wanted to share and wasn’t able to get the words out of my mouth. Instead, I’ll blog them.

When Marcel was Toastmaster of a meeting last November, he decided to pick the theme ‘take a chance’ and lived the theme by not contacting those with roles. I was among those people and two days before the meeting became concerned that something was wrong. I was the second person to call him to find out what was going on. Marcel was pleased with himself and he was particularly proud that his experiment succeeded and enjoyed that Dave, the General Evaluator that day, pointed out how lucky he was that it had worked. In an email following the meeting, Marcel included this quote:

“Take a chance! Life is a chance. The person that goes the furthest is generally the one willing to do and dare. The ’sure thing’ boat never gets far from the shore.”
– Dale Carnegie

On April 25, as elections for the 2008-2009 executive were approaching, I asked Marcel if I could nominate him for a position. I was being selfish. I was the only nomination for one of the positions and felt that for more reasons than I can describe here, but that those who know Marcel understand, he belonged on the executive. He took the request very seriously and suggested that we go for a walk to talk about it. We were a few seconds into the walk when he said ‘Do you always walk this fast? You have to slow down or you’re going to miss everything there is to see, smell and experience.‘ We walked for twenty minutes. It was a walk I usually do in about five minutes and I had never really experienced the feeling of being passed by other pedestrians on the sidewalk. He walked completely past his office, to mine, so that we could talk about his nomination and how important it was to him to do the most with the position. We talked about public speaking, life and family. We talked about the woman at Bell Pastry who always kept his favourite muffin set aside for him each day just as he liked it — not wrapped in plastic. On May 1, he accepted the nomination and was elected to the position of Sergeant at Arms.

Causseurs Sussex Speakers is notorious for its free-exchange of hugs. I will miss Marcel’s hugs — especially because he’s the only other member pushing six-foot-four. I will miss joking around with him, including the time when I spontaneously selected him as ‘the trouble student’ when I led a meeting themed on teachers that had an impact on us. I will miss seeing his smiling and curious face when I deliver a speech. I will miss talking about what to do with long arms during a speech. I will miss all of his insights and I will miss the opportunity of working with him as part of the executive.

Marcel is one of the teachers that had a big impact on me. Thank you, Marcel, for everything you taught me, including one of life’s greatest lessons: slow down or you’ll miss everything there is to see, smell and experience.

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

Space is limited so be sure to register.

Note: If you register and discover you cannot attend, please be sure to cancel your registration so that someone else can attend.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend the open house. Instead, I dropped by The Code Factory to congratulate Ian and Jocelyn Kartes (Minister of First Impressions) during lunch, yesterday. The space looks great!

Ian will be organizing a series of lunch-and-learn sessions for the community. He showed me a wish list of sessions and speakers and it looks like a great lineup.

As the promo says, don’t forget to P A Be there!

Despite all of that, I’ve learned my lesson.  I will again never live-blog a conference!

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.

Conversations that are based on stories are incredibly engaging. In that respect, this panel was strong. More importantly, they engaged with each other. They were energetic and dynamic in a way that no other panel or session has been so far.

Ryan waxed poetic on various topics throughout the session. In particular, he offered some interesting sound bites including marketing a web app is a full-time job, the hardest thing for an entrepreneur is focusing on one thing, don’t hire friends and don’t take money if you don’t to.

Julia joked that her hope is to sell out to Google. In the meantime, unique opportunities such as a global promotion with Adidas, strong angel investment and revenue through banner ads keeps the company financially strong.

Leah, who was surprisingly quiet most of the time and burst with excitement at others, signed with relief when she announced that Pownce is about one-year-old and things are much easier now than they were when the team first started out — it’s trying on your mental health.

Each company monitors uninstalls and departures and depends on their community managers to follow up on departures. Clearly, they all take this role very seriously.  Ryan also offered that entrepreneurs would be wise to read all customer feedback.

Ryan was a standout when I asked for each panelist to give a 15-second Purple Cow pitch of their company and products. Even though he didn’t detail why I’d want to use his product, it took him no time at all to describe a team and company culture that would be the envy of anyone.  Julia took about a minute to itemize the features of a great sounding service and Leah struggled to summarize Pownce as being remarkable.

Being remarkable is key to the success of a startup.  The question becomes how do you define success in relation to the rest of the web — can you co-exist with your competitors or do you stand out?

This panel was very solid, entertaining and loaded with valuable information.  I can’t help but feel that each could have spoken at depth for more than an hour.   This was definitely a standout session.

It’s my curiosity on how enterprise money is being spent that led me to attend a discussion on Social Media and the Enterprise with panelists Natalie Johnson of General Motors, Chris Reid of Yamaha Motor Canada and Jenny Bullough of Harlequin Enterprises Ltd., and moderated by Michael O’Connor Clarke. Michael’s mere appearance on the stage resulted in a dramatic hush coming over the room.

Following pleasantries and introductions, Michael kicked off the discussion with a quote from The Cluetrain Manifesto:

“…companies so lobotomized that they can’t speak in a recognizably human voice build sites that smell like death.”

Harlequin enjoys strong brand reputation. This means that there’s a community built on decades of publishing books that appeal to a specific and demanding niche. In fact, Harlequin publishes 120 new books each month including electronic selections of their back catalog based on user demand through their website. Also interesting is that Harlequin still accepts unsolicited manuscripts.

One of Harlequin’s greatest successes is a series of meet-the-author podcasts that connected aspiring authors with potential readers and meet-the-editor podcasts which educated aspiring authors on the Harlequin approach.

Nathalie talked up General Motors’ social site imsaturn.com (though her way of saying I M Saturn was confused by the entire room to be I Am Saturn which led us to the website of a hip-hop musician). Another initiative that connects their customers with the organization is IGotShotgun.com which features behind the scenes videos. The greatest challenge to moving to the social web has been securing the support of the upper ranks and steering the corporate culture of 266,000 people in a new direction.

Yamaha brought in an outside expert to educate senior management on the value of social media for brand value and online reputation. Chris described how he could see the lights go on during the session and that having an outside expert added credibility to the campaign, that he alone would not have had the same impact despite the fact that he is the in-house expert.

While each organization has corporate blogging policies, each approaches participation in online communities by employees a different way. Harlequin’s multi-page policy comes down to ‘don’t be stupid’; don’t blog about authors, don’t blog secrets, etc… The brand is well defended by a large and passionate community. This means that Harlequin watches as the community responds to negative comments. GM allows employees to participate in online communities provided they are transparent about their employment. They moderate comments for foul language and offensive remarks. Otherwise, they allow negative remarks and criticism in order to be transparent and to learn from the community. Yamaha only allows internal blogging and does not permit employees to represent the company online.

When the panel was questioned about their organizations’ commitment to social media, Michael noted that the panel represents a new environment in which companies are dedicating full-time positions to social media engagement.

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.

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.

While Metronauts has elements of familiarity, it’s a particularly important case study and something to be excited about.  You see, a group of citizens was able to thwart a long-established public procurement process that was well underway — a process that, in many cases, presupposes the winning contractor and that suggests that the public consultation process is a charade to appear transparent.

For all of the frustrations that Metronauts may be experiencing dealing with the municipal government, Metrolinx appears engaged and committed to the open-source process despite its incovenience.  Indeed, the success is probably due mostly to the open-mindedness of the Metrolinx brass and the safe third-space in which the Metronauts have invested a lot of thought and energy — two important achievements.

Much like the corporate examples we are all familiar with, Metrolinx has and is going to be the beneficiary of great publicity and a lot of public goodwill for their legitimate collaboration in this process.  There’s a lot of trust capital to be gained and for government to be tapping into that is significant.

Metronauts teaches us that there are opportunities for citizens to engage collaboratively and productively with government no matter where the government is in its long-established processes, and we are at the beginning of an era in which the public sector needs to hire open-source/social-media marketing and communications folks to be their community evangelists.

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.

I’m going to start off with two counterpoints so I can get them out of the way.

Why is it that so many people feel compelled to push making revenue directly from the production around web-based content? Specifically, this clunky word monetize — even worse, monetization. I have yet to attend a conference or session that specifically promotes the idea of producing and distributing content to build and strengthen a personal or corporate brand. I’ve decided to leave the discussion of how to monetize your content out of my post.

While content is extremely important, I disagree that content is king. Newcomers are often indoctrinated into the concept of content is king at the expense of context and delivery. While it is true that absence of content is a killer (Whitney Hoffman has dubbed content-free speech as oral kegels), strong content without relevant context and accessible delivery is going to be victim to the ’skip’ button. Scott did acknowledge in his talk that bad video will derail good content.  Jeff brought up a great point with respect to content and frequency — there should be a direct correlation between the strength of your content and the frequency of your production schedule.

Okay… that’s out of the way, now.

This session was full of great takeaways:

• The equation E² = education x entertainment.

• Engage your audience.

• Lighting will make a huge difference in your video. Use a bounce board to reflect light on your subject. The larger the board, the softer and more natural the light.

• Use a tripod to ensure a steady shot. For hand held use, zoom out and get close to your subject to avoid magnification of the shake.

• Every image you use should tell a story. Use the rule-0f-thirds to make your composition more interesting.

• Attention spans are short and YouTube imposes a ten-minute limit on all videos.

• Serve a need; fill a niche.

• Stick to a production schedule.

• Make sure your camera has connections for an external mic (1/8″ or XLR).

• Every camera has its strengths and weaknesses.  Any brand will do.  Prosumer cameras have great default settings to get started.

• A lot of what you will do will be sweat equity.

Amber, Jeff and Chris were able to draw on a lot of experience and creative collaboration for producing interesting content. This audio guy is ready to fire up the video engine and start experimenting.

Note: the presentation will be available on mgimedia.ca.

• It’s a great way to take notes and kick off a conversation

• When you record your thoughts in a stream-of-conscious method, you can sometimes miscommunicate or forget to review some of your initial thoughts that have evolved

The opening paragraph of my blog on Michael Geist’s session (Michael Geist: Digital advocacy is the new normal) is one of those paragraphs that needed to be revisited.  Michael’s session was loaded with new examples of digital advocacy in many disciplines, and featured a great list of pointers for successful digital advocacy.  What I had meant by overlap of content is that there is a common thread in Michael’s presentations — which is a good thing if you’re presenting on a common theme.

Michael, I owe you a beer.

• 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)

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.

Ethan’s opened his sit-down chat with Matthew Ingram by suggesting that record companies be viewed as venture capitalists; they are to musicians/bands what book publishers are to authors and newspapers are to journalists. These companies establish risk-reward relationships that are, to this day, based on traditional business models which make opportunities for artists possible.

He carried on by citing examples of bands such as Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead as being publicity stunts to create a market for their product that can (and has) overshadowed the art itself — the stunts have an impact for what they stand for rather than what they did. Ethan pointed out that In Rainbows is a great record but the real story ended up being that Radiohead gave the record away. Another example he cited, which worked very well, was when REM played unreleased material at a concert and made adjustments to the songs based on audience reaction before going into the studio.

As you would expect, there was a discussion on file-sharing and illegal downloading. Ethan offered that “if you get lost in the policy debate over file sharing you lose sight of the things you can control” — thanks to Joe Thornley for capturing that. As Joe pointed out on Twitter, “tell that to the RIAA”.

Another interesting part of the discussion centered around the fifty-some-odd-years worth of music in the Warner Bros. archives. Ethan would like to invest time reviewing this catalog and exploring what can be learned from and done with it.

Portable player APIs and especially video games such as Rock Band and Guitar Hero (and notable mention to Grand Theft Auto which just trumped all sales figures for an entertainment product launch) also offer significant opportunities to the record companies. Among other things, these games are introducing the ‘next generation’ to music from previous generations (e.g. Aerosmith, Joan Jet). These are products and marketing opportunities that definitely need to be explored.

Live music and touring is enjoying a peak in popularity right now. This has also led to an increase in bootlegs, live recordings and innovative marketing opportunities that bring the live experience together with technology including tools like Twitter (if it could stay online long enough) — and higher quality merch ($40 concert shirts that don’t crack in the first wash).

Ethan’s talk ties nicely to a conversation I had last evening with Jay Moonah. Jay pointed out that the music industry will remain strong and adaptable because of the increasing ability of artists to create their own groundswell, records and market — that there is a decreasing dependency on the record companies by many artists, particularly the newcomers. This means that record companies and long established bands (such as REM) must go through a reinvention in order to stay relevant and appealing to the marketplace. This requires a sense of daring, creativity and adventure. If they can’t keep the art at the front of the publicity game, the record companies will outlive their usefulness.

In wrapping up, the question was asked if MySpace could be a label. Ethan responded with “MySpace doesn’t filter. Labels depend on filtering. It’s what makes a label a label”.

While I had been looking forward to the keynote by Matt Mason, a visa problem has kept him from making the trip from the UK to Canada.  In his place, Michael Geist will be delivering the keynote in a few minutes.

The program is packed with great sessions which has made it difficult to choose between concurrent sessions.  I’m counting on the hallway conversation to fill in the blanks for me.   If this morning is any indication, the hallway conversation is going to be strong throughout the event.

It was great to meet Mark and Alex from Viigo and I am looking forward to using their technology on my iPhone when it’s ready.

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.

In a recent conversation with Jason Wells, Director of Marketing and Publicity for Harry N. Abrams Inc., a book publishing company, I learned about some of the major challenges that have come up.  The challenges are rooted in the limited amount of ‘face time’ a book gets. Face time is when a book is featured prominently on a display table or book shelf with its cover facing out so the prospective buyer can see the book.

In the old model of book selling, books got face time in a store in order to help promote and sell good books, and face time was rotated for the benefit of the customer. In the new model of book selling, most books get face time because a publisher is paying a premium to the book store for the book to be displayed face out. This means that the books are being displayed for the benefit of the book store and a publisher that is fortunate enough to have the budget to pay for the ‘face out’ privilege.

Most books are never even seen, or they are seen ’spine out’. Publishers and publicits are now forced to ‘market the spine’. Yes. That extremely narrow, sometimes tall, part of the book. If selling a book by its cover was hard, it seems that selling a book by its spine would be near impossible.

How much can be done with a book spine to attract attention among a sea of other book spines? Consider that there is no rhyme or reason to the colours, fonts and font attributes on a bookshelf of dozens of books. That is to say, using bright, rich or even dull colours for one particular book doesn’t necessarily help it stand out more than any other book using bright, rich or dull colours and a similar (or even different) font and font attribute combination.

This new challenge extends into many industries: technology, entertainment, services, etc… The window of opportunity to present a product or service as a Purple Cow among other products and services is getting smaller.

What makes this challenge more interesting is that there is no obvious solution. There is no way to truly model an idea and test it without taking a chance on a book and putting it on a bookstore shelf, spine out, and hoping for it to gain the attention of the right people — those that are going to spread the word about the book and even buy several copies as gifts.

Have do you market your spine?

I suppose part of the decision was the fact that I was asked twelve times over the course of three days if I was going.  The most compelling arguments were offered up by Jay West and Mark Stephenson.  Ahh… the pressure.

If you’re going to Mesh and want to connect, drop a comment for me.

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 thems