It was announced today that Ford Motor Company has won the Brand of the Year award from the Society for New Communications Research. My time at SMG began just as the Ford’s social media adventures were beginning and I’m proud to have been part of the team that laid the foundation for today’s successes.

So a heart-felt congratulations to Maggie and the crew at SMG for a job well done and an award not exactly won. ;)

I have spent a fair bit of my time over the last few years explaining the web to people. The people I talk to are smart people but the internet is new – and it’s new in a new kind of way. It is a transformative presence in our lives in ways we have never seen from a technology – or collection of technologies.

This kind of change often leads to suspicion and fear and I used to try to allay those fears by framing the internet revolution as an evolution instead. “Don’t worry,” I would say, “this is no different than the advent of the printing press, telegraph, telephone and television. The web is merely the next step along the road of communication technology. It’s no big deal, you can relax.” To hear me tell it, this was a mere incremental advance in a long string of similar advances.

I was wrong, though, and I knew it. My desire to make my audiences as comfortable as possible with things like blogs, Facebook and Twitter trumped any desire to tell the truth. The truth is this: the the web is a technological revolution that has transformed, and continues to transform, our global society. Nothing will be spared the impact of the web. Our socio-political structures will change, our understanding of personal relationships will change (in just the last eighteen months a single website has made the word “friend” globally ambiguous), and, eventually, our churches will change too.

Don’t take my word for it, though, I’ve lied about this before. Let Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, tell you. In June of this year, Shirky spoke to the US State Department as part of the TEDTalks program. In just fifteen minutes and a handful of slides Shirky is able to distill the seismic shift we are experiencing into accessible language and concepts. This video skyrocketed to the top of my “videos everyone must watch” list:

Link to video: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html

[originally posted at BeingPresbyterian.ca]

What brought me back a little early was a conversation I had earlier this evening on Twitter.

Over the last few days I’d been seeing Tweets from Geoff Livingston and others about something called @ChildFund and reminders that every 200 new followers sent more aid to children in Africa. It seemed a little odd to me. How did another 200 followers make more aid available for starving kids in Africa? It would be more logical if they were asking for donations instead, and every $200 raised sent more aid to Africa. That would make sense.

For days, I couldn’t figure out how simply following a Twitter account with 199 others suddenly made more aid available.

So today I asked.

@GeoffLiving I’ve resisted asking till now – how does amassing followers help African children, exactly?

Geoff pointed me to his recent blog post on the campaign which didn’t tell me much more except that @ChildFund is ChildFund International which was known as Christian Children’s Fund until last week.

Unfortunately there wasn’t anything there to allay my feeling that we were being manipulated into following a Twitter account. I could not get around the logic that if there was money (aid) set aside for followers (and there must be because the followers are revenue-neutral) then why hold it back just because some threshold had not been reached?

What followed, when I said aloud (on Twitter) that the campaign seemed manipulative, was unfortunate.

Mr. Livingston, someone I’ve worked with (briefly) and respect as a thought leader in the non-profit social media space, came out swinging. I don’t know if he didn’t understand the question or if he simply didn’t want to answer it, but all I got back was string of answers to questions I wasn’t asking (like “How do more followers help CFI?”) peppered with ad hominem attacks.

In the end, my question goes unanswered. Why would @ChildFund limit the amount of aid sent to Africa to the number of followers of their Twitter account?

So let me speculate a bit in the absense of an answer. I’m guessing that CFI set aside a specific amount of money for this campaign to be donated at those 200 follower increments. Note that this is money/aid that CFI already has since they aren’t asking for donations from those followers.

My suspicion is that the aid in question was destined for Africa regardless of how many followers @ChildFund gets – but that’s not the impression given in the campiagn. There’s a very strong “more followers, more aid” message in the campaign.

But let’s say I’m wrong and more followers really does mean more aid to Africa. The would mean that in the end, @ChildFund would be sending less than they could if they got less followers than they expected. That doesn’t seem right either.

IF you read the Tweetstream between Geoff and I, you’ve seen his answer to a question I didn’t ask about how more followers helps CFI by indirectly increasing donations. The only way this “every 200 followers = more aid” thing works out logically is if CFI has some magic formula whereby they know the 200 more followers will bring in X amount of donations down the line. From that they can calculate how much aid to send on behalf of those 200 followers. That seems pretty unlikely to me.

So I’m still wondering. How do 200 new followers to @ChildFund actually result in more aid to African children?

One of the custom things I’ve added is IP-based geolocation. This means that every visitor gets a custom home-page based on their IP address. Very cool because it makes the site instantly relevant no matter where in North America you happen to be.

My only concern is that Google happens to be in Mountain View, California. Obviously, I don’t want MainStWeb’s indexed pages to be skewed towards Mountain View. Obvious fix is to programatically exclude search engines from the geo-targetting algo.

Except that I also know that Google frowns upon efforts to present a different experience to the GoogleBot than to real people.

So what to do? Would the search engine exclusion be considered acceptable in the eyes of Matt Cutts, et al?

The default feed for events in a specific city is an atom feed and it includes the event title and a short description. BUT! If you replace ‘atom’ in the URL with ‘rss’ you get much, much more content. I didn’t look very hard but this didn’t seem to be a documented feed. An RSS easter egg, so to speak.

The Problem:
Google search feeds cannot be pulled into Yahoo! Pipes.

Pipes’ slogan “Re-Wire the Web” apparently doesn’t apply to Google. I don’t know if this is a restriction of Yahoo or Google or both, but it’s very annoying if you’re trying to do some heavy-duty monitoring via Google search and want to be able to manipulate the feed before it reaches Google Reader… for example.

The Solution:
Google Feedburner. If you run the Google News/Blog Search feeds through Feedburner and then pull the Feedburner urls into Y!Pipes, all is well. You can manipulate the Google data anyway you like before consuming it.

There is no shortage of social media skeptics in the world. We meet them everyday in our offices and at the dinner table. They’re the ones who can’t say the word blog without their eyes rolling. They’re the ones who has a friend whose cousin lost his job and got divorced because of Facebook – so it’s dangerous. They’re the ones who we so quickly dismiss as out-of-touch and behind the times – and most of the time we’re right.

There’s a problem with being right, however. Because we can (and do) dismiss these luddite skeptics so easily, there’s no check on our exuberance for, and sometimes irrational devotion to, all things social media. There’s no balance to the sometimes embarrassing gushing over the latest Facebook feature, or prophesying about the apocalyptic consequences of Twitter actually trying to make a buck or two.

The social media echo-chamber does a wonderful job of amplifying the group-think to almost mass hysteria levels. It’s time to introduce a little skepticism from within the echo-chamber!

Enter SocialMediaSkeptic.com. Primarily a podcast, SocialMediaSkeptic will ask the hard questions. Questions like: Is it really a good idea to diminish the Office of the President of the United States by making his official website just another blog? If Twitter decides to monetizes and loses, say, 25% of it’s most self-righteous members but actually becomes sustainable, isn’t that just good business?

The weekly show will be hosted by me, but I’ll be joined by at least one guest each week. The guest will play the role of fan-boy/girl of whatever the topic de jour is while I get to be the cranky skeptic. There will be times, of course where either myself or the guest will be arguing against their true beliefs. Kinda like a debate club – but way less nerdy. Sometimes, if they’ve got the guts, the fan-boy/girl will be defending their own app/product/strategy – good times. After each show, the listeners will decide who’s right – the skeptic or the fan. The episodes will be short – five or ten minutes – no need to beat these things to death!

I’ll be spending the next couple of weeks lining up the first few shows and getting the new site ready. I’ll have a “social media tip line” set up where you can let me know of any topics/products/features that you think need the scrutiny of a skeptical eye. For now, just use my contact page at colincarmichael.ca/me.

If you want to be a guest on the show, just gush online about some bright, shiny social media thing. I’ll find you.
Or just get in touch, and we’ll set it up!

The date will be selected by popular vote here: ScheduleOnce (voting closes Friday, January 16th at midnight)

Update: We had 18 people respond at ScheduleOnce. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a day that all could attend, but Wednesday, Jan 28th was the most popular with 15 able to come that day. See you then!

Time: Anytime between 5 and late. ;)

The venue has yet to be determined. Make your suggestions in the comments on this post.
Update: I was thinking Moose Winooski’s at Sportsworld in Kitchener since it’s fairly easy for everyone to get to – including the transit-riders.

Hashtag: #techtriangle

Re-tweet link: Click to Re-Tweet it!
(this link seems to break Twitter, what did I do wrong?) Nevermind, it seems Twitter had an unrelated seizure the first time I tested.

I wasn’t, however, disconnected from my online community. Twitter and Facebook (via SMS & mobile apps on my Blackberry) kept me in touch with what was going on in my social net. Around New Year’s, I resolved to make my resolution one that I could keep: “Twitter more, blog less.”

All would have been fine, if Sebastien Provencher hadn’t smacked me upside the head. He wrote a post a Friday that called me out (indirectly) for taking the easy way out. For being lazy.

Your blog is your home base. It should be the foundation upon which you build your online presence and your personal brand. Twitter is the devil. It tempts you to use it to share quick thoughts. It’s the easy (lazy?) way. You don’t have to sit down in front of your computer to think about your next blog post (it takes me between 30 and 60 minutes to write one), you just spew out bite-sized lines.

He was right, of course. Twitter has tremendous value for building a community – around yourself or your organization – but that doesn’t excuse you from attending to your primary communication tools.

I hereby resolve to blog more, both here and at BeingPresbyterian.ca.

There I said it – now can I stick to it?

I’ve added myself to the growing list of suggested sessions at PodCampToronto 2009, to be held February 21 & 22, 2009 at Ryerson University.

I’m offering to hold a session called “First Church of Facebook: an exploration of Faith and Social Media.” We will talk about how churches and para-church organizations are (or could be) using social media to engage their existing communities of faith – and to bring their message to a wider audience. We’ll also talk about the social media adoption hurdles for churches and how they’re different from the private, public, and non-profit sectors.

These are things I’ve been thinking about quite a bit over the last few months as I’ve settled into my new responsibilities heading up the Communications Office at The Presbyterian Church in Canada. I’m looking forward to an opportunity to share my thoughts, and find out what others think.

If you’re planning to attend PodCampToronto and you have any experience with churches and social media, I’d be happy to co-present – get in touch!