This event will bring together some of the brightest minds on the topic of social media from our region, and from across North America.

The response to this event has been amazing. In the first few weeks, the event sold over 100 tickets. We have now sold two-thirds of our goal.

Check out the amazing line of speakers, and the schedule.

If you’ve been thinking about learning more about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media, this is definitely the must-see event for you!

• Most recently, I jumped on as Social Media Day organizer for Victoria, and took the idea to Victoria City Council. As a result, Victoria became the first city in the world to proclaim June 30th Social Media Day, and received a fair amount of notoriety for this from around the world. The main event is tonight, and everybody is welcome!
• I am co-organizing Canada’s first Social Media Camp, featuring local presenters, and well known experts from across North America. The event runs the full day on October 3rd, 2010. Registration is now open, and there are some perks to signing up early!
• I helped found the local chapter of Social Media Club, which was the first in Canada to get off the ground. It provides opportunities for anyone who’s interested to come and learn about Social Media, with different topics each month. Meetings cost $5, so it’s a small investment to make, with the potential to learn a lot.
• I also organized two WordCamp events in Victoria, and plan to continue these about every 6 months. The first event had 100 people, and the last one had 130. We had some great speakers come from all over British Columbia.
• IdeaZone.ca organized the website and social media campaign for the last two Flower Count events in Victoria. This was our contribution to a great promotional opportunity for our city.
• Another great cause, which we happily supported with sponsorships and promotion through our channels (but cannot take any credit for organizing), is Twestival. The local Twestival event raised $8,146.32 for charity, the 15th highest amount in the world (not bad for a city that doesn’t even rank in the top 1000 largest cities in the world). This is a semi-annual event, and we look forward to doing our part to help make the next one a big success, too!

We work with many local small businesses and non-profit societies helping with all their marketing needs, including website and print design, and social media. We’d love to work with you, too. Feel free to contact us.

If you are interested in learning more about Social Media, I offer a number of training workshops, too.

Here Jon will be demonstrating the website listings features we are able to offer real estate clients on Vancouver Island, and Jodie will be on hand to answer questions about your social media strategies.

I will also be presenting Social Media and Realty: They’re Both About Making Connections at 10:30am.

Here’s a preview of my slides:

On January 13th, I was a guest speaker at the special general meeting for the Nanaimo Chamber of Commerce. I had a great reception and some excellent feedback from a terrific group of business professionals. I also got to know a little bit more about The Harbour City, and all the excellent stuff that’s been going on there in the last decade or so.

Needless to say, I’m quite looking forward to returning!

The Cridge Center for the Family offers a wide range of community based programs from seniors’ care programs to transitional housing for women in need. They have been operating as the Cridge Centre for the Family since the early 1960’s but with roots that extend as far back at the 1800’s.

The Cridge Centre contracted us to refresh a range of their communication material, but first wanted to extend their present corporate ID across the many services they operate. Each service should be identifiable as a unique identity but remain tied to the overall branding.

Before proceeding, I should specify that we did not create the original logo for the center but it has been in use for a fairly long time and is now an anchor point in their overall branding so reviewing this mark was simply not an option.

Creating logo marks for these services was a bit of a challenge for me. How do I create a graphic to represent brain injuries without it being cliché at best, or offensive at worst?

Since the object was to expand upon the original logo that was the obvious place to start. I considered using the well known candle in the graphics but decided instead to use a soft gradient within the window to show candle light within a room. The florals in the windows are extending outward inviting people into the warmth inside. I used different florals to identify the different services and thus was able to identify each service individually and maintain the spirit of the original logo.

For the uninitiated, WordCamp is like a mini-conference for WordPress users, developers, bloggers and enthusiasts.  As many IdeaZone.ca clients and partner companies use WordPress for their content management or blogging needs, it was a very worthwhile endeavour.

IdeaZone.ca President Paul Holmes was the main organizer of the event. It drew approximately 100 participants, and featured 13 speakers, including both Paul and IdeaZone.ca’s very own Catherine Novak, too.

Participants came from all over – Salt Spring Island, Vancouver, Comox, Nanaimo, Seattle, San Juan Island, and even Saint John, New Brunswick!

Paul presented on the topic of domain name acquisition, and his entire presentation is on his blog.

We’re looking forward to WordCamp Victoria 2010!

This is not a lecture, a seminar, or even a workshop!

It is an intensive, small class, hands-on training course designed especially to help small business succeed in Social Media. It is spread over 6 weeks (2 hours per week), to maximize, reinforce and measure the results of the integration of social media over a period of time.

We will work with the businesses on the course, to ensure they focus their energies right, and get the best return on investment possible for their time and money. Our aim is to equip businesses with the skills needed to make the most of the changing Internet landscape.

Do you know a business that this course could help? How about your business?

Follow this link for more details.

Any questions? Please contact myself or Catherine Novak for more information.

While we talk a great deal about the tremendous opportunity social media offers small business, the opportunities for non-profits are even greater. People who are socializing online are looking for what is going on in their community, including events, and causes their friends support.

One of the most common complaints we heard was that boards of directors and management were reluctant to take the plunge, for fear of diluting their brand, wasting time, or their inability to control the message.

Our response was simple:

People are online, right now, talking about your organization. The message is already outside your control. Do you want to be part of the conversation or not?

We plan on posting our slides and a number of other resource materials here early next week. If you were at the seminar (or not), please feel free to comment to this post. We’d love to hear your feedback!

Prominent Vancouver blogger, Dr. Raul Pacheco, managed to raise well over $1,000 for this important cause by blogging for 24 hours.

Dr. Pacheco kindly mentioned IdeaZone.ca in the article outlining his Top 5 Social Media Tips. Despite his certain exhaustion, it was a great article, and the recognition was greatly appreciated.

Cancer is something that we care about. When we launched our web services division, dotcanuck Web Services, we sponsored our own online fundraiser, with contributions going to the Canadian Cancer Society.

Congratulations to Dr. Raul Pacheco for his important contribution to the fight against cancer!

Why is this?

Usually it’s because you are trying to put your “standard” images into a different standard.  To do a really nice job, have your designer use the proper specifications for images, and the result will be a much cleaner look.

Here are a few basics:

Facebook Picture (Profile or Page)

The top-left image is 200 pixels wide.  The height can vary substantially.  Facebook will convert to a JPG and will shrink images wider than 200 pixels, so your page looks best if you save as a JPEG and have an image exactly 200 pixels wide (and 100 dpi, not 96 or 72). Since the image spans two colour fields, trying to have the background match either is pointless – in fact, it looks better if you use a third colour as the background, to add some contrast (the blue is #D8DFEA and the white is standard #FFFFFF).

(Another cool option is to put a 1 pixel border around your photo using colour #D8DFEA. This matches the menu border colour – have a look at the Avid Reader page for an example.)

Facebook Thumbnail

You cannot upload a separate thumbnail image for Facebook, you must zoom into a 110×200 pixel area of your picture that looks good.  Think about this when choosing your picture image.

Twitter Picture

The “Picture” icon is a variation of 73×73.  Since people can view a larger image by clicking on your face (or logo), you may want to do a larger image – but keep the dimensions a variation of 73×73 (i.e. 146×146 or 219×219).  Twitter accepts and does not convert a PNG, so use a PNG.

Twitter Background

Because the Twitter website is not a fixed position, the background image option on Twitter is a design nightmare.  Avoid trying to make things line up perfectly on the “right” side of your profile – instead, put anything important on the left side, or go with a “subtle” tiled image. Important: make sure your background image’s background colour is the exact match of an HTML colour, and define the rest of the background with that HTML colour, otherwise your image will look like it’s in the invisible box.

YouTube Account Image

Your YouTube account image is 88×88 pixels, and scales throughout the site at 60×60 in various places.  Make sure your image looks good at both, and upload the 88×88 pixel image in JPEG format (other formats are just converted to JPEG).

YouTube Channel Background

YouTube backgrounds that are not tiled are centered (and, thus, look ridiculous behind your channel info).  If you do a background at all (a solid colour is good), make it something subtle that you can tile nicely.  (Note: YouTube is rolling out new channel designs, so stay tuned on that.)

LinkedIn

An 80×80 pixel JPEG works best for the profile image, and a 100×35 pixel JPEG for your company page image. (Other image formats are just converted to JPEG automatically, even if they are the correct dimensions.)

Flickr

A 48×48 pixel JPEG works best for your buddy icon, and your group icons.

MySpace

Ugh, where do I start. Unless you are a band, think very seriously about whether you need a profile on MySpace.

But we also know that it is important to be pro-active with your customers, and your potential customers.

While useful and important, Twitter, Facebook, websites and blogs are all passive communication channels. The most pro-active methods of communication are pretty labour-intensive – just pick up the phone, or send an e-mail.

One mantra in our business for years and years, was to send a newsletter. Be it e-mail or snail-mail, just do it!

It accomplishes a few objectives:

• You “touch base” with people, if informally.
• By including “general information” about your industry, you establish yourself as a credible source within your industry.
• When it comes time to use or recommend your service, theoretically you will be top of mind for the person who receives your regular communications, whether they just delete it every time it comes in, or they actually read it.

There are a thousand good reasons to do it, but it has always been easier said than done. Who is responsible for designing and compiling it? Who is responsible for proof-reading it? Who has time to write content? What should we say? Are we saying too little? Are we saying too much?

Even for our organization, which boldly preaches the message, and truly believes it to be an effective, pro-active form of marketing, we rarely made it happen in communication with our customers in the past.

Fast forward to now, and blogs rule the world.  Every company has one (or should).  Theoretically, it’s the new newsletter – call it Newsletter 2.0.

With RSS, people can subscribe, and if they regularly read their subscribed blogs in their RSS reader, then they will see your message all the time!  Unforunately, while RSS gives us a high-tech method to pro-actively reach customers, the reality is that most customers don’t incorporate it into their day, and even if they do, it’s just another highly passive, generally ignored channel.

In short – your clients are not waiting with bated breath for your latest dollops of wisdom to arrive in their RSS reader.

The reality remains, therefore, that the newsletter is king, and should still be strongly considered for its proven merits.

For those who just cannot find the time to make a newsletter, like us, we recommend FeedBurner, a pretty amazing RSS tool that lets you do all sorts of fun and interesting geeky things with your RSS feed.

By enabling Email Subscriptions, you allow people to subscribe to your website blog, but to receive their subscription by e-mail. So, you still get out your “newsletter”, only it’s arriving in chunks, as blog entries. As long as you are not blogging 7 times a day, annoying people to no end, you accomplish the same objectives as sending out a newsletter, and you do so as part of your routine, not as a separate and tedious process.