Social Signal

Help me choose Noise to Signal limited-edition prints (and win a print for yourself)!

Rob Cottingham — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:06:30 +0000

Ever since I started drawing Noise to Signal, people have asked me if it's possible to get a print. I've finally gotten around to looking into that question - and lo and behold, making prints turns out to be perfectly feasible.

So I'm going to start selling prints of Noise to Signal cartoons. And I'd like to do it in two ways.

First, I want to make prints available for any cartoon someone thinks is good enough to hang on their wall (it's a hell of a compliment). That's still in the works.
But second, there are some special cartoons where I'd like to create a few limited-edition prints.

And that's where I'd like your help: choosing which cartoons to start with. I want to pick three cartoons for limited-edition prints in time for the holiday season. So here's my question to you:

Which Noise to Signal cartoon would you most like to receive under your tree / in your stocking / during your awkward office gift exchange / next to your Festivus pole?

Leave your suggestion in the comments below. And as my way of saying thanks - because I appreciate your doing a little free market research for me - I'm going to randomly draw one name from everyone who helps out, and send that lucky winner a print of their favourite cartoon.

We'll do this for the next week or so, and I'll announce the three cartoons (they won't necessarily be the ones that get the most votes, but your suggestions will carry a lot of weight) next Monday.

You can find the Noise to Signal cartoons here. Just drop the URL for your choice in a comment below.

Thanks for your help!

Is Twitter devouring itself?

Alexandra Samuel — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:58:50 +0000

Twitter lists have been around for all of one week and already there is a site that exists to make a list of lists. So I am hereby inaugurating my new Twitter destination site, consisting of this one page, on which I will offer a definitive list of the lists of Twitter lists.

Listerfluous: the list of the lists of Twitter lists

Listorious
Read Write Web's 10 Twitter Lists You Should Follow

Do you have a list of Twitter lists that you'd like to see included on Listerfluous? Please let our editorial team know so we can consider you for inclusion.

You know that this is a really serious Twitter project because it's got a picture of a bird on it. Here:

Another take on how to present social media options and opportunities

Alex and Rob — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:00:58 +0000

A few days ago, we wrote about the social media options document that is the final deliverable in the Concept Jam. Today, the fine people at BC Children's Hospital Foundation have allowed us to release the options document we prepared for them last year after their Concept Jam workshop.

That work led to the birth of the Be a Superhero! social media campaign. You'll see the beginning vision for this campaign in the options document we're sharing here. Since the work included additional options that may be partially incorporated into the Foundation's future efforts, we've removed them from the document - but we've included a description of their structure, as well as some general information about each one.

The foundation decided to proceed with the first two options: a fundraising widget and a personalized video (to the best of our knowledge, the first application of that approach in the fundraising arena).

Which means you get a chance to have a look at our descriptions of those options... and then compare them to the way they were ultimately implemented by our superb development partners at Work at Play. You can find the widget as part of the Be a Superhero Facebook application; the personalized video is also part of that app, as well as appearing on its own microsite.

(For a discussion of how the options document fits into the Concept Jam, read our blog post about the other document.)

The workshop, by the way, was terrific. The room of about three dozen people included foundation staff and volunteers, hospital employees, board members (including senior business executives), patient family members and others. All generously gave up their day; more to the point, they participated with enthusiasm and creativity - and enough ideas to cover pretty much every blank space on the walls of a very large meeting area.

We've mentioned a few times how thrilled we are to be working with clients who embrace the same spirit of openness that drives both the social web and Open SoSi. And we're grateful to BCCHF communications director Stephen Forgacs for letting us share this document with you.

Here's a thought: if you've found it useful, how about rewarding their generosity with a small donation?

Social Signal Concept Jam: Options Document for BC Children's Hospital Foundation

How a bad haircut created the risk tolerance to go open-source

Alexandra Samuel — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:57:42 +0000

The following post appeared in The Mark News earlier this week.

When I was a kid I had the shortest hair of any girl in my class because my mum couldn't face the hassle of hair maintenance. As soon as I got old enough to take care of it myself, I grew my hair as long as possible, and by the time I graduated from university it reached halfway down my back. Then I got my first real job and needed a grown-up look, so I gritted my teeth and asked for a modest trim. Instead, my stylist sheared me back to my ear-baring elementary school years, and I left the salon in an emotional state usually reserved for breakups and natural disasters.

That trauma led to an important discovery: hair grows back. Lost wallets are returned or replaced, thoughtless comments are forgiven, a bad week at work is followed by a good one. Divorced couples get back together; hurricane-flattened cities get rebuilt. Friendships collapse; groundbreaking legislation gets overturned. Things change, then change back, all the time.

It's humbling to realize that whatever you do or create is rarely lasting or significant. And it's liberating to realize that whatever mistakes you make are rarely lasting or significant. The hair grows back.

With that realization comes risk tolerance, an essential quality of any successful entrepreneur. To launch and build a business, you have to live with the constant gnawing anxiety of not knowing whether you'll succeed – or even meet the next month's payroll. Once you accept that success and failure are equally reversible, it's much easier to live with the pain of not knowing which will be your fate.

This mindset helps people like me start companies such as Social Signal, a social media agency I launched with my husband just four years ago. We had the entrepreneur's fearlessness and curiosity: could we build a company in a field that barely had a name? It turned out we could, and as social media emerged as a discrete and increasingly hot field, our client list, team, and consulting revenues grew.

Then the fearlessness went away. We made the mistakes that everyone makes in a new business, and our start-up debt felt a lot more permanent than a bad haircut. We developed skills, methods, and a reputation that we couldn't bear to lose.

So we did the things that businesses are supposed to do to protect their assets. We branded our methodologies and sold them as unique, proprietary tools. We signed non-disclosure agreements and non-competes with our staff and subcontractors. We fostered the long-term, mutually dependent client relationships that are the bread-and-butter of consultants living on retainer.

These are terrific strategies for managing risk – but they are also recipes for limiting success. If you won't let your clients go, you can't make room for new ones. If you can't have a conversation without a contract, you close off opportunities to learn and collaborate. If you won't share your own knowledge, your impact is limited by the size of your company. You can transcend some of these limitations by scaling up, but that involves taking on investors, diluting ownership, and limiting your upside in a different way.

If we worked in a conventional consulting business we might have stuck within that proven model, betting that the opportunity costs were lower than the security gains. But we don't work in a conventional consulting business – we work in a field that didn't exist when we started our company. And most of our projects are built by open-source software developers who run their businesses on an entirely different model, contributing the code they write to a larger community that continually revises and improves on each contribution.

Our open-source software colleagues inspired us to look at our business in a new way. What if we ignored all the consulting wisdom about accumulating proprietary intellectual property and tried giving it away for free? The risks were enormous – we'd be giving all these newly-minted social media consultants the benefit of our years of experience – but so was the potential benefit. Going open-source could scale our reach, impact, and reputation much more quickly, without requiring us to court (or live with) venture capitalists.

While the open-source model has proven itself in the world of software, we'd never heard of a consulting services firm that took the same approach. In a consulting firm, intellectual property is the only significant asset that can't just walk out the door. If we gave that asset away, we might have nothing left.

We're giving it away, anyhow. This week, we announced our plan to open-source all the methodologies, tools, and deliverables behind Social Signal's success. It could be the smartest thing we've ever done. It could also gut our company.

Oh no, you didn't!

The night before we open-sourced, our daughter gave herself a haircut. Her bangs are about two centimetres long on one side of her face, and fifteen centimetres on the other, sort of an Edward Scissorhands-meets-early Cyndi Lauper. This haircut will be immortalized in her class photo next week. And then it will grow back.

Managing Social Media - Calgary

Rob Cottingham — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:53:42 +0000

The Canadian Institute will hold Managing Social Media: Practical Solutions and Legal Strategies for Maximizing Success and Minimizing Risk on March 9-10, 2010 in Calgary. And I'll be speaking about Twitter:

Understanding Twitterculture, tools, trends and community
Using Twitter for brand awareness, promotions and contests
Real-world tweeting: tweeting to support issues, events and causes
Gathering business intelligence on your brand, organization and environment
Beyond 140 characters: building relationships that move to other online channels, such as your organization's web site
Case studies: how organizations are using Twitter right now to meet communications and business goals
Twitter missteps, how to avoid them, and what to do when things go wrong
Balancing Twitter's demand for spontaneity with the realities of public-sector organizations

More details as they become available!

How to create a social media strategy document that identifies options and opportunities

Alex and Rob — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:46:35 +0000

We deliver the Concept Jam to clients who are seeking their best social media opportunities: the campaign, site features or applications that can help them reach build relationships with their key audiences, generate revenue or deliver a key message.

The final deliverable in the Concept Jam is a document that gives them a set of options that reflects their organization's very particular goals, audiences and strengths. Today, we're releasing two documents that share our internal template and approach for delivering social media options.

The Concept Jam is all about sparking ideas from within an organization's team. But the sheer volume of ideas that come out of a workshop session make some kind of filtering and prioritization absolutely essential.

The first part of that work happens during the workshop itself, with participants shaping the priorities. But even a prioritized list often contains ideas that are duplicative or undeveloped. Once the workshop wraps, it's our job to take those top ideas and turn them into coherent, feasible concepts. In that process we often combine related ideas, integrate suggested details or features that came up in the workshop but weren't prioritized, and flesh out top options with features or approaches that are based on our experience in the field and our knowledge of what's possible.

The result is a set of options that are organized to support effective decision-making. We typically give our clients about 6 options that represent different price points, levels of complexity, and anticipated pay-offs. If some of the simpler options could serve as pilots or steps towards a more ambitious undertaking, we highlight the possibilities for smarting small and then growing into a larger project; in fact it's that ambitious end vision that often informs the client's selection of a modest starting point, since it is more useful to invest in an initial pilot that puts you on the path to the web presence of your dreams. And while we sometimes recommend one option in particular, we only present options that we believe in: there are no straw dogs here.

We are sharing two documents to help illustrate what an options document can look like. For confidentiality reasons we can not share a complete example of an options document. Instead we are sharing two halves that make a whole:

The options document outline shows the structure for a Concept Jam options document as we deliver them today. You could use this to structure the final deliverable for any workshop or strategy process that leads to a set of social media opportunities.

Open SosI: Concept Jam options document outline

The sample options document presents a slightly edited version of three options we delivered to a past client. While each of these options is delivered in slightly more detail than we typically provide, it demonstrates the level of focus, clarity and innovation that we expect from each option we deliver. Nobody needs a social media consultant to tell them to create a blog, Facebook app or social network: what matters is how that blog will be framed and structured, what that Facebook app will actually do, or how that social network will bring a group of people together.

OpenSoSi Concept Jam: Sample Options Document

We're always keen to strengthen and refine our deliverables, so we'd love to hear from other strategists about how they structure social media options and opportunities for their clients.

Reflecting on the Concept Jam

Back in the day, we jumped right into delivering options documents after only a conversation or two. Drawing on our own knowledge of the social web, and a basic understanding of what our client was about, we would come up with ideas for nifty things organizations could do online.

In some cases that worked great. Tyze, a personal support networking tool that we created for the PLAN Institute, was something we imagined before we even met the good folks at PLAN (though it was inspired by a book they published.) The vision we helped develop for HappyFrog (now part of 3rd Whale) was an intuitive extension of a terrific database of green living resources.

But we faced several recurring problems:

Execution. Just because we came up with a couple of ideas we loved didn't mean our clients loved them, too. We had our hearts broken a few times as we watched clients shelve our social media options in favour of more traditional online approaches.
Integration. The ideas we developed were sometimes at cross-purposes to the broader online or communications strategies our clients were pursuing.
Profitability. We delivered our Big Ideas quickly and at low cost -- then played catch-up by trying to make money on the design and implementation. Our revenue came from web development services (an increasingly commodified service that forced us to complete on price) and our strategic services (which were virtually unique) became a loss-leader.

So we decided to give our ideas a real shot at being implemented by tying them to a more intensive process, one where our clients and their organizations would feel a sense of ownership and buy-in. And, not coincidentally, one where we would be able to demonstrate the value of our strategic work. That process centered on a client workshop that ultimately became the Concept Jam.

But a funny thing happened when we started including our clients in the process of developing social media concepts: it turned out we weren't the smartest people in the room. We could help a client team learn the fundamentals of social media through an hour's worth of slides, rolled out over the course of the day. But each person in the room brought years and years of insight into the organization's goals, strengths and audiences.

Our excitement about social media was born of the belief that the best decisions emerge from processes that are decentralized, bottom-up and participatory. Yet in our own work, we wanted to be the creative geniuses who dropped from the heavens with the Perfect Social Media Opportunity.

The Concept Jam has proved to us, over and over again, that a room is always smarter than any one person in it. We're still active participants in the brainstorming process, because our immersion in social media means that we can help flesh out or translate some of the emergent ideas into feasible development options. But so many of the very coolest things that have happened in our recent online projects came from workshop participants contributing ideas like asking Global TV anchors to solicit donations to BC Children's Hospital Foundation, encouraging British Columbians to form teams to compete on energy conservation, or inviting the parents of disabled kids to share their wisdom on navigating social service bureaucracy.

The more we learn about social media, the more we discover that our clients (and, later, their projects' participants) are our most important teachers... and the Concept Jam is a great classroom. It's our pleasure to share it with you.

How to create a great report summarizing your workshop's results, with an example from Vancity's Change Everything

Alexandra Samuel — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 06:45:45 +0000

We love the Concept Jam workshop for what happens in the room, as people get excited about the possibilities for social media in their organizations and their own work. And we love taking what happens in the room and teasing out the ideas and mashing them up with what we know ourselves until we can deliver a really varied, exciting set of options.

But in between the room and the options lie at least a couple of weeks worth of work. Those weeks can give our clients a chance to reflect on the insights that emerged, and their team members a chance to start trying out the tools and approaches they discovered in the workshop.

Or those weeks can provide just enough time for clients to write their own narratives of what the group decided, or for team members to put social media entirely out of their mind.

We experienced both of those challenges in some of our Concept Jams, particularly if there's an extended period of time between workshop and options delivery. (Since we like to review the options in a client meeting, scheduling can sometimes extend the delivery cycle.) Then we hit on an easy solution: creating an immediate post-workshop report, deliverable within 3-5 days of the workshop.

The workshop report doesn't add any reflections to the workshop results: it's more or less a transcription of the workshop's flipcharts, and even that makes for a long document. But it serves the crucial purpose of letting all the workshop's participants review and reflect on the ideas and results, and in particular, to see the relative levels of interest and prioritization that emerge during the voting and risk/reward matrix session at the end of the day.

Sharing a workshop report is a lot to ask of a client, because unlike an options document it contains a wealth of ideas and information about an organization's focus and endeavours. But one very generous client stepped up: William Azaroff of Vancity, for whom we launched Change Everything in 2006.

The brainstorming session that we held for Vancity -- and which ultimately led to the Webby-nominated ChangeEverything.ca -- became the prototype for the Concept Jam. If you review the workshop report, you'll see lots of the ideas that later gelled into Change Everything, including:

share local success stories
personal stories about Vancity's community impact
demonstrating community involvement
member-to-member interaction
issue advocacy online
individual level connection to CSR
proposed actions
sharing personal (member) stories through blog posts/comments
community initiative blog with comments
photo contest

Vancity's williness to share this report -- as well as other deliverables we'll be posting in the weeks ahead -- is yet another dimension of their generosity and community spirit. Their approach to Change Everything has embraced the open source practice of sharing back their own code, as they did with two Drupal modules: the one that was created to designate favorite content, and the one that lets users nudge members to work on their changes. In allowing us to share the strategic and site planning work we did on Change Everything, they're taking open source a step further by sharing ideas along with code.

Open SoSi: Concept Jam workshop report for Vancity credit union

In the years since the Vancity workshop, we've refined our template for workshop reports, but we haven't asked our recent clients to share the results. Our strongest workshop reports are for clients who are still working with the results, so it feels premature to share this sensitive internal information.

What we can do is offer some guidance on how to structure and deliver a really rocking report:

Overview (one-page outline of complete report)
Chronological summary of workshop: what happened in each workshop session, highlighting key results.
Flipchart transcription: workshop ideas organized by topic (goals, audiences, strengths; storytelling ideas, connecting ideas, knowledge sharing ideas)
Appendices
- Workshop participants with their stated goals for the day
- Worksheet exercise results (based on combined input from group discussion)
- Voting results: List of most popular items plus table showing all ideas with number of votes for each
- Raw worksheets (as handed out to participants)

And throughout the workshop report, we include photos of the actual flipcharts, whiteboard and participant discussions. This really helps bring memories of the workshop to life.

If you compile it while your memories are fresh -- and if your flipcharter has better handwriting than I do! -- you can complete a good quality workshop report in 4-8 hours. Do it quickly, within a few days of a workshop, and you will help your client and participants get the most from the process of reflecting on and digesting the experience. That's a good practice not just for the Concept Jam, but for any participatory workshop.

Ask social media experts to share their secrets at SXSW

Alexandra Samuel — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 05:00:40 +0000

The incredible reaction to Open SoSi got me thinking about my proposed panel for SXSW, Are you smarter than a social media expert? As originally conceived, this panel asked:

Is there such a thing as a social media expert? What do they bring to the table? The experts will defend their titles (or admit their limitations) against challengers from the audience and the online world.

But our decision to open source Social Signal's intellectual property has made me rethink the stakes -- and the opportunity. This week, I've heard from folks who (like us) are eager to share their social media "secrets". So why not use that to see whether social media experts to live up to their own hype?

So I've amended my panel pitch as follows:

Is there such a thing as a social media expert? We'll ask experts to defend their titles (and admit their limitations) by open sourcing examples of their work, methodologies and deliverables. By the end of the session you'll have insights into how today's social media consultants make the magic happen, and we'll post a newly rich collection of repurpose-able social media strategy tools.

Are YOU ready to share your social media expertise -- not with the usual round-up of best practices or tips, but by sharing your core methodologies, business processes, or deliverable All that proprietary intellectual property that makes your agency, or your company's social media team, unique and valuable?

Then I want to hear from you. Please leave a comment on the SXSW panelpicker site (yes, you CAN still comment!) letting me know what you're ready to share.

And if you're not with a social media agency yourself, but you'd like to see social media consultants practice what they preach, then please leave a comment on the panelpicker to say you'd like to see this session at SXSW.

A recent graduate finds hope in Social Signal's social media career advice

Alexandra Samuel — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 02:45:01 +0000

We were delighted to see that Tamsyn Burgmann's article on social media career opportunities -- featuring Alex, Channing and TheBigWild.org's Theo Lamb -- ran in the Toronto Star yesterday. And we were even more delighted to get this lovely message from a Toronto Star reader Rhea Claus:

After coming across an article mentioning your company on the Toronto Star website this morning, after my own mother called me regarding said article and after finding an actual tangible copy of it on my streetcar I just had to google.

Much of my social circle, myself included, are finding ourselves in a rather frustrating position. We are recent or imminent graduates with degrees in communications, marketing, poli sci business etc. entering the 'real world' with high hopes of landing a job, dare I say a reasonable expectation. Unfortunately we find that lack of experience leads to little respect, little opportunity and little faith among potential future employers. Here we are shouting 'mold me to your will, tell me how you want the job done, let me work for 30 grand a year' and, nothing. After a good friend of mine was offered the job of a woman she had previously interned for, at a 40,000$/yr decrease in pay, naturally, optimism reached an all time low.

That is until I came across the aforementioned article. Having already texted, facebooked and emailed it around I've received responses ranging from 'win' to 'there is hope' to 'i totally though of this at the bar last week'. I begin to find myself more optimistic that there is a niche for us and perusing your website has confirmed this. So thank you Social Signal, for instilling hope in facebook addicted generation y'ers.

To Rhea and friends, yes, there is hope! You have knowledge, skils and relationships that many organizations are dying for. And the fact that you recognize it's not just about what you bring to the table, but what you need to learn (that's the part where you get molded to someone else's will -- though gosh, that makes it sound painful) makes you all the more valuable.

And to all you folks waiting for someone in your organization to "get" social media so that they can make the magic happen: stop waiting. For $30k, scoop Rhea or one of her buddies up today!

Presentation slide decks for the Concept Jam social media strategy workshop

Alex and Rob — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 05:00:47 +0000

Today, we're releasing three versions of the slide presentation we use in our Concept Jam workshops.

If you read part 1 of our Concept Jam series, you know that a full-day workshop is the heart of the Concept Jam process. We use slides to set the stage at key moments throughout the day, but we use them a little differently from the way many presenters use slideshows. Because the Concept Jam is so intensely participatory, the presentation doesn't account for the lion's share of the workshop. Instead, it supports and informs the discussion and brainstorming that really power the session.

An overview of the workshop structure and decks

You'll be able to make sense of the basic structure of the decks by looking at our sample workshop agenda. Each deck consists of two types of slides:

Introductory slides that present a quick overview of what makes social media different from other forms of communications (first part of each deck)
Case study slides that present examples of how social media is used in a particular area (storytelling, knowledge management, connecting, fundraising, etc)

Before the slideshow starts, we get everyone on their feet and primed for a day that is participatory, not passive. You can see the workshop script for the spectrograms (a technique we learned from Aspiration) that we use in this part of the day. There are no slides for this part of the workshop.

Once we shift into presentation mode, we whip through the introductory slides in about 20-30 minutes. This is the one part of the day that feels like a conventional talking-head presentation (though we still stop for questions).

Once participants have a brief intro to what we mean by "social media", we shift into discussion mode. As you will see in the script, we ask participants to make a list of their organization's goals, audiences and strengths. The flipcharts from this discussion stay up on the wall for the rest of the day, so that participants can refer back to them. There are no slides for this portion of the day.

Next we head into the case study slides and brainstorming sessions, which are the heart of the day. These are organized around three or four different topics:

storytelling (blogging, video and photo sharing, podcasting)
connecting (social networks, calendaring, task management)
knowledge management (wikis, social bookmarks, digg-style suggestion & voting sites, rating & review sites)
fundraising (widgets, customized product sales, targeted giving, Facebook Causes)

NOTE: We use terms like "storytelling" rather than "blogging & media sharing" because that makes the topic more accessible to participants. Ask people to suggest ideas for how you can use blogs or wikis, and you'll get blank stares from two-thirds of the room. Ask them about storytelling or connecting, and you're plugging into something they already know how to do, or at least feel more comfortable thinking about. We find the brainstorming gets rolling a lot faster when we avoid using social media jargon.

Each brainstorming session kicks off with a whirlwind 10- or 15-minute overview of the possibilities for using social media. The idea is to give participants a taste of the possibilities, by showing a range of examples drawn from companies or organizations in their field or related fields. We try to include examples that represent different approaches and technologies, and ideally where we can tell participants a little something about the project's impact. (That typically includes a few examples from our own work, but we are very careful to avoid turning a workshop into a sales pitch.) If we're doing a session for an organization that has asked us for help learning social media best practices, we'll wrap up the case study slides with some brief reflections on what works well with these kinds of projects. (See the "what makes a great strategy" sections in the workshop script.)

Then we go back into flipchart mode and ask participants to think about how THEY could use this type of social media (e.g. storytelling) to reach the goals and audiences they specified at the beginning of the day, building on the strengths they identified. We spend 40-60 minutes in brainstorming mode, and wrap up once suggestions slow down or become repetitive. We could write an entire blog post (make that a white paper!) on our facilitation approach, so we'll leave that for another day.

Allocating 60-90 minutes per session, we can get through 3 or 4 brainstorming sessions in a day, typically organized around the storytelling, knowledge management and connecting sections you find in the Concept Jam Master Slides file. On occasion we'll add a specific topic relevant to a particular client, like the fundraising section you find in the Concept Jam Health Slides file.

After the brainstorming sessions wrap up, we use the last hour of the day to vote on the top ideas that emerged, and to plot those ideas on a risk-reward matrix. More notes on this part of the process are in the workshop script. There are no slides for this section of the workshop, though we usually wrap with a slide showing our contact information so that participants can follow up with any thoughts or questions.

How to use these slides

The workshop slides go with the workshop script, so you'll be able to make the most sense of them if you go through the decks with a copy of the script open in another window (or printed out). Note that the example script does not correspond exactly to any of these particular decks, though the Health Slides probably come closest.

In theory you could wake up tomorrow morning, print out the workshop script, and then use a combination of the workshop script and our annotations in the Concept Jam Master Slides to deliver a workshop. Then you could sit down at 6 p.m. (we're giving you an hour for your post-workshop martini -- you'll need it!) to send us an e-mail, tweet or comment telling us how it went. In fact, if you have that kind of chutzpah -- and you're not wasting anyone's time or money on the experiment -- we'll buy you the martini. (And some iodine for those nasty scratches you'll get.)

But we can't recommend treating this as a plug-and-play operation. You'll want to go through the set of slides that corresponds to your needs (or your client's) and visit each of the sites in the case study slides (ideally doing a Google or Technorati search to get additional perspectives on each one). You'll want to practice your introductory spiel explaining what social media is all about. You'll want to come up with your own version of the spectrograms so you ask questions that will really engage the people in your session. You might even want to visit Noise to Signal to find additional cartoons that will support your presentation. There's only one thing we ask you not to do:

Do not add PowerPoint slides spelling out what you are going to say.

We are not asking you this because we regard our slide decks as sacrosanct. Au contraire: please feel free to add cases, change the intro, add sections, delete examples -- whatever makes it work better for you, your organization or your client. In fact we'd love to see what you do with the Concept Jam decks -- or the workshop decks you use yourself -- so if you can post them on SlideShare and tweet, e-mail or comment a link, we'd be thrilled.

We ask you to leave out the slides that say....

the title of the next five minutes of your talk
an explanation of your first point and then the bullet that spells out the complete text you use to make your second point
and then a long colourful quotation here, ideally with some impressive words or figures
and then another bullet here with another complete sentence that says exactly what you're saying except look I'm reading it while you're saying it

...because these slides suck. They are the PowerPoint slides of doom. Whenever someone delivers a presentation that is accompanied by a slide deck showing a complete transcription of the speaker's notes, a tiny toastmaster dies. So please, don't kill toastmasters -- or the people at your workshop -- by transcribing your presentation onto your slides.

Don't believe us? Believe Garr Reynolds (swoon). Or Nancy Duarte (Oscar-winning swoon). Or download and read this free and invaluable book by Andy Goodman (guy-who-shares-his-stuff-for-free-too swoon).

Enough presentation advice, just give me the slides!

Fine. Here they are - in Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple Keynote versions!

Canadian Press article points to Social Signal for social media tips and open-source resources

Alexandra Samuel — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 05:33:07 +0000

Day one of Open SoSi, and it's already in the news as a potential resource for professionals starting out in social media.

Today's Canadian Press article by Tamsyn Burgmann, Companies seek social media experts to keep online conversation rolling, includes the following reference to our newly open-sourced materials:

Samuel, 38, and her husband Rob Cottingham, 46, are Vancouver-based social media gurus who founded one of the world's earliest social media companies, Social Signal, in 2005. On Thursday they publicly unveiled the company's strategies for running a social media company, including techniques for training social media professionals.

This article focuses on how young people can get started in a social media career, drawing on advice from Social Signal staff and clients.

SoSi staffer Channing Rodman, who manages the BC Children's Hospital's Be a Superhero! campaign, summed up the qualities that make a great community animator:

You don't have to be a tech-genius, you just have to be someone who's interested in playing, who's interested in conversation and who's willing to play with the medium and see how you can get people not to just talk, but to talk about something that matters.

And over at MEC's TheBigWild.org, which we helped to relaunch earlier this year, Theodora Lamb focuses on the role of animators in creating compelling content:

A social media animator at heart needs to be a storyteller, because that's how you're going to engage your audience...(You must) be honest, tell true stories, bring people into it, get them to tell their stories and keep that story going.

Tamsyn also shared four of my tips for launching a career in social media:

Clean up your current online social profile. Ensure anything with your name attached to it on the web appears as you'd want a potential employer to view it.

Don't limit yourself to Facebook. Start participating is professional-oriented social spaces, like Linked In.

Start a pet project. Show you have initiative and ability to engage others by starting a small project and getting participants.

Pick up some traditional communications skills. While social networking may be second nature, you'll win over employers if you also have some classic knowledge under your belt.

And don't let the salary range cited in the article daunt you: $40-50k seems typical for an early-career community manager, but the dollars go up significantly if your career takes you into strategic or management roles.

Check out the full story for a handy, engaging take on how to get started with a career in social media. It's the perfect story to send to your favourite recent graduate.

Almost-real-time cartoon blogging at the Real-Time Web Summit

Rob Cottingham — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:03:45 +0000

I'm at the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit in Mountain View, CA today - and so is my trusty Cintiq, and some phenomenally smart people.

Over the course of the day, I'll be cartoon-blogging from the conference. You can catch it at ReadWriteWeb and here at Noise to Signal.

Comments always welcome!

Agenda and script for the Concept Jam social media strategy workshop

Alexandra Samuel — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:21:00 +0000

Read part 1, introducing the Concept Jam overview >>

Today, we're releasing two documents that can help you structure a Concept Jam workshop.

The Concept Jam workshop agenda (doc) is the document we share with all the participants in a workshop. We create a custom agenda for each workshop, depending on client, participants and the time available (while we prefer a full day, we've done half-day versions by developing the list of audiences, goals and strengths ahead of time, in consultation with our client). In some instances a client wants to include stakeholders or audience members in the brainstorming portions of the workshop, so we'll invite them to join the workshop at lunchtime, and use the morning to set up the audiences, goals and strengths lists as a strictly internal team conversation.

Today is the first time we're sharing the workshop script (doc) with anyone outside of Social Signal. It's what our principals use in delivering a Concept Jam workshop, and it draws on facilitation techniques we've learned elsewhere (like Aspiration's terrific spectrograms) as well as on presentations we've developed for in-house. Once you've downloaded one of our PowerPoint decks (coming soon!) you could take this workshop script, walk into a room, and deliver a Concept Jam workshop yourself. But you'll get better results if you take the time to get to know your client first, and in another few days, we'll share the tools and processes that can help you do just that.

Please note that the script and the agenda don't align completely; this is because each document changes over time, and we took them from different engagements.

We're curious to hear whether other people have developed similar approaches to social media strategy development, or whether these tools look helpful for your upcoming projects. We'd also love to hear suggestions for improvement. So please do share your comments below, or tweet us with your thoughts.

How to deliver a social media strategy workshop that builds capacity and finds opportunities

Alexandra Samuel — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:18:00 +0000

We're launching Open SoSi by sharing the Concept Jam. The Concept Jam is a workshop-based methodology for identifying an organization’s most promising social media opportunities. It's the part of our work that we love the most, and that we think gives the greatest value to our clients. It's also the one part of our current service line-up that we hope to do even more of in the months and years to come. So we figured we'd put our money where our mouth is by giving that away first.

Concept Jam sessions engage teams in learning and brainstorming so that they can find the social media projects that reach their audiences and achieve their goals. Each Concept Jam has three key deliverables:

A day-long workshop that engages 10-40 people (employees and stakeholders in a client organization) in a learning and brainstorming process that helps participants develop a stronger understanding of social media tools and strategies.
A workshop report summarizing the long list of ideas generated by the workshop (typically 50-100 ideas).
An options document presenting 3-6 options for social media projects. These options typically synthesize the ideas prioritized workshop participants, distilling and enhancing each option into a summary concept that our team thinks has strong potential.

The Concept Jam has evolved over the course of four years of strategic consulting, and builds on over a decade of experience leading classes and workshops in online strategy and communications. We've seen it pay off for client after client, both as a way of building internal capacity and support for social media, and as an incubator for innovative and compelling social media projects that reflect an organization's particular strengths.

And while the Concept Jam methodology was born from our own particular strengths, we think it's an approach that many others can adopt, adapt and deliver. We've already led workshops that taught other organizations to use this approach to social media training and strategy development, and seen the confidence that communicators get from having a clear methodology for leading social media development in their organizations.

Whether you're leading social media strategy within a particular company or organization, or offering strategic services as a social media consultant, we hope the Concept Jam can be a useful addition to your toolbox. Over the next little while we'll be sharing:

Workshop structure: a participant agenda and sample workshop script Now online! >>
Presentation tools: the powerpoint decks we use to introduce participants to a range of social media approaches, and session worksheets Coming soon!
Deliverables: an example of a Concept Jam workshop report (thanks to Vancity!) and an options document Coming soon!
Project management: an overview of the service delivery process, our pre-workshop intake form, and a workplan Coming soon!
Business processes: an estimating spreadsheet, example MOU, and example proposal Coming soon!

You can also take a look at the two brochures we currently use to explain the Concept Jam to potential clients. We have two versions: the super fun cartoony one (PDF) , and the buttoned-down texty one (PDF).

Read on to part 2, workshop agenda and script. >>

Social Signal open sources its social media consulting practice

Alex and Rob — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:13:51 +0000

It's Social Signal's fourth anniversary. But rather than breaking open the champagne, we're breaking open the vault that contains everything we've learned over the past four years.

We're taking the intellectual property we've generated and gleaned from Social Signal's four years of consulting, strategy and development and making it available for free online, under a Creative Commons license.

Here's why.

We launched Social Signal four years ago because we were thrilled by the advent of Web 2.0 - what we now call "social media". We saw a new medium that supported the best approaches to organizational decision-making and community engagement: approaches that were decentralized, bottom-up, and participatory. And we saw a new set of technologies born from the best of hacker culture: an open source software movement that created code in a way that was, yes, decentralized, bottom-up, and participatory.

Four years of experience with social media have only deepened our belief in its transformative potential for businesses, communities and individuals. In that time, we've helped to create more than 25 online communities and social media sites across the web, from NetSquared to Tyze and most recently, Be a Superhero! and Power the Games. Working with clients who shared our excitement about the social web, we've seen how engaging with social media helped them extend their reach, deepen their relationships and maximize their impact.

We've learned a lot in those four years. About what it takes for organizations to commit to a medium that demands transparency and authenticity, about what it takes to build a community and bring it to life, and about what it takes to build a sustainable and profitable social media agency.

While we were building our own knowledge and practice, we also saw the field of social media take shape… slowly.

Sure, people now (mostly) know what social media is -- and we can't overstate how helpful that has been to the challenge of explaining why social media is worth doing. But it's still very unclear what constitutes a social media professional (thus the backlash against social media "experts"), where social media should sit within organizations, or how to buy social media services. Every social media creator, department and agency is inventing their own definition of how to "do" social media -- just as marketers, h.r. professionals and management consultants had to define their fields a generation or two ago.

We created Social Signal to have an impact -- a big one. But the way we've gone about it - building individual communities, coaching our clients, and sharing high-level insights on our blog - can only take our impact so far, so quickly.

To have the impact we want - to build a field, and not just a business - we're shifting our focus away from implementing specific social media projects. That work has always included a big chunk of capacity building; now we're going to put capacity building at the centre so we can support many more professionals and organizations through trainings, workshops, speeches, and writing on social media.

But we don't want to limit ourselves to the people we can reach through those vehicles. So we're going to share what we know with the entire field of communicators, leaders and social media professionals. We're going to share it with every organization building a social media team, every communicator honing their social media skills, and every agency now offering social media services. We're going to share it with you.

We're starting today with the ingredients for the Concept Jam: the participatory workshop-centered process that we use to help clients generate innovative, effective concepts for social media initiatives.

This is uncharted territory. Like most consultants out there, we've built our business partly around the competitive edge of keeping our know-how to ourselves. While we've seen that developers can succeed while sharing their code, we don't know for sure if that same principle extends to strategic advice and core methodologies. And the actual effort of putting this stuff online is a bit daunting: much of our content needs to be reorganized and reformatted so that it will make sense to other people, and so that it protects our clients' confidentiality.

To get past the terror, we're going to treat the next 30 days as both an experiment and a challenge. How much of our work can we share, how quickly can we share it, and how will that sharing transform both what we do and how we do it? We've got a few hunches, so over the next 30 days, we'll also share some additional news about how we're reorganizing the business to build on an open source consulting model and refocus on capacity-building.

We truly believe that social media holds the potential to transform businesses seeking resilience in the face of volatility; to transform communities in the face of isolation; to bring people on the path to sustainability. We hope that sharing what we've learned will help all of us realize that potential.

How to to be part of Open SoSi

To stay up-to-date on our Open SoSi releases:

V isit the Open SoSi page on Social Signal's web site
Subscribe to the RSS feed for our open-sourced IP
Sign up for Open SoSi releases by email
Follow Social Signal on Twitter for the latest releases and other social media tips

To join the Open SoSi discussion:

Use or follow the #opensosi hashtag on Twitter
Blog or tweet about Open SoSi by linking to http://bit.ly/OpenSoSi (links to this post)
Comment on this blog post or our subsequent releases
Let us know how you're using these approaches (or your own!) in your social media work

Be a part of the conversation - how is social media changing the way we witness the world?

Channing Rodman — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 01:18:52 +0000

I'm happy to announce that I'll be speaking at Simon Fraser University's Institute for the Humanities conference this Friday, Oct 16 at Harbour Centre. And you're invited!

Their Institute for the Humanities is holding a conference on Oct 15-16 called Witnessing the World: New Possibilities for Citizenship and Social Change. If you’re in Vancouver, please come! Specifically, I will be talking about play and the internet, and how saving the world can be serious fun.

(I'm only slightly nervous to be doing this in a context where some of the best non-profit advocates will be up there talking about how they’ve dodged bullets as part of their dedication to social change…)

Want to be a part of the conversation? Throw me a comment or email me at channing@socialsignal.com. Here are some of the questions I'm thinking about for the session, and I’d love to hear what you have to say:

What can you witness on Facebook?
What kinds of social justice is social media good at? And what’s it less useful at?
Can a memory be a meme? Can a meme change your mind?
How does social media change the way people witness to history?
How important is a concept like fun when it comes to social justice?
Is play a way of activating witnessing? Is it a way to activate citizenship?
The internet is bad at “forgetting” (stuff gets posted, and it stays posted till you take it down – and that might be never) How does this kind of perpetuity change the way we remember and the way we move forward?

Here’s the SFU Institute for the Humanities' description of their conference:
In its simplest form, witnessing involves observing and reporting by a single person of a single act, but on a broader level it can involve documenting human rights abuses or discussing civic issues in popular media. With the rise of new social media, the ubiquity of cameras and the explosion of visual monitoring techniques (from temperature scans to iris recognition machines), the dynamics of watching have dramatically altered how we engage as actors, as viewers, as bystanders and as witnesses in social life. In a series of sessions comprised of journalists, academics, artists and activists, this conference – one in a series of events sponsored by the SFU Institute for the Humanities as part of its Imagining Citizenship initiative – features four interactive sessions to explore aspects of new relations between witnessing, social justice and citizenship.

I'm part of a panel session called Witnessing Cities with the wonderful people from Pivot Legal from 11-12:30 on Friday, Oct 16 at Harbour Centre.

How to enable sleep on your HP Mini hackintosh netbook

Alexandra Samuel — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 06:32:03 +0000

This is a postscript to my series on why & how to Mac-ify a PC netbook.

After following the initial (relatively easy) version of the Mac OS install using NetbookBootMaker, I saw that My HP Mac Mini had solved the (brutal!) sleep problem that made my mini freeze whenever I shut the lid, and forced me to shut it down each and every time. But the sleep solution seemed to involve a complete re-install, which was a daunting prospect, especially after all the work I'd gone through to migrate my existing Mac's settings.

Happyily, Mike (drfyzziks) came to the rescue once again. He came up with a relatively easy method for fixing my existing install (as documented here) so that...my HP Mini now sleeps!! Sleep works both by selecting "sleep" from the Apple menu, and just by shutting the lid on the netbook.

Here's what it took to get sleep working on the HP Mini 1000 (instructions are specific to the Mini):

Note: you'll need to be logged in to a user account on your computer that has admin permissions, and you'll need to know your password, to do this process.

Download SnowLeo_EFIboot package (http://www.mediafire.com/?crwqzmnmnnn) and unzip.
Create a folder in your root directory (i.e. the top-level folder on your hard drive, NOT your user directory) called TEMPKEXTS.
Go into SnowLeo_EFIboot folder (the one you unzipped in step 1) and copy or move the following files into your TEMPKEXTS folder.
Note: you may be prompted for your password to authenticate the copy or move process at various points...just enter it whenever prompted during this process.
- from the DSDT folder: dsdt.aml
- from the ClamShellDisplay folder: ClamshellDisplay.kext (this is what lets the computer sleep just by closing the lid)
- from the HPMiniKexts folder, ALL files that end in ".kext" (try sorting the folder by file type)
- from the OtherKexts folder, all files that begin in "Voodoo" and end in ".kext"

Next you need to open Terminal, and use the (brace for it) command line to get all those new extensions in the right place.

Launch Terminal (in your Applications folder).
In terminal, navigate to the root directory by typing "cd .." at the prompt, and hitting return.
Note: You'll probably have to do this twice until you get to the root directory. My root directory is MacMini, so I know I'm in the root directory when the prompt says MacMini:/ alex$ [alex is my account name on the system]
Type "ls" at the prompt. You'll get a list of files and folders in your root directory; you should see TEMPKEXTS in there and also the Extra folder created by your Mac OS NetbookBookMaker process.
Change to the TEMPKEXTS directory by typing "cd TEMPKEXTS".
Type the following at the command line: sudo cp -R dsdt.aml /Extra (this copies the dsdt file to the /Extra folder)
You'll be prompted for your password; just enter it (the password for the admin-level user account you're using) and press return.
Type the following at the command line: sudo cp -R *.kext /Extra/GeneralExtensions (this copies all the kext files in your TEMPKEXTS folder to the /Extra/GeneralExtensions folder)
You'll be prompted for your password; just enter it (the password for the admin-level user account you're using) and press return.

Now you need to deactivate a couple of extensions that won't like the kexts you just moved into the General Extensions folder. So, still in Terminal, type the following:

cd .. (this gets you back to your root directory)
cd /Extra (this changes you to the Extra directory)
sudo mkdir disabled (this creates a new directory [aka folder] by the name of "disabled")
cd GeneralExtensions (this changes you to the General Extensions directory)
sudo mv ApplePS2Controller.kext ../disabled (this moves this particular kext file to the disabled folder)
sudo mv AppleACPIPS2Nub.kext ../disabled (ditto)

Finally, you need to update your extensions with kext (settings) files you just installed. So...

Switch to the Extra folder by typing "cd .." and then "cd Extra".
Type "ls" at the prompt. You should see a file listed called UpdateExtra.app.
Type "sudo open UpdateExtra.app". You'll be prompted for your password again, so enter it and press return.
The Update Extensions application will launch, and you'll see a single window with a button that says "Update Extensions". Click the button.
Now wait...a while! Probably about five or ten minutes. You may see a spinning beachball (or not) but you will see that the Update Extenions button is shaded a darker grey. You'll know the process is complete once the Update Extensions button de-shaded and becomes the same grey as the rest of the window.
Reboot.

Once you reboot, you'll want to check that everything works right by trying to make your computer go to sleep. Choose "sleep" from the Apple menu: your computer should obviously and definitively go to sleep. Give it a few seconds, then try waking it by hitting any key. Once you've confirmed that sleep works fine, and that your computer wakes without freezing, try making it sleep by simply closing the lid. Again, give it a few seconds to truly fall asleep, then reopen to confirm that it wakes without freezing.

In my case it's now sleeping and waking flawlessly. Yay, Mike! Yay, Maurien! Yay, hackintosh!

A few notes:

The "sudo" part of the Terminal commands above is a way of overriding your computer's current rules about what you do and don't have permission to do. Those rules are there for a good reason: to keep you from doing anything that could bust your computer or compromise your security. So parroting a sudo command that someone else (like me) is telling you to type is the electronic equivalent of saying, "hey Alex, I really trust you and your awesome guide to hackintoshing my netbook!". Wouldn't this be a lovely moment to just tweet that message to me directly?
This whole operation may or may not work on your particular netbook. Even if you have my exact netbook (HP Mini 1000, model 1035NR) the world of hackintoshes, to say nothing of computer manufacturing, is kinda quirky, so who the heck knows what might be different about your setup. Follow these instructions at your own risk, and only if you've got the kind of leeway and troubleshooting capacity I outlined in my when to hackintosh post.
If it all works out for you the way it worked for me, you'll still have a couple of quirks. For one, you won't have any hardware-based volume control: yes, you'll have sound, but the only way to turn it up or down will be in an individual application (e.g. iTunes) that you're using to listen to something. For another, if you try to type a tilde (like this: ~) it'll come out very funky-looking. The tilde thing is probably only an issue for people who make regular use of Terminal, so if that's you, let me know and I'll ask the lovely Mike for his fix.

And btw, anyone who gets this post's title reference gets my honorary "OMG you're a massive geek!" tweet of the day.

Part 6: A checklist of steps to take before installing the Mac OS on a PC netbook

Alexandra Samuel — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 06:19:03 +0000

Continued from Part 5: How to decide if you should install the Mac OS on a PC netbook

You'll know you're ready to Mac-ify your netbook once you:

Read through the step-by-step process on mac-ifying a netbook, like this (fairly simple) one. You don't need to be a programmer (I'm not) but you do need to be comfortable with following technical instructions. If these instructions feel overwhelming, a Mac netbook probably isn't for you.
Make a short list of netbooks that appeal to you in terms of size, price and performance, if you are buying a new netbook. I cared most about the keyboard size, but other people care more about screen size, weight or hard drive capacity. A site like CNET can tell you which netbooks to consider (setting aside the Mac question for now); then visit Best Buy or Future Shop to try out the most promising models and see what feels comfortable. Comfort is a much bigger factor with netbooks since you won't appreciate the difference between an 85% and a 92%-size keyboard until you try typing.
Look up the how-to instructions for mac-ifying your current or preferred netbook(s). There are two reasons for this: (1) to see which features do and don't work on the model you've selected, and (2) to see whether you feel up to following the how-to instructions on converting your specific netbook to a mac. Depending on the model you buy, it may be easier or harder to Mac-ify, and the process may be well or poorly documented. To figure out what is feasible, Google the word "hackintosh" plus the name of the computer you are thinking of purchasing (e.g. "HP Mini 1000). And bear in mind that since Snow Leopard is only a few weeks old, hackers may yet find ways to fix any missing features -- for example, it's taken a few weeks for people to post a way of resolving the sleep problem on my Mini
Back up your netbook. Even if it's fresh out of the box, make sure you have a back up of your netbook's original operating system and files. If you've got your original system disks, all you need to do is back up your files and applications; if your netbook (like mine) came without system disks, you'll need to back up your system for later re-installation (in case you want to sell it).
Get ready to trouble-shoot. If you're experienced in the art of extracting information from the likes of Macfixit or the Apple discussion forum, you'll be able to manage any little hiccups that pop up along the way (like when I restarted before "update extensions" had finished). If you're better at cooking than troubleshooting, find a geeky friend who is prepared to offer help in return for homemade lasagna.
Pick a slow weekend. It took about two hours to get Snow Leopard running from an external hard drive (most of that was the time it took to run the Snow Leopard installer from the DVD onto the drive). It took about six hours to figure out how to do a crappy backup of my Ubuntu & Windows partitions, largely because I couldn't get Windows to recognize any external USB devices. It took about two hours to get Snow Leopard up and running on the netbook's hard drive, and a few more hours to do all the migration. Again, most of this was passive time -- waiting for files to copy -- but it's a lot easier to finish the process in one day than to set it aside and remember where to pick up.
Pick a slow week. Choose a week when you can live without your netbook. That way, if you totally screw up the process, you haven't screwed up your work. Even if everything goes smoothly (it should!) you may find that you don't like your netbook, or its feature limitations (like the lack of sleep on mine) are a huge problem. And if it does go well, you'll want to spend most of the week in cafés, enjoying the opportunity to say, why yes, this netbook IS running the Mac OS.

And one last, HUGE shout-out to Mike (aka drfyzziks) without whom I would still be cursing at my HP Mini's Windows interface and saving my pennies for a Macbook Air.

Part 5: How to decide if you should install the Mac OS on a PC netbook

Alexandra Samuel — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 05:51:15 +0000

Now that you've read about how I mac-ified my HP Mini netbook, and how much I love the results, you may be wondering whether a mac-ified netbook is for you. Here's my quick rundown of who should (or shouldn't) try this at home.

Don't consider Macifying a netbook if...

You're only going to have one computer. A netbook is too small and underpowered to be a primary computer. If you are only going to have one computer, and you need it to be ultra-portable, the Macbook Air may still be the best way to go -- especially if you can live without the processor power and hard drive room you get with a "real" Macbook.
You run Windows on your primary computer. Just as I found it frustrating to use a satellite Windows netbook when my primary computer was a Mac, you'll find it annoying to keep a Mac netbook harmonized with a Windows machine.
You hate messing around with your computer. You don't have to be a programmer or a hacker (I'm not!) to do this, but you do have to be the kind of person who feels comfortable with computers and isn't freaked out by the idea of doing something a little challenging.
You have body image issues. A tiny computer makes you look bigger.
You are under consideration for a Cabinet or White House staff position. Technically, this whole thing is against the licensing agreement you accept when you install the Mac OS. I'd hate you see you whip out your netbook during your confirmation hearings, only to get busted for your illegal OS install.

Do consider Macifying a netbook if...

You're buying a new computer, and can't afford a Mac. If price has been the factor that has kept you from getting a portable Mac, there's now an option.
You're a Mac user looking for a lightweight satellite computer, but you also want to have money to spend on banana yellow patent leather shoes. The netbook is a fantastic, economical option. And you can use MobileMe and DropBox to ensure that your netbook doesn't just start out as a twin to your primary Mac, but stays continuously in sync.
You're an iPhone user or a user of multiple Macs. If you've already developed a system for keeping your iPhone in sync with your desktop or Macbook, or for keeping your Macs in sync with each other, getting your netbook coordinated with your primary mac will be a breeze.
You just bought a really fantastic handbag that won't fit a MacBook Air. Some people would spend $1500 on a computer; others on a Louis Vuitton. If you've gone the leather-and-buckle route, you can use your spare change to buy a netbook that is small enough to fit in your purse (just be sure to protect it with a padded sleeve before you drop it in alongside your keys and nail file).

Getting serious about this option? Read on to find out when to give mac-ification a try. >>

New BC Hydro app lets users harness conservation efforts to greening 2010 Winter Games

Rob Cottingham — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:42:47 +0000

When BC Hydro asked us to help them develop a new social media project - building on the success of the Green Gifts Facebook app - our thoughts naturally turned to the 2010 Winter Games. BC Hydro is an Official Supporter; organizers are aiming to have their greenest Olympic Winter Games yet; BC Hydro's ad campaign is built around the slogan "Save power. See the games."... hmm...

The result is Power the Games, where you commit to reducing your electricity consumption by 10% over the next year, and pledge your efforts to help power the 2010 Winter Games event of your choice.

For a little added fun and conservation goodness, Power the Games offers daily challenges: little tasks that can add up to something big. Like snuggling under a blanket and turning the thermostat down two degrees. Or learning a little about how switching to energy-efficient lighting can cut your costs. Our hope is that this becomes a kind of green tasting menu, helping people to try out conservation-friendly behaviour that just might become healthy habits.

(And if you're as impressed as we were by the app's gorgeous design, then let the folks at Work at Play know - they built it for us, and they were, as always, an absolute delight to work with: professional, committed, dedicated and talented.)

Ultimately, this app aims to couple the excitement so many British Columbians feel about the upcoming games with their pride in our province's environmental reputation... and their personal commitment to conservation.

(By the way, BC Hydro launched their new Facebook page at the same time as Power the Games - please do drop by!)

Help write the agenda for the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference

Rob Cottingham — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:33:17 +0000

SXSW isn't the only fabulous event whose agenda is partly shaped by audience input. NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Network, will hold its annual conference next April in Atlanta, Georgia... and they'd like you to help them figure out what sessions to offer.

Head on over here for a list of candidates, and start a-clickin'. And if you'd like to leave comments – suggestions, questions, thinly-veiled requests to be included on the panel – just click on the session title.

As with SXSW, public voting counts for 33% of the final score in deciding which sessions make the grade. (Why only a one-third voice instead of having the community vote carry the day? Because, as the FAQ; points out, "If we did it that way, we'd have 40 sessions on social media, 30 on websites, and a score on e-mail. Yes, we're 'How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?' folks".)

While the deadline for session submissions was September 21, if you've had an idea that's just mind-blowingly fantastic, you can try to talk them into adding it to the 228-submission-long ballot... they're kind and generous people.

Voting wraps up on October 16, and they're adopting a strict one-IP-address, one-vote rule to prevent overenthusiasm from skewing the results. So start voting!

(We have two sessions in that list, by the way: Building your social media team and Planning for online engagement - if you think they'd be helpful, we'd love your support!)

Turning mild-mannered supporters into super-powered fundraisers

Rob Cottingham — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:19:30 +0000

The BC Children's Hospital is on the lookout for a Super Community - a group of people doing something extraordinary to raise funds, raise awareness and support the hospital's work caring for British Columbia's children.

And to do that, they've created an online space where communities can organize at SuperCommunity.ca. You'll find tools for collecting donations, emailing contacts, and sharing stories, videos and photos.

But they aren't just offering tools - they're offering some context as well: stories, ideas and tips for putting those tools to work, and fundraising and organizing online. We've helped them pull together their Super Community Resource Kit, which lives on their blog at bcchf.wordpress.com.

Be sure to check it out... and consider it just a beginning. Add your comments, ideas and links to other helpful resources, and help BC Children's Hospital's supporters do even more to help kids when they need it most.

(Oh, and while you're in the mood to help BC Children's Hospital, please do fan them on Facebook, follow them on Twitter and check out the personalized superhero video and Facebook application we helped them build!)

Part 4: My $400 MacBook Air Light

Alexandra Samuel — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 04:50:31 +0000

Continued from Part 3: How to migrate your current Mac setup to your new Mac netbook

Two weeks into my new Mac-ified netbook, I'm no longer longing for that MacBook Air. While I still find it occasionally inconvenient to work on a teensy weensy screen, the lightness and small form factor of the netbook are actually preferable to the larger (and slightly heavier) Macbook Air. Now that I've got the Mac OS to work with, I realize that my frustrations with the netbook were 90% software, 10% hardware (and the hardware issues are largely addressed by the fantastic Microsoft Arc mouse -- a must, given the poorly-located trackpad buttons on the Mini).

Overall system performance is excellent, especially now that I've spent 5 minutes and $50 to upgrade the netbook to 2 GB of RAM. Here's how. Certainly, the Mac OS runs faster than Windows did, and I think it may even (gasp!) be faster than Ubuntu.

The one major drag is that the system doesn't sleep. If I close the Mini, it freezes -- so I have to shut down every time I head out the door or move to a different café. However it looks like the new (and much more complex) process for installing Snow Leopard may resolve this issue, so I'm going to give it a shot, even though it means moving all my user settings again (sigh). Hopefully it will get the internal microphone working too.

Update: Sleep now works!! Find out how here.

Other than the mike and the sleep functions, the netbook works perfectly. And while it's certainly slower than my Macbook, I can successfully run 6 or 8 concurrent applications with no noticeable lags except when switching between apps. The main concessions I make to its performance are to use Safari rather than Firefox (since Firefox is a notorious memory hog) and to try and shut down applications I don't need at any given moment.

I can't recommend a Mac-ified netbook as a primary computer, largely because I wouldn't recommend any netbook as a primary computer: they are simply to small and under-powered. As a satellite computer, however, it's fantastic: at about $400, the HP Mini is literally one quarter the price of a MacBook Air, and I just love having a super-light, purse-sized computer. But even the small form factor imposes a minimal trade-off: the Mini's keyboard is the largest you'll find on a netbook, and at 92%, you'll hardly notice the difference between typing on your netbook and typing on a regular laptop.

As for the difference between a netbook running Windows or Ubuntu, and a netbook running the Mac OS: there's simply no comparison. Setting aside my relentless Mac evangelism, it is just a hell of a lot easier to use a single operating system. Apple's Migration Assistant made it incredibly easy to get all my apps right onto the new machine, and cloning my user account got me my settings, my browser history, my mail -- the whole enchilada!

Best of all, now that I'm living a two-Mac (as opposed to two-OS) lifestyle, I can keep both computers perpetually and perfectly in sync with each other (and with my iPhone!) using:

MobileMe for my calendar, address book,Safari bookmarks, keychains and mail accounts
DropBox for my documents and other files (but not synced to iPhone -- thankfully!)
Evernote to keep all my notes, organized by topic and tag
Gmail IMAP for e-mail messages

Just about the only thing that doesn't stay synced are any new apps I install or one machine or another. If I were really brave I'd consider using DropBox to sync my Applications and Library/Application Support folders in sync too, but that just seems a bit scary -- especially since DropBox occasionally confused about which folders it's synching.

Stay tuned for Part 5: Who should install the Mac OS on a netbook >>

Making a Mac netbook, Part 3: How to migrate your current Mac setup to your new Mac netbook

Alexandra Samuel — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 23:53:04 +0000

Continued from Part 2: How to install the Mac OS on a Windows or Unix netbook

Once I finished installing Snow Leopard on my HP Mini, I did one more incredibly brave and potentially foolish thing. Rather than endure the long and arduous process of installing all my Mac software to the Mini, and having to configure it from scratch, I used Apple's Migration Assistant to move the heart and soul of my Mac directly to the Mini.

Here's how I did it:

I connected my Mini to my Macbook Pro using a standard Ethernet cable.
I launched "Migration Assistant" on each computer. Here's how it works.
From within Migration Assistant on the Mini, I selected "FROM another computer".
From within Migration Assistant on the MacBook, I selected "TO another computer". It is very important that you get this setting right or you'll copy the virgin install on your netbook to your lovingly customized mac!
I chose to copy my System, Applications and Settings (but not files or users).

Next I had to copy my user settings. I didn't want to copy my entire user folder over because my netbook isn't big enough to hold all the music, files and photos on my Macbook. So here's how I replicated my user settings:

I created an admin-level user account on my netbook with the IDENTICAL full name and nickname that I use on my Macbook, and gave it my MobileMe username and password.
I followed the directions here to copy the following files from the Macbook to the new account, overwriting the netbook's files whenever I was asked to resolve conflicts:

NB: "Home" is the name of the user account you're copying

/Home/Library/Application Support/AddressBook (copy the whole folder)
/Home/Library/Application Support/iCal (copy the whole folder)

Also in /Home/Library/Application Support (copy whatever else you need including folders for any third-party applications)

/Home/Library/Keychains (copy the whole folder)
/Home/Library/Mail (copy the whole folder)
/Home/Library/Preferences/ (copy the whole folder)
/Home /Library/iTunes (copy the whole folder) [I skipped this because I didn't have room for my iTunes library]
/Home /Library/Safari (copy the whole folder)
/Home /Library/Calendars (copy the whole folder)

If you want cookies:
/Home/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist
/Home/Library/Application Support/WebFoundation/HTTPCookies.plist

For Entourage users:
Entourage is in /Home/Documents/Microsoft User Data
Also in /Home/Library/Preferences/Microsoft

For FireFox:
/Home/Library/Applications Support/FireFox
/Home/Library/Preferences/org.mozilla.firefox.plist

Once I had all my user settings copied over, I shut down the netbook and rebooted, this time logging in with my usual user account (the one I'd just copied over).

Then I went into MobileMe (in System Preferences) and set it to sync everything from my MobileMe account to my new netbook, which it did pretty much instantly. (This step may be unnecessary, since everything should have moved over via the copying process, but I did it anyhow.)

Finally, I launched DropBox, the application and web service I use to keep files in sync across multiple systems. It was already installed on the netbook (thanks to my application-copying process) so all I had to do was confirm that it was putting the DropBox in the right place on my file system, and trigger an initial synchronization. It took about an hour but DropBox duplicated all my work files on the netbook; since I keep virtually all my documents inside my DropBox folder, that means my netbook now has access to all the files on my Macbook and vice versa.

Continue to Part 4: My $400 Macbook Air Light >>

Making a Mac netbook, part 2: How to install the Mac OS on a Windows or Unix netbook

Alexandra Samuel — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:57:18 +0000

Continued from Part 1: Why to Mac-ify

Here's how Mike told me to test whether I could get the netbook to run the Mac OS:

Format an external hard drive and attach it to your Mac.Insert the Mac OS Snow Leopard Installation CD into your Mac.
Launch the Snow Leopard installer; select the external hard drive as the destination for your installation.
Once installation is complete, run NetbookBootMaker, available as a free download here. This is the step that magically makes the Mac installation work on non-Apple hardware.
Eject the hard drive from the Mac and attach it to your (powered-down) HP Mini.
Turn on the Mini, and when the boot-up process shows <F9> to change boot device order, hit <F9> and select your external drive as the volume to boot from. Your netbook should now boot into the Mac OS.

I followed Mike's advice, and while the Snow Leopard installation took a while (just as it did to install on my Mac), the process was incredibly easy. Within two hours of walking out of the movie theater, I'd booted my HP Mini netbook into the Mac OS. Wahoo!

The next day I proceeded to convert the netbook into its new life as a Mac. I decided to eliminate the Windows and Ubuntu partitions entirely, since Mike advised that I was more likely to get good results if I avoided the landmine of a dual-boot machine. The hardest part of the conversion process was creating a complete and perfect backup of my Windows and Ubuntu partitions, and in fact I never succeeded in creating bootable backups. But I compared the size of my original partitions with the size of the backup, and concluded that the identical size meant I almost certainly had a retrievable, reinstallable backup if I really needed to go back to Windows/Ubuntu. (All my data was already backed up -- I was just worried about the operating systems themselves.)

To convert the netbook to run the Mac OS, and the Mac OS only, I followed the excellent "Cat in the Bag" instructions on MyMacBookMini (there's now a newer, 4-part set of instructions on that site, which promise slightly better results but require a more complicated install). This methodology was a little different from Mike's -- it was based on turning the external hard drive into a Snow Leopard install disk, rather than a bootable version of the OS. Since I was too lazy to start the process from scratch, here's what I did:

While running Mac OS on the Mini from the external drive, I downloaded & installed CarbonCopyCloner.
I ran Carbon Copy Cloner and used it to clone the bootable drive to the Mini's drive.
I followed the instructions under "Post-install tweaks & configs" on the MyMacBookMini post. (I did not do the optional VooDooPS2Controller step).
Note: Step 7 -- when you hit the "Update extensions" button -- takes a LONG time. I messed my netbook up by restarting too soon. Pay attention to this line: You’ll know that the update is completed when this ramdisk is unmounted and the Update Extensions button is no longer recessed.

Once I finished up the install process, I rebooted, and miracle of miracles, I had an HP Mini that booted directly into Mac OS Snow Leopard. The final touch: slapping a big Apple sticker on the lid of my newly Mac-ified netbook!

Continue to Part 3: How to migrate your current Mac setup to your new Mac netbook >>

Making a Mac netbook, part 1: Why I Mac-ified

Alexandra Samuel — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:33:35 +0000

Some people have a favorite pair of boots that make them feel like dancing. Other people feel like themselves with they pick up a special pen, or dive deep into a remote patch of woods.

My soul feels free when I see a logo: Apple's, to be precise. No amount of goading and mockery from my open source pals can displace the deep sense of purpose and possibility that sets in when I hear that startup chime and see my computer booting up with a big, bitten apple smack-dab in the middle of my screen. After seventeen years as a Mac user, the sight of that logo provokes a Pavlovian response: my inner creative starts to salivate with excitement over the blog post I'm about to write, the web sites I'm about to explore, or even (!) the spreadsheets I'm about to edit.

I make this profession of fervour as context for what I'm about to say:

Turning my HP Mini into a Mac is the Best Thing Ever.

Give me that same day, and a super-light, underpowered computer, and you'll find me writing with great focus -- punctuated by extended walks whenever I hit a block.

The HP Mini thus looked like the perfect purchase. At 2.5 lbs and 7x10 inches, it fit into a small backpack that made extended walks a non-issue. And at 1.6 gz, and running Windows, it made geeking out so annoying that distraction has been a virtual non-issue.

But I discovered one major problem. Without that startup chime and glowing apple logo, the Pavlovian instinct to create never kicked in. Instead of launching my day with joy, I felt the incipient dread that is the lot of the Windows user.

I tried getting around it by running Ubuntu, a version of Linux. Ubuntu made me feel super cool -- kind of like the banana yellow patent leather heels that used to be my favourite shoes. Eventually, I had to admit that no matter how cool the shoes looked, they hurt like hell. In Ubuntu's case, the toe-pinching came in the form of Evernote, the one application I utterly rely on which had no Ubuntu version or equivalent. I got around the lack of a Linux version of Evernote by running Evernote inside of WINE, a Windows emulator. It was agonizingly slow. Then one day I realized: instead of running a Windows emulator, I could start using the Windows partition I'd left on my Mini!

For a few months, Windows did the job. As long as I was working purely in Evernote, with occasional forays into TweetDeck and Firefox, Windows was tolerable.

Then I reached the point in my writing when I wanted to format my documents. OpenOffice proved to be a pretty annoying substitute for Microsoft Office, perhaps because it ran incredibly slowly in Windows. I had yet to find Windows equivalents for the various apps and system enhancements I use on my Mac (like Skitch, Default Folder X and TextExpander) and I didn't want to waste time looking.

The moment had come to switch to a MacBook Air. I rounded up the various pieces of deprecated technology in my collection, and prepared to auction them on eBay -- along with the Mini -- so I could pay for a refurbished Air.

Then I went to see Star Trek at the IMAX theater.

I'd love to tell you that the sight of the freshly re-imagined transporter interface gave me a moment of sudden insight into my operating system travails. Believe me, nothing would make me feel more deliciously geek than to draw my tech how-tos from Kirk and Spock.

But the transformative moment came right after the movie, when my film-going companion and long-suffering netbook mentor, Mike K. (aka drfyzziks), showed me his Sony Vaio: running the Mac OS. I could do the same thing with the Mini, he assured me -- it would be easy!

Mike is to computers as my brother-in-law Rick is to carpentry. Rick is the man who assured me that stripping the paint from a bookcase would be a breeze. After suffering multiple chemical burns and taking the finish off our marble floors, I was just glad I hadn't listened to him when he said I could use a circular saw without risking my fingers.

So despite Mike assuring me that I could Mac my Mini, my excitement was mixed with skepticism. But I dove in and followed his verbal instructions.

Continue to Part 2: How I Mac-ified my HP Mini 1000 netbook >>

7 innovations that make travel easier

Alexandra Samuel — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:47:12 +0000

A few months ago I wrote a blog post for Harvard Business Online about social media tools that can make business travel more effective – and thus, more infrequent. Ironically, I’ve done a lot more travel in the months since I wrote that post, since my kids are finally at an age where I can travel without (knock on wood! knock on wood!) everybody coming down with the latest virus.

After seven years in which out-of-town travel was a relatively infrequent (and rushed) experience, I’m struck by how much easier air travel is now compared to my pre-parent days. Here are a few of the non-social-media innovations that make travel much better than it was in 2002:

Online check-in. It’s easy to take self check-in for granted, or even resent the disappearance of helpful staff in favor of self-service check-in kiosks. Check in before you get to the airport, and you’ll appreciate the brilliance of self-service. If you print your own boarding pass, or load it onto your cell phone using a mobile boarding pass option, you can head straight to your gate. It’s a huge incentive to travel light; pre-airport check-in, combined with carry-on baggage, makes air travel way faster and less annoying.
IMAP, wifi and smartphones. If you’re using IMAP on your computer and iPhone or Blackberry, you can stay online until the moment your airplane pushes back from the gate, and ensure that any e-mails you write in-flight sync seamlessly when you land. IF you’re lucky enough to travel out of an airport with free WiFi, you won’t even eat into your cell phone minutes.
In-flight power. We Canadians like to bitch about Air Canada, which has a virtual monopoly on full-service air travel in this country. But one place where Air Canada totally rocks out – at least compared to the American carriers I’ve flown on over the past year – is in-flight power. On high-traffic routes, you can more or less count on having a regular, no-adapter-needed power outlet at your seat, or the seat next to you. (Ask your neighbour to share.) It’s terrific to fly with the knowledge that your battery won’t die just as you thought of the next brilliant sentence.
Seatback TV. I have a screen addiction that borders on neurological disorder: for certain kinds of work (read: getting my inbox to zero) I have to have TV on in the background so that I can tolerate the tedium and stay on-task. The advent of personal seatback TV as a routine feature on many airlines means that I can process in-flight without dying of boredom. Yay, TV!
iTunes video. If you’re on a flight without TV, or you don’t want to trust your viewing options to the fates, downloadable video rocks out as an alternative to in-flight work or reading. When I flew cross-country with my daughter a few months ago, I downloaded a bunch of kid-friendly videos to both my computer and my iPhone, which (along with endless hours of gaming) kept her content the whole way. If the bored toddler behind you is kicking your seatback, consider passing him your iPhone. If the bored toddler inside you is throwing a tantrum at the prospect of a flight full of work, knock off after an hour and kick back with the latest Gossip Girl.
Public transit. Last month, Vancouver saw the opening of the Canada Line Sky Train, which connects the Vancouver Airport to the city’s downtown, with plenty of convenient stops along the way. I can’t think of a city with easier public transit access – the Sky Train stops just steps from the main terminals – but San Francisco, DC and even New York have pretty decent public transit options for getting to and from your flight. If you want to make use of every travel minute, a subway seat beats the pants off a taxi as a place to work by PC or smartphone. And if you’re in Vancouver, you’ll have continuous cell phone access (and for most of the way, 3G) on your way to or from the airport.
Kids. Kids are terrific at making travel less annoying, as long as you leave them at home. If you have kids, you probably keep your trips shorter and less frequent, which turns them into delightful respites from early morning wake-ups as opposed to interminable chores. You want to spend every last minute of your pre-departure evening with the kids before you go, so you’ll pack quicker – which makes packing less annoying. And you’ll have to find a souvenir to bring home, which provides a focal point for the eight minutes between meetings. Best of all, your kids turn the draggy process of packing up from a fun out-of-town trip into a speedy rush of homecoming anticipation.

An introduction to social media with examples from the health sector

Alexandra Samuel — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:22:56 +0000

I'm in Toronto today at the Getting to Uptake conference, convened by Sick Kids Hospital. The conference focuses on how social media can foster practice change in the arena of pediatric mental health by connecting practitioners with patients and with one another. In the desperate hope that I could get Sick Kids to return my tonsils and adenoids, I offered the conference an overview of social media and how it's being used in the health field.

I've posted the slides of my presentation to SlideShare, but since I subscribe to the less text/more pictures school of PowerPoint, I've written up some notes summarizing my presentation and linking to the examples I shared.

Building Social Capital in Online Communities

For social media to support practice change, practitioners need to see its value to their work and their patients. I suggested that one way to understand the impact of social media is through its relationship to social capital. Social capital, understood as the density of relationships and trust within a community, is a key determinant of health. Individuals are happier and healthier in communities with high levels of social capital, and high social capital communities have stronger economies and more stable political systems.

Social media can support social capital when it's harnessed to building relationships both on- and offline. If we use social media in a thoughtful way, intentionally harnessed to the fostering of social capital, it can promote both individual and community health.

What is social media?

Social media can be defined in terms of two crucial and related shifts:

The shift from "message push" communication towards conversational communication. In "message push" communications, a message is delivered from one (individual or institutional) author to an audience -- as per conference speeches, broadcast TV/radio, print media and web 1.0 sites. Social media consists of sites and communities where people engage in conversation instead of pushing a message or passively absorbing one.
The shift from single author sites that reflect the knowledge and views of a single author or organization, towards multi-author sites in which content is generated by the users.

Video: The Machine is Us/ing Us (not shown but highly recommended):
A great overview of the technological innovation that gave birth to social media, and its implications for our work, world and relationships.

Storytelling

Blogs, Flickr, YouTube, podcasts: these are words that can inspire anxiety about the novelty of what feels like a whole new form of communication. But all of these are just facets of storytelling. If you've ever sat around a dinner table and told your family or friends about your day, you already know how to do storytelling. Now it's just a matter of applying your natural storytelling capacity to the world of social media.

Here are some great examples of online storytelling for health:

Share Your Story is an online community for parents of premature or disabled infants, created by the March of Dimes. It provides a way for families to share news and get support during a difficult and often isolated time, and their moving stories have inspired greater awareness of birth defects and how to prevent them.
When Shari Kurzrok got a liver transplant, she used a blog to tell the story of her ordeal and raise awareness around organ donation.
The St. Louis Children's Hospital has created a YouTube channel to share videos that tell the story of the hospital's work through the personal voices of patients and their families.

Connecting

We humans are social creatures: we naturally reach out to connect with others. The huge and growing crop of social networks, from Facebook to LinkedIn, are just new ways of connecting. These online connections can support social capital by creating new relationships of trust. Here are a few examples of how people are connecting online to support individual and community health:

Tyze is a personal support networking platform that we created for the PLAN Institute. For twenty years, PLAN has been a world leader in creating personal support networks for vulnerable adults so that they have the relationships and support that enable them to lead a meaningful life and make their own contribution to the world. Tyze translates that support model to the web by creating personal support networks in which a small group of people can share stories, take responsibility for tasks and schedule their activities as a group.
The BC Children's Hospital Foundation has launched the Campaign for BC Kids to raise money for significant capital investments in the hospital and in providing high-quality pediatric care across the province. We've helped BCCHF take their Be a Superhero! campaign to Facebook with a widget and customizable video, building relationships with a new generation of supporters and donors.
LinkedIn connects professionals in a wide range of fields so that they can expand their network of colleagues and share ideas or information. Groups like the Pediatric Health Information Technology Community enable collaboration on specific topics.

Knowledge Management

Social media can help foster knowledge creation and knowledge management with tools and communities that make it easier to share knowledge. When people connect and collaborate online, that collaboration not only serves the instrumental goal of creating and sharing knowledge, but the process of collaboration itself builds trust and relationships among collaborators. Here are a few examples:

Delicious is a social bookmarking service that builds shared knowledge from the routine task of storing bookmarks for useful websites. Instead of storing a bookmark in your browser -- where you may have trouble finding the folder you put it in, or find yourself unable to access a link because you're using a different computer -- you store your bookmarks on the web, labeling each bookmark with every keyword ("tag") that might help you retrieve it later. Find new colleagues in child mental health by noticing who else is storing bookmarks with similar tags, or designate a tag (e.g. "uptakeTO") that you and your colleagues will use to store bookmarks that you'll all find useful. You can learn how to get started here.
Wikipedia is the best-known example of a wiki, which is a web site that can be collaboratively edited by many people. On Wikipedia, anyone can edit any article, but it's also possible to set up a wiki which is accessible to a smaller number of people, or where anyone can see it but only some people can edit it. For example, you could create a health resource where only clinicians can edit articles, but patients can still read them.
Kaboom! takes a more structured approach to knowledge sharing, by inviting parents to contribute to its database of playground locations and reviews.

More examples of social media with impact

In the introduction to my presentation and the ensuing panel, I covered a few other examples of social media projects that have had a concrete impact:

Katrina PeopleFinder was a volunteer-led effort to help hurricane survivors reunite with their family members, and to ensure that people could find information about the location and status of their family and friends. I kicked off my presentation with this example, which remains one of the outstanding examples of social media that had a concrete impact on the well-being of individuals and communities.
Social Actions is the service that lets bloggers and websites embed links to relevant volunteer and action opportunities.
The DailyKos ACLU wiki was the site that let volunteers assist in processing the high volume of data that the US government released on Guantanamo Bay prisoners.

So far, no word on whether my presentation has earned me the return of my deprecated body parts. If anyone at Sick Kids has my tonsils or adenoids in a jar of formaldehyde, I'll settle for you posting some shots to Flickr.

A little history... and some of the cartoon's greatest hits

Rob Cottingham — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:15:49 +0000

If you're visiting from PC World - or just happened to stumble onto us - we're glad you could come by. Pull up a chair. Lemonade?

Your timing's terrific: I was just about to start the slide show. Oh, no, don't get up - the holiday pictures aren't until later. No, this is all about Noise to Signal, my cartoon about the intersection of technology, communications and life. Sit back and make yourself comfortable.

Let me just plug the remote... into the projector... dim the lights... and here we go.

Here's the cartoon that launched Noise to Signal (although I didn't call it that yet) waaaay back in the spring of 2007. It was a simpler time (at least in the Oval Office, ba-dump-bump!)...

This is a tribute to the famous New Yorker cartoon, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." (I've come back to this theme once or twice.)

This one is probably the first one I published under the name "Noise to Signal".

And now, as measured by raw hits, here are the top 10 Noise to Signal cartoons of all time:

Number 10, sadly a little timelier now than when I drew it:

Number 9, a cartoon the PC World folks (and Amazon customers) will recognize:

Number 8, for everyone who obsesses about their Twitter follower count:

Number 7 is for my fellow gadget freaks out there whose spirituality glands may be underperforming:

Number 6 goes to a pie chart. Somewhere, my grade 6 math teacher's ears just pricked up.

Coming up to number 5, a reminder that it's probably a good thing Alex and I didn't have iPhones yet when we got married:

Number 4 promotes both privacy awareness and good dental hygiene. Hard to do in one cartoon, but we're committed to value here at Noise to Signal industries:

Third place - bronze! - is the closest I come to a religion: typography.

Number 2 - ooh, so close - makes that case that, while Flooz may have flopped, alternative currencies for the online world are still alive and well:

And the number one Noise to Signal cartoon of all time...

Thanks for checking us out! You can also find Noise to Signal on Facebook... and if you're hankering for the RSS feed, it's right here.

PC World features Noise to Signal

Rob Cottingham — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:41:03 +0000

When I was a young 'un still trying to wrap my mind around personal computers, modems, desktop publishing and stuff, I had only a few trusted sources to turn to: my very few friends who shared my interest... whatever I could glean at 300 baud from Ottawa's various computer bulletin boards... and magazines.

Two magazines in particular gave me the education I was looking for: PC Magazine and PC World. For me, neither übergeek or total n00b, they were the holders of the keys to the tech kingdom of the mid-to-late 1980s and early 90s.

So I'm especially delighted that, all day today, PC World's web site has as its lead feature "a dozen of the best tech-related cartoons the Web has to offer"... and among those exalted 12, you'll find Noise to Signal.

Head on over - and check out the other 11 cartoons as well, along with editor JR Raphael's lively commentary. (Want to read more JR Raphael? Then head to his site eSarcasm - billed, wisely, as "not for the easily offended".)