In the 5-months that I spent at Edelman Digital in Montreal, I learned a lot.

Measurement and Analytics are a must-have knowledge set. Just as in 1999 I pursued learning HTML because I thought it would be an essential skill for marketers and my career (and it has been), I believe that having measurement and analytics chops are mandatory to truly bring value to any company’s strategic decision-making. I will definitely continue to educate myself in this area, and encourage anyone who’s responsible for driving results to do so as well.

Corporations can be progressive. My return to the corporate world was long in coming, though in this case, brief. For being so large, Edelman is surprisingly agile in responding to the market and opportunities. This, I’m sure, accounts in large part for its incredible success. Some of the corporations I’ve worked for in my career sure could have learned a thing or two from Edelman’s approach.

Push yourself beyond your limits. When I left consulting to join Edelman Digital, I did so to go further in my career. I chose to narrow my focus to a small segment of my abilities in order to rise to other challenges, stretch and grow. It was a great way to learn new things about myself and to reaffirm some other things that perhaps I’d lost along the way.

Be grateful. I am truly grateful for my experience at Edelman. I am thankful for my successes, but more so for any missteps that I had while learning the ropes. Again, these were opportunities to learn so that I will grow and improve for the next time. I’m also grateful to have worked with so many amazing measurement and analytics pros, PR practitioners, web developers and senior management who impressed me with their dedication and talent.

What’s next for me? I’m looking for my next move. I want to use my talents in a more comprehensive way and integrate my experience – 5-years in social media with many more in marketing and communications.  I want to expand on my achievements in brand-building and strategic development, while continuing to stay at the front of the technology wave. I like trailblazers and organizations, big or small, seeking to make a difference. I want to do work that matters.

If you know of something that might fit the bill, please get in contact:

514.277.5623
Email
Twitter
LinkedIn

In the meantime, it looks like I’ll finally have time to get back to blogging

I am heading up the great team in Montréal that specializes in providing social insights and measurement and I will be liaising with other Edelman offices to provide clients with analysis and insights that will help guide their business decisions. I’m happy to be joining the company that is home to my colleagues in social media – David Armano, Steve Rubel, Dave Fleet, Rob Clark, Zena Weist, David Almacy – and so many more bright people that I’ll be getting to know in the coming months.

But What About…?

With this announcement, I will be retiring my consulting practice. I want to thank my clients and partners for making the last 4 years so fulfilling. Thank you for your confidence and for entrusting your marketing and social media to me. I’ve learned so much from you.

A special thank you goes to A.C. Riley and Mark Goren for your unwavering support and for always putting a smile on my face, no matter how tough a day I’ve had. I’m privileged to have worked with you both and to count you amongst my dearest friends.

Of course, I am grateful to my family who took the brunt of my crazy hours (remember when I was working on an Australian clock for 10 days while still juggling day-to-day, or the all-nighters on deadline? #goodtimes) and the waves of unpredictability that go along with striking out on one’s own. I could not have survived and thrived these last 4-years without your love and support, and I thank you for always being there for me.

Thanks also to my friends and all the wonderful people I’ve met along the way who sent me leads, had me speak at their event, and gave me a leg up when I needed it. I do my very best every day to pay your kindness forward.

This blog will continue, though with an expected change in focus and updated look (like I haven’t got enough on my plate ).

My research and speaking on Death and Digital Legacy will go on a bit of a break until I get my feet under me at my new gig. I’ll get back to it as time allows. In the meantime, if you’re interested in the topic, please be sure to follow my buddies Evan Carroll and John Romano over at The Digital Beyond.

I will also continue to stay as active as I can in the social media and tech scene here in Montréal and elsewhere, including being a mentor at startup incubator FounderFuel.

Why?

Some people might wonder why I’m giving up the freedom of my own business. My answer is simple. As my friend Shel Israel wrote a few months ago, it’s time. For me, the writing has been on the wall for the last year and my feelings about the future of social media consulting were confirmed in conversations with at least a dozen of my contemporaries at SXSW last March.

I need a new challenge and I am ready to dig into a niche. It’s exhausting work to be a generalist in social media because the pace of change makes it extremely difficult to stay on top of every aspect. In my new role at Edelman Digital, I’ll be happily diving into monitoring and measurement, while swimming in analytics and influence. I’ll be unfettered by the need to know the latest Twitter management app or Facebook custom page tool. Sure, I’ll be interested, but it won’t be essential for me to know. Narrowing my focus will help to alleviate the inevitable social media burnout.

And, the great thing about joining a company vs. being a lone consultant is that I get to work with a team of smart people who are just as passionate about this space as I am. It’s lonely out there on your own. I’m looking forward to doing my best work because of the collaborative process that teamwork brings.

So, here’s to new horizons and the next phase of my career!

• Shibi Mourad (Google): The Acceleration of Everything
• Connie Crosby (The Crosby Group): Adopting Social Media Inside the Enterprise
• Mark Goren (Transmission): Evaluating Social Media Monitoring Tools From A User’s Point of View
• Debbie Weil: Finding Your Social Media Sweet Spot
• Mitch Joel (Twist Image): CTRL-ALT-DEL – How to Reboot Your Marketing in a Connected World
• Geoff Livingston (Zoetica): Shooting the Social Media Messenger!
• Dragana Djermanovic (PRpepper): Social Web: in&out_come
• Maggie Fox (Social Media Group):Privacy is a Commodity, Not a Place
• Janna Anderson (Elon University/Pew Internet Project): Imagining the Internet

Ask Away

Can’t make it to Webcom Montreal? What would you like to take away from these sessions? Send me your questions, and I’ll do my best to report back the answers.

Running concurrently is WebCamp, an un-conference for developers to discuss the trends and issues evolving in web technology. (Sold out.)

There’s still time to register for Webcom tickets. The event is free to enter starting from 4 pm.

They were a great group who had lots of questions. Many of those in attendance had certainly experienced the let down that happens after you set up a Facebook page, get a few initial followers and then interest drops off when no strategy is in place to continue to engage fans of the page.

I also talked quite a bit about what to do when the shine starts to wear off the “Ooo! New Shiny!”. It’s hard for businesses of all sizes, but particularly small businesses with limited resources, to manage social media outreach when that is not your area of expertise. I commend all of the dentists and practice managers in my session today for understanding that they need to know more, and being open to hearing me bust some myths and shoot down the hype.

Here’s the slide deck to my session. It is applicable to most small and medium-sized businesses, not just dental practices. And, perhaps refreshingly, it stresses how to define your strategy based on your organization’s goals and objectives. Have a look and tell me what you  think.

Under CC licensse: Horial Varlan

I’ve taken some time off from blogging this winter to have a Big Think.

It’s been 4 years since I left my job and started my consultancy. A few years prior to leaving my employer, I’d immersed myself into the world of social media, learning everything that I could, convinced it would revolutionize the marketing profession. I remember pitching the VP of Sales on the value of producing a podcast. That was December 2004. The first Canadian podcasts only began in October of that same year. Needless to say, my timing was a little early and my pitch was not accepted.

In the spring of 2007, Twitter was only one year old and Facebook was not nearly as mainstream as it is now. There were few social media practitioners and agencies and we educated clients about the need to “join the conversation”,  a much-overused expression. Back then, we taught people how to use tools and why applying old-style marketing techniques to social media was the wrong approach.

Factions broke out. There were the Zealots – those who held themselves and everyone else to a moral high ground, insisting you couldn’t participate in social media unless you were utterly transparent and that every CEO should blog for their company – often a naïve and unrealistic blanket approach. And, there were and the Capitalists, who applied standard issue make-money-on-the-internet, secrets-of-success, increase-your-followers-for-$109 approaches.

Somewhere in between, I knew that I could help people understand and use social media to transform their businesses. I knew that I could use my  20-years of marketing experience and pair it with my knowledge of social media to make a difference and make a living.

As more agencies started popping up, and the large agencies started to train their people in social media and take the plunge themselves, larger clients didn’t need to use a specialty consultant like me. They could just stay with the agency they used for PR, for web, for advertising.

As social media has become mainstream, the number of people offering “social media strategy” has exploded. My specialty is now a commodity and I am lumped in with those who happen to know how to build a Facebook page.

Take this story for example:

Recently, at SXSW while waiting with a group of strangers, one person turned to another and asked, “What do you do?” The other replied, “I’m in IT consulting. We primarily did email consulting, but as that’s all moving to the cloud, we’re repositioning to offer social media marketing and strategy instead.”

It seems everyone thinks they can do it.

While at SXSW, I got to chatting with the old timers of Twitter; people I’ve known since 2007 and whom I met at SXSW in 2008 who are also social media practitioners. I must have heard something like this 6 times: the market is too crowded and if you didn’t become a super A-lister  early on or get swallowed up by a big agency, it’s time to either get out or become very narrowly focused to survive.

The industry has evolved. As we’ve been saying for 2 years, Twitter and Facebook are as common as the telephone and email. The shift moved us from teaching the tools to developing strategy, defending ROI, and conversation monitoring for business intelligence and lead generation. This sector is constantly refining and in flux, racing to keep pace with the frenetic pace of technology development.

Now, beginning my 5th year on my own, I’ve been thinking a lot about where the industry is going and wondering about my place in it. There are new things for me on the horizon, but it’s a little too early to talk about them right now.

But, just in case: Does anyone out there have a spare crystal ball they could lend me?

Canada boasts some of the highest internet penetration and social networking usage rates in the world. Social network users view social media as their online home—a hub for communication, entertainment and information.

The report also states that in some cases Canadians are adopting social media faster than in the US. It estimates that about 15.1 million internet users in Canada will have visited social networking sites at least monthly, up from 13.6 million in 2009.

The rankings of social networks by usage (via comScore) is not without some surprises, particularly Windows Live Profile as #2 and DeviantArt as #6.

More information about the report and additional stats can be found here.

This photo is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic

My research on digital legacy issues over the last 18-months has led me to explore the area of content ownership, copyright, data portability and that dry, dusty thing that everything online has: Terms of Service.

When was the last time you read the TOS of Twitter, Gmail or Facebook (whose TOS has more words than the U.S. Constitution)?

Chances are very good that you’ve never read the legalese that is buried in the bowels of the least-frequented pages of a service. These backwaters are often filled with paragraphs in ALL CAPS, a contractual practice that predates the connotation of yelling online, yet still makes me think a lawyer is vigourously wagging a finger at me.

Let me save you some moments of your life that you’ll never get back. Here’s the gist of what most TOS contain:

You’ve just signed away the exclusive rights to your content.

You may still own the copyright. You may still own the intellectual property. But, that service where you just clicked “I Agree” upon sign up can likely do what they want with your stuff, without compensation, in perpetuity.

Will they actually use it?  Will they profit from it? Will they use it in a way that is not how you wish it to be represented?

Maybe not. But, you need to be aware that they now have the legal right to.

What does it mean for business and marketing?

Let’s talk photo sharing for a moment. Say you are a professional photographer and you use Flickr because you know you can set the level of copyright from All Rights Reserved to a very open and flexible Creative Commons license, depending on your needs and intent.

Did you know that by simply sharing a link to your photo on Twitter its content now falls under their TOS, regardless of the TOS of the service your photo resides? And that they can sub-license it?

Neither did I. Until I read this post.

This means you can no longer legally sell exclusive rights to anything you link to on Twitter.

Is Twitter Evil?

If they are, then so are thousands of other online services. I don’t believe that someone at Twitter is masterminding profiting from your linked content. It’s simply a case of services needing to cover their digital behinds. In comparison to analog printed works, where the process itself made content scarce, and therefore, containable, the flow of data is raging torrent that’s out of control.

Without this type of TOS, would Twitter be open to rights infringement simply by displaying the link to your content? What if your tweet, and its associated content on Twitpic or Flickr, were featured on CNN? Without the right to sub-license it, is it conceivable that you could sue Twitter? Possibly.

The letter of the law has not caught up with the sharing frenzy that is inherent to web 2.0. My feeling is that it will take nothing short of a revolution to change the status quo so that we control exclusive rights to our data.

Call me a cynic, but, more likely exclusivity is lost. Revolutions take passion and ignorance is bliss.

Perhaps something drives you nuts, or, you really love something about New Twitter and want to give them a pat on the back.

Ou peut-être, vous parlez français et vous avez un problème avec leur support multilingue.

If you live in Montreal, tonight’s your chance!

Mark Trammell, Design Researcher for Twitter will be in Montreal tonight. Over the next few weeks he’s traveling and speaking with people about how they use Twitter.

Join us for a tweetup tonight from 5 to 7. Please RSVP here: http://twtup.com/c5hk8f

Just How Massive is Google, Anyway?

Computer School (via Wallblog) (via @acriley)

The winners of my Art of Marketing contest are:

Annabelle Agnew
(@sewlounge)

James Taylor
(@JumboJet04)

Congratulations!

Thanks to everyone who took the time to enter and tell me about what they hoped to learn by 2011 and what they’ve learned in 2010. I’ll be doing a follow up post that will take a look at those answers.

STILL TIME TO GET DISCOUNT & LINCHPIN

My readers can use discount code AM26 when ordering to save:

• $50 per ticket on 1 or 2 tickets
• $100 per ticket on orders of 3 or more

You’ll get a free copy of Seth Godin’s Linchpin if you are one of the first 10 people to use the discount code.

Thanks to The Art of Productions for sponsoring this contest.

Methodology:

As I knew several of the entrants, I used a list randomizer from Random.org to make the selection fair and impartial. I randomized two lists, one for women and one for men, for equal representation at the conference.

Disclosure: I have been provided with two tickets for the Art of Marketing conference in exchange for this promotion.