Today’s post is the first in a series that will be examining the importance of digital literacy to Canada’s economy. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be interviewing key people to get their views on why digital literacy is important for businesses, non-profit organizations and even politics.

My first interview was with Justin Kozuch, lead researcher for Pixel to Product, a research project designed to obtain accurate and reliable data concerning the qualitative, quantitative and behavioural aspects of the Canadian digital media economy. Launched in May 2010, project researchers spent a year polling and surveying Canadian digital agency owners and the digital workforce to understand the size and scope of the industry.

Pixel to Product released their final report on May 25, 2011 and the results showed that Canada’s digital economy is strong and getting stronger. A few results in particular will be of interest to business owners:

• Of the digital media agency owners surveyed, most were expecting huge revenue growth in 2011 and had already experienced significant growth in 2010 over 2009.

• Of the members of the digital workforce surveyed, only 58.6% felt their employers were innovating enough – and 45.5% said if they could change one thing about their employment, it would be to have more time to hone their digital skills.

• For the researchers one comment from the workforce really stood out:

 “I’d like to have more freedom to use digital technology to its full extent without having to deal with the red tape.”

For Kozuch the project’s results send a clear message to businesses – become digitally literate or be left behind. And literacy must be a priority at every level, including management.

“Digital media is evolving in a big way. I think we’ve gone past the era of ‘it’s just a fad, it will die off in no time’ thinking. For digital literacy to happen at the business level, there needs to be an open mindset and a company culture that supports it. Instead of saying: ‘we shouldn’t allow our employees to use Facebook’, management needs to say: ‘how can we leverage social media to engage with consumers, build relationships with customers and build awareness about our company?’. Digital literacy isn’t a by-product of being tech-savvy; it’s a by-product of being fortunate, and I think we often confuse the two.”

Digital literacy key to success in Canada’s growing digital economy is a post from: communicatto - Social media agency in Calgary Alberta

CALGARY, AB, Jan. 23, 2012/ Troy Media - Back when I lived in Saskatoon a bunch of us went running each day at noon. I know, those of you who know me today would find that very hard to believe, but I swear it’s true.

Credit: Huerto.net

Whenever it was too cold or we wanted to do a certain type of training we’d all congregate at the Fieldhouse, Saskatoon’s indoor track and field facility.

Each year in January our Fieldhouse gang would put on a weight loss competition. We’d organize ourselves into two teams; privately giving our starting weight to the coordinator who would tabulate the total weight for each team. No individual’s weight was revealed except to the coordinator, so it was the team weight that mattered.

Losing team paid for lunch

A few months later (end of March I think) we’d compare the start and finish weight of the two teams, and the team with the greatest weight loss won.

Ironically the losing team had to take the winning team out to lunch, a raucous noisy affair with about 50 people or more depending on the year.

It was all great fun with lots of peer pressure and trash talk, all of which was very motivating. Teammates would ask if you really needed that doughnut, opponents would tempt you with pizza. Much hilarity ensued.

I got to thinking about the old Fieldhouse gang and our competitions as I was making New Year’s resolutions to break this January. Being a digital weenie, I figured there must be software to replace the clipboard, protect participants’ privacy and facilitate the trash talk and peer pressure. A social weight loss network as it were.

A little googling and sure enough, I found WeightLossWars.com.

From their website, WeightLossWars.com is “a fun weight loss motivation website where weight loss success stories are made.”

What’s really interesting about this site is the social digital component. In their words “what other online weight loss programs give you the opportunity to choose whether to focus on support or to choose full-out competition and mess with your friends, family or co-workers?”

I’m all for support, but some good old-fashioned messing is also a key ingredient to my success.

I resolved to start a competition in the first half of 2012, but first I wanted to establish a baseline for myself and see a dietician.

Canadian health care being what it is (overcrowded, slow and inefficient), my doctor informed me an appointment with a dietician will be a three month wait. Excellent.

Credit: MyFitnessPal.com

I wanted to start right away, so naturally I turned to my iPhone. After all, I just want dietary info and I don’t really care if that comes to me via a person or a gadget. A quick search in the app store for the words calorie and dietician brought up the app MyFitnessPal.

This free application and companion website is a miracle.

You can track everything you eat in a digital food diary, it has a giant database of foods plus you can enter your own, and it scans grocery item bar codes to give you precise nutritional information on most packaged goods. It even tracks exercise and “gives you back” calories as reward for burning off a few! Walk the dog for 20 minutes, take the calorie loss or earn yourself a fiber bar – your choice!

Like WeightLossWars.com it too has a social component. Refer your friends to the app and let the support and trash talk begin!

Armed with a calorie counter, exercise tracker and a website for a future weight loss war I was almost ready to enter 2012. There was just one more thing – an app to measure my running. I found the ideal solution in iMapMyRun, which uses GPS to tell me how far and fast I have gone, which I can then record in MyFitnessPal. If I’m feeling particularly proud or needing validation, I can have iMapMyRun post my results to social networks.

True motivation

Sample tweet:

Doug just ran five kilometres in 40 minutes, barely outpacing a tortoise. His pants are likely to remain snug given his caloric intake. Intervention required.”

Now that’s motivating!

My theory on weight loss is this, I really only need a few things:

• information to make better choices
• tracking to see how I’m doing
•  someone to offer me carrot sticks
•  someone else to give me the gears
•  a team to not let down
•  an opposing team to compete with

These are all just tricks to establish new habits anyway, so it may as well be “gadgety” and fun.

Let the social weight loss begin.

Doug Lacombe is president of Calgary social media agency communicatto. Find him on Twitter at @dblacombe.

Twitter trash talk shaves off pounds is a post from: communicatto - Social media agency in Calgary Alberta

Companies are starting to really see the value in using social media to have conversations with their customers. Take McDonald’s for example.

Last week the social media people behind the Golden Arches turned to Twitter to engage in nostalgic conversations about Happy Meals with their customers. And with the tweet “’When u make something w/pride, people can taste it,’ – McD potato supplier #McDStories”, McDonald’s launched the promoted hashtag #McDStories and waited for the warmth. Here’s a sampling of what they got in return:

“One time I walked into McDonalds and I could smell Type 2 diabetes floating in the air and I threw up. #McDStories” @SkipSullivan

 ”#McDStories @McDonalds scalds baby chicks alive for nuggets #MeetTheReality here & take action: McCruelty.com #UnhappyMeal” @michellevegan

 “I haven’t been to McDonalds in years, because I’d rather eat my own diarrhea.” @MuzzaFuzza

 “#McDStories I lost 50lbs in 6 months after I quit working and eating at Mcdonalds.” @jkingart

 “Watching a classmate projectile vomit his food all over the restaurant during a 6th grade trip. #McDStories” @jfsmith23

You get the idea – #gross. This Promoted Tweet Campaign was a #McFail. In fact, according to McDonald’s social media director Rick Wion, the #McDStories hashtag was “pulled” within two hours. And in that statement we get a glimpse into the old media mentality that gets companies into trouble on new media. A search on Twitter today reveals that #McDStories is still very much talked about – now it’s mostly in reference to countless stories detailing the company’s embarrassing epic fail. Cold, hard proof that there’s no such thing as “pulling” a hashtag – once it’s out there, it’s out there forever. (Incidentally, many on Twitter claim to have proof that McDonald’s chicken nuggets last forever…mmm, chemicals).

#McDStories is quickly becoming a cautionary tale for over-eager and under-knowledgeable corporate social media employees. And although #McDStories didn’t inspire warmth and good-will toward McDonald’s, it did inspire a brand new social media term, “bashtag”, coined by Forbe’s privacy blogger Kashmir Hill (@kashhill). Definitely not the legacy they’d hoped to leave.

So what’s the lesson here for companies eager to embrace social media and have conversations with their customers? Two clear points stand out:

1. Know the medium: No matter what your campaign intentions, understand that Twitter has a life of its own. Once something catches on, it’s impossible to stop. So consider all the possible interpretations of any hashtag you’re thinking of using – ninth grade humour has its place on Twitter.

1. Know your brand: The only way this hashtag campaign could be worse for McDonald’s is if it serves as their first realization that a lot of people hate their brand.  Fat chance they didn’t already know that – so they should have anticipated the bashtag. Be honest with yourself and be honest with your customers.

When warm & fuzzy goes dark & ugly, a #bashtag is born is a post from: communicatto - Social media agency in Calgary Alberta

The weather in Calgary has been positively frigid this week (like you need me to tell you that) and the coldest day was probably Tuesday – the day of Third Tuesday Calgary’s (#TTyyc) World Kiva Day Meetup. As a result, the turnout was lower than anticipated (what with the fact that most people’s cars were frozen and AMA wait times were at 8 hours….). But I’m hardcore and don’t own a car, so I took a cab, the C-Train, walked and then took a bus to get to Melrose so that I could offer you this recap of the event.

It’s a small world after all. And thanks to technology and social media it keeps getting smaller. So small that it might be time to change the song lyrics to, “it’s really just a bunch of little communities after all.” Or at least it seemed that way at Tuesday’s #TTyyc Meetup event at Melrose. The event was in support of World Kiva Day and the sense of community was so strong it was like viewing the world through a microscope. Seriously, it was inspiring to see how many different communities were brought together by this event.

What is Kiva?

Kiva is a non-profit organization with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. Leveraging the Internet and a worldwide network of microfinance institutions, Kiva lets individuals lend as little as $25 to help create opportunity around the world.

You can learn more about how it works in this video:

Tuesday, January 17^th marked World Kiva Day and Meetups in 63 countries worldwide celebrated it. The members of #TTyyc were proud to be a part of this global event. People from all the Meetups used the global hashtag #kivameetup on Twitter. This is community one.

How Calgary’s social media community brought World Kiva Day to Calgary

Without a doubt Kiva is cool – it’s allowing regular people to help those in need make real and lasting improvements in their lives. But it took an equally cool chain of events to make it a #TTyyc Meetup.

It started when Gary Ellis, a long-time Kiva lender and personal friend of Kiva’s co-founders Matt Flannery and Jessica Jackley, set out to find a location to host a Meetup in Calgary to participate in World Kiva Day. Gary approached Donna McTaggart, a woman who truly has her hand on Calgary’s pulse, and a loyal #TTyyc member. When Donna realized that World Kiva Day was Tuesday, January 17^th she approached #TTyyc’s fearless organizer, Doug Lacombe and the date and usual #TTyyc Melrose venue were set. A match made in social media heaven! This is community two.

jan & john – self-proclaimed Kiva addicts 

 Meet Jan and John Bacon, self-proclaimed Kiva addicts since 2007 when Jan saw Kiva featured on Oprah. The pair were guest speakers at Tuesday’s event and provided an inspiring picture of the power of Kiva.

Jan, 64, is retired after years of working in the banking industry, and John, 67, is a school bus driver in Calgary. To date, the pair has made 2184 Kiva loans. Check out their Kiva Lender Profile here.

Jan is the driving force behind their prolific Kiva contributions, and she admits she’s a bit of an Internet addict as well. To feed this addiction, she (along with John) is a member of 28 Kiva Lending Teams. These teams consist of people around the world making loans toward specific causes as a team. The teams track things like the total number of loans made and the total amount loaned. Through these teams, Jan has formed many relationships with like-minded people all over the globe. This is community three.

Jan also described the powerful relationships she’s formed with some of the borrowers she’s loaned to through Kiva. She communicates with many of them via email. This is community four.

Join Calgary Pixel Pool Capital

Here’s the community that I invite you to join now: Calgary Pixel Pool Capital: a Kiva lending team for digital types – social media aficionados, web developers, pixel pushers, bloggers, Tweetheads, interactive creators and app developers.

Sign up here (it’s super easy), make a $25 loan and let’s see how many lives we can change together!

And, in case you lost count – this is community five.

Third Tuesday World Kiva Day recap: A community within a community, within a community…doing a world of good is a post from: communicatto - Social media agency in Calgary Alberta

Credit: krisitnschellinger.files.wordpress.com

Investor relations people are not social.

Oh, don’t get me wrong; I know they are in real life. I’ve been to numerous CIRI conferences and have witnessed this firsthand. Great banquets, golf tournaments, galas and hospitality suites – IR has social down pat in ‘meat space’ (what the digerati call the real world).

I mean social media. In fact, let me take it further, most investor relations folks really don’t ‘get’ digital at all. They’ve mostly caught on to websites, sort of, and email is old hat, but Twitter, Facebook, YouTube? Hardly.

In and of itself, this is no crime. Personal participation in the latest thing is purely optional, though statistically most IR pros are on Facebook at home. What is difficult to justify is when a profession ignores a mass medium, engaging in the workplace version of hear no evil, see no evil.

Ignoring a medium that attracts 50% of the Canadian population is like ignoring newspapers.

I’m sympathetic to the plight of oldsters, confronted with a confusing and complicated set of new media. What a bother! Heck, I’m a middle-ager myself, an anomaly for my generation as a very early adopter. Many of my university pals are not active or even on Facebook. My friends, however, are not a random sample, so I have accepted that my personal use and business use of social media will differ. You should too.

From a business perspective we can see social media rapidly moving from bleeding edge to mainstream in other corporate departments. The Burson-Marsteller 2011 Fortune Global 100 Social Media Study reports:

In a short time, social media has gone from an interesting emerging communications trend to a critical part of the media landscape, and companies are reacting to that change.”

The study reveals that 84% of the Fortune Global 100 use one or more social media platforms in their communications.

That study isn’t IR specific, but it certainly indicates mainstream corporate adoption of social media. The question is, should IR use it and if so, how?

Closer to home, in its report Public Company Use of Social Media for Investor Relations 2011, Q4 Web Systems states:

Of the 629 companies in this report 626, or 96%, have a Twitter account. After a careful analysis of the content, we found that 67%, or 418, are using it to provide investor-related material … Almost all of the 629 companies are using Twitter, and two-thirds of them are using it for IR.

The second part of Q4’s report on Facebook use:

found that 45%, or 216 companies, are using it to provide investor-related material …

Of course use of social media does not necessarily indicate using it well.

Simply put, social media is about talking to people. In the complex and highly regulated world of disclosure, IROs are gun-shy about talking to people on social media. They tend to broadcast, treating social media like a newswire or other form of dissemination.

Broadcasting on social media does not add value (I can get disseminated info all over the web) and is seen as a bit spammy. What people are looking for on social media is the colour commentary, the backstory, the MD&A explained.

This is analogous to the Q&A in the quarterly conference call, or at the AGM, or at an investor conference.

One myth that needs busting is that social media will replace something in the IR communications mix. That’s unlikely and in fact unwise. I generally use words like amplify and extend when referring to social media and how it fits in the mix. As in, you can amplify the reach of your conference call by making it a podcast or promoting it on Twitter and then extend its shelf life by leaving it archived for an appropriate period of time.

The idea is to take the content, and the conversation, to where the people are. And sometimes that’s on social media.

Brunswick Research’s 2010 report Digital Media and the Investment Community identified the single most important information source from companies as being direct interaction with management (50% of those surveyed). At the other end of the scale were digital platforms: website at 2% and digital media at 1%.

But is a live Twitter chat with a CFO direct interaction with management or digital media? It’s both, of course.

We know social media is no silver bullet. We know other forms of communications matter more. We know there’s mass adoption by the public and corporations. We know social media impacts business journalists mightily. We know IR is uncomfortable with digital dialogue.

What we don’t know is when IROs will decide to get good at this and weave it into their communications mix.

Doug Lacombe is president of social media agency communicatto. Lacombe is a 20- year plus media veteran with deep digital roots dating back to the 1990s. 

When will IR ‘get’ social media? is a post from: communicatto - Social media agency in Calgary Alberta

These buzz words are getting a lot of attention. From teenagers and grandparents posting profile pics on Facebook, to celebrities sharing their “genuine” love for cheeseburgers and purses on Twitter and HR professionals recruiting potential employees on LinkedIn, there’s no segment of society that hasn’t been impacted by social media. And that includes business. There’s no doubt that social media can be profoundly beneficial to businesses – that is, if it’s done right.

With his book “The REAL Truth About Social Media”, Eric Harr sets out to help businesses of all sizes master social media.

Harr is the founder and CEO of Resonate Social Media and when I @mentioned him on Twitter, he told me that his goal with this book was to introduce newcomers to social media and inspire and empower them. And this is most definitely the book’s target audience. Social media strategists and enthusiasts will find this book pretty basic. But for business owners looking to get involved in social media, I think Harr hits his mark.

“Old-school” meets new media

Harr makes his first strong point early on, when he draws a connection between “old-school” business techniques and the modern tools of social media, emphasizing the importance of:

• Exceptional customer service
• Sincere and genuine interactions
• Slow, steady relationship building

I personally enjoyed his use of classic quotes from people like Shakespeare and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to underscore the fact that social media may be a modern invention, but its principles are founded on humanity’s timeless basic need to be social.  He makes it clear that if businesses choose to ignore this fact, they are destined to fail.

Valuable insights

Harr spends a good deal of time on describing the various social media platforms and provides inspiring success stories for each of them. He then offers “actionable insights” for both personal and business use – instructions on how best to use each platform. This section would definitely bore regular social media users, and I’m not sure the personal insights are necessary given the target business audience, but business owners will find that this section demystifies social media and makes it seem “doable”.

Beyond the in-depth introduction to social media platforms, and inspiring case studies, Harr offers readers two extremely valuable hands-on tools for social media success:

1. Directions on how to set clear goals for social media, identify Key Performance Indicators and measure progress at regular intervals.
2. Appendices that include such valuable resources as 10 Simple Steps to Social Media Success and a Social Media Policy Template.

Bottom line: with his conversational, enthusiastic tone, Eric Harr is sure to inspire businesses to dive into social media. And with the valuable tools he’s given them throughout this book, and in the appendices, they’ll have a pretty good chance of succeeding.

For more information about Eric Harr and “The REAL Truth About Social Media”, and to purchase the book, visit: http://bit.ly/therealtruthaboutsocialmedia.

Kelly Ferrier is the owner of Calgary copywriting company Kay Phair Advising. Find her on Twitter at @kayphair.

Book Review: The REAL Truth About Social Media is a post from: communicatto - Social media agency in Calgary Alberta

CALGARY, AB, Jan. 9, 2012/ Troy Media - The Pareto principle, aka the 80-20 rule, seems to magically apply to many areas of life, including social media marketing.

Anyone who has ever managed a sales team is familiar with the axiom 80 per cent of your sales come from 20 per cent of your customers, but where else does it apply?

Remember pea pods

Credit: thesportsphysiotherapist.com

According to Wikipedia, early 20th century business consultant Joseph M. Juran figured it applied to land ownership and pea pods. He concluded this after studying the work of Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto “who observed in 1906 that 80 per cent of the land in Italy was owned by 20 per cent of the population; (and) he developed the principle by observing that 20 per cent of the pea pods in his garden contained 80 per cent of the peas.”

In business the Pareto principle has been ascribed to numerous datasets. From Wikipedia:

• 80 per cent of your profits come from 20 per cent of your customers
• 80 per cent of your complaints come from 20 per cent of your customers
• 80 per cent of your profits come from 20 per cent of the time you spend
• 80 per cent of your sales come from 20 per cent of your products
• 80 per cent of your sales are made by 20 per cent of your sales staff

My theory is the Pareto principle applies equally well to social media marketing. For example, I would guess:

• 80 per cent of your weekly blog traffic comes from 20 per cent of your annual readers
• 80 per cent of your blog comments come from 20 per cent of your readers
• 80 per cent of your Twitter interaction is with 20 per cent of your following
• 80 per cent of your Facebook interactions come from 20 per cent of your fans
• 80 per cent of what you publish on social media is dreck you want to say, 20 per cent is what the audience wants to hear

It’s this last one I emphasize over and over with my clients. In monologue marketing, companies said what they wanted to say and that was it, broadcast over. In social media marketing, where there should be a dialogue, you need to adjust, publishing what the audience wants to hear instead of what you want to say.

You may want to say your detergent makes clothes whiter than white, but most don’t believe that. The audience may principally be concerned about phosphates, or packaging, or cold water washing, or getting grass stains out of Johnny’s trousers and so on. Whiter than white is a laundry pipe dream from some non-existent marketing Pleasantville, and folks are too wise to be sold a total bill of goods these days.

Talk to them and they will engage, talk AT them and they will tune you out.

My final application of the Pareto principle is in outbound publishing, meaning the blog posts, tweets and so on you send out. I recommend a nice balanced 3-1-1 ratio, a variant on the 80-20. It goes like this: eighty percent of the stuff you publish should NOT be directly about you (but should be about your “area of expertise”), 20 percent should be about you.

Achieving the right balance

More specifically, out of every five tweets or blog posts or Facebook posts, I want to see three that are generous or educational in nature, one that is human and will accept one that is “pitchy”. If five of your tweets say “Company X is a great place to work” you sound desperate and spammy. If three of those tweets say “Check out this university study on careers in our industry” or some variant, and the next one says “Can’t wait for my tropical vacation” and the final one says “Career opportunities for you at Company X, search here” then you have struck the balance between giving, taking and showing a little humanity.

And that’s what social media marketing is about – injecting a little humanity into the process while we all continue to buy and sell stuff. Following the Pareto principle might just bring your marketing into harmony with the universe.

Doug Lacombe is president of Calgary social media agency communicatto. Find him on Twitter at @dblacombe.

80-20 rule applies to social media marketing too is a post from: communicatto - Social media agency in Calgary Alberta

CALGARY, Jan. 1, 2012/ Troy Media - It’s that time of year again for Digital Doug to summarize the year in social, fess up to the accuracy of last year’s predictions (or lack thereof), and break out the crystal ball for 2012. Here goes:

Credit: beartoons.com

2011 may have been the year Google finally got social networking right with Google+. After dismal failures in previous years with Buzz and Wave, Google stayed true to their roots and kept launching new spaghetti at the wall until something stuck.

Another, perhaps more notable event in 2011 was the successful initial public offering (IPO) of LinkedIn.com. The stock has consistently traded above its $45 opening price, currently trading at around $62.90. Obviously the market sees value in the “world’s largest professional network” and for good reason. As baby boomers retire and labor becomes increasingly scarce, LinkedIn is sitting on a gold mine – everyone’s resume.

Speaking of IPOs, social coupon creator Groupon last fall launched the largest IPO for a U.S. web company since Google, raising $700 million. As reported by Reuters: “The global leader in ‘daily deals’ is now valued at almost $13 billion . . .” Groupon is now trading at about $20.63 amidst concerns that long term prospects for the company are poor as their offering is fairly undifferentiated.

Other noteworthy events in social 2011 include the launch of Facebook’s timeline feature, an attempt to make that social network the diary of your entire life (resulting in lots of pages for ads to roll by on). Twitter was integrated into Apple’s mobile operating system iOS, further cementing that network as the way to share content created on the fly. Speaking of content creation, the explosion of Instagram, the photo sharing service that applies cool, retro effects to your photos, quite possibly made 2011 the year of the photo, and finally Facebook gobbled up and then closed location-based service Gowalla.

On the world stage, we saw everything from the ridiculous (Anthony Weiner tweeting his, well, you know, and Charlie Sheen’s #winning) to the muddled #OccupyWallStreet to the tragedy of the Japanese earthquake to the sublime news of Osama bin Laden’s demise, all played out on social media.

Closer to home, the National Post’s Toban Dyck added memoriams for Jack Layton and the outrage over the Canucks riot to the list of topics that trended on Twitter in 2011.

Back at the beginning of the year I predicted five social trends for 2011. Let’s see how I did:

• Social software as a service (so-called cloud-based applications) will remain niche and fragmented. I’d say there’s still no adequate social media dashboard nor analytics solution and Social CRM is in its infancy so I give myself full marks for this one. (If only school had worked this way!)
• Companies will measure Return On Investment (ROI) not audience-size in 2011. Wrong. People are still impressed by number of followers, which bears no relationship to selling more stuff or upping your stock price or cementing your reputation. E-marketer did report Chief Marketing Officers are more concerned about this, so that’s good, but we ain’t there yet.
• Corporations will broadcast less and listen/engage more on social media. Barely, but there’s a lot of corporate spam still happening out there. Dialog does not come easily to corporations.
• Advertising will flood social channels not already loaded with it. True, Twitter introduced numerous sponsorship opportunities for business and Facebook has added sponsored stories to its arsenal. Somebodies gotta pay for all this sharing, and it looks like ads will be the way.
• Apps will give way to better mobile sites and HTML5. Nope. I was thinking too techie here; users won’t have it, they seem to prefer the superior experience of a native app, even if that leads to phone screen clutter.

So my track record as a social media swami runs about 50/50 for 2011. Harumph. Guess I better keep my day job.

Here’s my shot at predicting some social digital trends for 2012:

• Business and media will really start to take advantage of trans-media web publishing, by which I mean news, ads, stories, publicity and so on will be packaged up in web-based multimedia collections, like a blend of landing pages, squeeze pages, social media releases tweets, photo albums and blog posts. Essentially a micro-site for important stories.
• Content producers will become content distributors. Comedian Louis C.K. fired a shot over the bow of traditional media distribution when he recently released a comedy special via the web instead of via major cable network as he has done in the past. As MSNBC’s Today Show reported “Louis C.K. cut out TV networks by selling his latest comedy special online – then used network airtime to promote it. The strategy helped him earn a cool million dollars in a matter of days, half of which he’s giving away to his staff and charities.” Authors, photographers, artists and other content creators now have their own distribution network, the web, and Web 2.0 tools to package, price and promote it. Who needs your stinking publishing house in 2012?
• Cords will not be cut. Network and cable TV will be just fine for a good long while, thank you very much. Sure, traditional television will have to become increasingly social and interactive in a bid to stave off incursions into their turf by the likes of YouTube, but web TV is just too choppy to ascend to the top of the heap in the family room, for now.

That’s it for 2011. Happy New Year and be sure to tweet your whereabouts, but please, avoid your own personal Weinergate and tweet responsibly.

Doug Lacombe is president of Calgary social media agency communicatto. Find him on Twitter at @dblacombe.

Social media in 2011 and 2012 is a post from: communicatto - Social media agency in Calgary Alberta

CALGARY, AB, Dec. 20, 2011/ Troy Media - Talk to some executives and they use the phrase “social media” as if it is a homogenous monolith. Like every platform is the same, and they are all equally worthy of a corporation’s attention. That’s not the case.

Credit: CMO.com - click to enlarge

Like every medium, you need to know who frequents each social network and to what extent.

Facebook vs. Twitter vs. LinkedIn

For example, Facebook’s advertising “wizard” tells me 15.7 million Canadians over the age of 18 are on that social network. 8.1 million of them are women. Facebook claims to have more than 800 million users worldwide. In other words, it’s a safe bet whatever demographic you might want to reach is on Facebook.

Twitter, on the other hand, has over 300 million users (according to Wikipedia) with 50 million active daily. Last April, the Financial Post reported Canadian Twitter penetration at 18 percent based on a comScore Inc. study, sixth in the world. Interestingly a June 2011 Pew Internet research report pegged Twitter penetration at 13 per cent of online Americans. All of which is to say that Twitter is relatively niche as compared to Facebook.

Not only that, but Twitter demographics skew a little older than some other networks, although Hollywood stars are changing that and attracting the younger set to Twitter. According to 2010 data gathered by DigitalSurgeons.com, the typical Twitter user is:

• Female
• 26 – 34 years old
• In college
• Income $26,000 – $50,000
• Outside the USA

While Twitter may be a niche network, the demographic is a desirable one; one might say a vocal, influential minority. Quick searches reveal hundreds of Canadian journalists and politicians on Twitter, for example.

Then there’s LinkedIn, the so-called “Facebook for grown ups” although they prefer “the world’s largest professional network on the Internet”. At 135 million plus members (four million in Canada) they’re right. And LinkedIn attracts a coveted demographic. According to Quantcast.com global LinkedIn visitors are generally male, middle-aged, Asian, no kids, affluent and highly educated. In other words, educated white-collar decision makers.

Not all social networks the same

Treating all social networks the same would be a colossal marketing gaffe, yet many do just that. Looking for mainstream media attention? Try Twitter. Seeking soccer moms? Check Facebook. Headhunting executives? LinkedIn.

Luring people to your new page, site or community is hard. Taking your page to the platforms where they already hang out is much easier. The Internet is not about reaching everyone simultaneously. It’s about reaching small pockets of the appropriate people where they already are.

Doug Lacombe is president of Calgary social media agency communicatto. Find him on Twitter at @dblacombe.

Finding the right social network(s) for your business is a post from: communicatto - Social media agency in Calgary Alberta

Credit: hockeydino.com

Well, maybe it helps reduce advertising costs with more efficient digital, but that’s not enough for the C-suite. To them it all seems too chatty and frivolous.

What drives CEOs?

That got me thinking about one of my favorite books “Freakonomics”, a non-traditional economics text that explores behaviour as explicable by incentives.

Stock price, the expectations of investors, revenue, margin, market share, production volume and so on are what drive CEOs. They are incented to raise the stock price, provide market gains, and to deliver dividends to investors. All the while, they are performing a balancing act between the board and employees, and keeping an eye on their own bonuses and stock options.

Telling a CEO you can’t deliver Return on Investment (ROI) on social media but you expect “return on engagement” is about the same as saying you’re seeking permission to hunt for unicorns. It simply won’t fly.

To embed social media into an organization you need executive sponsorship, which means you need to align your program with their motivations. Connect the dots for the leadership team on how this helps them do their jobs and you just might get their support.

I typically turn to the old economics trifecta to create this alignment: land, labor and capital.

Social media has been increasingly implicated in stopping projects or denying companies access to land, particularly resource companies. Witness the Quebec moratorium on hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. As the Financial Post reported this summer:

Behind closed doors in the board rooms of some of these energy firms, the introspection has been gut-wrenching. Directors questioned what the decision means for business and what they should do next. Backers questioned whether to keep their money in or pull out.”

Or consider the rough ride TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline project has been having in the U.S.

There’s really no bigger showstopper than being denied access to the land. And the folks seeking to deny such access are particularly adept at fomenting dissent via social media.

Next, there’s labour. Obviously you can’t run projects without talent, but how to find said talent?

While the U.S. shuns pipeline jobs in favour of partisan politics, Canada, particularly the western provinces, is rapidly experiencing another labor shortage. Human resource professionals are pulling their hair out to find qualified candidates. The demographics of the baby boom are playing against them, increasingly exacerbating the shortage. Print career ads have almost evaporated. Job boards deliver masses of under-qualified “junk” candidates that recruiters have to sift through. The new world of recruiting is search and social (think Google searches and LinkedIn). All of which came upon us in the past few years. Recruiters are reeling with the change.

Then there’s capital. As Howard Lindzon said at a recent meeting of the Canadian Investor Relations Institute…

Being active in social media does not mean your stock price will increase. Only good business will do that but you’ve got to participate in social platforms for no other reason than to prove that you’re doing what you are supposed to.”

Align your proposal with your CEO’s motivations

Lindzon, a highly successful angel investor and co-founder of StockTwits.com, told me recently…

It’s not just about driving the stock price, but it’s about recognizing these guys that own 10,000 or 5,000 shares … are the ones the reporters are reading that drive the stories in the Wall Street Journal, etc.”

If your CEO asks you why you want to “do” social media, think twice before blurting out something about engagement and the wisdom of the crowd. Instead, tell her how you’d like to help build the stock, attract talent, and educate the public on why you belong in their back yard.

Doug Lacombe is president of Calgary social media agency communicatto. Visit him at communicatto.com.

CEOs follow the money, not the tweets is a post from: communicatto - Social media agency in Calgary Alberta