Sound like you? Read more about the Associate Consultant role and get in touch!

Eden has spent the last 8 years on the corporate communications team of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, and previously worked for Corus Entertainment, notably launching Yabber.net (now part of YTV.com), the first Canadian online community for 8-14 year olds.

Eden’s name may sound familiar to you – she was recently nominated as one of Canada’s most influential women in social media. She is the woman behind Bargainista, one of Canada’s most influential blogs, and is a regular contributor to One Degree, a leading Canadian online publications about digital communications. Eden is also one of the organizers behind PodCamp Toronto, and one of the co-creators of Community Divas, a podcast about community building.

Please join us in welcoming Eden to iStudio!

Update: We met with some great candidates and filled the Account Director and Art Director positions. We’re always looking to meet smart, talented people in digital communications, user experience design, and technical development. If that sounds like you, get in touch.

Of course – as much as I suppose we might enjoy ruining people’s holidays by taking their cash in exchange for creepy garbage, we’re not in it for the money, and people would eventually catch on anyway. No, we’re doing it for the laughs we get from reading people’s pleas when they come in, as they attempt to provide good explanations as to why they might actually want whichever disappointing gift they happen to be bidding on. For those of you who may have missed last year’s fun with this, here’s how it works:

• First, you browse the 2008 Do-Not-Want-Ads, reading through the classifieds for any products you think you might be interested in.
• Using the marker provided, you select an ad, which brings up a more detailed description of the crappy gift in question; along with several photos so you can see the product in action.
• From there, if interested, you place a free bid on the item by providing your email address and a sentence or two explaining why you want it, or why you should be the one to receive it. Email addresses will be collected for the purpose of contacting winners, and nothing else.
• Then, bidding closes on December 18th at 11:59pm, and winning entries for each gift will be chosen the following day, Friday December 19th. On that day, winners will be notified so that shipping arrangements can be made. If winners cannot be reached by December 20th, the gift will be awarded to the next runner-up, in the hopes of getting all the gifts delivered by the 25th. We can’t guarantee it, but we’ll try…
• As a winner, you receive the gift via FedEx, hopefully just in time to ruin your holidays.

That’s how it works… and what fun it is. When else can you suffer a barrage of advertisements trying to sell you on a bunch of free crap you don’t need, but actually enjoy it for once? Take back your holidays! Show the world it’s not about money, and it’s not about choosing good gifts, but that it’s the thought that counts. Even if you’re only sending something hideous to somebody out of spite.

So we did it before, and we’re doing it again. The response was so great last year that we just had to – and some of this stuff is just begging to be given away…

iStudio’s 2008 Do-Not-Want-Ads
http://www.istudio.ca/holiday08/

The ads are ready, they’re waiting for you. Go on, place your bids. You’ll be disappointed you did.

Happy holidays!

Dave

If you’re in Canada, you will have hopefully been touched (in both senses of the word) by the Public Service Announcement in almost all media that direct you to the site.

Today, I’m very excited to say that the full version of endMS has launched. And it looks fantastic!

Along with the other functionality, bells and whistles I ran through in my original post (Flash intro, interactive funding simulator, email registration and secure online donation form), there are two very cool new additions.

First off, there is a community scrapbook. Because it’s not just the people with MS who are affected, it’s their whole family and network we wanted to allow everyone to tell their story. We could never hope to create the sort of content that truly tells the story, so we decided to have the community tell us, and tell each other how MS affects them and why it’s so important that we do, finally, endMS.

We’ve given the community the ability to tell their stories by uploading video, pictures or just plain text to the site - and we hope they do.

Secondly, we recognise that the site can only do so much - most of the conversation around the campaign will happen off-site and we want to embrace that. So, by tagging your content with “endMS” or “stopSP” on Technorati, on Flickr, on YouTube, on Daily Motion, on Photobucket, your content will be pulled in and displayed on the site. We believe that this will show momentum and provide some context to the wider conversation.

With something as important as the endMS campaign, we also wanted to show the reader just how important their donation is by getting the researchers that they are funding to blog about their work. But that wasn’t enough for the MS Society - the Society wanted to have everyone involved with endMS to talk about why they were passionate about ending MS forever.

And because this is Canada, for an added twist, everything had to be bilingual. Which it is, in the form of stopSP!

As of today, it is frankly awesome to see that the campaign has raised $32mm so far. Please take some time to check out the site, sign up for the newsletter and, if you want to, make a donation.

It’s easy to do great, rewarding work when you have a great client that does incredibly rewarding work - and the MS Society team is just that sort of client. Thanks to them for choosing iStudio for such an important project.

I’m pretty sure that everyone in the iStudio team had a hand in this project but I’d like to give special shout outs to Steve Coppola, Mike Badgley, Dave Knight and Keith Chadwick for all of the hard work that they in particular put into the project. I know I owe them a drink or two the next time I’m in Ottawa.

For those not keeping score, listed below are a few of our favourites from previous years:

2006’s Build-Your-Own-Holiday
There’s a special kind of magic that’s created when you combine seemingly unrelated concepts together – and then apply it to the holiday season. 2006’s greeting made users the artists, encouraging experimentation to create the most ridiculous holiday scene ever.

2005’s Hot Toddies for the Holidays
As RSS adoption rose, our 2005 greeting put a new spin on the advent calendar, revealing a new tip for the holidays each day. A winner of 4 industry awards, this year’s greeting featured contributions from each of our employees.

2003’s Holiday Memories
Back in 2003, before the blog and social networking boom, we presented a kindergarten-like play with each of us sharing our fondest holiday memories.

With all of the season’s madness, year-end deliverables for our clients and planning for the new year, one has to wonder why we do this to ourselves. Indeed, conceptualizing this year’s greeting began late in the summer, with production taking us all the way to the 11th hour on December 3rd. And so you may ask, don’t we have other things to worry about?

Of course we do.

But truthfully, there are a number of reasons why our annual holiday greeting is so important to us. And they may not be what you think.

Proving our Chops
Okay, let’s get the obvious one out of the way first. Sure, to some degree we do use our holiday greetings to showcase our talents. So yes, a bit of showboating. Just a little bit though.

Team Building
It may not be immediately apparent, but each of our holiday greetings requires hands-on work from virtually every employee at iStudio. We each have a hand in this and it helps to ensure that the flavour of our greeting properly reflects us as a whole.

Personality Plus!
Whether you’re a client, partner, supplier or colleague, our holiday greetings provide a simple way to get to know each of us a little better. As mentioned above, it requires significant input from each team member, with specific topics or content directly related to individual employees.

Keeping us on our toes
Whether it’s being more innovative, making better use of technology or being more strategic with the concept itself, each year presents us with a new challenge – to outdo the previous year’s entry.

It’s Fun!
You may not believe it, but we have a blast creating these things each year.  Brainstorming sessions, late-night photo shoots, shopping trips and basking in the satisfaction of launch day. It’s amazing.

Considering all of these reasons, this year’s holiday greeting is no exception.
 For those who haven’t yet seen it, 2007’s Do-Not-Want-Ads brings a new twist to the concept of gift giving.  iStudio’s team members have selected one or more gifts that, for one reason or another, are so bad – they’re good. You know the type.

Visitors can receive the actual gift (shipped to you free!) by simply telling us why they’d like it. Witty responses are encouraged, and the best submission wins the product on December 19th.

Using a classified ads metaphor for the interface gave us a number of opportunities to inject humour and sarcasm throughout the piece with both the want-ads themselves, or supplementary advertisements found elsewhere in the newspaper spread.

Also be sure to check out our companion Facebook application that allows those who install the app to send virtual versions of these terrible gifts.

After less than 24 hours since the launch, we’re positively blown away by the response we’ve received so far. Already over 70 terrific submissions from users! Thanks to everyone who has participated..and to those who haven’t, don’t be shy! Show us your love for the horrendous gifts we’ve collected for you by entering your bid on one!

In this final segment, I’d like to talk about another key trend contributing to the importance of in-world brand representation – facilitating greater social interaction with your brand and the implications for your sales cycle and brand initiatives.

Facilitating Interaction: Reaching the Community

Selling or marketing in-world means connecting with your customers on their terms, engaging in the conversation and becoming a part of the existing vibrant communities. Many companies today are still following a traditional means of SL communications; build an island and traffic will come. In the 90s, it was build a Website and traffic will come. Today many islands are beautiful but deserted. Significant in-world presence - but no community and no connection. Organizations need to take the lessons learned from communicating with bloggers and other online participants and apply these principles to the virtual world.

In-world, this means identifying the key influencers within the communities most likely to be responsive to your brand. These people may be in-world journalists, musicians, DJs, association or island leaders which have high interactivity with your target audience. In communicating with these individuals you should consider the current motivations for why people travel in-world: to discover, to explore, to have common experiences, and to share creative visions of the world around them. Many organizations are tuned in to these motivations and cater their marketing accordingly.

Building Community around the Brand

1-800 Flowers knew that its audience was motivated to explore and be creative in-world. The approach? Open a store where your audience can create and collect a free assortment of virtual flowers, allow them to enter an in-world photo contest where they explore the world and submit their photos for the most beautiful fields of Second Life. Ensure your store is populated with real people so that your target can share questions and suggestions with in-store representatives. President Chris McCann noted that the nirvana of it all would be to allow users to submit their virtual bouquet to receive the real thing. McCann noted of the experience, “We recognize that this is not just a place to jump into so we can sell more flowers and gifts. It’s a different environment and an emerging world.”

Coca-Cola recently tapped into the community with its Virtual Thirst contest. The approach? Engage in a conversation with the existing communities and allow them to determine how the Coke brand can creatively enhance the virtual world experience. One suggestion included the traditional elaborate island. This represents the “build it and they will come” approach that many companies tried and failed to sustain. Another suggestion was much simpler, less costly, and much more engaging; the winning idea was an in-world vending machine that offered not drinks but experiences and a means to be truly creative. One such machine dispensed a gigantic pink coke puzzle bottle that residents could play with and solve like a Rubik’s Cube. Each bottle displays a surprise experience after the puzzle is solved. The puzzle also gives users a SLURL (a link to the other areas of the virtual world) to find other bottles to solve.

While Second Life, as with other virtual worlds, will experience hype and anti-hype, many companies are continuing to explore its possibilities for enabling greater interaction between audience and brand.  KPMG went out to the communities with an online job fair to attract and meet with potential recruits. CNN trains and equips citizen journalists to contribute eyewitness reports in-world; news is delivered via kiosks scattered throughout the community. The State of Missouri recently sent out its CIO to stroll the streets to recruit IT staff. 

CSI creator Anthony Zuiker developed a virtual Manhattan to promote the television program “CSI: NY”, tapping into desires for exploration and creativity with tours and puzzles such as “Murder by Zuiker”. As a contest, Zuiker evaluates entries by people trying to solve a crime based on evidence found in a crime scene in-world. Similarly, Microsoft used puzzle solving to promote Visual Studio for its campaign, “All Things Possible.” For the promotion of the film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, IMAX and Second Marketing recruited two dozen avatars, paid in real-world wages, to act as virtual street teams, handing out free virtual promotional items and engaging fellow avatars in discussions about the film. 15,099 unique avatars engaged in conversation about the film; the campaign logged 25,189 individual IMAX brand interactions – all within a span of roughly seven days in-world.

Implications for Organizations

With respect to encouraging social interaction around your brand, your organization may want to consider the following:

Who are we trying to reach? Why does this group go in-world? Is it for general exploration or creativity, or a particular cause, hobby, or interest?  

• Who are the key influencers within the community? What is their connection to the group? Island leader, head of an association, musician, builder, businessperson, artist, in-world citizen journalist? You may want to also consider in-world journalists from Virtual World News, Second Life Insider, the Seventh Sun, Second Life News Network, and the Second Life Herald.
• What are the motivations and preferences of the community? This often means logging on and striking up a conversation not related to the brand. Get to know them, participate in the conversation, share insights and opinions. Listen to their responses.
• In communicating our brand, what can we offer that will add value to their experience. Will our offering allow them to explore new aspects of the world? Will it allow them to create? Will it allow them to share their creation with others in the community and gain recognition in the process? Ideally a good campaign can integrate all of the above. Also, sometimes the best ideas come from the community itself. Don’t be afraid to solicit their opinion.
• Which key influencers (determined from the initial assessment) will we approach to communicate our brand experience? Why should they share the message? What will they gain in terms of recognition and respect within the community?
• How will we measure our engagement? Given that community outreach is typically reaching those at the beginning of the sales cycle, sales should not be the primary metric. Many companies use number of avatar engagements per unit of time and length and quality of conversations as measured by number of positive and negative brand mentions. Once you’ve developed a relationship (showing that you understand their lifestyle and needs) you’ve built the foundation for a discussion of more specific product and service offerings.

Looking Ahead:  Commerce on the Virtual Web

Many tools are moving the virtual Web in the direction of mainstream adoption. Recently Second Life added voice as a standard option, eliminating the requirement for text-based conversations. Vodafone now offers pay-as-you-go calling between the real world and in-world avatars. Don’t have money? First Meta offers participants virtual credit cards with daily interest. Linden Labs is actively working towards interoperability, allowing you to share your avatar (appearance and assets) across platforms. IBM is teaming with Pelican Crossing to develop a universal open source client for all virtual worlds, allowing companies to embed virtual worlds (including Second Life) directly into Web pages.  

In The Coming of the Virtual Web, PARC’s Moore notes “what’s missing from online shopping is the social and recreational experience. That’s exactly what you get with virtual-world shopping.” Joe Miller, VP for platform and technology development for Second Life notes, “In contrast to the Web, where there’s no assumption of a human heartbeat behind the Web page, virtual worlds are inherently social settings. You go up to an avatar and you know there’s a real person on the other end.”

Throughout this series we talked about the degree to which online commerce has come to not only compete with traditional commerce but also to complement the offline world and to facilitate innovative means of product interaction, customer service, and social engagement in and around your brand. In the bestseller Why We Buy: the Science of Shopping, Underhill concluded that “in the cyberworld the best is yet to come.” Fast forward to a Web based on sharing and participation, with all of the tools for interaction at our disposal, and the best is only limited by our imagination.

In the past month we launched social media news releases for big names like Yahoo! (Yahoo! Canada and Canadian Soccer Association Launch The Kick) and Gatorade (Stanley Cup Winner JS Giguere Tackles Hydration Issue with Sweat Test), and it’s really satisfying to have well-known brands participating in the brave new world of building relationships with bloggers to get a story out.

We’ve been knee-deep in online audits, monitoring and influencer outreach for a real variety of programs, from issues management to consumer marketing to fundraising. I’m personally up to my eyeballs in search optimization and I’m happy to say that it’s becoming less and less challenging to convince clients of the need to increase their online “share of voice” – oftentimes, they’re actively requesting this from their iStudio counsel.

It’s incredible to see how much online communications work has changed so much over the past three to four years.

And on that note, heads up that iStudio is on the prowl for a Managing Supervisor at our Toronto office, so if you’re as nuts about online communications as we all are, drop me a line. More details on that soon.

Tags: social media news release, social media press release, smpr, online communications

But I think these questions are too often asked not with the intention of providing conveniences specific to certain audiences, but instead to find grounds on which to ignore the concept of "accessibility" as a whole, an excuse to knock it off as one less thing to worry about: "No blind users coming here? No need for accessibility then". Yikes. This points to some confusion about what it really means to produce accessible content, and I’d like to try and clear up a bit of that by taking a closer look at what it really means to be "accessible".

Right, so let’s start with the word "accessibility". The term has been fashionable for years now, but it grew to be a little ambiguous as the idea became more popular and more people starting tossing it around. All in all I think it’s still centered around the right idea, but there are at least two sides to that coin (the um coin of accessibility?) and I think we might stand to benefit from a quick look at what those are.

We can all agree that one of the great things about the web is the way that published material can be accessed from pretty much anywhere with a connection, and using a huge variety of software tools. Properly coded content can be syndicated, redistributed, rewrapped, re-styled and reborn with little or no effort, due to the clever design of the technology involved. Now this is nothing new - we’ve all heard it a million times by now - but we’ve also learned from experience that it’s not quite so simple, either. Things do go wrong - and given the complexity of it all, there are a number of ways they go about doing it.

Take me, for example. As a user, I’m pretty mainstream. I run Firefox or IE on Windows with a big, full-colour screen and good multimedia support. I don’t exactly fall into the category most people think of when they’re worrying about "accessibility"… but nonetheless accessibility problems still arise. Server is down? Then I can’t access the site. Connection dies between client and server? No access. Google can’t see the site? I can’t find it. Flaky browser chokes on a piece of code? No access. What I’m getting at here is that, strictly speaking, the word "accessibility" refers to "the ability to access the material being presented".

But as the industry matured, people began to give serious thought to what they called "universal accessibility", in an attempt to understand the difficulties faced by those of us working with physical limitations. Not only should mainstream audiences be able to access the site, the thinking goes, but so should those using screen readers, braille devices and voice-activated software, too. Enter initiatives like the Canadian Government’s Common Look and Feel standards, and Section 508 in the United States. All noble goals, and all worthy of attention, which they received.

However, the development trends at the time were such that the main challenge for "universal accessibility" was not in finding ways to make things easier for the so-called ‘disabled’ crowd, but in finding ways to allow them just to get in the front door. Unnecessarily heavy reliance on images, scripts and non-standard widgets to deliver core content resulted in the majority of websites being almost entirely inaccessible to people using assistive technologies. It was in this atmosphere that the term "accessibility" took hold and really started to go somewhere.

Support for the idea grew, which at first seemed to be motivated by ideas of equality and non-discrimination - the worthwhile pursuit of being as inclusive as possible. But as time went on and people began to understand web standards and move back towards using these technologies the way they were intended, it became clear that universal accessibility is already inherent in the design of the medium… if you publish a plain HTML page, everybody will be able to access it simply because it’s in HTML.

Where the problems kick in is when people pave over their plain HTML content in a way that accidentally locks out certain segments of the population. And that’s sort of the sad part of the story here… the way we were building sites those days, we were actually starting off with an accessible solution and then inadvertently erecting these barriers as we put more effort into construction. Then, failing to understand where we had gone wrong, we took what we had and tried to address these barriers by putting even more effort in - on top of the slightly misguided construction done so far - to try and make our inaccessible product at least "degrade gracefully". Like spending cash on building a wheelchair ramp to get people over a high curb that arguably shouldn’t have been put there in the first place.

Now - without a doubt - a site that "degrades gracefully" is better than one that is totally inaccessible, but in truth there is no need for anything to degrade at all. Instead it is better to remember that the pure content we’re putting online is the product and is already accessible to all sorts of different people - and that the visual designs and snazzy scripted widgets are upgrades to the basic offering. Done properly, nobody gets a degraded version at all - instead it’s just a question of how many of the upgrades the user takes advantage of during their visit.

So back to the two sides of accessibility, that stupid coin I was talking about. The old-school approach sees accessibility as "the ability of disabled or ‘alternative’ users to access your content". People coming from this perspective understand the challenge to be about the elimination of accessibility barriers that would lock these users out.

The other take on accessible design is based on a more modern approach in which universal accessibility is achieved by keeping core content clean, to allow everybody and every machine access to your content… and then applying layers of enhancements for those who can make use of them. The big difference between this approach and the other is that the old way is about removing barriers to entry - and the other is about ways to make things even easier for alternative users to make their way through the already barrier-free content. And from here it becomes clear: any effort taken which confounds, obscures or otherwise mangles your core content is not only creating potential barriers for alternative users, but also may be locking out other segments of your audience based merely on their choice of browser, operating system, bandwidth or display setup.

Clearly, the modern approach has won out, not only due to dreams of equal-access-for-all, but also largely driven by the fact that the most modern and powerful technologies are not steered by human eyes but are instead software entities operating in much the same way as screen-readers do: by reading the HTML. People began to realize that if the screen-reader couldn’t read their website, then neither could Google. That got people’s attention pretty quickly.

So I guess what I’m saying is that we should try not to talk about accessibility as if it were just an option to be applied as an afterthought, or as some kind of favour for blind people. If your server is down, if your fonts are too small, if your site is too heavy to be downloaded easily, if your content is hidden behind proprietary plugins or buried away in scripts somewhere, these are all accessibility problems. This is about so much more than just catering to some ‘disabled’ demographic… it’s about making sure people can get what they came for:

• ensuring search engines can see all the content, so the content makes it into the web at large
• ensuring that automated tools can see the content, and do things with it (search crawlers, link checkers, translation tools, etc.)
• building sites and pages in such a way that all current browsers, old legacy browsers, and browsers that haven’t been released yet will be able to see the content and do something with it
• writing clean HTML to ensure compatibility with devices that don’t run scripts, won’t display images, or devices with ridiculously small screen sizes
• making things easier for people on slow connections
• ensuring browser functionality works as intended (ie. not breaking the back button, allowing people to right-click and "open in new window", allowing people to bookmark pages, etc.)
• making things easier for people with broken mice, broken keyboards, or monochrome monitors… broken fingers, broken glasses, broken browsers… AOL users, Lotus Notes users, paranoid users, government users, etc etc.

Okay then. So if we can agree that the old notion of the "accessibility problem" is best left to the modern, standards-based design tactics, then what is there to talk about when it comes to making things easier for people with actual disabilities?

Well, as I said, most of the old "accessibility" tricks were less about providing conveniences for disabled users and more about dealing with the problems that kept them out entirely. Now that we don’t have to put effort into providing workarounds for those barriers any more, what better way to spend that time than to work on implementing bonus features that make their visit a little easier? Having now removed the barriers to entry, we’re in a better position to think a little bit about things we can do to help out… this is where "skip navigation" links come in. Or special stylesheets that help screenreading software do a better job of reading your site. Or setting up a more useful tab-order in your site’s links, or establishing keyboard shortcuts, or… you get the idea. Lots to talk about there, but that’s a whole other conversation. For now, just remember: Accessibility = Interoperability.

Where would we be without it?