Julien

I found Trust Agents to be a smart, practical introduction to the mindset that underpins success in the interconnected world of social media. A few quotes from the book that will give you a sense of what to expect from Julien:

“You need to be liked, and you start becoming likable by being worthy of being liked.”

“Helping others is probably one of the most effective ways to help yourself. By spreading ideas that help others, you get credit and people get the help they need. It’s win-win. What a change from the scarcity mentality most people live with every day, isn’t it?”

“One element of being considered One of Us is that the benefits or rewards you will encounter come from genuine interactions. Exchanges of kindness or transactions involving social capital tend to build on each other.”

Julien will be sharing his insights into the nature of social capital, the role of trust agents and how we can form tribes with others who care about the things we care about. In Julien’s words: “We will never need more advertising. We will always need more community, and tighter links between those we care about. Learning to build tribes using the new radios has never been more important, and understanding social capital has never been more valuable.”

Register to attend

Julien will appear at Third Tuesday Ottawa on November 30 and Third Tuesday Toronto on December 1. He’ll then do a pair of appearances at Third Tuesday Calgary on January 18 and Third Tuesday Vancouver on January 19.

You can register online now to attend Third Tuesday Ottawa and Third Tuesday Toronto with Julien Smith. The links to the Third Tuesday Calgary and Third Tuesday Vancouver events will be posted soon.

It takes a community to make Third Tuesday possible

Our sponsors – CNW Group, Rogers Communications, Molson Coors Canada, Fairmont Hotels and Resorts, and Radian6 – underwrite the cost of bringing speakers to Third Tuesdays in cities across Canada. Their sponsorship goes toward travel, accommodation, the costs of the venue and audio visual.

Our speakers donate their time. Thank you Julien.

And volunteers in each community organize the events. So, a big thank you to our volunteers – Michelle Sullivan and the Montreal team; Tanya Davis and Monica Hamburg in Vancouver; Doug Lacombe and Andrew McIntyre in Calgary; Kirsty MacRae in Ottawa and Sarah Laister in Toronto.

Without you, Third Tuesday simply wouldn’t be possible.

One of the great things about Third Tuesday is that we can program the speakers and topics to respond to the interests of you – the Third Tuesday community. So, I’m asking for your suggestions of the speakers and topics that you are most interested in and that you think other members of the Third Tuesday community would also be interested in.

Have you seen someone speak at a conference who absolutely blew you away? Have you read a book that gave you new insights into social media, community, search and the future of our online life? Is there a blogger who is writing great content that should be shared with others? Is there a company, organization or person who is using social media in a creative and cutting edge way?

Your suggestions will guide the programming for the winter sessions of Third Tuesday. So, please have your say and let me know who you think we should invite.

And thanks to our sponsors – CNW Group, Molson Coors Canada, Rogers Communications, Radian 6 and Fairmont Hotels and Resorts – we’re able to bring these speakers not just to Toronto, but also to the other Third Tuesday cities across Canada. Already this year, we’ve brought Shel Israel to Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto. And just last week, we were able to bring Katie Paine to Ottawa.

So, who would you like to hear from and what would you like to discuss at Third Tuesday. Please offer your suggestion as a comment below or a tweet to @thornley.

Enough is enough. Happily, this last #VistaFail occurred on the morning of October 22 – the day that Windows 7 went on sale. So, I took myself off to the nearest Future Shop and bought two copies of Windows 7 – one for my notebook and one for my desktop (Did I mention that my desktop also was struggling to install the same set of patches?)

So, now I’ve been living with Windows 7 for several days. And I’d like to share what I think of it.

The Good

Wow. I love the new Task Bar. The Windows 7 version of the Task Bar allows me to pin to it the programs that I use most frequently. And instead of individual icons for each open document, I see only the program icons. If I want to see individual documents, I only have to hover my cursor over the program icon in the taskbar. A popup window appears above the icon showing miniature versions of each open document. Hover over a miniature version and it appears full size on your display. Click on it and it opens for editing. With the new Windows 7 Taskbar, all my favourite programs and open documents are right there where I can see them.

Windows 7 is fast. Much faster than Vista. This shows up when I boot up. But it is much more dramatic when I open programs like iTunes. With Vista, it could take as much as a minute when I plugged my iPhone into my PC before iTunes opened. With Vista, it now takes less than 5 seconds. Goodbye time wasted waiting for tasks to complete.

Finding files and programs. Windows 7 search function is vastly improved over earlier versions of Windows. Want to change opening folders and files to single click from double click, but you can’t find the right place to do this in Control Panel?  Simply search the term “single click” in the Start button search and you’ll be provided with a link directly to the Folder Options screen in which you can make this change.

Even better, Windows 7 makes it much more simple to find files spread across folders on your hard disk and on external hard drives. They’ve added “libraries”‘ of your documents, music, pictures and videos. What’s the difference between a library and a folder? A library will display documents, pictures, music or vidoes that you have saved anywhere on your computer. Want to add the contents of an external hard disk to be displayed in your libraries?  You can easily add a folder to a library from a drop down menu in the folder. Find your files easily regardless of where you stored them.

Home Networking is made easy with Windows 7. A new feature, HomeGroup, enables any user to set up a home network to share folders, files and printers with other users. A very nice, overdue feature.

The Not So Good

I discovered that I couldn’t do a simple upgrade from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Professional. I had to do a much more time consuming clean install of Windows 7. More time consuming because I had to restore all my drivers and reinstall all my applications. That was a full day lost. I can’t understand why a simple upgrade from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Professional isn’t possible. The only advertised differences between Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate is that the latter offers Bitlocker data encryption and the ability to switch between 35 languages. I don’t need either of those features. So, I purchased Windows 7 Professional. It wasn’t until I had the disk in my computer hard drive that I received a message that I couldn’t upgrade from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Professional. My first #Windows7Fail. Another Microsoft “Gotcha.”

Once I’d installed Windows 7, it turned out that Windows 7 drivers are not yet available for each of my Dell computers. The Dell download site offered Windows 7 drivers for my enterprise-class Latitude E 6400. However, it did not yet have Windows 7 downloads for my Vostro 400 desktop. Given that the Vostro line is targeted at small businesses that don’t have dedicated IT departments, that was disappointing. Hopefully, Dell soon will offer drivers for the entire Vostro line.

Home networking. My home computer is on my office domain. And Windows 7 won’t allow me to set up a home network with other users in my family. Instead, I’ll have to ask my son or daughter to  so that I can access files and printers remotely.

The Bottom Line

If Windows Vista is your current operating system, run, don’t walk, to your nearest store and get a copy of Windows 7. If you’re still using Windows XP, I think that you’ll find the user experience of Windows 7 more than justifies the upgrade.

Bonus Tip

The experience of using Windows 7 is quite different from Windows XP and Vista. You can start using it straight out of the box and discover new features serendipitously. But you don’t need to do this. Microsoft offers an outstanding set of introductory videos. I found several particlarly helpful, especially

Getting Started for tips on how to use the new Taskbar, the “jumplists” of recently or frequently opened files, and how to easily arranged windows to take all or half of your display space.

Find your files for tips on how to use Libraries and Search to quickly find files and programs.

Sharing files with HomeGroup to see how easy it is to set up a home network and share files and printers.

What’s your experience with Windows 7?

Are you using Windows 7? What’s your experience with it? Are there features you’re finding useful? Are you encountering problems? Share your experience by leaving a comment.

This morning, the CCPRF brought togetherin Toronto a group of top level corporate communications executives to discuss best practices in communications measurement. The discussion was led off by a panel of measurement experts: David Alston from Radian6, David Scholz from Leger Marketing, Jacqueline Taggart from Watson Wyatt and Alan Chumley from the CPRS Measurement Committee.

What follows is the highlights of the Twitter coverage (hashtag #CCPRF) of the discussion that I captured using CoverItLive. Enjoy.

And the best tweet came from @DoctorJones:

“Buy a man a mesh ticket, he’ll learn for a day; Give me a ticket and I’ll give it to a prof who can teach social media for life.”

So, we took him up on his offer.

Now, David has followed through and passed the ticket along to Andrea Tavchar, a Professor in the PR program at Humber College.

Good move, David Jones.

Customer reviews married to social media are changing the way that many people make decisions.

At the next Third Tuesday Toronto, four well-known entrepreneurs will share what they have learned building and working with customer reviews and social media. We’ll hear from Ali De Bold, co-founder, ChickAdvisor Inc., Pema Hegan, co-founder, GigPark.com, Brian Sharwood, president, HomeStars.com, and Stuart MacDonald, CEO and founder, Tripharbour.ca and Tripharbor.com.

Special thanks go to Eden Spodek, founder of Bargainista.ca, who suggested this session and put the panel together. Eden also will moderate the discussion.

You can register online to attend Third Tuesday Toronto. I hope to see you there.

One more thing: As always, we’re grateful for the ongoing support of our Third Tuesday sponsors: CNW Group, Molson Coors Canada, Rogers Communications, Radian6, and Fairmont Hotels and Resorts. Their support is allowing us to program great speakers not just in Toronto, but at Third Tuesday across Canada.

Katie Paine

Katie will be sharing her expertise at the next Third Tuesday Ottawa #TTO. I asked Katie to give me a preview of what she’ll be talking about. She replied:

Social media measurement doesn’t require new standards or new methods, just a new mindset. How the best measurement tools today are some of the oldest. Relationship surveys, content analysis, correlations and statistical analysis have all been around for decades, and we really don’ t need much more than those.

What we do need is a new way of looking at measurement – from a functional perspective, not a tactical perspective. It’s not about measuring what you do – those individual campaigns, or tactics, or gimmicks you happen to be using. But rather about measuring why you exist. What’ is your function within the organization, and how are you contributing to the success of your organizations objectives.

Each communicator must face the fundamental fork in the road. Are you doing social media for sales? For reputation? For cost avoidance? For crisis management?  Once you’ve decided the reason, then measurement becomes quite simple.

This sounds like an interesting perspective on measurement. I’m definitely looking forward to attending to hear Katie elaborate on it. And, of course, we’ll keep at least half the time available for Third Tuesday attendees to ask questions and discuss Katie’s ideas.

We’ll also have a bonus at this month’s Third Tuesday: a demo of Google Wave. A lot of us have heard about Google Wave, but relatively few of us have had a chance to use it yet. Come and see what all the fuss is about.

One other thing is special about this month’s Third Tuesday Ottawa: the time. We’ll be holding the event at 7:30 AM on October 23. We’ve been able to book Katie on her return from speaking at the MeshMarketing conference in Toronto on October 22. And a Friday evening event just didn’t seem like it would work. So, for this one time only, we’re making Third Tuesday Ottawa a Social Media Breakfast (Hat tip to @bryanperson and the real SMB Ottawa organizers, @sylc, @ryanAnderson and @roblane).

If you’re interested in attending, you can register online for this month’s Third Tuesday Ottawa.

Thank you to our sponsors

Of course, we wouldn’t be able to book a great speaker like Katie Paine to come to Ottawa without the support of our sponsors: CNW Group, Molson Coors Canada, Rogers Communications, Radian6, and Fairmont Hotels and Resorts. You make it possible to bring smart speakers together with Third Tuesday participants across Canada.

I’m capturing the highlights of the session from the Twitter stream using the #CdnInst hashtag and posting them here using CoverItLive.

Click on the CoverItLive window below to see the Twitter discussion of this session.

I’m capturing the highlights of the session from the Twitter stream using the #CdnInst hashtag and posting them here using CoverItLive.

Click on the CoverItLive window below to see the Twitter discussion of this session.

Kevin Lo and Stewart Wolfe covered the IT security issues in their session at the Managing Social Media conference.

I’m capturing the highlights of the session from the Twitter stream using the #CdnInst hashtag and posting them here using CoverItLive.

Click on the CoverItLive window below to see the Twitter discussion of this session.