I was more interested to learn about why there are a bunch of feral horses on this tiny island with a permanent human population of five. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:
The first horses on Sable Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada were brought to the island during the late 1700s. Many people believe that they arrived on the island from off of the many shipwrecks, however, this romantic notion is false – they were in fact intentionally left on Sable to graze and multiply, and were most likely seized from Acadians during their expulsion from Nova Scotia at the hands of the British. Although often referred to as ponies due to their small size, they have a horse phenotype.
The whole island is a wildlife preserve, so the animals are left in their natural state. You apparently need special permission from the Canadian Coast Guard to visit.
Skimming recent new followers this afternoon, I discovered that Ms. Denise Savoie, Member of Parliament for Victoria, is newly on Twitter. I started wondering which Canadian MPs are on Twitter?
Over the past year or so, we’ve been running a lot of one-day training sessions on all this social media marketing stuff. Combine that with the fact that our social media marketing course at UBC was full and had a sizable wait list, and we’re seeing a lot of demand for this kind of training. Seeing as we already have the curriculum prepared, we thought we’d run a couple of day-long workshops in Victoria and Vancouver. Here’s the blurb:
Adding social media into the marketing mix is increasingly important for marketers who want to establish an online presence for their businesses. We're running one-day workshops to teach communicators and marketers, as well as small business owners, how to:
Bring more visitors to your website
Increase your company’s visibility online
Approach bloggers and other online influencers about your products and services
Get your website social media ready
Craft a potent social media pitch
Incorporate online channels like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter into your marketing programs
Avoid campaign killers and online faux pas
Building on the sold-out course we taught for UBC Continuing Education this winter, we discuss the dos and don'ts of social media marketing; look at successful marketing campaigns; introduce the social media tools every marketer should know about; and cover online communications etiquette.
Students will leave with:
A copy of our social media marketing ebook, Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook
Templates for creating a social media marketing plan
The workshop is $299, all in after taxes and fees. There’s a way you can get a discount, though, and another way that you can attend for free:
You can save $50 off that price by blogging about the workshop on your own established (meaning not brand new) site. Don’t have a blog? Ask a friend or a local blogger if you can write a guest post for their site.
We’re giving away one seat for free for each event. All you have to do is tweet a link to the page on Capulet’s site (here’s a shortened one: http://capulet.com/smm) and include the hash tag #smmvic or #smmvan, depending on the session you want to attend. So, a sample tweet might look like:
OMG, I really want to attend this event: http://capulet.com/smm. It looks awesomesauce! #smmvan
Or, you know, something along those lines. We’ll randomly choose a winner for each event about two weeks before they occur.
Mathew twittered about this iMedia Connection article by Robert Moskowitz the other day, and it piqued my interest. Its thesis is that because offline advertising costs a lot more than online advertising, it must be much more valuable:
According to Michael Hirschorn, for example, writing in the January/February issue of The Atlantic magazine, “Already, most readers of The [New York] Times are consuming it online. The Web site… boasted an impressive 20 million unique users for the month of October… The print product, meanwhile, is sold to a mere million readers a day and dropping….
“The conundrum, of course, is that those 1 million print readers … are worth about five figures a page to advertisers, [and] are far more profitable than the 20 million unique Web users, who… could support only 20 percent of the [newspaper's] current staff…”
The article goes on to cite a bunch of ad executives as they opine on the differences between the two landscapes. There’s a great deal of hedging of bets, lingo and hand-wringing about the state of the industry. What’s illustrative, I think, is how little discussion there is of actual measurement.
Measure, Measure, Measure
We aggressively discourage our clients from spending a cent on advertising that they can’t measure. And I’m not talking about the invented metrics of the ad industry–”brand impression” is a synonym for “might have vaguely glanced at your billboard on the subway”–but actually measuring actions that potential customers may take. This limits their offline advertising options, but if you can’t measure outcomes, why throw money at it?
I was holding forth on this measuring theme at a little brainstorming session for Hollyhock, an extraordinary retreat centre on Cortes Island. It’s the answer I always give to busy marketers who say “I’m already swamped, how do I do this social media marketing stuff, too?” I tell them that they don’t necessarily have to. They just need to analyze the value of all the work they do, add social media stuff to the mix, and see what’s most valuable. If your billboards outperform your Twitter account, then stick with what works.
Speaking of advertising, I read a couple interesting posts on TechCrunch over the past couple of days about the state of the industry. First, it’s shocking to see how rapidly the newspaper industry’s revenue base has declined. The rate of newspaper advertising decline has been accelerating for the last six quarters. Likewise, that article points out that online advertising has declined slightly over 2008.
At South by Southwest Interactive last week, marketer Peter Shankman said “if you say you’re a social media expert, I’m going to check how many Twitter followers you have.” This is about as useful a metric as saying “if you say you’re a professional hockey player, I’m going to count how many hockey sticks you have.” It tells only a tiny fraction of the whole story.
Shankman’s comment got me wondering: how would Twitter be different if the service didn’t publish statistics about who you’re following and who’s following you? Because these numbers are public, we’re experiencing a kind of follower arms race, where heedless reciprocal following has become the norm and popularity and leader-board sites are de rigeur (I’m still working on getting my douchebag index into the nineties). One’s list of followers has become, for better or for worse, the new unweeded blogroll–messy, too long and polluted with hastily-exchanged links. This shouldn’t be a surprise: from box office revenue to Technorati ranking, if we can count it publicly, we will.
Severalpeoplehavebegun wondering about how our burgeoning networks will scale, and how its users will deal with the growing amount of signal.
If our Twitter numbers were private, wouldn’t we be more selective about who we followed? Wouldn’t we focus on forming a conversational network based on the quality of people we followed, instead of the number of people who followed us? Wouldn’t we emphasize meaningful discussion over the “top seller” mentality that seems to pervade the tool?
Grade Eight Gym Class
It took me years to start obsessing about the web stats for this site. I eventually learned to follow my friend Dave Olson’s advice to “fuck stats, make art”. Now I’m facing a similar grindstone with Twitter. The bloggy, social media world has always been a bit too much like high school. I thought we’d begun to grow out of that immaturity, but the tyranny of Twitter stats puts us right back in the sweaty locker room after grade eight gym class.
I was talking to my friend John Keyes about how I could reduce my compulsion to watch my Twitter stats. He was sympathetic, and whipped up a Greasemonkey script that simply hides the follower numbers from the tool’s web interface. It’s only as effective a mind hack as, say, setting your watch five minutes fast. However, it’s a little reminder to chill out and use Twitter the way I want to, instead of how the popularity-obsessed web demands that I do.
UPDATE: British writer and comedian Dave Gorman has a great post that touches on a similar topic:
But yesterday I had two people contact me to tell me that I was rude for not following them. How not-following someone can be rude is quite beyond me. So I asked. And their point was that they were following me and that it was therefore only polite for me to follow them back because unless I did that I wasn’t being interactive.
Which seems to me to be a false definition of what interactivity really is. In what way would clicking a button to say I was following someone be actually interacting with them? At the moment I follow between 200 and 300 people. When I log on I normally find there are between 10 and 20 posts for me to look at from the last 5 minutes of activity. But I’m followed by over 20,000 people. If I followed all of them, there would be a hundred times as many recent posts to review. There would be no way of me actually reading – or even meaningfully scanning – 1000 to 2000 posts every 5 minutes.
I especially like his conclusion:
The difference between following someone and replying to them is the difference between stopping to chat with someone in the street or giving them a badge declaring that you know them. One is actual interaction. The other is just something you can show your friends.
Last night I finally got a chance to watch the Battlestar Galactica finale. Early on in the show, at about the 2:00 mark, the camera pans across a futuristic cityscape. At one point it passes over an inlet or river. There’s a bridge in the foreground and a geodesic dome further back. Here’s a screen capture:
Does that remind anybody else of False Creek, the Cambie Street Bridge and Science World? I couldn’t find a perfectly analogous photo (I suppose I could install Google Earth and see how it looks), but this one gives a lower perspective:
Obviously the show is shot in Vancouver, and I’d imagine that the special effects are done locally, so it’s only natural that we might recognize bits of the city in the finished product. This is the first time, though, that I’ve noticed renderings of Vancouver in a CG-only shot.
Warning, Spoilers Ahead
As for the finale itself, I give it a ‘B’. Some random notes: the final battle was reasonably satisfying, in an SDF-1 Macross sort of way. In retrospect, I’m still unclear on why Hera was so important to everybody, practically speaking.
I’m glad they found Earth, but it was a bit silly when they’d already found an ‘Earth’. It seems highly implausible that, after four years of a brutal struggle for survival, that the humans would send all their remaining assets into the sun. But what do I know?
The bit with Gaius and Caprica 6 each having a kind of Swayze-esque ghost was charming the first time I saw it, but they pushed their luck. That whole present-day New York denouement to the denouement was incredibly cheesy, and really should have been cut.
My unanswered questions:
What was Starbuck in the fourth season? A corporeal angel? I noticed that nobody called her “Starbuck”, which I suppose meant something.
How many cylons are left? Aren’t there a bunch of baseships out there still, roaming the galaxy?
What will future generations of humans do when they find the lyrics to Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” written on some cave wall?
UPDATE: I spoke to a member of the visual effects team who said that since the Caprica City scenes are shot on location in Vancouver, it made sense to base the look of the CG city on Vancouver, but with a few extra “futuristic†buildings thrown in.
The first time I saw an LCD display built into the back seat of a taxi cab, it was last New Years Eve in Mahattan. It mostly ran advertising, with intermittent weather reports and news clips. At the time, I wondered how long it would be before I saw them in BC. The answer, it turns out, is about four months.
This latest intrusion was in the back seat of a Vancouver Taxi cab. The company that offers them is Moving Media Group, a Vancouver-based company that specializes in digital screens in cabs. The screens have apparently been in operation since last November.
In my taxi, the screen replaced the headrest on the passenger side front seat. The unit is actually surprisingly thick (here’s a side view), and with the seat reclined, the screen really imposed itself on my field of view. In New York, the display was built into the back of the cab’s front bench seat. Its commercials had audio, which (thus far, at least) my Vancouver cab didn’t. As in New York, the content seemed like it was mostly advertising combined ‘breaking news’ headlines and weather updates.
Dumb Display Ads
Does anybody not find this development totally egregious? In an age where marketers and media companies are re-evaluating the fundamental efficacy of ‘dumb’ display ads, why introduce yet another distraction engine into the consumer’s view? Does the Moving Media Group imagine that we don’t yet have enough commercials and advertisements in our daily life?
Besides, I’m already paying the driver to take me from Point A to B. I’m not paying for the privilege of watching ads for the balance of my journey.
A couple of years ago I went to the bathroom in a pub. Stepping up to the urinal, I looked up to see a video display showing a beer commercial. Increasingly, we’re ceding space to useless, ineffectual advertising. This trend is particularly offensive where, in places like pubs, hockey arenas and taxis, we’re already paying for a service. Shouldn’t we be able to enjoy the experience of, say, riding in a cab or micturating without the intrusion of a commercial?
I touched the screen (I know, kind of gross, no?) only once. Following instructions, I touched the “Touch for Menu” button at the bottom of the screen. And I apparently broke the thing:
By fixating consumer attention on the screen, all advertisers can take advantage of this captive audience.
The next time I flag a cab that has a video monitor instead of a head rest, I’m going to wave the driver off and wait for the next one. I encourage you to do the same.
Yesterday Julie wrote about the Skate Bug, a kind of auditory aid for getting from (to borrow Lee and Sachi’s metaphor again) A to G:
At the Four Continents Championship in Vancouver last month I saw the ‘Skate Bug’ for the first time. It’s a radio device that connects listeners with live event commentary. One part fits in your ear; the other part is hand held. With the Skate Bug, listeners can get real-time event commentary–even more detailed than those watching the event on TV at home–and can even ask questions about elements or scoring via text message during the event. The device is meant to make figure skating more understandable and fan friendly, according to this article in the Vancouver Sun.
It’s kind of like a real-time tutorial in your ear. I remember watching figure skating on the BBC during the 2002 Olympics. The eloquent commentators did an astonishingly good job of articulating the nuances of the sport and the judging system. This was critical, as the Beeb’s audience probably only sees figure skating once every four years. I often feel that this is an explanation failure of North American coverage of the sport–the hosts assume that their audience know more than they do.
Apparently Skate Canada is offering this device directly, as a means of recruiting new fans to the sport. In their press release, they say they’re introducing “a new multimedia tool at Skate Canada events”. That’s a misnomer, isn’t it? I mean, it only offers the one media.
The next step would be to offer the feed in stream audio, so that neophyte fans at home could tune in. And it’s easy to imagine that these could be offered for other sports, too. The first time I go to a cricket game, for example, I could seriously benefit from one of these.
I was channel surfing the other day and happened upon a documentary entitled “Chasing Wild Horses”. It’s about Roberto Dutesco, a New York fashion photographer who visits the remote Sable Island, a windswept crescent of land off of the coast of Nova Scotia. He goes there to photograph some of the 300 wild horses that roam freely on this bleak, grassy islet:
