Date: Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Time: 7:00pm - 11:00pm
Location: Autumn Brook Artists Gallery, 1545 West 4th Avenue (map, view from street)

We’ll do a brief talk at some point in the evening, followed by a short reading from the book. We’ll also be available to personally inscribe the many, many copies you’ll surely be purchasing to give out as Christmas gifts.

Sundry details:

• Appetizers will be served.
• Convenient cash bar.
• Autographed copies of our book will be available for purchase for $20.
• There’s lots of street parking around, or you may want to consider parking on Granville Island and walking up to the gallery. Otherwise, the location is served by many lovely bus routes.

If you’re local to Vancouver, feel free to stop by. Please either RSVP to the Facebook event or, if you’re not the Facebooky type, drop us a quick email at rsvp@capulet.com.

Instead, I want to share this great video that the local video-meisters at Giant Ant Media created for TckTckTck. It speaks for itself:

I usually wouldn’t be a big fan of a video full of cute kids, but this one jibes with our philosophy and theory of change for TckTckTck. It’s reportedly brought the occasional person to tears, which is a pretty good result for 80 seconds.

Here’s a great Mashable article on what Foursquare is, and why it’s more compelling than the other location-based social networks such as BrightKite and Google Latitude:

Now we’re starting to see the app get adopted by more and more of our friends, finding traction in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, San Diego, and several other hyperlocal metro hubs. These breeding grounds of Foursquare activity are creating quite a frenzy, and we thought it appropriate to take a step back and survey the surrounding location-based social networking space as it applies to mobile apps, look forward to the future, and break down the beauty of Foursquare.

As the article points out, the killer feature of Foursquare is the gaming component. In Foursquare, you earn points every time you ‘check in’ to a particular location. The point system is slightly more complex than that, but that’s the basic gist. If you check in frequently at a particular location, you can become ‘the mayor’ of that location. What does that imply? Nothing really, it’s just classic useless online cred, as old as arcade games. But I suspect that it’ll be highly addictive.

Foursquare strikes me as one of the first practical tools to have a powerful and direct connection between the web and the real world. It blends the real-time nature of something like Twitter with the physicality of the real world. It takes Twitter’s question of “what am I doing right now?” , adds “where am I doing it?” and turns the whole process into a game.

I also like that Foursquare reflects the social swarming behaviour that text-happy teens exhibit. It feels like a logical extension of this behaviour.

A Game-Changer for Local Businesses?

We’ve been mentioning Foursquare in some recent workshops, and I’ve been showing this photo from San Francisco’s Marsh Cafe (click to embiggen):

Talk about an enticement to frequent visit this cafe, eh? I’m not sure what they are yet, but I can imagine that there will be all sorts of creative applications for real-world businesses. Consider, for example, a restaurant where each subsequent check-in in the same week gets you an additional 10% off? It feels like a game-changer for local businesses who haven’t necessarily seen the point of having a robust web presence.

What About the Creep Factor?

Normal Humans tend to get seriously creeped out by location-based social networks. It’s not a surprising response, but I remind them of the fears they’ve probably already overcome as they adopted blogs, Facebook, Twitter and so forth. They may find that, in six months, Foursquare feels totally ordinary to them. Or not–I’m incredibly bad at predicting the success of these things.

In any case (thanks mostly to Chris Briekss, I gather), Foursquare has arrived in Vancouver–the first Canadian city. I won’t be able to try it out in person until I return from my pan-Canadian voyage next week, but here’s my account.

I’m not sure how (or even if) I’m going to use Foursquare. However, I’m going to try to only ‘friend’ Foursquare users who I know and have met in real life (and probably people who I’ve come to know well online). Sharing my physical location with strangers, even only occasionally, feels like a bridge too far.

UPDATE: Here’s another symptom of Foursquare’s real-world connectedness: there won’t be the same compulsive friend-counting that occurs in Facebook or Twitter. What’s the upside of having 1000 Foursquare friends? That doesn’t scale very well if you’re just trying to get some work done at Starbucks.

Updates may be a bit light over the next few days, between the workshops, client work and travel in-between. In the meantime, here are a few photos from the road. I see that this slideshow goes backwards, but I’m sure you’ll manage:

Speaking of workshops, we have a few spots left in our Vancouver session on September 16, if anybody’s interested.

What? No. Can’t be. Too simple. No way. Someone came up with a blog theme that 1) makes me laugh, 2) doesn’t cost me anything, and 3) raises my self-esteem, self-worth, and feelings of superiority over my fellow human beings (term used loosely)? “People of WalMart” is simply genius. Or cruel. Or genius.

Here are a couple of screenshots if the site is down, and there are photos on the associated Facebook page as well.

Julie pointed out that the blog isn’t really “People of Wal-Mart”, it’s “People of America”. The photos on the blog depict the country’s underbelly, not just the store’s.

Crisis Communications, Redneck Style

I tweeted about the site last week. In response, Patrick asked:

What would you do if you were Wal-Mart? Ignore/Encourage/Sic the hounds on these guys?

It’s a good question. The site is getting a lot of attention–reportedly “250,000 hits per hour”–and Time magazine covered it on their site. Siccing the legal team on a blog is rarely a good idea, so I’d wouldn’t take that approach. I certainly wouldn’t encourage the blog, either, as it’s clearly ridiculing Wal-Mart’s customers.

What other avenues do they have? Strike back with a ‘The Customers We Love’ blog on their own site? That seems like protesting too much. How about inviting some of these funny-looking punters to a media event? Not wise, as these people are certainly outliers, and you wouldn’t want to intimidate the more, shall we say, average customers.

When you get media inquiries, I think you reply with a statement about “being proud of all our customers”. Besides that, though, I’d go with “ignore, and hope it goes away”. That’s not really a winning strategy, but I can’t think of a better option. What would you do?

At the moment, they’re running a fairly awesome contest, and it’s dead simple to enter:

In 140 characters or less on Twitter tell us why you really need a week in the lap of luxury at the Porto Cupecoy luxury resort and marina village on the island of St. Martin in the Caribbean. Be sure to start your tweet with ” Dear @pcupecoy” so we can find it.

Don’t tweet? If you tell us on your blog why you need a Porto Cupecoy vacation (just include a link to http://www.portocupecoy.com and we’ll find you) you’ll be entered into the draw too. You can both blog and tweet for two chances to win!

Prize
The prize includes:

• Round trip airfare for two from US, Canada, or Caribbean (up to $2000)
• One week accommodation for two at Porto Cupecoy during 2010
• One water sports activity to be coordinated through Porto Cupecoy (up to $250)

Porto Cupecoy is on Facebook and Twitter, if you’re so inclined.

We’ve taking the rest of the summer off, but, come September, we’re going to take our bootcamps on the road. We’ve scheduled events in Kamloops, Kelowna, Calgary and Edmonton in the second and third weeks of September. The details and registration links are below:

In promoting these events, we’re looking to connect with local marketing and communications groups. We usually offer a discount to their members or a free spot for a staff member in exchange for an email announcement or mention in their newsletter. If you’re such a person, or know such a person, drop me a line.

Because I’m a big nerd, I made a Google map showing the bootcamp locations. Google actually chose the route, so I welcome alternative suggestions. We’re also going to spend a weekend somewhere between Kelowna and Calgary, so I’m up for recommendations there, too.

View Social Media Marketing Bootcamp, Roadtrip Edition in a larger map

A Social Media Release should contain everything necessary to share and discover a story in a way that is complementary to your original intent; but, the difference is, how they find it and the tools they use to share and broadcast.

They’re basically standard media releases, but augmented by audio, video, photos, social bookmarking links and other social web widgets. Here are a couple of randomly selected examples:

• Pepsi Refreshes Its Look to Appeal to the Next Generation of Consumers as Iconic Brand Turns 75 Years Young
• A million dollars for every Albertan?

Social media releases are a crutch for old school marketers. They’re a familiar lens through which communicators can examine this new social web. All they’re really doing is putting some chrome and new mag wheels on a bog-standard media release. And that clearly isn’t good enough.

The social media release encourages marketers to pretty up their traditional releases and check the ’social meda’ box as done. It’s methadone to the traditional release’s heroin. A little healthier, but still not a good idea.

Besides, let’s go back and look at the definition of a social media release. An announcement or story, augmented by rich media and conversational tools. That sounds like a blog post, doesn’t it?

Disenchanting Wire Services

My skepticism about the social media release isn’t helped by my general disenchantment with wire services. We don’t write releases often, and it’s even rarer than we put them on wire services. In the past five years, I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve gotten quality feature articles strictly out of a release ‘on the wire’. Crafting a personalized pitch and targeting specific journalists has much, much better results.

Yes, there are some minor SEO benefits from posting releases, but I’ve never found them overwhelming. For one client (at their behest) we’ve put 10 old-school releases on PRWeb over the last two years, using a paid level of service. Collectively, those releases have driven all of 343 visitors to the client’s site. That represents 0.04% of all the visitors to that site. They cost an average of US $100 each to distribute, so that’s a rather dear $3 per visitor. Add in the time we spent writing, editing and preparing them for distribution, and that expense gets considerably greater. Maybe we’re doing it wrong, but those releases would have to perform at least 10 times better to be worthwhile efforts.

Of course, the wire services are all over this social media release business. They’ve been marketing them aggressively over in the past couple of years. Such releases cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to build and distribute.

Do these newfangled releases actually reflect the new more conversational, genuine ethos of the web in 2009? To put it simply, do they reduce the bollocks factor? For an answer, check out Marketwire’s 2008 social media release about their social media release offering:

Marketwire Unveils Social Media 2.0: Industry’s Most Authentic Social Media Product

Marketwire, a full-service newswire and communications workflow solutions provider, today introduces Social Media 2.0, the industry’s most authentic and comprehensive social media newswire product. Social Media 2.0 advances today’s press release format, offers public relations professionals a multitude of content options, and distributes news in a variety of mediums to distribution channels beyond traditional media distribution networks.

The title says it all, doesn’t it? And if it doesn’t, that first paragraph feels pretty old-school.

Any remotely capable marketer ought to be able to build a web page or blog post instead. They just embed some video from YouTube, photos from Flickr and some sharing widgets and they’re good to go. Cost? Zero dollars.

The gesture behind the social media release–to be more conversational, to eschew the corporate language of the traditional release, to use rich media more effectively–is right-minded. Unfortunately, the resulting releases often call to mind lipstick and a pig.

It seems pretty offensive to me, particularly given that it describes menopausal women as ’street rat crazy’. When I compare it to the Motrin ad that caused all the furor back in November (I wrote about it here) it seems much worse. Sure, criticisms of the Motrin piece focused on insidious details, but the sexism of this Jack in the Box seems both overt and, well, nasty.

I found a few blog posts criticizing this ad, and some complaints (as well as some support) on Twitter. There’s nothing, though, that matches the uproar that the Motrin ad earned.

So what gives? Why isn’t this ad causing the same fuss? I have a variety of theories, but I don’t want to bias anybody’s responses.

• ActiveState recently announced a public beta for Workspace (not to be confused with the excellent, local co-working space), something we’re calling ‘instant infrastructure for managing software development projects’. It’s a set of hosted, customized tools–source control, project management, issue tracking, wikis, blogs, and so forth–aimed at small teams and individual developers. In addition to the collective wisdom and experience that ActiveState brings to the project, Workspace promises to spare developers the pain of manual setup, integration and the apparent endless tweaking associated with managing tools of this sort.
• We’ve been helping the folks at the BC Healthy Living Alliance with understanding this whole social web business. Last week they ran a little event entitled “The Politics of a Healthy Neighbourhood”, and a bunch of local social media types attended. They even created this custom Google Map showing the route of our walk, and the associated services in the neighbourhood. I shot four shaky minutes of video with bad audio.
• Our longtime client Nitobi announced a couple of exciting bits of news this week: they sold their session recording tool RobotReplay and became shareholders in BookRiff. Nitobi built BookRiff (we’ve done some work with them as well), and it looks pretty sweet. They haven’t gone public with their tool yet, but we’re psyched about it.

In other Capulet news, our first social media marketing bootcamps in Victoria and Vancouver sold out. So we’ve added second sessions for both Vancouver (June 23 - just one spot left) and Victoria (June 4).

It is, indeed, an ad for KLM. The ad’s link is here. If you click that, you’ll notice that it actually redirects three times (once from Googlesyndication.com, and then three times around the KLM site). That’s a bit weird, isn’t it?

Is there some secret code that I’m supposed to crack, or is that just gibberish? The irony, of course, is that the nonsense words actually made me click the link.

“Newspapers work. It’s as simple as that. We know it works,” Boot said. “Newspapers draw attention. There’s an immediacy to it. There’s a credibility to it. It’s still a very, very good retail medium.”

The article also quotes a media buyer, president of an ad agency and the CEO of Canwest Publishing, Dennis Skulsky. Everybody, as you might imagine, has a dog in the newspaper advertising race. To no one’s surprise, they can’t say enough good things about running print ads. Here’s Mr. Skullsky:

“It’s not just about selling a full-page ad, it’s about an engagement that might have a tie to a digital program, to a website, a video, to a link to company website — it’s all integrated.”

That’s a great notion, if it were true. I browsed the paper, checking out all of the sizable ads. Few of them displayed URLs at all, and those that did weren’t prominently featuring the web address. It was an after thought. Here’s the best example I could find in today’s paper (apologies for the lousy photo):

All three of these ads included a URL, if in very small print. You’d have to be very generous to call these ‘ties’ to digital assets or any form of ‘engagement’. All the addresses point to non-custom URLs (admittedly one of them is DouglasCollege.jobs). If an ad buyer was designing an integrated campaign and wanted to measure the results, this isn’t how they’d go about it.

There are plenty of smart media people thinking about saving newspapers (my favourites are Mathew Ingram and the Sun’s own Kirk Lapointe), and a recent report suggests that Canada’s papers aren’t as bad off as those south of the border.

That said, publishing articles about the awesomeness of print advertising probably isn’t one of them.

UPDATE: Speaking of the Sun and old media, somebody pointed me to Stephen Hume’s recent column. He continues to wage war against the “semi-literate” new media barbarians at the gate, writing in praise of the editors that bloggers (et al) so sorely lack. There’s an exquisite irony in the article’s penultimate paragraph (the italics are mine):

I’m endless grateful to my unsung colleagues at The Vancouver Sun who so diligently keep the egg off my face.

I’m assured the typo was unintentional.

Hume’s correct in observing that everybody could use some editorial oversight. And yet, people keep reading the semi-literates without it.

PopVox is the people’s choice awards held during Vancouver Digital Week. The PopVox Awards recognizes all major sectors of the digital media industry and celebrates its creativity, talent, and achievements. Creators submit their projects and the people vote online for their favorites.

We’re submitting in the ‘Best Do-Gooder’ category, talking about our work to help save the Great Bear Rainforest. I recorded a quick YouTube video for our submission, in which I woefully mispronounce the word ‘tract’:

While you’re at it, you could also vote for PhoneGap (a client) and friends of Capulet, Giant Ant Media. If you’ve got other favourites, feel free to post them in the comments.

There’s my wrap-up of the South by Southwest conference on Techvibes:

While there were big names at the sessions (hey, there’s Heather Armstrong! There’s Hugh McLeod! And so forth), I didn’t think they were any better, on average, than, say, Gnomedex or another, smaller geeky conference. They followed a similar bell curve from awful to excellent. This is no surprise, as there are hundreds of panels and being popular doesn’t necessarily make you insightful or a good public speaker.

I intentionally tried to go to sessions which had little to do with my day job. I quite enjoyed a session on video game marketing, and my favourite panel was a group of four archaeologists discussing how they use the web to talk about their work.

For the O’Reilly Radar blog, I wrote about a common hiring mistake that startup founders make:

Her response highlighted one of the most common mistakes we encounter when working with early-stage startups: the founders hire too much marketing talent too early.

Why does this happen? I’m not sure, but I wonder if it’s because many founders have a technical background. As such, they’re unfamiliar and sometimes a little intimidated by the challenges of promoting their startup. To assuage their concerns, they bring in a senior marketer with plenty of credentials.

In theory, this looks like a rational decision. After all, the more experienced the executive, the better. Practically speaking, things aren’t quite that simple.

And just yesterday Mashable published my guest post on how to use social media to market the ordinary:

It would be great if we worked for Apple or Volkswagen. Their products generate conversations because they are legitimately worth talking about–they’re beautifully designed, innovative and easy to love. They are, to use Seth Godin’s classic metaphor, a few purple cows among a vast pasture of Jerseys. And, of course, the social web loves purple cows.

But what do you do if it’s your job promote toilet paper or minivans on the web?

Find a gimmick. Devise an original way of talking about (or around) your plain old brown cow. Marketers like to describe this strategy as ‘creating a meme’, but that’s always struck me as needlessly high-minded. Let’s call it what it is: a gimmick. My dictionary describes a gimmick as “an ingenious or novel device, scheme, or stratagem, especially one designed to attract attention or increase appeal”.

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.

On the other hand, today’s TechCrunch article is more upbeat. It cites Interactive Advertising Bureau numbers that claim that, after a dip mid-year, online advertising numbers are recovering.

Warning: This post gets pretty web-analytics-geeky very quickly, so bail out now if that doesn’t interest.

I checked out the Sun’s online advertising site. According to their downloadable PDF, these were the traffic numbers for May, 2008:

vancouversun.com
7.2 million monthly page views to vancouversun.com
522,000 unique visitors in May 2008 on vancouversun.com

theprovince.com
3.7 million monthly page views to theprovince.com
391,000 unique visitors in May 2008 on theprovince.com

There’s some fine print at the bottom of the page which indicates that the page view numbers come from (the links are mine) “Source: Omniture SiteCatalyst, Avg. May 2008″ and the visitor numbers come from “Source: comScore Media Metrix, Total Canada, Home & Work, May 2008″.

Analytics and Panels

I take an interest in those sources because Omniture SiteCatalyst provides a more accurate visitor total than comScore. SiteCatalyst is an analytics-based tool like Google Analytics, and if it’s counting page views, then it’s counting visitors, too. Like any such ‘web-bug’ system, VancouverSun.com has code on every page that enables them to capture and report on behaviour for each of their site visitors. I grabbed a screenshot of that code from a page on the Sun’s website.

ComScore, on the other hand, is panel-based. They use a sampling of over two million online consumers who have opted-in to share their online attention data with comScore. It’s a reasonable approach, but unquestionably less accurate than on-site analytics.

So why isn’t CanWest reporting the visitor number from their analytics tool? If their page view number is accurate, and I have no reason to doubt it, then the number of visitors from their analytics is surely higher than 522,000.

Why do I think that? First, there’s a correlation between “unique visitors” and “visitors”. Looking at the stats for a number of medium to high traffic sites, the ratio of unique visitors to plain old visitors (meaning those who may have returned multiple times) is about 1 to 1.25. So, working with the comScore number, let’s say the Sun has about 650,000 visitors. I do this extra bit of analysis because I want to consider the common metric “page views per visitor”.

Too Many Page Views or Too Few Visitors?

Assuming 650,000 visitors and 7.2 million page views, that means the average visitor views 11 different pages on the site per visit. Anybody who works in SEO or analytics will tell you that that number is extremely high. I’ve never seen stats for a site where the number of page views per visitor is higher than 5. Have you? Most are between 1.5 and 4. This site, for example, averaged (a very lousy) 1.5 page views per visit last month. The math for TheProvince.com is a little better, at about 7.5 page views per visitor.

So what gives? I don’t know. If that page view number is accurate, then CanWest ought to be promoting a visitor number that’s significantly higher than 522,000. More visitors means more popularity, which in turn makes the newspaper sites more attractive to advertisers. I don’t mean to imply any conspiracy–the likeliest explanation is just an oversight.

As an interesting side note, Kirk LaPointe, the Sun’s deputy editor, points out that “more than half of our traffic at vancouversun.com arrives from search and a large percentage of that is non-local traffic.” This is true for the stats of every established site I’ve ever seen. That fact presents an interesting online advertising challenge. Do they play up the local chunk of their traffic, reach further abroad with the non-local portion, or both for different audiences? I emailed CanWest and the Sun late last week to ask for a comment on this story, but haven’t heard back.

Any thoughts? Or is my math wonky?

It’s accurate, sure, but is it appetizing?

In truth, it could be more accurate, or at least more localized. “Pop” is a much more popular term for “soft drink” in Canada than “soda”. That fact comes courtesy of the very useful website Pop vs. Soda.

In any case, I wanted to share a couple of artifacts from the class. First, we used a wiki page to assemble a list of questions that people in the class wanted answered.

Additionally, we bookmarked a bunch of links on Delicious (because, sadly, Ma.gnolia suffered a meltdown). These are a combination of examples we used in class and additional resources that we thought the students might find useful. I thought I’d share, in case there was something in the 60-odd links that appealed. I’ve embedded the most recent six below, and the rest are over on Delicious.

In case you can’t read it, here’s what it says:

This cup travelled over 2000 kilometers from the forest to your lips. Slow global warming by using a travel mug.

Here’s how I read that:

We’re entirely comfortable selling you an environmentally insensitive product, but want you to feel guilty about giving us your money. Plus, [as filmgoerjuan points out on Flickr] we’ve been unwilling or unable to find a more sustainable source for cups.

I suppose this cheeky chastisement might work with the UBC crowd, but I think it just redirects blame away from the coffee shop to the consumer.

I was going to leave a suggestion in their suggestion box, until I saw this: