July 19th, 2009, 1 Comment »
Just a mini link round-up, as there’s a few items I’ve been meaning to mention:
- Rebecca, along with about 25 other local bloggers, is participating in a Blogathon on July 25. It’s “24 hours of blogging every 30 minutes for a cause”. An excellent idea, and had I a more formidable constitution (and time to recover), I’d do it too. I’ll just have to satisfy myself with donating to the cause. You should, too.
- The Canada West Coast chapter of the Society for Technical Communication–I used to be a member–its annual Technical Publications Competition. I wonder what I have that I could submit in the ‘Technical Art’ category?
- Capulet is currently a cog in the giant advocacy machine that is TckTckTck. More on that later, but in the meantime, they’re hiring for a blogger/online campaigner role. It would be a kick-ass job for the next six months.
1 Comment »
July 9th, 2009, 2 Comments »
As I mentioned back in March, we’ve been running a series of all-day social media marketing ‘bootcamps’ in Victoria and Vancouver. Attendance has been good, thus far, and we’re running our fifth one in Vancouver on July 23 (there’s a few spots left for that session).
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:
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Kamloops
Campus Activity Centre
Thompson River University
Thursday, September 3
9:30am - 4:30pm
Register Now!
Kelowna
Delta Grand Okanagan Resort
Friday, September 4
9:30am - 4:30pm
Register Now!
Calgary
University of Calgary
2500 University Drive NW
Tuesday, September 8
9:30am - 4:30pm
Register Now!
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Edmonton
The Mettera Hotel
Wednesday, September 9
9:30am - 4:30pm
Register Now!
Vancouver
BCIT Downtown Campus
555 Seymour Street
Wednesday, September 16
9:30am - 4:30pm
Register Now!
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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
2 Comments »
May 12th, 2009, 1 Comment »
We’ve been involved with some interesting client projects lately, and I’ve been meaning to share them:
- 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).
1 Comment »
April 24th, 2009, 16 Comments »
Capulet needs a video camera, because we occasionally shoot video for client projects. It’s never anything fancy–typically just interview footage and the destination is always YouTube or a similar video sharing service. Here’s an example–a little video we shot for Nitobi. We don’t, as far as I can figure, need to shoot in HD. If need something more sophisticated, we’ll just hire some videographer-types who come with their own equipment.
I’ve never bought a video camera, as it happens, and know very little about what makes a good one. I’ve been told that the trickiest part of shooting video is actually capturing consistent audio, so I suppose that’s a consideration. Most of the video we shoot will be under controlled circumstances–in an office or boardroom.
So what do you suggest? I gather from reading Consumer Reports that I can get a MiniDV camcorder that uses tapes, or one that uses flash memory. The latter seems like a wiser choice. Would, for example, a Flip Video device be adequate for our needs? Or maybe it’s one of these ordinary-looking camcorders?
UPDATE: Thanks to everybody for the awesome suggestions. We ended up buying a Canon FS200, which is a SD (meaning non-HD) camera that has an audio-in jack and Flash-based memory. It cost $350, and is ridiculously small–about the size of a can of Red Bull. We also bought a lapel mic, which should be sufficient for our work.
16 Comments »
January 3rd, 2009, 4 Comments »
James likes to say that advertising is an act of faith. That’s generally true, and it’s a concept that I rail against whenever I speak to marketers. The ad industry of the twentieth century was built on a house of sand: immeasurability. Most of the time, most marketers failed to measure most of their advertising spend.
How effective is that full page ad in that industry magazine? How many people actually see that billboard? How many people actually pick up and read your brochure? These are questions that, too often, assaulted the faith of ad buyers everywhere.
Of course, all of that changed with the web, where we can measure the cost of every click, every conversion, every customer. It makes the newspaper ads and movie posters seem hilariously antiquated. When we talk to ad reps on behalf of our clients, we’ve always got an exact cost-per-conversion in mind. If they can’t offer services below that cost, we don’t advertise with them.
Seth articulates this idea in a recent post:
If the local bank were offering a sale on dollar bills, ninety cents each, how many would you buy?
Most rational people would say, “I’ll take them all please.” Especially if you had thirty days to pay for them.
So, why, precisely, do you have an ad budget?
We always discourage our clients from undertaking any advertising that they can’t measure. If they’re running offline ad campaigns, we urge them to have a unique call to action (such as a specific URL) so that they can track a campaign’s effectiveness.
Otherwise, they’re operating on faith alone.
4 Comments »
July 24th, 2008, 2 Comments »
In the early years of Capulet, as with most businesses, we said ‘yes’ to nearly everything (we did refuse the mail order bride project). For the past couple of years, we’ve had the luxury of being selective about who we take on. These days we have to decline most enquiries because we’re too busy.
We obviously try to choose winners and avoid those companies that give us a queasy feeling in our stomach. But it’s nice every once in a while to take on a client who’s social goals really align with my own. DreamBank happens to be one of those.
Long time readers may recall this 2003 blog post about how I’ve come to think about gifts:
On a more ascetic level, I have so much stuff already. So does everybody else in my family (with the exception, perhaps, of my more ascetic brother, and he doesn’t want anything). I have more difficulty creating a wishlist for myself than I do choosing gifts for other people (with the exception, perhaps, of the aforementioned Spartan brother). This isn’t humility on my part, it’s just a lack of wanting things. Particularly things that I don’t choose for myself. I suppose I should just ask everyone to give me vouchers for travelling. Hmm…that’s not a bad idea.
DreamBank is a Vancouver start-up with a mission that addresses this issue. Here’s the elevator pitch:
DreamBank.org is about helping dreams come true and doing it in a way that helps the planet and important social causes. Instead of giving gifts that, although appreciated may not really be wanted, with DreamBank you contribute to someone’s dream. As well as helping fulfill a dream, your contribution helps spare the planet some of the nasty side effects of manufacturing and packaging unused gifts. Plus your gift automatically generates funds that are given to important social causes.
It’s essentially collaborative giving with a charity angle. Or, if you prefer, a gift registry for everything. Here are a few sample dreams:
It’s a charming idea, and we’re pleased to be helping them with their online marketing. We’ve been blogging up a storm on their site, and running a fun outreach campaign to local bloggers. Plus we had a fun launch party at a French bistro.
2 Comments »
July 2nd, 2008, 2 Comments »
Irish blogger Damien Mulley devised a generous and clever means of increasing the visibility of Irish tech companies:
The premise is that everyone talks up a company (if they think it deserves to be) on a particular date. Every second Tuesday at it happens. Everyone tech and non tech alike are encouraged to talk about the company so that hopefully a tipping point is reached and a potential investor or journalist or partner hears/reads about the company.
Happily, the first candidate for this bloggy bake sale is our client, PutPlace. The response has been mighty, mighty impressive. For all you Catholics, Eirepreneur suggests that a better name might be ‘Shove Tuesday’.
I was thinking that we ought to do this for Vancouver (or British Columbia) startups. Maybe Techvibes or Bootup Labs could sort that out?
In related news, we’re running a photo contest for PutPlace. All you have to do is photograph yourself making a silly face, submit it to our contest, and you could win an annual subscription to PutPlace for 100 GB of data + $200 USD Amazon gift certificate. Go forth and panic for the camera.
2 Comments »
June 10th, 2008, 17 Comments »
We finally got around to getting new business cards made. Our old ones were woefully out of date and, besides, I’d run out. Here’s the new card:
The talented Nick Monahan did the design. It’s rather minimalist. I give full credit to Julie on this, as it was her idea. I like it a lot, though, and here’s why.
What is a business card? It’s a token. An artifact of a conversation (or, when I speak and leave a stack for people to pick up, a physical memento of the talk I gave). What do people need later on? A reminder of who I was (hence the photo), and a means to contact me. That’s all.
Everything else feels a little superfluous. We move around a lot, so our physical location often changes. Likewise, our focus and services have changed significantly in the past couple of years. That’s likely to happen again. Finally, we are different things to different people. Sometimes I’m a speaker. Sometimes I’m a blogger. Sometimes I’m a book author. And so on. It’s tricky to meaningfully encapsulate that on one card.
Hence, the less-is-more approach. I ensured that one side would be white, so that I could make a little show of manually writing my phone number on a card if somebody wanted it. It makes them feel special, and that can’t hurt.
What do you think?
17 Comments »
April 22nd, 2008, No Comments »
Over the past month or so, we’ve been preparing a social media marketing campaign for ThoughtFarmer. ThoughtFarmer makes a simple-to-use wikified intranet solution.
We needed a good angle to promote their solution, and came up with a wacky idea:
After some brainstorming and false starts, we devised Tubetastic, a fake company with a fake logo, a fake org chart and, you guessed it, a fake intranet…
…We invented a fake tube manufacturing company called Tubetastic Inc. We created fake employee profiles for each influencer. Each profile is a sort of entry interview, with the answers coming from excerpts from their blogs and articles. We left one question unanswered, in the hopes that some folks might offer up their opinion.
That’s from a lengthy blog post (also cross-posted to OneDegree) I wrote up on the ThoughtFarmer blog. It goes into considerable detail about the intranet site we built and the snail mail packages we sent out. It also discusses our logic behind the campaign, and the risks we foresee. We even wrote a few Onionesque articles as recent Tubetastic news.
If you’d like to check out the Tubetastic intranet site, you just need to request access (trust me, there’s no spam risk–you’ll only get one email from ThoughtFarmer) and we’ll hook you up. I encourage you to check it out.
UPDATE: Cool, we got Thoughtfarmer covered on Read Write Web.
No Comments »
November 7th, 2007, 15 Comments »
We’re doing some online marketing for Brother Canada, helping to spread the word on their new line o’ colour laser printers. I’ve contacted some local bloggers (using a slightly unorthodox but apparently effective strategy), but we’ve still got a couple of slots available in the, uh, program.
Here’s the deal: You’re a blogger who lives in western Canada. We ship you your choice of these printers (there’s also one of those print-scan-fax-make breakfast multi-function devices) and you try it out for two months. We’ll include a printer cartridge and some paper. You check it out, write, shoot or record a review in any form, tone and medium you like. Then you ship it back to Brother (we’ll cover the cost of shipping both ways, obviously).
If you’re interested, drop me a line with:
- Your choice of printers
- The URL of your blog
- Your full name, snail mail address and phone number.
UPDATE: Wow, I didn’t anticipate that much interest in printers. We’ve filled the remaining slots.
15 Comments »
