Category Archives: social media

Forrester’s New Technographics Data - How Do Canadians Measure Up?

So, how does Canada measure up against other countries in this new data? You may be surprised - this data is pretty controversial.

Integrated Social Media > Stand-Alone Social Media

If anyone who approaches you and offers to implement social media tools in your organization without integrating them with your marketing and corporate communications strategies, chase them away with a pitchfork.

Practical 101s: Social Bookmarking With Delicious

As people move more and more of their lives online, it gets harder and harder to stay organized.
Where was that great article you read the other day? What was that great blog you read? What was the name of that cool tool you found?
Of course, you could save everything in your browser’s favourites but, let’s [...]

Capturing Canada’s Social Media Case Studies

Dave Jones, the man behind the PR Works blog, the Shill podcast and (when he remembers) the Inside PR podcast, has created a new Web 2.0 Examples in Canada wiki to capture Canadian social media case studies.
The new wiki perfectly fills a gap in the social media space that has existed for a [...]

Practical 101s: Google Reader And Persistent Search

As a public relations professional, it is your responsibility to be aware of the coverage your projects are getting. This applies whether you work on the agency side, the corporate side or in government.
One of the easiest ways to keep track of this is through persistent searches.
What is persistent search?
Persistent search allows you to enter [...]

Government 2.0 Best Practices Wiki

Given my former life in the Ontario government, I was recently thrilled to see a new effort by Mike Kujawski - the Government 2.0 Best Practices Wiki.
As Mike says:
Every workshop or conference I speak at, I am asked the same first question by most public servants: “Who else is doing this in government?”. I want [...]

ROI: Why Social Media Will Grow

If you haven’t seen this video from Gary Vaynerchuk, well, you need to. Gary eloquently explains why advertising in traditional media is falling and why advertising in social media is growing, and will continue to grow: measurable return on investment.
Layer that on top of the methods for measuring other outcomes in social media, which [...]

Four Questions To Ask Before Suing Bloggers

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington wrote recently about a company that has sued TechCrunch "out of spite," laying into the people filing the suit using words like "absurd" and "frivolous" while threatening a countersuit.
Unlike Arrington I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to talk about the merits of individual cases. In fact, I’m going to set [...]

Yes, Some Social Media Programs Will Fail

CNET News reports that Gartner analyst Adam Sarner thinks half of social media campaigns will be classified as failures.
News flash: that goes way wider than social media campaigns.

Roughly 60 per cent of restaurants fail within three years (Business Week)
50-54 per cent of small Canadian businesses fail within three years (Industry Canada)
70 per cent of public [...]

Social Media Is Like Running A Marathon

I’ve written before about how social media is like distance running. That was all about the long preparation that’s involved. I’m shooting for a sub-3 hour time tomorrow in the Toronto Waterfront Marathon, so I thought I’d riff a little on how you can also compare social media to the marathon race itself.
You need [...]