An amazing tribute

This is an email that I received today from a friend from years past. I think it's a neat way to optimize viral messaging to create social movement.

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This happened in Toronto's Eatons Centre!

For all my amazing women friends!

A Flash Mob Dance Video was organized by Kim MacGregor. Kim created this as a tribute to her best friend Erika Heller who died of colon cancer last
year. Each and every telephone conversation they ever had, Erika would end
by telling Kim "You're an amazing woman"!  Well, Kim wanted to do something special to honour her friend and this is the result.

Kim's goal is to reach 1,000,000 viewers - please help her reach her goal and pass this on to all the amazing women in your life.  Kim's goal is to reach 1,000,000 viewers - please help her reach her goal and pass this on to all the amazing women in your life. 

Social Media Conference

The opportunity presented itself to attend a social media confernece at the end of March in Toronto and I'm jumping in head first. The conference is called Social Media, Networking and Technology Summit in case anyone is interested in checking it out as well; link.


The conference is being put on by the Canadian Society of Association Executives (CSAE) and it's all about how Associations can make use of social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, etc to most effectively engage people. It's going to be two days with fairly intensive knowledge transfer, which is going to include case studies about those who are doing in right and those who are failng miserably. I am hoping my organization doesn't pop up in the failing miserably category.

I think for the most part the conference will help me to build a social media strategy which will work even with my limited familiarity with most platforms. Hopefully, if I build a strategy that mirrors one that has proven to work it will, in a sense, buy me some time to learn the rest of my way around.

My boss has said that her vision for our association's strategy is to align ourselves favourably with a structure that is already working for a sister society but ultimately learn all we can to position ourselves ahead of the curve. My boss hopes to see us in the next coming years as the leaders in social media within the medical community. The group that all others look to.

To me these sound like fairly lofty goals, especially seeing as we are getting into the game on the later side of things.

Content Rules

My boss lent me a pretty interesting book:

"Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and more) that Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business" <- longest book name ever!

I haven't quite made it all the way through the book yet but so far it's intriguing and Chapman and Hanley's approach is unique. They discuss content in terms of their kids and how the small principles of nurturing are needed for new ventures (social media). And the way to keep the momentum going is to "feed the beast".

I jumped a couple chapters to the section about webinars for two reasons. First, a large part of my field includes attending webinars and web-based meetings. And second, because of the title "If Webinars Are Awesome Marketing Tools, Why Do Most Of Them Suck?" it totally sums up my opinion of webinars nicely. I find most of them tedious to sit through or frustrating because something always fails to work properly.

Anyway, the chapter defines what a webinar is and how they underperform on a regualr basis. But they also make sure to outline what you should consider when you do decide to put on a webinar.

Now I understand that webinars aren't the most appealing mainstream social media option but when done properly I think they are effective business to business tools. If tracking is done properly (number of registrants : number of participants : number of leads generated) webinars can be an effective way to monitor messaging and business growth.

Links:
Google Books "Content Rules"
C.C. Chapman

CRAP! Someone stole my Audi!

Unfortunately, I am a little late with my post but I got wrapped up in a book more on that another day....

We've had an executive shift in my office and the new executive director has a lot of different ideas and is keen to fully integrate social media into our everyday public education/awareness activities. When I mentioned that I was taking courses to learn more about social media and how to create a business strategy using social media, she mentioned having seen an innovative use of SM for the launch of the Audi A3. So I went on the hunt.

Audi used social media and instant news reporting in a landmark move to promote the new A3 which began with a late-night heist. The "story"included surveillance footage, news reports, special investigators, TV commercials, posters seeking public input; eveything you could think of, all available online, in print, and via mass media. Bloggers worldwide heard about the heist of the A3 and the "story" went viral. I'm not going to give too much away because you really should watch the video below. But think interactive spy movie, Audi was actively engaging the public in seeking the missing A3 through ingenious multi-media cross platform advertising.

I think because of the format in which Audi presented the theft of the brand-new-state-of-the-art-not-yet-available-in-North-America A3 it became a thrilling story which people were following with fervent anticipation. The impact the launch of the Audi A3 had was such that 5 years later there still really hasn't been anything like it.

If you'd like to watch the case study about "The Art of the H3ist" I've included here, but you can also visit the ad company's website, http://www.campfirenyc.com/, to check out some of their other work.



Audi Case Study from Campfire on Vimeo.

On another note I love the CampfireNYC website, again, it's super innovative and unlike any other site I've seen. These are definitely people who know how to think outside the box