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I saw a lot of "Uh oh, it's Blue Monday" and "No wonder I'm so sad, it's Blue Monday" status updates and tweets today. But not from A.C. Riley (content strategist extraordinaire). She has a great counterpoint to any manufactured drama: brighten someone's day.
Mission accomplished, Charlotte! You brightened mine!
Back in the day, when I was in university and hadn't ever really heard about "marketing" as a career option, I majored in Philosophy and wrote a thesis entitled "Intentionality, Sacredness and Play: Integral Elements in the Philosophy of Ritual". For several years I spent a lot of time thinking about how ritual is used to bind communities together. My studies generally had a mystical bent (I specialised in the ritual of secret societies), but part of my work concerned more accessible and "every day" ritual.
I don't spend a lot of time thinking about this aspect of my education on a day to day basis now, but I admit to being a little smug (FINALLY my degree has relevance) when I was reading Sean Moffitt and Mike Dover's new book Wikibrands and came across this passage:
Typically, a brand community has five characteristics:
We all participate in these ritual manifestations of our online communities: from badges we place on our blogs to the hash tags we use on Twitter (#FF anyone) to the three-or-more letter acronyms we use in our favourite discussion forums (omg, I am so lqtm right now!). I'm pleased to see that Moffitt and Dover has acknowledged them in their book. Now, they don't go into a LOT of detail about them (ooo .. maybe that's the book *I* should write), but the fact that it is referenced is important.
I haven't finished Wikibrands yet, but I am enjoying what I have read so far. I skipped directly to the community section which is an interest of mine and a number of my readers. Chapters include:
What I'm extra delighted by is that McGraw-Hill, Wikibrands publisher, has made available Chapter 11 - Community Development as a free download for MNIK readers. It has an excellent overview of the structure of brand communities as well as some great social media case studies including Lunapads, 1000 Awesome Things and the Museum of Modern Art - all great discoveries for me this week. Thanks, McGraw-Hill!
Also, I believe that one of the authors will be guest blogging on MNIK next week, so stay tuned for that!
UPDATE: Check out Sean Moffitt's guest post on what it takes to build a community in 2011. And then pick up your own copy of Wikibrands!
Photo Credit: Beltane Fire Festival 2009 - the Bonfire by Richard Milnes
I bought a domain name recently. Once it was transferred from the owner's registrar to my own, the best domain registrar ever - Hover.com (use code mynameiskate for 10% off domains at Hover), I needed to change the name servers and then one of the records in my host file so that the domain would now point to the new website I had set up for it.
A lot of you who are reading this have now put your fingers in your ears, closed your eyes and started singing "la la la la la la geeky stuff la la la la". Stop it. Breathe. As a marketer or a PR person who conducts some of their craft on the Internet, it behooves you to know the tiniest bit about how it works. It will make you a better communicator and a better person. Kind of like eating your veggies.
Name Servers. Name servers maintain a directory that match domain names (like www.mynameiskate.ca) to IP addresses (like 204.9.177.195). And that means that I only need to remember the human-friendly domain name and not all the numbers of an IP address when I type it into my browser.
Host Files. These are the plain-text files that contain the individual directory entries for the name server. Host files allow me to do a lot of interesting things, not the least of which is to have different services running on different machines (e.g. my email and my blog are run on different servers) and allows me to have sub-domains off my main domain.
Propagation. When you make changes to your name server or host file, it can take a little while for all of the other name servers around the world to get the message. So there can be a period of time while all the name servers get the new address mapping. This can happen if you're switching domains or putting content on a new domain. That's why it's important that marketers build in time in their campaigns for their sassy new domain names to propagate.
Domain Information Groper. Sometimes, when you want to check on what the rest of the world thinks your domain mappings to be (as opposed to what you have put in your host file), you can use a Domain Information Groper (DIG) tool to query other name servers about what they think the official mapping for your domain is. The DIG tool is usually a command line on a unix server, but sometimes very clever and helpful folks build web interfaces to it. I had been using a dig interface that apparently wasn't updating very often, so the helpful folks at Hover pointed me to one of their fav tools - digwebinterface.com (built by Martin Holk Rasmussen). It's quite a nice interface. This is the output for www.mynameiskate.ca:
I know, I know .. to some of you that may not seem like either sexy or helpful output, but really, it is. :)
Note for the hard core geeks in the crowd - remember, this is written for tech-curious marketers. I'm sure I've missed a lot of the nuance of the wonder of name servers and host files. But as long as the basic ideas are correct, please don't flame too much in the comments :)
For this week's shill, I wanted to highlight a client's project (though not really much of a LintBucket project - we just did the landing page). Last summer, Suncor Energy started publishing a weekly email newsletter called Oil Sands Question and Response (OSQAR for short).
I have to say, from a content perspective, I do love their writing style and sense of humour. My favourite issue of the newsletter is "In Situ Oil Sands: Mining’s Hotter, Younger Sibling" - which, if you've spent as much time trying to understand the oil sands process as much as I have, is actually pretty funny (and drove some pretty good open-rates).
I think it's hard for a corporation like Suncor Energy to have a sense of humour - the line they must walk is so very fine. And I'm sure that some people feel they have crossed it. But I think that opening up a constructive dialogue around controversial topics, one that is framed in a human way - that includes both humour and pathos - is essential. Humour doesn't necessarily indicate a lack of seriousness. And our collective business and political rhetoric could use a good dose of humour these days.
Related: I read a post today by Joseph Thornley entitled Three Questions to Ask Before Accepting a Controversial Client.
Disclaimer: This post is my own opinion and in no way reflects the opinion of Suncor Energy.
It's been a few weeks since there was a great disturbance in the force: Yahoo announced internally that Delicious, the popular bookmarking service that I've been using since 2005, is a service in the "sunset" of it's life with Yahoo. And of course, the news was leaked and we all went ape shit.
Delicious has since responded on their blog that they are not immediately shutting down the service, but the announcement certainly got a lot of people thinking about where their content lives and what the longevity of those platforms is likely to be.
It's a question to ask about your overall social media initiatives. Sure, right now it may seem impossible that Facebook would ever go away. Or Twitter. But we've all heard "too big to fail" before.
If you didn't have Twitter and Facebook, would you have a social media strategy?
This is why it is so important for businesses to own the platform that is the focal point of their social media strategy.
I'm not saying don't have a Facebook page or don't run a contest on Twitter or don't experiment with new social media. Your customers are there right now, using these services. You should be there too. Listening and engaging.
But what happens when Facebook isn't all the rage. And Quora has lost its appeal. And gloofr is where all the kids are hanging out now? How much will you have to scramble to re-establish a presence with solid content and knowledgable community managers?
Here's what you can do to get a start on owning your own social media platform:
1. Start a blog. I know it sounds cliche. But there are a b'zillion reasons to blog (not the least of which Seth Godin says you should).
2. Put that blog on YOUR URL. I simply can't stress this enough. Why would you want your corporate/professional brand be associated with someone else? yourco.blogspot.com is not as professional as blog.yourco.com And to the whole point of this article - what happens when Blogspot (or Typepad or Wordpress) goes away? Even if your blog RUNS on one of those platforms, by owing your own blog/social media URL, you could migrate it to another platform if you wanted/needed to.
3. Use that blog as the starting point for your corporate social media hub. What's a social media hub? Dave Fleet offers a great diagram and model for understanding the place of a social media hub within your larger online presence.
A number of companies offer good examples of using their blog as a start for their social media hub - Whole Foods comes to mind. Other organizations have taken it a step further - including their blogs and other social media profiles into one large hub. Possibly the best example I've seen is Doubletree Destinations (Pizza Hut and H&M are also doing some interesting things in this area).
How are you mitigating risk vis a vis your social media presence potentially being owned by someone else and possibly going away? Or do you think this isn't really a risk - Facebook go braugh and all that?
I am so upset and grieved by the deadly shootings in Arizona this weekend. Our language and our rhetoric towards those we disagree with lacks compassion and empathy. So I thought this would be a good idea to revisit the Charter for Compassion. The Charter for Compassion was conceived in 2008 by religious scholar Karen Armstrong and launched just over a year ago after submissions from over 150,000 people from 180 countries across the world.
It's aim: to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion.
On two slightly related notes ...
First, I saw this piece on BoingBoing - about Egyptian Muslims standing with Egyptian Coptic Christians during their Christmas services to act as "human shields" against threats of violence towards the Coptic Christians. Said a Muslim student who attended the Mass, "We are one. This was an attack on Egypt as a whole, and I am standing with the Copts because the only way things will change in this country is if we come together."
Second, it seems that even die-hard baseball fans can find compassion for an umpire who made an erroneous call that resulted in a pitcher Armando Galaragga losing his perfect game. These notes were found on umpire Jim Joyce's baggage tags from the Detroit baggage handlers.
OK, this first Discover post isn't about something new, it's about REdiscovery.
And it isn't my idea, but the brilliant Rob Cottingham's.
But I have so much unrated and forgotten music on my iTunes that I just had to share his tips.
Rob has two great ideas for finding new and old favourites in your iTunes library:
I'm doing the second one (Discovery .. see the connection?), RIGHT NOW:
Create a Smart Playlist that includes following criteria:
So smart!
Thanks, Rob! Make sure you swing by his blog and read the full post!! And while you're there, stop by Noise to Signal, Rob's amazing cartoon about social media, business and how we live in the digital world.
Anyone else have any iTunes tips?
I got an iPad for my birthday in November. I love it. ADORE it. (Thank you, Rosemary). I've been reading all the "So, you just got an iPad, what now?" articles I can find. So many of my friends and colleagues already have an iPad, I want to be sure I'm keeping up. This year, at a New Year's Eve dinner, several of us had our iPads out (Geek Dream Date) and were swapping app recs. As we were passing iPads around, I noticed that only I had 6 icons in the dock (the default is 4). "Hey, you guys know you can have 6 apps in the doc, right?"
Well, they didn't know. And I had my moment of geek superiority.
Carriage Returns in an Excel Cell (Mac)
I've been spending a little more time than I would like in Excel lately. And I often forget how to put a hard-return (carriage return) in a cell, particularly on a Mac.
Well, for those of you who want to know, it's control-option-return.
Counting Characters in an Excel Cell (Mac and PC)
I've been doing a little Facebook advertising work lately. They have character limits for the headline and the body of the ad. We're getting several ads approved by the client at a time, so they are all going in an Excel spreadsheet. I wanted a character counter so I didn't have to do it manually. Very easy.
Now, it doesn't update in real-time (e.g. you have to exit the cell you're editing for it to update the count), but it's better than counting by hand!