Oh Twitter, look what you’ve become

April 7, 2009 in Pop Culture, Social Media, Technology, Trends | Tags: , , , | 4 comments

I used to love explaining to people what Twitter was and how it works. Once in a while I would mention it in passing to my real life friends and be confronted with a very confused look. If they still didn’t get it I would reluctantly say, “it’s like Facebook, but just the status update part.” They would nod their heads to show understanding and I would always have to end off with, “but it’s so much better than that.” That was the old Twitter. Now we have the new Twitter era filled celebrity Twitterers and this guy.

I think the tipping point for Twitter was when Ellen DeGeneres started speaking about it on her show. I got many new followers after that. Now of course, it’s in the news every day so much so that reporting of Twitter is accurate. I remember early articles about Twitter being terribly inaccurate.

I was reading Mark Cuban’s blog post about Twitter and laughed out loud when he wrote:

2. Twitterers are older. Myspace started around music and students. Facebook started around college students. Twitter was started by old people. Relatively speaking :) . It could be the first new social media platform to start old and get younger, but there really is no assurance of that. I don’t know that twittering will get big for the 18 and younger set.

At first I laughed because I thought that was ridiculous, but thought about it a bit and he might be right. Everyone uses social networking sites for different reasons. I think it makes sense that different groups of people will use different social networking sites.

Hates

I am getting tired of those who complain about people who Tweet about themselves too often. That’s what the unfollow feature was created for.

Loves

I do think I am getting better at defending why I find Twitter so valuable. I follow interesting people who share information with me and are great at giving me feedback/reviews/opinions. It’s a great way to subscribe to news services. Most of the news I read is stuff I’ve found on Twitter. The Twitter community is wonderful and have done some really great things with it.

Follow me: @sarahroger

Blog changes and updates

April 4, 2009 in General, Social Media | Leave a comment

Doing lots of changes over here. Going to the Geek Dinner London last week inspired me to blog again. Playing around with a few themes and will eventually find one that I love.

Thoughts on Talk is Cheap 2.0 at Centennial College

November 23, 2008 in Public Relations, Reviews, Social Media, Toronto | Tags: , | 2 comments

Christine Smith, Centennial College and the current group of Corporate Communications and Public Relations students did a great job organizing and hosting this year’s Talk is Cheap 2.0. It was a fun evening with interesting sessions of which I attended three.

  • The Ethics of Social Media PR session with Dave Fleet and Michael O’Connor Clarke speaking about the obligation we as PR practitioners have to be up front and honest when participating in the social media space. An interesting conversation started to brew about ghost blogging and ghost Twittering. Some provocative questions were presented by audience members. Barack Obama’s Twitter account does not explicitly mention it is a member of his staff updating it, so is that unethical? Probably not as the majority of people would understand that he has more important things to do with his time and would assume it is one of his staff. The conversation then led to why is it that ghost blogging is unethical but writing a speech that a CEO gives and assumes her/his own is considered fair game. Quite interesting stuff and I’d like to hear more on this topic.
  • The second session I attended was Influencing the New Influencers with PR professionals Keith McArthur, Brenna Flynn and blogger Eden Spodek. They spoke about the importance of developing relationships with bloggers before you pitch to them, the same as you would pitching to a journalist.
  • The final session I attended was Digital Snippets given by much of the Social Media Group team. They talked about SMG’s version of the social media press release they call digital snippets which is being used for their client Ford. It was quite interesting to hear them talk through how the digital snippets work. The most important element of the digital snippet is that in order for it to be interesting there needs to be a constant flow of new information to it.

I recommend this event for anyone in PR/marketing interested in learning more about trends in social media.

Talk is Cheap 2.0 at Centennial College

November 11, 2008 in Public Relations, Social Media, Toronto | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

tclogo1I’m really looking forward to attending the second annual Talk is Cheap 2.0 at the Centre for Creative Communications at Centennial College. Talk is Cheap is a social media unconference being held at the wonderful school where I studied Corporate Communications and Public Relations. The schedule looks interesting and I wish I had the opportunity to attend all the sessions. Hope to see you there!

 

Details:
When: Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 6 p.m.
Where: The Centre for Creative Communications, Centennial College, 951 Carlaw Ave., Toronto

Social media and the Canadian election: Who is still keeping up with it?

November 2, 2008 in Politics, Public Relations, Social Media | Tags: , , | 2 comments

As I wrote about here, I was quite intrigued to see how Canadian politicians were using social media, especially Twitter, during the election. Now that the election is over I find it interesting to see who has kept up with their Twitter stream and who has not.

Of the five major candidates it seems that Stephen Harper is the politician that seems to have his Twitter streams updated the most often. The streams can be found here and here and here in French. Even the Prime Minister’s flickr stream is still being updated. 

I would really like to hear feedback from you on why you suspect some politicians have been keeping up with social media, and others have not? Do you think that social media played a role in winning votes? 

The Twitter streams of Stephane Dion, Elizabeth May, Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe all fell off the radar immediately after the election. Perhaps each campaign had a volunteer who had the responsibility of updating the streams, and since the election is over their services are no longer required?

I have noticed that Liberal MP Dan McTeague’s Twitter stream is update frequently alerting the public of rising or falling gas prices in various cities across the country.

We also have http://electopinion.ca/, http://www.netprimeminister.ca/ and http://www.govtweets.ca/ still going strong aggregating Tweets mentioning politicians.

Was it even necessary for these politicians to sign up on Twitter to begin with? Is the point of Twitter to broadcast information about your next campaign stop, or would it have been put to better use engaging in conversation with users who sent @messages?

With the U.S. election on Tuesday it will be interesting to see if Obama’s use of technology to help organize his campaign will continue if he gets elected.

Creativ Festival Fall 2008

October 21, 2008 in General, Reviews, Toronto | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

I’m kinda crafty so when my friend told me about the Creativ Festival I pretty much freaked out. I looked through the website and was excited about all the vendors, a few I was even familiar with.

We started our morning bright and early on Saturday hoping for greatness but anticipating the worst and prepared to leave if we were bored. The festival ended up being phenomenal. Lots of very good quality goods being sold for quite reasonable prices. Everything is expensive nowadays, and craft supplies is no different, so we were happy to browse through everything and even able to afford stuff.

The event was held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre which was a spacious venue for this event. It was laid out more or less by type of craft. There was an area each for: quilting, knitting, sewing, scrapbooking, beading, needlepointing and the like. 

We arrived around 11 a.m. and left around 3 p.m., with a nice lunch break in the middle. We couldn’t resist the temptation of the Pizza Pizza smell coming from the food court.

Before Saturday the idea of scrapbooking bored me. I honestly thought it was lame because I envisioned it a hobby solely for wives and/or mothers. Not that there is anything wrong with that, just that it was not relevant for me. Browsing through the many scrapbooking booths I realized I was wrong and scrapbooking is extremely creative and not tacky in the least. I would like to start making cards (birthday/wedding/thank you) rather than buying boring/tacky/ugly/NOT FUNNY cards from the store. I want to have a birthday party or take classes at this place.

I left the festival with three purchases:

1) Burgundy coloured alpaca wool from Peru (sorry the flash was too bright) bought at the Unwind Yarn House booth

2) Fabric and a pattern from Amy Butler purchased at the Macfab booth

That I made a makeup bag out of

3) A scrapbooking kit from the Urban Scrapyard booth that I plan on making and giving as a gift so I am not posting a photo

We’re definitely going to go to the spring 2009 Creativ Festival.

Facebook Encounters: 10 People From Your Past

October 13, 2008 in Pop Culture, Social Media | Tags: , | 2 comments

Thanks so much to Bonnie for introducing me to this gem. I find this hilarious because it is dead on.

Read the rest of this entry »

My excursion to PodCamp Montreal

September 30, 2008 in Reviews, Social Media | Tags: | 2 comments

 

The New New Music – Fans, Community And What Business Can Learn From An Industry In Peril'

David Usher and Mitch Joel's session 'The New New Music – Fans, Community And What Business Can Learn From An Industry In Peril'

I was fortunate enough to head to Montreal, QC last weekend for PodCamp Montreal. It was my first PodCamp event and I fell in love with its format.  From the PodCamp wiki: 

 

A PodCamp is a usually free BarCamp-style community UnConference for new media enthusiasts and professionals including bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, social networkers, and anyone curious about new media. The first PodCamp was held September 8-10, 2006 in Boston, Massachusetts. PodCamps are now being held worldwide.

Here are highlights from some sessions I attended:

  • I heard from Mitch Joel and David Usher talk about how the music industry is evolving and adapting to the new world of obtaining music from the click of a mouse. Very interesting stuff and it was neat to hear about what content David Usher provides to his online community.  The main point I left with is that for an artist to sustain a career s/he needs to help foster a strong online community which can be done by using social media tools. As a fan of music I find it frustrating when I am searching online for information about an artist and they have a website with little information or only maintain a MySpace page. 
  • Isabelle Lopez conducted an interesting discussion ‘The Self, the Identity and the Internet’ where participants shared their own perspectives about their online identities. Coming from a sociology background it was neat to hear everyone’s opinions.  Is your presence on the internet a true reflection of yourself or is it a constructed representation? I would say everyone’s internet identity is constructed, just some do it more carefully than others. This talk was thought-provoking and made me want to go back to school but considering I just finished school in July I will wait some time before I head back.

The organizers did an excellent job and I wish I had more time to explore Montreal and visit all the sessions.  I will be attending WordCamp Toronto next weekend which I’m sure will be just as enlightening and interesting.

Social media and the 2008 Canadian election

September 16, 2008 in Politics, Public Relations, Trends | Tags: , , , , | 1 comment

You, you social media enthusiast never thought you’d hear the term social media and Canadian federal politics? Maybe you did but I didn’t think it would happen any time soon and I sit corrected.  I’ve always had this idea that Canadians are often behind the times.  I assumed that Canadian politics would be

From the 2006 election, I just love all the thumbs up

From the 2006 election, I just love all the thumbs up

 a few years away from engaging in social media, but it seems that we live in an age where things move quickly and also that I am often wrong.

 

electopinion.ca

From its FAQ page: 

What is electopinion ?
electopinion.ca follows Twitter users blogging about this federal campaign. A mix of posts made by the chiefs, the press or the touring team and the different medias and citizens.

The site is an aggregation of Twitter messages about the campaign and is sorted by the five major parties. The site is very easy to navigate and extremely interesting.  I’m very impressed.

Politicians on Twitter

All major parties are represented on Twitter. Most have just recently started writing updates, as the election was only called on Sunday September 7th, but it’s interesting to see them all use Twitter.  As far as I know in the United States only Barack Obama has an “official” Twitter presence (correct me if I’m wrong).

You can follow the Canadian party leaders pmharper, ElizabethMay, LiberalTour, jacklayton, gillesduceppe.

It seems that they are using Twitter as a means of announcing their campaign stops for the day and what media outlets they are being interviewed by.  It would be nice to see their Twitter accounts (I would assume they have people writing for them) engaging in conversation with other Twitter users, or even other candidates, but I’m not sure if that is realistic considering limited time and budget.  

NetPrimeMinister

And my personal favourite is NetPrimeMinisiter. The University of British Columbia’s school of journalism has launched a website NetPrimeMinister.ca that is aggregating content from blogs, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Digg that mentions anything about the five party leaders. We’re only into week two of the campaign and you could probably spend hours reading through all the content that NetPrimeMinister.ca links to.

Let me know if you’ve come across other interesting uses of social media for this election.

Shmoozing is an actual skill

August 21, 2008 in Public Relations, Toronto | Tags: , , | 4 comments

Yesterday morning I attended my first event while on internship.  SickKids Hospital hosted a news conference announcing the donation of over $250 million to four research intensive hospitals in Toronto.  The donation was made by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Industry spoke briefly at the event.  I was there because I am interning at Industry Canada and we’re expected to provide any communications support if needed.

The event ran very smoothly and was well planned by the SickKids communications people.  The speakers representing the hospitals receiving the funds seemed to be extremely pleased with the donations.  It was very nice to attend a positive event.  It’s so rare to hear good news so it was very refreshing to attend an event that will have a positive affect on a large number of people.

A few things I learned from the event:

  • When planning an announcement outdoors take into consideration loud road construction.  Fortunate for them the noise stopped during the announcement, but that won’t always be the case.  Usually you plan a backup for weather, but noise and other external factors can also put a snag in your plans.
  • Wear comfortable shoes.  I figured the event would be very short and I would be back to the office in no time.  That wasn’t entirely the case and I was standing for a few more hours than I’d planned and my feet were killing.  Let’s just say stilettos and lawns are not a good match.
  • Remembering people’s names is hard!  I was introduced to so many people and was so worried about presenting myself in a professional manner I got distracted and it became difficult to remember everyone’s name.  I’ve been told when being introduced to someone to repeat their name out loud to help remember it.  Do you have any tricks to remember names and faces?
Shorter About Me
I'm a Government of Canada communicator AND particularly interested in Web 2.0 tools and social media. These are exciting times to be participating in this space. Loves include: ice cream, music, the internet, irony, travel, friends, humour, crafts (especially knitting and sewing) and food.
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