Business Line Articles

  If a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s the worth of a video? From a business perspective, priceless. In today’s world, where life online is fast-paced and hyper-interactive, businesses have the ability to connect with their customers in a way that’s genuine and long lasting. While we’re staying connected via keyboards and touch screens, there’s no denying the impact of a human face – and a professionally produced web video has the power to create an emotional reaction that can convert a Google search into a loyal and enthusiastic customer. Credit: socialmediapowerguys.com For today’s installment of the digital literacy series, I spoke to Neil Scott (@StrategicVideo), President and General Manager of The Edge Communications Inc., a Calgary-based full-service video production company. Scott filled me in on the benefits of a well-made web video to businesses and offered valuable insight into how businesses can incorporate video into their digital media strategies....

Do social media ads even work? Question: When is an ad not an ad? Answer: When it’s a story, maybe even one shared by a friend. "Call of Duty" game maker warns of zombies in Promoted Tweet In the ever-changing world of digital advertising, and the never-ending quest for business models for online publishers, “social advertising” is suddenly all the rage. In part this stuff resembles what we called “advertorial” back in my print days. The rule then was we had to clearly mark advertorial so it wouldn’t be confused with properly vetted editorial content. On the social web those lines are somewhat blurry to non-existent. A case of banner blindness It’s natural, even predictable this would happen. I’ve written in this space before about the ineffectiveness of banner ads. Publishers need to find other mechanisms to generate revenue. Brian Solis, principle at the Altimeter Group, a California-based technology advisory firm, put...

  Success in social media is, in large part, about attitude. To grossly oversimplify, if you have a negative attitude about social media and/or you are wildly introverted, there’s a good chance you’ll suck at social media. Which means your organization will either suck at social media under your guidance, or, at a minimum, will not benefit from the positive interactions social media can engender. This is because, as Bradley and McDonald wrote in the October 2011 Harvard Business Review: Social media is about people, not technology. Its business value does not come from social software or a snazzy website, even one with 800 million users. Its value stems from how business leaders, from senior executives to managers, use it to foster new collaborative behaviors that materially improve business performance.” Get rid of the bad attitude Credit: TheXatPerson on photobucket Occasionally I run into executives with bad attitudes about social media. Thankfully...

  In this week’s edition of the digital literacy series we examine the power of social relationships – what makes them possible, why they’re powerful and important and why they matter to businesses. To get insight into this interesting topic, I turned to Harley Rivet (@HarleyRivet), President and CEO of Deep Dish Digital, an online and social media marketing company based in Saskatoon. Credit: www.schneiderb.com What makes social relationships possible? According to Rivet, today’s digital climate is allowing conversations to take place on a global scale and in all shapes and forms – between individuals and between thousands of people all at once. What’s making this possible? He points to the widespread availability of Internet access and a new wave of simple communication tools. Tools like Facebook and Twitter have torn down barriers, allowing people of all ages and demographics to form online relationships and to have meaningful conversations about a wide...

  But ads have to be relevant to the consumer Internet advertising is a big deal and getting bigger – generating almost $3 billion in revenue per year here in Canada. Credit: GapingVoid.com with h/t to DaveFleet.com According to the latest available figures from the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada“In 2010, Online ad revenues surpassed Daily Newspaper ad revenues. As a result, the Internet is now second only to Television in terms of share of total Canadian media advertising revenue (15.9 per cent). Online advertising’s 23 per cent increase from 2009 to 2010 also bested other major media, all but one experiencing only single-digit growth rates during this time.” A banner year for banner ads In past years this advertising spend was dominated by “digital display” ads (i.e. banner or button ads and the like). In spite of years of dire predictions of the demise of banners, total spending on digital display...

  The world’s biggest focus group for brands   When you want to do a gut check on consumer opinion, there’s nothing like a quick focus group to tell you what you don’t know. Credit: BACD.ca Researchers will tell you, quite rightly, that focus groups are not statistically valid. They are a form of qualitative not quantitative research and thus can’t be extrapolated to any larger population. Pollsters and marketers will also tell you how useful they can be to unearth hidden sentiment or to shape more formal research. Data mining Twitter Social media is becoming a bit like the world’s largest focus group. In some cases it goes beyond that to a sample size that is sufficiently large and thus random to accurately predict outcomes. Occasionally it predicts as well or better than traditional polling. Take for example the UK political/media tool Tweetminster that was used to analyze tweets and predict...

This article was originally published in Newsline, a publication of the Canadian Investor Relations Institute. Credit: SoundTrackCollector.com Nearly every IRO I speak to is dissatisfied with his or her website. Usually I innocently ask: “How is your website working for you?”. That’s when the eye rolling and sighing starts. Whether due to death by committee, an unskilled developer or hijacking by IT, what started two years ago as a noble venture in web publishing now looks more like the bride of Frankenstein. Lucky for you it’s easier than ever to remake that corpse into a publishing supermodel. The first step in this makeover is determining what the website is supposed to be or do. Unlike the brochure-ware of old, modern websites are sleek, shiny lean mean publishing machines, with far-reaching syndication capabilities. This ain’t your daddy’s website, kids, it’s a whole new beast. You have to share the website with the...

Maybe what’s needed is an Internet Whisperer Sometimes it feels like my job is to make old white guys comfortable with the Internet. Apparently I am the Internet whisperer. Or maybe the baby boomer whisperer, I’m not sure. As a boomer myself. it probably makes sense. It’s a statistical reality that corporate Canada is largely run by white male baby boomers. Ann Golden, President and CEO of the Conference Board of Canada, noted in a 2011 Canadian Board Diversity Council report… Diverse groups continue to be significantly under-represented on Canadian boards of directors. Non-profit boards are making better progress in adding women compared to corporate boards, but both could do much more to include more individuals who are visible minorities, Aboriginal peoples or have disabilities.” Boomers run Canada's oilsands (photo credit Dean Bicknell, Calgary Herald)   Time to pay attention I’m an anomaly for my generation. Old white guys are generally...

This is a guest post by Kelly Ferrier, owner of Calgary copywriting company Kay Phair Advising. You can find her on Twitter at @kayphair. This week’s digital literacy post focuses on the ways that digital media has changed politics, how this impacts Canada’s economy and why businesses need to be paying attention. Credit: Vancouver Sun To get an in-depth look at this topic, I turned to Troy Wason (@imparo), President of WMS Communications Inc. Wason has over 25 years experience in the political sphere, with a particular focus on digital media, including acting as the social media manager for an Alberta political party during the 2008 provincial election and as communications officer (social media) for a legislative caucus. According to Wason, digital media has influenced and altered politics in a number of important ways. In particular, political entities, including non-governmental organizations, have profited from the ability to connect with the public...

One way or another it has to be about the bottom line Carpenters have a saying “measure twice, cut once” designed to prevent wasted materials. The same principle applies to social media marketing – get the right measure before “cutting” a campaign and you’ll be a lot more productive. Credit: taste-of-torah.blogspot.com Most companies start by measuring the obvious: fans, followers, views, tweets and retweets. The problem is, you’re likely not in the business of collecting fans or followers, and volume of tweets or retweets only vaguely approximates influence. It’s a bit like measuring success by how many business cards you collected versus appointments or sales. You’re paying attention to the wrong things. Focus on outcomes, not fans After all, you could be tweeting your brains out with robots aplenty retweeting you and nary a person paying attention – not exactly what you were hoping for. As Jeremiah Owyang says on web-strategist.com: Companies...

This is a guest post by Kelly Ferrier, owner of Calgary copywriting company Kay Phair Advising. You can find her on Twitter at @kayphair. In continuation of our series focusing on the growing relevance of digital literacy to Canada’s economy, today’s post focuses on the importance of strategically understanding market research. Our modern world offers an unprecedented volume of data, but it’s important to go beyond the numbers to realize the power they have to build brand loyalty and increase the bottom line. For more on this exceedingly relevant topic, I spoke to Brian Singh (@bfsingh), a market researcher and economist with over 20 years experience, and founder and managing director of ZINC Research. According to Singh, the current reality for businesses boils down to this: Marketing and communications is research and research is marketing and communications. You can’t have one without the other. Everything that a business is doing must be measured...

This is a guest post by Kelly Ferrier, owner of Calgary copywriting company Kay Phair Advising. You can find her on Twitter at @kayphair. Today we continue our series examining the importance of digital literacy to Canada’s economy. This post is focused on the impact of digital media on the non-profit sector. For insight into this topic, I turned to Bob McInnis, current executive director of Brown Bagging for Calgary’s Kids (@brownbaggingit), a registered charity that delivers daily lunches to students in need at Calgary schools. With his 25 years of leadership experience in the non-profit sector, McInnis is in a unique position to reflect on the ways that digital media has changed how charities spread their message and to offer advice to other non-profits on why they must include digital media as part of their messaging strategy. Brown Bagging for Calgary’s Kids (BB4CK) currently includes blogs, forums, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube...

This is a guest post by Kelly Ferrier, owner of Calgary copywriting company Kay Phair Advising. You can find her on Twitter at @kayphair. Today’s post is the first in a series that will be examining the importance of digital literacy to Canada’s economy. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be interviewing key people to get their views on why digital literacy is important for businesses, non-profit organizations and even politics. My first interview was with Justin Kozuch, lead researcher for Pixel to Product, a research project designed to obtain accurate and reliable data concerning the qualitative, quantitative and behavioural aspects of the Canadian digital media economy. Launched in May 2010, project researchers spent a year polling and surveying Canadian digital agency owners and the digital workforce to understand the size and scope of the industry. Pixel to Product released their final report on May 25, 2011 and the results showed that Canada’s digital...

This article was originally published in Newsline, a publication of the Canadian Investor Relations Institute. Credit: krisitnschellinger.files.wordpress.com Investor relations people are not social. Oh, don’t get me wrong; I know they are in real life. I’ve been to numerous CIRI conferences and have witnessed this firsthand. Great banquets, golf tournaments, galas and hospitality suites – IR has social down pat in ‘meat space’ (what the digerati call the real world). I mean social media. In fact, let me take it further, most investor relations folks really don’t ‘get’ digital at all. They’ve mostly caught on to websites, sort of, and email is old hat, but Twitter, Facebook, YouTube? Hardly. In and of itself, this is no crime. Personal participation in the latest thing is purely optional, though statistically most IR pros are on Facebook at home. What is difficult to justify is when a profession ignores a mass medium, engaging in...

Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIn. YouTube. Social media. These buzz words are getting a lot of attention. From teenagers and grandparents posting profile pics on Facebook, to celebrities sharing their “genuine” love for cheeseburgers and purses on Twitter and HR professionals recruiting potential employees on LinkedIn, there’s no segment of society that hasn’t been impacted by social media. And that includes business. There’s no doubt that social media can be profoundly beneficial to businesses – that is, if it’s done right. With his book “The REAL Truth About Social Media”, Eric Harr sets out to help businesses of all sizes master social media. Harr is the founder and CEO of Resonate Social Media and when I @mentioned him on Twitter, he told me that his goal with this book was to introduce newcomers to social media and inspire and empower them. And this is most definitely the book’s target audience. Social media strategists...