Business Line Articles

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 we continue our digital literacy series with an interview with Kate Trgovac (@mynameiskate), a digital marketer with almost two decades of online marketing experience. Kate is President of Vancouver-based LintBucket Media, a boutique marketing agency specializing in social media marketing and digital content creation. Her clients include large corporations like Suncor Energy and Maple Leaf Foods as well as startups like Kinzin and Osmosus. Credit: mynameiskate.ca It’s fair to say that Kate is a social media trailblazer, especially in the sometimes reluctant oil and gas sector. Way back in 2006 (when social media was really in its infancy) Kate led a major player in the oil and gas industry on their first foray into social media. She’s one of the minds behind Petro-Canada’s successful PumpTalk blog....

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...

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...

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...