I’ve worked with hundreds of businesses and organizations and nearly all of them struggle to keep up with the sheer pace of change in the implementation of effective social media strategies. I recently returned from Social Media Camp, Canada’s largest social media conference. This year’s conference theme was Going Global and I had the good fortune of meeting and mingling with thought [...]
Chris Brogan, a thought leader I truly admire, sent me an email recently announcing the demise of long-form writing. This news breaks writers’ hearts everywhere, mine included, but his point is well taken. I met Brogan in Boston, Massachusetts, a couple of years ago and I’ve had the opportunity to hear him speak more than once. He is a grounded, peaceful guy, who pays a kind of fine [...]
In her book, The Power of Off, psychotherapist Nancy Colier explores mindful ways to stay sane in a virtual world. Needless to say, Colier and I are largely singing from the same song sheet. While technology and social media offer important ways to solve problems, communicate, and do business, they also have a shadow side. There are more than 32 million Internet users in Canada, with 3.6 billion [...]
Facebook recently jumped into the live story telling arena, first with Facebook Live, then with Messenger Day, and in late March 2017 with Facebook Stories. The recent move by Facebook signals a sea change in how we approach online communication and the way businesses will need to adapt to marketing products and services. So, what’s the big deal? It means we’ve entered the world of [...]
One of the great gifts of the Internet is that we are able to solicit ideas, input and advice from a wide range of sources. It’s called crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is defined as ‘the practice of obtaining information or input into a task or project by enlisting the services of a large number of people, either paid or unpaid, typically via the Internet.’ Preparing for this article, for[...]
Angela Crocker is a writer, teacher, and information organizer. Among other achievements, Crocker has developed a process she calls the ‘digital cleanse’. The digital cleanse is a 30-day series of strategies and tips based on her more than 25 years on the Internet. In her series, she shares how she sorts, stores, weeds, and organizes unwieldy online data to create order and keep systems [...]
The Internet is a pretty big place – and I’m using the noun ‘place’ deliberately. There is a way we can be tempted to think about the Internet as a ‘thing’, primarily because we access it using devices. I’m careful about this language because it is easy to forget, while we are cozily ensconced at home in a favourite chair with our iPad, or snugly settled at our laptops in a [...]
Delighted to introduce you to my new column, #Untrending, published bi-weekly in the Maple Ridge News. In my recent book, #Untrending – A Field Guide to Social Media That Matters, I talk about social media as a doorway to meaning, contribution, beauty and truth. Tall talk, I know, but aimed at challenging us to take a long view of our online engagements and consider each post as a kind of [...]
Successful social media is all about building relationships of trust with the online community that you serve. First, you want to be crystal clear about who is in that community. We call this defining your avatar. In Hinduism, an avatar is defined as “a manifestation of a deity or released soul in bodily form on earth; an incarnate divine teacher” (which to be honest, is a definition I [...]
What's hot and what's not in 2016? Leading social media and digital marketing specialists weigh in with their predictions. Sean Smith, That Social Media Guy: “Video, Video, Video. 2015 saw the arrival of platforms like Periscope, Facebook Live and Blab, but I think it is only the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to personal or mobile video broadcasting. Wide scale adoption will lead to even [...]