Tiktrac is a free project management software that is aimed specifically at the business user.  “Project tasks are broken down into component tasks and allocated to individuals to create a set of timesheets; time is logged against tasks and project progress is monitored,” (Burrows 2007, pg. 130-131).  Tiktrac is free to use with limited options, but could be a great inexpensive tool for an agency or company that is looking for robust tool to track the time people spend working on different projects.  The systems has been through several upgrades since its inception and can even be branded to give the user the same look and feel as the rest of your company.

The first thing to remember is the content that will be in the video.  People like to watch content that is interesting, informative, or entertaining.  There are millions of videos on YouTube, many of them have been watched over a hundred thousand times.  These videos can be great marketing communication tools.

How do you optimize a video for the web?  There are some general guidelines that should be considered.  First, you need to have short files; meaning the length of the video should be an average five minutes and the size of the file should be 6mb or less.  This is also going to depend on the quality of the video and the size of the player that it is viewed in; a good general player size is 480 x 320 pixels.

Start slow with using video and work your way into it.  Just remember who your audience is when utilizing this great communication medium.

A wiki can be used for many business applications.  As a simple collaborative environment, wikis can be a FREE tool that is used to help employees share knowledge and information.  It can be used by a whole company or just a special group or department within a company.  For example, in a research facility, a wiki could be used by a group of scientists or engineers that are working on a specific project or technology and need to be able to share information with each other instantly.  This technology could reside with a 3rd party host (www.wikia.com) or could be installed directly on a server within your network.

I don’t mean to be the poster child for wiki technology, but there are several practical business uses for the technology in today’s business economy.  Wouldn’t it be nice to use something that is FREE for a change and save the company or organization some money?

Almost 24 million Canadians age 2+ online in a  month are spending an average of 46 hours online per person.  94% of the online population perform a search, 85% of the online population stream a video and view an average of 120 videos per month, and 85% of the online population visit social networking sites.  Canadians are heavily involved in online communities.  Canadians are engaging more online in both time and reach of users than the United States.  Online usage across the globe is increasing rapidly, though.

Internet shares of media usage are growing substantially across all age groups.  Adults 18-24 and 25-34 spend a larger portion of their time with the internet.  People spend more time on the internet than reading newspapers and magazines.  Concurrent use of television and the internet account for half of a persons daily media consumption.  A majority of people are even using both the internet and television at the same time. Internet reach actually exceeds the reach of television from 7am to 11am.

Numbers are significantly lower in rural areas due to the high cost of internet access and the lack of high speed technologies.  Newer technologies are slowly changing this, but it will take significant time for these communities to catch up.

The top visiting web sites in Canada are Google, Microsoft Sites, Facebook, Yahoo Sites, eBay, Wikimedia Sites, Ask Network, Amazon Sites, Apple Inc., AOL LLC.  Google is obviously the top site here in Canada.

Growth areas are services, search/navigation, conversational media, photos, and communities of women.  These fast growing communities are quickly shaping the realm of these environments.

Canadians are changing the way they communicate.  User-generated content is exploding in Canada.  Facebook and YouTube are at the forefront of this growth.  The top growing sites worldwide are tagged.com, bebo.com, orkut.com, friendster.com, hi5.com, facebook.com, and myspace.com.  Canadians are spending about 380 minutes per visitor user per month in social media environments.

Social networking is reaching across demographics as far as age and location.  Obviously, with the younger groups more active, but the older age group are mostly concentrated on LinkedIn.com.

This course wasn’t just available to students of the university, but was also available to anyone in these communities that wanted to actively join the class.  Everything was linked together via RSS feeds and used Skype video to video conference with each other.

One thing that needs to be stressed is that you have to give back to the community for the common good.  You need to actively participate in these environments as socially responsible individuals and help to add value to the community.

Students were asked to get involved, create podcasts in the communities around them.  The expectations were that students knowledge of this environment were not very high and also creating an open course that added value.  It took time for the students to find social media value and slowly became actively involved throughout the semester.

Challenges that affect content creators is monetization.  Falling CPMs and placement of the ads are just among the challenges that are faced.  The economy is taking its toll on all factors within these communities.  All of the conventional ad models are on the decline.  Placement is relying on the fact that people aren’t blindly ignoring them.

But, an alternative is to charge for your podcast.  But, then, do people want to actually pay for content, when they can go to another site and get it for free.  There are a lot of things that take play in this realm.

You have to remember that ethically, it is about the community, first.  It is about trust and the perception of your audience.  You want to be able to convert these trusted contacts and start monetizing on your audience.

Remember, it is about results.  Track and analyze everything.

Government is a social environment for people to interact with a two-way communication.  Two-way communication is important in a web 2.0 world.  Participation, transparency, and collaboration are three words that can best describe Government 2.0.

There are 1.5 billion people online today.  YouTube alone will get 350 million visits today.

But, what does this mean for Government 2.0 in Canada?  Governments are now looking at and using open-source technology and also using wikis for collaboration within their internal environments.  Most public servants are still waiting for someone to take the lead and guide them.

Best Practices can be found here:  http://government20bestpractices.pbwiki.com

The Canadian Census Dept. has created a discussion forum for people to interact with each other.  They are slow to take hold within government, but gaining slow momentum.

These agencies are also starting to leverage RSS feeds and mobile accessible portals.  So, there is more and more of a digital communications integrated plan.  People are experimenting with using Twitter to create two-way communication among different populations.

Government best practices are still being tested with trial and error.  Be smart when planning and moving into social media environments.

What is your target?  Think about what it is you want to gain from participating in a social media environment.  This is also going to help define your target public.

Remember the timescales.  Everything that happens in a social media environment happens in real time.  It doesn’t just come out once or twice a day like the newspaper or a telelvision news program, but can happen every second of every day.  This arena can also give you a heads-up on what is happening in mainstream media.  Things happen online about 2 weeks before they are actually picked up by the traditional media.

There are free tools and professional tools that can be used to help measure these environments.  You need to use multiple tools and layer them against each other to get a true analysis.  The key is being able to interpret the data collected to show how effective your campaign was.

Four things that you should measure are:

1. Measure Flow:
   1. measure the flow of information
2. Measure Content
   1. measure the content of the discussion, see if there is anything good or bad within the conversation
   2. what is motivating people to write the things they are about a product or service?
   3. what is the tone and relevance of the conversation?
   4. what is the prominence of your brand within the content?
3. Measuring Creators
   1. how influencial is the creator and did he care about the topic of the post?
   2. how engaged are these creators; are they sharing the content via social technologies?
   3. are they persistent about writing and talking about your company?
4. Measure Community
   1. Think velocity:  how many people are talking about your company in a given day?
      1. The speed of the discussion can happen very quickly, like thousands of people in a single day.

These are just some great guidelines when measuring your social media involvement.

Word of Mouth is one of the most trusted sources of content.  Patientslikeme.com is an example of a site that allows medical patients help each other live better daily lives.

Social PR/Social Communications say that all content must now be created and packaged in small pieces for easy mixing, sharing, and consuming.  Small and small is how the end-consumer will better effectively receive information.  An important concept in social media is that you are allowing your content to be shared with everyone else in the world.

Fund raising is one of the most discussed topics in social media.  There are other ways to utilize this technology in your non-profit.  Social media can allow you to respect your end-user’s time.

Over 72% of people in the United States are connected.  Obama used this to his advantage to raise money and further his platform for being elected President of the United States.  Obama’s objective was to raise money to help meet his goal and he raised more that $500 million, with most donations being amounts less than $100.  There are still people on these sites talking about Obama even after he was elected.

Tweetsgiving is a good way for an organization to hold a donation event online via twitter. This site is free and using social media payment accounts to allow people to donate.  There are widgets that can be used in conjunction with this.  An example of these widgets would be one called ChipIn.  You can make it easy for many properties to share the same widget and collect donations from all over the world.

There are many people volunteering their time and energy to raise money for their local non-profits, also.  People all over are creating innovative ways to use social media to gather people around a cause.  This can be characterized as “Your New Volunteer Army.”  These army of social conscious individuals can make an impact to help charities all over the world.  All done with spreading the word around a great cause.

People can make change one connection at a time.

A good tip is to change the rhythm of your podcast to keep it interesting for the listener.  This is a good best practice that can be learned in any basic television production class.  Mark Blevis actually does a podcast of these types of tips for people that want to know more about producing these types of interesting programs for listeners.  These are content creators.

Producing for podcasts is very similar to producing for television and radio, but you need to keep in mind the end product.  The end product is going to be used on the internet, either downloaded or streaming.  First, you need to watch the content that you recorded and/or gathered and start to cut those spaces that are not interesting or have any relevance to the podcast that you are producing.  After editing, matching your audio and video content, and splicing the content blocks together, then you have a full experience.

This is a very similar way to the way a director/producer creates a documentary film.  Blevis is creating a mood with his podcasts and doesn’t include much narrative from himself.  Blevis usually sets parameters to his creative process, inluding:

• setting a general time limit for the end product of approximately 15 minutes
• make tough decisions to cut content that isn’t compelling for the end-user
  • Is the absence of content taking away from the story?
• be patient and take the time to create something worth watching

Reference: Mark Blevis, Sound Connections, Toronto, Canada