Posted by Joe on Feb 22, 2009 in
IMC 619 How are Canadians using social media tools? This data is according to research provided by ComScore.
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.
Tags: bookmarking, Canada, Canadiens, communication, comScore, internet, journalism, media, networking, online, pr, public relations, social, social bookmarking, social media, social networking, statistics, tools, world wide web
Posted by Joe on Feb 22, 2009 in
IMC 619 The University of Ontario has created a class that exists solely within social media environments. This was created as a Master’s level class within the Journalism dept. and was created on a social networking site called 
Ning. Other tools used were twitter, delicious, facebook, skype, and rabble.ca.
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.
Tags: college, facebook, higher ed, higher education, journalism, learning, media, new, new media, ning, pr, public relations, skype, social, social media, twitter, university
Posted by Joe on Feb 21, 2009 in
IMC 619 There challenges and strategies to monetizing your blogs and podcasts. Important factors to keep in mind is 
how well your content is and how relevant your content is. People want good content that is also relevant to what is happening so the end-user can relate.
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.
Tags: blogs, challenges, community, CPM, media, monetizing, money, new media, perception, social, social media
Posted by Joe on Feb 21, 2009 in
IMC 619 It isn’t about the tools that are available anymore, it is about the individual. But, what is Government 2.0?
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.
Tags: best practices, Canada, government, media, mobile, pr, public relations, rss, social, social media, tactics, twitter, youtube
Posted by Joe on Feb 21, 2009 in
IMC 619 The important things that get executives heads moving is measurement. If we want to create objectives and a social media plan, we need to be able to measure the outcome to create best practices for the future.
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:
- Measure Flow:
- measure the flow of information
- Measure Content
- measure the content of the discussion, see if there is anything good or bad within the conversation
- what is motivating people to write the things they are about a product or service?
- what is the tone and relevance of the conversation?
- what is the prominence of your brand within the content?
- Measuring Creators
- how influencial is the creator and did he care about the topic of the post?
- how engaged are these creators; are they sharing the content via social technologies?
- are they persistent about writing and talking about your company?
- Measure Community
- Think velocity: how many people are talking about your company in a given day?
- 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.
Tags: analytics, communication, content, discussion, global, information, internet, measure, measurement, media, online, pr, public relations, social, social media, world
