Posted by Joe on Mar 15, 2009 in
IMC 619 In today’s busy business world, it is becoming increasingly important to manage ones time for both personal and business. For many professional individuals, it is necessary to keep track of the time spe
nt working on different projects. One tool that has been developed to help with this is Tiktrac.
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.
Tags: business, employee, employee tracking, internet, intranet, management, Personal, project, project management, reports, Tiktrac, time, time management, time sheets, timesheet, track, tracking
Posted by Joe on Mar 15, 2009 in
IMC 619 Video on the web has become a mainstay and is growing by leaps and bounds every year. Sites like YouTube have made it increasingly easier for people and businesses to post and share video. But, there are still things that need to be remembered when planning to use video online.
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.
Tags: communication, company, format, internet, marcom, marketing, marketing communication, organization, pr, public relations, video, youtube
Posted by Joe on Mar 15, 2009 in
IMC 619 “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge,” (mediawiki). Wiki technology was developed in 1994 and has grown by leaps and bounds in the past 15 years. Wikis can be used for a plethora of both internal and external communication tactics.
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?
Tags: 1994, collaboration, communication, free, internet, pr, public relations, technology, web, wiki, wikia, wikimedia, Wikipedia
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
nt working on different projects. One tool that has been developed to help with this is Tiktrac.
