Win 2 VIP Tickets To #PepsiPopUp @Lights Acoustic Performance in Toronto!!!

OK, I just got word about this contest I can run for you, my loyal readers. Electro-pop sensation Lights will officially kick off the Pepsi Taste Challenge at the all-new ‘Pepsi Pop-Up space’ at 315 Queen Street West in Toronto. There she’ll delight Pepsi fans by administering the popular Pepsi Taste Challenge and performing an exclusive acoustic set on Wednesday, June 26 beginning at 2:30 pm. The official Twitter hashtag for the Pepsi Pop Up is #PepsiPopUp for those of you who want to follow the action online. The contest I get to run is hooking one person up with two VIP tickets to this launch event!!! Details below!!! You know you want to check this out, I mean just look at that picture of Lights below, she knows how to play a keytar! You know a musician is awesome when they can bust out a keytar! (Although she probably won’t tomorrow, it being an acoustic set.)

Pics From When I Met Michael Nus, Casie Stewart, & Other Awesome Folks At #KloutTO

My friend @MichaelNus recently wrote a post on his blog called “The Day I Met Chris Brooker.” The post, which I’m given to understand will be one of a series, is a great post by a superb gentleman about @cbrooker, someone whom I cannot begin to express enough praise. Chris Brooker is a really special human and I am privileged to know him. Nus’ post brought to mind the day I met a bunch of different people involved in social media and tech in Toronto (I refuse to call it the “Social Media Scene” or the “Twitterati”) and then somehow it got brought to mind last night by a complete different person in a completely unrelated manner.

It all started when Sandy aka @sassygirlcanada tweeted this:

I was just thinking about the first people I met #IRL from twitter!! Can you remember the first people you met in person? 🙂

— SandyT (@sassygirlcanada) February 7, 2013

Which led to my friend Raymond Motee aka @FunkyBarrister replying with this:

@sassygirlcanada First person was @LateJuly. First tweetup was #GirlsNightTO where I met @fragileheart & @TheDanLevy among others.

— Raymond M. (@FunkyBarrister) February 7, 2013

That tweet brought me into the conversation and brought to night the aforementioned night when I first met in the real world people from Twitter. The night was an awesome one hosted by Klout. They called it #KloutTO (yes, amazingly that hashtag search still brings in results from June 2010!) and I met a bunch of stupendous individuals many of whom I count among my friends today including Team SidewalkHustle: @TristanBanning & @HawleyDunbar, Casie Stewart (@casiestewart), Michael Nus, Chris Brooker, Joallore (@clickflickca), Dave (now @BlueFoxCA and not in Toronto but he had a different Twitter handle back then), and many others who right now I can’t remember that I actually met them on that day. I went that day even though I wasn’t an “influencer” which was the reason Klout was throwing the party for the influencers and due to a partnership with Virgin America Airlines and was immediately welcomed into this group of the “cool kids.”

I tweeted this with that rush of fond memories warming my brain:

TweetDeck For Chrome & The Massive Wasting of Screen Real Estate. Why?

I have been using TweetDeck for Chrome at work for the past bit and this is one thing that just astounds me about the client. I have no idea why this is, I truly don’t.

I would love to know why Twitter (which now owns TweetDeck) decided to do this with their client. The latest version – 1.4 – was last updated April 27, 2012 and I don’t use the in Chrome app all that much preferring, at home, to use the old Adobe AIR client (which was last updated before TweetDeck got bought by Twitter and they switched the format of it to a native app.) As far as I can tell, you can’t even make the columns skinnier so as to fit more of them on the screen (which you can do with the old Adobe AIR version of the app).

When you look in the Chrome Store at the images they show of the app, they show the Mac version which doesn’t seem to suffer from this horrendous waste of space (see above) but at the same time it also doesn’t allow/have more than three columns on a page which is still downright odd.

If you know a work around for this or simply how to remedy the situation please do let me know! (Suggesting I use a different client isn’t what I’m looking for unless it is one which has sprung up to replace the Adobe AIR version of TweetDeck which Twitter has seemingly abandoned). Until then, it seems as if Twitter may be very successful in their apparent goal of driving people into the hands of other third-party API accessing Twitter apps and away from the one they spent a lot of money buying, TweetDeck.

TweetDeck for Chrome Mac image taken from Chrome Web Store.

Twitter In The University/College Classroom

This past summer when I was at York University for the Rogers Cup I got to talking to a Health Sciences professor – Professor Christopher Ardern – about social media and its place in a university class. There are the obvious uses for many types of social media in a college setting such as creating a group on Facebook so people can keep in touch with one another and with their Teacher’s Assistant(s) and/or Professor without “friending” them.

However, being the huge Twitter addict that I am I soon found the conversation veering towards that social media outlet. (OK, I steered it there.) Professor Arden told me how he would be teaching a higher level course with a smaller class size than any first year or second year classes. It was then that I asked him if anyone had ever tried using a hashtag for the course to foster discussion between different students in different universities taking a course on the same subject matter and he told me no one ever had.

The way I pictured it as I was discussing it with him would be a after consultation with the professor’s peers teaching similar (or even the same) material they could agree on a hashtag. This predetermined hashtag would then be written into the syllabus and given to each student in each of the university classes at the beginning of the course. The hashtag could then be used to “increase the size of the class” by adding students from different universities to the conversation. As well, it would be beneficial because although each class is learning the same material each professor has his or her own teaching style and method of explaining concepts. Students would be able to have the benefits of more than one person explaining concepts to them so if they didn’t quite understand one professor’s method, another’s might make everything clear to them.

This hashtag could or could not be monitored depending on the preference of the different professors and students would understand this beforehand. This has the benefit, though, of being reliably from a different similarly accredited professor and not just off some random website or Wikipedia.

Professor Arden did mention after our talk that he was considering doing a trial run of my hashtag suggestion for his upcoming winter semester course. However, I never followed up with him (until earlier today) to see if he had tried it out. I will let you know what he says if/when he emails me back.

Any academics/students/professors out there reading this blog? Has this been tried already? What do you think of the idea? Let me know below!

Photos via Microsoft Office.

When Should An Event Get/Announce Its Hashtag?

As someone who has been to a number of events (as I’ve oft chronicled here with my “Event” tag) especially ones that are promoted on, geared towards, and inclusive of Social Media and the people on Social Media sites – specifically Twitter – I have noticed that leading up to or even at many events no one seems to know what the hashtag for the event is!

My thoughts about this really coalesced  into me writing what you’re reading now when I read this blog post by my friends over at Notable.ca: called Tweeting Your Way Through Events. Notable.ca and the article is targeted towards Young Professionals but, in my opinion, what’s mentioned in the article holds true for almost any demographic. They say that we find Twitter so useful because although “we make our own notes as writers at events and leave armed with media kits…being able to go back and have a digital diary of things we may have missed – plus the access to comments of others at the event – is always appreciated.”

NOTE: This post assumes you know what a “hashtag” on Twitter is and their purpose. If you don’t know, I suggest reading this article in the Twitter Help Center: “What Are Hashtags (“#” Symbols)?” before continuing.

I couldn’t agree more with the above assertion, it is EXTREMELY useful to be able to look up the hashtag before, during, and after an event to see what the buzz is about it, what’s going on at the event (if it’s big enough of an event there’s no way to be everywhere at once), and what happened at the event after the fact. The article goes on to say:

In this day and age, most organizers will create a designated Twitter hashtag and announce the hashtag ample times to promote the event and connect with their key audiences. It is important to let people know well in advance so they can follow along if they’re interested and engage using the same hashtag.

Unfortunately, in the article the Notable team never makes mention of what they define the terms “ample time” and “well in advance” to be in this situation so I thought I would offer my take on it.

Why Do Brands Expect Us To Find Them On Social Media?

As the title of this post implies today we are going to talk about brands and how they expect the consumer/customer to interact with them. I have been seeing quite a few ads and commercials recently where the advertiser wants to show their 21st Century savvy and how they are available on different social media platforms but they do it like you see in the picture above. The announce to the world (or whoever is seeing the ad) that, yes, they are present on those platforms but they seem to think that we all like to play a game of Where’s Waldo with them.

Waldo via Waldo Wiki

 I mean, I loved sitting on trips with my family when I was a kid and opening one of the Where’s Waldo books but that was recreational and something to do when we were sitting in an airport/on a plane/in a car and had nothing better to do. The point of advertising and being present on the various social media platforms is so that the consumer and potential customers can engage with the brand/advertiser. Don’t make it difficult for us!

This shouldn’t be news to anyone either. Heck, I recently was in the the new shop on Queen St West called Community 54 where they have old arcade video games from way back in the day. One of those games, Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey, was from late enough (1996) that they thought it relevant to mention that the game had a site on this newfangled thing called the Internet. But they didn’t just announce this fact, they didn’t put “WE ARE ON THE INTERNET” and expect people to go out and find them. If you look in the picture below you can see exactly what they wrote because I snapped a picture of it.

They told people to “Check out these WEB sites” and then listed them. Done. Consumer can easily interact with those two websites assuming they had computers and access to the Internet. But at leas they didn’t lose them in the potentially interested person having to do any work to engage with the brand.

Some more examples below:

And

To be fair, the second one of the above pictures, from Union Station in Toronto, they did point to the account @unionstationTO on Twitter for us to engage with but they didn’t bother for some reason with Facebook to do the same. My guess as to why this is is because they didn’t bother to get a custom URL for their page before printing up this signage (they have’t, it seems, bothered to register a custom URL even to this day). This is just laziness plain and simple (in my opinion).

In conclusion, this is a message to all Brands, Advertisers, and Marketers: Remove barriers to engagement don’t erect them.

Have you seen similar displays as I pictured above? Have you ever gone out and actually engaged with a brand afterward or did you just say screw it because it was too much work? Let me know in the comments below.

(And in case you are wondering, no I have never bothered looking into the above pictured brand’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. As well, here’s a link provided by the Way Back Internet Machine for Gretzky.com in 1998. I couldn’t get Midway.com because it just redirects to Warner Bros which bought their assets in 2009 when Midway went bankrupt.)

Brands: ‘Tis NOT Better To Have Loved & Lost, Than Never To Have Loved At All (Online)

In his poem ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’ 19th Century English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote:

‘Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

But this post is going to dispute that when it comes to corporate communications on Twitter. Well, OK, not really out and out dispute it because I wasn’t in love with the brand I am referring to in the tweet about (which you can find here) but I felt a little bit of poetry would class up the post.

What I was referring to in the tweet above is a brand who engaged with myself and a friend when we started talking about an article I read in LifeHacker. I thought this was one of the most brilliant things I had read that day and planned to give it a try when my friend told me about a product that does just this and she uses it all the time. I tweeted at the brand who makes the product in question – which as far as we knew was not available in Canada – and asked if it was available in Canada and the replied fairly quickly and told us that, yes, it was available in Canada.

To say we were happy is an understatement. I quickly went out to try and find this item at one of the chains mentioned and came up empty. I checked the chain’s online web catalog and came up empty. Each time I made a step following the advice of that brand I tweeted back at them what I was doing and the results. They never answered. It has been the better part of two weeks and still, they haven’t answered. In that time they have tweeted 15 times, the last time being on January 14th and not one time did they respond. (The first time when they did reply and tell us some info it took them about 12 hours.)

It would be one thing if they had never replied in the first place to our tweets, I would be totally fine with that because not every company and brand monitors all aspects of their social media presence, preferring to register their name and just leave it. This is the reality of the world we live in and no harm no foul if that’s the case. It would also be, sort of OK if they only came on once a month to respond to queries and hadn’t been online since the day they told me and my friend their product was available at Chain X and weren’t present to see my response. But they have been available, they have been present, they have been not only tweeting but interacting with other Twitter users and ignoring me is just bad for business. Doing this makes me feel as if I were talking to the Volcano Insurance Salesman that Peter dealt with in an episode of Family Guy from a long while back (best quality I can find.)

Do you think pretending not to be there while answering and interacting with other people is really going to have a positive response? It won’t. You’re just pissing potential customers off and ruining any relationship you may have had with them.

I have waited a while (more than 10 days) to write this blog post because I wanted to give the brand a chance to redeem themselves. They haven’t.

Better to not be doing it all than to be doing it wrong.