Ryan Anderson dot ca

Starting a new chapter in one’s life is always a bittersweet experience. The feeling of leaving something behind is often a difficult one, but the knowledge of continual growth and evolution more than makes up for the wistful feelings of nostalgia of turning the page.

As of this week, I’ve moved on from my position at Fuel Industries. Over the past three years, I’ve been a part of some amazing projects, worked with some insanely creative people, and learned a lot about the industry and about the importance of pushing the boundaries of creativity in everything I do. I enjoyed my time at Fuel, but the time has come to keep moving forward.

I’ll be unveiling the details of my evil plans over the next few weeks, but I’ve decided to return to the entrepreneurial ranks and launch my own company under the name Fat Canary Communications.  For now, I’ll be focusing on developing web and public relations strategies for a core group of clients with some help from a few colleagues, with the goal of growing the team as things progress.

Anyone who has ever left the safety of a full-time job with benefits to build a new company from the ground up will tell you that it’s as terrifying as it is rewarding… but in the end, nothing good comes without risk. Now that I’ve begun a new chapter, the excitement of filling the pages ahead is a great feeling.

We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.

- Walt Disney

No matter what you do, always keep moving forward.

As many of you know, I’ve always been involved with the local arts community.  Sadly, with the demands of a day job being what they are, I’ve not had as much time to devote as I would like – but the one piece of involvement that I have held onto is being on the board of the Ottawa Fringe Festival.

The Fringe, for the uninitiated, is a theatre festival where local, national and international performers converge, and over 10 days, put on over 300 performances (many, many more in some markets) and 100% of their box office takings go to the artists themselves.  The festival itself serves to organize venues, schedules and publicity, but the actual content of the shows is left completely up to the groups that are lucky enough to be selected.

Now, you may think that a not-for-profit theatre festival taking place in Ottawa where all of the box office proceeds go to the artists must be rolling around in thousand-dollar bills and diving into silos of gold boullion.  The reality, however, is that any charitable organization needs to squeeze every last cent they can out of a dollar, and reaching new audiences by buying full page newspaper ads is not even a consideration.

That’s why this year, the festival will be making a major change in focus to include a number of social media marketing initiatives to reach new communities, make new friends, and build the visibility of the festival both locally and on the international circuit.

Blogging. It’s a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised at how many organizations don’t blog about what they’re doing.  We made the conscious decision this year to hire a community manager who would blog not only about what we’re doing, but about what our performers are doing, what our sponsors are doing, and what our audience thinks of the shows.  We have two community managers manning the blog this year, and no doubt other staff and volunteers will get involved as the festival kicks off.

Commenting & Feedback. We started allowing comments on individual show pages last year with some trepidation.  We were afraid of companies trying to sabotage one another, performers complaining about bad reviews… and there was not one issue.  This year, audience members are free to review shows directly on the site, for all the world to see.

Facebook. We’ve had a Facebook group and fan page for a while, but this year, thanks to Refresh Partners, we also have an application that allows users to search for shows they want to see, share it with their friends, and buy tickets directly.  When you select a show you want to see, it sends a notice to your newsfeed, letting friends know the shows you’re attending and when.

Flickr. When you’re dealing with an event that is fairly hard to explain in words, photos are a powerful way of conveying emotion.  As always, we have an official Fringe photographer, but this year, we’re lucky enough to have a photographer who is doubling as community manager and reaching out to local photography enthusiasts to set up a public photography contest for the Festival.  Every day, a winner is chosen from the public Flickr pool, their photo printed and posted at the Fringe tent, and linked online – and the photographer submitting the best photo of the festival, as chosen by our judges, is awarded a gift certificate for dinner at a local restaurant.

Video. A few years ago, wrestling with the idea of video was next to impossible.  Connection speeds, technology, processing tools and know-how was far out of reach, but now that it’s trivial to take a video on a cell phone and upload it to Youtube, there’s no reason for organizations NOT to integrate video into their web strategy.  This year, in addition to gonzo interviews from the festival we’re partnering with local startup Eventbots to place a speaker’s corner-style video booth at the Fringe Courtyard.  Videos are going to be posted on the Ottawa Fringe site, on Facebook and on Youtube to give people a first-hand account of what the Fringe is about.

Real Life – the ultimate social network. At the end of the day, the festival is about art and people – and that’s something that can ultimately only be experienced in person.  Our goal this year was to put ourselves out there, and make some friends.  To solidify those friendships, we’re holding a Social Media Wine and Cheese on the first Saturday of the festival (June 21), where we can meet with members of the community, discuss ways that we can better engage with local communities and improve visibility for the upcoming years.  If you’re an Ottawa blogger, and want to attend, just shoot me an email to ryan (at) ryananderson dot ca, and I’ll give you some more details.

In theatre terms, what we’re doing is a bit of a social media dress rehearsal.  Some parts have been sloppy, some have been surprisingly polished, but the organization has learned every step of the way and sometimes, that’s the way you have to do things.  At the end of this festival, we’re hoping to have a block of clay that we can shape into something that will last for years to come.

If you’re in Ottawa, I hope you’ll join us at the Festival, running June 19 – 21 in the heart of Downtown Ottawa.

When noise first started being made about Twitter, I immediately dismissed it as a nonsensical waste of time that only the geekiest of social media geeks could ever love.  Finally, I gave in to all the talk about microblogging and figured that if I should at least try it before clients started asking me about it.  I figured I would give it a chance for a month and see where it went from there.  I have to say… I’m a convert, and have been evangelizing it to many people for the past few weeks.  These are just some of the reasons I think it’s worth at least trying:

1. The connection is much more genuine.  I’ve found that it’s very hard to get a sense of who someone is by their blog.  There’s a certain amount you can tell about their sense of humour, but in most cases, people have blogging personas.  With Twitter, the combination of the profound and the banal leads to a much more personal connection with the people in your network.  It’s not as personal as IM, of course, but it’s as personal as a public conversation is ever going to be.
2. It has a low barrier to entry.  I don’t know about you, but writing blog posts takes me a long time.  There are times when I have a lot to say, but cannot bring myself to write it down.  There are other times when I have something to share, but don’t feel that it warrants a blog post.  Because it’s easy to produce and consume, Twitter is an ideal forum for these situations.
3. It’s easy to connect.  I have a lot of respect for far more bloggers than I can realistically read in one day.  Connection also has a low barrier to entry, and unlike subscribing to yet another RSS feed, it’s easy to deal with the content, since it only comes at you 140 characters at a time.
4. It’s a persistent connection to your social graph.  I’m connected via blog only when I’m writing or have my nose in my feed reader, which, depending on how many of those pesky clients want me to earn my day rate, can be very little.  The fact that it is tied into your mobile phone, via SMS or data, allows me to keep on top of things on the road, driving down the highway or waiting to be pried out of a smoldering car wreck caused by Tweeting while driving down the highway.
5. News travels fast.  Thanks to being connected to extremely plugged-in individuals and those who live-tweet events, I’ve found out about a number of things I’m interested in before they even hit the web.  In reality, does it matter if you don’t find out about who’s buying Livejournal for another 10 minutes?  Probably not, but it’s one of the most efficient social news networks I’ve ever seen.
6. There’s a real community.  I’ve asked for help and I’ve helped people who asked.  The blogosphere has that vibe too, but there’s less of a chance that someone is going to ask for help via their blog.  Before I left for Singapore, I asked via Twitter if anyone had any tips for presenting to an Asian audience.  Shel Israel emailed me a few minutes later to introduce me to Jeremiah who gave some invaluable advice and James Seng, who I met and had an excellent talk with when I was there.  This probably says more about Shel being an exceptionally nice guy than it does about Twitter, but this is but one example of many.

Within a few weeks of using the service, Twitter had already become one of the most powerful connection tools I used, and continues to be useful.  Certainly, it has its downfalls – the ease of posting has made me lazy about blogging regularly (which Brendan was quick to chastise me for at Third Tuesday) and if not properly managed, it can become an honest-to-goodness time sucker.

I honestly believe after my experience that if you haven’t given Twitter (or microblogging in general) a chance, you haven’t really joined the conversation.  The motto of the blogosphere is about conversation, but it’s not really suited to honest-to-goodness conversation.  We write blog posts like articles, and the responses, either in comments or in the echo chamber are time-consuming to keep track of.  There is a real conversation going on within the Twitter community that includes blogs, photos and everything else – and is inherently a dialogue rather than monologue with some follow-up.

If it helps, just think of it as a persistent chat room that’s invite only and completely public.

Bonus links:  What the Web strategist should know about Twitter.

Despite the fact that Third Tuesday Ottawa was held on the first Monday of December, and despite the fact that 40cm of white fluffy pain fell on the city during the day, the night, which featured Richard Brinhammer of Direct2Dell fame, was definitely a successs.

To be honest, Richard was not what I expected from a living, breathing social media case study. Far from a utopian social media zealot, he’s a gruff, opinionated, and extremely intelligent communicator who is surprisingly pragmatic about the role of social media. That said, there’s no question that he’s a believer in what Dell is doing with Direct2Dell and Ideastorm.

A few things stood out at me in his recounting of his experience with Dell’s online reputation management. First, he mentioned that their methodology is still getting reports from Technorati and Google, and bringing them all together in an Excel sheet. Dell is mentioned over 4,000 times per day. What’s your excuse for not listening to what bloggers are saying about your company?

He also mentioned that when responding to bloggers, Technorati ranking is never considered. In his words, “we don’t know where the next perfect storm will come from.” Technorati scores are great for a lot of things, but it’s hardly a reflection of a blog’s true influence. If I have 100 readers, but they’re all named Scoble, Israel and Arrington, then I’ve got more influence than many bloggers with thousands of readers.

I think the comment that resonated with me the most was when Richard said that the main effect of blogging and interacting with the blogosphere was that Dell “started worrying less about transactional relationships and more about relationship relationships.” Given my recent post on the subject of transaction, it was nice to have my thinking validated.

It was nice to put a real face to the example we all pull out when clients ask us about blogging, because it reminded me of something that I think we all need to be reminded of from time to time – at the end of the day, social media is not about corporate strategy and ROI. It’s about people. From what I saw, Richard is good people.

At around noon today, celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton “broke” the news of Castro’s death.  The first post was followed by another announcing that official announcements would be made shortly.  Then another.  Finally, when every reputable news source in the world confirms that he is indeed alive, Hilton stands by his story.

This will either prove that a democratized system of free citizen journalism by all is a far more effective system than a centralized corps of professional journalists… or, that bloggers are full of shit.

Either way, the fact that one post could incite a media frenzy around the world gives one pause to think of the collective power of the blogosphere.  Also, reading the comments on PerezHilton.com gives one pause to consider how bad manditory sterilization by the government would really be.

Everyone knows someone who absolutely should blog, but doesn’t. Someone with a ton of insight to share with the world, who would genuinely improve the overall quality of the content online.  My friend and former boss Bernie Gauthier was such a person until about a month ago.  Since then, he’s written some of the best and most thoughtful posts I’ve read in the industry.

Bernie is one of the smartest PR minds I have ever met, and is an excellent writer to boot.  This is definitely one for the RSS reader as his posts are far between, but as high a quality as you could ask for. It’s an interesting read especially because he tends to stay out of the typical conversations that get rehashed over and over, which is refreshing.  He runs a PR firm and is finishing a PhD. in communications, so his insight tends to combine an academic approach along with an industry background.

His most recent post is an excellent argument for transparency and establishing trust in business, linking low voter turnouts to the rise of consumers increasingly eschewing traditional ways of buying and instead opting for direct selling and purchasing through sites like ebay and craigslist.  Good reading.

http://www.bernardgauthier.ca

Bernie, I’ll be expecting that cheque in my mailbox.

It’s an odd feeling, to suddenly lose touch with something that has been so much a part of your life for years. Blogging, and more importantly, reading blogs has been part of my professional routine since about 2004. I’ve taken time off, but it’s only been for a short time. Every time, it feels weird.

I’ve been a bad blogger for the past couple of months. The twelve-or-so hour days I’ve been working for the past month as we put together a major project at work put my conversation with the blogosphere on hiatus. I read (skimmed) a lot of the blogs that I normally read, but I had no real time to respond, to engage or to really think critically about what’s going on in the profession.

It felt weird, too. It felt like I wasn’t on top of my game. Like I wasn’t up-to-date. Like I wasn’t part of the conversation. In short, it made me realize how valuable this whole blogging thing is to what I do every day. No, it doesn’t directly influence the minutia of my day most of the time, but it certainly effects the lens through which I view it.

This feeling tells me a lot about what blogging really is. It gives a whole new layer of understanding to why I’m so consistently annoyed when people talk about blogging’s ROI, or try to put this exercise in any kind of business terms, really. It’s roughly the same as trying to quantify the ROI on human interaction. You get benefits from it, but I don’t know how you could put it in financial terms… and I really don’t care to.

Anyway, the long and the short of this is that I’m happy to be back to the conversation. So… did I miss anything?

I highly recommend that you check a new addition to the world of PR blogs – 42 Points on a Double Word Score, written by my good friend Joe Boughner. He’s insightful and a great writer, and deserves some healthy traffic.

http://www.joeboughner.ca

I have a confession to make. I am lonely. Painfully so. I didn’t realize this until today, but thankfully, I had University of Calgary professor Michael Keren to inform me of this through an article on Canoe about his new book, “Blogosphere: The New Political Arena.”

I admit that I have not read the book, but if the article accurately depicts its thesis, then it is painfully stupid.

Keren is quoted as saying:

in this world of blogging, which the whole world can read, you have a personal expectation about a readership that’s just not there for the millions of bloggers who are writing their personal feelings.

Many of us end up like Father McKenzie in the ‘Eleanor Rigby’ Beatles song, who is writing a sermon that no one is going to hear. Some of us are going to be embraced by the mainstream media, but the majority of us remain in the dark, remain in the loneliness.

While it’s true that many blogs are written about personal topics, Keren’s description of the blogosphere seems to equate all bloggers as a homogeneous mass. The nine blogs that he follows and chronicles for the purposes of the book seem to be what we would refer to as “cat blogs;” as in someone that blogs the minutia of their lives, including what their cat did today.

To then apply this type of blogger to the rest of the blogosphere is not only ridiculous, it’s academically irresponsible. His description of these particular bloggers as sad and lonely may well be correct, but his statistically irrelevant sample size can certainly not be extrapolated onto the blogosphere (which, remember, is the title of the book) as a whole.

Beyond being reductive, this analysis ignores the core reality of the blogosphere as a major social change. Individually, bloggers do not matter, this much is true. The real social change comes from the democratization of the tools of distribution, once only held by a few. Together, bloggers represent the potential for a major force of change. To equate this force to a few bloggers who live in the woods and talk about their dead cat is like someone in the fifteenth century saying that the printing press is just a bunch of weirdo monks just making bibles.

I’m not naive enough to believe that every blogger is making a social change – they’re not, and frankly, there is a lot of crap out there. The great thing about the web is that not everything has to be good, but the crap can easily be filtered out.

Another, much better article on the book touches on the veracity of blogs:

Although the medium offers seemingly unlimited freedom of expression, Keren said bloggers too often shape public opinion by reporting distorted versions of the facts.

“Social dialogue and political dialogue must be marked by restraint — one of the victims of the blogging phenomenon is the truth,” he said.

I’d just like to emphasize for lovers of irony everywhere that the first paragraph was written by a Sun Media journalist – the same franchise which, on numerous occasions, has referred to the Ontario Liberal Party as “fiberals.”

Keren does have a valid point, however, about not believing everything you read. The thing about the blogosphere is that it has an excellent bullshit detector. If I were to write something blatantly false, someone (probably Joe) would call me out, either in comments or in another blog. The more influential I am, the larger this effect.

Again, individually, the credibility of blogs is suspect, but in the aggregate, most errors will likely be found out and called out. Furthermore, the natural bias of an unedited personal opinion is evident, and it should come as a surprise to no one that nothing written in any one blog should be considered above suspicion. To me, what is far more harmful is the facade that anything in the mainstream media is true and unbiased. Anyone working in the media knows that this is often far from the truth, but sadly, many consider the print and television news as the unbiased truth.

The reality is that there are good bloggers and bad bloggers, PR bloggers, cat bloggers, political bloggers and a whole lot more. Some are self-interested, some are as unbiased as any newspaper. Some, I’m sure, are lonely and some lead rich lives and are among the most influential and intelligent people in the country.

However, as long as we’re toting out stereotypes of lonely, ineffectual individuals with no relevance outside their small and insulated peer group, I can think of a few about academics.

Fellow Canuck Darren Barefoot just posted a survey asking people why they blog. Hey, I’m down with helping. Take his five-minute survey here.

Bonus Link:

Darren’s excellent Second Life spoof.