Carman Pirie's Blog

Changing things

First off, this is brilliant. Secondly, it's a great example of a new type of citizen engagement and how the way of changing things is changing. (Note: the video has since been taken down. For those in Halifax, the video was the now almost famous HRM Hitler spoof.)

Social Media and Sales

(Originally posted over at Kula Partners. We'd love it if you subscribed!)

I had the pleasure of speaking last week at the December meeting of the Professional Sales Council here in Halifax. They were a great group - lots of fantastic questions, lovely conversation, etc. This got me thinking a bit about the use of social media by sales people and, more broadly, by sales organizations. 

Of course, not all sales gigs are the same. Many of the people I know who make their living in sales are on the more technical / consultative side of the “sales game”. Which is to say, they do not position themselves as someone you buy from simply because they have access to a range of products or services. Rather, they want you to buy from them because they have a certain expertise - they know more about these products and services and how they should be used. 

It seems to me that if this is the kind of sales you’re in, you should most likely have a blog. Integrate it with your sales efforts... direct prospects and clients to it... give of your knowledge and expertise... overall, choose to lead. It will pay dividends more than you know. And, since many sales folks tend to move around a bit, it’s a nice way of ensuring that you’re building your own brand as well as that of your current employer. 

Further, if you manage a sales organization, you should be thinking seriously about a corporate social media presence that includes your sales professionals each blogging about their particular area of expertise. So many industries are ripe for this sort of leadership. 

Announcing Kula Partners

Originally announced late yesterday afternoon on Twitter and via email, our new agency Kula Partners is now live! 

Here’s an excerpt from the email announcement for the Coles Notes version: 

I'm ecstatic to announce that I have formed a partnership with Jeff White, heretofore owner of Brightwhite Design Group, to launch Kula Partners - an agency built for our hyper-social world. Which is to say that we see the evolution of the internet, the rapid adoption of social media, and the increasing role technology is playing in our lives as something more than "just another medium". Or, put another way, it's the difference between marketing that uses tools available these days and marketing built for the way things work these days. 

We’re just incredibly excited about the launch of Kula Partners. It’s been quite a few months in the making and now the real work begins. 

A special thank you to Hugh MacLeod for his work on our lovely cube grenade - I’ve been a HUGE fan of Hugh’s for the better part of a decade, and I’m honoured to have him be a part of the launch of Kula Partners. Just fantastic. 

Expect to hear a lot more from me over the next while about Kula Partners and what we’re up to. Interesting times!

Landlord Lou Blockbuster gets a Silver Digital Marketing Award

Cool to see last year's Landlord Lou campaign take home a Silver in Marketing Magazine's 2009 Digital Marketing Awards (pg 15). It was our first time working with the Picnicface folks - great fun. Joshua Bartlett, now soaking sun in Australia, built the site while handling all art direction and design duties. Amy Wheaton took care of, well, practically everything, as she does. And a big thanks as always to the lovely folks at Killam Properties for signing up to it all.

Chatting social media on the Webconomist show

Several weeks back, Giles Crouch was kind enough to have me on the Webconomist show, live on haligonia.ca.  For those who don't know about haligonia, they are "...a new and local online broadcaster that combines internet and television media with reality style shooting. We're all about instant local gratification". And well, who can't get behind instant local gratification?

What follows is a rather meandering, two-part chinwag surrounding social media for the most part. It was good to meet the folks at haligonia and the interview was fun - thanks Giles!  All of that to say, while I enjoyed it, your experience may well vary. In that event, give this Rory Sutherland TED Talk a try instead (HT @joelkelly).

Going to the Max

(Disclosure: Going to the Max was one of the last strategies I developed during my time with the good people at Colour.) 

Perhaps Joel started something with his Video Monday mention of Going to the Max, Atlantic Lottery Corporation’s latest campaign for the recently launched Lotto Max. Marketing Magazine covers it here. 

The brief for this campaign was pretty simple: Lotto Max - a bigger / better draw game than the soon-to-depart Super 7 - was about to launch. ALC was looking to raise awareness of the new game, targeting Atlantic Canadians (19-34). Without going into too much detail, that’s basically the Coles Notes of it. 

I started thinking about this by trying to think of ways to pull people together and give them something to do.... something (an experience, etc.) to share with each other. From there, if we could give them an easy way to share that experience with most everyone else they know, then we might be able to tell a little bit of the Lotto Max story along the way. That story - quite simply - being that Lotto Max is, well, bigger and better. Lottery dialed to 11, etc. 

So as I thought about lotteries in general, for some reason the picture of an old air mix lottery machine wouldn’t get out of my head. This led me to what I knew at the time as “zorbing” (it turns out this is a brand name for what is more generically known as sphering), a sort-of extreme outdoor bit of fun that involves two people strapping themselves inside a big plastic ball and rolling down a hill. With these two dots sort of connected, the rest fell into place rather quickly: 

• We could hold sphering events across Atlantic Canada 
• At the event, we could broadcast participant facial expressions from inside the ball side-by-side on large video screens... and all participants could vote on who had the best / funniest / etc face via text messaging. 
• Those same videos could then be posted online, where visitors could vote for their favorite video.
• Most importantly, those same videos are also easily shared with your friends. 
• And, basically, if there’s a silly / fun video of you rolling down a hill while strapped inside a plastic ball, there’s a pretty decent chance you’re going to share that - right? 

And... of course... 

• Participants could get a sample of Lotto Max at the event - preferably driving them to redeem online 
• And, in the process of finding out about this new lottery game, everyone gets to know that Lotto Max does things a bit bigger and a bit better than what your used to. 

Promotion of the events happened largely via Facebook and Twitter with some help from a YouTube video, as well as radio, print, and guerrilla activations (the spheres can attract a bit of attention). 

While I may well go into more detail in later posts, that’s the base thinking behind the campaign... essentially, success = bums-in-balls. The more people you can get strapped inside a sphere and sharing their video with others, the better. 

And, so far, it seems to be going pretty well - with many videos raking in thousands of views following very well attended sphering events (there’s still one to go!). I’m looking forward to seeing how everything goes over the next while. 

I should note that in addition to the many folks at Colour (Melissa, Suzanne, Joel, Jonathan, et al) who worked on this, a few Halifax-based folks also had a hand: Brightwhite Design, MGI Media, Spider Video, Time+Space and Agenda Managers. 

As always, I’d love to hear what you think of it all!

Next

It's official: Thursday was my last day at Colour. A great firm with lovely folks.

It's been a great ride for almost 4 years - time flies, etc. - but I am happy to report that my friendship with Colour and the entire team there remains.

As always, watch this space for what's next!

Auto-following on Twitter

I received an interview request from John Pollack of the Telegraph Journal last week asking my opinion of auto-follow services for Twitter and, specifically, Twollow – a Moncton-based offering. You can read the article by clicking here. 

What happened next is rather interesting. 

 First off, the owner of Twollow who was featured in the article tweeted: 

"To what end would you need 25,000 followers..." I'm sure that didn't come out right. @Pirie 

I responded rather promptly – originally with this, followed by this. 

And then a tweet came along directing people to this blog post from the folks at Twollow. While I find the magic-8-ball-esque attempt at understanding my commentary flattering, perhaps it’s best if I provide some assistance. Just before I do that, you should know that since the blog doesn’t appear to allow comments or trackbacks, I sent an email with some additional clarity to the contact on the site. Further, I followed up with an @reply to comforteagle. Now, 48 hours later, there’s been no acknowledgement of either. 

Here we go. 

First off, RE: 

1) Twollow doesn’t send messages. That’s up to you. 

2) “Unless a company is engaging in conversation with potential customers on Twitter and other social networking sites, the business is essentially broadcasting through twitter, Pirie says. 
“What it amounts to is spamming,” he says.” 
I’m sure Pirie didn’t know clarification Point 1 above, it just came out wrong, or he’s addressing people who just broadcast. 

Actually, I did know that. That Twollow doesn’t send messages is irrelevant. My point is pretty simple. In my view, Twitter (and social media more broadly) is about people connecting with people. i.e. Social media is social. It’s human-to-human interaction. In my experience, automating this via auto-follows on Twitter just runs against the grain of the space – it just is fundamentally not human-to-human contact. So all sorts of issues surface, chief among them is the utter lack of context. Try as you might, automating this process will always feel clunky at best, and most likely just plain fake and a nuisance. Ergo, I describe it as spammy. That sounds about right to me. 

And then, RE: 

3) “To what end would you need 25,000 followers, and what do you think you’re getting from there..” I feel weird defending other people’s words, but I’m pretty sure we’d all love to have 25,000 followers hanging on our every word about our businesses. We do. Well, almost 25k, 22k-ish now.  

No need to extend favours with a defense. It seems pretty obvious to me that having 25,000 followers on Twitter and having 25,000 followers hanging on your every word are two very different things. A follow target in and of itself is a false one – it’s meaningless, or masturbatory at the very least. 

Let’s examine via the following four Twitter profiles and their respective followers - as I write this, @twollow has 22,555 followers; @gapingvoid has 18,557 followers; @NS_Archives has 1,520 followers, and; @ecologyaction has 1,015 followers. In terms of measuring the respective value of each Twitter profile, let’s make it simple by saying that the value of a Twitter profile is directly correlated to the number of people who would give a shit if it went away. Measured thusly, ranked in order of most valuable to least, I’d say @gapingvoid is #1 with a bullet, @NS_Archives and @ecologyaction are neck and neck, and @twollow is dead last. And why would I say that? Because in the case of @gapingvoid, @NS_Archives and @ecologyaction, they’ve all built followers the old-fashioned way, to quote Smith Barney. They’ve become part of a community that truly values what they bring to the table. In the case of @twollow, it decodes as perhaps a touch too concerned with a race to a big number. There seems to be some customer service there – but it sort of pales in comparison to the number of followers at first glance, no? 

And this is almost always the case with auto-followers – they seem to make a social space less social and thus run counter to what the community really wants to do, connect to each other. Please note the “almost” above. This isn’t always the case, and there can certainly be legitimate business uses for auto-follow services, but so far they’re certainly the exception rather than the rule in my experience.

(Disclosure: The Nova Scotia Department of Tourism, Culture and Heritage is a client of my firm. However, we are not actively involved in the @NS_Archives Twitter profile.)

2049.ca and the Green at Heart movement

Visitors to Halifax’s famed, historic farmers market this weekend were surprised to find lifeboats hanging from the old Keith’s brewery and a SCUBA diver wandering about, among other anomalies. 

2049.ca marks the start of Killam Properties’ Green at Heart movement. For complete details on the Green at Heart movement and the change we’re hoping to help make, please take a look at Killam’s new blog. 

The 2049.ca idea is pretty basic admittedly. Halifax is a port city with our downtown core resting on a lovely little peninsula. While projections vary on the timing and severity of a rise in sea levels, one thing appears certain: If we don’t get our environmental act together pretty damn quickly, the water levels will rise to an extent that significantly impacts our ability to carry on living where we currently do. Simply put, in 2049 – just 40 years away – if we do not change how we live we could all be screwed. 

Most of us are far from perfect where the environment is concerned. We all know of things we could be doing to live more sustainably and we simply choose not to. The Green at Heart movement will seek to wake us all up a bit, to remind us to do our part and keep exploring new ways of living in an environmentally friendly way. 

I really love Killam’s approach to it all. They recognize that they too are far from perfect, that they don’t have all the answers and have a lot to learn. But they’re definitely working at getting better – dedicating more and more resources towards finding and implementing environmentally sustainable approaches and experimenting to find out what works and what doesn’t. Of course, apartment living itself is a rather environmentally friendly choice with certain environmental economies of scale, etc. 

It’ll be interesting to see where this leads us. I’d love to hear what you think about it all.

Social media training for agencies

(One of my favorite Hugh cartoons. You should read his blog and, while your at it, buy his book - it's fantastic.)

I spent the day this past Friday in Edmonton conducting a full-day “Social Media for Agencies” training (that’ll need a better title, but you get the picture) for the good people of Calder Bateman. 

Calder Bateman is an integrated ad / PR agency serving clients most often based in western Canada. And, well, they’re a seriously talented bunch. Good creative / PR / GR chops all around. You might want to check them out on twitter (@KiannM, @Jadelikethegem, @kiriwysynski, @justin_archer) or LinkedIn. Seriously lovely folks. 

To add more background, Colour has been collaborating with Calder Bateman on a project over the past 6-months – we’ve been providing the social media counsel and digital work, Calder Bateman the 'traditional' ad and PR stuff. It’s worked out well, and we’ve gotten on nicely. 

I’ve told a few friends about the seminar and they seem to find it sort of interesting. The idea being that doing a seminar for Calder Bateman amounts to training my own competition, so to speak. Canada’s a relatively small market, after all. 

But ya know, it’s been a lot of fun and rather challenging. It’s one thing to be sort of in the middle of it all as you’re building social media into an agency over time (as I’ve been doing at Colour for the past 3+ years), and quite another to endeavour to compress some of that learning into a day long seminar on building social media in while outlining the business model, etc. The feedback has been extremely positive thus far, and it’s certainly been a great experience for me. 

As I think of it, we didn’t really ever talk about the tools much. Calder Bateman is well beyond that, first off, plus the actual social media tools really do not matter all that much do they? (it’s the human interaction that matters, isn’t it?) The day started with a brief keynote – a sort of outlining of how I view things, just so people understand the built-in biases up front. We then moved through a social media planning framework that integrates across PR, customer service and marketing. Work in a host of case studies, some Q&A, breakout sessions, etc. and before you know it, it’s beer o’clock. 

So I don’t know, maybe there’s something to this. Working with agencies on baking social media into the agency – not just one-off seminars, but perhaps an ongoing arrangement, etc. Something to think about. What say you?