Archive for the ‘internet’ Category

I was watching my local newscast the other night when I watched a story about a local — and legendary — butcher shop.

Aubrey’s Meats is over 100 years old, and located in the Byward Market, one of Ottawa’s oldest areas. This may be one of its problems, actually. The Market, as it’s known to us Ottawans, is usually packed with a combination of tourists in search of the right tchotchke to take home to a coworker or maiden aunt and young revelers heading to The Heart and Crown or the Chateau Lafayette to get their drink on. If I’m gonna buy some steaks or a nice roast for the grill I’m not going to head to the Market.

But I digress. Aubrey’s Meats, according to its own “About” page, found itself in a serious bit of difficulty recently. The death of its owner and his declining health meant employees were running the shop. And not too well.

…in December 2010, Catherine Davis, the store’s bookkeeper, was made ad-hoc manager of Aubrey’s. When she took over, certain employees had run our store, between rent to the city and money owed to the suppliers, into a debt in excess of $300,000. Though it didn’t appear so, Aubrey’s was a sinking ship that some might not have tried to save. Out of a respect for Brian and his work, and an undying faith in this store’s potential, Catherine set about to keep Aubrey’s afloat.

So they were in trouble. Like some on a sinking ship, they grasped at anything that looked like it might help them float. And what they grabbed were Groupon and Kahoot.

They embarked on a number of different offers. One offered $200 in value for $89. They sold over 1000 of those. They offered others at $55 for $175 worth of meat. They sold thousands of those.

HANDLE WITH CARE

The hammer started to fall for the people running Aubrey’s when they realized that they couldn’t fulfil all the orders placed. So they limited it to redeeming $50 worth of meat at a time. Now they’ve suspended all redemptions until May 1.

What went wrong here? I think it should be obvious. The cash crunch they found themselves in made them decide to try this for an immediate cash infusion (even though they only get a portion of the revenue — according to the butcher who is the spokesperson for Aubrey’s right now, each $55 coupon resulted in $24 in revenue to Aubrey’s). But they didn’t look even one step down the road to figure out what to do if they SUCCEEDED with the offers. I feel for Aubrey’s employees. It sounds like they’re in a tight spot. But they’ve done themselves no favours by pursuing this strategy.

The companies which marketed their deals? I’d wager that they’re in no way suffering the way Aubrey’s is.

This isn’t a new story. Others, including my buddy Anne Weiskopf, have written about some of the challenges of managing daily deal sites for small businesses. Don’t just dive in. Think about the risks AND the potential benefits. If you’re new to doing that sort of thing, get advice. And if you’re considering a daily coupon site, you need to not only ask what will happen if your offer goes nowhere, you need to  think VERY carefully about what the implications of SUCCESS will be. Dying of popularity is not any better than dying of neglect. 

___

UPDATE, January 23: Three of the four companies which issued coupons for Aubrey’s meats are refunding those coupons, according to CBC Ottawa. Those are: Team Buy, DealFind and Groupon. CBC is reporting that Ottawa-based company Kahoot told its customers:

“We have been made aware of these unfortunate circumstances regarding Aubrey’s. Unfortunately we are unable to refund vouchers outside of seven days after purchase. If interested in a refund, we suggest going directly to Aubrey’s as they are now liable for their commitment to honour all vouchers sold.”

I wonder if Kahoot has thought about the several thousand people who bought through them rather than another of the coupon sites, and how likely they are to return to Kahoot to purchase.

UPDATE, JANUARY 24: I’ve asked Kahoot a couple of questions:

1. Can you provide the statement sent to customers who purchased Kahoot deals for Aubrey’s?
2. Is Kahoot concerned that its decision to not refund coupons will cost it brand loyalty when compared to the decisions of Teambuy, DealFind and Groupon to refund the coupons?

I’m hoping for a reply more substantive than this one from them:

I’ve seen it. I’ve suffered from it. I’ll bet many of you reading this have too. I call it… launchitis.

It’s a terrible malady, suffered from by those who toil in the trenches of the social media salt mines. The symptoms include depression, burnout, hair loss (from people tearing it out by the roots), uncontrollable anger, and addiction to Dilbert cartoons.

Here’s how a typical case of Launchitis usually goes:

1. an organization gets super-duper excited about some online social media tool or trend that involves interactivity — Foursquare, communities, bulletin boards, Facebook pages, augmented reality. Yay!
2. They task staff to put the project on the to-do list.
3. Staff get moving. Sometimes they hire consultants to help out.
4. The project creeps. Let’s do THIS TOO! And this! And let’s make it glow in the dark!
5. People start getting tired. Deadlines loom. Sometimes budgets start to get dicey.
6. The project launches with attendant hoopla. Ribbons are cut. News releases go out. Everyone congratulates each other, whether or not it was on time or on budget.
7. The landscape is then suffused with the gentle sound of crickets. Nobody posts in the community. Nobody joins the page. Those who do don’t say much. Nobody checks in.

What’s happened here?

The organization forgot that it’s not enough to launch. It’s easy to believe that  all you have to do is build the tool and it will rise like Frankenstein’s monster and live. But to keep on with that monstrous metaphor, Frankenstein didn’t just assemble the parts — he added electricity. That belief is dangerous to the success of your projects.

If you’re a communicator and you’re tasked with a new project, do yourself — and your organization — a big favour. Write an element into the project charter, the project plan, the communications plan and any other document related to the project that identifies the resources that will be necessary to nurture the product through its early life. That might be a month or two, it might be a year; it might mean part of someone’s job, or hiring a contractor to manage the product.

If it’s blog-related or relies on written content, ensure part of the plan coming up to launch is pre-writing content that will either get finished and posted in the early days; if it’s video-based, have some video ready. You get the idea.

And don’t stop talking about it the whole way through the project. The best way to ensure that your project will survive the launch is to keep people focussed on the fact that the goal is not to LAUNCH something. It’s to BUILD something. Social media sites should not be envisioned in Ray Kinsella mode, as in: “If you build it, they will come.” It’s more like George Burns mode: “I look to the future because that’s where I’m going to spend the rest of my life.”

You should also think about adding in measures in your evaluation plan (you HAVE one of those, RIGHT?) that make it more likely that you’ll nurture the project post-launch.

Preventing the spread of launchitis is a great way to make the likelihood of your social media initiatives succeeding greater. Thinking past the launch is important. Don’t miss out on the chance to scream, just like Dr. Frankenstein, “It’s alive. It’s ALIIIIVE. AAALIIIIIIIVE!!!”

And now for something mostly unrelated to launch-itis, a little LOVE-itis from the J. Geils Band:

A tip of the hat to Ottawa Citizen blogger David Reevely, who inspired the thinking behind this post.

Last month I blogged about my frustration with a lack of solid Canadian data on Internet use.

That frustration has by no means abated. Since I wrote that post in mid-December, I’ve been trying to get information about the seemingly moribund Canadian Internet Project, but so far to no avail. The good news is that sometime between December 16 and early January, their site went back online. However, the last content added seems to be a 2008 report titled “Canada online!” based on 2007 data.

There was a glimmer or two of light on the horizon though. I learned that Industry Canada has a team working to refresh its Digital Economy site. That’s good. And then yesterday, my friend Lydia pointed me to a report from new research firm Abacus Data that’s just come out this morning.

“What’s the big deal with Facebook” is a 10-page report based on a public opinion survey that explored who’s using Facebook up here in Canada and what they’re using it for. There’s some fascinating data here. Some of it is confirmatory of hunches that most of us have — that the younger a person is, the more likely they are to use tools such as Facebook and the less likely they are to see sharing information as risky. But just having confirmation of this is useful.

But here’s the big story in the data for me:

Graph from page 10 of the Abacus Data report

The fact that the number of people identifying Facebook as the most likely source of information about their friends goes from 8% for 60+ folks to 46% for 18-29 year-olds is information. But look at that text messaging bar. That’s 1 in 5 young people getting friend information via text.

That’s an amazing shift in carrying information. It requires incredibly condensed language; it also requires incredible virality — that text needs to push the receipient to pass the information on to another person. And that means that within the incredibly condensed language, there has to be attention and time to pushing on information — the texts have to have “hooks”. I’m not suggesting that 18-29 year-olds are taking marketing classes — I’m suggesting that unconsciously they’re practicing a version of SEO for texts and interpersonal communication. What is that? Would you call it TFO — text forwarding optimization? I’m not sure.

I’m really excited that Abacus Data is doing this work. Perhaps eventually, we’ll have a lively and productive Canadian Internet Project doing the same thing.

And in the meantime, I’m still hoping that people will ask  – or answer — themselves why we have so little native data on such an important phenomenon.

A different kind of digital divide

UPDATED, December 21: after some chasing, I heard from Daryl Korell, who was at the Canadian Media Research Centre. While the Canadian Internet Project site is still down, he offered to pass on my coordinates to the project staff. I’ve asked for an interview with them, and if and when I get one you’ll hear about it.

If you’re going to advise people on communications, PR or social media, chances are you’ll spend a lot of time thinking and writing and talking about online life. I know I do. It helps if you’re passionate for understanding how people use media to communicate  Doing that means that I love to read stuff about what people are doing online. But I realized this morning, when I saw a CBC story about internet use among older people, that there’s a big gap here in Canada.

The story quoted something that I consult all the time: The Pew Internet and American Life Project. This project, one of seven that make up the Pew Research Centre, regularly publishes data about … well, the Internet and American Life. Of the Centre’s 117 staff, eight are working on the Pew Internet and American Life.

So far in 2010, the Pew Internet project has issued 19 reports on everything from government online to social media reputation management to “the future of the Internet.” Their reports are really great. I frequently download them, and I use them to write, make presentations, and the like.

But where’s the Canadian equivalent? For the Canadian who’s interested in these issues, there’s really no way to dive deep into this data that I can find.

• Statistics Canada does some work. In May, it released data on Canadians’ Internet use from its Canadian Internet Use Survey, which reported on data from a 2009 survey (the previous one was in 2007); in September, it released information on e-commerce in Canada from the same survey. As far as I know, that’s it.
• Industry Canada’s Digital Economy site has research on e-commerce dating to 2008, as well as a “research and links” page that doesn’t look to have been updated since 2006.
• A site called “Internet World Stats” has a 2007 review, mostly of broadband penetration in Canada.
• Emarketer has a report on Canada from 2008 that would likely cost a couple of hundred bucks.
• The Canadian Media Research Consortium (a group made up of partners from York University, Ryerson University and Université Laval) has the “Canadian Internet Project.” Unfortunately, the project’s site is down. But there are two reports, one from 2008 and one from 2004.
• Services like Comscore do monitor web traffic and offer Canadian statistics. But that’s site based, not user based. And they haven’t issued a release mentioning Canada since August 2009.
• Even the Pew Global Attitudes project surveys 22 countries but excludes Canada.

Am I missing out on sources here? Why is it that we don’t have something like the Pew projects? Tell me where I haven’t looked.

I had a quick chat with Robert Janelle yesterday, who was writing an article for the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce‘s member newsletter about social media for business.

One of the things I talked about was learning from others, and building on their ideas. In folk music, that’s “the folk tradition.” But given that you can’t copyright an idea or a concept, there’s no reason that businesses embarking on a social media initiative — or any sort of communications, for that matter — shouldn’t learn from others.

And case studies can be a powerful way of doing just that. Conveniently enough, there are good people who are compiling lists of case studies online. Some of these lists are in wiki form, so you can easily add your own; others are more conventional sites. Either way, use them. Why not save yourself making the same mistakes others made, and find brand new mistakes to make! As Samuel Beckett so famously put it: No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Here are some places to find useful case studies in social media:

Penn Olson’s 30 social media case studies

Web 2.0 examples in Canada wiki

Peter Kim’s list of over 1000 social media “examples” (the inspiration for Web 2.0 examples in Canada)

Tod Maffin‘s Case Studies Online site

UPDATE: If you prefer your case studies in the live and in person format, and you’re in Ottawa, you should check out Case Study Jam, a little meetup that I’ve been helping to organize with a cast of ones, including Joe Boughner, Amy Boughner, Melanie Bechard, Della Siemens, and Nick Charney. You can get a sense of what a CSJ is like from Robin Browne’s handy-dandy audio playlist!

And one more thing to think about: If you have an example of how your company or a client did something interesting, why not write something up about it and submit it to one of these lists? Sharing is caring.

Photo credit: The Cake Engineer on Flickr, licenced via Creative Commons

Last night (Tuesday, May 25), Ian Capstick, Erik Hagborg and I were the panelists for a hugely fun (at least for me) panel discussion on social media and its effects on more “traditional” communications. The discussion was part of the Cafe Scientifique program. This discussion was organized by The Canada Museum of Science and Technology and the Canadian Museum of Nature. Particular thanks should to to Isabelle Kingsley, who organized the event.

Here’s roughly the entire evening in audio format. It’s about 100 minutes long, and it ranges from the future of cursive script, to the “art should / shouldn’t be free” debate, to the fundamental disadvantage of the e-book (hint: “Hey! Read this!”) to how we preserve the important things in a digital age that doesn’t preserve things in tangible format.

Apologies for any rough audio — it was a big room and I was recording only with my Edirol. Mostly pretty good, I think. The audio begins with Erik Hagborg’s opening remarks. Download it here, or use the player below.

[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/CafeScientifiqueOnSocialMedia/cafescientifique.mp3]

• 00:00 — Opening statements. Erik takes us back to the beginning of communications with the run at Marathon, then moves on to the four questions of the evening: Are we conducting too many of our relationships via tech? Why do we choose to use technology to communicate? Does tech facilitate or impede face-to-face communications? Are technology and f2f interactions complementary or exclusive? (Bonus from Erik: The difference between a “friend” and a “good friend”?)
• 05:45 — Ian Capstick talks about his earliest experience with technology and F2F communication, when he was a teenager and met online friends in Ottawa at a choral conference.
• 09:20 – Ian’s train of thought is briefly interrupted as his dinner arrives.
• 11:40 — Ian recalls the phone phreakers as one of several examples of how humans hack technology for good and ill.
• 15:25 -- Bob acknowledges that concern about social media is fair, but fear is unreasonable. People will use technologies in the ways that best suit them, and that one of the tension points with social media is that they are changing and growing so rapidly that our collective, unconscious agreements on what’s proper — the norms of using the medicum — are being left behind. Social media killed geography as the defining limit of friendship.
• 23:00 — I inform the audience that Mel Blanc was allergic to carrots (as is Ian Capstick)
• 24:00 – Discussion kicks off with an anecdote from moderator Isabelle Kingsley about texting as distraction
• 26:00 — How to sift through “all the crap” on the Internet, and whether there’s more crap on the Internet than there was before, with a slight detour into Internet dating
• 34:00 — Ian recommends Andrew Potter’s “The Authenticity Hoax“
• 37:00 — Discussion about the idea of digital legacy, in which I deftly pimp out PAB 2010. Adele McAlear and Derek K. Miller, come on down to pick up your name-checks! Ian argues that the problem won’t be a lack of information left behind but TOO MUCH.
• 40:00 — Erik talks about the craft behind communication — the calligraphy and the content of handwritten letters, for example. We won’t lose the CONTENT; we’re going to lose the style and soul. Ian counters by saying “the pen stole oral history,” polls the audience on the use of cursive handwriting, and nominates Isabelle Kingsley as the leader of the future handwriting guild.
• 46:00 — Where will obsolete media be preserved? Punch cards, 8-inch floppies, 5.25s, 3.5s… Erik suggests most technologies will be backwards-compatible and that this is not a huge worry. He also admits to, as a child, ruining his father’s punch-card programs on their home mainframe (parenthetical note: Erik had a mainframe in his HOUSE?!)
• 49:00 — Bob shouts out to Project Gutenberg and Librivox as examples of how people are preserving ‘outdated’ content
• 51:00 — Do people have opinions on e-books? Ian is conflicted and thinks there’s a generational shift involved with the shift from paper to pixels. Bob hates the DRM, the lack of pass-on-ability and marginalia and mourns the loss of craft in e-books as well as the LP-CD-MP3 transition.
• 55:00 — Erik jumps on a DRM soapbox and ventures the “art wants to be free” argument, to be countered strongly by Ian and audience members, and weakly by house-concert presenter Bob (yes, I’m shamelessly whoring myself; it’s my blog.) Erik maintains that examples of commercial success exist.
• 59:00 — Ian begs to differ and betrays his proud socialist heritage by arguing creating content has to be valued and compensated (shoutout, Cory Doctorow)… “we must find alternative funding models!”, and takes a run at Robert Bateman (f-bomb warning)
• 1:06 — Discussion of the power of social media tools to connect people and to foster awareness and action internationally, with references to Iran, to Burma, Michael Jackson, balloon boy, and to the local experience of Ian and my blogging about Cornerstone.
• 1:16 –  Does reliance on specific ways of communicating leave you excluded from some people because they don’t use the same channels? Discussion of how to get out of your “comfort zone”, how Bob’s next-door neighbour reached out using Facebook to make the introduction (thank God), and how Ian met his condo-mate at a ChangeCamp.
• 1:27 –  Does the desire for texting / tweeting / constant “communicating” mean people miss out on genuine interactions?
• 1:30 — The difficulty of sloppy communication, and how interpretation of communication tells as much about the  interpreter as about what is being interpreted.
• 1:34 — after an awkward jump-cut where I muffed the recorder, Ian gives his online parenting advice, which incorporates a story about his own adolescent online adventures in the land of shirtless men. Bob talks about tailoring communication media to the audience, whether family or not.

Errata: I talk about Librivox at about 48-49 minutes in. But I screwed up: it’s Hugh McGuire, not Hugh MacLeod, who created Librivox. Hugh MacLeod is also a great human being, but for other reasons.

Links:

Erik Hagborg is a VP at RealDecoy

Ian Capstick is the owner of MediaStyle

Canada Museum of Science and Technology

Canadian Museum of Nature

Librivox

Project Gutenberg

ChangeCamp

Cornerstone

Changecamp

The always fascinating Pew Research Institutes put out an interesting little release today, titled A Portrait of Early Internet Adopters: Why People First Went Online –and Why They Stayed.

One of the points it makes using a quote in the lede, is that this whole “social networking” thing is not so new. One anonymous respondent (I’d bet a billion Turkish lira that it was a guy) told them: “I started my online life on a state-wide time-shared mainframe computer in the 5th grade in 1972, and we were ‘social networking’ on it by 1976.”

For me, I can remember using acoustic-coupler modems in high school to communicate via dumb terminal with a mainframe at the Canadian Coast Guard College, across the harbour in Sydney.

When I got to university, I thought I was going to be a programmer. Hah. By then, I was learning Fortran and Pascal using punch cards during the day, and trying to delve into the mysteries of my TI 99/4A and its oh-so-cool cassette recorder which served as a storage medium.

I wasn’t really into “social networking” at that point, but I do know that there was a geeky culture that had already started to build around computer users. It was an interesting time.

By the time I got out of university and started freelancing for magazines and CBC radio, I’d moved on to a portable typewriter, first a Smith-Corona portable and then a gee-whiz Brother electronic typewriter with a two-line memory and something like a laser printer (something like this, but even MORE primitive).

CBC radio had an early messaging system and central file storage, even back in the late ’80s, and I guess that was when “networking” started to be a reality.

But the Pew Institute report brought back memories and thoughts that while the tools have gotten fancier and more graphic, the reasons that people went online back in the day were essentially the same reasons people are using networks and the like today, with the added appeal of being part of a subculture that 99.9 per cent of the world didn’t get. If you were an outcast to start with that was a big deal.

Then, of course, came the BBSes, the e-mail groups, etc. etc. That was the beginning of a whole lot for me, and for a lot of other people. Colin McKay and I were part of e-mail groups together since the early 1990s!

Ciao,
Bob.

Okay, I am going to give the mine disaster a skip for a bit. But if you ever needed proof that a Web site might be a good idea for a company… (or needed that proof 10 years ag0)…

My blog, which is highly critical of how the collapse of the Crandall Canyon mine is being handled, is now #1 for the search term “murray energy group” and #2 for the same term without the quotes.

But then again, who would google something crazy like that?

Ciao,
Bob.