At Northern Voice a few weeks back, I was doing my best to shoot as much video as possible.
The action and the great presentations kept me from getting too much coverage, but during lunch one day I did sit down for an interview with Lee LeFever of the Common Craft Show, to talk about the rising popularity of their “paperworks” how-to videos. This is also the very first time I’ve embedded a video using Kyte, a new video broadcast service I signed up for while dining with Kyte’s CEO in Austin during SXSW:
To add a little hype to the upcoming Bob Dylan “Best Of” release, there’s a new site called Dylanmessaging.com that lets you personalize a message from Bob himself.
I knew this would impress the hell out of my dad, so I made mine a message to him:
The embed codes are a bit tricky to track down, but well worth it.
I’m pretty excited to report that Tell Ten Friends is in The Viral Garden’s Top 25 Marketing Blogs (Week 58)!
We’re just in, with our 521 links. Too bad we’re not measured by the links to the home page here: www.telltenfriends.com. To that address, we have 1091 links as of today on Technorati. Note to friends: link to the blog!
It’s great to be recognized, especially among so many other talented and insightful marketing thinkers.
And while I was still groggy from the jet lag, etc. I made a few changes of my own. For starters, I test-drove the aforementioned slideshow app, see the result here, using some of my Seoul pics:
Also, I’m quietly launching a new site dedicated to my way-too-big ego, using Wordpress, and mapped it to www.jordanbehan.com. The amazing thing is that the whole site cost a mere $18 USD/yr. And it would have been cheaper (package deal for domain and mapping) if I had bought the domain from Wordpress and not Yomamma. I mean, Godaddy. Today’s lesson: for just $15 USD, you can have your own Wordpress blog, including your own domain name. What are you waiting for, world?
That new site will be home to some video podcasts, and all of the rants that I hold back from here. I felt like I couldn’t goof off on the company site as much as I do in general, so the more personal, reflective and downright silly side of me will be published on the new site. I will continue to publish marketing and PR news and tips here, hopefully at a steadier pace than I have of late.
And if I don’t publish a newsletter soon, I might as well board up the shop; I get an average of four or five subscribers a week, and I have neglected them for months. Bad me!
This is short notice, but I had to inform the world that my wife and I are going to Korea this Sunday, to attend the wedding of my brother-in-law Dan. It should be a lot of fun, but it will mean that I will have limited connectivity until our return two weeks from now.
I’ll return with tons of great photos, and a continuation of my Media Training Series, which is being sidelined for the time being in favor of getting work caught up. As promised, a newsletter shouldn’t be far behind that, especially since the news is piling up, and it’s high time I shared it with my database, which still grows in numbers every week.
Anybody in Seoul want to meet for a coffee or some kim bap?
Every once in a while, I rewind to the very basics of how to catch yourself up on everything that’s happening on the web.
My readership has gone up since the last time I did a “What in God’s name is RSS” post, so it was high time I revisited the topic; if nothing else for the expanding network of Facebook contacts who will see this “imported note,” wonder how the hell it got there, and maybe even tune in to learn something new.
Well this time the job of explaining how RSS feeds work has been handled brilliantly by Lee LeFever, travel blogger, podcaster and web guru. Lee’s “live action animation” adds charm to his step by step tutorial. View his original post here.
So get to it, newbies. Watch it twice if you have to; but this is a complex and potentially life-changing concept, boiled down to the very simplest of terms, in what Lee calls:
“There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don’t. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don’t know where to start.”
One of the greatest brands in my neighborhood to embrace the social media concept is that of our beloved Vancouver Canucks.
Although I do follow the team throughout the year, I don’t post about them very much. I had the pleasure of attending three games this year, including Game One of the Western Conference Quarter Final against the Dallas Stars on Wednesday night. For those who don’t already know, the game was a franchise-record 138 minutes long, and resulted in a 5-4 Canucks win. Big thanks to my darling wife for getting us the invite to Rod’s executive suite for the most exciting game I’ve ever watched.
Which, on its own is enough to want to write a blog post about. But the reason I’ve waited all this time to write about the Canucks is not merely because they could use the moral support as they continue after taking Game 3 in Dallas, (ahead 2-1 in the series) but because the Canucks have truly embraced social media, and it’s bringing the community of their fans closer together.
Case in point: The Fan Generated Content Challenge, which includes several categories with prize packs associated with each. View the “Round One” winners at that link, or just click one of the YouTube vids below.
In other “engaging social media” news, the Canucks almost treat podcasters like the media that they are; giving access to practices and interviews (and of course sidebar widgets) to the likes of the Crazy Canucks, who collectively host a Canucks podcast and blog, and severalother fan sites and podcasts as well. Hey, Canucks front office! Give these cats some tickets to sit amongst the fans, and bask in the glory of the customer evangelism that results.
(Canucks Ultimate Fan Search sidebar widget)
Between periods and during TV timeouts, the massive screens above the ice at GM Place display some of the videos photos that have been submitted by fans.
Or take the much-debated but undeniably community-minded slogan of the Canucks this year: “We are all Canucks.” They have certainly re-embraced the fans, in the wake of an assault lawsuit and an epic lockout.
And so it is with a warm heart and a healthy dose of Canucks nostalgia that I present you with the four winners of “Round One” of the Canucks’ Fan Generated Content Challenge, followed by my own submission, at the very bottom:
The Ultimate Canucks Sacrifice
Two-Year-Old Ultimate Canuck Fan
“Trapper’s Delight,” The Canuck’s Rap
Canucks Chase Flames
And The Crowd Goes Wild!
(Shot by Alex Lee Behan at Game One of the Western Conference Quarter Finals)
If you’re not familiar with tag clouds, they display the most frequently used tags or terms for a site, using the size of the displayed term to represent its frequency. If this doesn’t make sense, just check the wikipedia definition, or better yet, enter your url into the box below and see for yourself:
If you’re expecting to come up in a Google search for a term that you can’t seem to find in your tag cloud, then you have some work to do. When you’re done checking your own domain, have a look at your competitors’ domains. All of them.
Finally, a widget that displays your online presence in ALL of your various social networks!
Okay, that might be a bit of a stretch, but most of the major online social networks that one might belong to are there. A few of the major blogging platforms are noticeably absent, but thankfully my dear sweet Wordpress is represented. Hat tip to Joel Burslem for pointing it out.
Anyway, without further adieu, here’s my new widget (soon to be featured in the sidebar, perhaps?) from “Show Yourself.”
Perhaps the coolest feature of this is the customizable colours (I checked my CSS to make it match a bit) and the fact that it is a match with the MyBlogLog widget that many of us have already nestled neatly into our sidebars.
Update: The custom colors aren’t displaying properly, so perhaps you should ignore that last line.
Later…Upon closer inspection, it is displaying my “Trebuchet” font, and so it is actually my stylesheet overriding the customization.
Are we going widget crazy? Perhaps. But it is still fun, and that’s good enough for me.
In a side note, this exercise finally persuaded me to sign up to Twitter. Now the whole world will know when I’m working tirelessly in my pj’s with naught but coffee for sustenance.
That is, if I choose to share.
I can’t seem to get both widgets to display, so Twitter will have to wait for now
I guess you could say the theme here is "Marketing 2.0." I'm fascinated by the rapid changes happening on the web in the world of marketing and new media. Want to join the conversation? Leave a comment, or send me an email.
Here’s a little link love for the list:
