OurTraction

When a company is seeing a major decline in their market share, they have a couple of options. Their advertisements could play it safe and focus on the traditional approach. Or, they could be like Proctor and Gamble and trust the direction of their creative agency to turn the Old Spice brand around and throw all assumptions out the window.

By now I’m sure you’ve seen the widely successful Super Bowl Ad for Old Spice body wash. Old Spice recently followed this up with a second advertisement using the same unique and unusual creative stylings. However if you thought that a couple of funny and unique videos was all the company had up their sleeve, then what took place on the @OldSpice Twitter stream (combined with other social media activity) during the last few days must have you reconsidering that position.

A relative new-comer to the microblogging site, Isaiah Mustafa and the Old Spice team turned the Internet on its head when the started personally interacting with their fans online. It all started out with the relatively innocuous tweet:

“Today could be just like the other 364 days you log into twitter, or maybe the Old Spice man shows up.”
What we saw was one of the most original and innovate uses of the Internet and social media since Zuckerberg stole a series of yearbook pictures from the Harvard student body. (or a couple of rainbows appeared in the sky)

As fans interacted with Mustafa, he would respond to their messages via short YouTube clips. The responses were done in the same random, post-modern, uber-meta style as the rest of the Old Spice advertisements, which made them entertaining and addictive; it was impossible to just watch one clip.

And oh yeah… It was in real time, as in you could make a comment or ask a question and within minutes hopefully watch a response from Old Spice.

Target the Audience

The brand capitalized on influencers, like Kevin Rose and Alyssa Milano, and used them to spread the campaign beyond Twitter. Sending personalized videos to both “web” celebrities and media outlets promotes the brand and this advertising campaign to even broader communities.

You could easily write this off as a really cool idea, wish that you had thought of it or think that it’s only possible because of the enormous budgets multinational brands like Old Spice have available…

Or you could think about what the lessons are for your brand.

What Are You Doing?

Old Spice has effectively shown the internet what social media promoters have been telling brands for years: successful usage of social media requires you to honestly listen to and interact with your users and then provide them with relevant information and content to consume.

Should you run out and start recording a bunch of personalized video responses to questions and comments posed by your audience? Are you’re willing to take the risk needed for fast turn around times?  Do you have chutzpah to create entertaining videos that capture users attention? Video responses work for Old Spice because it’s the format viewers expected from the brand.  What medium and what type of conversation will your users expect from you?

Run with It

Even if you don’t think the format will work for you, there are tonnes of lessons your marketing department can learn from Old Spice:

• Its not enough to just respond when you feel like it – if you’re really listening, you need to respond when your audience is ready and with the information they’re expecting.
• You already have interesting and relevant information or marketing to share;  if you can share it in an engaging manner then people are going to spread it for you.
• Old Spice broke down our silo assumptions;  that Twitter is for Twitter responses, blogs for blog responses and YouTube for inane comment responses. Instead, they connected various platforms together in an incredibly effective way.
• We’re not done innovating yet, and it’s always possible to take simple ideas and combine them into a new and interesting way of presenting information.

If you want to read more about what’s going on behind the scenes of the the Old Spice shoot, there have been a few great interviews with the creative team of Wieden+Kennedy.

Titus and I had a wonderful opportunity this past week to speak to civic leaders at the Ontario Municipal Administrators Association about the importance of engaging online websites, social media, and open data. The underlying theme of the day was that better engagement from the city/regions results in better citizenship engagement and an overall improvement to the quality of life in those regions.

We had some tough questions from the audience around social media policies; where do the lines between personal liberties and freedom of expression cross into professional conduct and employment agreements. We were very grateful for the additional insight provided by Dennis Flaherty from the City of Markham around the importance of having a good, clearly communicated policies AND social media training in place.

Both Titus and Dennis brought up that the challenges with social media and employees excercising poor judgement in a public forum is not a new challenge, and in fact many of the employment contracts already have provisions in them that protect the municipality in the event that employees are excercising poor judgement, provided the aforementioned policies and procedures are in place.

One interesting point that came out during the question and answer period is the lack of information around community pages on Facebook, and a general lack of participation in Wikipedia. A challenge I’ve put out to attendees from the session is to task someone within your team to ensure that your municipality is participating in generating the content for both community pages and on Wikipedia.

During the presentation, we showed some examples of some websites that do a great job of broadcasting out information to their constituents:

• www.waterloo.ca
• www.portcolborne.ca

We also discussed Social Media Policy and suggested a starting point could be our own social media policy generator:

• www.policytool.net

There is a lots of information about social media and to get a handle on the scope, popularity, and sheer importance of it all, we recommend the excellenet Socialnomics video:

We gave some examples of what some municipalities and citizen groups have been able to do with Open Data:

• www.data.gov
• www.data.gov.uk
• data.vancouver.ca
• www.ottawa.ca/online_services/opendata/index_en.html
• www.vantrash.ca
• www.eatsure.ca
• www.nextstopapp.com
• www.taxicity.ca

And suggested that if there was interest in learning more, some great resources are;

• A great resource for open data discussion/dialogue – www.eaves.ca
• Our blog (you’re on it!)
• Another passionate individual on the topic of Open Data talks at TED

Our slide deck was mostly visuals to aide in the discussion, but here are the key talking points per section:

Website

• We are living in an age of participation and websites need to encourage that
• Avoid using “closed” file formats that require additionally programs to open, such as PDFs
• Start using RSS Feeds to push content to citizens

Social Media

• Conversations are happening online and municipalities should be part of that
• Content should be engaging and connect citizens with services
• Explore the POST method to develop a strategy

Open Data

We wrapped up the session by issuing a challenge to all present to work harder to position their Municipalities as leaders in these areas. The changes we’ve seen in the first decade of the 21st century are only the tip of the iceberg and there is no better time to get involved.

IE 6.x has long been the bane of any sane web developer. Many, many hours are spent making otherwise perfectly healthy website implementations work in this broken, and terribly outdated browser.

IE 6.x is continuing to experience a decline in usage; Google (and Google owned YouTube) have already discontinued support for the browser.

We are jumping on the bandwagon. By default, rtraction quotes will no longer include IE 6.0 support in quotes, RFP responses, etc. We will still include IE 6.0 support as an optional line item.

Here is what this means to our clients:

1. The average cost of our website implementations will drop significantly, especially for basic content management systems. It’s actually scary to analyse how much time has gone into IE 6.x support over the years. Now we’ll have that time to spend on other, more innovative things.
2. Websites built/quoted before this announcement will continue to support IE 6.x. Additionally, for our public sector friends support is still available for those sites that are required to have backwards capability.
3. Our developers will be happier. I am expecting a parade, or some equally elaborate celebration now that this announcement is formally made.

As always, if you have any comments, complaints, etc please comment below or drop me a line directly – email hidden; JavaScript is required.

As a newcomer to the industry, I found Canada 3.0, held in Stratford, ON  May 10-11th, a great place to be immersed in ICT culture. It was a golden opportunity to connect with like-minded, highly creative and collaborative people who are shaping the very world we live in. Most importantly, I appreciate the awareness I gained about the major needs unique to the ICT industry:

- increasing homegrown R&D opportunities
 -upgrading our digital infrastructure to accommodate digital innovation and Canada as a digital nation
- increasing digital literacy in our youth and current adult workforce
- producing more Canadian content and becoming identifiable globally
 -growing the overall Canadian ICT industry

From the perspective of a former educator, I chose to attend the learning stream, as well as the creating stream. What I was looking forward to most was the opportunity to participate in what was being touted as highly interactive breakout sessions to develop immediate action steps to help create a digital economy. But what actually took place was far from being interactive. Each session was essentially a one-way conversation and ended up being a rather large let down. While the speaker panels were clearly stacked against those who were the most active in the industry, I was relieved to see that in each case, the digital savvy panelists ’represented’ and fought through the noise to be heard – at least by the audience.

What amazes me is Canada 3.0 succeeded in pulling together some of the brightest minds in the business, but neglected to use them as a resource. I know the attendees I spoke to also felt the same way. Why was that? If change is truly going to happen then an open dialogue must take place and those making the changes need to feel they have some ownership over the changes they are going to be making.

Maybe next year…

The second Canada 3.0 Digital Media conference was held in Stratford on May 10th and 11th, and despite the choice to hold it in a freezing cold hockey arena, the event was able to attract over 1,500 attendees who gathered to help craft a digital media strategy for Canada as we get closer to Canada’s 150th anniversary.

I’ve read with interest David Eaves‘ thoughts on the two day event and he summarized exactly how I was feeling after I left Stratford. I have some positive thoughts but unfortunately I’m disheartened by a lot of the rhetoric coming from traditional institutions and the lack of encouragement of the grassroots communities and poor attempts to include them in honest discussions.

My time at Canada 3.0 was largely in the Creating Stream, but I did attend a few sessions elsewhere. I won’t pretend to have a complete grasp on all the conversations that took place over the two days, but I’m sure my experience was much like many others. To put it bluntly the conference did not even remotely live up to what the organizers promised on the front page of the Canada 3.0 website;

“Your voice will be heard.

Whether you’re a Content Creator, Tool Maker, or Tool User, this is your chance to influence our national digital media action plan. Become part of the discussion to ensure Canada can not only compete, but also lead the world, in today’s new digital economy.”

Unfortunately nothing could be further from the truth. Only lip-service was given to honest interaction and community involvement. Throughout the event  it was clear that the agenda had been set before the event, and the sole purpose of the conference was to get industry leaders together to pay homage and ratify a predetermined outcome.

The organizers also promised “camp-like discussions”. I have experience running and attending camp-like conferences, and there was nothing remotely like that at Canada 3.0. Nor was there even the opportunity to have any type of community driven session.

When it came time to wrap up on Tuesday, the chairs of each stream were invited to present ‘action items’. These were ideally to come from the participants and were supposedly to help build Canada’s digital strategy. None of the items that were presented from the Creating Stream reflected the comments that the attendees had made publicly.  Worse yet, they all came from the first session and seemed stilted, fake, contrived, and designed to appease the traditional mainstream communication channels.

Which leads to the single most major issue with Canada 3.0. The event had the potential to realign Canada’s digital future and to create and foster new and innovative ideas, models and platforms. Instead it focused on bolstering traditional positions and industries; like the big three telecoms, television networks like CTV and Global, and mainstream media outlets like newspapers and radio. Funding announcements designed to benefit tired business models, old-fashioned copyright reform that encourages conglomeration instead of independent and innovative creative works were championed, and traditional failing ideas were propped up, solely because they were Canadian.

Not all is lost though, there is a grassroots movement, full of content creators, small industry professionals, tool makers and developers, who are all working to create a digital environment in Canada that will take us as leaders into the 21st century; we can position ourselves as innovative and relevant, ready to do business in the digital media space on a global scale. However, we’re going to need to shake off the ball and chain that is the traditional broadcaster and we’ll need to be prepared to move forward without government assistance, but ultimately we will succeed.

Ewoks was the codename of our Twitter display at last Saturday’s Podcamp London. The purpose of the application was to provide a fun interface to view tweets that pertained to the event throughout the day. The application provided event attendees with useful information and a new way to interact with others.

Features

• 3D isometric floor plan
• Current and Next session displayed for each room
• Use the Podcamp hashtag #pclo10 to have an avatar displayed in the lobby.
• Ability to “check in” to one of the session rooms by using the room name in a tweet.
• Unique avatar for each visitor.

Response

Attendees found this display to be very useful – they would see tweets of someone they know enjoying a session in one of the rooms, and they would make the decision to visit that session. Some users managed to find an “easter egg” built in – when a user uses the hash tag “#bye” their avatar would be beamed off the map with an animated laser.

Throughout the day people congregated in front of the display to check out what others were saying and what was coming up next, or to find directions.

Built on Code Igniter, the application made use of jQuery, CSS3 transformations (to achieve a 3-dimensional effect) and the Twitter Search API. Stay tuned for a more technical post on how some of the effects were achieved.

Lessons Learned

You can do amazing things with Javascript and CSS – Flash is no longer the only option for “cool”. Since this application was meant to run on a large display there was no need to worry about browser consistency which allowed for unbridled CSS3 greatness!

Seeing others interact with your work is very rewarding. Seeing large groups of people, mobile devices in hand, staring at the screen waiting for their tweet to show up or their character to blow up makes it all worthwhile.

If you have any questions or comments about Ewoks (the application, not the small furry creature indigenous to the forest moon of Endor), or if you have built your own supercool Twitter display, we’d love to hear from you!

Several of the staff from rtraction have spent that last two days in Stratford Ontario at the Canada 3.0 Digital Media Conference. The main focus of this event has been to build a digital media strategy for Canada so that by our 150th anniversary in 2017 everyone in Canada will be digitally connected. The organizers are calling this the “Moonshot” in reference to Kennedy’s 1962 speech in which he outlined the U.S. push towards space.

However, there has been a major issue with determining what exactly it means to be “digital”. There is no consensus between the stakeholders across Canada about what we’re measuring. Therefore we’ll never really know if we’ve reached  our goal. Additionally there is a variety of disagreements about who should be leading this charge and how far do we need to go with public consultation by government instead of action. Finally, there seems to be a big push to work within existing models and platforms of broadcasters and “old media” and ignoring new systems and potentials.

Despite these challenges, the conference has been a great opportunity to connect with content creators, brilliant developers, industry leaders, and corporations.  As the second day continues we’re invigorated to keep these conversations alive and encouraged by the community that we’re seeing that already exists across Canada.

When we get back to London we’ll review our notes and our twitter streams and we’ll present much of what we’ve learned on this blog.

Until then, how well do you think we’re preparing for 2017 and what goals should we be looking to measure in the lead up to this date?

There have been a couple of high profile announcements about government institutions using open source products in place of proprietary systems.

One of the biggest announcement came from the White House and they have released some great new modules for Drupal.  All three modules work well to fill noticeable voids and provide a better browsing experience. One module, “Context HTTP Headers”, allows developers or system administrators to customize caching for pages based on type.  This means is that you can have your news pages cached for five minutes on a high traffic website and have your ’standard content pages’ such as About Us cached for sixty minutes.  Another module release is called Akamai and helps target scalability as well by enabling integration into a their Content Delivery Network. Another module called GovDelivery makes it a lot easier to send out tailored emails to the governments email list.

The White House also released one of the most desired modules for any developer who is working hard to build accessibility complaint websites. Dubbed “Node Embed” the module helps deliver rich content (photos and videos) with all of the appropriate meta data that makes them fully accessible by screen reading software.

The Bank of Canada has also made some contributions back to the open source community. They released three WordPress plugins that were developed for their website.  The AJAX Scroll plugin adds a graceful fade in and fade out for next/previous links when a user is navigating content.  Another recently releases plugin is called PBox and it allows a developer to create custom content widgets and standardize the display of the content within them.  This is very useful as it helps ensure all information will have the same look and feel across a site.

The Bank of Canada has also released a WordPress plugin that helps remove the handcuff’s when it comes to widgets and customizing them.  The plugin called XWidgets allows for a page-by-page customization of any widget which means you can have a news feed or any type of widget customized to fit any specific pages layout or design needs.  This means you can easily have your about us page display a Flickr feed and the same widget could display a twitter feed on your contact us page.

All these announcements are great news for all types of internet users, from casual surfers, to content producers and developers. Its great to see political offices getting on board with open source and we hope that this is just the start to many more contributions from all levels of government.

What online government features would you like to see made available to the general public?

When our local health unit released its Food Inspection Disclosure Site we thought it was a great resource to find out about our local eating establishments. The interface for the application is very good if you’re looking for information on a specific establishment but we found it difficult to get a sense for what might be going on in your neighbourhood or region.

One of the advantages of working in a digital technology firm is that all someone has to say is something like “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if you can see this on a map?” Because the answer is yes, you can. After a few days of solid effort by our team, we are happy to introduce: EatSure.ca

We uncovered a few surprises ourselves doing this initiative – for example – looking in your area may turn up your grocery store has a critical warning. I didn’t even know that grocery stores were inspected!

We believe that the resource itself will be useful to the people in our community but we also hope to start a community discussion around the importance of open data and how citizens can imagine new and exciting ways of using that data.  We were able to create EatSure.ca with only the information that is provided to the public web browser; we could make the application more powerful if we had access to the underlying data that drives the health unit’s web site.

We are aware of only one other initiative in our area – a Blackberry application that was developed by a Fanshawe College student on his own time to display London Transit bus location data (not yet available for public use). If you are aware of any other open data initiatives in our community, please post them in the comments below.

Across our country, cities like Toronto, Edmonton, Ottawa and Vancouver have embraced open data and have initiatives well underway. Edmonton is also launching a contest for open data applications and offering $50,000 in prizes for winning entries. And around the world the US and UK governments have massive programs established.

At the forefront of the open data movement in Canada is David A Eaves. Recently he launched a citizen led initiative to advance the progress of open data across the country – datadotgc.ca.

“Unlike our American and British peers, the Canadian Federal (and provincial…) government(s) currently have no official, coordinated effort to release government data. We think that should change. But rather than complain, we thought we’d do something. This is our effort. A stab at showing our government, and Canada, what a federal open data portal could and should look like.”

Our political leaders are excited by the ways in which open data can be used to enhance the lives of our citizens and it is up to us who are interested in technology to continually better the services that are available.  Technology geeks like to do these types of things for fun, to see if they can, and for the general service of our neighbours, friends and peers.

All we need, our government friends, is the data. Please?