Congratulations to Amanda Farough of the violet Minded design blog, who won two tickets to the Neanderthal Arts Festival running from July 21 to August 1 in Vancouver. (Thanks to superblogger John Chow for picking the winner out of the hat!).

My fellow VBM assistant coordinator and Left Right Minds website development god Shane Birley will be in touch so Amanda can claim her prize.

In the meantime, here’s a quick shout out to the participants. Despite admittedly lackluster service and unusually under-par refreshments at our location, I think we all had a good time meeting other creative types, getting introduced to new blogs and learning a bit about how to make our online dreams (well, the G-rates ones, anyway) come true. Cheers to:

Get up, grab Starbucks, go for a walk. Next, sit down for three hours and tap out a few proposals and blog posts for clients.

Eat lunch. Go for another 20-minute walk. Come back and develop a website content site map. Then update some content. It’s end of month, so time to do the bookkeeping.

One more blog post to go.

I’ve been sitting down too much. My ass hurts.

I should go for a walk. Why the hell am I sitting here writing this blog post? No one’s paying me to write on my own blog.

It’s a compulsion.

I shouldn’t complain. I mean, let’s face it: I’ve got a great gig where the odds of getting the black lung are pretty low.

Actually, it’s quite simple.

If you’re interested in learning more about social media for business, specifically Strategy, Business Intelligence & Metrics, then go to the SMCV event.

If you would rather gather together with some smart, fun and quirky people with nothing in common except for the fact that they (A) have a blog (or blogs), (B) are thinking of writing a blog; or (C) will never have a blog but are extremely attractive and desirous of meeting local bloggers for the purpose of recreation and procreation — then you should come to the Vancouver Blogger Meetup.

Either way, you can’t lose. Have fun out there.

It’s happening at 1:15 pm on Friday, May 7 at the Life Sciences building on the UBC main campus. Here’s a description of the panel:

A plethora of self-appointed social media consultants have emerged in the past two years. It would seem as though knowing how to set up a Twitter account or creating a Facebook page has become this decade’s snake oil. Despite (or perhaps due to) the fact that social media is an ever-evolving field, there is still a dearth of best practices on what and how to teach about social media. Even more frightening, interesting and challenging, there is a whole field that has just barely recently begun to be explored: teaching with social media. In this panel, we will share our experiences in the educational field, both teaching about social media and teaching with social media.

We will share our concerns, questions and worries about social media as a field to be educated in and as a platform/tool to educate in other fields. We will ask the tough questions that need to be asked, and hope that through this exploration, we will be able to further both social media as a field of study and as a technological tool for educational purposes.

The panel will include:

• Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega (otherwise known as Hummingbird604)
• Dr. Glen Lowry, writer, educator, and editor
• Tris Hussey (MscM.S.) a long-time technologist, blogger, and writer
• Andre Malan, a Computer Science student at the University of British Columbia specializing in human-computer interaction

Tell your friends! Tell your mom! I’m sure it will be an informative and entertaining panel that will fill you with love of all things social media-ish.

Thus, the acid test:

Can a competitor’s product name be substituted? If so, you haven’t differentiated yourself.

The seminar also included some excellent overviews and self-assessments entrepreneurs ought to be taking while refining their messaging and taking their product to market. Definitely worth a read.

On related news, here’s a quick shout out to a few of the very cool entrepreneurs I’ve met at the NVBC seminars over the past month. All of these people seem to have big ideas, solid business plans and bright futures (Angel investors, where are you?).

Bradley Coleman, co-founder of ProxyDemocracy. Think “corporate governance”. ProxyDemocracy provides a set of tools to help investors use their voting power to produce positive changes in the companies they own. Seems timely, eh?

Eric Brooke, owner of Ignitia. Eric is frequently engaged in a leadership capacity or as a strategic adviser to executives, as well as to offer his wealth of expertise in communications and marketing. Very smart guy.

John Gray, CEO of SKRIPT Foundry. SKRIPTfoundry specializes in multifaceted solutions using Web standard coding practices. John’s got serious ambitions for this company and it sounds like they’re on the cusp of big things.

Ian Clark, President of RealSpace. His company creates innovative solutions for interactive 3D. Good for training in a virtual 3D world for employees in a range of industries. Their offering sounds awfully useful.

Positioning: How to Stand Out in a Cluttered Market

The client said he wanted to ramp up his “social media” campaign, which so far included a Twitter account and a Facebook fan page. But a social media campaign without a blog often is like a cheeseburger without the beef, or a car with no engine. A key element is missing.

Unfortunately, he seemed a bit confused.

“Tell me again why a blog might help my business?”

I decided to switch gears. This is what I told him:

#1. Search engines love the fresh content that blogs provide. If you want customers to find your website, you need to populate it with new articles… like blog posts, for instance. This also applies to any other fresh stuff you put on your site, though (eg. case studies, press releases, newsletters, etc.).

#2. Blogs help you tell your story. With a blog and a stream of interesting content, websites will help visitors understand what they’re all about.

#3. Blogs are the “home base” of many effective online marketing campaigns. Write a blog post and then syndicate it through your social media platforms. A customer reads a Tweet or an update, clicks to the blog and then hopefully begins to explore the rest of your site (such as your checkout page).

Even for businesses that recognize the benefits of having a blog, keeping the site updated can be a challenge. That’s where WRITEIMAGE comes in.

We write your blog posts so you don’t have to do it. You concentrate on running your business. You get more visitors to your site who can then go on to buy stuff from you. Interested?

To get a free initial consultation to learn more, contact WRITEIMAGE today at 604.230.2638 or email info@writeimage.ca

SPECIAL INVITATION
Do you already have a blog for your business (Perhaps one that you’ve been neglecting lately)?

If you live in Vancouver and want to get inspiration from some fellow bloggers (for business and non-business websites), you ought to check out the Vancouver Blogger Meetup happening this week.

Date and Time: Wednesday, April 28, starting at 6:30 pm
Location: St. Augustines, 2360 Commercial Drive

More details at http://blog.meetup.com/30/calendar/13245316/

Business Blog vs. Normal Website: A Simple Explanation by Remarkablogger

This was in response to Vancouver Sun Managing Editor Kirk LaPointe’s remark that bloggers, Tweeps and Facebookers seemed to be missing niche opportunities. He pointed to the lack of resources “traditional” media outlets were throwing at the Vancouver Paralympic games, seeming to suggest that bloggers ought to fill the vacuum. A participant from the audience suggested another example, where coverage of the Olympics protests petered out significantly after the first day.

With all due respect to LaPointe and the lady from the audience, I think their critique misses the point. It’s true that some social media creators, a very slim minority, do develop entirely original investigative pieces that are on par with reporting by paid journalists. But the vast majority of social media content developers prefer to piggy-back on the efforts of traditional media, focusing on offering alternative opinion rather than alternative raw data. Individually and collectively, social media makers largely don’t have the resources to do anything else.

Sure, we create all kinds of original content, from photos and videos to really thought-provoking essay-type blog posts. But as a rule, we don’t pick our themes from whatever the newsmakers have deemed unworthy of their attention — at least, not if we want people to actually see what we’re creating.

Why didn’t more bloggers cover the rest of the Olympics protests? I suspect it was because most realized that the real story was the hundreds of thousands of happy patriots gathered in our public spaces and an outpouring of positive feeling — not a few hundred increasingly fractured and inarticulate protesters accompanied by masked thugs intent on useless violence.

Why aren’t more bloggers covering the Paralympic Games (NOTE: the lack of coverage is only relative to the Olympic Games that preceded it. Bloggers, like regular media, are covering these Games)? The stories of courage and overcoming adversity are there to be recorded in spades, perhaps even more than with our Olympic athletes. In their absence, sponsors, reporters, bloggers and the general public have once more indicated something a little bit ugly about our society. Perhaps that is the real story here.

The bottom line is that when traditional media does its job well of investigating and providing the raw stories, social media makers can then do their job of being the gateways to that content through hyperlinks and also providing alternative opinions. There are benefits going both ways.

It’s happening at 7 pm on Thursday, March 18 at the BOB Coworking Space in Vancouver’s Gastown District, 163 E. Pender Street.

Register for the event at http://smcyvrolympiclessons.eventbrite.com

See more information about this event below.

VANCOUVER OLYMPICS DEMONSTRATE BOTH GOOD AND BAD IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Local leaders in traditional and social media gather to discuss impact of social media on the 2010 Winter Olympic Games

VANCOUVER, BC – In the afterglow of the 2010 Vancouver Games, top BC media leaders will come together on March 18, 2010 to discuss the positive and negative impacts of both social and traditional media on the Games. The panel discussion will be held from 7-9pm at the BOB Coworking Space in Vancouver’s Gastown District, 163 E. Pender Street.

For more information about Social Media Club Vancouver, please contact Guacira Naves at g@onlinestrategy.ca, or visit http://smcyvr.com.

Blogs

The blog is often the essential tool of any social media campaign. You can use it to provide authoritative information, announce new things happening with your organization and link to things you’re doing elsewhere on the web. The blog is where you provide the authentic “voice” — or voices — of your organization.

As the most-frequently updated part of a website with fresh content, a blog is typically easier to find on Google than static web pages. It also is ready-made for facilitating discussion with your audience through a comments section, allowing your organization to obtain instant feedback from your fans, provide extra information and (as sometimes necessary) issue timely clarifications and corrections. There are many other benefits, but for now, suffice to say that the blog is the work-horse of many social media campaigns.

Twitter

Free instant messaging in 140 characters or less to your closest friends, whether you number them on one hand or in the hundreds of thousands. The PR benefits are obvious. One extremely important thing to remember about using Twitter for your organization is that you are often using it to connect with influencers who will spread your message to other channels.

Experienced Twitter users for organizations will often use their profiles as link-back machines to automatically promote content on their own websites, especially their blog content. In that case, think of the website as home-base, with your Twitter account inviting people back to your site to see what’s going on.

Facebook Fan Pages

Facebook Fan Pages are often set up as bulletin boards merely syndicating content from the main website. Actually, there can be value in this if updated regularly, since Google likes Facebook. If your website is having trouble competing in its niche to get on page one of searches, your fan page may be easier to find. That said, a more ambitious use of these platforms is to host contests, allow fans to post content that you might not want on the main site, or offer something special to your customers or supporters.

As with Twitter, a Facebook Fan Page will typically represent another spoke linking back to your hub, the main website.

YouTube Videos

YouTube is the most famous video-sharing site in North America. There are competitors, but if the point is for your video to reach as many eyeballs as possible, it makes sense to at least post one version of your video on YouTube. Use it to create educational clips, show interviews and demonstrate whatever it is your organization does. The medium is great for announcements, tutorials, advertisements — whatever you want to do.

Keep in mind that text is still king on the Internet, even when you’re working with video. With good descriptions and tags, more people will actually see your video.

Which Social Media Tools Should I Use for My Business?
As usual, I would remind my readers that social media is not the be-all and end-all of marketing tools. Direct-mail marketing, sign-boards, brochures and other “traditional” marketing tools also have their place.

First, figure out your target demographic. Next, focus on what it is you’re selling (whether that’s widgets, services or a charitable cause). Define your campaign. After that, you can start looking at the tools in your toolbox.

Be A Social Media Punk

So if you are a blogger in Vancouver and you’re looking to share some war stories or just learn from others who have achieved some small measure of success in this upside-down crazy world of new media, join the Vancouver Blogger Meetup group and come on out.

Whether you’re blogging for business, for fun or some mix of both, I can guarantee you’ll learn something at these events and probably have a lot of fun to boot.

Hope to see you there.

Don’t get tricked or traded into a blogger sweatshop!