The Blog Studio

Is Social Media Week over already? It went so fast, and we learned so much here at The Blog Studio. We’re just starting to process and make sense of it now. We’d like to take a second and send a heartfelt ‘Thanks’ to all of you who came out to our office for our ‘No Cheerleaders Allowed’ talk. We wanted an honest conversation about social media, and thanks to all of you, we really got one.

If you’ll indulge us for a moment, we’d like to take a quick stroll down memory lane and recap some of the interesting discussions we had that evening, and share what we learned for those of you who couldn’t make it in person. For those of you that braved the Canadian cold to squeeze into our offices, we commend your moxie!

The biggest lesson we learned is that social media means something different to everyone. Everyone in the room had a different opinion on what social media is, how you can use it personally or for business, and what works and what doesn’t. This make a whole lot of sense, because the one thing everyone agreed on is that social media is powered by the individual behind the keyboard. So to all the ‘experts; out there trying to define social media, you’re being shouted down by the rabble. There is no solid definition that everyone in the industry feels comfortable with.

We started the conversation off by asking everyone to discuss the early experiences they had with the web, and with social media. I got the ball rolling discussing how I miss the days where social media was a free for all, and everyone shared their ideas free of charge. Maybe this is a bit of nostalgia, but it still holds true for. Early memories in the room ranged from telnet to Twitter, and I quickly realized the age of people in the room started in the early 20’s and went all the way to people in their 50’s. How cool is that? Social media crushed the age barrier. It isn’t just for young tech savvy whippersnappers.

The hot button topic of the night was definitely using social media to make a buck. Is it OK to do this for profit? The answers ranged from absolutely to absolutely not. Fair enough. The consensus seemed to be we all want to make a living, but it can be very difficult to quantify ROI on social media campaigns. It’s great to hear that people really want to show their clients and employers they can demonstrate real value with social media, and hopefully prove it.

A thorough discussion of tools and analytics followed, and again the room was split. Many of you felt you can use analytics to show success with the numbers. A second camp felt that while numbers are important, you can’t always quantify the intangible way that people view yourself, or your business in the social media world. Personally, I agree with both points of view. In a perfect world a combination of analytics and conversation is able to tell the whole story. That isn’t an easy concept to explain, but we’re trying, and as time goes on we’re getting better at making our case.

This brought up the idea of whether it’s more valuable to target a select group of people on the web, or get your message out to everyone and see what sticks. Here’s one point where just about everyone in the room agreed: the targeted approach is the way to go.  Speaking to your specific audience, in the space where they live, generates the best results and the most clear communications. This is genuine two way engagement. The ‘scatter gun’ approach is headed out the door with the old media world, because it gets in the way of having a real conversation.

This led to a discussion about where people live and hang out online. We all agree that fewer and fewer people are watching television, at a set time, on an actual television. More commonly, viewers are tuning into their favorite shows online. This has a huge impact on the way we buy and consume advertising, or what even constitutes advertising anymore. While online viewing hasn’t eclipsed traditional TV watching yet, it’s coming.

Our favorite loudmouth American at The Blog Studio, Michael Dolan, turned a few heads when he said “Everyone who watches TV will be dead in a few years anyway.” That’s one way to put it. Maybe a more optimistic way to look at it, is you can get great bang for your buck by participating in TV online, either through ads or social media conversations around these shows.

Mr. Dolan gave a quick rundown of one his favorite topics: Social Media Trainwrecks. We discussed the Saatchi and Saatchi Toyota social media campaign, The Motrin Moms Debacle and the Steve Rubel Wal-Mart bloggers screwup. All interesting cases with a lot to teach anyone who gets involved in this space. The takeaway here is to enter at your own risk and be certain to keep things honest. Your audience is as smart as you are, don’t forget that.

The discussion continued with people and brands who are honest, and using social media in a fun and transparent way. Shaq, PDiddy and BlogTO were three names that popped up right away. I agree. They all do it well, keep it honest and make it fun. They also engage with their audiences and don’t use social media as a way to blast out ads.

The last part of the evening focused on Facebook, and opinions were all over the place. Some people love it, some people hate it. That’s the only honest assessment I can give of this discussion. Every person had a wholly different opinion. Some thought it was the future of online engagement, and some thought it’s already seen its’ day. The line of the night came out of this conversation, courtesy of Meghan Warbly of Argyle, “Facebook is the Nickelback of Social Media.” Ha.

We really had a great time, and were extremely impressed with the wide range of opinions and backgrounds that all came together in one room for a smart and civil conversation. That’s why the social media world is a such a great place. We’d like to take a second and thank all of you for coming and sharing with us. A few of you went far beyond the call of duty. Like Crystal Gibson, who shared her excellent great notes with us. Carolyn Van who showed up early to help us set up, and @tourdedufflet for bringing over some yummy dufflet treats.

It was lovely to meet some familiar Twitter avatars in the flesh like Toronto PR gadfly @J_Lab, @interpretivist and man about town @mynameisguygal. We also got a chance to play Smush. CA, and meet the brilliant minds at Atmosphere industries who thought it up.

Also a special thanks to Marijke Daye from Sweet Something Design for her awesome candy table that kept us all hopped up on sugar for our chat.

Thank you all for taking the time to visit, we’re looking forward to having you over for drinks again soon. 

There’s been quite a bit of buzz about Google Buzz since the rollout this week. Terrible puns aside, we’re always curious to try out the latest, and possibly greatest tech toys and social media tools. Google Buzz is no exception, and we couldn’t wait to get our grubby mouse pointer all over it.

Because we’re special, important and extremely good looking, The Blog Studio team noticed Buzz pop-up in our Gmail accounts late Tuesday afternoon, so we’ve had a bit of time to take it for a test drive. The easiest way to explain Buzz, which I’m sure Google will hate, is that it’s a built in Twitter for your Gmail account. It also offers quite a bit of integration with many social media platforms, bringing them all into one easy to manage place. Buzz offers you the option to follow and be followed by the people you Gmail with. While this isn’t anything special, it is nice to use a new service that you don’t have to invite your friends to. If you’re a heavy Gmail user, your contacts are already in place. You don’t have to chase down your contacts and convince them to sign up for something new. It’s been a while since we’ve experienced that luxury.

You’ll notice a multi-colored balloon under the inbox icon in your Gmail account, which is the Buzz button. When you click the button, you’re brought to a screen that is aesthetically familiar to most Google users. You’re offered the option to use your Google Public Profile as your Buzz profile, or you can create a new one. Next, you’ll see your photo icon, with a comic book like speech bubble coming out of it. This is where the action happens.

You can type a random thought snippet, similar to Twitter, or post a picture, video, or a link. You have the option of sharing this information publicly, with your followers, or keeping it completely private. The interface is nice, and it definitely has that Gmail snappiness to it. It feels very solid right out of the gate.

Look down the page a little farther, and things start to get interesting. You’re given the option to connect other social media sites you participate in. This very simple interface allows you to link up your YouTube, Blogger, Flickr, Google Reader and even...your Twitter account to Buzz. It works like a charm. I imagine over time, Google will begin to offer support for more and more services as the number of Buzz users increases. Whenever you update one of your other social media sites, your buzz followers will see that update in their stream. It’s a social media catch all. There’s a mobile, location based sharing feature as well with features similar to Foursquare.

Google has managed to bring your entire online life into one place, with no hassle and no fuss. It’s just there. It’s like Friend Feed on steroids with great UI. You can comment on the updates of the people you follow, ‘Like’ their updates a la Facebook, or email that person, all from the same screen. In the short time we’ve been playing with Buzz, we can already say it’s extremely convenient. If you spend a lot of time in Gmail as it is, you now have access to all of your other social media networks right from your inbox. That’s a timesaver as well as a powerful sharing tool.

We haven’t really scratched the surface of all the features and potential uses for Buzz. Hey, it’s only been 48 hours, give us a chance! It’s too early to make any predictions, but we’re betting Buzz is hugely popular in the very near future. With so many built in Gmail users, and the simple to understand interface, Buzz may be what brings microblogging to the masses. We will say this: for hardcore social media geeks, Buzz is a convenient way to ride herd on all the accounts you have. What does everyone else think so far? Leave us a comment and let’s discuss. 

It’s an exciting time to be a geek in Toronto! Social Media Week Toronto is headed your way, and of course The Blog Studio will be right in the thick of things. We’d like to invite all our old friends, new friends and friends we haven’t met yet to join us for a good time on at our offices on February 1, 2010.

Leave your pom poms and megaphone at home! We aren’t hosting a panel, we’re not giving a talk and there definitely won’t be a slideshow. There will be good eats, cold booze and Toronto’s smartest people (that’s you!) having an honest discussion about what is actually going on in social media. We aren’t selling anything, we don’t have an agenda, and social media ‘gurus’ and ‘mavens’ will be stopped at the door.

I’ll be your hostess with the mostess, while we all sit down for a chat about our industry that might end up anywhere. Submit your questions and RSVP beforehand to socialmedia@theblogstudio.com. I really hope to see you there. There are some more details below, and keep your eye on Social Media Week site to find out what else is going on during Social Media Week: Toronto.

No Cheerleaders Allowed: An Honest Conversation About Social Media

You ever get the feeling that the social media ‘experts’ are only telling half the truth? Do you get the distinct impression that the Big Time social media mavens and gurus are painting a pretty picture because it benefits them directly? We do to.

Join Managing Director of The Blog Studio, Lucia Mancuso, for an intimate, no holds barred discussion about the on the ground state of affairs in the wired world. Submit your questions anonymously beforehand. Then join us February, 1. 2010 at the The Blog Studio space in downtown Toronto for apps, booze and a rollicking discussion about what’s really going on. No punches pulled, no smoke and mirrors and no self-proclaimed experts. Just a diverse group of smart people who engage the social media space talking about their ideas and concerns.

Afterwards we’ll compile a list of the sharpest, wittiest, nastiest and most useful answers to see if we can make sense out of what social media is, and what it might become.

Please RSVP as soon as possible. Space for this event is very limited.

RSVP to socialmedia@TheBlogStudio.com

2010 is upon is. We’d like to thank all of our clients, co-workers, friends, freelancers, geeky colleagues, fellow tech workers and everyone else that we’ve met and worked with in 2009. You’ve made the last year absolutely wonderful for us, and we’ve enjoyed every interaction. The great people we talk to everyday are what makes everything worthwhile. We’re extremely proud of the work we’ve done in the past year, and we’ve had some brilliant successes. Thank you, thank you and thank you again.

We’re looking forward to the upcoming year. Thinking about our plans for the future, we realized that there is always room for improvement. We want to share some of the goals, ideas and improvements that we’re going to make happen immediately in the upcoming year. Everything we want to do comes down to one thing: providing you with best web presence to make your business successful.

Put You First
The most important thing we can do is improve our customer service. You, our clients are the sole reason we exist, and we want to treat you even better than we do now. We want to get things done more quickly, do them better and create the best sites that we can. We want you to be happy with us. In order to help things along, we’re expanding our team so there is more of us to go around. Your project always comes first. This is a promise we take seriously, and if something falls between the cracks let us know and we’ll make it right.

No Agency BS
We’re not an agency, and we’ll never be one. What does that mean exactly? We’re a boutique size business with small to large size clients. You won’t get your project passed off to an underling after we win your business, because we don’t have any underlings. We’re a team. We’re proud of every project we’ve done, and take it personally if something isn’t right. We don’t care about running up billable hours, that isn’t how we work. We’ll quote you for your project, and we’ll stick to that quote. Since everyone at The Blog Studio does a little bit of everything, you don’t have to pay for a bunch of unnecessary management costs. There aren’t a bunch of overpaid executives sitting in our office that need to keep the Lear Jet gassed up. We all get our hands dirty, so all the hours you pay for get your project closer to perfection. We’ll never pad your bills, we’ll never give you the runaround, we won’t bill you for vapor work, and we’ll make sure the work is done right. In short, we’ll treat your business the way we like people to treat our business.

Adding New Services
After we finish a site, many of our you have asked us for help getting the word out, creating content strategies, advice on copywriting and how to get a PR program started. We’ve got you’ve covered in 2010. We’re happy to say we’ve expanded our menu of offerings in these areas, and we’ve brought in some new staff with loads of experience in these areas. So whether you want to learn about how Twitter can help your business, what taglines work the best for your site or how to get your business featured in a big name magazine, we can help you build a program to expand your brand.

Offering More Advice
We’re very proud of our blog, and the most popular posts are the ones where we share advice on how to get things done. In 2010 we plan to post more how-to’s, more software reviews, and more of the methods we use to get things done. We love to share our ideas and working methods with you, so you can make your business better. The ongoing conversation in our comments section teaches us a lot about what you want to know more about. From WordPress to Google Wave, we’ll try our best to cover it all. If there’s something you’d like to hear more about, please drop us a line and let us know. We’ll also be offering more advice and continuing to answer your questions on Twitter @TheBlogStudio, so stop by and say ‘Hello’ anytime.

Keeping Up With the Joneses
Technology wise, things are moving faster than ever. We keep up with the newest of the new, so you don’t have to. In the coming year we plan to work even harder to ensure that every site we build is compatible with the new best of breed browsers like Google Chrome. Our improved cross browser support and testing will make certain you don’t miss a single slice of your online audience. We’ll be extending this testing to all the software, plugins and code that we use. We want every site built by The Blog Studio to work flawlessly in every situation, every time. 

Thanks for making 2009 a great year, and here’s to 2010.

Cheers,

The Blog Studio

WordPress 2.9 ‘Carmen’ just hit the street, and this update has some really useful new features. We’ve spent some time with Carmen (named for jazz chanteuse Carmen McRae), and have written a short rundown to let you know what to expect when you upgrade, aimed at the everyday end user. This update is an especially big win for media heavy bloggers and inexperienced WP users.

The most exciting improvements can be found in the way WordPress handles images. While we love WP, we’ve always found the image handling a little clunky, and it’s the most common complaint we hear from users. Carmen adds a feature packed image editor to the WP dashboard. It’s now possible to resize, crop, flip and scale images right inside the program. This is a huge improvement that will save you time and trouble of having to edit images in a 3rd party app, and the fly them into WP.

The image editor works beautifully, and photos fit painlessly into the post. Images look the way you’d like them to look in your posts on the first try. Say ‘Goodbye’ to the old system of editing, inserting an image into the post, viewing the post, and going back to do it all over again. This feature is a huge win for bloggers that include many images in their posts, or users who aren’t familiar with image editing software.

Carmen also makes it dead simple to handle video embedding, which was a bit of a nightmare before.  Video embeds usually required a plugin, and many times the video formatting ended up looking funny in the post. Now, you just paste the video URL on its’ own line in the post, and the video will show up. That’s it’s. It couldn’t be simpler. WordPress 2.9 supports most popular video upload services including YouTube, Google Video, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler and many more. We gave this a quick test this morning with some videos from YouTube and they went up without a hitch. This is a big time saver, and will let users add video with zero hassle or technical skill required. If you can paste a link, you can embed a video in WordPress 2.9.

Though not as flashy, Carmen overhauls the WordPress Plugin upgrade and compatibility system. One of the best things about WP is the staggering amount of useful plugins available, and most users have at least a few installed. The new system allows you to update your plugins as a batch, up to 10 at a time. It also improves the way WP checks plugins for compatibility with WordPress updates. As time goes on, the feature will become more useful as more plugins, and WP itself continue to release new versions. You can upgrade without having to suffer through plugin/WP compatibility issues.

At one point or another we’ve all accidentally deleted a WP post, and lost some sleep because once it’s gone, it’s gone. Not anymore. Carmen includes a powerful Global Undo feature. Now, when you delete a post or a comment, it goes into your trash, where it can be resurrected. As developers we LOVE this feature, because we no longer have to tell clients that the post spent hours working on is gone into the ether forever.

There quite a few less glamorous technical improvements going on in the background too. The most useful is that WP now supports rel=canonical, which is nice bonus in the SEO arena.

WordPress 2.9 Carmen has only been out for a couple days, but we’re already deeply impressed with the new features. Carmen takes two of the most frustrating aspects of WP, image and video handling, and completely overhauls them to make your life easier. The next time you create a post, you’ll immediately notice a difference in how simple it is to get media into your posts. The next time you accidentally delete a post, and can recover it, you’ll want to kiss Carmen on the mouth. The other improvements, while aren’t as obvious will become useful over time. As usual the brilliant people working on WP have cleaned up the code, stomped out some bugs and tightened things up all around.

Should you upgrade? Absolutely. The only reason not to upgrade would be if you rely on a certain plugin that is currently incompatible with Carmen. Other than that, you should switch over as soon as you can. It will simplify your blogging, and make using WP an even better experience.

If you’re currently using a previous version of Wordpress, you’ve got a lot to gain from this update. At The Blog Studio, we’re currently offering an upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress for $150! The service includes a backup of your current site and database (an essential, yet often ignored step), as well as performing the upgrade itself.

If you are comfortable performing the upgrade yourself, upgrading to WordPress 2.9 couldn’t be easier. Login in to your WordPress Dashboard, and you’ll see a link that asks if you’d like to upgrade your installation. Click it, and in 30 seconds you’ll be ready to go. We didn’t have any issues at all, and the process was ultra fast and painless. You can also go the more technical route and download the package and perform the upgrade manually.

As always we’d like to take a second to extend a huge ‘Thank You’ from The Blog Studio, to the wonderful people who write, update and improve WP. You’ve done another excellent job and we appreciate your efforts.