The Blog Studio

All hands on deck! The North By North East festival is descending on Toronto Monday for a full-on Music, Film, and Culture takeover.  What’s more exciting for us geeks this year is an ‘i’—meaning NXNE has gone interactive, just like i its’ big sister festival SXSW (where the interactive portion has actually become larger and more popular than music and film!).

Alongside the massive gathering of bands and fans, there will be 30+ panels featuring industry leaders and design professionals discussing digital technology, creativity and social media trends.

This is especially thrilling for us here The Blog Studio, and we’re beyond excited and honoured to be taking a really active role at NXNE. Our President Lucia Mancuso (@lulula), and our Lead Strategy and Outreach nerd, Mike Dolan (@EvilPRGuy) will be speaking on two panels at the sold out conference.

On Monday June 14th at 2:00 pm, Lucia will share the stage with Amrita Chandra, Guinevere Orvis, April Dunford and moderator Meghan Warby on “Thank You For Being A Friend: tips, traits and tactics of successful women in tech and social media.” These women are Toronto’s leaders in Social Media, Marketing, and Digital Communications. They will unveil and discuss gender, workplace and media strategy. You can also expect to walk away from this panel with usable strategies and ideas you can implement into your own workday right away.

On June 14 at 9:30am, Mike will share the stage for the hotly anticipated “Circle Jerking 101” panel, along with Andrew Lane, Kevin Airgid, Mark Evans, and panel moderator Jamie Woo. Mike Dolan is a man who tells it like it is (for better or for worse, his talk at Toronto Social Media Week stirred up more than a little controversy)—and this panel won’t be any different. These contributors will discuss the pitfalls of social media, and exactly what a client can expect from a great social media campaign. You can arm yourself with the insider straight dope you need to make the right decisions for incorporating social media into your business strategies, and avoid getting ripped off by the sham artists that multiply by the day in this industry. This panel is guaranteed to be entertaining, so this is one you definitely don’t want to miss.

These Digital Discussions will be cutting edge, raw and uncut. We are excited to sink our teeth into the NXNEi’s Social Media fabric, but are concerned that NXNEi could fall into the pit that many people feel has crippled SXSW in recent years.  SXSW started small and expanded exponentially very quickly.  With its rampant growth, depth of information and diversity of the SXSW conference, the festival became so popular it it lost some of the intimacy that ensured you would make personal and business connections that are really the most valuable takeaway from a conference..

Too much of SXSW is now spent waiting in lines, coordinating hangouts and trying to hit the fifteen parties hosted each night. A ‘Swarm‘ badge on Foursquare? That’s the line at the Empanada Truck at 4am. How about a SuperSwarm of 250+ people in one spot! That badge popped up at nearly every gathering at the festival.

We love NXNE’s intimate vibe, and are curious to see if it can retain the ‘warm feeling’ this year. As How Magazine editor Bryn Mooth says, “All this Social Media stuff makes us think we are really connected—facebook and twitter are fine ways to do that—But for my money, making connections in person is what really matters.” While Social Media enables you to reach out to a huge cross section of people , there r is nothing like an old school face to face chat.  So come out and chat with Lucia, Mike and all of their colleagues next week during the industry panels (or the parties, which are just as important)!

We invite all of you to attend our panels as well as email us questions to address during our talks, so please send them in. We will also keep you posted via twitter and our blog on the people, parties and panels.

Plus we’ll be annoucning a huge surprise for every attending NXNEi. So keep your eyes on the blog here and at http://www.nxne.com for this special announcement . You’re going to love it (pinky swear)! Stay tuned!

It’s been a great couple of months at The Blog Studio, thanks to you, our clients. We’ve recently completed quite a few projects that we see as our best work to date.  According to all of you, you like our work as well, and because of this we’ve been busier than ever.

In order to keep up with all our new projects, and continue to provide you with same level of service and individual attention you’re used to, we’re expanding. We’d just like to take a moment of your time to introduce you to the new members of our staff, here online. You’ll have a chance to meet everyone in person very soon.

The Blog Studio team has grown by three. We now have a dedicated Account Director Nalin, and PR Intern, Victoria.  As our Account Director, Nalin will be overseeing the daily business operations and acting as a point of contact for all of The Blog Studio Clientele.  He is a business administration expert, and we are excited for all of you to meet and chat with him. That will be easy because Nalin is ultra friendly and loves to talk. He is the go-to-guy for information on planning your projects, status updates, day-to-day questions or any information you might require while working with The Blog Studio. While Nalin knows the business side of things, he’s also a well trained web designer and developer, so he can answer your technical questions and help you make sense of any aspects of your project that might require translation into plain English. He’s the guy that will make sure your project is done on time, on budget, and works just the way you want it to.

Victoria will be working in our PR division, creating web content for our blog, sharing new ideas, chatting away on Twitter and keeping up on social media trends. She’s a dedicated blogger herself, and enjoys interacting in the real life and online. 

We’d also like to take a second too formally introduce you to Michael Dolan, who heads up strategy and outreach at The Blog Studio. Michael has been with us for a while, and many of our clients have had a chance to work with him in the last year. In fact, he’s so busy on all of our projects we haven’t had a chance to properly introduce him. He’s a PR vet with many years of agency and in-house experience. As on old-school geek, Michael is always on the bleeding edge of the tech scene and his one-of-a-kind creative strategies have been widely praised everywhere from Wired Magazine to the NY Times.

So I invite you to get to know them and what makes them tick. Here is a little Q&A and some info about our new friends:


Account Director:
Nalin is a graduate of McMaster University, and also Web Design Development at Humber College.  He then began freelancing for tech companies in Toronto learning the ropes before joining the team at The Blog Studio.  He has an eye for design, development skills and is a damn friendly fellow.  Nalin is a truly gifted communicator who specializes in bridging the gap between the deep tech world and everyone else. Nalin spends his days riding hard on all The Blog Studio projects to ensure that every client gets exactly what they want at the end of the day.  When he’s not keeping the wheels greased at work, you can find him following the NBA (Go Raptors!), swinging a tennis racket or hanging from a climbing rope somewhere. He’s excited to take on new challenges at the Blog Studio and brings things to a whole new level.

Questions:

1) What are you most passionate about? I am most passionate about communicating and forming new relationships with people.
2) What is your favorite ice cream flavour? Mint chocolate chip!
3) What is your twitter handle? @nalins
4) What social network do you love the most? Twitter, because Facebook is just starting to get creepy.
5) What piece of software is your favorite? I would have to say Coda for Mac, it’s a great development tool and lets you do so much through a simple interface.
6) What can’t you live without? My macbook.
7) Mac or PC? Mac. They are much more stable and have better applications for what I do on a daily basis.
8) Favorite Website? Probably something sports related, maybe nba.com…
9) Gamer? If so expand on favourite games? Used to be. I loved strategy games. Age of Empires, Starcraft, Command & Conquer. Goldeneye and Mario Kart for N64 were classics.


PR Intern:
Victoria is a devotee of all things surrounding design and social media.  She’s a social butterfly that combines her gift of gab with an innate ability to write publicity love notes on all of her favourite subjects.  Having studied English Lit and Communications at UofT, she’s written for Holt Renfrew—who deems her work “truly inspired,” Toronto’s http://www.iheartthemusic.com, The Varsity and her own blog Rosebuds&Rascals. She draws influence from classic concepts of aesthetics as well as from her diverse background; her vision is created through a mash-up of eastern and western textures and flavours.  When she’s not tweeting her heart out (a rare occasion) you can find her in a yoga studio or patio hopping. She is really excited to working at the Blog Studio and putting her creative eye to use.

Questions:

1) What are you most passionate about? International Travel and photography in search of beauty (in all its obscure forms.)
2) What is your favorite ice cream flavour? Roasted Marshmallow from Greg’s Ice-cream.
3) What social network do you love the most?
My blog http://rosebudsandrascals.blogspot.com I’m constantly updating it and it’s my vehicle for being fearlessly self-expressive.
4) What is your twitter handle? @lolakuketz
5) What can’t you live without? Sleeping in, dark chocolate and house music:)
6) Mac or PC? Mac—After having Apple I could never go back to PC. Love love my Mac.
7) Favorite Website? Style.com and I have a committed daily love for Scott Schuman and Garace Dore.
8) What makes you blush? Admitting my middle name is Lolita—after the opera, not the book. But try convincing people of that:)


Strategy and Outreach
Mike Dolan

1) What are you most passionate about? Making new ideas fun. There is no reason you can’t make things both succesful and enjoyable.
2) What is your favorite ice cream flavour? Strawberry Tofutti
3) What social network do you love the most? Twitter. I’ve been called a Twitter-aholic by more than one person. You can usually find out what I’m doing minute by minute by checking out my feed.
4) What is your twitter handle? @EvilPRGuy
5) What can’t you live without? Long bike rides as often as possible.
6) Mac or PC? I never go anywhere without my Macbook, and it’s been that way for 10 years. I also have a Linux box for games and general geeking out.
7) Favorite Website? BoingBoing.net I need my daily fix of the strange and geeky.
8) What makes you blush?  Red wine. 

Last night I had the honour of attending the Hills Season 6 premier and live taping of The Aftershow at MTV. The show was good but it was the way that MTV handles social media that really left a lasting impression on me. 

The premier followed Kristin, Brody and the rest of the cast members partying in Miami for Superbowl weekend and lest we forget: the official Hills unveiling of the new and improved (?) Heidi Montag.  Then Jesse and Dan discussed the show highlights and had a bit of naughty back and forth with the audience during The Aftershow.

What you won’t get from watching online is the atmosphere MTV creates during their live tapings. They created an intimate, communicative vibe for both in house guests, and the web audience. 

MTV treated the bloggers with style and courtesy. They welcomed Social Media to the premises via a dedicated press entrance and seated us in the balcony, which were the best seats in the house.  Everyone was invited by the hosts to tweet and blog away. MTV’s policies were clear: social media is welcome here, and so are your cameras, laptops and any other electronic gizmmo you can think of. They provided a fast wi-fi connection and encouraged everyone to take full advantage of it throughout the show.  MTV is smart and they get it. They understand social media and the influence that bloggers hold in their target demographic, and did everything possible to ensure we had a good time...and could easily tell our online friends what was going on. 

It was cool to see the barriers between “formal journalism” and social media fall away in this regard.  So many publications make it crystal clear that these are two mutually exclusive arenas. We really appreciated that bloggers were treated as press, because we are. Viewers outside the studio were interacting with MTV via twitter, adding another layer of inclusivity to the event.

I really enjoyed myself last night and was impressed by the scope and spirit of the event. There were 90,000 viewers in North America alone and I can’t wait to see what MTV brings us in the months to come. I think a lot of this can be attributed to the influence of MTV’s new community manager Casie Stewart, and I’d like to extend a thank you to her for having The Blog Studio be part of the action. 

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.