How Not to Run a Question on Facebook

The other day, I was on Kodak’s Facebook Page, and saw this gem of a Facebook question: “What do you like to get/give for Father’s Day?”. While its an innocent question to begin with, their Social Media Manager left it open to users to enter their own…

You’d think people would be mature enough to enter something relevant… but, not so much. The top answers were “My Dad is Dead” and “A new Kodak Community Manager who doesn’t leave the Poll options wide open”.

At least to give Kodak some credit, they didn’t take down the poll after these unfortanate answers were added — but, conversley, they didn’t actually even comment on it. I guess to them, it was better to ignore it, than get involved. Afterall, it would probably just call out the stupidity.

Social media lets anyone do almost anything — think twice before leaving the polling open for anyone to add anything. Personally, I like to offer 4-5 choices, and then “other (share in comments)”. This makes it much more manageable, where you can reply to a particular person’s concerns/comments, as well as, delete things that are beyond out of line.

How Far We’ve Come

It’s amazing to think this was less than 20 years ago…

Northern Voice 2011 Review

For the first time, I attended Northern Voice up at UBC over the past two days — while it was a last minute decision to go, I was pretty impressed.

Dubbed as a “two-day, non-profit personal blogging and social media conference” it caught my interest, along with seminar titles including “Your Blog is Boring and Your Photos Suck” and “Awesome-Izing Your Podcast: Secrets from Radio.”

Going into it, I didn’t know what to expect. I’ve been to other marketing events through BCAIM and IIMA, and they tend to be extremely polished with really established speakers. Northern Voice, on the other hand, wasn’t as much — but thats what made it interesting.

Starting with the keynote, April Smith spoke from her first hand experience of the infamous Vancouver East side, and shared her unique story from struggling on the street to being behind a blog documenting the community she lives. It showed the power that social media can have, and how it can help share stories that may never reach the masses.

From there, came the breakout sessions — everyone could pick between 3-4 sessions, depending on their interests. I chose a panel on Social Media and how its impacting the news, followed by a discussion on online defamation, by the team at Vancouver Sun. Both were enlightening just how news organizations are having to change their perspective on how they communicate news. While the underlining method (telling a story) hasn’t changed, the new mediums have had a substantial impact on the speed and style of news.

Later that day, I took in a session on “How to blog funny” with Mike Vardy, which was an entertaining presentation around actual tips/ideas to make content more compelling. As you can read, I have learned nothing. After that, was a presentation around building strong communities online with blogs.

Day 1 ended with wine, followed by an after party at Academic – nice venue, just couldn’t stay too long.

The second day in, a Saturday, was a bit harder to get started. Aside from having to wake up on a Saturday, I had to figure out a different bus route to get out to UBC (I hate transit). But, I still managed to make it on time. Day 2 kicked off with Chris Wilson reminiscing about the good old days of the internet, along with interesting observations about where we’ve come in the past 20 years.

Following that, was more breakout sessions — starting it off was a pannel about creating online movements with no budget. It chronicled the recent election, and grass roots campaigns including “Harper Chooses Donuts Over The Planet”. It showed that even with no money, you can still compel people to take action. Following that, was a bit more technical presentation on how to write an ebook from an actual teacher, Cyri Jones… BCIT represent. (Interesting, as I’ve seen first hand how much text books cost, and how little of it actually gets used. After that, was a presentation titled “Stop Apologizing for Your Online Life,” all about breaking the stigma of ‘online’ life, versus ‘offline’ life. (wait, theres an offline?)

Finally, after two long days, the conference ended with a presentation by Tod Maffin who explained the process of “Awesome-Izing Your Podcast.” While Im fairly sure ‘Awesome-izing’ isn’t a word, he pointed out things people take for granted in any sort of video/audiocast — timing, music and tone. All of which, can take a podcast from just being another presentation, to being something more. This presentation dived deeper than any other, in my opinion, and was a great way to end the conference.

All in all, Northern Voice was a really well done — but long — two days. Seeing as it was a whopping $90 to go (probably the cheapest convention I’ve been to), I’d definitely buy tickets next year. Not to mention, I had the chance to meet a bunch of interesting people really passionate about online.

After Northern Voice, I’ve been inspired to blog a bit more, and get more active on Twitter…. two things that I’ve been half-assing for quite some time now.

Facebook’s Trigger Happiness

The other day, I was logging into my Facebook account, and I came across something interesting. When I enter the wrong password, not only does Facebook give me the “wrong password, idiot” screen, but also likes to rub it in a bit more by sending me an email instantly saying “Sorry you’ve been having trouble logging in…”

While I’m sure the email itself may be useful for those who genuinely forget the password, could they at least wait a minute before sending it? Without even giving me the chance to enter my password a second time, and to try again to get in, the email is already in my inbox. Trigger happy?

I’m sure I’m not the only one whose mistyped my password at least once, so why not give me some breathing room. Say, if I enter it three times incorrectly, send the email. Or, if I don’t get in within five minutes, send me an email. But not instantly — its just another email to delete out of my inbox.

Below is an example of the email I’m talking about — The underlining concept of the email itself is great, but the instant execution is flawed at best.

Copyright 101 with YouTube

This is YouTube’s attempt at convincing people not to upload copyrighted work. Its a pretty clever in tying together education with entertainment. Guess they realized no one would watch it if it wasn’t in cartoon format — but now, 250k people have. Too bad 80% of them ‘dislike’ it.