I had the pleasure of creating a wonderful social media piece for  Oshawa National Peacekeepers Day.  Joan Kerr and Glenn Mcknight of FBSC.org hosted a  very successful event which attracted local military veterians, nato mission peacekeepers, Durham Regional Police, RCMP, Honourable Colin Carrie, James Anderson and many more Oshawa citizens.

My role in this project was to document the event with photography, video and audio to create a social media piece.  Social media content, like the video (see below) is a great way to spread the word about an annual event you may be holding.  This video has organic viral power with far greater leverage than traditional media outlets.  This video is easily hosted/embeded on serveral partnering websites and backed with a key word search campaign optimizing its search engine capability.  In other words, much easier to find in Goolges search engines.  There are many strategies for social media campaigns with many ways to promote events, products or individuals on-line.
Please make a comment about why you think it’s important to remember canadian peacekeepers.

WordCamp Toronto 2009

MICROPLAZA offers an interesting way to make sense of your Twitter streams. Called itself “your personal micro-news agency,” it aggregates and organizes links shared by those you follow on Twitter and display them as newstream. Status updates that contain similar web links are aggregated into ’tiles.’ Within a tile, you can see updates from those you follow and also those you don’t. Another interesting feature is ‘Being Someone’, which you can peek into someone’s world and see their ’tiles’; designed to facilitate information discovery. You can also organize those you follow into groups or ‘tribes’. You can create, for example, a knitting ‘tribe’ to easily what URLs your knitting friends are tweeting. In addition, you can bookmark ’tiles’ for future reference. Its yet-to-be-released feature, Mosaic, allows users to group together the bookmarked ’tiles’ and turn them into social objects – for sharing and discussion. At the time of this posting, MicroPlaza is still in private beta.

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You could spend two hours every evening reading tips on efficient working. You could then implement every last one of them so that you’re working as efficiently as possible, every minute of your working day.

And, all too often, you’d find that you’ve become very good at Getting Things Done. But the “things” you’re doing could be done by pretty much anyone and you’ve not made yourself any more effective. You’ll be racing through work, but, like Alice, you’ll be running hard and going nowhere.

Once you’re past the most junior level in your company, you can vastly improve your effectiveness by being willing to delegate. Even if you’re a freelancer working solely for yourself, there are tasks you can pass on to someone else (what about using a Virtual Assistant?)

So why do so many bosses end up trying to micromanage? Why do so many managers waste their time on work that a kid fresh out of high school could do? It’s often because they’re not willing to delegate – or not confident enough about it.

Delegating typically brings up some tricky issues that you might rather not face, like:

• Needing to clarify a hodge-podge procedure before attempting to teach it to someone else
• Spending time teaching someone else to carry out the work (when you could just’ve done it yourself)
• Accepting that you’re not the only person who can do a good job of this task – forgetting the silly proverb that “If you want a job doing, do it yourself”
• Needing to spend your time on real work, which only you can do. You may find you’ve been bogged down in trivia because it’s easier than tackling hard, creative tasks.

Here are some of my tips on getting through these problem patches.

• Clarifying Procedures
  Whether or not you plan to delegate work, you should have a written procedure for any regular task that you carry out. (Keep it as simple and step-by-step as possible.)

  For example, if your job involves hosting websites for a number of clients, there are probably some simple steps you go through for each one:

  • Buying the domain name
  • Setting up hosting
  • Setting nameservers and other technical details
  • Creating email accounts…

  ..and so on. Do you really want to spend ten minutes figuring out what you did last time, in what order (and looking for account names and passwords) every single time? If you’ve got a straightforward document which lists, step by step, what you need to do, you can run through it without room for error and without much need for thought.

  Most of us have a number of routine tasks that we “bodge” our way through; things which we do on a semi-regular basis but can’t be bothered to sit down and work out a system for. When you next come across one of these in your own work, create a simple set of instructions there and then. It’ll take you a few minutes now, but it’ll save you time from now on. (Think of it like insulating your home: you pay up-front, but then you save on heating and air conditioning bills for years to come.)

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Some people say they “work well under stress”, but most of us are happier, healthier and more productive when we feel that we’re on top of things. With that in mind, here are ten tips to help you stay on top of your work.

1. Don’t Take On Too Much
   If you’re overworked, is it because you’re not very efficient and waste time (be honest) or is it because you simply have too much work?

   All the time management tips in the world won’t give you more than twenty-four hours in a day. When you’re offered an exciting new project to be part of, when a colleague asks for a favor, or when you’re thinking about sticking up your hand and volunteering in a meeting … stop and think about your other priorities. Remember that if your day is currently full and you take on new work, something else is going to have to go.




2. Minimize Meetings
   Many time-management writers, from Tim Ferriss to Mark Forster, advocate avoiding meetings if at all possible. How often have you sat in a meeting, bored out of your skull, wishing you could be getting on with your actual work?

   If you’re obliged to be in regular meetings, try cutting the frequency (perhaps a team meeting every fortnight, not every week, would be just as effective) or the duration (it’s surprising how much can be accomplished in half-an-hour).

   If you can possibly avoid meetings, do. That goes doubly for meetings which are off-site – there’s a lot of wasted time involved in getting there and back.

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Paul Smith – dubbed the Twitchhiker – made the 11,000-mile trip using only donations from people who use the social networking site Twitter.

He gave himself 30 days to complete the trek, and was forbidden to spend a  penny on so much as a taxi journey.

On completing his epic trek he wrote on his blog: ‘The Twitchhiker project showed that kindness is universal, that the whole can be infinitely greater than the sum of its parts, and that social media may begin online but it will converge with the real world whenever and wherever you let it.’

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1. Keep ‘em Guessing

• Never use personal information to create a username, login or password (i.e. names of pets, relatives, nicknames, dates of birth, birth location, etc…). In this day and age where information is often finding its way onto the Web and identity theft experts have become ever-savvy at ferreting out these details, it is CRUCIAL to choose usernames and passwords that are disassociated from your personal history. Does it make it harder to remember? Yes, but you’ll be thankful when you’re spared the potentially hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars it often costs to fix a stolen identity.

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1 Seed Selection

First emerging near the very densely populated Mexico City, Swine Flu seemed to travel to half a dozen other countries around the world over night. Many of the first confirmed cases were among children in schools who had taken trips to the popular Mexican vacation destination.

Children, due to their gregarious nature and low levels of hygiene awareness, are called the “super spreaders” of this outbreak, prompting many schools to close. Children are often blamed for a host of illnesses, but perhaps the most famous super spreader was Typhoid Mary, a cook who was responsible for 2 outbreaks of typhoid fever in the early part of the 1900s.

When planning to seed a viral marketing campaign it is important to take into account which members of the target audience have the most potential to be contagious. Typically, savvy social media users, including bloggers, Twitter users, Diggers and Facebook fanatics, are the best seeds.

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