You know when you hear a song and don’t know the words so you make up some lyrics in your head to sing along to? Well it turns out the lyrics of Weezer’s new song Pork and Beans are just that, “I eat my candy with my pork and beans.” So yeah, I’m not crazy.
With that I’ll back up a little and first introduce the concept of memes and then explain why the heck Weezer is going to get total geek cred for their single’s music video.
A meme consists of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity. Memes propagate themselves and can move through a “culture” in a manner similar to the behavior of a virus. As a unit of cultural evolution, a meme in some ways resembles a gene [wiki] Note: A meme does not have to be a video.
I have a feeling the Weezer meme is going to make quite a splash. Even with an iTunes-only release in the USA last year our pal Matthew Good’s album Hospital Music was on Top 10 charts as well. The lesson here? Embrace the power of the internets.
I know that’s a big statement, but I’ll simply leave it at that and allow you to watch the video and get the Pork and Beans tune stuck in your head as it has been in mine for about six days now.
I’m going to call this a day blog as I won’t be live blogging per se, moreso collecting thoughts, sharing links, and posting information throughout the day.
Right now on the Convergence 2008 main stage Grant McCracken is talking about Digital Cultures:
McCracken looks at the places where culture and commerce, anthropology and economics meet most often: marketing in general, branding in particular, popular culture, Hollywood, advertising, television, magazines, and new media. Through his highly-customized ethnographic and anthropological research, he provides clients with a comprehensive but incisive review of contemporary culture, its foundations, current state and future trends and strategies for managing it. [Convergence]
VIDFEST’s International Partnering Forum (IPF) is taking place down the road at the Granville Island Hotel from 9:30am until 5:00pm, running in tandem with Convergence here at the Arts Club Theatre. Also under the VIDFEST umbrella is VIGS, the Vancouver International Games Summit taking place downtown at the Hyatt.
Tonight will wrap up with the “Schmooze Lounge” at the GI Hotel, and this will all resume tomorrow with the Creative Exchange Conference, another Schmooze Lounge, then the POP VOX Awards gala.
With all of the formal stuff out of the way, I’m going to follow Phillip’s Twitters to see what I’m missing on the main stage right now.
Update: The conversation during Grant McCracken’s keynote involved a lot of Twitter talk.
For her question about Twitterers in VancouverHeather (who is currently my side-by-side MacBook blogging buddy at the Arts Club) got a copy of Grant’s book.
Update: I’m sitting in on the “Giving Your Brand Away: Brand Communities” panel on the main stage at the Arts Club Theatre. “How do you harness the evangelical impulse of these customers and manage the politics of others?” The panelists are from McDonald’s (speaking to engaging employees with online surveys, blogs and discussions instead of paper newsletters), Future Shop, Vancity (talking about ChangeEverything.ca) and Tourism BC (presenting the HelloBC website using Flickr, YouTube etc).
Update: Raul live blogged my panel with Kate and Darren. Due to the great conversation flow and discussion there were some questions that were missed but I wanted to address the one about negative comments. We all said to embrace them from a corporate perspective and use them as feedback, having an open discussion for the better of your brand and its credibility with your consumers. However the second part of that question was about negative comments on a personal blog, to which I just have to say it’s your blog – you have veto power – sure being open, honest and transparent has its advantages but at the end of the day I have the ability to click “delete” on anything that is posted, commented or submitted here.
Another note is that my fellow panelists receive more pitches than I do. I probably get about 5 a week so I know what to look for, what is out there, but as far as the “firehose” of PR campaigns knocking down my door, it’s pretty minuscule in the grand scheme of things.
With that, I really enjoyed being on the panel although I was really nervous as usual. I hope folks got something out of our Blogger Relations insights.
I’m currently debating whether to head to the Happy Hour or to hop a False Creek ferry over to John’s office, pick him up, hit up the grocery store, then head home for some Bollwitt time. I just polled Twitter and so far it’s split down the middle, with 50% of people saying I should go chill and the other half encouraging me to come out to the Schmooze event… just waiting for that tie breaker right now.
Sometimes I think I lead a busy life in social media because I have three to four events a week. Well I must be reaching some kind of new face-melting plateau because tonight I have somehow booked myself into three events… just tonight. Here’s the scoop:
Ever wonder where you can find job listings in Techcouver that don’t involve painful browsing of Craigslist and feature the words “adult” and “industry”? Techvibes has been the place to go for years and they’re reaching out this afternoon, hosting a career fair at Republic (958 Granville St).
Various Vancouver startups have signed on to give quick 5 minute pitches to potential candidates who will then be able to network and find out more about these eligible and exciting companies:
You can find more information on the Facebook event and things kick off at 3:00pm.
Photo credit: Phillip’s Launch Party3 Set on Flickr
Following the Techvibes Career Fair is Launch Party Vancouver 4, which is a chance for startup companies to mix and mingle with potential investors, while spreading their news and buzz amongst the social media gurus of Vancouver. [LPV1, LPV2, LPV3]
These companies will be giving demos, displaying their wares, and hopefully handing out swag – swag rules!:
More info is available on the Facebook event and this will take place at 5:30pm following the career fair.
My final destination this evening will be the Vancouver Art Gallery for the official kickoff of VIDFEST. Since I’m speaking tomorrow at Convergence (a part of VIDFEST) I get a pass for all these cool parties, although I have one confession – I’ve never been to the VAG. Not once. Never. I’ve never been a tourist in my hometown and have never taken part in the cheapie Tuesdays where they let you in by donation. I’m looking forward to participating this evening, picking up my conference pass and checking out the latest exhibit, Krazy! (the delirious world of anime, comics, video games, art).
The VIDFEST conferences start tomorrow on Granville Island, check the site for a full rundown and be sure to stop by our panel during Convergence 2008.
Related posts, hat tips, and cool folks I get to see in the next few days:
Update: If you would like to follow along with all the Twitters about VIDFEST tomorrow, you can follow this feed which is pulling in Tweets tagged as #VIDFEST.
Welcome to Third Tuesday at Century Restaurant in Vancouver! The wifi is spotty at best so the majority of this post may not be live.
Tonight’s speaker is Darren Barefoot who will be talking about “Getting the Attention of the Web’s Influencers”.
Update: Darren introduces his company, Capulet Communications and one of its facets which is ‘web influencer outreach’ or ‘blogger relations’, and will be presenting a case study: ThoughtFarmer, which provides intranet solutions.
Darren believes in making a marketing campaign “cool”, see: Apple. For this particular client, they wanted to market to business bloggers, those who would have a true interest in the project.
Here are some assumptions to be made when going into a project like this:
– Everyone is Busy (which leads to how do you get noticed amongst busy bloggers?)
– Email Doesn’t Work (people respond to originality) ie. the comic Darren created when pitching John and I about the Brother Printer Campaign
– Marketing equals Thing You’re Marketing (giveaways work!) same example, the Brother Printer giveaway
– Funny beats Unfunny every time (it’s risky because humor levels may vary from person to person)
– Get people to visit your site (more links from your campaign participants equals more people tracking back to your website).
Darren suggests having a database of bloggers; find your target bloggers, narrow it down to blogs with a big enough audience, and balance out content and reach.
Update: Back to ThoughtFarmer. Since it was an intranet for businesses, Capulet created a fake company (Tubetastic) and even built them a website. They also created profiles on the site as though bloggers they were targeting were employees of this fake company ie. Robert Scoble was the Tube Janitor. Essentially it was a micro site with content from all the bloggers’ sites, aggregated over at Tubetastic.
To recap: Fake company, fake employees, prominent bloggers, and an intranet. It was an entire scenario and experience for the bloggers who were in turn feeding content surrounding the product. They were engaged.
Update: Remember the value of an ‘elevator pitch’, your quick, simple, not-too-much-time-to-explain pitch.
Another thing on the humour side, was the use of snail mail to send an employee welcome letter to bloggers from the fake company Tubetastic.
Seth Godin quote: “Safe is risky and risky is safe”.
Update: Note: Bloggers are very public people. Couple of things that could go wrong…
– Snail mail fail could happen.
– Wikis could go bad ie. unrelated content being posted, content altered in a bad way etc.
– Blog posts that become more about the campaign (in this case Tubetastic) and less about the actual company, being ThoughtFarmer in this case.
Results of the ThoughtFarmer campaign were all positive and traffic to the site doubled. Something that they noticed however was that there were fewer full length blog posts since folks were publishing their thoughts instantly on Twitter or microblogging systems.
Update: Formal presentation is over, now time for questions. Monique asks how traffic is tracked via Twitter – Darren says through ‘follows’ and I would assume Twemes or hashtags.
David asked how many physical packages were sent by snail mail. Out of 50 about 35 were sent (some addresses weren’t found etc.)
The question is raised about distributing the likenesses of the bloggers. From personal experience with Darren, he used our Creative Commons licensed Flickr photos but still always asked permission to publish them, either on his site, in his campaign or even when our mugs showed up in the Wall Street Journal.
Darren goes through the criteria he looks for when looking for a blogger for a campaign. From things like Google Page Rank, Technorati Rank, number of posts a day (how active they are) to blogrolls, discussions, design, etc.
More words of advice are things like linking to your bloggers – bloggers love link love. A question from the room asks about negative reactions etc.
Bruce asks how do people differentiate Darren’s emails from spam? Darren quotes Tim Bray, mentioning it’s unsolicited commercial email from someone you don’t know. Darren always tries to add a personal element when reaching out and tries to get the blogger in the loop as soon as possible.
Question from the audience: How to pitch you, Darren? “If you read my blog, you’ll know.” Local, for a good cause, do you have a good story to tell? Also, “we don’t deal with press releases anymore, we just point people to blog posts.”
Update:Metblogs meetup is currently going on over at Library Square.
One of the best things about Web 2.0 in my opinion is open source development. Partnered with Creative Commons Licensing, you are often free to build, re-work and share your contributions to an original work through public collaboration.
WordPress is a shining example of an open source project, meaning folks are free to build their own plugins, make their own themes, and add to the value of the entire platform by spinning around the code in their own way and releasing it back to the community for all to share – at least that’s the expectation. I haven’t heard of it happening much just yet, but with a WordPress install being basically free (except for your separate expenses for hosting, a domain etc.) just what exactly do people get out of running WordPress?
Reading one of my favourite resource sites this morning I came across “24 Ways To Contribute To WordPress” – from wearing your WordPress t-shirt with pride, to even writing a blog post about it, all of these step help spread the word. Here are some of the ways you can contribute:
Participate In The WP Forum
The official WordPress forums which can be found here were set up for users to help other users…
Donate Money Towards The WP Project
Now, you might scoff at the idea of donating cash towards the WP.org project, but the fact of the matter is, most of the money involved with Automattic is used for WP.com…
Create And Share WordPress Themes
Not much explaining I have to do here. If you create a theme, share your work to the masses…
Report Theme Piracy
While there is a large amount of inspiration within the WordPress themeing community, some folks just can’t seem to find a way to differentiate themselves, so they copy a successful theme from the codebase all the way to the CSS…
(Side note: Most themes have a Creative Commons License. I have found that if you hack apart a theme based on an original ie. not from scratch, simply credit/link the original author and state that your theme is ‘adapted’ from their works. As for premium ‘paid’ themes, always check the licensing and to see if they are being re-sold).
Report Security Hazards To The Proper People
If you happen to be a coder and come across something that you think may pose a security risk, the best thing for you to do is to send an email to security at wordpress.org…
What if you’re not a code monkey? Well.. blog it, wear it, or organize it.
Also, a great way to participate is by having a coding party like the folks did at DrupalCamp Vancouver. Through the power of a Drupal Code Sprint, they took a website from alpha to beta and gave back to the Fearless City project. I propose we figure out something cool and neat to contribute during or after the next WordCamp Vancouver.
Finally, if you have a WordPress site show it off with a “proudly powered by” link or button, found here.
