On January 23rd at Archeo restaurant in The Distillery District, 55 Mill St, Toronto, there is to be held another Search and Social Rank Symposium. Visit here to GET TICKETS!

On this evening Rob Campbell of Lenzr Corp, and David Shephard of Jib.ca will have gathered together some of the brightest thinkers and builders in Toronto’s internet technology community to share their thoughts and ideas on ‘social rank’ and how it affects search results. This is what we mean by ‘search and social rank’, how social media is now skewing search engine results, and vice versa.

Guest speakers include Joey DeVilla (the Accordian Guy) from Shopify.com, Geoff Whitlock of Click Clip Deals. Craig Backman the president of McLellan Group , Benjamin Allison, myself and one more speaker, To Be Determined . You can see all their faces and read their biographies and subject lines on the Search and Social Rank Symposium on Jib’s website.

At 6pm the doors will open and early attendees will commence networking, mingling about and snacking on food and ideas. Sandwiches and one glass of beer or wine is available with the price of admission. There will be wireless internet available – I will post the wifi password at the event.

At 7pm everyone will take their seats and I will introduce the evening and the first speaker. This is a night of ideas, and these people are not salesmen, not tonight. They are scientists pioneering software and web tools designed to help improve their users’ social media marketing and search engine optimization. The best tools do both, at the same time. Joey is no doubt going to talk about how to get social with an e-store, and Geoff will discuss the rise of the social coupon.

The Google Search Algorithm is the Arbiter of Relevance in Search and Social Rank

Its a bit like natural selection, and very much like Mother Nature herself, the Google search algorithm is always evolving. The smart company, reacting to the market, is always changing its search algorithm by weighing different links heavier or lighter, and adding or subtracting values in an effort to remedy black hat SEO practices and return more accurate search results to users. And it works – I have always found Google to be the best at delivering high quality results. THIS IS THE AGE OF EARNED MEDIA: It seems to me, now more than ever, that to be listed on page one of any search engine, our clients must genuinely deserve to be there. I like to tell people that we are fooling Google, by doing exactly what they want.

Today our clients need to build better destinations, and grow content fields to ‘earn’ natural rankings as one of the top ten portals on page one. Many URLs do this by serving up good information for free, in the hopes that someone will be impressed and return to buy their product or service. Much like the apple tree gives away its fruit to spread its seeds, I ask clients, “what can people take away from your site and digest? What subjects are you the expert on? How can we plant your idea seeds in other peoples’ brains?’

Where search engine optimization meets social media marketing there’s a round table.

A symposium is a meeting of equals and a general sharing of ideas. There is no keynote speaker and nobody will dominate more than twenty minutes of the occasion at one time. Also, I have asked that Archeo restaurant be set up with a central round table – not a bunch of round tables, but rather a central horseshoe wherein 36 people can comfortably sit facing each other around the central speaker. Other attendees can sit behind this arrangement. This will facilitate true round table discussions, like a company boardroom, the dieas can be weighed and analyzed, clarified and expanded upon by enthusiasts – plus it gives everyone at the table room for their notepads, laptops and food and drink. Deb Lewis of Toronto City Events is organizing the symposium. Deborah was recently profiled on Canada Blog friends.

We’ll be promoting the event on Dingo – so get Dingo to see what happens there.
On Twitter we’ll be out tweeting updates and promoting the event #ssrs12 .

One of the best parts of my job as Managing Director of Lenzr Corp is walking to work in the morning through the Distillery Historic District in Toronto. Located at 55 Mill Street, south east of Front and Parliament, this is one of the oldest parts of the city and was originally the busy lakefront up until the 1870s. I used to work as a grip in the film business, and I’d get called to shoot movies here in the 1990s, which was before it was restored to its present glory.  Today the compound is still filled with cinematic old buildings and beautiful cobblestone streets, but also accommodates a thriving community of artists and theatre workshops, cafes, galleries, stores and specialty markets. The area has been preserved as much as possible to accommodate museum quality historic artifacts and tell the life story of a large Canadian distillery, Gooderham and Worts 1842 - 1921. These people made the rye whiskey that was drank all across the Canadian and American West.

Its always interesting to me to see the work that’s involved in creating a live event. The Toronto Christmas Market is a massive spectacle that will attract a quarter of a million people to the Distillery venue over the next sixteen days. Everyone is hoping for snow.

In this picture you can see a suction pump machine is draining the marshy land underneath the new clock tower. Getting a firm foundation in The Distillery is difficult because the water table is high.

Working in combination with the event planners and Distillery District staff, I am proud to announce that Lenzr.com was chosen to power the Official Toronto Christmas Market Photo Contest which collects and displays images right on the Toronto Christmas Market website.

This world class event runs from Dec 2nd to December 18th, 2011- the photo contest runs until Jan 1st. Voting begins on the 15th and ends on Jan 25th. The sponsor is the sole judge.

The photo challenge has been created to secure the most beautiful picture(s) taken at the event - the Distillery District is keen to show the best snaps that capture the true essence of this festive assembly.

The winning photo will almost definitely be used in the 2012 Toronto Christmas Market advertising campaign, both on the website and in print, published in Distilled Magazine with proper photo credit.  Because there’s nothing worse than winning a big prize and then finding your shot expropriated and used everywhere without any consideration.

There are three prizes:

Winner will receive a $250.00 cash prize,
2nd place will receive a $250.00 restaurant gift certificate
3rd place will receive a $100.00 restaurant gift certificate.

Also on Lenzr, House For Renovation by Toronto Mortgage Broker

Lenzr members have been very busy in the last month uploading sensational snaps of derelict houses and barns and buildings that could really use either a wrecking ball or the womanly touch of a property developer who would preserve them. House for Renovation is making history by collecting over a hundred images of historic properties. This is a photo preserve to stand the test of time. Renovation properties are a hot subject on cable television right now, but they have always been of interest to photographers. Old houses and shacks are storytfull scenery with people in the foreground, or wonderful subjects all by themselves. The prize is an Apple iPad2 courtesy of a successful Toronto mortgage broker with a great team located in the High Park area of the city. These guys are very experienced in the local Toronto mortgages, and international US mortgages, commercial mortgages and residential real estate mortgages.

Electronic Engineering Photo Contest on Lenzr for Reed Switch Maker

The Electronic Engineering photo contest on Lenzr is sponsored by a reed switch designer and wants to see the actual electronic mechanisms inside of things. The contest page copy leads with a cry to compel members to crack open their clock radios and spill out the circuit board guts. ‘Break into your obsolete electronics and showcase the components. Let’s see dusty old chips and thermostats, fuses, filters and fans - can you tell an amazing story with only microchips?’

The prize is an Apple iPad 2 courtesy of a reed switch component designer that makes and distributes these magnetic marvels to many home electronics producers in Canada and USA.

The anything-goes, colorful world of HARTH really came to life at 99 Sudbury St in Toronto on Weds 26 October 2011.  Harthfest 2011 was a large colourful event attraction filled with enthusiastic phone app developers fresh from AndroidTO.

Raymi the Minx told me about harthfest in a heartfelt mass email. She wrote,

Hey idiots this is how you come to harthfest for FREE tomorrow - get your tickets for your flight on harth air, i’ll be checking you in at the door. Forward this to friends of yours you want to bring with. 8PM 99 Sudbury See ya! http://harthfest.com

Harthfest was the AndroidTO After Party

2 ROOMS - 2 EXPERIENCES, both of them kinda chilly

LIVE PERFORMANCES

COLORFUL EXHIBITS were arranged about the room behind a boxing ring,

The StickerYou Make-Your-Own-Sticker Photo Booth
Roller Derby champions THE ROLLERGETTES in-person
The art of Jimmy Chiale
The Eightshit social media profile pic service and much, much more.

Raymi the Minx, harthfest, her on stage antics  complimented Sean Ward harthfest opening for ANDY MILONAKIS, a rap artist with MTV accreditation. Sean and Raymi shared the stage with him.

Andy Milonakis is no stranger to new media; he broke into show business through a series of Internet shorts. His rap was passionate, but to me it wasn’t very interesting because the words were incomprehensible in that venue.

The stage, which was a boxing ring, was bouncing so much it threatened to break, and the promise of that imminent disaster kept me watching for another 20 minutes, but then I had to leave for the quieter and slightly warmer climate of the second room.

Michael Nus was there and I see today he wrote a comprehensive account, AndroidTO and Harthfest

Casie Stewart were there, and she wrote about it too, Canada’s Android Conference, AndroidTO.  And many other people I didn’t know, and have yet to follow me on Twitter @roberrific

It was indeed a Harthfest and I hope they do it again in a more  acoustically suitable venue next year. Here are my pictures of the evening.

There is a new page on the Lenzr Blog entitled, How To Get Votes? that explains the art and science of soliciting votes and earning a Top Ten ranking (to be considered by Judges as winner for prizes and permanent honour with blog links to user profile page).

Not content with simply posting my thoughts on the subject, and reflecting on years of experience, I have placed a thread in the Lenzr discussion forum. How To Get Votes? in the Lenzr Forum to ask the membership for their ideas. (The Promote section of the Lenzr Forum is incidentally one place where you can get votes), Referrals and ‘Vote Exchanges” are allowed, and encouraged when they are communicated and acted upon in a manner that perpetuates a germ of the sponsor’s story.

Carolyn Wilman, Contest Queen and Lenzr Judge

Carolyn Wilman has volunteered to be one of eight current Lenzr Judges! The Contest Queen is a veteran contest media blogger with a dedicated following of frugal moms and many more semi-professional contesters, some of which are photographers of considerable ability. She writes From The Contest Queen which is a weekly round-up of best prizes, clever challenges, international conventions and thoughtful profiles of other successful sweepers. Last week she wrote about Lenzr photo contests in a piece entitled Get Clicking with Lenzr that set the record straight regarding seven contests on the index in October 2011. She’s a pal.

There’s a lot of noise in contest media, because there are so many competitions to choose from, and so people need to be able to reference a veteran authority like Carolyn Wilman; here’s a lady with a passion for these web attractions, and she has the competitive constitution necessary to compare the data and decide which contests are worth entering.  You can follow her on Twiter @ContestQueen .  Carolyn is a regular on morning TV news programs, including Canada AM on CTV; she was cast in a TLC reality TV show about online contesting in the summer of 2011 but that project hasn’t won any broadcast windows yet.

Lenzr Celebrates The Bread Maker’s Art with Our Daily Bread Photo Contest

This online event is sponsored by a food scientist with a bread baking company that has just launched an organic ingredients estore to help folks find good stuff that they can use in their kitchens. Home baked bread is the best food in the world. The challenge asks members to submit foodie shots of bread, either by itself or alongside meals. The Prize is a fancy Breadman Breadmaker, the perfect electric rig for making bread and it comes with a baker’s manual book in which you can glean the basics and then perhaps substitute your own components into the bread recipes.

Will you also be handcrafting your own clever Halloween costume this year?

Making a homemade Halloween costume can actually improve your reputation as a friend or neighbour.  Homemade Halloween Costumes is an online event designed to celebrate the best achievements, that would otherwise be forgotten. This is a sixty day web challenge. The Prize is $250 worth of cash or candy that comes courtesy of Jib Strategic Social Media Contests and if you visit this page you can see how this boutique web marketing company is getting clever with their own unique blend of contest media storytelling and social marketing for urban professionals. Upload your pictures to the index now, and right up until November 25th, 2011. It’s recommended that you promote your pictures when voting begins Nov 15, 2011 to get into the Top Ten grouping.

Do you have any pictures taken inside warehouses?

A leading information technology company that develops material handling software for cost efficient inventory management systems seeks specific images to accompany informative text on their new website.

Warehouse Stockpiles asks for images of exterior holding pens and interior warehouses full of raw materials or finished goods. The challenge here is to get good pictures for a technical assignment beyond the contest. Getting pictures of industry is tough. This match demonstrates how manufacturing companies can use Lenzr to crowd-source images that have more character and authenticity than stock shots. The warehouse data management software developer shows extensive thought leadership in raw materials handling systems, and production planning software that can better track expenses, and calculate wasted time and stock.

Top Ten Limiting Script

Lenzr is adding limiting scripts to prevent the usual chorus of semi-professional contest photographers from dominating the Top Ten photo galleries in every contest. Its not their fault - they jut happen to be more social and have more ‘networks’ that will engage and help them .

On Oct 22nd 2011 the Lenzr admin (Rob Campbell) made the decision to manually remove multiple images that are held by the same members. You can read more about this development and about the development and installation of a manual limiting software switch in the Site Suggestions category of the Lenzr discussion forum.

It’s October already. September was a blur, but there was one day I did manage to get out to my parent’s farm in time to help harvest honey. We brought in one hundred and forty honey supers in one day.

Here I am helping my brothers harvest their honey crop. The harvest is late this year, and beeing out in a ‘yard-of-bees’ on a chilly September morning isn’t much fun - the bees were miserable!

But the mist covered scenery is breathtaking.

I love this particular beeyard because its centered in an old apple orchard. Its a trip back in time to when local farmers planted fruit trees and made their own home cooked pies and preserves. Now here in a very old field, far from any major highway there are a half dozen hundred year old trees and their children, and their forgotten fruit lies all around the perimeter of the apiary enclosure.

This place would be excellent cow pasture, or a natural habitat for wild deer if it wasn’t for the beehives and an eight volt solar powered fencer that keeps the critters away. It keeps the animals away from bushels of healthy apples too, and that’s a shame.

The second best thing to happen in the month of September was meeting Nora Camps of Duo.ca

Nora Camps of Duo Strategy and Design is a business storyteller with a great track record, and a website full of referrals from well known clients.

Nora taught me lots of little things in our very first meeting. She introduced me to High Fidelity Storytelling and enlightened me on how charitable Foundations and Trusts do business, and how she tries to do good work for the most deserving clients;

she seeks out projects with green mandates, and especially those organizations that work to create real change. She is overwhelmingly positive.

Nora has a wonderful  storytelling process and it starts with listening…

Building your Brand Story

I am honoured to be working with Nora and Duo Strategy and Design

We’re running a Lenzr photo contest for Duo called Canadian Harvest, wherein we’re asking folks to upload pictures of themselves, friends or neighbours outdoors harvesting Nature’s bounty.

TEXT UNDER IMAGES!

Here is a look at the future of Lenzr storytelling - to me this is a very exciting. Text under the pictures adds volumes to the story.

Websites that collect high quality user submitted content can be used to help businesses investigate and even illustrate their consumer’s perception of a subject; they collect ideas and images for the sponsor’s own brand stories.  By selecting a theme that’s somehow related to their business, the sponsor makes mosaics with other people’s pictures and anecdotes; Lenzr lets companies make powerful myths to serve their own brand establishment.

A web 2.0 storytelling tool, you can see all the pictures in Canadian Harvest, Photo Storytelling on Duo.ca as Nora is testing the innovation on her own site - the RSS feed for this contest will someday be a fully developed API that allows real participation on the client’s website.

The photo above is all that i have left of an interesting experiment that I captured - for two days the feed to Nora’s site from Lenzr had the 140 character descriptive text displaying under each uploaded images, and it revolutionized the entire storytelling experience. This is how to tell stories! Images and text melt together into a beautiful rich media collage - this is how I want the Lenzr Archives to display all previous contests.

Saturday August 27 will see a great many blog friends and social media marketers gather behind CSI in the parking lot south of Honest Eds at Bloor St and Bathurst in Toronto.

Word11 has been conceived as a 24hr blog media event, and hopes to be the first in a long series of annual 24hr events. It emerged from a minor kerfuffle between Cg6 and WordCamp, the details of which remain unclear.  Some refunds were issued and are still the subject of excellent blog discussions and tweets.

The event was preceded by something called Prefix which took us all by surprise.

I ask you… Will WORD11 be the first occurrence of an annual social media festival? or will this be the only one? Whatever the case I’m sure we’ll make memories, and I reckon it will be rather historic day and night and day again.

I intend to use this opportunity as a speaker, on stage at 3pm on Saturday afternoon, to share my vision of the emerging online economy of ’social relevance’ and how its become much more than just SEO link building (although incoming links are still the base currency in the economy of relevance).   I’ll define the role of the Relevance Producer and how Lenzr photo contests can help build up the ’social capital’ of business URLs very effectively, and very affordably, in a remarkably short period of time.

STORY FUNNELS TO BUCKSTOPS

I see stories everywhere. The elements of story are in everything we do; they are core to our existence because  human brains need stories like human bodies need food.  People who have boring jobs generally watch a lot of television after work because they need, enjoy and have become addicted to those stories. If they didn’t have that outlet they’d fill the taverns and converse with each other and about each other or listen to bards’ songs that do the same. Television is a modern ’story restaurant’ with a 56 channel menu full of drama, comedy and adventure for human brains.

The internet is a story supermarket, but you have to cook the food yourself and interact with others to get the goodness.  The stories come with some assembly required, and are digested in different ways.

This is a golden age for storytellers because never before has it been so easy to affect hundreds, thousands or even millions of people.  But we have to tell the stories differently. The best relevance producers engineer an ‘orchestra of participation’ around their brand idea both inside and outside their companies.

Here at Lenzr we like to fragment each corporate message into several mediums and compel participants to move from one platform to another, putting the story together in their own heads -that’s a powerful branding exercise. True social media is the mad clicking between blogs, and discussion forum threads, viewing pictures and responding to tweets where # of followers doesn’t matter, and search engine result pages are part of the experience.  Good stories compel people to keep clicking, looking for more and more juicy little details.

Story Funnel to Buckstops is how we tell stories at Lenzr Corp

Intelligent social media marketers that are ‘in the trenches’ distributing messages on articles, blogs and discussion forums, Facebook and Twitter soon come to realize that it behooves them to execute each campaign in a certain order, with a preordained pattern of digital venues that support and boost the credibility of each other, and bring traffic and other people’s ideas into the mixture. This grows a campaign. At Lenzr we start by taking or securing original pictures, and then by hosting our media on 3rd party photo / video hosting sites; we use Flickr or Fotki or YouTube and post pictures and videos first, because we know we’re going to need these resources to embed into all of our upcoming articles, blog and forum posts.

We start at the top and write great original stories, and then work our way down a long list of To-Do media until we find ourselves at the bottom of the funnel, and there we instigate a switch post and use it to build content that we’ll need to start all over again. Every node has a different language and different social values. Every replication of the story is not a duplication, but rather a different telling from a different perspective of the same message / links.

A good story funnel compounds the relevance created in the original featured media, and magnifies the value of all links back to the client under perfect keyword anchor text.

It also excuses and makes wholesome other links back to the client in other supporting articles blogs and forums that link to the featured story and to the buckstop.

The buckstop is the engine where the ecommerce happens, or where you wrangle more Twitter followers, or Facebook likes or Flickr friends, etc - this is a participation harvesting mechanism. The buckstop of this blog post would be you registering for a ticket to see me speak at Word11.

I’m marketing Lenzr at Word11, and this Smojoe blog post Is the featured story in a story funnel I’m composing to promote that upcoming presentation. I have posted the pictures you see above on Fotki where I have linked to the Word11.com website, and I will bookmark this post on Digg, Delicious, Reddit and Zoomit etc StumbleUpon after I publish and proofread. Next I could truncate this message and leave a quick blog on Young Entrepreneurs, or I could guest blog it, or seek out local social media forums like League of Kickass Business People (is that still around?) or Toronto Forums esp UrbanToronto.ca and of course Facebook and Twitter. This post is made to be linked beside #Word11 #Toronto on Twitter.  Then, and this is the true beauty of live events, while at the conference I could discuss these marketing actions on and off stage with people and learn which parts of this story funnel they encountered / remembered while surfing about trying to decide whether or not to attend.

The Grasscutters, Solar Generator - David Shephard donated a solar powered generator from his eco friendly property maintenance company and earned lots of points with the organizers. TM Mahdi gave him a sponsorship button and some free tickets to the event, and I managed to get Lenzr button linked up as a sponsor too, just for being in the middle of the deal. Truth be told I also helped the Word11 committee secure sponsorship from Absolute party rentals and Its My Potty portable toilet rentals which are long standing friends / clients of Lenzr corp.

MILESTONE This blog now has 100 posts. I just crossed the line. I’m reminded of a conversation at WordCamp09 where a guy said ‘You’re not a blogger until you have 100 posts.’  I started this portal in June 2008 to help sell my intangible goodness.

This 100th blog post affords me the perfect opportunity to reflect back on my own progress as a freelance writer, blogger, web content producer and thinker / organizer that specializes in helping others find a marketing path in the age of earned media. I taught myself and learned empirically the Smojoe Code of compound link building and ‘how to make keyword sandwiches’.

Readers of every description have watched and read along as Smojoe gave birth to Lenzr and everyone can see what that business is becoming…  This blog is one of the best places to glean rare inside looks at traffic stats and issues. Will that project mature into the world’s best 3rd party photo contest solution?

Looking back on 100 posts I have some favourites. Below are the best ones, most of which still get a half dozen readers a day from Google search. Some are popular because they have curiously searchable keywords and subtitles, some because they have original pictures and some because they are controversial or appear on popular lists somewhere, in every case there’s a different reason.

TOP TEN BLOG POSTS

ZOS Last Tango in Jadac
This was one of the first posts I ever wrote on Smojoe, in June 2008 and it was for a LifeCapture Interactive project wherein they were executing a Bell Globe Media fund for a TV Series called Z.O.S. or Zones Of Safety. Not many people saw the TV show and even fewer people visited the website, but my Smojoe blog post about it has been very successful and I’m still getting visits and people ‘borrowing’ the images, which were mostly screen grabs from the game or interactive experience. It was groundbreaking at the time and there were indeed some chapters of this game that i will never forget. Peter Miskimmin was the producer - he was a friend from film business.

Dumpdiggers Arena Photo Battle Widget
A piece of my web development history that was made to showcase pieces of history as they were uploaded to an antiques and collectibles photo battle competition - Lenzr grew from this attraction. The photo contest website comes from this photo battle game prototype on what used to be Dumpdiggers.com. The side bar widget was similar to the present day Lenzr widget in that it showed the latest upload in three or more contests. You can read more about this photo contest engine evolution in The Story of Lenzr.

Best Case Scenario: Original Content Published Exclusively
This post, dated Nov 2009 represents a shift in my thinking away from article marketing websites and the mass replication of low quality links, toward researching and writing and publishing great original content full of good data and rare information, exclusively. To deliberately avoid all replications and make the content valuable, exclusively on high quality magazines and awesome blogs requires a whole other set of rules - a whole new economy of building relevance through bookmarks and original photography, interviews and getting the scoop for high quality ‘citizen journalism’ - but I give away these lessons in the next post right after this nugget titled, “Actually Sharing Secrets’ which became a category in my blog.

How To Stop Canpages Phonebook Delivery?
Little change has been made to the Yellow Pages or Can Pages phone book distribution model that I am aware of, as there is still an enormous stack of books down by the mailboxes in my building. What will happen to them? I may do a follow-up on this one.

Nestle Pure Life - Greenwashing The Web
I wrote this as a reaction to seeing the television commercial on CityTV wherein the female voice-over narration implies that bottled water is a healthy alternative to pop because ‘we don’t swim in pools of high fructose corn syrup’. On the Nestle Pure Life website they claim that recycling the bottles is a managed solution inherent in all plastic containers, and that their eco-friendly bottle uses less plastic and is therefore an environmentally friendly choice.  It really pisses me off that they can get away with this, as this is simply not true.  And the commercial is still running, and every convenience store, grocery store, hardware store, and office supply store including staples and home depot sells Nestle Pure Life bottled water in ‘eco friendly’ packaging for 2.99 a case

Smojoe Dental Surgery is White Tooth SEO
After visiting my Toronto dentist I wrote a detailed account of the experience of getting porcelain crowns and included YouTube videos and pictures and long blocks of keyword rich text.  I wrote the whole story for Dr Archer so she could put it on her website, which she did. This adds to her website as a resource - a handcrafted testimonial by a skilled blogger. Then I promoted the piece on Facebook and Twitter of course, but also in bookmarks and my specialty, niche discussion forums. This blog post chronicled the original testimonial and the work I did to promote the piece. Incidentally I always led with the pictures of my teeth - which i still do today. You see the picture up top? Its a hard habit to break.

How Blogging Saved The Beauty Pageant
This blog post bears witness to one of my greatest achievements as an interactive experience engineer. My relationship with the Miss Teen Canada World organization was founded right after speaking at a Deb Lewis event at The Spoke Club in December 2008. That cold Tuesday night I met the warm and friendly marketing people behind the 2009 Search for Miss Teen Canada World. At that time, this was a ‘beauty pageant’ funded entirely by participant’s entry fees and had no connections to modeling or photography schemes or any sponsors (or any after market sales beyond selling a DVD to the parents). Smojoe built a blog network for this organization - first it was on the OnSugar Blog Platform, a free blogging platform hosted in California, but now we have a permanent network of self hosted blogs all bearing the Miss Teen Regions of Canada. This year Lenzr Corp registered and skinned 75 WordPress blogs and already the Miss Teen Canada - World Blog Network is a very powerful marketing tool perfectly targeted to a youth demographic. Its a massive new venue for storytelling, and captures a vast amount of user generated content.

What is a freelance social relevance producer?

The idea came to me that community managers are often asked to do way too much because their role remains undefined.The relevance producer is a new vocation. The online social relevance producer is the company storyteller that sets policy and executes keyword strategy. He or she composes stories as ‘hot scripts’ which are txt docs that are in html or pre-fabricated bits of BB code that contain pictures, and links as well crafted incentives. They’re cut and pasted from the back end of the relevance producer’s own favourite blogs and discussion forums. Community managers spread the relevance producer’s messages as they adapt the core hotscript to fit their own blogs and forums in their own niches and communities.

How to tell Business Stories with Photo Contests

This will be my specialty for the next few years - how to tell business stories with Lenzr photo contests and build visual databases and dominate search engines will be my presentation. How to make great hooks that affect markets will be my case studies. I will consult with anyone telling stories in the form of interactive web challenges esp photo contests - are you thinking about doing a photo contest? Talk to me. I know how to use photo contest media to build ’social capital’ in the form of incoming links and increased reputation.

The Google search algorithm is the primary arbiter of relevance in the post information age.

Traditional Search Engine Optimization companies and veteran web developers have not kept abreast of Google’s latest changes to their search math which now favours a great deal more ‘social metrics’ and ‘usability’ over sheer volume of incoming links – its quality over quantity in the age of earned media.

Lenzr has pioneered a new way to tell stories that builds social capital in the form of user generated content on a particular theme photography challenge.

Clients should know that less than ten percent of the media appears on the Lenzr website, while more than 90% of the work is done off page when a team of skilled social media marketers communicates news of the prize, and interactive challenge to the blogosphere in handcrafted rich media articles, blogs and discussion forum posts, Facebook and Twitter updates.

Most North American SEO companies still buy incoming links for their clients from South Asian companies in the form of directory listings. These same SEO companies cannot fathom how to cheaply and efficiently buy ‘social links’ from websites that people actually use – because Google is very smart and they know what links and sites people actually use.  They know Lenzr is well used. Although Lenzr is still an infant with only 5000 unique visitors a month, the website itself has a very high usability (39% bounce rate, average visit 4 minutes, 9 pages viewed). The links we plant to and from our photo contest arena are couched in the natural relevance of web storytelling. The links we plant to sponsors share that relevance and high usability message space. So for example a heads-up blog post about a cool new Lenzr photo contest is a relevant message for photographers, art lovers, and contest media opportunists alike. And so is the knowledge that a particular business URL sponsored the prize. Its part of the story.

That’s the base - its our job as storytellers to create imaginative and wildly successful challenges like A Counting Exercise photo contest on Lenzr in June 2011, which attracted over 150 submissions and garnered 1886 votes to decide one winner.  The last two photos are from that contest and featured among the Top Ten picked by the membership (so I’ve used them here in connection with the contest as per the Lenzr Terms of Use).

Here’s a long overdue update on the continued success of Lenzr.com from me, Rob Campbell the Prime Innovator sharing his insights into the hopes and dreams of this start-up which was ranked at #365 in the Techvibes May 2011 Toronto Start-Ups List, and now in the June 2011 Techvibes Canada Start-Ups list Lenzr is ranked #303, up 62 points, (and ahead of BNOTIONS). The websites listed there on TechVibes are ranked by volume of traffic I imagine? and if that’s the case our enterprise should keep skyrocketing up the charts as our model improves and we host more and more interactive challenges.

Lenzr is a serial photo contest website that aims to be the World’s number one choice for providing custom photo contest solutions. It’s a delivery system designed to make user generated photo challenges easy to create and implement on sponsor business websites. The storytelling can occur in the form of buttons, banners, display widgets and even a small API to allow voting. The idea is that anyone’s blog or company website can be dramatically improved *socially* by adding a clever photo contest to the homepage or blog.

Over the last two years, Lenzr has grown a large community of professional photographers and many of them have now uploaded their profile pictures and links. They all enter the contests regularly and chat with each other in their profile pages and in the discussion forum. But we have even more social surprises to unveil in the months to come…

Lenzr is free to join and free to use, and you’re free to win great prizes.

There are no ads either, and we never sell email addresses or any user information. The new photography discussion forum will soon be filled with helpful site-related queries and replies, and of course some unrelated discourse about the art and science of photography and the business of being a freelance photographer.

With this new custom website we hope to be able (someday) to offer a flawless contest delivery system that will be quite unique in the marketplace and offer users more customizable options plus lots of native traffic.
Lenzr does not own any photographers’ images – the terms of service are very specific.  Each participant simply grants Lenzr and the contest sponsors the rights to display their images in connection with the specific web challenge to which the photo was submitted, only. The photos must not be copied and we are working on disabling browser Save Photo feature.  That being said we hope to introduce custom photo licensing software that will incent members to join a cooperating image bank and allow others to license their pictures.

The new website launched June 1 at Lenzr.com and it has been a rather bumpy start, but nothing more onerous than our IT solution manager Will Webb of Innate Media Group predicted.  The main complaint has been CMS issues – everyone is thrilled with how well the contests look on the front end.

Last month four sponsors broke the ice on the new platform. A Toronto IT staff solutions firm launched Best Office Staff Party which is probably the least successful so far, with only about twenty five photos uploaded. An Ottawa roofing company sponsored Construction Sights because the same firm does vinyl siding and windows and doors. There have been almost sixty submissions so far in that match. Shafts of Sunlight is presented on behalf of a sunrooms installer in Cambridge Ontario, and although there are lots of entries, very few  actually have a good tangible shaft; most are just lens flares.

The number one photo contest right now in terms of entries will probably become the most successful challenge ever launched on Lenzr. When last I checked the A Counting Exercise photo contest sponsored by Toronto accountants had 110 pictures uploaded, and there’s still more than fifteen days before the challenge ends. On the 25th of July, after voting ends, the Top Ten images in each match will advance to the Judges for a final decision.

On July 1st long weekend, while I was vacationing at a Muskoka cottage near Bracebridge Ontario, three more photo contests launched. And there have been four Community Contests hosted on the portal since we unveiled the new website on June 1st, 2011.

My sincerest apologies for not updating Lenzr members earlier to announce the winners of the Glorious Colours contest and the What’s In Your Garden photo contest, but I forgot that these were only 30 day challenges – it wasn’t until Saturday July 9th that I took any action to announce the winners, mr_slava and tluvr respectively. The prizes are pretty sweet too, a solar powered radio and an Ames’ lawn buddy.

Inside the 2011 Search for Miss Teen Canada World

Saturday July 9th was a very special Registration Day for at least seventy five participants in the 2011 Search for Miss Teen Canada – World, as one by one teen girls age 14-18 from all across Canada checked their luggage into the sponsor hotel in downtown Toronto to start their week long adventure. One at a time they met each other in the lobby and corridors the massive historic hotel complex at the base of the city.

In the antechamber of one of the enormous ballrooms, they found Michelle Weswaldi and lined up there to present her with their head shots, and CDs filled with pictures, videos and audio that they recorded at home in which they demonstrate their acting, singing and special skills for the upcoming talent show.  After a brief question and answer with the Pageant Director they went and joined the others on the carpet of the large empty room.

There’s a nervous energy in the place as the teenagers meet each other in person for the first time. When I arrived they were sitting on the floor in a huge  75 bodies-wide circle, telling stories about their trip getting here, and their plans for the rest of the summer. But in the back of their minds they must be thinking that their plans could change… One of them will be crowned 2011 Miss Teen Canada - World and will be flying south to Houston Texas where she will represent all of Canada in a quest to be 2011 Miss Teen World. Once crowned 2011 Miss Teen Canada – World, that young person’s life will be changed forever as they’ll be required to fly all over North America meeting local dignitaries and celebrities presiding over regional pageants.

As the 2011 Social Media Director I spoke to the assembly for about twenty minutes, and we discussed the brand new Miss Teen Canada Blog Network and the difficulties that some of them were having with the interface. I explained WYSIWYG editors and cautioned that what you see in the backend is sometimes not what you get in the post, and it can be very frustrating.  I was keen to council them NOT to cut and paste Word docs directly into the Visual editor of their WordPress blogs, but rather paste it into the html editor first, and even better is to paste into notepad or a text file editor to ‘sterilize’ the text before using the html editor to insert pictures and links.

We talked about the sidebar widgets and whether anyone had ever clicked through the ads. The all voiced their opinion that the TWIG ad at the bottom the screen should be removed. We talked about making incentives for corporations to pay them in iTunes credits, or Paypal to review beauty products or movies or TV shows.

I explained just exactly how good blogs can make their authors famous. Each of the contestants in this challenge has already completed three different writing assignments on the blogs. Their 3rd and last assignment asked each blogger to dream up a TV show idea and cast themselves as the star. Then we asked them to pick two companies from among the official MTCW sponsors to fund their concept. They had to explain why these sponsors would be interested in funding their TV pilot and in the act of thinking like a sponsor they see the value they bring

Here’s the Miss Teen Canada Blog Network on Squidoo – this assembly of teen bloggers from all across Canada is really quite a remarkable social media innovation in its own right. Last year, or perhaps it was two years ago now I wrote about how teaching the contestants to blog and linking them into a network could grow this ‘beauty pageant’ to new heights. How the Blog Saved The Beauty Pageant details how this flimsy blog network could be grown year by year into a powerful new broadcast medium.

Each participant’s blog has a video player, and we hope to integrate user generated videos into the system next year, and perhaps even later this fall. We need a better Flickr interface so each participant can post their own pictures. We need custom Facebook plugins so each girl can display her own wall. And finally, most importantly we need a custom RSS feed widget that shows every participant’s post in chronological order – 10 on display at all times, headlines and text beside their avatars, one click and readers are transported to the author’s blog.  It would multiple our readership ten-fold. Already Blogs Canada has expressed an interest in securing the RSS feed from the network. And this is something I could also put in the sidebar of Canada Blog Friends.

The week continues until July 25. There is fun and excitement in store for this

Link to Maram’s post on lushhouse, and Arob12’s post about launching the Miss Teen Canada Blog Network and how Lenzr Corp helped Michelle pitch an improved video net to ad agencies and corporate sponsors.

Here”s a two minute video that I shot in the ballroom on the afternoon of July 9th 2011 in which I asked about fifty of the teens to introduce themselves and their title. Before  I started taping one voice informed me that someone else had tried to do this earlier and had soon run out of memory on their camera card. I feared she was right, so I asked everyone to be quick and we would try and circle the entire assembly of about fifty regional title holders in under two minutes. ..

If you’d like to see the two hour competition this year, you can buy tickets on Ticketmaster for the July 16th main event, the 2011 Search for Miss Teen Canada - World at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre
190 Princes’ Blvd., Cne Grounds, Toronto, ON M6K 3C3. The show starts at 8pm and is approx two hours long, and I believe the tickets are $60 each. Unlike previous years, this time its assigned seating - your ticket has a seat number and that’s where you’ll be sitting.

Somebody put me on the list and I got invited to the YYZ LIVING magazine second issue launch party at Ultra Supper Club on Queen St West on Thursday 16 June 2011 evening 8pm. It wasn’t hard to get invited to this event, everyone was there.

The evening started at 8pm upstairs on the white paint of the Ultra patio which had just come into shade cast by taller brick buildings west on Queen St. The food was tasty. The free drink was orange juice and champagne w strawberry

The two bartenders on the south bar were overworked from the start.

It was a nice night that actually got warmer when the sun went down. It was downright steamy later.

This highly anticipated party did indeed bring out some interesting people from the world of fashion art and media, and this really was an almost perfect evening for an outdoor patio party.

The YYZ LIVING Magazine launched its summer issue here to build a following among a class of Toronto’s most prolific influence-rs, and people that appreciate a distinct ambiance of class and glamour. The atmosphere the night of June 16th was perfect for the club’s exclusive patio opening party of the summer.  It was a night of mingling, cocktails, stylish hors d’oeuvres, and dancing.. but there was no dancing. There were no hors d’oevres either.

To the left is Heckuva Guy and Desiri Kotnala, the events coordinator at Noode @DesKotnala

With good editorials and alluring photographs, YYZ Living intends to present a definitive vision of arts, culture & society to tempt the imagination in an era of constant change. I scraped these sentences right off the invitation.

YYZ Living Magazine guides the reader to engaging information and exclusive access to the hottest runway fashion. Their pages take readers on a visual journey to extraordinary places in a parade of contemporary design.

Here are The Wine Ladies, Susanne and Georgia @TheWineLadies holding their fresh copies of the new issue and looking as sophisticated as the magazine. They are happy to see me - I captured a moment of pure joy on Georgia’s face as she discovered me in the crowd.

Later the Wine Ladies were talking to a well known rapper “PB $TYL$” and his partner model “FREE”. I had to get a picture and capture that …

Forgive me I forgot or misspell anyone’s names and if anyone knows please leave them in the comments and I’ll add them to this post later.

Here’s Mario Miotti who takes good pictures with his camera and here’s Lisa Charleyboy and who always takes a good picture.

Here’s Josh ? and Lauren @LaurenONizzle

The north station bartenders were fast as hell; they were both really pretty, super efficient drink making machines. I really regret that I didn’t have the presence of mind to make a movie of them mixing drinks - they were so machine-like. arrgh I get the best ideas after the events.

YYZ LIVING Magazine  @YYZmag is a luxury fashion and lifestyle publication that brings you the latest trends & happenings in world of arts, culture & society.

Something unusual happened on Tuesday 31 May 2011 -  I went out after work!

I went out to see Keisha Chante and Casie Stewart rock the Pepsi Throwback Event at Revival, on College St.

Casie Stewart does it again, and  Keisha Chante was there too.  They went on stage and spoke to the assembly at around 7pm. Keisha told everyone to get twittering.

Casie Stewart thanked all her friends for coming out. Look in the picture, do you see how she’s looking directly at me. You can see that right?

Do you follow me on Twitter?  @roberrific

This is someone else’s tweet and i show it here because its good storytelling - perfect use of twitter - ‘excited for the #PepsiThrowback Retro Party tonight! Looking forward to seeing @TheSpoons, @KeishaChante, and @CasieStewart!‘

Casie warned us about tonight in her blog, then she asked for input in What Do You Think I should Wear to the Pepsi Throwback Event? was this the outfit her people recommended?

Pepsi Throwback Party,  I took it all in, alone, a fly in the data butter Twitter stream.  There was 80s music and free Pepsi drinks and costumes and prizes and interactiove photo backgrounds Raymi the Minx and … and some girls I didnt know to talk to / try and introduce myself to  or yell across small round tables. Vintage clothes and big hair were the order of the evening. Loud music eclipsed most of my interactive opportunities and prevented me from hearing any other people. I guess I’m getting old… but i’m really growing tired of events where the music is too loud to talk (even before the band started playing)  here in this room are some really intelligent people who love to talk and be social on something other than keypad phones. all there needs to be is an escape - a second atmosphere, a patio or a lounge where people can talk …

Newsflash - we’re going to have an event soon for Lenzr and there wont be any DJs - I’m going to put an old record player in the corner and 100 vinyl albums from the 1970s. Everyone gets to play two songs.  Come and drink and laugh and talk and make memories

So for me the event ended quick. I only bought an hour parking anyway -I was in and out in forty minutes.

It was a free evening. The event was almost totally free cause Deb Lewis @CityEvents gave me tickets which came with drinks. I paid $3 for parking on the street.

And yet it was my first real event in months.  Yeah that’s a tragedy. I‘ve had my nose down for a while now, building the new Lenzr and prepping contests and wrapping contests and yeah well that’s another story – check out the new Lenzr website.

I’ve got to admit I’m a little socially awkward these days. My brain is elsewhere, and I had no peer support either; I just hate standing by myself at big events pretending I’m doing something on my BB phone, or dancing to the music like I don’t care. Looking content is hard work

Consequently I tend to take action, and this situation causes me to be very aggressive, and I say the strangest things – never cliche or ordinary things  of course, but exceptionally bizarre things like “…Hey its summertime now.. Love that the girls are wearing shorts already…” and then I’ll follow that with  “…So what do you hope to accomplish this summer?”  Yeah I probably said all that, and even weirder things at this gathering. Maybe its good the music was so loud nobody could really hear me  Twice it happened that people I was talking too excused themselves to get a drink, and they left me standing there, alone, again.

I saw @mhp and we made small talk – Mark Pavlidis. I can usually remember his name but we don’t know each other very well.  He makes @Tweetagora which is an iPhone app for Twitter?  His lady friend was polite and very intelligent as I recall.

Then I met Jarvis Emerald. He showed me a clear glass ‘gem’ he keeps in his pocket and that’s pretty strange; he’s the Gems of Toronto and that’s pretty strange too. Maybe he’s as weird as I am, but he’s way less socially awkward - fearless is how I would best describe him. Sadly Ive no picture.

I should have have hung out with John Leschinski more. He’s a swell guy, and I can talk quite comfortably with him, and I really respect his work, but he had his own friends.

Raymi gave me a big wave from the door – she was posing with some adoring fans against a green screen set – up – probably to allow some manner of super impositions of some description perhaps retro pepsi esque. It was crowded right at the door  – that’s where I got my hug from Casie and smiles and polite nods from several familiar faces. Casie is a friend and some others but most of these tweeps are acquaintances. We’re friends because we talked once, or walked to a restaurant together or did something… you know its my challenge in life as a human to make better friendships with people. I think in many ways being social and selling social are synonymous

Thirty minutes later, and quite by accident I really annoyed Raymi with even more socially awkward behaviour. I asked for a pen to get a number from a guy, a hair dresser who wants to be on page one of Google and Raymi said she had one. Turns out she didn’t, but I went looking a little too intently in Raymi’s open purse and she scolded me. Rightly so. I felt foolish. Especially because it’s Raymi, and I have nothing but respect for her… Her acerbic wit is rare and precious, and she’s truly a unique voice and author. I’m not just saying that. Have you ever read Raymi The Minx ? Anyway I don’t know why I’m suddenly being so confessional here, of all places, probably because Smojoe is fading into the background behind Lenzr and I feel more comfortable writing emotion reflections here as I drive Lenzr forward – this blog isn’t a business anymore.  One of my employees just read this post and she says this blog confession reads like a cry for help - haha i suppose i should rewrite it. or not. Welcome to the new Smojoe.com

A MOMENT IN TIME - whenever I attend something , an event of any significance, I will try and make a 360 panorama of the setting and record a moment in time

This is approx 7:15pm on 31st May 2011 inside Revival on College Street during the Pepsi Throwback party

As an interactive story engineer, I’m always interested in learning new ways to communicate business messages in digital media;  I like to see companies doing exceptional things that ‘hook me’ and make me want to know more, and thereby bring attention to their products and services through story.

There are many examples of how the magic of a good story has moved consumers, most famously, Ted Williams, the homeless man-with-a-golden-voice in Atlanta Georgia, the Old Spice guy, and Susan Boyle surprising Simon Cowell and everyone in Britain’s Got Talent.  Susan didn’t win the competition, but her first  moments on stage were so special that her fame will forever eclipse the names of the winners.  She went on to sell millions of recordings and is living proof of the power of story.

Each Lenzr Photo Contest is a Ready Made Story Just Waiting To Be Told

There are concepts and there are tools, and it’s important not to confuse them. There’s at least seven different free services that are ‘digital message mediums’ that I use to tell business stories on the web - I combine their usefulness to communicate a singular story concept.

Articles, blogs, discussion forums, email newsletters, videos, Twitter, Facebook are seven FREE and perfectly acceptable places to share business messages. These are everyday social media marketing tools.  Using free tools anyone can make and distribute a business story. You can make the tale infinitely more interesting and more effective when you combine and ‘cross platform’ the tools - good marketers link them together to tell one moving narrative.

Without a compelling story, the ad bytes by themselves will fall flat. There’ll be no comments, retweets, likes or thumbs-up anywhere in the funnel.

Also important, a good sharp idea or user challenge (with the promise of honour and monetary reward) can get your business story featured in many places that would not otherwise be so welcoming of your company’s adverts or blatant brand messaging.

Click Clip Deals Uses Photo Contest Media To Gain Entry Into Unusual Places

Case study - Click Clip Deals is a start-up company offering printable coupons in what has now become a crowded ‘frugal’ marketplace. The small firm has a limited marketing budget but hopes to rise in prominence by providing unique services. The site acts like a free coupon search engine, and it has a nice visual interface that lists coupons found all over the web in one handy location.  Good execution of an idea is made even better here by the advent of a ’social coupon’ business model, and a unique reward system for members. Even better, the website lets small to medium size businesses sign-up and custom make their own coupons, which is a terrific idea. The destination is full of innovation and is well designed to save consumer’s time and money - but how do we advertise this frugal utopia in such a noisy marketplace? How do we enter and cut through the maelstrom of group modified discounts media?  The answer is simple. We tell a good story.

In addition to other discount media buys, ClickClipDeals.com has engaged Lenzr Corp to create a unique photo contest called What’s In the Fridge? and they’re offering $500 worth of free groceries as reward for the best photo, as selected from the Top Ten user ranked images by a panel of Judges on May 25th 2011.  You can read more about the coupon website sponsor and competition on the Lenzr blog.

The Lenzr contest is both a skill challenge and reward message in one headline - ‘What’s in the Fridge? WIN $500 free groceries from printable coupons website.’  The contest message becomes the perfect vehicle in which marketers can safely enter and leave more information including pictures and logos / brand messages on many dozens of different websites.  Here’s how,

First we develop the resources that we’ll need to share. We make logo jpgs, pictures of heroes, contest plates and #hashtags - in this case Click Clip Deals already has a demo video on YouTube that we can embed into blogs and forums.

We make a story concept that allows us to share pictures, videos, podcasts and text in many different places. The responses we get on those sites helps shape the overall story on Lenzr.

The online contest discussions forums are the low hanging fruit and they a seeded first - these relatively low value messages are bookmarked on Digg, Delicious, Reddit and Zoomit.ca and the threads are incorporated into later blogs and forum posts. Sometimes they will sprout their own ideas (other user submitted content) which can be processed into follow up articles, blogs and discussion forum posts. And so the process is cyclical.

As an example, we put the Click Clip Deal message on a respected Canadian photography discussion forum, and instead of being eliminated as spam, the message is welcomed as a unique challenge for both amateur and professional photographers.

The mission is to cut through the noise by doing something imaginative and ‘engineering an architecture of participation’ that lets other people interact with the brand.  Lenzr collects user submitted content in the form of pictures, comments and votes - each action becomes part of the story.

The photo contest is a customizable ‘myth’ that grows in relevance over time and makes companies more findable.  The message changes and grows in dozens of articles, blog comments, forums, and on Facebook. The results are easily measured directly on site, and in the form of new incoming links to the client’s website.

Lenzr is a serial photo contest website that lets business sponsor art.  We started the website in August 2009, and have hosted over forty contests in two years.  The average price of a photo contest is about five thousand dollars, with prizes and tax included.  The companies that sponsor the photo contests get some buzz marketing, and notice some rise in traffic, but more importantly they get a shot-in-the-arm of social relevance that search engines can’t ignore.  A photo contest is a catalyst to growing social capital.

On February 1st 2011 nine different matches launched on Lenzr, with all manner of interesting and unusual theme challenges.  For the first two days there were no photos entered into any of the categories… it was unnerving.

But as of March 26th 2011, there were over 300 photos entered in all nine different challenges that compose the latest Lenzr offerings.  In the ten days of voting that began on March 15th 2011 and ended yesterday on the 25th, over ten thousand votes were entered!

The quality of some of the photography submissions is simply breathtaking, and the seven Lenzr Judges will have a very hard task separating the winning photos from the top ten user ranked images in each competition.

Google analytics dashboard for Lenzr in the month of March 2011 confirms my suspicions…  This was among the busiest 30 days ever in the history of the website! We did over 100K pageviews in 30 days!

The spike upwards reflects the day voting began, and shows the total effects of each photographer independently promoting their work on various social networks, asking for help securing a top ten ranking.

In all there were over 7500 visits this month with over half of those being new visitors.

Referring sites make up half of the traffic sources as people promote their work on Facebook and Twitter.  Lenzr also does a fantastic job of marketing the contests themselves on a long list of Canadian ‘frugal’ websites.  Would you like help marketing your contests in Canada? Shoot me an email and I’ll share my list of websites.

The winners to be named on Friday, Apr 1st, 2011

Last night the emails went out to the Judges with an attachment in which they could record their choices and make valuable notes. I have already received three returns, and have been enjoying the writing.  Adopting a Panel of Judges will no doubt prove to be the most successful public experiment yet in this open evolution of a user generated photo contest website.   The latest winners will be notified by email. Stay tuned for the tell-all Blog Post on Lenzr that will declare for all to see the winners of the photo contests, their winning pictures and links to their profiles.

JWT stands for J. Walter Thompson and they bill themselves as the world’s most famous communications agency.  It’s probably true, but I had never heard of them before Laurie Dillon Shaulk accepted a position there last fall.  She invited me to attend #JWTslam last night, Feb 9th 2011. The swank event was held in the historic St. Paul’s Church venue at Bloor St E.  This is the big leagues, home of the Big Ideas.
JWT Canada’s Retail Slam – Showcasing the Major 2011 Trends Shaping Retail was set in the heart of social media week in Toronto or #smwTO  on Twitter.  And so I’ve been out every night because I feel obliged to attend these events despite the fact that I loath the cliché that social media is becoming, (has become) and I resent the dominance of Facebook and Twitter and the inevitability of the garden web becoming the most common experience.  I go to these events to meet people and collect stories and business cards.  I generally keep my opinions to myself, except after two beers and oh my… this event was licensed! And it served free alcohol ! No seriously I still held my tongue because it’s the big leagues, home of the big ideas.

JWT Canada’s Retail Slam

Showcasing the major trends shaping retail

Ann Mack from JWT was up first on stage.  She outlined some overarching concepts and showed stats and then shared some scintillating ideas about the future of consumer goods. I really liked the notion that retail stores will become bricks and mortar attractions, with value added goods and services not available online – it’s easy to understand that trend, and it’s a very positive, creatively satisfying concept. Ann Mack herself is an attractive young woman, and a confident speaker. All the same, it surprised me that a big multinational media company like JWT would venerate such a young expert - she was introduced as someone who writes white papers and prognosticates on the future of retail sales for the benefit of the global brands that are JWT clients… a good job indeed for someone so young. But then you know this knowledge has got to come from somewhere, and it’s understandable that a vocation as mystical as trendspotting is best accomplished by a young person, spying on an even younger demographic, and this woman is quite remarkable.  I read in her bio that she started as a crime reporter in Mansfield Ohio. I like that. She should lead with that.

David Peres at Bee Media

David is the chief marketing officer of Bee Media Inc, which is a leading Canadian hyper-local media services company. He spoke about mobile innovations and his slides were great – short bits of text and statistical data alongside interesting schematics and even a dose of technology in one slide’s sneak peek at the infrastructure of an in store mobile campaign.  Bee Media delivers content and offers to consumers by knowing who they are, where they are and by correctly guessing what they want. It’s an art form as you can well imagine, but some people think the data is slightly invasive which is a notion that David challenged early on in his presentation. I kept thinking about the famous scene in Minority Report where Tom Cruise goes into The GAP and the TV screen asks him if he’d like to buy some shirts to go with the pants he bought last time, or something like that…  The creepy data sniffing notion came back into the dialogue when David used the word ‘profile’. It’s funny how one word can dominate a thought process, and … well that’s me, rebelling against the garden web again.
I spoke with David co-worker, Davi Bosch after the event and learned more about Bee Media. I told her that I’m the original Son of a Beekeeper and I’d sell her firm pure Canadian honey and we immediately began working out a price for one thousand 365ml jars served up fresh next August.  Fingers crossed on that one – I will insist the jars are labeled Campbells Honey, Grade A White Clover / 100% Pure Canadian Honey.

Janice Diner of Horizon Studios spoke about F-Commerce and big brands on Facebook

The rise of Facebook as a marketplace with its own currency was made obvious in Janice Diner’s presentation. Up until she started speaking I had no idea about ‘social business’ and Facebook credits. I had no concept of the business model and learned there that Facebook takes 30% when you buy credits - this was an eye opener. Honestly, I have never played Farmville. This was the first time that I had ever heard of business done on Facebook referred to as f-commerce. With a mixture of fear and awe I marveled at the amazing innovations that help brands win friends and turn ‘likes into buys’.

I smiled at the slide transitions In Janice’s show– the frames rotated on screen as though plastered on the side of a 3D box that turns, and that to me is what Facebook is… its a box, that’s much like the beach.  I particularly liked the slide showing how a circle of 112 friends can link to billions - great slide, and a lot to think about.

Benjamin De Castro spoke on technology and group manipulated pricing

Ben De Castro is a senior marketing leader with a long history of helping big phone companies, Canadian banks and credit card companies. Now he’s at WagJag which is a TorStar property.  He spoke with skill and grace about technology and group manipulated pricing trends. Ben has a nice presentation style and he got the most laughs out the crowd.  He also revealed that there are seventeen group buying companies in Toronto, Ontario marketplace and he showed a slide of the biggest five, with WagJag positioned in the center. He postulated that the rash of start-ups in this sector is probably over now, but the phenomenon will continue as long as consumers and retailers find value and technology continues to refine the data and experience.

Petar Bozinovski of Crucial Interactive spoke about QR Codes and what’s possible today.

Petar has thirteen years experience in online marketing at some of the biggest ad firms in North America. He’s been thinking about QR codes for a while. Again I learned something – QR stands for Quick Response and was created in Japan by Denso-Wave in 1994. Petar showed examples of other 2d barcodes which most of our phones cannot read. I have that picture on the left and if you click it the image will expand and you can see the one on the right is called a Maxicode.

Mark Campbell from VMG Cinematicss

Mark is an interesting guy with an interesting business, and a great last name. He had the disadvantage of going last and speaking to an already  overwhelmed audience. He knew it though; he recognized the challenge and he started by reassuring folks that his presentation would be short and sweet. He didn’t lie. Mark spoke about videos and emerging genres, their qualities, characteristics and special powers. In an early slide he listed search engine optimization as a positive quality of a good video, and that’s something I would really like to pick his brain about. He didn’t mention it again in the presentation, but I bet he knows a lot more on the subject. I saw him in the wine mixer melee afterward but sadly I wasn’t fortunate enough to meet him. Mark finished his presentation and the slideshow ended on a big brand logo of his company, VMG Cinematics – the disadvantage of going last was rewarded by the unexpected privilege of having his corporate logo present on screen during more than half of the question and answer period.

Finally, the spectacle of big ideas ended with a rather bizarre video that was cut during the 1.5 hr session.  It was a two minute montage of talking heads, people that arrived early, cut into tiny bits and jumbled into song.  It was an audio visual after-dinner mint.

Free Alcoholic Drinks, No Tickets, and No Waiting at #JWTslam

The event staff was ready with trays of red and white wine already poured in glasses at the door of the reception room, and that was cool. I didn’t know they would do that. I left my fifth row seat right quick after the show ended to scurry ahead of the pack thinking to get ahead of the crowd so I’d not have to stand in line for my wine, or for anything…  So of course I felt rather foolish when I got there and found myself alone in the room. I took the first glass of white wine off the tray and looked around, nobody.  So I got out my camera and pretended that I ran down there so fast so I could get a shot the crowd emerging from the conference venue.  FLASH It worked.

During the meet & greet I bumped into lots of old pals and met some new friends. Here’s Ben De Castro talking to @Guy Gal from TheBizMedia.

When asked in conversation what I do, or even what I thought, I issue my standard message that ‘I believe search engines are part of the social media experience - if I was ever asked to speak at an event such as this, that would be my topic.’ I’d speak on how to engineer stories across multiple platforms using one curious word, any word, your word.

Once again I was on my best behaviour. I tried not to be overbearing, or conceited or verbose, but I suppose everyone at the event took away a different notion of me… Some people like me, some don’t. But why should I care? Except that’s what social media is all about… making people care. So of course I care. Tell me your life’s passions and then let me decide how best to sell you something, er I mean help you with something.

Hundreds of free thinkers and media makers gathered together on Monday Feb 7th 2011 at the Mill St Pub in the distillery district in Toronto. I went there as @Smojoe and took lots of photos. There were friends in the crowd, and I enjoyed publishing their pictures.

Sean Moffitt spoke about Wikibrands, a book that he and Mike Dover wrote together that’s  ‘…both visionary and pragmatic, delivering a framework for understanding the pervasively connected consumer.’

The subtitle reads, ‘Reinventing Your Company In A Customer-Driven Marketplace’

The book reviews are good, and include a common refrain, “a must read for business leaders’. It was an exciting event. Very well attended, there were people of all ages and from many parts of the industry , all united in an appreciation of ’social business’, and of media making and marketing.  Pretty much everyone has an interesting story - it was fun to mingle and be provocative.

There were debates and Keri Blog, Casie Stewart, Michael Nus and Jeremy? and @HeatherTravis from the beef marketing board, and myself entertained the crowd with gentle banter and verbal debate on subjects relating to social networking and media making. Read Casie Stewart’s blog on Wikibrands launch, and also, Keri’s Blog has updates.

I first met Sean Moffitt in the summer of 2008 in High Park. He arranged the meeting at a pub that sold Guinness. But when I think back on the event, I remember it only came about because I emailed him and dropped another friend’s name, and then called him up on the telephone. It came about because we lived close to each other and it was a hot summer day and the idea of having a beer with a stranger wasn’t so tedious - plus I made it clear I wasn’t looking for a job, and so I think Sean obliged me more out of curiosity than anything else.

We met, and sat in the window as it started to rain outside, then lightning and thunderstorm.  Against that backdrop I showed him my ideas for a ‘relevance builder’, although I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time. We looked over my communities, which were drawn out on bits of coloured paper. The whole recipe for how I build social relevance today was laid out in front of him, and he encouraged me to continue, which I have… Anyway, satisfied that it wasn’t a waste of time, he paid for the beers - he felt sorry for me probably. We talked and he spoke in a digital marketing tongue with clever words and phrases that I didn’t really understand at the time. He spoke a new language and I didn’t take much away except that I had a lot to learn. I had a role to fill and I knew it was more than ‘managed services’, and now I know today that it’s called being a relevance producer.

Anyway Sean Moffitt said to me ‘be that guy’ as more of a question perhaps, because he didn’t know how to sort me, and tonight when he introduced me, he still couldn’t quite remember my brand, because it does get confusing. Is this Roberrific? or Smojoe? Rob Campbell is the prime innovator of Lenzr photo contests and specializes in building relevance - I make social media for improved search engine rankings.

I wrote a story for the League of Kickass Business People around this time last year. I wrote the piece exclusively for that site, just a few hours after having the experience.  The story is called I watched a Social Media Boxing Match. Tonight’s event was very similar, and so was Sean’s shirt. And so was my behavior; hours after the event I’m about to hit publish on this blog post.

On Thursday January 20th 2011 at approx 4PM, I found myself at The Boiler House in the Distillery District sitting in the back row of an eLATED.ca networking group. The gathering was sponsored by Redwood E-learning Systems and we had the pleasure of hearing Lydia Sani speak on the subject entitled, ‘ Web 2.0 With Redwood E-learning And Four Seasons Hotels’

Lydia Sani from Redwood e-Learning and Chetna Patel from Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts shared their knowledge and experience working together with Redwood’s social media platform, Boost.

The event was a practical example of informal learning on the web, and kicked off with a look at their proprietary software in action.  The detailed case study that was presented by Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts and Redwood e-Learning was full of rare insights and anecdotes. It’s clear the application promotes knowledge sharing and empowers employees in Four Seasons widely distributed environments.

During the networking event at the end of the presentation, the Redwood / Four Seasons project development team was also present to discuss the implementation and share examples of the successful use of social media in a business environment.

There was a heavy snowfall outside Duggan’s Brewery and all over downtown Toronto on Jan 6th, 2011. Unfortunately the inclement weather negatively affected attendance at the Greater Toronto Business Network Meet-Up being held inside the brew pub. All the same, a dozen or more knowledge hungry, independent thinkers joined in conversation downstairs in ‘The Cellar’ opposite the steamy Plexiglas walls of the bottling room which accommodates a giant beer vat in this special event facility. Food and drink was served up alongside hot ideas. Hosted by Mark Bauche of RBC Dominion Securities, the group was composed of medium sized business owners and digital marketing executives. Special thanks to Michael E V the manager on shift at Duggans Brewery that night; he is excellent at his job.

Inside the pub, starting at seven pm downstairs, I, Rob Campbell CEO of Smojoe delivered a forty minute seminar on how we use social media marketing to rank our client’s websites higher for popular keywords in search engines.

Without sounding too conceded, I must report factually that my Smojoe learning seminars are full of rare and precious information, and void of clichés. There’s no ‘page of social media statistics’ for example.  My PowerPoint presentation is two slides. I always get the biggest laughs when I use different voices and reenact typical conversations I’ve heard in boardrooms, or read in discussion forums throughout my career. I play moderator and ban users. I play brand manager and endorse rich media websites made entirely in Flash, while a squeaky voice SEO consultant protests for all the right reasons (and is ignored because fulfilling the client’s vision in Flash is far more lucrative for web developers than writing good copy and building relevance).
Once again, I detailed Smojoe’s core marketing concepts. I explained the true power of unreciprocated incoming links as honest ‘votes for your relevance’ in an age of earned media. I showed how the search for experts drives the internet, and how bloggers really are similar to farmers with market ‘fresh or frozen’ keyword crops.

Today is a Golden Age for ecommerce storytellers. Good stories build relevance and search engine traffic rewards the experts willing to share secrets or ideas, or even their youthful perspective on popular subjects. Business owners that are skilled storytellers, those who invest the time to research and write or create hero driven media don’t require big marketing budgets; they can make themselves rich all by themselves, as their own brand publishers.

There’s a lot more online places in which to build relevance using social media marketing than Facebook and Twitter.

My clever friend Michael Cloke at Wolf21 gave a great list of other powerful resources in one of his recent posts, There’s More to Social Media than Facebook and Twitter. He reminds us that “Linkedln, YouTube and MySpace also have 100 million plus users, while sites like Wikipedia, Flickr, Yelp and Reddit have more than 25 million users. More than 10 million people use Tumblr, Care2, Slideshare, Scribd, Digg etc. Apart from these, the number of users for upcoming sites like Quora, FourSquare, Hunch, Posterous, StackExchange, Namesake etc is also increasing rapidly. Ignoring all these sites in your social media marketing efforts means ignoring a huge number of potential customers.” Depending on your target customers, you need to shift awareness to other sites.
Anyway I finished the Jan 6th presentation by drawing out a typical story funnel that shows how we at Smojoe make keyword sandwiches over multiple platforms complete with keyword rich links to 3rd party conversion tools, or our campaign ‘buckstop’.  Several good questions came from the audience; most notable among the participants was David Mclean, a stand-up comedian and real estate agent, author of Living in the GTA, and Volkmar Volzke the CEO of New Pace Consulting. Intelligent questions also came from Guy Matorin of Design Clinic, and a very specialized accountant named Vitaliy Babiy and Corbet Pala the CEO of eVestor.com

To say I’m disappointed would be an understatement. I love MyBlogLog, and I use it everyday. I will miss it dearly.

Kudos to Kole McCrae the Toronto writer who was the first one to rather cheerfully inform me that MyBloglog was ‘slated for Sunset’ as per Yahoo slide leaked from the Yahoo insider’s meeting on Dec 12th 2010.  In case this is a surprise to you, ReadWriteWeb reports from “sources close to the project” that Yahoo will shut down MyBloglog next month. Kole was pretty chipper about it, but the news found me very sad.

Smojoe uses MyBlogLog to,

1. Fragment media in the ‘What’s New With Me?’ blog sidebar widget
2. Collect stats and learn which keywords are driving traffic
3. Find and monitor ‘blog friends’

Spread the relevance - don’t give away the whole story in one place,

Rob Campbell is Roberrific on MyBlogLog. And Roberrific on Delicious. And I’m Roberrific on Flickr. And on Yahoo Buzz . For a while I thought Yahoo was trying to be friends with all social media marketers; they made such ready tools for freelance storytellers.

Blog sidebar widgets can show ’story fragments’ which are different pieces of the same interactive meme.

I love the MyBlogLog and specifically the What’s New With Me? blog sidebar widget for a whole lot of reasons, but primarily because its the best new feed I’ve ever seen or used. I put this gizmo in the margins of five different blogs. This mechanism displays tiny thumbnail-sized Flickr pictures, Delicious bookmarks, Twitter updates and YouTube videos that I post myself, thumb-up, or comment upon. The blog sidebar is a great way to fragment media and deliver more options to consumers in the margins of the actual story space. Its like when you read an old book from a school library, and find notes in the margins - another perspective on the same data.

The What’s New With Me? widget lets bloggers populate their sidebar with a variety of different feeds. I found the ones checked off here to be best for my own story fragmentation purposes. People searching for information about things will bounce around until the find a blog like mine with Flickr pictures, bookmarks and tweets in the sidebar. Then they don’t bounce back to search, but instead they journey deeper into my experience portal. They click on the thumbnail picture to visit Flickr, or a Facebook page, or watch related videos on YouTube or Vimeo until they arrive at a destination where they can be converted into followers, subscribers, and of course consumers.

There are more than two sides to every story. Smojoe hints at ‘the rest of the story’ by showing all the pictures that were uploaded, including many that were not used in the original article, or blog post. Comments on related blog posts, and bookmarks in supporting material also help make the sidebar another dimension of your communication stream, and a powerful tool for multi-channel interactive storytelling.

Story funnels for humans and robots.

Moving readers from one destination to another through a story funnel, some of which is visible in a blog sidebar widget, makes their conversion from surfers into shoppers more likely.  That’s because knowing more of the story, and actually putting the story together in their own heads makes them ‘invested’. Story funnels filled with info kibble, and fragmented media pleases both humans and search engine algorithm cache bots - it increases conversion and insures high usability by humans, which increases the inherent SEO value of incoming links.

FriendFeed and BlogCatalog news feed widgets are poor alternatives

On the right hand side of this blog you will find three ‘news feed’ style sidebar widgets - the first is Friendfeed, then MyBlogLog and then Blog Catalog.  Friendfeed is annoying - it shows the destination url in the feed, but it takes the clicker to the author’s Friendfeed profile page first, and then to the destination from there, with another click.  Annoying. But Blog Catalog news feed is the most primitive; I cant seem to edit my ‘add services’ page at all right now.

So if MyBlogLog really was the best, then why shut it down?

There is a Quora question: Why did the web services group at Yahoo fail after acquiring Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming, MyBlogLog and others?  that has 18 answers.

Maybe MyBlogLog will live on in another incarnation?

On December 23rd a messenger wrote on the Yahoo Developer Network blog, that “…it’s no secret within Yahoo! that we’re actively discussing the future of MyBlogLog. However, it’s also true that we have not made any final decisions at this point. Is a shutdown on the table? Sure, that’s an option. But there are other options as well. We know this creates some uncertainty for current MyBlogLog users. While we aren’t quite ready to share more details, we promise to keep you posted.”

Once again City Events steps up and builds a better mousetrap – a networking event that’s also a competition!

Deb Lewis consistently designs and presents world class events that are extraordinary. And she’s even better when she teams up with other events industry veterans.

Jeffrey Musson is President of three Information Technology (IT) companies, including a wireless product “start up” and an accomplished entrepreneur with 10 years experience in achieving corporate goals through operational excellence and solid financial performance.

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Jeff is well known for his ability to effect change through simplifying complex challenges and by motivating staff, along with peers, to meet desired business outcomes. Throughout his career, he has demonstrated success in directing business development with progressive responsibilities, strategic business planning, marketing and contract negotiations with affiliated partners.

Jeff received his LL.M. in ADR, at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, in 2007, but he was friends with Deb long before that. These two buddies usually meet up at events and have long conversations with each other in the middle of the dance floor.  I’ve seen it happen more than a few times…

Jeff Musson and Deb Lewis together are a great combination and this event’s success is testament to the strength of their professional networks. Together they know hundreds of people who work in advertising and marketing, social media, multi-media, web development or other related IT fields. Dynamite Thursday brings these folks together to talk shop in a very civilized environment. The ordeal showcases the most innovative technology that people are just beginning to use in marketing and advertising campaigns. These are brand new and shiny ideas - these things drive traffic and make the web more satisfying. And everyone sticks around to the end to see and understand which is the best, and why.

Four entrepreneurs explained their tech companies and presented their services and their visions of the future at Dynamite Thursday at The Spoke Club on Thursday Nov 25th.

The competitive event was moderated by a panel of executive judges who cast their votes to decide a winner, alongside all the votes collected from attendees. I’m not sure how the

On the left hand side is Ray Reddy, Founder & CEO of Pushlife. This company has made a music application that lets consumers enjoy their favourite songs on their mobile devices, like never before. Their music app lets you play your iTunes™ and Windows Media Player™ desktop music collection on your phone - with or without an wireless connection or data plan. All of the player’s functions are at the user’s fingertips with the intuitive media carousel.

Early in the evening I met Adam Ben-Aron from My City Lives, and his co conspirator Adil “Toronto Fan Boy” Dhalla. These two geniuses have built an online platform that allows you to share your video experiences with your city’s public spaces, organizations and humanity in general. The videos are in Flash today, but will be displayed in html5 tomorrow, maybe.

These web stories appear live on an interactive map showcasing the locations in which they were filmed so you can learn about your city based on the stories of others.

Collectively, these stories define a city, but they’re rarely connected with the sterile grids of modern cartography or even lively user generated review sites. Through the advents of modern media, My City Lives bring you an authentic view of your city that is powerful because it is personal—their technology works to animate the missing link between locations and the people.

Adil Dhalla also has a terrific blog called Creativity Killed The Recession in which he writes that ‘ A city is not a collection of inanimate roads, expressways, trolley-tracks or buildings; that is infrastructure. A city is the combination of these objects with the people who build and live amongst them. At My City Lives, we combine the topographical precision of new-age mapping technology with the vibrancy and style of an independent film.’

Vayoo Connects Consumers to Business

Alex MacKay of Vayyoo Connect told me
Vayyoo was founded in January 2007. Today they’re a young, dynamic, privately held start-up that focuses on developing a software platform to enable systems integrators, software developers, and OEMs to rapidly add mobile functionality for a wide variety of clients and applications.

Vayyoo Connect Personal is a package deployed on devices which integrates deeply into the native functionality and enhances the advantage of capture and share of information. Users can respond to emails with multimedia attachments, create single click destinations from the address book for friends and family, capture all types of media in one place, and include GPS location with messages. There are shortcuts to post to many popular social networks such as Twitter and facebook.

In addition to the features available in Vayyoo Personal Connect, with Vayyoo Professional Connect users can create meeting minutes and assign tasks directly from their calendar, add voice memos and whiteboard screenshots, define custom widgets for direct connection to business applications, and integrate server configurable forms for surveys, reports, expenses etc.

Gary Puppa of Epixome! was the friendliest contender; he has the oldest business with the longest track record and most corporate clients.  Epixome specializes in recording videos of fans and participants at sporting matches and outdoor events - they create digital keepsakes which allows folks to get social and spread a brand around their friend networks. The organization has been growing steadily since its beta launch in 2001.  Since that time their servers have processed over 500,000 photos and dispatched millions of e-mails allowing over 5 million PiXo views. Their technology has been a core component of hundreds of regional and national campaigns, events and promotional programs across Canada and the United States.

At 7:30 pm on the night of November 25th the winner was declared…

Pushlife was voted #1 by four celebrity judges and the majority of event attendees. When I spoke to one of the judges later he revealed that they felt Pushlife’s mobile software had the best proprietary technology (with many patents pending), the best production partners, and overall the most potential to succeed.