The Social Networking Site Facebook

I love you, ever since I joined your service a couple years ago. I have been able to reconnect with friends from Sydney, AZ to Yellowknife, NWT.

But Facebook we really need to talk… Your not Twitter, Nor do I want to be Twitter. See Facebook I joined your service to share my life with a close 200 friends, and I really try keeping up with all of them. Honestly, I have a personal twitter account, but I am not sure what to do with it because I already use this site, and that site, to voice my public views.

And, yes, before you privacy experts get your shirt in a knot. I know the privacy on Facebook is a basic one. And anyone with some savvy hacking skills could potentially see, copy, change any of my info on your site, and I am OK with that. I know the risk of what I post and have read more then one story about employees getting fired for posting stuff on Facebook. I also prefer to keep my business life and social life separate, so if I haven’t accepted your friend request. Isn’t not you it’s me. . .

Lets just call my Facebook friends an extended family for want of a better word. I’d be OK with telling them stuff I wouldn’t be comfortable tell a complete stranger, which quite frankly resembles the entire Internet.

If I did want to publicly rant and rave then I have half a dozen different services at my disposal, or I’d just make all of my post public. but I didn’t join Facebook to do that. Nor is Facebook something I want to use that for. I like Facebook for being Facebook it was the reason I joined and the reason I continue to log in each day.

Hope you had a great Christmas and I look forward to seeing you in the New Year.

regards

Robert

Well my summer has been a lot different than the usual tree planter. Instead of working in a camp in the middle of a clear cut, I am working for Bikes on the Drive (BOTD) on Commercial Drive, which is pretty much the center of East Vancouver.

I walked into the shop some months ago and talked with ilan Handelsman, manager of BOTD about telling their story and getting some more traffic to their website. What happened was ilan told me the story of The Tree. A bike conceived by the staff on BOTD out of frustration with the current trends in the commuter bike industry.

Bikes on the Drive Tree

What happened next was truly something amazing. I had one opportunity to convince BOTD that I was the one who should tell the story of The Tree. But to do this I had to explain social networking. The problem is that much like everyone else I didn’t really fully understand social networking in terms of marketing and a return on a shop’s investment. But what I did have was time on my hands.

I sat down and two days later with the help of OmniGraffle I had built a three-page flowchart that somewhat explained social networking to the bike shop and how it could be measured. A full two months after my first conversation I then presented this two month proposal to Tina the shop administrator and owner.

I am happy to say that three weeks ago a three month contract was approved by Bikes on the Drive and I have barely had enough time to do laundry since then. (I said barely).

So we have taken The Tree to the Bike to Work Week BBQ’s, Commuter Stations, Mexico thanks to Bugsy, Critical Mass and the bike is already a Museum Piece and it’s barely two months old.

So far it has been the biggest internet marketing project I have ever taken on. Here is a short list of what we’re working on:

• Microsite dedicated to the bike.
• Bikes on business card
• Magazine display ads
• Domain Purchase and association
• Guerrilla marketing
• Art Directed photo shoot on false creek.
• Photos of every part of Tree Life
• Event promotion and coverage
• Video
• Own Flickr group
• Interview of all staff

And we’re not even into month two of the contract. . .

So unlike the intrepid tree planters of the Canadian wilderness I have been a firmly planted urbanist this summer, promoting one of the coolest projects I have worked on since becoming a web designer.

Jenelle models the Tree on False Creek

The shop managers and owners have been amazing to work with. I have presented ideas and concepts and 9 times out of 10 I hear, “Yes, sure, lets try that!” To be given almost cart blanche to market a product without a laundry list of restrictions has been a dream of a job to work on.

But I could not do this without friends like: Jenelle Schneider who was an awesome model for the photo shoot. Jacob Hopkins who did the photography of the tree on False Creek. My programer Kevin Ganapathy who is a great web developer but also speaks fluent Robert, which means he know what I am talking about most of the time. . .

Will keep you posted on how things are progressing this summer it certainly has been a wild ride this spring.

“I believe all of these community review sites and user-generated content site is all about transparency.” ~ Vancouver Indy Coffee Scene

And while this will be the last double post between the two blogs, I felt it was important issue to cover. 

Also, to show the nature of change on the internet. Most of the traffic the coffee blog received was from Twitter. It also had a huge bump in subscription from Twitter because of this. 

Hopefully all this controversy will subside and I can return to blogging, photography, web design watching the Canucks in the playoffs and swimming with the club.

Powered by WordPress

But I took the writing for the web course in stride and had to sign up for a WordPress.com account. I decided to write on coffee as it was close to home, easy to write about and a popular topic. My class only required me to write 12 posts, but after those 12 posts I saw the power of blogging and had 1,200 unique page views and a number of comments about the blog.

So I really started to take the WordPress blog seriously about that time and got a domain name and style that fit and the readership continued to grow. WordPress was growing right along with my own blog, the two seem to feed off each other (no pun intended).

When I started to see other blogs link to mine in some authority I knew I was on to something. So what to do? Well the first thing was to make the blog self hosted and, well, that was the hardest part. But, it was also important to keep the blog looking the same. I picked the Freshy theme by Julien De Luca as it was one of the 16 different themes available to WordPress.com users at the time. While I could make a change when I moved the blog why change? As it works for me and the readers seem to like it. (p.s. the theme I am using here is a highly customized Orange Coffee)

Change is a good thing…I think…

While WordPress had designed a way to take your content with you when I moved it wasn’t that easy. I had three issues with my content moving:

• I wanted to keep my old Freshy theme and while it was still available for download it wasn’t optimized for WordPress 2.7
• My old content from WordPress 2.1 didn’t format that well into WordPress 2.7 So if I wanted to edit any of my old content I essentially had to re-align the entire post.
• All of media, pictures and video had to be manually copied from the wordpress.com site and uploaded to the new server while persevering the perma-links.

Yeah this totally wasn’t that easy and I would never suggest trying to do this and I am sure there are easier ways to go about this but just not to me and not at this time.

When moving call friends

But with any move you need to enlist the help of some good friends and I really couldn’t have done this without the help of:

• CSS guru Jeff Hifner.
• My service provider Site 5.
• Developer Kevin Ganapathy of Second Sites Communications • WordPress Plugin Developer Dylan Kuhn at the Cyber Hobo• And of course my awesome, awesome editor Stefania Seccia

So what is new?

Better Cafe Reviews

Lattes and Laptops

The whole essence of this blog is to pass on the most accurate information I can. I’ve done some minor editing of archived posts but only to keep information current as some of those old posts are damn popular.

Interactive Map

I always liked maps especially when they are interactive so now you can find a visual representation of the great cafes (in my humble opinion) via this map. Just click on the cafe review icon to bring up the review of that café.

Our Mantra

I really like to show people where I am coming from when I write a review or give my opinion. This page is after two years of coffee knowledge, what we at the Indy Coffee Scene and what I rate on. Also a code of ethics for users to see where we’re coming from and what we look for, and once advertising appears on the site, what type will be allowed.

Coffee Terms

Well I decided to stake my claim on this lexicon and collect over 100 coffee terms that are currently used in Vancouver.

Social Media

We have also joined twitter so you can follow us at coffeevancouver. We have a flickr group called (Vancouver Indy Coffee) where we’re posting some awesome coffee photos.

CBC Radio is branching out into social media

The Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) is increasingly putting all shows in podcast format, and even putting hourly news in podcast format for download. When Apple released their podcast friendly iTunes they looked to CBC to help promote their product.

“iTunes said you guys are one of view few music podcasts out their can we promote. For the first month they promoted the hell out of it and it gave us a really good start … Apple has been really good at it (podcasting) and they have been a huge factor in our success. In raising awareness that we are doing (podcasting) and we have been a fairly good market colleage for them.”
~ Steve Pratt, January 24, 2008 – Director CBC radio digital programing and CBC Radio 3 ~

CBC Radio 3 has made the most of it's online profile

They started in earnest two years ago and now, according to iTunes Podcast Directory, hold many of the top podcasts in Canada. CBC radio is only federally mandated to provide advertising time to candidates in either a provincial or federal election. They have no other mandate to sell advertising to on any of their radio programing.
However, just a year after they starting podcasting most of their radio shows, all podcasts are now sponsored before the start of the program. Steve Pratt – head of CBC Radio three and CBC Radio digital programing explains why the advertising is needed.

“Our License is only for terrestrial radio, so AM and FM broadcasting. And that is written into our mandate that we have to be commercial free for that. But that is where all our funding is directed as well, so all the government funding is directed towards terrestrial radio.”
~ Steve Pratt, January 24, 2008 – Director CBC radio digital programing and CBC Radio 3 ~

To fund the podcasting that was coming from CBC Pratt had to dip into the special programming fund and while that was ok when it was experimental and new as podcasting as it was going to be called became more mainstream, CBC had to find a way to fund the extra resources needed to make it’s shows available in a digital format.
The bandwidth was another issue for CBC but beyond that producers where puting a lot of resources to make the shows podcast friendly.
And while this might be easier for a local radio station to do CBC has 35 different locations across the country that both produce national and regional programing. It is a major shift of technology moving from a proprietary file format that is somewhat archaic to a MP3 friendly and more robust digital format.

“What we are implements and rolling out across the country is a program that is more MP3 friendly which requires less man ours and then using a content management system to deliver all the show to the various servers where our shows are hosted. For a broadcasters as large as the CBC it is a large rollout to producers across the country.”

“We rather look at ourselves as content creators rather then radio programers. We will find some really interesting extensions from the radio show that find themselves on a web or on a phone, it provides a really rich show experience which allows you to pick the way you want to get into it.”
~ Steve Pratt, January 24, 2008 – Director CBC radio digital programing and CBC Radio 3 ~

Spark is a CBC Radio show about technology

From expats who live around the world to Canadians who have moved across the country and still want news from their home town CBC is providing it’s listeners more way to connect and in return the national broadcaster is more relevant and has a higher listening audience.
Which really isn’t to far from the CBC’s original mandate when CBC radio went live back in November 2, 1936.

“It is pretty great. The feedback we have gotten about podcasting that is. It is really is remarkable what we hear from audiences is that as a broadcaster we need to be there. Because that is what Canadians want from us, And that our mandate is to provide programing to Canadians about Canadians for Canadians.”
~ Steve Pratt, January 24, 2008 – Director CBC radio digital programing and CBC Radio 3 ~

Podcasting is a new media where anyone can produce content and anyone can watch that content on a variety of devices, whether the business models of Podshow Inc. are a viable long term the next five years will be a very interesting time.