I’m headed back to Everest on March 25, 2010 to chronicle the final peak in Robert Hill’s No Guts Know Glory 7Summits campaign. You should follow the blog over there.
The 12 wines of Christmas: Twitter version
Published December 22, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a CommentI wanted to get suggestions for 12 great wines to package up as Christmas gifts so naturally I turned to the Twitterverse for this little crowd-sourcing project. I got some great suggestions from all kinds of tweeps, but one tweep really took it to a level that needs both recognition and reward. @RodPhillips is the buyer for Liquor Plus, a chain of liquor stores on Vancouver Island. I asked him to weigh in with some suggestions for my list, he did that, and more. Here are his picks:
- Bodegas Cortes Red $8.99
- Redhill Creek Shiraz $9.99
- Santa Julia Malbec $14.99
- Vina Maipo Sauv Blanc $11.99
- Desert Hills Gamay $19.99
- Finder’s & Seekers Shiraz $18.99
- Canforrales Tempranillo $17.99
- St. Hubertus Riesling $17.99
- Cristalino Brut Rosado $17.99
- Naboli Palzzolli Primitivo $14.99
- La Mura Nero D’Avola $14.99
- Redwood Creek Cabernet Sauvignon $13.99
Rod’s final statement was “glad I got that off my chest!” Me too, Rod, me too. Kudos and cheers. I look forward to buying these great wines from a guy and a business that gets social media marketing on my way into Victoria this week.
President Obama has called America’s dependence on oil one of the most serious threats their nation faces. The Discovery Center is hosting a two-day conference, Beyond Oil, supported by leaders from Microsoft, Ford, state and local governments at Microsoft’s Redmond, WA -based conference facilities to discuss how the integration of information technology, sustainable transportation solutions and smart growth strategies can mitigate the effects of climate change and dependence on oil.
JDO Communications client, Rapid Electric Vehicles CEO Jay Giraud, will speak in the New Technology Showcase, Friday morning, October 23, at 9:15 AM and provide test driving opportunities of the REV 300 ACX all-electric SUV, designed for the fleet market. I will be traveling with the REV team to provide social media content development and media outreach services. I’ll be tweeting highlights at http://www.twitter.com/joshaughnessy. The REV press release is found here.
Questioning if your business should be there?
Published October 5, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a CommentWonder no more:
While you are still deciding on it’s value, your competitors are engaging with your customers.
World Ostomy Day is October 3, 2009. IDEAS has partnered with Jessica Grossman and the UOAA to produce the UncoverOstomy.com awareness project.
The press release was put out this morning on Marketwire. Here’s the social media release and here’s the Facebook page.
Full text of the social media release follows:
Jessica Grossman, Age 20, Uncovers Ostomy for World Ostomy Day
Toronto, Ontario, SOCIAL MEDIA ADVISORY, October/1/2009 – Toronto-based actor and model, 20-year-old Jessica Grossman, kicks off the Uncover Ostomy public awareness campaign on World Ostomy Day, October 3, 2009. Uncover Ostomy is a provocative look at a hidden issue-the social stigma of living life with an ostomy.
“World Ostomy Day is a day we recognize the importance of ostomy surgeries as life-quality improvements for people suffering through terrible illnesses,” said Jessica. “I’ve had my ostomy for six years and every day I am thankful for how healthy I feel because of it. World Ostomy Day is the perfect time to show this to Canadians.”
Many ostomy patients, especially those who have had recent surgery, are reluctant to talk about the changes made to their body. Living in a society that shuns body waste discussion, ostomy patients often feel alone. Quality of life suffers as ostomy patients may be reluctant to participate in recreational activities they previously enjoyed for fear of adverse social reactions. Estimates suggest 50,000 Canadians are living with an ostomy, although the true number remains unknown.
In the Uncover Ostomy campaign, Jessica exposes what may be beneath the clothes of 1 out of every 700 Canadians. Jessica partnered with the Intestinal Disease Education and Awareness Society (IDEAS) to create UncoverOstomy.com, a website serving as the hub for an ongoing social media discussion about ostomy related issues. A long-time performer despite a lengthy battle with Crohn’s disease, being in front of a camera was natural for Jessica.
“Most of my friends and family are using Facebook and other social networking sites to communicate with one another these days. We decided to give them something really unique to discuss,” Jessica explains. “We took some barely dressed photos with my bag completely visible. When people see these images they’re going to be really surprised. I don’t know if anyone has ever shown the ostomy in this kind of light before. A lot of people think of ostomy as an old person’s problem. It’s not.”
“When Jessica approached us a year ago with her vision for this project we felt an instant fit with what IDEAS is all about,” said John O’Shaughnessy, IDEAS board president. “Our programs raise awareness and educate people about intestinal diseases and the issues patients’ face. A lot of people have ostomies because of intestinal diseases. We want to help Jessica uncover the ostomy and help frame a positive public discussion aimed at eliminating social stigma surrounding the ostomy.”
Visitors to UncoverOstomy.com are encouraged to share the site’s content with their online networks and make donations to IDEAS for awareness projects.
“It’s a 10 plus 10 ask,” Jessica explained. “Donate $10 to IDEAS and share the website with 10 friends and ask them to do the same. If 10,000 people in Canada do this, we’ll raise $100,000. More importantly, we’ll educate as many Canadians as possible about the ostomy and why having one can be really good for people suffering through terrible illnesses.”
- END CANADIAN SOCIAL MEDIA RELEASE – 10/1/2009
Further information:
About Jessica Grossman: Jessica is a 20 year old University of Western Ontario media studies student, an actor and a model. Diagnosed with Crohn’s disease at age 9, Jessica made the decision to have her diseased colon removed at age 13 and undergo ileostomy surgery. Professional studio photographs of Jessica, including her ostomy, are available for media reprint on request.About Ostomy: Ostomies are a category of diversionary surgeries. There are three major types: a colostomy is made from the large intestine (colon); an ileostomy is made from the small intestine (ileum); and a urostomy is a diversion of the urinary tract. The most common reasons for ostomy surgery include inflammatory bowel diseases, cancer, birth defects and trauma.
About IDEAS: The Intestinal Disease Education and Awareness Society is a Canadian non-profit organization with chapters in Vancouver, BC and Windsor, ON. The society’s mission is to eliminate intestinal disease and ostomy related stigma. Their website serves as an educational resource and their programs aim to enhance life-quality for children and youth suffering from Crohn’s disease, Ulcerative Colitis and other digestive illnesses.
Social media contact information:
John O’Shaughnessy
IDEAS board president
604.862.4759
john@jdocommunications.com
Twitter: @joshaughnessy
City of Inglewood Chooses REV to Transform Fleet Vehicles to 100 Percent Electric
Published October 1, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a CommentFull press release here.
The crew from Rapid Electric Vehicles are down in southern California this weekend at the Alt Car Expo showing off the almost-production-ready REV 300 ACX all-electric SUV. I drove this truck several weeks ago on the streets of Vancouver and it was an incredible experience. Pretty cool to think in the next couple of years you’ll be able to choose electricity as your fuel of choice.
The City of Inglewood has stepped up to prove the viability of REV’s all-electric fleet vehicles. The first of many fleet operators who will do so over the coming months.
At around 8:30am local time, Phil Wu, Andy Manson, Robert Hill, Clinton Shard, Jimmy MacKenzie and Paul Head reached the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, Uhuru Peak, 5895 metres, Tanzania, Africa. Congratulations to all of you!
You can read about their adventure on the team blog at ibdadventures.wordpress.com. The team climbed Kilimanjaro to raise funds for the Intestinal Disease Education and Awareness Society (IDEAS) and the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of Canada.
Have a safe and enjoyable trip home. I look forward to seeing more photos and hearing more stories of this amazing adventure.
Christine and I are on our way to the Napa Valley in northern California for a working holiday. We’re driving down the I-5 freeway from Washington State to make quick time there and decided to stay in Rice Hill, Oregon, as it’s just over half way to our first destination of Santa Rosa, CA.
I’m not sure we were fully prepared for what we arrived to. This town is a hoot. Actually, it could be a hootenanny because it sure does have that country feel to it–country as in mid-west prairies, not country as in an one-hour drive to the sand dunes of the Oregon coast. Or country as in too small to appear on a Google map zoomed to state-level.
We’re staying at the Best Western, which is about as perfect as you can get in a town that doesn’t have more than a couple hundred residents. There are a few restaurants to choose from: a Denny’s, Subway and a couple of mom and pop type diners, all lining the one street in town. We ended up seeking dinner in the Ranch Restaurant & Lounge, a throw-back to a 50s truck stop cafe.
One of my favourite parts about traveling is sampling the local beers, and while this one may not have truly been local, it was definitely a new brew for me. A very passable amber ale, Alaskan Amber in a frosty glass was a jaw-dropping three greenbacks a bottle–a price the server proclaimed to be outrageous–but considering that I could get three for the price of one pint of Guiness in a Yaletown pub, I was quite happy to pay the tab, and enjoy the cool refreshment after eight hours on the road.
The menu was typical of truck stops, so we ate the typical truck stop dish: steak sandwich with all the fix’ins. And yes, that bad boy is fried, just like grandpappy used to make it! For $7.95 you get a tossed green salad to start, baked potato with sour cream, side of well-cooked and buttered baby carrots and a 6 ounce pan-fried steak served on a thin slice of garlic sourdough.
The two other patrons of the place and the server were all a buzz about the day’s big event. We couldn’t help but overhear and ask a few questions of our own. Apparently, sometime late morning, an eager trucker had ripped into town a bit quick and decided, albeit a tad too late, to pull into the only store that doesn’t sell food or gas as it’s primary offering.
Turns out he or she overestimated his or her driving skills. I sure hope the injuries sustained weren’t as bad as they may have been given the state of the cab.
I don’t think I will ever forget Rice Hill, Oregon. Great choice of mid-point stops on the drive from Vancouver BC to northern California, I highly recommend it. If you ever do stay here, ask a local how Uncle Bob is doing. I promise you won’t regret it.
Look out Santa Rosa, the O’Shaughnessy’s are coming.
The BC Bike Race, an epic seven-day mountain bike stage race is happening this week. The race starts in North Vancouver and finishes in Whistler with stops on Vancouver Island, the Sunshine Coast and Squamish in between. Two good friends are racing this year, so I hung out with cameras in tow to capture some of their day. Congrats to Dawn and Lisa for ripping it up out there against some of the best professional women riders in the country.
I shot 448 pictures in total, 10 are on Flickr. I spent some time playing with Sony Vegas to make the quick movie below. It’s my first attempt at editing a film beyond a quick interview piece. I’d love to know what you think of it.
I’m done for the day–way too much sun for this Irish skin.
Building on a previous post about using social media for business engagement, I’m going to narrow this discussion to internal communications.
Businesses tend to be focused on ROI. And why not? If you’re going to be spending money, it should be purposeful and provide tangible results. There is a ton of discussion online about ROI calculations of social media. In fact, I’d suggest that horse has been beaten to death and kicked one too many times. But if you want links, here they are, and are, and are, and are, etc.
Here’s a bit of a case study: first the outline of the problem.
I worked in a medium sized corporation not too long ago. It was connected to a larger professional organization but tended to isolate itself as an arms-length entity. The employees there had created a culture over the years that was somewhat disjointed–different but the same as their wider peers across their professional organization.
Like many corporations, this one is caught in the grips of perpetual change: leadership shifts, organizational moves, staff growth in some business areas, retrenchment in others. The business has the tendency to silo due to the nature of the work and the organization of business activities–some employees are skilled professionals while others would be considered front-line service workers–teamwork across business areas is crucial to the success of both the business deliverables and the well-being of the organization.
Like all organizations of its size, this one has communication and knowledge transfer issues. I’d hesitate to call them critical problems; that said, a clear employee engagement strategy to create an open, multi-directional dialogue between leaders, managers, supervisors and employees would be beneficial. As would a well-defined plan to create an open source platform for business knowledge to be captured and spread throughout the many knowledge workers who depend on the expertise of long-time employees and leaders to do their work.
Much of the corporate written knowledge is contained on the corporate website and intranet. The intranet is problematic because it hasn’t seen an upgrade or redesign in years. As a result, some workers tend to shy away from using it as their primary source and prefer to create meetings and shop around documents to get what they need. This is a costly and time-consuming practice that often results in a logjam of product development. Two business areas even have regularly scheduled knowledge transfer sessions that resemble an undergraduate lecture.
Here’s my pitch:
Knowledge transfer
A corporate wiki on the intranet site edited by chosen subject matter experts regularly and published by designated approval actors. Initial content development is a minor issue as much of the content necessary to make this resource purposeful already exists. However a team of communications experts will need to organize the content in an intuitive, hyper-linked environment. Meetings scheduled for knowledge transfer should include clear wiki-deliverables: that is, if we’re meeting to hear about corporate knowledge, write it down and upload it to the wiki. The wiki becomes the default location of knowledge in this case–every subject contains the most recent version of the specific associated knowledge. Version control risks are minimized when knowledge is contained in one central location and format.
Engagement communications
This is a bit more tricky. Should you use Yammer–a closed Twitter-type community–or something like Ning, a closed Facebook-like community platform? I can understand the draw of Ning, as most people are familiar with what Facebook is and does. However, Yammer, to me at least, is so much more powerful for creating organizational conversations–streamlined, search-able and horizontal. The problem with Yammer, as I see it, is the lack of an intuitive application client to make it easy to keep the conversation flowing and organized.
Here’s the solution, laconi.ca plus twhirl, (solution find courtesy of Chris Brogan). You get the benefits of a Twitter-client with a closed system like Yammer.
Like all communications efforts, these require careful planning and implementation. There should be research, development, testing, implementation and evaluation phases.
It all starts with buy-in at the top. It’s up to the internal actors doing the planning to convince the decision makers of the relevance of an internal conversation creating effort. My recommendation is to start with a baseline: answer the question “Where are we having corporate conversations currently and how do we measure their effectiveness?” Present those findings, pitch the additional conversation creating qualities of any new tools (we’re not replacing what we were doing previously, we’re building on those practices) and counter the initial negative reaction (if there is one) by asking “How do you evaluate the ROI of knowledge transfer meetings, corporate newsletters, employee events and whatever else our organization does to increase employee engagement?”
I think you’ll be surprised at the response. Or lack there of.
