Alphablogs

I’ve been meaning to set out more on Bridging Media but have been too busy until today. Thinking about it, I’ve been trying to analyze just what made this event on March 29th such a success? Not only the hard work of the organizing team and the vision of the two founders, Erica Hargreave and Megan Cole, but also the willingness of the panelists to open up to the group and the easy interaction between the panelists and the audience. The setup in the round helped a lot, so it was more like sharing a conversation between panelists rather than having a linear group each taking a turn to show and tell.

Also, from start to finish this was a rapid and effective free community event. The concept came into reality very quickly - and this includes panelists, equipment, sponsors, barbeque from the folks at Vera’s Burgers, remarkable real-time liveblogging documentation by Miss604 and Robert Ouimet’s full podcast of the proceedings that was made available the next morning.  With around 150 people registered from both the video production and interactive media communities, this was a terrific example of the kinds of open events that are making a difference now in all fields.

Looks like this will be one of those “mark your calendar” events in Vancouver.

Bridging Media: Addressing the Challenges - this Saturday, March 29, 2008, 9:45 am - 3pm

Aimed to provide a bridge between the two communities of film/television and interactive/social media, I think this event comes just at the right time. The expertise we have here in Vancouver is remarkable, and the panelists assembled for this event have a lot to share in the short time they have available, so it looks like the whole day will be power-packed.

The tools are here and easier to use than ever, and the panelists are articulate and experienced in the slippery ever-shifting world of web/mobile/social media. Its free, its informative and it can change what you think you might know about social media, and more. Plus there is a door prize: a free pass to nextMEDIA, just before the Banff Television Festival.

Want to know who’ll be there? Go to the registration site and take a peek.

And did I mention that lunch is sponsored? Yes it is a free lunch!

Brainchild of Megan Cole and Erica Hargreave, the event now has a terrific team putting this together, with good will and sharp skills:  Cinci Csere, Monique Trottier and Monica Hamburg. I’m really glad to help out with this event and be in their company!

On October 30, 2007, I finally made it over to the annual SOHO small business show here in Vancouver. I had known about it for quite a while – a business mentor, Dean Barbour, had always talked about it very enthusiastically – but I had never initiated contact yet.

SOHO’s fact sheet states that

SOHO Business Group is a national marketing company focussed on connection Canadian business with valuable tools, benefits, savings, resources and special events. The SOHO – SME Business Conference and Expo is a national circuit of one-day events that focus on delivering a unique event experience to support success and growth of small and medium size businesses in Canada.

Part of this “unique event experience” were speeches by Peter Legge, well-known author and President and CEO of Canada Wide Media Ltd. (publishers of business magazines such as BC Business) and expert advice talks by people such as Martin Bryne of Yahoo! Canada.

A component that I personally found interesting was an “Ask the Expert” center. I think that’s a great idea; however, I must say that the one person I talked to saw this clearly more as a chance for a sales pitch than an opportunity for a potential customer (me) to ask questions; so it would be good to tweak that a little bit.

As you can imagine, this is a topic of particular interest to me. Marketing via blogs is pull marketing: Working with your clients’ and potential clients’ existing interests. What are their problems? What are their goals? What attracts them naturally? What turns them off right away? Where is the love?

What really excites me as a client or potential business partner is when, through normal person-to-person conversation (vs. let-me-sell-you-something conversation), synergies arise. That was the case with a number of exhibitors at SOHO, particularly Daniel Wang, a commercial insurance specialist at the co-operators (we discovered we had both lived in Germany), the people from the Gay and Lesbian Business Association (we might do some work together), Katie Morrison from The Business Exchange (an interesting concept, especially for people interested in franchises), and Victoria Ronco from Boiling Point Communications, who gave me a list Canadian business bloggers (you might find some of them discussed here in the future).

Have you been to any local trade shows lately? Or even participated? How did that work for you?

When using your blog for marketing and PR purposes, it’s vital that you turn on your visual thinking and come up with great ideas that can communicate energy around your project. Using a blog to promote your message and to connect to your current and potential community is now commonplace. But if you want people to talk about it, and spread the word, you need to make a visual impact.

How do you stand out from the crowd?

Here’s an example using a very simple project. Because it’s hypothetical, there are no photos for it. Let’s say you’ve self-published a recipe book, made up of recipes your family has loved for the past 20 years, with a few really old ones from your mother’s day. You want to use a blog to promote it beyond your close family, and to create strong visual meaning so people will remember it.

Number one: who loves your book the most? Your family, and possibly a few friends. How can they provide visual impact for your project? Simply by being photographed (in good light) laughing and enjoying one another’s company at the table. Pop it in the blog and voila!

Let’s say you connect with a worthy group or association, willing to support your efforts. If they were to have a fundraising dinner made entirely from your recipes (with participants receiving copies of your book) you would have plenty of opportunities for photos of a positive event to include in your blog - plus a link into a good cause as well. Or go for a school event, something other than family, where your recipe book can bring out the good times and good feelings in people. Again, document the whole process, not just the final meal.

Endorsements are standard workhorses of the photo-op, and if you do find a prominent person to endorse your recipe book, don’t think only of a text blurb. Try to get a photo of yourself and the endorser together, with the book, or perhaps sharing one of your cupcakes! Very blog-worthy indeed!

No external endorsement or organization? Use your extended network to get a couple of cooking teams together, to make your recipes, then celebrate by eating the results and reviewing the creations. All this can go into your blog. Be sure to photo-document the whole process of each team. You could even go so far as to select a couple of “judges” to determine who wins the “bake-off”!

One tip to remember: nothing looks less appetizing than food that has been badly photographed. If you don’t have access to great lighting and a good camera, stay focused on the interactions between people - go for the smiles and the good times rather than the plate of limp-looking yam fries.

Okay, that’s enough of the recipe book example. The main thing to remember is that everything you do in getting your project to fruition is bloggable. It is never too late to start. You can use the old documentary trick of “recreating” if you didn’t start out documenting your process. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a tagged picture can speak even louder.

And one more tip: Be yourself! It’s a lot more fun.

A report from an event …

An Inspiration

Yesterday’s second Mental Health Voices breakfast truly left me “inspired and enthusiastic about the possibility of recovering from mental illness”, as Jonathan Oldman, executive director of the Canadian Mental Health Association put it so eloquently.

Last October, the CMHA’s Vancouver/Burnaby branch put on this event for the first time. It was so successful that this year, six other branches adapted the concept and held a similar event.

Mental illness is still a taboo; this despite the fact that today in North America, mental health related disability claims are higher than any other disability claims.

It was encouraging to hear the voices of people who are willing to stick out and break that taboo.

Vancouver’s Chinese community

And none more than Jim Wang. In a video vignette (beautifully and professionally done by Lemongrass Media), this sprightly elder spoke about CMHA’s Chinese Community Program, a mental health program for Vancouver’s large and vibrant Chinese community. Traditionally, in Chinese culture, too many people are afraid to share their stories of adversity and particularly mental illness.

But - “I am very proud to tell my story,” said Jim Wang. Every person has a story that needs to be told. His was of a hectic professional schedule, filled with music and tennis in his time off work. And then suddenly, his motivation dropped. He fell into a deep depression, one that required his concerned family to take him to a hospital.

Volunteering - Becoming happier and happier, and healthier and healthier

In the course of his mental illness, he came across one of CMHA’s Chinese Mental Health Screening booths. Soon, he became a volunteer. “CMHA is like a home to me, and I needed to do something that was beneficial for other people.”

Says Stella Lee, who operates the Chinese Mental Health Screening program: “At our first booth at a health fair, people just walked by us, some saying, ‘Oh, that’s for crazy people.’” But that has changed.

When symptoms of mental illness are observed, the traditional reaction by many people of Chinese origin is till often that they want to deal with it themselves and don’t want to see a doctor. However, through outreach efforts like this and ambassadors like Jim Wang, there are now many more who participate in the mental health screening events.

“We must share our difficulties,” says Jim Wang, “Life is so valuable. CMHA helps people to live life more fully, to become healthier and healthier and happier and happier.”

Mental Health Voices

Mental Health Voices is CMHA Burnaby branch’s signature fund raising event. The event takes place annually during National Mental Illness Awareness Week. It is a complimentary breakfast by special invitation. During the hour, CMHA presents an award to a local, public or community figure who has openly discussed the impact of mental illness on their lives.

Most importantly, the event showcases how people who use CMHA’s services are successfully dealing with the challenges of living with a mental illness. The program is lively and mixes video with speeches by a wide variety of people involved in the CMHA, from program users to staff to volunteers.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank the people who accompanied me to this great event and generously donated, including web developer Zoe Neill-St.Clair and her partner, real estate investor Gary Herriot, wellness coach Billie Sinclair, real estate agent MJ Ankenman and financial advisor Vanson Field.

The blog of the Vancouver Skateboard Coalition is a good example of how a blog can serve exactly the same function of a “normal” web site – and more.

In fact, if you’re the average internet user, you probably will not even be able to tell right away that this is a blog. The first thing you see is a full navigation bar, directing the reader to exactly the kinds of information they’re looking for – news about skateboarding, skateboard parks, links to more information.

It’s a great communication tool, perfect for an association. It has

• information for the casual looker like me, whose interest in skateboarding stems mostly from our blogging friend Tina, who used to be very involved in the community
• information for skateboarders who may be visiting or new to Vancouver
• information and news for the existing skateboarding community in the area, including information about volunteering
• private communication capability for members
• images
• video

They’re up-to-date, and they offer lots of ways to contact them.

Ideas for improvement would be to put some information in the “events” and “donations” area, or, alternatively, take those links off until the information can be posted. Also, there could be a few more categories.

All in all – I really like this blog. In fact, I’ll recommend it to VanCal, a new blog about inexpensive entertainment in Vancouver.

technorati tags: vancouver, skateboards, events, communities, parks

The other day we were talking about why arts organizations should have blogs. Most of the reasons go for any organization.

Here is one more reason: blogs are a great way to report on past events. We all have very busy schedules and at any given time, we may have to choose between two or more things to do.

Just as an example, my friend Monica had already bought the whole weekend ticket for this year’s folk festival when she received an invitation to a fundraiser by another mutual friend, Haedy, for her Weekend to End Breast Cancer walk - so she just couldn’t make it to Haedy’s event. However, she has been a staunch supporter of this fundraising campaign for years and would really like to know what happened. She wants to be kept up to date.

This is not an isolated example; it’s probably happened to you before.

So – for those of you who weren’t there, and to show what such a report might look like, here’s a little recap of what happened at Haedy’s party on Sunday

One thing you need to know about Haedy is that she is a fabulous cook – and, let’s face it, a fanatic cook. So here she is, very, very sick, and what does she do? She cooks 100 cabbage rolls, 60 pieces of fish, 60 sausages, a gazillion devilled eggs, a bucketful of salad, 2 huge casseroles, 6 strudels – and the list goes on. Of course she had help, as usual, from Timmie and June – but still. Boy, Haedy, you’re crazy. And of course the food – all of it Hungarian, to celebrate her ethnic background – was mouth-watering to the extreme.

It wasn’t just a celebration of her background – it was a celebration of her whole life. Just because things aren’t looking good for her health doesn’t mean she can’t have a great party. So there was music, and Haedy dished up her sidesplitting stories, one after the other. As she was playing Pink Floyd’s The Wall, she told how as a teenager, to drive her mother crazy, she’d put it on full blast at 6 o’clock in the morning: “We don’t need no education …”

More sidesplitting happened when a friend of Liz’s led us through a 15-minute session of Laughter Yoga. Who is Liz? She is “the other grandmother” – last year, Haedy became a grandmother to her son Nick’s daughter Kiera. As I was looking down at Kiera from the podium – it was my job to be the bumbling MC – I realized that among the crowd, there was a distinct group of people in the room: five grandmothers, whose children had given birth to six grandchildren, every single one with Haedy’s help.

Yup, Haedy sure knows how to celebrate life.

technorati tags: arts+organization, associations, fundraisers, vancouver, weekend+to+end+breast+cancer

Today we gave a blogging workshop at the Alliance for Arts and Culture. It was interesting to see how many people were eager to sign up. Eighteen participants showed up and we actually had to turn a few more away.

Quite a few of the participants were from arts or arts related organizations. This is exciting; as far as we can tell, very few arts organizations in British Columbia are blogging right now. Of course, this is similar to other fields. I am always amazed how few corporations, business and professionals are taking advantage of this great communications tool.

Maybe our workshop will have helped to build a blog or two.

What could an arts organization do with a blog? Here are a few ideas:

1. announce events
2. discuss arts trends
3. connect with other artists and arts organizations in the blogosphere
4. feature individual artists
5. give a voice to individual artists and other stakeholders (through guest blogging)
6. showcase expertise to patrons, members, and funders
7. function as a virtual gallery, museum, concert hall or book store
8. function as a resource clearinghouse to stakeholders
9. be a communications tool for members
10. be the only web site the organization will ever need

These are just a few ideas. Maybe one of the workshop partipants will surprise us with some more …

(This post was included in the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants)

technorati tags: blog+workshop, artists, arts+organizations, canada, virtual+galleries, virtual+museums