Alphablogs

Blogging goals - with passion

By isabella

Carol and I haven’t spent as much time on Alphablogs as we’d like to. We both have and look after other blogs and lead busy professional and personal lives – but hey, how difficult can it be to write a post a week?

So, motivated by the promise to come up with three timed blogging goals by today, we sat down to talk about that.

“Alphablogs,” Carol said, “is a bit like a house plant that we don’t care for very well.” We also realized that like everyone else, at some level we’re selfish creatures – and Alphablogs is not giving us as much as we’d like.

Since this blog is our own creation, we really needed to remind ourselves that we can do with it whatever we want. I guess sometimes that’s a startling realization.

What, whatever we want?

Yup.

Okay then. What do we want?

We are not marketers. We know something about marketing – actually, quite a bit – but we’re not professional marketers. What we are is two women with lots of passions and interests, and when they are not expressed, we get cranky and lose our oomph.

So the obvious solution is to inject as much as possible of this passion and interest into Alphablogs.

We are both passionate about Web 2.0. About the immense possibilities for connection and creating and nurturing community, about the democracy of open source, about using the word, images and sounds in ways that are not only entertaining but truly meaningful.

Why don’t we write more about that? Because that’s another passion we share – writing. So … let ‘er rip!

We also figured that we truly enjoy having conversations with one another – so why not do that here on Alphablogs? Chances are others will enjoy our conversations, too.

So … these are our goals then:

1. To start a conversation and follow it, with at least one conversation post each a week, for two months, starting today, August 18.

2. To check in again on October 18.

And, since we’re so excited about the “fun” part of this, we both felt we could also do something that doesn’t seem so much fun –

3. For each of us to spend 30 minutes towards one item on our SEO “to do” list, by September 18.

Modest goals? Perhaps. But they are goals, and we’re committed to them. Watch our Alphablogs plant grow!

Posted in Web 2.0 - the new web · No Comments

One Year of Canada 9-5

By isabella

Canadians blogging about business, non-profits, public life and work in general – you can find them all here at Canada 9-5.

A warm welcome to the August 2008 edition! As I look back, I see that we’ve been doing this for a whole year now. It’s one of our proudest accomplishments; there’s really no site that gathers these types of Canadian blogs all in one place.

Today we have a blog by a sales professional, a jazz music site, a blog written by the owner of an online dating community, a blog by a librarian and an online community site for seniors.

Sales: The Perfect Customer Service Experience

Let’s start with an excerpt from one of Shane Gibson’s Blogathon articles. Shane is a sales professional. Other than these blog entries, he also has quite a collection of podcasts. Here he features a guest blogger, Neil Godin, sharing his thoughts on a perfect customer service experience. In my opinion, that’s a perfect example of using a blog – for telling a professional story:

The Situation
New York Times business writer Joe Nocera was at the receiving end of a mind blowing customer experience—and wrote to tell about it. Four days before Christmas, he realized that a $500 PlayStation gift for his son had not arrived. He tracked the shipment from Amazon and learned that it had been delivered and signed for—but not by him. Ouch!

The Idea
If you want customers to become your brand ambassadors, you’ve got to go “way” overboard on satisfaction. Amazon did. Satisfied that he did not receive the package, they sent a replacement immediately, and it arrived on Christmas Eve. Naturally, Nocera has been talking, and writing, about the experience ever since.

The Risk
The risk here is perceived, not real. Even if one or two customers went to great lengths to rip you off, you’d be ahead in terms of your investment in customer loyalty.

Jazz!

All About Jazz is an absolutely fabulous site which, I believe, originates in Canada; at any rate, it has an enormous amount of information on Canadian jazz. This intro to their site shows the fantastic rage of information to be had:

We strive to serve both the jazz newbie as well as the jazz aficionado. Listeners who are new to jazz may profit from visiting our Building a Jazz Library section; those with more of an established interest will find our extensive archives of reviews and interviews helpful. And everyone should get a chuckle out of our humor section.

The internet is a great place to find information, and we maintain stacks and stacks of it: about jazz festivals, radio stations, upcoming releases, and much more (just look under the “guides” section of the menu bar).

Throughout the site, we have emphasized an interactive approach. The jazz timeline and “This Day in Jazz History,” for example, allow readers to check out the major developments in a year, month & day of their choosing. We organize our reviews so that you can home in on a particular style that you prefer (or wish to investigate). We provide multiple forums for you to express and exchange opinions on all sorts of issues relating to the music and the musicians.

Finally, we make an ongoing effort to stay current. We constantly update our news section, and we offer cutting-edge interviews among over 40 featured columns. Each month we review 150-200 new and reissued CD’s, giving you advance notice so you’ll know where to look when you visit the record shop. For the latest happenings at the site, visit our monthly greeting page.

In addition to this, you can, of course, also listen to music. Today’s offering is Chasm’s Blue Bamboo, which you can listen to for free just by signing up with the site.

Online Dating

This innocent-looking blog, Paradigm Shift, is the blog by Marcus Frind, owner of Plenty of Fish, the largest dating site in the English speaking world and the largest community site in the US not owned by an American company. Most of his posts are about internet and social media news directly related to dating sites. At the beginning of the year, Marcus got philosophic and shared his technological predictions:

[In the next 100 years] In the scientific world I could see computers creating a virtual world for you that looks like a dream. Other people can then enter the dream and change things at will.

Think of hundreds of people working together to design something, but instead of using tools like Autocad its done with your mind connected to others as well as computers.

I wonder if i’ll live to see any of that… In the next 5 years I think the next major thing on the internet will be a site that helps convey emotions in some way.

Canuck Librarian

A site with a nice, fresh voice, like in this review here of Michael Pollan’s much discussed book In Defence Of Food:

I think this book is another case of common sense that just ain’t so common anymore. Like he writes, his book really boils down to seven words “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”. If you truly understand that then you probably don’t need to read his book. But if you’re like me you may be wondering what he means by those few words, and that is what he explains.

Communities: Seniors

Finally, over on the other side of the country, The Grey Zone, a site for seniors, is one of the two dozen community blogs at myConnect.ca, a community place hosted by The Halifax Herald. The blog is written by Alex Handyside CSA (that’s “Certified Senior Advisor” – just found out about that designation). He says that seniors

often feel that they no longer have a voice, or that their voice no longer counts as much as it once did. And that’s what this blog is for. To get the word out about elder issues, and to get the discussion flowing.

I liked the title of this post, We celebrate Elder Abuse Awareness Day?? No…we educate! I’ve often wondered about events like “Cancer Awareness Month” – what are you supposed to say, “Happy Cancer Awareness Month”? That sounds a little strange. But phrasing it in terms of education rather than celebration – yes, that makes sense to me.

Gathering all these blogs together is a lot of fun. It’s interesting to see how slowly, slowly, Canadians are starting to see blogging as a valuable an important part of their communications strategy.

As always, if you know of a Canadian blog that fits what we’re doing here (and we’re looking particularly for non-IT bloggers; IT blogs are already getting a lot of exposure) please let us know by using this submission form. The next edition will be out on September 18, 2008.

Posted in Blog reviews, Canada 9-5 · No Comments

Make Your Own Marketing Materials

By Carol Sill

A terrific little site called Brandoozie is a fun 2.0 tool for creating your own marketing materials quickly and easily. Sure you could go into Illustrator and use their templates in a pinch, but this might be all you need.

You can enjoy getting lost just playing with different fonts, colours and packages - the materials are sorted by industry so there are plenty of templates to choose from. You can also upload photos and other images.

It’s fun to watch the little gears turn and to see the materials building themselves before your eyes! Letterhead, postcards, business cards and sales sheets as well as trifold rack brochures, even a 4 page brochure - in minutes, and with high resolution output for printing. It’s beta right now and free to try - give it a test drive!

Posted in General, Marketing and PR, Web 2.0 - the new web, presentation · No Comments

Canada 9-5, the June edition

By isabella

Here we are again, friends, with Canada 9-5, the showcase for Canadian – well, what kind of Canadian blogs? Business blogs, corporate blogs, blogs by non-profit organizations, blogs about the life of the citizenry. Or, if you’d like a reverse definition: non-cat blogs (which doesn’t mean they’re dog blogs), blogs that aren’t about celebrities or personal experiences, about baby pictures or games or iPhones.

As of this writing, it appears that Canada 9-5 is still the only place where these blogs are showcased on a regular basis. That probably means that we are well on our way to fame …

Let’s see what we one the menu today.

Life balance for lawyers
Laurie Mapp, who runs Halo Secretarial Services somewhere in central Alberta, talks about work-life balance

I think balance is an elusive but achievable goal - it just takes having an open mind to doing things a different way. This is the part law firms struggle with I think - there is often a tendency to do things as they have always been done, since it has worked for so long. But there is a long list of ways to give your employees some flexibility while still achieving the firm’s goals and providing results for the client.

Corporate recruiters: Paying attention to details
Kate Baggott is a recruiter. Her article For the Price of a Cup of Coffee points out that even small details about how recruiters do business can turn an impressive candidate on or off. Read about how one company lost a potential hire over the price of a cup of coffee.

Vancouver online newspaper: Women in jail
The Vancouver Observer is a newspaper done in blog style. It has the feel of a community newspaper (reminds me a bit of the South Vancouver Revue, for which I used to write an environmental column way back when) and thus talks about every topic under the sun. I liked this little interview with Betty Krawzyck, a B.C. senior who had become famous for going to jail for her environmental activism. Here’s an excerpt where Betty talks about her new book:

I also try to illuminate the lives of women in jail. Most women are there because of conditions and abuse that we really cannot imagine – most of us that is. Poverty is the underlying condition that sends a woman into the penal system and of course, when one discusses poverty, one has to speak about the disproportionate number of First Nations women there are in prisons – on average at least 60% - and you have to discern why this occurs.

Green interior design
Next is an interior designer who writes about greening your home. It’s interesting that environmental consciousness has taken such a leap in the last few years; it all happened after Al Gore’s video. From what I hear, his home isn’t very green; I’m willing to bet Betty Krawcyck’s is, though! At any rate, here are some ideas from a list of 10. I think I’m going to go out and get myself an aloe plant, and am going to check into what exactly an organic bed is.

3. Change the light bulbs in your house to compact fluorescents, but as they require replacing, begin to use LED bulbs, which consume very little energy and do not contain mercury, so disposal is less of a concern.

7. Unplug all unnecessary electrical devices when not in use or not needed, including televisions, computers, microwaves, clocks, stereos and lighting. Electrical devices which are instant on use power all the time, even when turned off. For easy on/off operation plug as much as you can into a power bar and turn it off when not in use.

8. Use green plants to clean the indoor air. Aloe Vera, English ivy, corn plant, golden pothos, peace lily and weeping fig are all excellent choices to remove formaldehyde and benzene.

9. Buy an organic bed. A good night’s sleep in a comfortable bed that emits absolutely no toxins is paramount to green living. After all, it is where we spend most of our time at home.

Books on money
Let’s take a sharp right here and go to Canadian Capitalist, one of the top Canadian finance blogs according to The Globe and Mail. Here’s a list of the Capitalist’s top ten money books. These two look interesting to me:

Your Money & Your Brain by Jason Zweig. What happens inside our brains when we think about money? (Full Review)
Unconventional Success by David Swensen. A guide to constructing a portfolio for individual investors.

Communication – or, in this case: miscommunication
Heath Slawner has a blog about persuasion. I’d like to find out a bit more about Heath; it seems to me that someone who clearly uses his blog as a part of his business would do well to tell a bit about himself on his blog. I presume he’s a salesperson – maybe he’ll see this article and will enlighten us. Heath offers a post on the cost of misunderstanding

Have you ever wondered how much a misunderstanding costs? According to a recent report by UK-based consulting firm Cognisco , misunderstandings and miscommunication among workers are costing companies US$37-billion a year.

Masterminds
We’ve had Evan Carmichael from Toronto here before, in our February edition. He has a section on his blog that exclusively discusses Mastermind Groups. What are mastermind groups?

A mastermind group offers a combination of masterminding, peer brainstorming and support in a group setting. The beauty of mastermind groups is that participants raise the bar by challenging each other to create and implement goals, brainstorm ideas, and support each other with total honesty, respect and compassion. Mastermind group members act as catalysts for growth, devil’s advocates and supportive colleagues. This is the essence and value of mastermind groups.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that Hueina Su, one of my blogging friends from Change Therapy, is writing a series of articles here. Having been part of similar success groups myself, this one really spoke to me, about the necessity for commitment in such groups

Some of the members started to miss quite a few meetings, due to other activities and commitments. Others started to question whether they are committed to our mastermind group and see it as a priority. Overall, we were unhappy that some members kept missing our meetings, and it’s a sign of lack of commitment and respect.

Scrape!
Let’s round this off with something amusing. Rob Cottingham from Social Signal, a blog for a Vancouver company that “builds online community with real life impact” (they started the credit union VanCity’s Change Everything site) just wrote a series of articles on blog scrapers. He set a funny little trap for them – well, you have to see for yourself.

That’s it for this time around. The next edition of Canada 9-5 will come out on August 8. If you have or know of a Canadian business or non-profit blog, submit it here so that we can include it!

Posted in Blog reviews, Canada 9-5 · 5 Comments

Over 1.4 million new blog posts per day!

By Carol Sill

Here are some amazing blogging statistics collected on the Blog World Expo site. (The big enormous Blog World Expo will be held in Las Vegas this year.) These stats are American only, and don’t even touch the Canadian, or world-wide blogging universe. When I checked their links for the sources of their stats, some of them are of earlier reports, such as Pew dated 2005! So extrapolate that to the present. When I started with wordpress.com, there were already 60,000 bloggers there. Now, we have 3,392,124 blogs with 93,184 new posts today. And that’s only wordpress.com.

So if you are thinking about starting a blog, or have heard about it and wonder what it’s all about, don’t wait any longer to join this tsunami wave of participation. Blogging is no longer a rare or unique activity, it’s decidedly mainstream.

Look at these Blog World numbers!

Over 12 million American adults currently maintain a blog.
More than 147 million Americans use the Internet.
Over 57 million Americns read blogs.
1.7 million American adults list making money as one of the reasons they blog.
89% of companies surveyed say they think blogs will be more important in the next five years.
9% of internet users say they have created blogs .
6% of the entire US adult population has created a blog .
Technorati is currently tracking over 70 million blogs .
over 120 thousand blogs are created every day .
There are over 1.4 million new blog posts every day .
22 of the 100 most popular websites in the world are blogs .
120,000 new blogs are created every day .
37% of blog readers began reading blogs in 2005 or 2006 .
51% of blog readers shop online .
Blog readers average 23 hours online each week .

Posted in Blog reviews, Blogs as web sites, General, Interactivity, Stuff on the net, Web 2.0 - the new web · No Comments

Blog, I mean, Restaurant Review: The Brave Bull

By isabella

I hope my friend Raul won’t be disappointed with this, him being Mr. Vancouver restaurant reviewer.

But I need to grab Buzz Bishop’s challenge and tell you that yes, I have eaten at the Brave Bull.

It’s been quite a while so maybe Raul can give an update. Although for a place like the Brave Bull, I’m not sure that six, seven years make a difference.

Actually, the other day I was meeting with one of my old friends from the Downtown Eastside, we weren’t quite sure where to eat – but when I proposed the Brave Bull I could just see a big black question mark form over her heavily furrowed brow.

I only have pleasant memories of the Brave Bull.

For example the time I went there with someone who was later going to become one of my closest friends. The Brace Bull is (was?) a cosy, tucked-away place if you like peace and quiet and that old-fashioned diner feel. It’s one of those 60s mixtures of “Chinese and Canadian Cuisine”, both in décor and food. Which means, of course, watery, pale iceberg lettuce – but you don’t go there for the veggies, do you? That’s what Greens & Gourmet is for.

So anyways, Haedy and I hung out there for two hours or so, I forgot what we ate, the old Chinese lady who’s always been there ever since I first darkened the doors of that establishment would pad over to us once in a while in motherly fashion and refill our coffee. It remains in my memory as one of the pivotal moments in our friendship. Haedy also told me that once in a while she’d take her husband there for a good dose of trucker’s steak.

My husband used to work in that area, just a bit up on Clark in one of the industrial areas, so once in a while I’d truck down to the Brave Bull and we’d have lunch together. Invariably, I’d have their oyster sandwich. I love oysters! Four plump deep-fried oysters with a bit of tartar sauce on a piece of white “bread” – again, don’t go there for your health food. Don’t matter; you know what, I still find myself wanting to go there once in a while, just for those oysters. I even took my educated-palate son there once and he liked it. Oh, and I remember my husband having beef dip there and liking it.

Other times were when I took one of my daughters to volunteer at the SPCA, and I’d make a point of hanging out at the Brave Bull (or the Old Foundry, with their fabulous sign that says EAT) waiting for her, reading a book, slurping coffee, eating – you guessed it – an oyster sandwich.

Now if you’re not into the romance of old greasy spoons where they still don’t use point-of-sale computers, where they haven’t changed the curtains since 1979, and where a salad still means a slice of tomato and three leaves of lettuce – well then maybe the Brave Bull is not for you. But if you like that kind of nostalgia, go and try it out!

(What do you think, Raul, maybe we should go there together?)

(And next time I guess we should go back to regular programming and do a blog review)

(Image by Buzz Bishop)

Posted in Vancouver · 1 Comment

Research - A Dance of Intuition and Intelligence

By Carol Sill

Okay, Smartypants, you figure it out! Get in there and dig (digg?) - isn’t this what research is all about? Or is it the cool composed review of previously digested information? All you have to do is look for it and list it, right? Well, not exactly.

While working on a research project recently, I’ve been thinking about the nature of research itself.

When I was teaching Research Skills for Writers and Reporters, I shared many tips and tricks of the trade, including the reality of hours of searching that may or may not yield the result that is being sought. A simple research timelog reveals the process. Hours spent in one direction that brings another lead, then several, then the branching out of the mind from item to lead to dead end to lateral correlation to new lead, and so it goes through the windy twisty passageways. Research doesn’t always reveal the answer directly, but through resonance and correspondance leads are found. And sometimes, there is a big pay off! Aladdin’s Cave of treasure: it’s all there for the picking!

I see research as a subtle dance between intuition and intelligence. It helps if your mind has been trained to categorize and make connections. It helps if you can keep track of what you have done, to retrace your steps if need be. And it helps if you can trust a hunch, make a lateral leap of the mind, think poetically to synthesize concepts. Intelligence serves the intuition at that point, and new ideas are formed that make new sense of old information.

The results of research are more than just a list of quotes and places. They are a synthesis of the information. Information is easy to find. The need is to make sense of the information, to be in a position to prioritize that information and to define uses for the most salient aspects of the information. Research is more than finding and keeping, it is a process of sorting and defining that ultimately yields new information that can be acted upon.

Posted in Alphablog services, General, Marketing and PR · No Comments

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Blogging goals - with passion

One Year of Canada 9-5

Sales: The Perfect Customer Service Experience

Jazz!

Online Dating

Canuck Librarian

Communities: Seniors

SMART blogging goals

Make Your Own Marketing Materials

Blogging and Sign Language

Canada 9-5, the June edition

Over 1.4 million new blog posts per day!

Blog, I mean, Restaurant Review: The Brave Bull

Research - A Dance of Intuition and Intelligence

How global is the internet really?