that canadian girl

I’m fascinated by today’s effort by The Guardian to crowdsource investigation of the MPs expenses.

My interest isn’t in the topic investigated, really. While I agree that MPs need to be brought down from that Lala land where they can expense duck houses for our hard earned tax money to pay, I do feel that it has somewhat turned into a witch hunt. The time and energy spent by auditors and journalists to establish who should be burnt at the stake first could have been used in much better ways.

So The Guardian came up with a solution; use those idle hours we spent faffing around on the web when we should be working and crowdsource the investigation. Built by Simon Willison and a few others, it is a giant repository of the scanned expenses documents for us to browse.

The process is simple:

So how did The Guardian manage to make it such that we have collectively crunched through 20,000 pages in the past four hours, when we procrastinate for weeks before doing our own 12 receipts worth of expenses at work? By rewarding us and feeding our voyeuristic streak.

Rewarding us

The rewards are simple; we get satisfaction in knowing we’re taking part in “justice” being made. So far, I’ve marked two items as “Investigate this!” and I feel like a mini Sherlock Holmes.

In addition to this, the use of a big fat progress bar makes us feel the power of the crowd by showing us how quickly it’s progressing. At one point, I refreshed every 60 seconds to see over 100 documents knocked off every minute. For a generation used to racing games’ lap times and Flight Control high scores, it’s just another little buzz.

Feeding our voyeuristic streak

Admit it, you’ve always wondered what these people spend their allowances. Being able to snoop around feeds that urge. Well… somewhat does. There’s enough black tape redacting out claim details to hold together the hockey sticks of an entire team for a couple of seasons, but we can make out enough to shake a finger and tut at our MPs.

How crowdsourcing could (and should) be used

This kind of manual work that cannot be handled by a computer is already widespread on the web.

Spammers use a clever tactic through which they republish a captcha they want to solve from any given site to a porn site, let an “innocent” porn site visitor solve the captcha by telling them they must fill it in to access the site. Use the solution to access the first site. The poor porn site visitor has not only killed kittens, but also helped a spammer fulfill its dirty deed.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is also using the power of crowds by enabling companies to outsource manual tasks to workers at a lesser cost than hiring staff to do colour comparisons or other tasks computers struggle with.

However, the potential for this type of crowdsourcing is amazing. Thousands of people, passionate to get something done, can achieve seemingly impossible tasks when shown a way to direct their efforts.

It makes me wonder how we can unleash our own communities’ potential; beta testing, idea shaping and customer cross-support… The possibilities stretch forever.

If you’ve come here tonight looking for brilliant marketing insight or the usual stuff, you may be disappointed. Meanwhile, if you’re looking for fluffy-tailed kitty cats frolicking in the garden, then you’ve come to the right place!

This is what summer should be like

If you’ve not yet met Jack and Rose, here’s what they were like at the age of nine weeks old.

It’s entirely possible that Britain has had the only three days of sunshine it’ll get this summer, and while I’m writing this, it’s monsoon weather out there. Regardless, summer is an interesting time for anyone working running a small business, so here are a few tips to beat off the heat both in your home office and in your business.

Keep your house cool

First let’s look at a few tips to keep your house from heating up during the day:

1. Setup fans to make the air circulate

Rather than just letting air blow towards you, setup two fans along a “corridor” area crossing your house or apartment – from bedroom to office or kitchen to living room. One should face inwards and the other outwards so as to encourage the natural airflow throughout the rooms.

2. Get it done before the heat kicks in

Let the fresh air into the house early in the morning. Open all the windows, and let the crisp morning air cool down the house before the sun gets too strong.

In the same spirit, get your toughest work done early in the morning. Once it gets too warm and you can’t focus, you’ll be able to take on the easy tasks (or pop out for an ice cream!)

3. Keep the blinds down

Throughout the day, selectively shut blinds and windows on the sunny side of the house to avoid turning your home office into an oven.

4. Rehydrate

You may not be doing very physical activity when working at home, but when it’s hot around you, you’ll sweat nonetheless. Be sure to drink plenty of water to keep your brain working at its best.

5. Make iced coffee

If like me, you need your caffeine to get the day going, try this cold-brewed iced coffee. Sure, the soaking coffee grounds look like a bowl of mud in the fridge, but it makes delicious iced coffee and can be prepared in larger quantity to last a few days. It’s a great way to avoid hot beverages if you’re already feeling too toasty.

Keep your business cool

1. Warn clients ahead of your holidays

If you’re a fairly small outfit, you may not have significant backup when you go on holiday. Let your clients know at least a few weeks in advance, so that any urgent work can be communicated ahead of time.

With difficult clients, it’s worth setting the ground rules ahead of time, letting them know that they need to give you at least a week’s notice for work that needs to be done ahead of a holiday. If you let them know that this ensures you can give them quality results and avoid releasing dodgy code on a Friday night before you go away for two weeks, they’ll (usually) appreciate that it’s for their own good as well as yours.

2. Get backup from colleagues

Wherever possible, build good relationships with industry colleagues who you trust and could rely on to take over while you’re away. Whether it’s running a monthly report for a client or being on-call if things go wrong, it’ll be a relief to have someone back home dealing with it so you don’t have to pick up on the beach!

3. Plan your summer development

Before the summer starts, map out everyone’s holidays on a calendar. Based on the availability, plan your development cycle in more details. Avoid making big promises or planning projects too large for periods where only a few people are in.

4. Setup server monitoring

If you’re hosting client sites, applications or services, put your mind at rest by setting up monitoring. We use Pingdom, but there are many services out there providing a similar service.

5. Create a swipe file

A swipe file is a set of templates, examples and inspiration documents, which can serve as resource or starting point when writing a proposal or starting a new project. Whether it’s a physical print file, or a set of notebooks in Evernote, it’s a great way to give any project a kickstart, especially when you’re not in the mood to be writing and would rather be out playing frisbee!

What are your tips for coping with the challenges of summer? Do you bring in extra support for your team, take on less projects or just don’t take holidays? And do you prefer Pimms & lemonade, an air conditioned office or the beach to help cope with the heat? Share your tips in case the warmth comes back! (In the meantime,  I’m off to turn the heating back on!)

[Image credit: "Vicar's Delight" by Tower Girl on Flickr, CC]

With many years of moonlighting and now nearly a year under my belt working full time for Pepsmedia, we felt lately that it was time to refresh our site to reflect the shift in what we’ve been doing for our clients.

Much of my time this year has been focused on strategic planning for blog & social media campaigns, in-house coaching and brand monitoring, interspersed with some gorgeous blog and website designs. So far, it’s been both the most enjoyable and the most challenging experience I’ve ever faced.

Many people ask me whether I regret choosing this economic climate to jump into self-employment, and I always answer that I don’t have an ounce of regret. Sure, I’ve had a few sleepless nights and my squeezy stressball is due for some therapy, but it’s been worth it every step of the way.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with great clients to date, and every new meeting excites me because it keeps getting better. Great projects, great experiences and best of all, I didn’t have to eat beans on toast for too long. (Phew, I hate beans on toast…)

So over the past few weeks, we spent some time brewing a new design for pepsmedia.com and finally launched it this week. Let me know what you think of it!

Earlier this month, I announced that I was giving away five fun gifts to celebrate my blog’s five years. Each of the gifts represents an aspect of my personality and what I’ve been blogging over the years; Geeky, funky, practical, foodie and artsy. (No, they’re not five of the Seven Dwarves, before you ask)

It’s taken me a bit longer than expected to pick winners. Who knew cats would be so adverse to making choices! (Seriously, they either fell asleep on the papers or tried to eat them…)

So with no further delays, here are the winners:

Geeky:
The ticket to the FOWA UK Tour was won by Kat of Safety Goat fame.

Funky:
The three sets of Spin Collective vinyl wall stickers were won by William, Neil and Terence.

Practical:
Eric and Dan won the two SpinVox voice-to-text voicemail accounts.

Foodie:
Adam won the opportunity to have a recipe of his choice immortalised by Niall Harbison on Look & Taste.

Artsy:
And finally, Angela has won the Blurb book gift certificate!

Congratulations to you all, I will be in touch soon to put you in contact with the provider of your goodie

This year’s must-have accessory for any business or marketing team seems to be a community manager.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve had nearly a dozen emails – either direct or via LinkedIn – from companies who were calling upon my network to find Social Networks Managers, Community Relations Executives, etc. [If you're of the right breed, skip to the bottom for information] I couldn’t help but think about how much things have changed in the past few years.

What’s it like being a Community Gal?

I don’t care what fancy title a company makes up, I’ll always boil them down to being the Community Gal/Guy. I was once asked why I “lowered” my job title to Community Gal, when one of my previous employers had hired me with the title “Blog Goddess”. I mean, wow, Goddess? That’s a shiny title, isn’t it?

If you can’t see the issue with the Goddess title, then you’ve failed the first test to becoming a good Community Gal/Guy (CG).

In my opinion, being the community’s main link into an organisation requires a lot of humility. Maybe, just maybe, having a humble and simple title like “Community Gal” was a daily reminder that I wasn’t hired to stand in my ivory tower telling people how GREAT the company/product was. I was there to sit in on conversations and listen. Like a sunflower, I faithfully turned to where I should be every day, no matter what happened.

As Toby Moore said today at Amplified 09 East: “We have 2 ears and one mouth. Let’s use them at that ratio.” Listening actively means there’s a lot of feedback to filter, summarise and turn into actions for the rest of the company, whether from a technical, ethical or business relations management perspective.

Being a CG also requires thick skin. There are some real bastards out there who will absolutely not sugar-coat their views of your business. They’ve always been there, but social media now gives them an easy way to make themselves heard. While it’s important to listen to those users and act upon their feedback wherever possible, anyone taking those comments too personally will lose sleep over it and feel like crap.

I know, I’ve been there. Nearly failed the second test myself.

However, the thick skin can’t be accompanied by a thick skull. If you’re a stubborn mofo who assumes that anyone disagreeing with you is wrong, you’ve failed the third test.

So being a CG is both the best job and worst job in a company.

Why so in demand, suddenly?!

As I mentioned in my introduction above, the influx of CG roles has been unbelievable lately. It’s like everyone woke up two weeks ago and decided they should recruit their own.

For most of these companies, it’ll most likely be the first time they put any thought into how to interact with their community. From cursory glances at the many job descriptions thrown around, many companies seem to allocate very minimal budgets to their new-found passion for social media, hiring junior to mid-level people.

Nothing wrong with that, I’m all for the youff getting to experience great new roles. I got to where I am now because some people were mad smart enough to give me a chance to setup their first blog back in early 2004. It was a complete and utter failure because neither company or market were ready for it. Since then, I’ve setup community outposts everywhere I’ve been and rubbed a lot of people the wrong way in the process. But we’ve also achieved great things through spending time listening to the community’s feedback.

That’s the wonderful thing about young, creative people – they might be a bit green but believe me, they can be passionate!

So it’s a question of balance then; someone youthful* enough to understand what excites and engages your users. There is no maximum age to “getting it” when it comes to community, but younger people often have an affinity with technology – I don’t think anyone could deny that. However, experience can help avoid making a complete cock up of an outreach campaign through having a deeper understanding of the risks involved.

[Note: By youthful, I don't necessarily mean based on birth date, but rather in mentality. My grandpa was in his 70's and was still more young at heart than many 25 year olds I know!]

Finding the right balance is key. Every company will experience a crisis at some point and a very junior team member may not have the experience to deal with it best. In the same way, someone with little knowledge of social media may not spot some great opportunities to build new relationships.

This is an area where I believe mentors – whether internal team members or external consultants – can make a world of difference to how successfully a business can be in their first year of active community interaction. A few hours a week with a skilled mentor can help your CG become far more confident and resourceful.

Would you want your PR Manager to be a £20k fresh graduate with no experience of dealing with customers or journalists? Then why opt for that in social media, when your CG probably touches 100 times more people in a day than your PR department does?

So here’s my advice

1. Build your team with a cool head

Find someone who has a passion for your industry, not the first girl who says she knows how to use Facebook.

2. Have someone dedicated to community relations

If the CG is torn between a number of roles, he/she is more likely to drop the ball at an important time. If it’s not possible to have someone doing just that, ensure that community management remains their top priority.

3. Give your CG a support network

If your product is technical, ensure the development team are aware that they’ll occasionally need to provide insight when the CG reports bugs or enquiries. There’s nothing more demotivating than feeling that no one in the company is willing to help.

4. Provide guidance

Whether it’s through the existing marketing team or an external consultant, your CG should have someone with experience to sanity-check ideas with. The book of social media remains largely unwritten so the best way to check something’s a good idea is through a good ol’ natter over coffee.

5. Set realistic (and useful) objectives

Getting 500 Twitter followers is pointless if the followers are spammers or people who’ll never become your users. Social media is much less about numbers than a traditional marketing team might be used to.

It’s more important to have reached out to 10 bloggers who’ll love you and talk about you, than ship your press release to hundreds of people to whom you’re only vaguely relevant.

6. Be open to your CG’s feedback

This is a tough nut to crack, but the feedback coming from the community might not always be rosy. Be open and welcoming of it, and accept that people will occasionally suggest things you think are stupid or useless. Don’t close up or start to ignore those reports – you might just miss some real gems.

Let’s Connect!

As you’ve gathered by now, I’m a strong believer that there’s a big future out there for people who are passionate and interested in being the main point of contact for an active community.

If you think you’re that person, please connect with me on LinkedIn. Use the intro box to tell me what makes you tick and what you’re passionate about. When companies next contacts me looking for a Community Gal/Guy, I’ll introduce you to each other.

I hope that, in doing this, I can help top notch companies find someone who’ll help them nurture the relationship with their community, whether budding or already fully-fledged.

[Image Source: "Yellow sunflower. Blue Sky." by wabberjocky on Flickr]

This is by no means a groundbreaking tip in my eyes, but having shown it to a few people, they suggested I should immortalise it by posting it for others to benefit from.

If you regularly travel or attend events, you probably pull your phone out of your pocket every few minutes. You also most likely rely heavily on it as your main means of communication, so losing it becomes a real pain.

What I did during SXSWi was create a note containing my contact details if my phone was found. As it was a total geekfest, my Twitter username and email address was enough, but if you’re staying at a hotel, you could ask them to leave it at your hotel’s reception desk, etc. As long as it fits within that single screen.

Set a PIN code on your phone to avoid anyone having a jolly by making international calls when they find it and hope that, if you do lose it, a Good Guy/Gal finds it who hands it back to you.

Quick handy tip, do it next time you go away!

[Update: Some readers pointed out they didn't know how to get from creating a note to making it visible as wallpaper so here are some further details.

When you'll next wake your phone up from standby, you'll see the wallpaper telling someone who finds your phone how to get a hold of you, while protecting your personal data by keeping it locked with a PIN.]

In April, That Canadian Girl celebrated 5 years of bloggy goodness and, yet again, I nearly missed its birthday. Oops!

In reality I’ve been blogging for nearly 10 years – a friend kindly hosted my first diary-style site back in 1999 or 2000. The Wayback Machine can see a site on thatcanadiangirl.co.uk from 2002, which is when the previous iteration of this blog was born.

This makes me feel really old. In Internet terms, that’s an eternity. I mean… ten years ago, Geocities was still popular, Google was moving into its first office, the Melissa worm was working its magic on mail servers across the world, and everyone was still starry-eyed about the Information Superhighway.

Oooff… sorry about that flashback, it was like being the old drunk guy from the Fast Show for a minute.

As my memory is absolutely hopeless, I usually consider my blog’s current archive – which goes back to April 2004 – to be the beginning of Time As We Know It.

Now for the giveaways: To celebrate this milestone birthday, I’m giving away goodies to my readership which match the topics I’ve written about over the years; geeky, funky, practical, food-related and artsy goodies.

To take part, all you need to do is leave a comment and tell me which ones interest you: On Sunday, 10th May, Jack & Rose will pick out winners for each of the prizes!

A ticket to FUEL conference FOWA Tour, an excellent Carsonified event about online marketing and social media, held in London on June 23rd. Ryan kindly offered me a ticket for one of my readers, so entrepreneurs, marketers, this one is for you.

Anyone can win this ticket, as long as you’re able to make your way to London for the event.

[Update: As there have been some changes to the Carsonified calendar and FUEL has been cancelled, you will win a ticket to the FOWA Tour in a city of your choice: Cambridge, Leeds, Bristol or Edinburgh.]

I love unusual art and beautifully decorate home offices. Stuart from Spin Collective is giving away three sets (up to a value of £30 each) of the superb wall stickers. They’re jaw-droppingly cool and I’m having to resist very hard the urge to keep them all for myself!

Spin Collective will ship anywhere, so everyone is welcome to take part. If you win, you’ll get to choose from the website and they’ll be shipped to you directly.

To satisfy the productivity nerd in me, I had to include a tool I’ve been using for a couple of years that changed the way I use my phone. James from SpinVox is giving away two SpinVox voicemail-to-text accounts.

SV is available in the UK, US, Canada, France, Germany & Spain, so if you live in any of those countries and uhh have a mobile phone, go for it!

I’m a total foodie, so I thought it was only fair to include something food-related to the list. Of course, I’m not going to ship you a bowl of my awesome homemade chilli as it’d get messy and Royal Mail would give me funny looks (…yet again)

Niall Harbison from Look & Taste (previously ifoods.tv, and yes he’s the guy who braved Dragons’ Den) is offering a few things:

First, if you’re an iPhone user, there are 10 licenses for Twecipe (£2.39) and another 10 for Look & Taste’s own video recipes app.

Secondly, Niall has agreed to create a pro video of a recipe of my readers’ choosing. Want to immortalise your nan’s best pudding or that wild recipe you made up the other day? You’ll get a mention, and Niall will let his viewers know where the recipe comes from.

The apps are (obviously) for iPhone & iPod Touch owners, and the recipe video is open to everyone.

I love beautiful things, making cards & handmade gifts. I’m pretty much rubbish at it and my projects look like something out of a preschool classroom, but I still love it.

Blurb.com have offered a £35 voucher for a Blurb book, so it’s a chance to create your own full-colour, beautifully professional-looking bound book. Whether it’s to remember your kids’ summer holiday or a special event, it’ll be unique!

Blurb ships to lots of countries, have a look at the list if in doubt. Promise you’ll show me your finished product

So what are you waiting for? All these awesome goodies are just one comment away!

New mothers apparently say that after they hold their newborn in their arms, they forget almost all the pain of the laborious process (literally!) that preceded. I think this week, I can see what they mean.

On Saturday, April 25th, the second SocialMediaCamp London was held at Wallacespace St Pancras after a long gestation period. The event itself is fairly simple; BarCamps are “unconferences” and therefore there are no speakers to book and manage. The venue is fabulous and the team there make my life incredibly easy by being such a well-oiled machine. The only pain was the sponsorship issues I encountered, which was resolved by making the event a single day instead of the original intended two days.

In general, the event was fantastic; there were some stellar presentations, on topics ranging from “What to do with a corporate Twitter account?” to “Porn & social media: A practical guide to working with ‘adult’ content” and a discussion on LARP to one on how to help PR agencies collaborate better with bloggers (”PR agencies want your soul”). The weirdness of presentations can pretty much be summed up in a single photo by Neil Crosby.

The day was topped off by what I hear was a comedy Scavenger Photo Hunt, organised by Kat Neville. “I hear” because by that point, my knees had turned to Jell-O and so had my brain, so I had to skip on the photohunt, as brilliant as it seemed.

A few days from the event now, and I’m still basking in the glow of a great day, filled with new and known faces, creative ideas & suggestions. I’ve pretty much forgotten about the faff of the weeks leading up to the event and am already thinking about doing it again.

As  far as the homepage of my blog is concerned, this is where the post ends. If you’re interested in a few contentious aspects of the event, then read on.

Read the rest of this entry »

It may be Easter weekend here in the UK, but for me, Friday is Just Another Work Dayâ„¢. The best feeling however, is the one that accompanies ticking stuff off my immense task list, which is made easier by everyone else being on holiday.

I’ve mentioned a few of my Getting Things Done tools in the past, like the “Everyday…” list of rules to respect when working from home, which include setting three most important tasks, creating blocks of time without distraction and taking a lunch break at a reasonable time. Ok, I’ve not exactly excelled at following them but they’re good reminders nonetheless.

I’ve flirted with just about every web app or task-list software out there, having bought more than I like to admit. Lately, I’d been using Things by Cultured Code but didn’t feel 100% happy with it. In the latest round of Macheist, I acquired The Hit List which Josh Clark described as “a grown up version of Things.”

Totally fell in love with The Hit List for its ease of use, nested lists and simple tagging. Mainly the nested lists though, as that was sorely missing from Things. Plus it’s even prettier.

To show how I use it, I’ve taken a few screenshots…

“Today” view

The most practical view of it when glancing at it to see what task is going to jump at my throat if I don’t do it immediately.

Single-list view

When working on a specific client’s projects for a day, I’ll focus on their list, keeping everyone else out of view.

“Waiting For” view

I have a notoriously bad memory, so when I email someone who assign a task to a teammate who I’ll need to chase up later, I create a list item with the tag @wf (Waiting For). It then becomes easy to quickly scan the smart folder of answers I’m waiting for.

You can find all three on Flickr here.

It’s a painlessly easy to use piece of software, makes for a great braindumping ground for projects. It even makes a satisfying little noise when I tick a task as completed.

I continue to use Basecamp for shared projects, but nothing on the web yet has the convenience and ease of desktop software drag & drop, offline use & speed, so until that point, solo project lists will continue to live in The Hit List.