Marketing Director

New Beginnings: How Social Media Changed my Life

@GuyKawasaki and @KempEdmonds at an Olympic Hockey Tweetup thanks to @Jason_Baker
I've had many jobs in my life, almost 50. Today I started my first job that I consider something of a dream job. It all started in 1998 when I made a geocities page and learned about animated GIFs and a href. I knew right then and there that I didn't want to code so I stayed away from the web and computer technology as a vocation for more than a decade

When I traveled years ago I began to see the value in social networks like Hi5, Friendster and the other six I signed up for as I traveled across Canada and throughout Europe. When I returned home I began to see the way that these technologies were transforming our civilization for the better. I was always a wanderer never sure of what I should be doing. All I knew was that it involved people, I love people. While I was on one of these trips that doubled as a job as a "Community Marketing Ambassador" for Bell Canada I met Trevor O'Boyle (that's him eating the sandwich at one of our favourite spots on the tour: Ric's Grill in Lethbridge's old Water Tower).
Trevor was a driven, goal-oriented, high achiever from Mount Royal College in Calgary. He joined our tour after presenting at the Nationals for SIFE (Students in Free Enterprise) formerly ACE. That Summer we built a friendship and I knew that when I returned to school I would have to join this ACE thing he kept talking about. So a few years later upon returning to BCIT the first thing I did was join ACE BCIT (SIFE BCIT) an organization of volunteer students working to advance entrepreneurship in Canada. One day I decided to make a short video profiling the organization to tell other students what makes SIFE BCIT the place they want to be. The video (shown below) was then picked up and featured by YouTube on their non-profit and activism sections garnering nearly 7000 views in 48 hours. That was the moment I understood the possibilities of this new medium. YouTube even let me see which countries the viewers had come from it was amazing.



The next thing I did was create a series of business video lessons. One of those videos has an amazing long tail (lots of traffic over time) as it is titled "5 ways to find new business ideas" and now receives more than 40 views a day from people all over the world looking for new business ideas. I knew at that point that something amazing was possible, we now all possess the ability to publish, to create and to share. The exclusivity on creating content is gone. We can all publish now it's as easy as getting started.





That was the beginning of the journey to my current position with BCIT's School of Business as the leader of a new Centre for Social Media Education in Business. This is a dream job. A year ago I never would have thought as I sat in classrooms and lecture halls concentrating on the evolving social media space via Twitter and Mashable that I would make it here, thank you to everyone. My interest has only increased over time as I share and discuss the knowledge and examples I have collected. I now see that all of us are curious and interested in the evolving role of evolving communications in our lives.
Paul Shorthouse @pshorthouse and @KempEdmonds (1 year after BCIT at Globe 2010)
This is where I hope to make a difference; through education. I have embedded a treat below. It is my number one tip for using Google, social media and Twitter in particular for real-time search. I hope that I will have a new 'number one tip' soon and then another, what would you want to learn about? The more specific the better, please leave it in the comments. Enjoy and please view in full screen 720P HD.




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Facebook's Hottest Scam: Fake Profiles

Do you know Tracey Candace? Whitney Ximena? Kathy Theresa? Bethany Zoe? Micheala Huntsman? I didn't think so and neither do any of the people I know who have befriended these fake profiles. I reported the profiles as fake and one has been taken down at the time of this writing. The question for a few hundred people, many of whom are my friends in real life, is why did you friend them on Facebook? Some good rules were proposed by a few of my friends:
These are a few pieces of good advice. Most often these profiles are for gathering and selling your personal info but rarely for spying. As my older brother said, "Tin foil hatters" may think that these fake profiles are authorities in Canada and the US as has been reported by a reputable news site. Most often they are phishers or people looking to collect data to sell. Fake Facebook profiles have also been used by students to make fun of teachers, by unknowns and administrators to spy on students and by police to bust underage drinkers.
I checked all of Gillian's 170 friends on Facebook and not one had a hint of fake although it's hard to know as she says. Below I have put in screenshots of fake profiles. The top profile, Tracy Candace, is the less sophisticated one and the bottom one, Whitney Ximena, which has since been pulled from Facebook, is more sophisticated using a photo and joining some pages and groups.
Most often these profiles claim to be women born between 1981 and 1990, although the stories referenced above include both fake men and women. They join a network and start friending everyone who will accept. Then they move on to add all of the friends of the first group and so on spreading like a virus. 
Most people could care less and that's part of why they accept these fake friends. We aren't preparing ourselves for the possible repercussions of fake profiles which include harvesting personal info, spreading spyware, phishing scams and many more shady moves. Have you been asked to befriend a 'fake' profile? Has anything bad ever happenned because you did? Do you care about fake profiles? Please comment below.
 
Original Photo by: Darren Hester remixed under Creative Commons License

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Information Fatigue & Attention Scarcity

"What does an abundance of information create? A scarcity of attention."
- Herbert Simon, 1971.
Original Photo By: obo-bobolina remixed under Creative Commons License
I stumbled onto a video (check it out below) by social media and wine guy Gary Vaynerchuk making some groundbreaking personal statements about the way that Twitter, conference calls, webinars, advice giving and speaking gigs have burned him out and he wants to 'play more basketball' among other things. His comments are fair and honest. I have noticed this kind of social media and information fatigue among users new and old. The video starts at the point when he says he's going to give up using Twitter and I think he is pointing out a fundamental flaw in the current online economy; we are not considering the scarcity of attention. Join me for more after Gary's Video:







Attention Scarcity and information fatigue don't just effect people like Gary Vee and Oprah. We all know lots of people, some experts and others newbies, who are currently experiencing information overload and I am sure you do too. I came across the Attention Economics on Wikipedia. Where it is defined as "an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems".
The entry is very thorough and discusses taking advantage of these technologies for financial marketing and sales benefit lending to its origins within sales and marketing particularly online. The Looming Attention Crisis is discussed briefly in this post. Fast Company's John Hagel does a great job discussing the problem and ROA (return on attention) in this post. ReadWriteWeb covers the Attention economy in a smart way in this post. They quote a group calling themselves the AttentionTrust who created these basic consumer rights in the attention economy:
  • Property: You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish.
  • Mobility: You can securely move your attention wherever you want, whenever you want to.
  • Economy: You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return.
  • Transparency: You can see exactly how your attention is being used.
The Value of Attention comes from three rules:
  1. You have CONTROL
  2. You have the ability to TRANSFER your attention
  3. Your attention has WORTH
Does your attention have worth? Are you experiencing information atigue? Do you battle attention scarcity? What do you do to overcome attention scarcity? What tools do you use?

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