Urban Shore is now on Facebook

I figured it would be a good idea to get the conversation started on Facebook in order to generate ideas to fuel my reviews for the Urban Shore blog. So now I've created an Urban Shore: North Vancouver City Living Facebook group. It might prove to get more of a community feel to it there - discussion boards and posted items I'm sure will be a benefit.

New Blog Site: UrbanShore.ca

I'm not sure if it's just a God-given trait of all mankind or if it's the artist in me, but I constantly feel the need to create something. I have this overwhelming yearning to create something of value to the people around me; something that will enhance the lives of others.

Whether it's writing, singing or playing music, writing or sharing intimate conversation with people, the drive to create seems to be rooted in this longing to contribute to the betterment of mankind.

I am on the edge of creating something new right now - a new hyper-local website/blog about urban living in the City of North Vancouver - and mostly the mid to lower Lonsdale area. This is my neighbourhood and I think it's the best place to live anywhere. I really just want to find a way that all of us who live here and love it can share ideas about the best places to shop, eat, play... all those places that make this community unique.

And so now, urbanshore.ca is live. Welcome. Sit down and stay a while. Tell me what you think are the best places to enjoy this vibrant place. Share it with me.

Life In The Kingdom Starts Now

This weekend has me filled with a renewed excitement about my faith, my church, my life and my ability to relax in the middle of the craziness. Tomorrow marks the launch of a ten week series on Life In the Kingdom that will include Sunday sermons, a book study and weekly small groups. I'm hopeful this shift of focus will help put my faith right back in the centre of my life where it belongs and that I'll gain valuable insight and inspiration to live it out every day no matter what my environment or circumstance.

Today is a day of preparation for the upcoming 10 weeks. It's a day of prayer and fasting and I also have the privilege of being a part of the worship team that will be leading our congregation tomorrow, so today we get to rehearse, which is just a big bonus for me. This morning's biggest challenge was getting up and not pounding a giant mug of coffee with cream and sugar - probably my biggest vise. Instead I've opted to get through the day drinking herbal tea. I was surprised how relaxed I was about it... I'm usually just mean when I don't have my coffee, but I guess God's in the house ;)

It seems the last few months have seen me get busier and busier as I delve into some areas of exploration in my life. It's good to take a step back and spend some time focused on what really matters. I'm grateful for the opportunity.

Awful Ads

Sometimes I'm ashamed to be in the field of marketing. This video makes me throw up a little in my mouth. I love some of what the Canadian Dairy Farmers are doing - I LOVED their Canadian Cheese Rolling Event concept, but this is just shameful.

How to promote your business or company on Facebook

Judging by the crowd of people sitting on the floor in the "How to Market Your Blog, Business & Brand on Facebook" session at BlogWorld & New Media Expo 2008, people want to know how to promote their business or company on Facebook.

Facebook is one of the world's fastest growing social networking sites and facilitates some of the easiest, most comprehensive sharing strategies within any single online community. Here are some stats from the Facebook Wikipedia Page:

According to comScore, Facebook is the leading social networking site based on monthly unique visitors, having overtaken main competitor MySpace in April 2008.[69] ComScore reports that Facebook attracted 132.1 million unique visitors in June 2008, compared to MySpace, which attracted 117.6 million.[70]

According to Alexa, the website's ranking among all websites increased from 60th to 7th in terms of worldwide traffic, from September 2006 to September 2007, and is currently 5th.[71] Quantcast ranks the website 15th in US in terms of traffic,[72] and Compete.com ranks it 14th in US.[73] The website is the most popular for uploading photos, with 14 million uploaded daily.

Blogs, businesses and brands all want to get seen by those users. Today's session from Shama Hyder on Facebook Fortunes (even if, as she admitted, the term came from Mari Smith) attracted a crowd. And Shama's advice was good IF (and this if is HUGE) you ARE your company. If you and your company, business, brand etc. are one and the same, i.e. you are a public figure, artist, internet rockstar, performer, realtor, author or you own your own business that you never want to sell (along with its identity), everything Shama said is golden. Do it. Follow her advice.

***If, however, you are an employee of a company that you do not own and may not be a part of forever, I don't recommend you do it.***

Companies can use Facebook as a complement to their online and offline marketing efforts in a number of ways. I'm going to outline some of the ways I use Facebook to facilitate sharing of information about my company by our most loyal of followers as well as how to use the built-in marketing tools Facebook provides. These methods have made Facebook my company's #1 referring website since we launched the redesigned grousemountain.com last December.

A little disclosure so you understand the bigger picture for me: 50% of my traffic comes via search engines and 36% comes direct. Referring sites in total make up only 13% on average, so these numbers matter, but they're not everything. Facebook is not referring the bulk of my traffic, but Grouse Mountain is an established business with a membership component so the majority of our customers already know where to find us. We have huge brand recognition within our industry. For smaller, newer or lesser-known companies, I think the interaction you can create with Facebook can be very valuable, and that goes beyond just click-through-rate.

Facebook tools that I'll discuss include groups, fan pages, event listings, targeted social ads and share widgets. This is going to be a bit long, so please bear with me. Other tools that I'm less familiar with and will not discuss include marketplace listings, polls, applications and beacons.

Before I launch into what you need to know, I'll start by saying join Facebook. Join as a human being. Upload a photo of yourself, put in a little information, go find your friends and family members and connect with them. It's fun and you'll like it. Now that I've said that, reconsider before friending everyone you've ever heard of or met for business purposes. Again, I'm saying this as an employee of a company. It's not that I don't want to connect with some of my business contacts, but I don't want to share my personal life with everyone I know and I DO want somewhere to share my personal life with my friends. Not only that, but my friends don't really care what I'm up to at work though most of them understand I will occasionally spam them with the latest thing I'm working on. They understand, though... they're my friends. My real friends. Well, most of them are.

Building Facebook Groups for business conversations

Facebook Groups are mini communities centred around a specific topic. When you build a group, your personal profile is listed as the creator. This is where people will be able to see who you are and, if you've left your profile open at all, a little about you (more on profiles at the end). I think the best use of groups is for something that's ongoing (best not to build a group for a one-time event - there are event listings for that) but maybe not your entire corporate identity.

Groups are great for specific promotions, products and shared experiences. One of the ways I have used Facebook Groups is with our Build Your Own Park project, where we decided to engage our terrain park riders to tell us what features they wanted to see in the park and how they thought it should be set up. For more ideas, just Google "innovative Facebook groups".

Facebook Groups allow users to share without hesitation. They can blast it out to everyone on their friends list with one click. This is the fastest way to share info if the info is worthy of sharing. Groups include photos, posted items, discussion boards and walls; each item can be removed as the administrator sees fit or set to 'admin only', which means users can't post items (that's a strategic decision you need to make depending on your goals). They aren't customizable with applications (yet) but allow for multiple editors and you can message all members direct to their inbox. The only downside here that I know of, is that groups are limited to 5000 members (that I didn't know - heard it from Shama Hyder; my groups have been more niche than that so I've never reached the threshold).

Building Facebook Fan Pages promotes identities

Fan Pages are ideal for many companies, celebrity personalities or specific products or product lines. Two very important things to note with regards to fan pages:

1) People cannot share fan pages to their entire list of friends
Promoting a fan page is harder than a group - you need to put more effort into getting the word out. The only sharing mechanism is for posting to profile (where the item shows up under someone's posted items) or sending to a friend as a message (it arrives at the friend's inbox, but can only be sent to 10 friends at one time). And, while your friends will get a note in their news feed when you become a fan of any particular Fan Page, this sharing limitation makes Facebook Fan Pages much harder to grow.

2) Fan Pages include a mandatory 'Reviews' application
With the Reviews application, people are free to review your product and the reviews cannot be taken off a fan page. If no one reviews it, great, no reviews. If they do and they didn't like your product, tough. You can, however, set the reviews to only show based on a person's friends i.e. if I visit the page I see only reviews written by my friends but even when that option is exercised, I can always click 'see all' and get the rest if I want them.

Fan pages don't limit membership and include discussion boards, a wall, posted items, photos, videos and many applications can now be added to fan pages, which makes them way more customizable. Also, if you're a blogger or internet rockstar, or you have a corporate blog, you can use the Notes application to import each entry as a note so each time you post to your blog, your fan page gets updated. This is not an option with a group.

One of the benefits to larger companies that may have multiple administrators (or employee turnover, for that matter) is that when the administrator posts anything on the page it posts it from "Fan Page Name" instead of from your personal profile. If you have multiple people administering a page the fans can't tell who did which part. This can be good or bad and I'll leave it to you to weigh the pros and cons for your company. One point to note: If you comment on a note in your own Fan Page, the comment WILL show up from your personal profile. So when you write the note, it's the corporate identity and when you write a comment on that note, it will show up as your own.



You can message all fans, but it goes in an area called 'updates' within the message centre (click on your inbox and you'll see a tab for updates) rather than the actual message inbox, so it really comes in as a 'marketing' type message. That isn't all bad, though, because most people only become a fan of companies and people they really want to hear from and, as many have said before me, people don't want to be friends with companies anyway. When a new update is sent, the user gets a notification and link on their home page when they log in.

Using Facebook Event Listings to promote events

Event listings are exactly what they sound like. Use Facebook Event Listings to create and share event information surrounding a single date (I'm not a fan of using these for multi-day events because they don't show up as "upcoming" once the start date passes). Events can be structured in such a way so you can show the invitation list, see how many people have been invited and who they are, how many people haven't responded, how many people have RSVP'd yes and how many declines you get. People can share events to their entire list of friends or post to their own profile.

An example of an event listing on Facebook is The TechSet Presents: Poolside in Vegas though in this case they chose to show only 'yes' responses and 'maybes' (sometimes it's better not to show how many people declined - again, a strategic decision). Events use photos, videos, posted items and walls and all of these items can also be removed or set to 'admin only'. You can also set events to private, public, invite only or open so anyone can invite anyone else. Lots of options here.

Note: You can post an event as an individual or as a business with a Fan Page. If you post it from the Events link on your home page you will be considered the host. If you post it from within a Fan Page, the company/identity name will be the host.

Facebook's targeted social ads are simple to use

Facebook has made placing ads so simple, anyone could do it. Now, it's not appropriate for everyone, but most B2C companies can find value here. In fact, after this, I'll probably devote an entire blog entry to targeted Facebook social ads. Very cool stuff.

Facebook ads are the small ads that appear on the right hand side of a person's profile pages (see sample, right). With the new Facebook design, users are now served up two ads on almost every page they visit (except their home/news-feed page). Those ads are served up based on carefully selected targeting options; often they're so well targeted I love getting them because they're entirely relevant to me! With Facebook social ads you get a tiny headline (25 characters), a tiny photo (110 x 80px), and a very small space for copy (~135 characters with spaces). These need to be written with the precision and skill of text search ads, but Facebook gives you all the metrics to see which ones are more effective so you can switch out the less effective ones (though it doesn't do it automatically like Google does).

You can target by geographic region, gender, age, marital status, education level, sexual orientation, workplace and keyword. Most of these are self-explanatory; workplace and keyword are very interesting. While I've never targeted ads based on workplace, this has huge implications for HR professionals and B2B companies. Many large organizations have Facebook networks devoted to their employees; these are part of the targeting criteria. For instance, you could target employees of Intel, Microsoft, Google, Buzzlogic, or any number of other organizations - there are hundreds to choose from.

Keyword targeting, however, is where you can fine tune after you get past all that demographic info. You can target people by any keyword they may have put in their profile, be it a favourite band, movie, sport, religion, book, interest, activity or cause. Anything anyone may have included in their profile is game. Furthermore, you can also add social actions to your ads: You can choose to have your ad served up, whenever possible, with a photo of a friend who is a fan.

Example: My Grouse Mountain ad is getting served up to Bob and Bob is friends with Joe. Joe is a fan of Grouse Mountain's Fan Page. Because of that, Bob gets that ad with Joe's photo and a note saying "Joe is a fan of Grouse Mountain". That makes it all that much more relevant because now when Bob sees it he thinks "hey, Joe is a fan, let me check it out..." See how that works?

You can buy Facebook Social Ads on a CPC or CPM basis and even my most targeted campaigns have worked out to roughly $0.30/CPM or around the same per click. You set your daily maximum and your time parameters and start the campaign. I could also get into the whole strategy aroud where your ads are linking, but I won't. I'll just say I think in most cases I think it's better to send the ad clicks to your website rather than your Facebook page, group or whatever.

Facebook Share widgets promote your web content

Finally, Facebook has a widget that's easily added into any web page that allows a person to send the page to their profile as a posted item. I am going to start this section by saying I can't find the share code on Facebook anymore... it seems they aren't promoting this as an option any longer, however, it still works (probably because many have used it when it was promoted). They also, incidentally have a bookmark for this too. This code (pardon me if it's messy - I'm not a coder), embedded in your page, will allow your customers to post the page to their profile:



And it will look and work like this:

Share on Facebook

Note: It can be a little trickier with a blog entry because the URL inside the code must be the exact code of the page you want to share, so presumably that's the post permalink. You will need to either know exactly what that permalink is ahead of time to put it in there, or go back and edit it once the permalink is generated.

About Facebook Profiles and Privacy

You can control the privacy level on just about every item of your profile - your contact info, your 'about' info, your employment info, education info, interests, photo albums, videos etc. based on who you want to see what. As a corporate person who has a private life, I highly recommend you consider who can see what. Any portion of your profile that you leave open to everyone, or your network, or friends of friends can, well, be seen by those groups of people. You can pick and choose who can see what and I highly recommend you take some time to get to understand these privacy settings. I can't begin to explain them all here. If business networking is important to you, leave a limited profile available to everyone and use the messaging feature to communicate. You don't have to be friends with someone to message them back and forth, but if you're not friends it's harder to keep track of them - there isn't a non-friends contact list option. Once you've set up whatever you want public (either entirely public to the world or public to your network/geographic location), set the rest to 'friends only'. Then, when someone tags you in a photo at the bar or doing something you'd rather your business contacts didn't see, there's no fear. You can choose to have some stuff available to 'friends of friends' in case you want old friends to find you - education info for instance. You can choose to put your home address and telephone number on your profile and make it visible only to your friends or even to selected people. Again, so many options here so go and have a solid look through the privacy section - you'll find it at the top right of every page you see.

With that, I'll leave you to digest the above info. If anyone has any additional feedback, ideas, comments, or just wants to tell me they think I'm plain wrong, feel free to leave a comment. Alternatively, if you'd like me to go into further depth with any of the above topics, let me know and I'll do that too. I'd love to hear from others who are using Facebook as well; I'm one of the crazy fans who leaves it open all day so I can see what's going on there. At the same time, please don't be offended if I don't accept your friend request. As I said, I use Facebook almost exclusively for personal relationships, so if you'd like to connect professionally, please follow me @seeking_balance on Twitter (I'll more than likely follow you back), connect with me on LinkedIn, or find my friendfeed and connect with me that way.

Blogworld 2008: After the E&E Conference

So here I am at day one of Blogworld & New Media Expo 2008 and I'm up way too early after last night's TechSet party at the Bare Lounge at the Mirage. My visit to Las Vegas began with having to remove my flipflops to get through security at YVR, receiving Oreos and raisins on my Philipine Airlines flight, and losing about $80 within 10 minutes at Circus Circus, but I'm having a great time here.

The E&E Conference was decent... good info, but not much that was new. The highlights for me were meeting Paula Berg from Southwest Airlines and Gary Vaynerchuk's keynote, no matter how profanity-riddled it was. He's a captivating guy and, incidentally, very nice - he shared a cab with me after the TechSet party and he paid. Thanks @garyvee.

The general trending topic of the E&E day and this morning's Keynote from Richard Jalichandra of Technorati is authenticity and transparency, and I completely agree. Companies have to embrace their human face. Now it's my job to go back home and inspire the owners and executive of Grouse Mountain to embrace this critical change of thinking. We can no longer afford to hide our thoughts and actions behind boardroom doors. It's time to show the world that we care, we're human, and we want to enrich your lives with what we have to offer.

What's so great about bloggers?

The more time I spend in the social media world, or 'space' as the techset like to call it, the more I am starting to wonder how far the boom will be heard.

The boom I'm talking about is the notion of giving bloggers their due and, ultimately, the same perks as mainstream journalists. For as long as newspapers have existed, companies have been pitching journalists on new story ideas in hopes that one of them will pluck their story out of the pack and write something that will generate real interest. They've held media-only events, given special access for the best interview spots, arranged for interviews with top executives and given away tons of swag at industry events. They tirelessly write their press releases, amass the largest list of contact information possible and painstakingly invite each worthy individual to put pen to paper on their behalf. And still, the fear always exists that even after choosing their story, the writer may still sway that carefully crafted story another way and paint that company in a dim light. Today's PR world has shifted.

I've just been reading Miss604 on my feeds and think what The Vancouver Canucks have done to highlight bloggers is quite brilliant. And as my mind begins to wander as I ponder ideas I could implement to garner the same kind of attention from bloggers for Grouse Mountain, I'm reminded that the canucks are not the only ones doing it:

• Molson just held an exclusive event for bloggers;Vancouver blogger Duane Story tells all about 'Brew 2.0' Vancouver.
  

• Kate Trgovak - a.k.a. MyNameIsKate - regularly receives an assortment of laptop bags hoping to make the list of Funky, Chic and Cool Laptop Bags she keeps.
  
  
• Even the Christian music industry is on board. The Worship Community recently tweeted a message enticing bloggers to seek out a free CD with the following message:

"Darrell Evans (the writer of “Trading My Sorrows”, “Fields of Grace”, etc.) is getting ready to independently release his brand new worship CD next month. It’s called Nothing Less Than Everything.

I am looking to give away a free pre-release of the album to bloggers who will commit to getting the word out through a CD review on their blog, etc. I am looking for 10 people. If you have a large readership, that would of course be a plus.

If you would like to be considered, please email the following to..."

These are just a few examples I've noticed in the last week.

If companies are not getting involved in Blogger Relations as a new function of their PR department, they're going to miss out. Check out Lee Odden's Blogger Relations 101 if you don't have a clue what I'm talking about (at the bottom of the entry he also gives you another giant list of reading to consider). Bloggers are not only writing far more content than many of the mainstream columnists in your local paper, many of them have large crowds of followers... and not just oh-yeah-I-saw-that-article-on-my-way-to-the-sports-section followers, but measurable followers who specifically subscribe to their material.

The challenge for people like me (marketing types) and our cohorts (PR people) is to figure out where the line is drawn between giving people free stuff just because they write a blog and putting out meaningful pitches to influential bloggers in our area of business. Chris Brogan and his many readers share some insight on his post How Does The Web Define Authority? but the answer is still elusive. The truth is, not every blog gets read, but those that do are worth a little attention. Kudos to the Molson and the Vancouver Canucks for getting on board.

Where do you think that line should be drawn? Subscribers? Alexa rankings? Google page rank? Technorati? Which bloggers make the list of desirables? Tell me...

Photo: sskennel

Work Life Balance and other Impossibilities

This week has really put me to the test. Every time I'm faced with sick-kid scenario, I find myself questioning everything about my life, the validity of my job, my value as an employee, and most of all, my worth as a mother.

I got a call from the daycare on Tuesday noon-ish that mini-man had woken up with a fever of nearly 107 degrees. I immediately packed up in the middle of lunch with a friend, threw my laptop in my bag and ran out of the office. I took mini-man to the emergency room only to be told it's probably a viral infection and to just give Tylenol until it goes away. Other than the fever, he seemed perfectly normal... not even a runny nose. Anyway, by Wednesday morning the fever had broken and he seemed almost back to normal. I tried working from home that day as best I could, but eventually had to get out in the afternoon if only for a walk to the pharmacy and a stop by the little playground near our home.

Working from home with a 2 year old is next to impossible. I think all those people out there who do this regularly either have a nanny in the house or they're not getting a lot done. Every two minutes it's "Look! Mommy look!" Or, "I need help!" And, yes, everything is an exclamation. All I can really get done is look through my email, send a few files here and there as people request, and delegate a good deal. Microsoft Outlook Web Access is awful and times out every 10 minutes or so it seems; it doesn't allow me to open an attachment without saving it first to my local machine and then opening it from there, which adds time to everything I do. Furthermore, half my working files are actually sitting on my network at work, so I can't access all the things I usually can.

I really have a hard time with this. I really take pride in being very good at my job, so when I can't do it to the best of my abilities, I get really down. To make matters worse, I have some kind of deep seeded issue which makes me want approval from everyone around me, so God forbid I let anyone down. You might as well tie bricks to my feet and throw me off a bridge. Incidentally that's the same reason I do all sports alone... I hate the possibility that I might slow anyone down, so I just do what I do by myself. So being out of the office is hard. I know it puts extra pressure on the other members of my team - both above and below me. Being a perfectionist doesn't help either. In many ways it's what makes me good at my job, but it also will likely send me to an early grave.

When my head starts spinning about how ineffective I am in my job while taking care of the most important blessing in my life, I start questioning my worth as a mother. Why do I worry so much about work... shouldn't my head be on this little man I'm tasked with raising - teaching to be a human being? What am I teaching him? Am I teaching him that work is more important than family? Am I teaching him that a person is supposed to spend all day in front of the computer or the TV? Am I teaching him that he's not important enough?

When push comes to shove, my family is more important than my job. There, I said it. If you were considering asking me to work for you but you changed your mind when you read that, fine by me. I really do strive to find a balance in my life... balance between solo time, family time and work time. I need time where my family gets my undivided attention. I need time to hang with friends and time to exercise and play music. I need time to live my life and time to share it with others. As it is this week I ended up skipping my measly two workouts I usually fit in so that I could spend additional time working when big-man came home to occupy mini-man, but I can't and won't dedicate my life to a cubicle.

Now mini-man isn't cleared to return to daycare until Monday, so we're making the most of it...



Yeah, he looks real sick to me.

I'd love to hear how other people are achieving this somewhat elusive work-life balance I keep hearing about... especially working moms. How do you do it?

On the topic of Personal Branding

Yesterday I downloaded a Free eBook on Personal Branding from Chris Brogan. Firstly, I have to say, I highly recommend reading just about every blog post he writes. No, seriously... subscribe. It'll be good for you if you want anything to do with social media. I get his blog right next to my local news from News 1130 each morning as I sit and drink my coffee.

Having said that, I felt either the title of this eBook was off, or something was just missing for me. Maybe I am the one who's just not getting it despite being a relatively savvy person when it comes to marketing, branding and social media, but this piece seemed to lack a reference to the 'personal' aspect of personal branding.

The eBook is filled with references to relatively unknown people. Sure, they are all superstars in their respective lines of business, but the concept of personal branding extends well beyond the tech world. This eBook should be called "Personal Branding in the Digital Space" or "Personal Branding for Bloggers". The truth of the matter is that personal branding existed well before the internet.

The biggest thing I battle with is that I can put out this 'brand' that is me... you can read my thoughts on twitter, you can read my blog, you can check out my profile on LinkedIn, you can google me and find out how long it took me to run the Sun Run or see that I once won 1st place in a kickboxing tournament, but none of that matters if what I project in person doesn't match what I'm putting out in the digital world.

I suggest that personal branding also has a lot to do with your real life person... how you dress, what you look like, what type of glasses frames you choose, whether you wear nice shoes, what kind of car you drive or if you drive a vespa. If you are into sports or if you are into remote control cars, that's going to make a difference to how people see you. I get a very different impression in my head from someone who wears designer clothes (my boss) than I do from someone who wears yoga pants, hoodies and flip flops (me). A person's commitment to personal integrity and decency also play a huge role in my mind. I'm shocked to see CEOs/CMOs/CTOs using the phrase "WTF" on twitter, for instance. Not only is it unnecessary, but I can't picture these people using the same language in person; that is still considered poor form in the boardroom as far as I know. Certain personalities, sure... but then I guess that just really does come down to personal branding.

So it's not that I want to knock what Chris Brogan is saying, because everything he's said is right on the money. I just think people really need to consider more than just the footprint they're leaving on the internet.

photo: jeromeinsf on Flickr

The Beauty of Twitter

I have to say, I'm in LOVE with Twitter. I just discovered it a few months ago and already I've gained more knowledge from the people and events I follow there than I have from any other single source ever.

I think it gives me the opportunity to feel like I'm on the leading edge. It puts me among the first to hear about some of the coolest, funniest, most shocking or most interesting news and events in the world and on the web and I've NEVER been that person before. I was always the awkward kid trying to get in on the conversation but walking in the road to hear what was going on on the sidewalk.

I logged in last night (well, opened the window - who am I kidding? I never log off) to find out that an earthquake had just taken place in San Francisco... 4 minutes ago! I also followed Twitter Search last weekend for #Gustav and saw minute-by-minute accounts of those people who were actually there on the ground in parts of Louisiana. How cool was that?! I realized then and there that by the time the newspapers are printed, what they're telling is no longer news.

Twitter is where I heard about the BlogWorld & New Media Expo that I'll be attending in Las Vegas in a couple of weeks. Twitter is where I've heard about BarCamp Vancouver, which I'm waitlisted to attend at the moment. Twitter is where I hear from and even interact with some of the greatest minds in Social Media today such as @chrisbrogan, @mitchjoel, @briansolis and my local favourite @roxyyo, blogger for the #1 e-commerce blog in the world, GetElastic.

I only hope one day I can contribute as much to those who follow me as I'm getting from those I follow. In the meantime, here's a little vid to get you laughing:



Thanks everyone!