Got Facebook Places to Be

Is this really a good idea? Okay, I’ll admit it might be fun for a while, but this seems like another Pandora’s box being opened to me. There are plenty of people saying this is not a good idea already, but I’m going to go ahead and add my short two cents.

The only reason Facebook is doing this is so that they can better tailor their advertisements. They are now able to collect more data and therefore deliver better ads. If you think Facebook is doing this for any other reason, you are sadly mistaken.

I have no doubt that Facebook wants to add new features to ensure people continue to enjoy it, but that’s not the driving force here. It was when it first started, and everyone was on Myspace, but five years later, with the majority of the internet now officially switched over to Facebook, they have a captive audience. They can give our information away with impunity.

They won’t of course. Not when they can sell it instead. Which is what they intend to do. Do you realize that all of the photos you upload to Facebook are their property? That they get to use even after you terminate your account? Think long and hard on that one.

I’m not implying that Facebook is evil, they’re a company, most successful companies do this kind of stuff. I am saying that everyone should watch out for the content they put there.

The Best Marketing

"Word of Mouth" is sometimes incorrectly traced back to 1980s, when the term seems to have been coined. The truth of course, is that this phenomenon existed and was probably tapped long before it was named.

It all boils down to a simple set of rules, really. if you maintain high customer satisfaction and high customer retention, they will tell their friends good things. If you have high customer turnover instead, you will likely run out of people who want to buy your product or service because unsatisfied customers, tell their friends before their friends have the chance to purchase.

I'll provide an example: I heard about ISP Teksavvy by word of mouth. Satisfied customers told me they offered a great service at a great price, and that I should try them. I signed up for their internet services and have had relatively good service with them. Rogers and Bell are monolithic companies that spend a great deal of money on fairly average advertising. Some of their commercials have been alright, but they do not inspire the same reactions as the Old Spice commercials do. Teksavvy is a smaller provider without the money, size, or clout that Bell or Rogers have; they are a slightly oversized small fish in a pond with two elephants. They piggyback on Bell's RJ-11 DSL infrastructure and have recently also added support over Roger's last-generation coaxial cable infrastructure.

Cutting Through the Haze of Uncertainty

After some initial difficulty, it looks like the uncertainty that surrounded three important priorities in my life is finally yielding to my persevering efforts. In addition, I've temporarily abandoned some of the home-brew web projects I was working on to focus on content. If content is your selling point, sometimes it is best to focus on that and diversify later.

Companies are similar.  When any company - new or old - is launching a new product. The original blackberries were little more than pagers with an amber-black LCD. RIM got very good at doing one thing before they added more functionality. Netbooks offered greater mobility and lower pricing as the greatest attraction factors, and worried about greater ram, faster CPUs and better wireless range as they became successful.

Yes, you can spend a lot of time working on the perfect version of something. Duke Nukem Forever might be an excellent example of what happens in such a case. It never gets done, or money stops coming in, usually one leading to the other. The reason companies can release imperfect products is thanks to early adopters. To all you disappointed iPhone 4G owners, you can rest easy knowing your money is not wasted; it is a donation to the Church of Mac. Without your donations, they would be unable less able to develop the next slightly-better version, which you will also pay a horrendous amount of money for.

For me, my next tech purchase will probably be a Kindle. It's got battery like nothing else, displays text clearly and yet also connects to the internet. That's a whole lot of awesome for a new product. So it's amber-black, so what? What if that is exactly what the application calls for? Besides, with so much variation between how colour is perceived (and also described, 'midori' is apparently Japanese for green and blue), perhaps amber-black is the best option for a number of mobile devices. You'll never see Apple, the company of colour for everything do that though, right? Right? Oh, except maybe on the original, original iPods.

Kids these days don't even remember THEIR good old days. This is what companies have to do, though, confront the initial uncertainty that their products may be viewed with and defeat it by doing one thing very well. If their product provides utility to individuals or companies in additional ways, it may help, but start by doing something very, very well.

Networking and Association

No recent updates have been posted because of a busy few weeks. In addition to the usual work, there is a competition coming up that I intend to enter into. I’ve also been building a number of thing and recently picked up a new camera and I am still getting used to it.

It’s been talked about plenty already, but I’d like to talk about the Old Spice Guy. With a number of newer commercials launching during the final games of the world cup, they also went viral in a very effective way, and I’d like to explore why.

The viral aspect of this ad campaign started out small by responding to tweets from users such as 12755JDH with the usual humour and randomness, but quickly moved to the top of the food chain by responding to several celebrity tweets.

This is not simply marketing, though it does a very good job at that as well. This is networking and association. Old Spice is winning association with both internet regulars or ‘the everyday people’ and with the celebrities they fawn after.

In short, this is an excellent example of how a company can do viral marketing correctly.

Pictures of Canada Day

Though backlighting was pretty awful in alot of cases, there were plenty of lovely photos that turned out from the Canada Day celebrations at Columbia Lake Fields.

I was enjoying myself, so I didn't start shooting until around 6-7 pm, missing the first half. The pictures included are low-res jpeg compressions of the high-def RAW photos. If you believe I snapped you or your business, contact me for your free high-def jpeg.

There were two bands that I noticed playing the opening show. Apparently the first band is going to be playing for the Black Eyed Peas shortly. I believe this was Cana Brava, but if the band depicted would like to contact me with corrections or details, please send an email to adamlunde-at-gmail-dot-com so I can add the update as well as your next scheduled gig.

There were a large number of vendors and business including the impressively-styled CHYM FMtrailer. Looks good, takes me right back to the time when people took boom boxes out in the street and danced on slats of cardboard.

 

The next band I got pictures of was full of soul and song. I believe this was the Rhinos. If the band depicted would like to contact me with corrections or details, please send an email to adamlunde-at-gmail-dot-com so I can add the update as well as your next scheduled gig.

The sun went down and with the opening acts done, Neil Beaumont took the stage with the Waterboys, a local male A Capella group operating out of the University of Waterloo. After a brief introduction, the Waterboys then performed "O Canada!" to roaring applause.

Then there were the fireworks! Still going through all the images now, but I picked one that I especially liked as an example. You can still see the glow of the horizonline, the smoke from the last fireworks, people watching thm and two distinct detonations. Lovely.

[UPDATE 20100704, 10:34] Well, it would seem as if the signifigant differences between my live environment at reislunde.com and the test environment here at home have caused the first code failure. As a result, the pictures are currently direct links to a half-resolution version of the image, rather than tiny 512 pixel versions. All photos on the server are copyrighted, but any pictures of people can be freely used by the individuals in the photos.

So go ahead and grab them before I update my code!

[UPDATE 20100704, 22:17] Despite a large number of tweaks that needed to be made, most of the modifications to my online CV have been made and I am in the process of rebuilding the image index. That means only my ultra-low resolution previews are now available for download again. If you do want to have a full resolution version, please contact me and we'll arrange something.

[UPDATE 20100801, 13:30] I am now using my Skydrive as picture storage for these pictures which means you can get copies of the images at a low 400x600 resolution. You can view these at http://cid-747b4a3d9095bca9.skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?page=play&resid=747B4A3D9095BCA9!518&Bpub=SDX.Photos&Bsrc=GetSharingLink or by simply clicking below. Viewing them does require Microsoft Silverlight

Every Day a Networking Day

Happy Canada Day, everyone! I was out there enjoying myself and happily taking picture after picture with my camera when I ran into person after person that I have not seen in a long time.  In addition to many new interesting people , I had the chance to meet ever so briefly with Neil Beaumont of CHYM FM, the local Rogers station.

The short version of the story is that marketing is about people and bringing value to their lives and marketing yourself is no exception. When you have a full-time job like me, you should still be out there meeting as many people as possible and networking with them to expand your list of contacts.

That does mean I can expect more traffic to hit my website at adam.reislunde.com, which is a good thing and a bad thing. The website is HTML 5 and designed to be web standard, so to simplify: it works in browsers like Firefox, Chrome and Opera, browsers that focus on adherance to the W3C web standards.

The flip side of that coin is that Internet Explorer, the browser with one of the biggest market shares, has never been designed with standards as a forefront concern. Mangled box models and other basic CSS 2 display issues were never fixed until Internet Explorer 7, when compliant browsers like Firefox started to draw users away. As of Internet Explorer 8, HTML 5 is still not supported, as it is a draft.

Are any of these good reasons to write bad markup? Or poor code to deliever and modify the markup? Or hacked-up CSS files that exploit the differences in web rendering? All of these are practices of a past when that was the only option. However javascript can be used to modify the markup to HTML 4, then commented to be sent only to browsers based on IE.  A similar method can be used to send a secondary CSS file that fixes the IE incompatibilities.  These cause longer loading times in IE, and there is an additional hitch. They take additional time.

Frankly, the website works everywhere on every browser, but its not ready for prime time. There are several minor IE glitches that still need looking after, and there is a great deal of content that still needs to be uploaded. Other, older content needs to be updated for a new version of PHP. In short, the website is not perfect.

So if my life depended on perfection, I'd be in a bit of a pickle, but I understand that perfection comes from working towards an ideal, a goal, and that the last 20% of what is seen is often 80% of the work. Adapting, updating, always changing, that is what drives towards perfection. Even if it's never touched.

In other words, the site does everything it has to. Even if it doesn't do everything I'd like to. That will come with time and effort. What is important is that even on Canada Day, when I was out and enjoying fireworks, I remembered to do what every person should be doing each day: networking. Getting to know someone new and setting up a reason for contact in the future.

The Way Social Networking Should Be

People seem to think that I'm against social networking, which is a ludicrous idea. I'm against many of the poorly implemented features the current incarnations. Facebook does a few things right, but its original focus, business networking, has been overshadowing by drama llama and school cliques.

I know a number of people who use Facebook professionally, for a number of professional means, but even their ratios of business-related content to personal content are still somewhat startling.

Now I recently joined LinkedIn and Meetup, and I'm measurably impressed. They have their flaws as well, but not in the same number as Facebook and Myspace. LinkedIn focuses on business events, informing people and networking people in similar areas. Meetup is focused around setting up in-person events between people who have joined local groups.

Since LinkedIn is well covered on a number of other blogs, I will discuss Meetup. I have gotten involved in a local photographic group and though I did not RSVP to the first events, I have finally gotten the chance to go out and get involved in one of these events. After a casual introduction to strangers I'd never met in the field, we went on our way, taking photographs and speaking about the industry.

I suddenly realized that this is what I always wanted Social Networking to be about. Using technology to set up real, live, human interactions more easily. After all, business networks are built from the people we know, and if my first experience is any sign, Meetup is a very fast way to branch out and expand your network.