I’m reading Duct Tape Marketing by John Jantsch right now and one of the smartest things in the whole book comes in the title of Part 1.  It says quite simply “Help them know, like and trust you more”.  I’m always puzzled that people have a hard time grasping this concept.  As far as I’m concerned, this sentence is what social media marketing is all about.

What’s the purpose of telling people how great your product is if they don’t trust you or like you.  Why not concentrate on having relationships with your clients and letting them get to know you first. Then, if they trust you, they may buy your product but if they don’t who cares, the relationship is still very valuable. Before “know, like, trust” - you have nothing. The best way to get “know, like, trust” is to engage your potential customers in a conversation and have a  relationship with no strings attached.  Give it a try.

This is always fun when it happens. WelcomeObama.ca was on CTV, although just for about 3 seconds.

The next two weeks are going to be pretty fun.  For the last six months or so I have been working with Scott Annan on MG’s new CRM app Dex.  One of the things that we always talk about is how we can make connections with other startup communities in both Canada and the US.  The launch of Dex was really all the push we needed to come up with the idea of doing a Co-working / Dex Roadtrip. 

The idea is simple. We are traveling to Montreal, Toronto, New York City, Boston and Philadelphia to connect with the local startup scenes in those cities to see if we can figure out ways to make our own startup scene better as well as talk to them about the whole process that went into the development of Dex.  As part of this trip, we really wanted to connect with people who are doing co-working spaces and as a result we have booked all our stops at co-working spaces in the various cities.

Toronto is the first stop and we just pulled into the Centre for Social Innovation which is by far the nicest and biggest co-working space I have ever been in.  I’m really looking forward to meeting the people who are going to be coming tonight. The goal is for both of us to blog about the whole trip and hopefully encourage some people from other startup scenes to do the same thing and bring their startups on the road to Ottawa.

I have to share this…  Here is a pic of the cable that runs in the ceiling at CSI.

One of my favorite sites of 2008 was Scribd.  Scribd is like Slideshare for documents.  In any case, I recently came across a great document on Scribd entitled “Social Media Predictions 2009” - it is a compilation of ideas by some of the best minds in the space as how social media will evolve over the next 12 months.  It is worth a read.

Earlier today I was asked to sit in for Nik Nanos on a panel event for the Canadian Public Relations Society.  The topic up for discussion is the “use of social media in the recent Canadian federal election” and since politics and social media are boths passions of mine, I immediately accepted.

Although the use of social media by Canadian politicians pales in comparison to what we have seen happen with the Obama campaign, it still was very present in the last election. Here is a small look at some basic social media stats for the Liberals, Conservatives and the NDP regarding their use of Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Flickr and Myspace.

After a quick look, I think the NDP did the best overall with their use of social media.  Keep in mind these are basic stats but my gut feel is that they used social media most effectively of all three parties.  In addition to success in these four social media applications, the NDP also developed the Orange Room, which is a very interesting site full of social media features including giving points to members who add social media content.  Check it out here, it is really a good site.

Since the question that we are being asked tomorrow as part of this panel has to do with whether or not we feel that social media has been effective in swaying voters in the last election, I think the answer is clearly ‘not really’. It was a good start but personally I don’t think it had that much effect overall.  By this I mean it is great that all parties really tried to engage voters through the use of social media but no one party made it a central part of their strategy for swaying voters. Overall the NDP made the biggest commitment to social media but I’m not sure if I would chalk up their success in the last election to social media alone.  This time around it was mostly just for show however next time I think it may be quite different.

I think Canada’s political parties will finally understand the power of social media when they use it to help achieve electoral goals instead of just being a way to “be on the web”.    Whenever I speak to people involved in party politics, I always hammer home the same message which is:  For social media to be an effective tool for elections, its use has to be squarely aligned with the objectives of the campaign which are to:

Recruit, Organize, Fundraise and Vote.

Until that happens, its unlikely that any party will be able to use social media to run away with an election the way Barack Obama did.

I like Barack Obama. I have been watching him since the first primary in New Hampshire. I was impressed when he hired Blue State Digital to run his online campaign and when Chris Hughes from Facebook joined him as a strategist because both of those moves showed he wasn’t just going to run a standard campaign.

Although this election was a bit of a blowout, it really wouldn’t have been that way had it not been for the social networking machine that the Obama camp created in order connect and organize their supporters at the grassroots level.

Of all the candidates who were active during the primary and election season (if 2 years can be called a season), it was Barack Obama who understood that the only way to connect with young voters is to do so on their own terms.  That means online.  He also understood that micro-donations can total huge amounts of money and the best way to solicit these types of donations is online.  Lastly, since no party can be organizing everywhere, the Obama camp really open-sourced political organization and made it easy for people to organize themselves instead of relying on the party to organize them.

There was a great article in the New York Times entitled : “Running a Volunteer Operation With a Do-It-Yourself Attitude“. Its about how individuals without any real help from the Democratic Party where able to connect with online resources and organizers for Obama Campaign to help them open campaign offices on their own independently of the main party structure.

The big question, I have is why is this type of organization not happening in Canadian politics?  For us, it seems like it would be even more important to exploit these tools. We have smaller election budgets and we must cover a larger land mass than our american counterparts.  Isn’t social networking perfect for these types of situations?  I’m curious to see what the upcoming Liberal leadership race does with social media.  My fear is that they still havent learned that the world is changing.

I just wanted to say “thanks” to everyone that helped us with the Mercury Grove video that we shot this past weekend. Above is a still from one of the scenes. Craig Fitzpatrick was amazing in his role as a white suited business person. The entire video is designed to show how by using DEX (MG’s CRM product) you always keep your relationships with you no matter where you go.

I’ll post the final version as soon as it is finished. Special thanks goes to Ian Graham as well for letting us use the Code Factory to shoot some scenes. If you have yet to check out the Code Factory you should. It is by far one of the best co-working spaces I have ever been to (and I have been to alot).

For the last while, Scott A and I have been wanting to set up a Startup Ottawa event that was just for hanging out with people in the startup scene.  By coincidence we also need a bunch of people to participate in a video shoot that ThinkSM is doing for some Mercury Grove videos.

Our idea was to put both events together.  Scott A is offering to take everyone who shows up to be an extra in the MG video shoot to a free breakfast/brunch downtown on saturday morning.  We would have breakfast first, then do the video shoot.

The shoot is actually two video and would filmed on location at the Code Factory and at the corner of Metcalfe and Queen. The whole thing may take 2 hours max.

If you are interested in attending, just reply to this post and let us know how many people you will be bringing with you.  Also when filling in the form be sure to put your email address and I will send you the exact details.

Feel free to invite friends and family as well. The weather is going to be great on saturday morning and the more the people we can get the better.

This will also be your only real chance to make fun of Craig Fitzpatrick who will be wearing a white suit for the shoot.

The whole thing will get started at 10am on saturday morning.