Michael Jackson Tribute – Montreal Flash Mob
July 27th, 2009. Published under Social Media Marketing. No Comments.
Michael Jackson Flash Mob dance Tribute in Montreal at Champs-de-Mars on July 27 2009.
Hundreds of people gathered together to pay Tribute to the King of pop by dancing to Beat It in public in Mtl today. I learned about the event named MJMT through Facebook. I was disappointed that I couldn’t attend the meetings and participate because I was out of town. There were multiple Flash Mobs reported in Montreal that day, this was the final one. The Flashmobs appeared at 4 different places throughout the day in Montreal:
- Place des Arts at 12:10pm
- Victoria Square at 12:50pm
- Place Jacques Cartier at 1:30pm and
- Champ-de-Mars at 1:50pm
The presentation on the Champs-de-Mars was obviously leaked to the media. Rather than doing an organic one like the first Flash Mob MJ Tribute in Stockholm, this was done in front and facing the cameras. The original Michael Jackson Flash Mob Dance Tribute was originally planned for a later date (August 6) but due to the leak to the media, they decided to push the flash mob forward in a Facebook message. Hence the non organic feel and the amount of media of the last presentation.
This is the first MJ Flash Mob Tribute in North America and was inspired from the first Michael Jackson Tribute Flash Mob in Stockholm which was repeated all over the world for the King of Pop. The nice thing about this one is that they just kept the music playing afterward and let people dance outside as opposed to the other flash mobs where people break out of character and just return to their daily tasks.
Thanks to a Twitter Search for Flash Mob near:Montreal or Michael Jackson Tribute near:Montreal I was able to dig more information about the event. I had a hunch that it would be preformed at Place-des-Arts but since all the infos I gathered only pointed to the Champs-de-Mars Flash Mob, I did not want to risk my 1h lunch at work for nothing. I really wish I was at the Place-des-Arts! 
The MJMT (Michael Jackson Montreal Tribute) was originally organized by Danny Michael Thifault. Here is his Thank you Message on the Facebook Event:
EN MON NOM, MOI DANNY MICHEAL THIFAULT, JE VOUS REMERCIE DU PLUS PROFOND DE MON COEUR POUR AVOIR FAIT DE CETTE EXPÉRIENCE UNE RÉUSSITE INCROYABLE! JE SUIS VRAIMENT ÉMU. MERCI À ARTMISTICE, LA POLICE DE MONTRÉAL, À LA MINISTRE DE LA CULTURE ET L’IMMIGRATION, MON AVOCAT RICHARD OUELLETTE ,SOLOTECH, LES LOCATION JEAN LÉGARÉ, ACROMATIK ET BIEN SUR À VOUS TOUS! MILLE FOIS MERCI! LE VIDEO OFFICIEL SERA SUR YOUTUBE D’ICI À DEMAIN MATIN! NOUS VOULONS LE MEILLEUR MONTAGE POSSIBLE! FÉLÉCITATION!
—————————————
ME, DANNY MICHEAL THIFAULT, I THANK YOU FOR DEEPEST FOR MY HEART TO HAVE MADE THIS EXPERIMENT AN INCREDIBLE SUCCESS! I AM REALLY MOVED. THANK ARTMISTICE, THE MONTREAL COPS, CULTURE AND IMMIGRATION MINISTER, MY LAWYER RICHARD OUELLETTE, SOLOTECH FOR MUSIC, THE JEAN LÉGARÉ HIRING, ACROMATIK AND OF COURSE WITH YOU ALL! THOUSAND TIMES THANK YOU! THE OFFICIAL VIDEO ONE WILL BE ON YOUTUBE BY TOMORROW MORNING! WE WANT THE BEST ASSEMBLY POSSIBLE! GONGRADULATION!
I created a YouTube Playlist with the other recorded Flash Mobs across the city of Montreal:
Enjoy, and Long Live the King of Pop!
UPDATE July 28, 2009: Official video from the organisers:
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Social Media Million Dollars Idea
July 21st, 2009. Published under Social Media Marketing. No Comments.
After reading about Yahoo’s new home page redesign… I was thinking. Why are web publishing companies taking so much time getting more social?
The most important rule I learned in video production is:
People are interested in people.
That is the reason why all this “social media” stuff is becoming popular don’t you think? Why do you think people spend hours on Facebook? With all these social networking tools out there and all the different ways to make the web more social (Google Friend Connect, Facebook connect) what is AOL, Yahoo, MSN waiting to work with MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn or even Digg to integrate at least one column on their homepage.
I am not talking about status updates. Make a section where everything your network is sharing comes up at one place. All the videos your friends has “favorite”, the google reader’s posts your friends has starred, all the web pages your friends has shared on Facebook etc.
There are great opportunities for this. Facebook “highlight” column is horrible, Friendfeed is too cluttered and doesn’t have the eyeballs of MSN or Yahoo. Newspaper companies are too focus on their own content. This platform would exponentially increase the virality nature of any content on the web. You own the platform, you monetize. I think there should be a website à la Digg but I don’t believe Digg has the web publishing experience to make it happen.
Having a category like this on a major portal or creating your own portal would give a lot of leverage to the social media underdog platforms such as Vimeo or Viddler. Having their videos go viral earlier or faster than Youtube will help them compete with the giant.
Whoever has the skills to program this will be a very rich man. Too bad I am not a programmer.
Picture by: Tracy O
How to Twitter
July 20th, 2009. Published under 101, Twitter. No Comments.
I have been using Twitter for over a year now. In fact, my first tweet was June 11, 2008. I haven’t been using it for as long as many web marketing early adopters, but I am among the first in my offline social circle and considering that it has been launched publicly in July 2006, I have been using it for the 1/3 of Twitter existence. 
I decided to write this post because I see more and more friends in the communications and/or marketing industry sign up on Twitter and are obviously clueless about how it can benefit them. People are asking me more and more what is the point of Twitter so I think it would be good to have a blog post where I can send people for more information.
What is Twitter?
Twitter is a micro-blogging and social networking tool. Similar to blogging, it allows any of its members to publish whatever they wish. However, every posts or “tweets” must be 140 characters or less. Why 140 characters? Dom, one of many who helped create Twitter explained that Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter, wanted to have a dispatch service that connects us on our phone using text. Something that would allow a person to contact many people at once in a brief and concise manner. Hence the reason why Twitter asks you to answer the question:
What are you doing?
Keep in mind that this was in 2006, thus smart phones were not as rampant as they are today. Just to give you an idea, the iPhone was released in June 2007.
What does Twitter mean for me?
To be informed instantly and to inform multiple people at once. Ashton Kutcher for example, can currently inform 2,85 million people in less than 30 seconds (Also, on an SEO note, with all the publicity he received, imagine all the inbound links he has to his profile page. Guess what the Page Rank is … 4!). In terms of traffic, that means that Ashton Kutcher can potentially send 2,85 million visitors to one web page of his choice by just publishing a link in his tweet. I wonder how many dollars is his tweet worth? We all know that not all 2,85 million people read his tweets but his reach is still phenomenal. The same is true for us. The more followers we have, the more influent we become and the more traffic we can send to the web page of our choice. Rather than paying PPC ads, I still don’t understand why online publishing companies such as Canoe.ca, MSN Sympatico or Cyberpresse do not develop relationships with power users to send them traffic. Pay them for a tweet, your revenues are in CPM anyway!
On a personal level, Twitter helps people come closer. It allows people to stay connected.
Twitter as Marketing Research
About 6 to 9 months ago, I was reluctant about talking about Summize (now Twitter Search) because it was such a powerful tool. Now, I’m still confused as to why people don’t seem to use it. Twitter search allows you to see in real time what people are saying. You want to know what people are saying about Blackberry? Twitter Search. Is the new Harry Potter worth watching? Twitter Search. Bing now integrates real time search results via Twitter? Twitter Search! What ever news or information you want to get, you can get very good information thanks to Twitter Search. You can even find job seekers on twitter!
The important thing is to know what to search for. Don’t just search for keywords. Think about your target audience and try what they are most likely to say/tweet. An industry colleague of mine works for a promotional company and was looking for promo agents. Rather than typing “promo agents”, she can try to search for outgoing, social people and perhaps students. Outgoing and social people are more likely to tweet about going out or partying rather than tweeting about going to the movies. She can also try to make a search for her competitor’s name and offer their agents a promo contract.
How to Use Twitter Efficiently
Here is my Twitter 101 in two words: Listen and Engage! I cannot stress this enough. This post is meant as an introduction to Twitter or “Twitter for beginners”. I will create an archive of all Twitter related posts so you can read more advance ways to using Twitter. Rather than talking, talking, talking (or in this case, tweeting, tweeting, tweeting…), listen! Make a Twitter Search, find key Twitterers to follow and read their Twitter posts. If you don’t find them relevant, unfollow them. Don’t worry, it isn’t like Facebook. Twitter is much more volatile than Facebook, therefore if you unfollow them, it isn’t as dramatic as when you unfriend somebody on Facebook. Reply to other people tweets, ReTweet somebody else’s post. That is the best way of integrating yourself. Twitter is also a social-networking tool. In order to develop a strong following, you have to create relationships and just as in real life, hanging around somebody that talks all the time is very annoying. Twitter is the same. Once you develop concrete relationships on Twitter, then you can go on to the next stage. Twitter is about relationships and conversation.
Twitter as part of your Marketing Strategy
Twitter is a tool like any other communication outlet ie: advertising, telemarketing, direct marketing. I cannot tell you how to use it. There are many ways to use Twitter. I can only give you example. Like in any marketing strategy; analyzing, planning and setting objectives are important. Twitter cannot be your only strategy. It can only be part of your overall marketing strategy whether it is a web marketing or social media marketing strategy.
If you are interested in integrating Twitter in your marketing strategy or are interested to know how Twitter can help your business just send me a tweet!
Photo by: carrotcreative
SEO, Rel=nofollow and PageRank Sculpting (Oh My!)
June 18th, 2009. Published under SEO. 1 Comment.
Google hinted their position on using the hyperlink rel=nofollow tags for internal linking and basically stated that through a clean linking architechture, PageRank sculpting is recommended. However, Search Engine Land recently reported that at SMX Advanced, Google anounced how PageRank flows through nofollow links. The long story short is that nofollow links are a PageRank black hole rather than redistributing the PR to the dofollow links and This raised a big concern in the Search Engine Optimization community.
I believe that Aaron Wall of SEOBook and Randfish of SEOMoz make good suggestions.
SEOMoz state that they will perform tests and come back to us. I am under the impression that SEOMoz’ position is to leak as less PageRank as possible from the page by finding alternatives to mask outbound links without using nofollow with the following options:
- Option A: An embedded iFrame on the page containing the links you don’t want the engines to follow (remember not to link to the iFrame URL, and potentially block it using robots.txt)
- Option B: Links that call a Javascript redirect script with access blocked for search engine bots (as Google is also now crawling basic javascript and counting links through it)
- Option C: An embed in Flash, Java or some other non-parseable plug-in that contains the desired links
- Option D: Settings that turn off links for non-cookied or non-logged-in visitors
SEOBook’s position is the opposite. PageRank leaking is not a big deal because there are so many greater factors influencing SEO:
- Comments offer free relevant textual content that helps your pages rank for a wider array of related keywords.
- Allowing some relevant outbound linking makes the page more useful, and makes some people slightly more likely to want to comment.
- When you are competing for core keywords in big, competitive markets the SEO game comes down to industrial strength link building, public relations, social networking, branding, advertising, and other aspects of classical marketing.
I would be very interested to hear about what SEO Theory’s Michael Martinez has to say about this nofollow drama.
I think I side more with SEOBook on this issue and I wonder if the title : “Expert SEO Testing: Usually Worthless” is a jab at SEOMoz. Nevertheless, I agree that having comments in an iframe is a waste because they can raise the credibility of the page as well as creating context for Google to judge incoming and outgoing links. The same can be said about any practices that not only hides links but any User Generated Content as well. As much as I am as dissapointed in Google as Randfish stated. I have to say that I beleive Google is smart. Basically, Matt Cutts just anounced that due to abuse of nofollow, Google had to make a change. Nofollow was introduce to fight spam and later paid links. It was not created to block internal PageRank flow. I beleive there is more to this than Google is telling us. Thus, the reason why I like Aaron Wall’s position on not paying too much attention to the nofollow hype.
Here is where my Social Media Marketing kicks in. I think we can have our cake and eat it too. Taking Will Reynolds’ advice on not wasting too much time analysing nofollow links using his Youtube Channel as an example, it has a lot of comments, a lot of views, a lot of videos. Google would be crazy to not use that wealth of information. The amount of times the videos was shared, liked, added to favorite has to add towards determining the authority of that page and hence of that link. I will take Will Reynold’s position and believe that some authority or link juice or pagerank or relevancy or whatever-you-want-to-call-it must be transfered to the outbound linked page.
My suggestion is that comments and/or any UGC should have a rating system and in turn, the rating system will help Google determine relevant links/content. If comments are making pages more social, why shouldn’t they be affected by social actions? A system where users can vote on other UGC just as they vote on the original content. The best content will be floated to the top similarly to LinkedIn Answers, Yahoo Answers or Get Satisfaction.
I like what Aaron Wall suggest because it follows Google’s (Matt Cutts’) recommandations. Spending time and energy focusing on quality content is more important. If you are a small web site fighting for small to midsize search engine results’ market share, you can compete by using a small link building strategy combined with proper meta, titles, h1, bold, keyword in URLs, etc. practices. If you are a large website ie: publishing and traditional media companies battling in a competitive market, you will need to use your traditional offline marketing to get a competitive advantage. Finding juice retention strategies is not an efficient use of your time.
UPDATE: June 18, 2009
I found Michael Martinez’ position on this on Matt Cutts’ blog but I am still interested to hear him discuss this on an SEO Theory level… oh well…
You cannot prevent people in the SEO industry from buying into nonsense and bad advice. PageRank sculpting has always been a waste of time and resources.
However, despite numerous attempts by Googlers over the past two years to persuade people to stop engaging in BAD SEO PRACTICES, the SEO community has continued to try to sculpt PageRank.
It’s Google’s index. Let them manage it anyway they please. A truly good SEO would never develop a site just for Google anyway. There are plenty of other search engines out there and collectively they still draw more monthly searchers than Google.
But then, the SEO community (which now holds itself to the standard of measuring success by number of conversions) is still focused on the obsolete metric of counting pageviews for measuring search market share rather than actual search conversions.
No one should be surprised at all the weeping and gnashing of teeth going on right now in the flames of PageRank hell.
It is pretty clear that SEO Theory and SEOBook stand on the same side of the fence on this one. I think SEOMoz are spending too much energy finding ways to conserve PageRank leaking. I find it is a more micro view of SEO where as Aaron Wall and Michael Martinez are offering a macro approach to this nofollow issue.
What I am taking out of this nofollow/PageRank drama is that Google is officially saying that PR is becoming less and less important. I think Google is shifting away from PageRank and their algo is most likely dependant on something else that they do not want to divulge yet because by keeping the SEO/black hats guessing, they will control spam better in the search results.
The Power of Hyperlinks
May 21st, 2009. Published under SEO. No Comments.
In SEO, I find that too many people get lost in link building, nofollows, dofollows, anchor keywords, page ranks, ect. I think we need to step back and really understand how powerful hyperlinks really are. In a matter of a click, we can have access to so much information. Why aren’t marketers more excited about this? My guess is because hyperlinks are so embedded in our daily life that we forget about them.
In traditional marketing, say advertising for instance, people would see your ad and the experience stops there. The internet and links allow that person to go further. Imagine if every billboards were clickable? Marketers would make sure that the public receives the full branding experience. That same feel that display/merch teams create for customers when they walk into a retail store.
Imagine: A customer is able to “click” on a billboard ad and he is instantly transported inside the store in the exact aisle where the product advertised is located.
That is called online marketing. The difference is that, let’s be honest, online banner ads suck. They are mundane and not creative. So people do not click (pun intended). I am not very interested in PPC or banner ads so I will keep that discussion for another blog post.
I want to bring you even further. Imagine that rather than clicking on a billboard ad, you can click a video or a book or even an experience your friend has recently been exposed to?
That is social media marketing. I believe content marketing is at its best through social media marketing because it is the most effective form of word of mouth. The anchor for its effectiveness is in the hyperlinks.
I want to leave you with a great video @olegr shared with me. This Youtube clip is created by Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. It offers great insight about the power of hyperlinks and content. It discusses Web 2.0 and the future of the web.
The importance of content
May 19th, 2009. Published under Social Media Marketing. No Comments.
Content marketing is not an easy concept for businesses to get. I can understand why some companies can think that posting content can be a waste of time but content is exactly what you are pitching to prospective clients in your sales call. I know there still are many companies who feel that sales calls, cold calls, direct marketing or telemarketing is more efficient because it feels like you are doing something but who really believes that cold calling works?
I know that times are hard and everybody is stressed but please take a step back, take a deep breath and think about it. What are you doing in sales calls? You are trying to demonstrate value in order for your potential clients to buy your products or services. What is content? It is demonstrating why your product or service is valuable. It is showing your clients how it is of value to them.
The only difference is that rather than being unsolicited, good quality content is solicited. It is only the packaging that is different. What is the point of a really good product when nobody is listening? If they don’t listen, it doesn’t matter how valuable your products or services are.
This is the beauty of the Internet. Now that anybody can be publishers, you don’t have to hope to get picked up by the media or pay the media in order to have people listen to you about your products. Not only that, Social Media is like word to mouth marketing on crack. Social Media makes it so easy for people to share and be instantly exposed to the message.
Before Social Media, before Internet, word of mouth was not as efficient. If you liked a product, you might only tell a small group of people about it and it was on a long period of time because you are not in touch with them as easily. Now with Facebook and Twitter, if you like something, content you like, you can share it with hundreds or thousands of people in an instant. “Sharing” is essentially talking about it. Not only that, rather than being exposed to the product after a couple of days, because it is not accessible, nowadays hundreds or thousands of people can be exposed to the product within seconds. That is the power of hyperlinks. Moreover, they can even learn more about the products with a quick search. Hence, the importance of your content being found easily and the importance of your branding, the experience, you transpire through your website.
Content Marketing is the content of your sales call. Just packaged in a form that will be solicited ie: white-papers, videos, webinars, blog articles, images, etc.
Photo by: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
More Twitter in Canada for Rogers and Fido users
May 5th, 2009. Published under Twitter. No Comments.
Why is this a big deal? It is a big deal because Bell initially imposed a 15 cents fee for each tweets sent AND received. Thankfully, 2 days later, outraged by Canadians, Bell folded and did not charge extra fees for tweets.
I am glad that Rogers and Fido did not go the greedy route and decided to charge extra for tweets. Finally, somehwat good news from the Canadian Personal Cellular Service industry.
What this means for social media?
Twitter is at its most effective when it is instant. I have an iPhone thus I can check on my tweets on my phone. However, I cannot be instantly notified. I can get my tweets hours later and miss out on a friend who was just a couple of blocks away from me. This is also a major milestone for Twitter penetration in Canada. Twitter is very useful for sharing information if you are on a computer but Twitter is a great way of connecting people both online and offline and that is only efficient when we can get instant notifications of the people I want.
It was a pleasant surprised today at lunch when I started receiving my friend’s tweet. The next step for Twitter to take over Quebec is to translate its service to French.
UPDATES:
Canada gets Fully Twitterized. Twitter announced on their blog on May 11th 2009 that Telus, Virgin Mobile and Koodo Mobile users can now Tweet and receive Tweets. Twitter reassures the users that they will not be charged extra fees for their Tweeting activities.
Conseiller SEO Canoe.ca
April 29th, 2009. Published under SEO. No Comments.
J’ai remarqué que Canoe.ca recherche un conseiller SEO. Je devine donc que connaître l’ensemble des aspects techniques reliés :
- au référencement
- à l’optimisation des pages (“on page” et “off page optimization”)
- à l’indexation
- et l’évaluation stratégique des mots-clés (sélection des mots-clés et position des mots-clés)
sont importants mais je pense que le SEO et le SEM n’est qu’une étape. Si le but de Canoe.ca est d’augmenter l’achalandage, attirer le trafic des médias sociaux est donc un bon début mais est-ce que payer pour des publicités payantes dans les médias sociaux est assez? Le PPC peut être très efficace si le public est bien visé.
Par contre, l’important ce sont les objectifs et le plus grand défi pour le conseiller SEO-SEM de Canoe est de ne pas se perdre avec les chiffres du nombre de visites, les rangs dans les résultats de Google ou le Page Rank. Si les objectifs sont d’engager avec les sites influents et de développer une relation fructueuse, alors le conseiller SEO doit être apte à communiquer avec le webmestre, le responsable ou même les membres de la communauté du site en question et construire une relation de confiance. L’implémentation de la bonne stratégie médias sociaux est cruciale car les médias sociaux sont des excellents canaux de communications d’échange, de partage et d’engagement.
Bien analyser la population de Youtube, Facebook et surtout Twitter peux permettre au conseiller SEO-SEM de bien cibler la population pour le contenu voulu et donc permettre une grande chance à la page voulu d’être partagée exponentiellement. Lorsqu’un site Internet est souvent partagé ou discuté par des amis, il est beaucoup plus prône à gagner des visiteurs réguliers.
Google Events for Business
April 17th, 2009. Published under Social Media Marketing. 1 Comment.
Google is opening Facebook to the web. In a race between the two eGiants to dominate the web socially, Google has opened Facebook’s event to the world. Websites can now bring people together more than ever with the launch of their new event gadget.
The function is simple, by installing the gadget on a web page, you can promote your event without having any web page programming knowledge and allow people to RSVP to your event online easily, as well as allowing other people to see who is attending the event. Google is making it easier for Social Media Marketing to complement event marketing.
What this means for your business or organization :
- You have more control on your branding because rather than creating a Facebook event, thus having to be restricted to a small logo and a dull format controlled by Facebook, you create the page the way that you want and insert the gadget in.
- You can measure, with web analytic tools such as Google Analytics, you can find out how many people have visited your page, where they come from and by the amount of people attending, you can calculate the conversion rate and determine your efficiency.
- You can reach a non Facebook audience. As attractive as Facebook’s population is, not all of your target market (eg: decision makers) is on Facebook. However, anybody can connect with their Google, AIM, Yahoo or Open ID account.
- Set up a poll on the page or in the future for feedback to learn more about your target market and why they did not attend your event. Learn from the comments and do it better the next time around.
- Use a URL shortener like Bit.ly to promote the event online in emails, Facebook page, Youtube or Twitter and offline through word of mouth or promotional products easily eg: bit.ly/myevent.
What else do you think Google Friend Connect’s new event gagdet can do for a business?
Google’s official video explaining how to use the event gadget:
