The Virtual, Emerging Tools and New Realities

To start off class today I want to discuss a recent post by Twitter called "The 10 Most Powerful Tweets of 2010". So click that link and let's talk about the power of this medium this year.

From there we will take a look at a presentation and framework that I show people in talks that I give. Then we'll move on and see what we have from there. My lovely wife has cooked some lovely holiday treats for the class!

There’s a feeding frenzy going on right now in the world of social networking. Companies are being funded left right and centre and new tools are coming to market everyday. Some of the tools are in private testing, sometimes referred to as Alpha or Beta, while others are open to the general public. - Kris Krug.

The $335,000 Virtual Nightclub. -Entropia.com

Virtual worlds are selling digital properties. In one case a virtual nightclub that actually creates real revenue recently sold for $335,000. Virtual Japanese Pop Stars are filling real stadiums fulfilling 'prophecies' written by Vancouver author William Gibson years ago. Young people are dying from spending so much time in internet cafes without food or drink.

Thanks for being part of enjoyable class last week. And a big thanks to Both @MackFlavelle and @GroosterVan. It was a lot like a Meetup. Meetups are great ways to bridge the digital divide. I've presented at a few meetups including two that are happening tonight while this class is going on. In fact there are at least three events happening tonight that I would like to attend: Vancouver Social Media Professionals Meetup, Net Tuesday (Non-Profits using the web) or The Vancouver Board of Trade Small Business Council Meetup.

 I recommend that you find meetups that suit your interests or professional development desires. Into iPhone and iPad apps? Attend the iPhone Developers Meetup. Like Drupal? Make it out to the Surrey Drupal Meetup. Graphic Design? Check out the Vancouver Graphic Designers Meetup. You get it!

As a student you have a special skill, an ability that no one else possesses. As students you have a reason to speak to everyone and anyone and most of them will be more than happy to do so. Some of those people will offer you jobs, internships or opportunities. Curiosity is your special power as students it's a super power. A desire to learn and acquire new knowledge is the one thing most employers are looking for. When looking for things whether about people through Google and LinkedIn or about businesses through Yelp and Google Maps technology can be imperfect.

Thanks for coming down to Gastown. For those who used Google Maps to find the place you probably noted that the location is still registered as the previous location across the street causing confusion. I spent 20 minutes looking for the place the first time I was there having used Google Maps to get there. This is the new reality; although the technology mostly helps especially when using Google Maps it can also cause confusion. In fact one woman walked the wrong way on the freeway and is now suing Google Maps for her distress.

After a great first half of class I feel like most of you are using and learning about the tools that are important to you. I hope consideration has been given to each of the tools we have focused on so far: Wordpress, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google and Delicious.

Today in the social media realm let's explore what we call emerging tools and networks:

Tools
Slideshare.net - Publish documents, PDFs, PPTs and videos
Ning - Create your own social network (no longer free)
Formspring.me - Q & A social network
Quora.com – Q & A social network.
Namesake.com – professional networking tool.
Flavors.me – create a personal landing page/aggregator.
curated.by – currate Tweets into bundles.

Music
SoundCloud – broadcast your muscial self
hypem.com – music blog aggregator
Last.fm – music social network
Blip.fm – music broadcast social network
MixCloud.com - music social network
Ping - iTunes' social network

Video
UStream.tv – live video streaming + mobile
Justin.tv – streaming video social network

Mini Blogging
Posterous – mini-blogging
Tumblr – mini-blogging & remixing web content
Ping.fm - A tool to post to dozens of social networks at once

Location
Dopplr - travel social network
TripIt – travel social network
FourSquare – leading location based application
Gowalla – location based social network

Planning
Plancast - Time plan and broadcaster
Tungle.me - Great scheduling tool

Etc
Namesake.com - Invite only. Ideas & advice
Honestly.com – reputation & resume
Jumo – connect with & support non-profit’s online campaigns
Wibiya – cool social networking toolbar to add to footer of your sites
MailChimp – manage email subscriber list
EmpireAvenue.com - the social stock market
Path - 50 friends max.


Lab & Homework
Sign up for 5 of these social networks and explore others. Write up a short review on your working blog for each of the five networks. Give three pros and three cons for each site in your opinion. This will part of your mark for assignments and is due the week before the last class.

For those who are curious about just how popular these sites are use Quantcast, Alexa or Compete to analyze their web traffic before signing up or use google to find reviews and articles about some of these social networks if you're curious.

From this class forward we will now be focusing entirely on the business side of social networking and online media. So get ready with your questions and queries and start thinking about the internship that's right for you. Want a sneak peek of some of what's coming? Check out my SlideShare.

Enjoy your holidays and keep on tweeting and sharing. Your level of communication: in person, via email and on social networks will largely determine what kind of internship you will end up with. If you want advice about how approach organizations you want to intern with please email me and let me know how I can help you.

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..." -William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984.

DaveOHoots Visits!

A big thanks goes to @MackFlavelle and @GroosterVan for giving us an amazing class last week.

Here is the live concert of the virtual japanese pop star as discussed last class
It's great to have @DaveOHoots in the house for our class. Check out the slide deck chat from the chat he is giving in our class today.

Power Tuning Social Campaigns with HootSuite

View more from HootSuite.

Roundtable & Facebook for Business

We are going to start off class today by coming together without our computers. We will get together as a group for the first part of class for each of you to discuss the challenges and experiences you have had with social media thus far. I will ask each of you about the homework you were asked to complete.

Facebook for Business and FBML are the main topic for today's class. Today you are all going to learn how to do a few different things within Facebook pages. Here is a one page step-by-step guide I have created for this task.




Involver is one of many products out there that will create custom Facebook tabs for other social media properties. There are other options but for today's lesson and example we will be using this free tool. Now that you've been introduced to the new tools it's time to put them into practice. Remember that your Facebook page is private unless you choose to publish it so don't worry about it. You may be asked to show your page and its elements in a class in the future so do your best.

Homework:

• Create a Facebook page
• Add a custom FBML tab
• Add a linked image and a Google Form to the FBML tab
• Add two Involver tabs to your Facebook page
• Get excited for next week's field trip to McLean's. 5pm Sharp.
• Check the class blog for an update Monday night

Wordpress, @mor10 & Blogs talk...

Welcome to class #5 in Social Media for Web Dev. I had a request for more guest speakers and I am happy to oblige as today we will have @mor10 joining us for the middle part of class. Morten, who started his own company in 2008, Pink and Yellow, is a bit of a Wordpress wizard. Today he will be telling the class about Wordpress and his business, how he came to be successful and what he does to keep it up.


*Currently watching this video and so stoked to get started.* Pure Awesome by @mor10.

Morten's Wordpress Blog and some posts:

Wordpress 3.0 Essential Training
Simple Yet Powerful Wordpress Hacks

Be sure to ensure your client owns and understands hosting and domain ownership. This should not tie or tether your clients to you in the long run.

Take advantage right now of Google Places! Register your customers here to take advantage.

ExpressionWeb: Windows Only. Use VMWare to run it on Mac. Like Adobe Dreamweaver

Bitnami: The Wordpress+ offline viewer. The self hosted option is free. Like WAMP or MAMP. Download the "NATIVE" app from here. It's WordPress on your computer!

Mashable: Top 10 Wordpress Plugins to promote your Social Profiles
SoloStreamTop 10 Wordpress Plugins for 2010

Blogging is a word that has had it's day. The word originated from it's initial meaning of "web log" which was shortened to "Blog". A blog is a for ideas, opinions and thoughts. Some people blog about their personal life or interests while others use blogging to discuss ideas in their work and bring together insights gathered from others. The name of the game is, provide it. Don't know what it is? Ask your audience. The largest blogging platform isWordpress.com and it is the starter's recommended option. I use Blogger :(for now... because it's what I am used to and it works for my purposes. Advanced users or those with access to capable technology professionals should useWordpress.org. The major differences between Wordpress.com and .orgare listed here by Wordpress>. Ultimately if you have a strong grasp of Wordpress.org you can create entire websites and custom designs.

Blogging is now just a part of a website and most important it's the part of the website that is updated the most and provides the most content for Google, Yahoo! and Bing to index. This is one of the main reasons that a blog is so essential. The blog also trumps Twitter (too short) and Facebook (too social) in that you control the user experience. You decide what the experience will be like: simple and clean like Thomas' Tumblr site or widget filled and full of processing errors like my Blogger site.

A blog compliments your other efforts on social networks and can lead to revenue and writing work for other publishing mediums whether online or print. This is an important way to leverage the content you write on your blog to publish in other places whether you blog for a business or yourself. Your blog also feeds other online efforts by backing up your insights and ideas with more concrete examples with links and references to supporting documentation.

Today I want you to really dig in and explore your own blog. Install Google Analytics, install the Facebook like buttons, install Twitter's @anywhere feature. Try installing all kinds of things to see what changes are made. Be sure to install a Spam filter on your wordpress.org blog. Please spend the rest of the class working on and messing with your blog.

Homework:

1. Setup a 'test' blog: This can be a test blog or your real blog.
2. Write one post with a video embedded in it
3. Write one post with a Creative Commons licensed photo on it with proper references.
4. Look up and understand Hyperlinks if you haven't yet.

TED, Alignment & Homework

It is with great pleasure that BCIT welcomes Vancouver's Digital pioneer Kris Krug who is teaching a different group of students in the New Media and Web Development program this exact course! Kris teaches on Thursdays and in order to keep our classes aligned we will bringing the two courses together in terms of major components and general direction. You did get a head start and a sneak preview of some of the web's newest trends!



Social technologies and the internet are changing our culture at an incredibly rapid pace or as @BADavid said the other day the pace of acceleration is accelerating exponentially. These changes may be new to the masses but as US NOW, arguable the first feature film about social networks. It's from the UK and was made in 2008. The clip above is a short version of the film I created. You can view the feature length film at your leisure for free on YouTube.

TED is an amazing organization fostering the newest and most interesting ideas in our world today. They bring those talks together in one place so that the world can benefit from the knowledge of some of our greatest thinkers. TED talks are great for a short getaway from coding or the perfect spot to get your brain thinking about different solutions, different directions and new ideas. Today we are going to take things down a notch and introduce you to TED and a number of videos that make understanding social technologies easier to understand the major tools in the social technology revolution














Lab:

1. Create accounts on (you may be half finished already!): 
• Google 
• WordPress 
• LinkedIn
• Flickr
• YouTube
• Delicious
• Twitter
2. Create profiles on your new accounts – add avatar photos, bio information, links
3. Create a post on your WordPress.com and link it to your new profiles

Bonus:

• include in your blog post links to other social network profiles
• watch any 2 videos from TED Talks and write a 2 paragraph review of each

Twitter Language, 6 Pixels, Memes and Social Media Dashboards

Welcome to the second class! It was great to meet all of you and I am very excited for an awesome semester and class. Having students who are engaged and interested in the subject matter is fantastic!

Today we will be covering Twitter Language, memes, social media dashboards and visiting 6 Pixels of Separation in the Great Hall. So let's get started. I am going to walk you through some tweets and we'll breakdown what things mean together. The following video explains some of the uses of #hashtags with examples. Using Twitter Search you can follow some amazing events and discussions.







Check out the #TEDxUBC hashtag, sadly all tweets disappear from Twitter search in 7 days. Now lets head to the great hall for 6 Pixels of Separation... So Let's Go!

After we get back I will be discussing memes, internet memes and how to take advantage of what's hot in the world of 'viral'. Viral marketing is a misnomer as a marketer can hope to create a viral video or viral sensation but can't guarantee it or plan on it. Attempting to illicit LOL, WTF and OMG with your 'viral' media is the formula most likely to create success.

Double Rainbow
Double Rainbow Song
Double Rainbow Taco Bell/KFC
Double Rainbow Microsoft Ad
Double Rainbow iPhone Ap

Old Spice Guy @ teens
Old Spice Guy @ women
New Spice Guy

In the last part of class today I will be introducing you to Hootsuite and Tweetdeck and we'll have a class discussion about the FABs (features, advantages, benefits) of each tool. Please be prepared to discuss each tool from your perspective. New users opinions are the most interesting to me.

Lab Part 1 - MemeTown
You will be asked to find and present a meme to the class. Please describe: Why it caught on in your opinion. What elements of OMG, LOL and WTF are present? How could a business, individual or organization take advantage of this meme to gain exposure?

Lab Part 2 - TweetBox
Tweet once "@kempedmonds" with a message about something you learned today.
Tweet a shortened link to something of value to your classmates and include "#MDIA2045"
Tweet a question on Twitter about something you want to learn about and include "#MDIA2045"
Tweet and follow @mackflavelle @groosterVan and @daveohoots. Your tweet should let them know how excited you are to have them speak to your class or what you hope to learn from them. Include "#MDIA2045"
Retweet a tweet from #TEDxUBC that has a link to something you found interesting in it.

Introductions, Ideas & You

Welcome to MDIA 2045 at BCIT in the New Media and Web Development 1 year senior management certificate. This course will be informative, interesting, challenging and broad. There are a lot of things we are going to learn in the next 12 weeks. As your instructor, Kemp Edmonds, I will act as a facilitator, not a dictator. Education is being transformed by social technologies and in the course we will work to take advantage and benefit from this change.




Your education is longer restricted to this classroom or a school. Learning is lifelong and not based just in books and history. It's based online in multimedia, connecting with others and learning to find answers to your own questions. Google can teach you more than I ever could. Education especially in New Media, Web Development and Social Media comes from great sites like NewMedia.org, W3Schools & Mashable.

Before we go further I should let you know about my story. It's a story about passion, education and personal learning. Sitting in lectures I used my laptop not for Facebook, poker or online games but to learn about everything I could about social media and the transformation of our world through personal learning. Through tools like Twitter I was able to expand that into a personal learning network and build a personal brand.

Personal Branding: My Story and Tips

View more presentations from Kemp Edmonds.

Shortened URLS
Shortening links are a key part of all internet marketing because they allow us to track and measure the effectiveness of our activities. They are a number of URL shorteners but in this course you will be required to use one with built-in tracking. Either bit.ly, j.mp, goo.gl or ow.ly through Hootsuite. There are a few others and you can use BUT they MUST track the click throughs, location and referrers.
Let's look at a few examples...

RSS Feeds
RSS or Really Simple Syndication is the best way for you to stay up to date on information that is important to you. RSS feeds also allow you to make your content or your clients content easily available for consumption by readers. Instead of going out and visiting sites to see if there is new information on them you can use a reader like Google Reader, my personal choice, to gather all of those 'feeds' into one place. This saves time and allows you to quickly check the information to see if it's relevant to you.





Boolean Search
Boolean Search is a few tweaks you can make to a search online that will enhance the usability of these searches. The main tools are AND, OR, -, ~, and "". Each of these items means different things to the your search. ~ means similar to, "" means an exact match. NOTE: On Twitter you don't need to use AND as it is already assumed when two words appear next to one another.







Lab 1

MDIA - 2045 Lab #1. This is a Prezi an awesome alternative to Powerpoint.
Prezi is free and a great deal for students and educators.

BONUS: a video adapted from a talk about the current educational paradigm from Sir Ken Robinson. Another great place to expand your mind is TED Talks: ideas from the world's top thinkers.