New Year’s Resolutions 2009
Dec 31, 2008 Random Thoughts, Short and Sweet
I usually don’t bother with New Year’s Resolutions. Sure, I have goals in life and in my career but for the most part they exist only in my head and I congratulate myself if I manage to reach them. Usually they don’t start on January 1, and end on December 31. That said – it can’t hurt to put some positive vibes out into the world (or so says The Secret) Perhaps if I share them I will accomplish them. And, like a true marketer; perhaps if I make them “measurable” I can reach my goal by then end of 2009.
Here are my Objectives (ahem…Resolutions) for 2009.
Personal Life
- I will drink 6-8 glasses of water a day
Tactics:
Carry a bottle wherever I go…
Just a thought is there such a thing as a Pedometer for Water? Something to stick on your glass, and when you drink a full glass you can move the dial to “One Down 6 To Go”? That would really help, since by the time I get to glass three I have forgotten if it is glass 4 or 6. - I will lose the final 10 lbs to get to my pre-baby 2 weight
Tactics:
Drink lots of water
Go to Gym at least 2 times per week (sadly, even this is difficult with two little ones, especially the one who refuses to drink out of a bottle!)
Eat less ice cream - I will read one book a month (Seems reasonable since I used to read 2-3 books a month pre-baby!)
Tactics:
Like the water, carry the book wherever I go
Read a book before bed instead of blogs (leave the blogs for the daytime!) - Get my son to give up the pull-ups at night (can I have resolutions for him?)
Tactics:
Cold turkey, replace pull-ups with plastic mattress cover
On the web:
- Increase traffic on my blog by 15% in 2009
Tactics:
Learn some more cool tricks and create some more amazingly fun reports on Google Analytics which will of course help me focus on best content, and promotion for my blog
Improve writing and use keywords in posts
Run contests
Look for guest post opportunities - Encourage my readers to get the urge to comment 10% more in 2009
Tactics:
Run a contest
Ask questions and write brilliant content (as usual!) - Keep Google Reader under 1000 unread items!
Tactics:
Once a month purge blogs, assess which blogs are must reads, and use PostRank. - Try 1 new Application or Social Network every month and write about it
Tactics:
Once a month (3rd week!) have a new post about a new application, social network, or mobile phone application
In my Career:
- I will do what I love 99.999% of the time
Popularity: 15% [?]
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Tags: new years, objectives, resolutions
Twitter Press Conference on Gaza Violence
Dec 30, 2008 Digital Marketing & Metrics, Microblogging, PR, Politics, Random Thoughts
I have just been following the @IsraelConsulate on Twitter. This reflects a whole new use of Twitter. Amazing discussion! The “press conference” using the #hashtag #AskIsrael allowed Twitterers to ask questions directly to the Israeli Consulate. As could be expected of course there were more questions than Consulate could answer! They will be posting answers within in 24 hours at http://www.israelpolitik.org/.
This, along with the past discussion about the Canadian Coalition, and of course previous discussions about the US election show us that Twitter goes beyond “I am eating cereal” and “Guess what I just wrote on my blog…”. I have talked about how brands can use Twitter for marketing and customer service purposes, and now Twitter shows that it has a role as providing breaking news in a way that even the big networks can’t do. Now the public can ask questions, communicate with politicians, representatives of news-makers, and contribute by “breaking news” themselves. This is fascinating! How will this change how we watch the news? How we get our information? How we EXPECT to be able to manipulate and contribute to the news machine? It could be fascinating to watch if Twitter gets used more for breaking news and emergency notification. Already, many of the news networks are Tweeting…but how else will they be used for further engagement with their followers?
I can imagine that in the future press conferences and interviewers could use Twitter to “crowdsource” questions, news channels could use Twitter for follow-up after a story, or to continue discussions online. Opportunities for polls, testimonials, and personal stories could be pulled from Twitter for news stories. What other uses can you see?
Check out Twitter Search for a full list of tweets from #AskIsrael. Here however are a few tweets I pulled from the discussion!
As @shelisrael mentions the most difficult part of this kind of conference or discussion is filtering those who have honest questions versus those that simply want to make a biased point. Sadly, there were a lot of people who obviously joined Twitter just to harass and push their agenda…you can of course see some of them a mile away as most never even uploaded an avatar (image) and use the default Twitter image (two circles on brown background) – and they follow no one and have zero followers.
I hope that the situation in Gaza and Israel becomes peaceful and is resolved soon. The civilians, the good people in Gaza and in Israel should not have to live like this because of extremists, and terrorists (on both sides!) who destroy the chance for peace.
For More Info:
This blogger pulled together a list of questions from the conference.
And of course tomorrow check out IsraelPolitik for the full list of Q&A
A wonderful site of videos of people in Sderot and Gaza: Life in Spite of Everything
FYI while writing this blog, and while following Twitter Press conference I watched the news. Surprisingly no mention of #AskIsrael Twitter Conference. Why not? Especially since one of the CNN news announcer had his Twitter address on the screen!
Popularity: 23% [?]
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Bellies, Bonuses, Bewilderment
Dec 29, 2008 Random Thoughts
In a nutshell a feminist is: A person who supports the equality of women with men. Or, according to Wikipedia feminism “is a discourse that involves various movements, theories and philosophies which are concerned with the issue of gender difference, that advocate equality for women, and that campaign for women’s rights and interests.”
Reasonable enough, right? Why, then does it have such stigma? Why do I visualize women with under-arm hair and placards, chanting death to men? Check out the first picture on the Wikepedia page on Feminism – women with placards. Despite some negative stereotypes the feminist movement has done a lot to positively alter law and culture, including the right to vote, reproductive rights and workplace rights including maternity leave.
But, after reading a post by Mom on the Run about how her maternity leave messed up her raise and bonus I started thinking, are we as equal as we think? It isn’t something that usually crosses my mind, since for the most part I have never felt that I couldn’t do anything simply because I am a woman.
In reality, all is not always equal. The civil right to vote federally for women in Canada has only been allowed since 1918 – only a young 90 years! So, perhaps we are just in the infancy of equal rights.
The Equal Pay Coalition lists the following information:
- According to Statistics Canada, women, on average earn 29% less than men. This wage gap was even larger for racial minority women, aboriginal women and women with disabilities. Racial minority women, on average, earn 36% less than men. Aboriginal women, on average, earn 54% less than men. Women with disabilities earn significantly less than women and men without disabilities.
- Young women graduating from university earn 16% less than male graduates in their first jobs. This wage gap widens as their careers progress. For every age group the earnings gap for women with a university degree has widened in the last decade.
I am sure some of these figures are affected by decisions we, as moms end up making for our families; for example working part-time, working shorter hours, job-sharing, becoming a stay-at-home-mom, and working in careers such as teaching that allow flexibility around our kids schedules, and of course taking time away from our careers for maternity and parental leave.
Despite general equality between genders women do tend to continue to take the bulk of the child rearing – even if they, like their husbands, work full-time. In my family, I am lucky as my husband works shift-work which makes him more available to take on increased duties with the kids. Still, it is the women who take the leave from their careers to have babies, no way around that one!
In Canada we are fortunate enough to get a full year to take care of our little ones. Which compared to our neighbours to the south is amazing. We are home long enough to see them get their first teeth, roll over and sit up for the first time, crawl and often even take the first steps. The downside of course is that we take a break from our career, and so we aren’t likely to get a promotion that year, or be able to apply for a new position at the company, or get a new office or more responsibilities. Fair enough, we aren’t there, we are enjoying our time with our children. And, when we return we can expect to get our job back (or a similar job) and we can start where we left off, right?
Look at Mom on the Run’s situation. She worked the majority of the work year, but left for maternity leave prior to raises and bonuses being delivered. When she returned to work it turns out she didn’t get the raise she had been promised, and months later she didn’t get what she had hoped for in retro pay. The year she was gone she was left off the list for her bonus and despite promises her bonus this year was less than she had hoped. Wouldn’t it make the most sense to give bonuses and raises based on the actual time worked: for example say MOTR worked 8 months out of 12, then she would get 3/4 of her bonus that year. And, obviously she should get a raise for that year worked, and perhaps not the next year – or just an adjustment for “cost of living”. The return year she would be eligible for 1/4 of her bonus.
Why didn’t it work this way for her? I suspect that this is the case for many women. While maternity and parental leave oblige the employer to provide the same job upon return, they do little to encourage employers to continue to compensate the employees for time worked prior to leaving and when they return at the same level as before. So, it seems women who take a year off, not only stall their career as can be expected, but lose out in compensation deserved for work already accomplished. Should more protection be sought for this, or do we as employees simply need to ensure we fight our own battles?
This issue is close to my heart – as I am currently enjoying my fifth month of maternity leave (second and FINAL time!) And, hoping for a bonus too!
Popularity: 14% [?]
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Tags: bonus, canada, careers, ei, feminism, kids, maternity leave, pregnancy, rights, women, Work
Monday Mini: Michael Dell
Dec 29, 2008 Short and Sweet, Social Media
Last week’s Monday Mini was about how marketing, social media, and business is about changing conversations, and that those conversations were changing the “game”.
Conversations about products and brands are going on everywhere, but the ones on the Web – these are ones brands can listen to, respond to, and then make them count. Here is a great quote from Chairman & CEO of Dell, a company who doesn’t just say the words they live them, with company representatives blogging, on Twitter, and an active community on their website.
These conversations are going to occur whether you like it or not…do you want to be part of that or not? My argument is you absolutely do. You can learn from that. You can improve your reaction time. And you can be a better company by listening and being involved in that conversation.–Michael Dell in Business Week Discussion with Jeff Jarvis.
Popularity: 11% [?]
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Tags: computer, conversations, dell, ideastorm, michael dell, web
Lessons in Driving Traffic and Engagement to Blogs
Dec 29, 2008 Blogs, Digital Marketing & Metrics, Microblogging, Search Marketing, Social Media, Web Analytics, social networks
The Lineup: Courtesy Stock.xchng KLatham
Traffic and engagement are not the same thing. Likely you know that. Quality vs Quantity…
Having people visiting my site looking for Chia Pets and Chicken Recipes and Fred Flinstone is ultimately not my goal. People who visit my site using these search terms don’t tend to stick around very long, but they show up in my ‘traffic’ report nonetheless.
Quite some time ago Avinash Kaushik from Occam’s Razor gave me access to Google’s Custom Reporting and Advanced Segmenting which were at the time in beta. I had played with the new features quite a bit with my work websites, but not with my blog. I decided it was time to do so, with the goal of figuring out how to grow my community of readers, and engage those of you who are regular visitors – for example getting you to comment, visit regularly etc. Using the extra reporting functions I was able to find out some interesting stuff:
- My most valuable new visitors were referrals (visiting from another website) and most were visiting from blogs I had commented on. These visitors, over visitors from Facebook, Twitter, Technorati or Blog directories; spent more time on my blog and visited a higher number of pages.
LESSON
- Commenting on other blogs drives interested and engaged traffic and hopefully subscribers - Most returning visitors (those who aren’t subscribed via RSS, visiting directly or via a bookmark) visit again from Facebook, Twitter, Google and MichelleKostya.com
LESSON
- It is worth promoting blogs on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter by linking new posts. - The keywords that drove the most valuable search traffic (pages/visit and time spent) to my site over the last few months were to posts on politics.
LESSON
- Posts on current events drive traffic. - Keywords including “mego”, MEGOAgain”, “Mego Michelle”, “Michelle Kostya” etc spend the most amount of time on my site compared to site average. Duh…they were looking for me. Other keywords that engaged my visitors: Facebook advertising, Facebook ignoring friends, jetblue twitter duty, corporate tweet, Loblaws, Sony, Sheridan
LESSON
- Optimize site and posts around keywords that engage.
- Brand names are often searched and can drive traffic although not all engage readers enough for them to stick around.
- Continue to write posts on social media and Web 2.0! - Unfortunately, since most return visitors came directly to the main page it is hard to determine what content is driving them back via Google Analytics. However, if you I look at my Feedburner stats and refer back to the articles posted around that time my readers enjoyed these posts over the last 30 days (why does Feedburner only allow me to break data by 1 day, 1 week, 1 month or “all time”?) the most popular posts to my return visitors are:
- Social Media’s Next Victim
- Kid’s Say the Funniest Things #2
- My Top 15 Web 2.0 Sites
- 5 Tips to Organize Google Reader
- He Sleeps! A Miracle
Interesting – a mixed bag of social media posts AND parenting. However, one thing I do know about these posts is that they were either short or broken up by bullets or subject headings.LESSON
- Short is good
- Break long posts into sections or use formatting to break the post up into smaller bites! - I have been racking my brain to find ways to encourage commenting, this is a good sign that readers are enjoying what they are reading on my blog. However, this is not the only way to measure this.
LESSON
- Measure depth of visit, number of pages/visit
- Time spent on site
- Return Visitors vs. New Visitors
What kind of lessons can you share about building your blog community? Where do your readers come from? How do you measure engagement?
Popularity: 18% [?]
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Tags: analytics, avinash kaushik, Blogs, commenting, community, engagement, facebook, feedburner, google advanced segments, google custom reports, keywords, search terms, seo, twitter, web 2.0, web traffic
The Art of Simplicity: Board Games
Dec 28, 2008 A Good Laugh
Despite definitions such as a “Bird eating bee” and “A hospital where contagious people reside” simplicity reigns in a game of Balderdash. Yes, sometimes the wine (or beer) gets in the way of a truly remarkable answer and gives you the aforementioned …but generally speaking simple definitions seem to get the most points. “A tool used in archaelogical digs”, or ” A professional ballroom dancer”, or “Lighthearted mood” are simple definitions that seem appropriate. While complicated statements such as ” A person who become elected based on the fact that they have a stove upon which they can cook food” – seems – well rather farfetched (despite the fact that it is correct!).
I have never played Balderdash before, but it was quite fun when played last night. I stuck with simple and came in second. ” A two seated vehicle” and ” A riot between animals” were my most exotic definitions.
What are your favourite games? And, by that I mean your favourite old-fashioned board games!
My favourite are Gobblet, Cranium, and probably classic Monopoly.
Popularity: 26% [?]
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Tags: balderdash, board game, definition, entertainment, fun, games, word game
Toronto Twitterers Top Twittersphere
Dec 26, 2008 Customer Service, Digital Marketing & Metrics, Microblogging, Social Media, social networks
Are you a Twitterer who Tweets from Toronto? If so, you top the Twittersphere according to a recent study called the State of the Twittersphere by Hubspot.
The report uses data from Hubspots Twitter Grader which has graded information on over 500,000 Twitter profiles as of November 2008. The report also used data from Compete.com and Alexa.com.
Twitter doesn’t require that its users give exact location in the “location field” so many people put Canada, or US or USA, or Toronto (even if they live in Mississauga, Oshawa or Hamilton). Hubspot report therefore lists the top 30 “phrases” that appear in the location field. But that said “Toronto” appears pretty high on the list (as does Canada!)
London
USA
San Francisco
New York
Chicago
Los Angeles
California
Toronto
Austin, TX
New York, NY
NYC
San Francisco, CA
Canada
Texas
Atlanta, GA
Washington, DC
UK
Los Angeles, CA
Chicago, IL
Not surprising, I suppose, since Canadian’s have been early and eager to engage in social networks. According to The Meaning of Web blog Canada has the most users outside of the United States, at more than 10.6 million (numbers taken from Facebook’s Ad Network). And, numbers given on SEO & Web Marketing News North indicate nearly 30% of Ontario’s population have a Facebook profile. In May 2007, Statistics Canada speculated that in the span of the previous nine months the site had grown to one in ten Canadian Internet users having a profile on Facebook. Canadians love the social web.
Other interesting stats from the study:
- 70% of Twitter users joined in 2008
- An estimated 5-10 thousand new accounts are opened per day
- 35% of Twitter users have 10 or fewer followers
- 9% of Twitter users follow no one at all
- Twitter has about 4-5 million users, about 30% are relatively new or unengaged users
- Traffic has grown over 600% in the past 12 months (Compete.com)
- Twitter.com became one of the top 1,000 websites by traffic in May 2008 (Alexa.com)
Many companies are using it as a customer service tool, to promote products, and promotions, and often simply to broadcast marketing messages. Some are more successful than others. (Check out my post on Some Dos and Dont’s of Corporate Tweeting)
So, given the popularity of Twitter are you Tweeting? Is your company? Why or why not?
As of yet it is unknown how Twitter will monetize (is that truly a word?) its service. Investors don’t seem concerned, apparently the numbers of members (and engagement) is enough to keep them investing millions.
Popularity: 17% [?]
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Tags: canada, facebook, hubspot, Microblogging, state of twiiter, stats, toronto, twiiter
Tracking Santa: Experiential Marketing from NORAD
Dec 24, 2008 Family and Friends, PR
You aren’t tired of my Holiday posts are you?
There have been a few I admit:
- Elf Yourself and Portable North
- Getting Me a New Wardrobe this Christmas
- Happy Hanukkah
- Christmas Cookies
I guess the holidays’ (Hanukkah and Christmas for my family) are on my mind! Today we wait for Santa. I remember when I was younger we would watch the news after dinner on Christmas Eve, and they would “track Santa”. They would show maps from NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) indicating the location of Santa at that exact moment. It was quite exciting. So I looked it up for my three year-old.
NORAD of course is on the web with its Santa Tracker. No need to wait for the news any more! Currently Santa is in China (Map powered by Google) You can even see a video of him leaving the North Pole this year on YouTube. Yeah, for Social Media Santa! 
Did you ever wonder why Norad Tracks Santa? It is an interesting story :
1955 Sears ran an advertisement with a number to call Santa. Only problem is they forget to review the ad apparently and the number was printed incorrectly. Instead the number put kids through to NORAD’s predecesser Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD)…and the Commander in Chief no less! The Director at the time had his staff check the radar for Santa, and gave the updates to the children calling for Santa Claus. Today they have volunteers who answer emails, phone calls and of course help to track Saint Nick.
NORAD’s day job: They are the bi-national U.S.-Canadian military organization responsible for the aerospace and maritime defense of the United States and Canada. NORAD provides advanced warning of impending missile and air attack against its member nations, safeguards the air sovereignty of North America, and maintains airborne forces for defense against attack.
Santa Tracker seems a brilliant PR play…however accidental. I wonder if this is one of the early examples of Experiential Marketing?
More on Santa and PR: Check out Dave Fleet’s humourous post “If I Were Santa’s Pubic Relations Guy” where Dave comes up with some PR 2.0 ideas for Mr. Claus and his North Pole crew. (Note: Read the comments too I added a few ideas!)
Popularity: 10% [?]
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Tags: experiential marketing, holidays, norad, PR, santa, santa tracker
