Ian M Rountree

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Search Results for: tweet team

Modern Earth Tweeting the QNet Conference May 4th

April 27, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

I’ll be part of the Modern Earth Tweet Team attending the Manitoba Quality Network Excellence Conference this time next week.

As we’ve done at other events, Modern Earth Web Design is deploying half a dozen Earthlings to platform journalism at the conference under the hashtag #qnet2011. We’re covering the entire day, beginning with the keynote presentation by (OH MY GOSH!) Mitch Joel!

See the blog post on the Modern Earth Blog for more details, or register for the conference if you’ll be in the city that day!

Filed Under: Event Notices Tagged With: attending, conferences, events, mitch joel, platform journalism, tweet team

#TEDxMB un-Wrap-Up

February 16, 2011 by Ian 2 Comments

I had the extreme honour of being part of the Modern Earth Tweet Team covering TEDx Manitoba yesterday – Susan Hurrell and I spent 12 hours yesterday with our duelling laptops doing the platform journalism on Twitter for the event.

Susan Hurrell and Ian M Rountree - Modern Earth Web Design Tweet Team - TEDxManitoba
Susan Hurrell and Ian M Rountree – Modern Earth Web Design Tweet Team – TEDxManitoba

But, I can’t talk about it. Not properly. Not yet. My head is still swimming a bit, from lack of sleep, 12 hours of extreme Twitter goodness, and a number of fantastic talks.

If you want to get a sense of how it went, though…

The Modern Earth Facebook page has some pictures from the event in a #TEDxMB Photo Album.

Check out the What The Hashtag stats and see the transcript. We owned the trends in Manitoba, were number 2 in Canada for the majority of the day, and got into the top 40 trends in Canada according to Trendsmap. More than 1200 tweets were sent with the tag #TEDxMB on the day, from more than 200 participants, from 5 countries on 4 continents. We’ve got tweets from Canada, the US, Hong Kong, Ghana, and Guatemala.

To put that in perspective, that’s fully one third of this week’s #blogchat activity, or two #tweetdiners, with a very niche audience, a closed attendance list, and a livestream. Very little non-new-media promotion before the event, and mostly guidance from the Tweet Team and those on the volunteer crew who were digging in as well. Not too shabby.

The Winnipeg Free Press’ Melissa Martin wrote up a pair of great recaps, as well as an article about “Fast Flying Ideas at Conference” relating the nature of the event’s speed.

UPDATE: I don’t know how I forgot to mention, but I also met Kevin Hnatiuk, Leanne Havelock, Lisa MacKenzie, Ryan Caligiuri, Matt Shepherd, Kevin Glasier and Erica Glasier at the event, and made a point of saying hi to David Pensato again – all of whom I follow and most of whom I’ve spoken to for some time on Twitter. I’ve met many people I’ve known online before, but never so many at a single event.

I’ll say more when I can. Promise.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: #blogchat, #tedxmb, event notes, events, journalism, modern earth, new media, notes from, platform journalism, tweet team, work

Attending the Manitoba Business Awards

November 3, 2010 by Ian Leave a Comment

Modern Earth will be tweeting from the Manitoba Business Awards tonight!

A team of Earthlings will be in attendance, and the Modern Earth blog will have a recap up later this week.

If you’re on Twitter and/or attending the event, keep an eye on #mbbizawards to follow along with the event as it happens!

Here’s the press release from the Manitoba Chamber earlier this week: “Manitoba Chambers of Commerce and Modern Earth Web Design Join Forces to Tweet during Business Awards“

Filed Under: Event Notices Tagged With: event coverage, platform journalism, presence media, tweet team, twitter

The Rise of Presence Media

April 8, 2010 by Ian 2 Comments

Valentine rose on flickrForget the real-time web, we’re skipping that entirely.

Soon, the idea of presence will become a major part of how we view communication. How do I know? Because it’s everywhere – and that’s part of the point, a big part of the mystique.

How do I know this? Because humans always outpace. We’re wired for it. No matter what’s going on, we sprint ahead, finding ways not just to cut corners and shorten process, but to make things efficient, usable, simple to communicate. As much as complexity is a necessary part of societal growth, to a point, so is precision of communication. And because precision and presence playu so nicely together, we have a natural tendancy to want face-to-face contact with our information.

The Real-Time Web is here. Like it or not, someone well enough equipped can find out just about anything with not a lot of lag time. We search, we aggregate, we syndicate and broadcast. Some of us even publish from our keyboards directly. Why? We want to connect. We’ve talked about connection, right? It’s fairly important.

One of the biggest components of connection is presence.

Amber Naslund sparked this with a post about presence journalism and immediacy that made a lot of sense – and as I responded, younger generations (younger then me anyway, being late Gen X, early Gen Y) believe rightly that without immediacy, media is uninspiring. Their worlds have never lacked the communication capacilities we now begin to take for granted.

Amber’s not alone – Jay Rosen made a comment about CNN preserving the View From Nowhere, and how that’s becoming a failing part of their business by limiting their journalistic capabilities. I agree wholeheartedly. Think back to the first time you saw a local reporter “On location” for a national news team. Did the story hit home a little more? Did it make more sense, even if it wasn’t in your back yard, to have someone intimately involved in the details reporting them?

You bet your sweet Tweets it does.

Jay and Amber were talking about reporting, but I think this argument has to extend to all manner of human communication on the web. Julien Smith just dropped a post entitled “The End of Bookstores” which talks about the immediacy of technology adoption, specifically comparing how long it takes to get a book on your Kindle or iPad, compared to the time it takes out of your day to hit the local Chapters or Borders for the same piece of text. The costs differ, not just in dollars, but in time. Yes, local bookstores have people, and a sense of community, but that’s a poor tradeoff for some people.

Presence nullifies a lot of arguments.

Did Tiamamen Square happened? If they’d had Foursquare, there would be proof beyond cover-up. Was there a second shooter on the grassy knoll? Geolocation and Twitter could have solved that one easily. In a lot of cases where details are the difference between a headline and a news phenomenon, current and emerging technologies change not only the information that’s reported, but the way it’s reported.

Look at the Iran elections where Twitter broke before CNN did. Trouble in India. The last three earthquakes. Do you remember the headlines? Probably not, as catchy as they certainly would have been. But I bet if you think you’d be able to remember what the first tweet was, or who it came from.

Presence media goes beyond making yourself available to others; it makes others available to you. Are you going to wait for a life-and-death situation before you make yourself aware and involved?

Photo by alicepopkorn

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: amber naslund, jay rosen, journalism, julien smith, presence, presence media, real-time web, speculation, the future

Hack Analytics, A Participants’ Guide

January 15, 2010 by Ian 8 Comments

World's longest suspension bridge, in Hyogo on flickrSo you’re a blogger! Good for you. You’re successful, and you’re interested in staying that way. Why else would you be here? You probably know your formula already, you know when you’re posting and when it’s effective. You’ve got your theme set up and it looks awesome, your ads are placed in all the best places… But how can you be sure exactly how efficient your posts are?

The dreaded numbers. Analytics.

Numbers can be depressing sometimes. They’re not consistent, they fluctuate, and if you don’t know what to look for, anything but a nice clean hockey-stick shaped graph in your visits and pageviews can look discouraging, or worse, stagnant.

When was the last time you looked up from your subject material to make sure people were reading?

I mean it. Anyone who’s managed to make a name for themselves as a blogger likely stopped paying certain kinds of attention to numbers long ago, because it becomes inherent in what we do. We make sure that, in order to keep up the quality of our writing, we watch the reactions we get from certain pieces, certain subjects and certain approaches, in order that we don’t slip.

But what about those of us who aren’t so good with tracking? When was the last time you looked at the visitors report on Google Analytics, or whichever other package you’re using to listen to your site, and had a small stroke because traffic had dipped for a day or two, just when you thought you were posting your best stuff this month?

Numbers can be the bane of your existence if you let them. Seeing any dips can be very discouraging. But it doesn’t have to be so hard. I’ve spoken before about using some free tools and easy metrics to develop a routine around analytics – especially when you’re just getting your steam going – to figure out where all that traffic is going when the dips appear, and why it’s just not that big a deal.

Do you know where your traffic comes from?

FeedBurner isn’t much on metrics – those subscriber counts and reach numbers can get a bit overly vague, especially to the untrained. But are you making sure you’re making the most of your use of services like this? You could, after all, just leave your feed at your own site, and not route it through a service like FeedBurner. But why wouldn’t you, when its so easy to set up? It can also provide a bit of encouragement when you’re looking at your numbers.

Sometimes page view counts dip. Do you look to other places on those days? FeedBurner, right on its dashboard for your site, has an “Uncommon Uses” button. There aren’t usually any uncommon uses to be had, but this page will show you how many exact accesses of your feed have been made in the day. Often, on days when your page views counts are down, the Feed Uses numbers are up. People are using aggregators or readers like Google Reader of Viigo to access your site. They haven’t abandoned you, trust me! What this means is not down traffic, it usually means down new traffic instead. If that’s the case, you might want to look at how available you’re making yourself outside the echo chamber of your own blog.

Social Media is a time sink, but it has massive value if used with intention.

We can’t all be hyperactive tweeters. But, if we’re careful, we can let Twitter do a lot of work for us. Fully one third of my traffic comes from Twitter referrals, and I usually never tweet about a story more than twice. You don’t want to sound like a douche, right? But every so often, depending what I’m writing about, I’ll see a massive spike in Twitter traffic. What happened? Someone with a bigger following passed on a post. But how do you know when this happens?

Bit.ly is your best friend.

One of the brilliant things about some URL shortening services is that they give you simple, off the cuff metrics to work with. If you tweet a blog post using Bit.ly for example, within seconds you can see how many people have clicked on it, and you’ll see continual running numbers appear as it goes. Bit.ly also aggregates all of the links generated through it, and shows you not only how many people clicked on your link, but also the total clicks, as well as who’s tweeting about that aggregated link! Retweets, new engagements, sporadic short comments – all of which would normally never make it to your blog, show up in near real time on the info pages for your links. All you have to do is go to your account, or add a + to the end of any given bit.ly link to see all the info made public about how that link has performed.  If you want a way to get this stuff off to your blog to use as social proof, you can do that too.

Disq.us is your best friend’s wing man.

There isn’t a huge amount of community to be had just around commenting, but Disq.us does this fairly well; in addition to providing a socialized segment for comments (on which more below) Disq.us will aggregate Tweets and other reactions to your posts and drop them into a very nice looking segment below the comments. It separates and gives semantic meaning to comments made about your blog, even providing shortened URLs as cited in these reactions. This is of huge benefit when you’re trying to figure out the path of sharing. Even if you only see one referrer – say Twitter, FriendFeed or Facebook, depending on your chosen venue for the original share – having the reactions cleanly collated has value lots of people miss.

Disq.us also has the side effect of exposing you to others, if you let it.

I’ve been using Disq.us for less than six months on my blog. While it doesn’t do too much for the blog itself – you can style your comments section however you want, and a lot of the things Disq.us does are homogenous – it does provide some interesting long tail benefits. For example, any registered Disq.us user who comments on your site gets a bit more visibility, because their profiles are viewable, comment counts in some cases, and some other contact information. I’ve made a number of good connections with people through their Disq.us profiles, and found a lot of good blogs to read as well. This is beneficial because, as we all know, commenting on others’ blogs builds great community, is good for your link juice, and ensures that you get involved outside your own echo chamber.

Not so threatening, is it?

Socializing your blog is a big deal if you want more traffic. Whether you’re a big name in the self-publishing world, or the tiniest of niche bloggers, traffic is paramount. But in order to make sure you’re focusing your efforts in the right arenas, you have to pay more attention than just looking at pages viewed and revenue earned. It doesn’t just come down to volume. If you really want to make the most of your efforts, learning to make use of small, fast tools to measure efficiency can make a big difference in the impact of every post you publish.

Photo by Ionusho.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: analytics, bitly, disqus, disqus is your wing man, encouragement, feedburner, google analytics, internet, social media, success, the-web, twitter

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