Ian M Rountree

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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

Notes From #tweetdiner – Authenticity vs Transparency Death Match

February 12, 2011 by Ian 2 Comments

#tweetdiner - Good food. Good advice. Goats.I co-hosted #tweetdiner tonight!

Well, actually, was deputized to host, and the awesome @MyAgenda stepped up to the plate as well.

For those unaware, #tweetdiner is a weekly twitter chat originated by Marjorie Clayman (@MargieClayman) and Stanford Smith (@pushingsocial), which explores how people get into online community platforms, what they can do to make their experience better, and how we can all get the most out of what we do online.

First, some resources:

Dawn Westerberg published some tps for Twitter beginners, one of which was 7 reasons to attend #tweetdiner.

Russell Faust retweeted an article originally shared by Mark Ragan – 10 phrases that mean your blog post is worthless – which decries the use of the term authenticity.

during the chat, @RickCaffienated shared a link to his blog, about dealing with crises.

So what’s the beef?

We talked about authenticity and how it meets transparency, almost entirely because of this article from Margie which asks, in a nutshell, if someone does you a favour… How likely are you to criticize their future work, even if they jump the shark?

It’s an important question. There’s also a really important breakdown of how these things are most often seen online, in their mediatrope froms:

Transparency: Tweets about ham sandwiches and pet bowel activity. See also; [Too Much Information]

Authenticity: The tone by which you transmit your aim to others. See also; [Blogger’s Voice], [Personal Brand] and [Good Job Breaking It, Blogger]

What’s interesting about this is that transparency is almost never equated with letting people know that you’re an affiliate for a program, or that someone you mention is a client or employer. It’s also almost never measured against your authenticity – in the way that Margie says in her article. What’s missing from this conversation?

The idea of integrity, character, tact, and social grace.

Yes. I like transparency to some degree. But I almost stopped listening to Media Hacks when, in one episode, Chris Brogan actually left the podcast by proclamation of bowel movement. I kid you not.

And now the meat!

There were a lot of noteable notes from the chat, as always. Some of them:

@BrandSprouts: I think if you have to work hard to be authentic, you’re probably not. #tweetdiner

@RickCaffienated: my problem is that everyone assumes you’re NOT authentic/transparent in given circumstances and that assumption to me smacks of being inauthentic as well. #butthatsjustme #tweetdiner

@DWesterberg: Authenticity means I’ve lost some, won some – but probably won and lost the right ones #tweetdiner

@jaclynmullen: I think integrity is a huge determining factor for authenticity. It can also be a double edge sword. On the one hand, if you provide full disclosure & promote a product that you may be vested in, you have integrity, right? But when we know someone may have received consideration to review a product, how much do we trust their review?

We all stumbled around the same elephant (as Rick put it) for some time; authenticity is a personal trait, not a verb, and transparency seems to be the means by which we express that authenticity.

Integrity can be really easily defined as consistent authenticity over a long period of time; even as applies to social media and online communications.

The bottom line.

There was kerfuffle in the US last year when a bill passed requiring affiliation and sponsorships to be listed on blogs. That changed some of the landscape of disclosure on the web, and led in part to the discussion we had tonight. The nature of authenticity and transparency is tricky, especially as applies to the pseudo-anonymous web. Even when we’re ourselves, we’re not all of ourselves all the time.

You don’t need to share everything. But you do need to share the things that matter – like client relationships and perks – because failing to do so is is disingenuous. However, there’s a line to be drawn between enforcing openness at an uncomfortable level, and encouraging people to do the right thing.

We’re not going to get into the question of exactly what “the right thing” is tonight – ethics and morality on the web have to be another day entirely. Big, big can of worms there.

Last quote of the night:

@tsudo: Authenticity is the Aim. Transparency is part of the method. #tweetdiner

Fantastic stuff.

What are your thoughts on authenticity? Do you disclose everything, or are you cautious in your sharing? How do you think different levels of disclosure affect our integrity as people and publishers?

Find more information about #TweetDiner on What The Hashtag

Read the full conversation transcript here as well.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: digital body language, ettiquette, events, Marjorie Clayman, mediatropes, notes from, online, Pushing Social, Stanford Smith, tweetdiner, twitter

How To: Turn Your WordPress.org Blog Into An Event Manager

January 19, 2011 by Ian 2 Comments

If you spend any kind of time out in public, doing stuff, you’ll appreciate that keeping your calendar not only up to date, but accessible is important.

"Events, Places I'll Be" section in my blog's footer area
Simple, dynamic, maintainable

For example; I’ve been getting out and doing stuff more often lately (and this will continue in the future), and I wanted to display this information here on my site. for a while, I just edited text in my footer (pictured to the right) – but that’s not sustainable, really, and not efficient.

Then, I read this tutorial from Devin Price (@devinsays on Twitter), explaining how to build a Custom Post Type into WordPress 3.0 to handle events. Perfect!

Here’s how it works, in short. You’re going to need a little knowledge of WordPress theme development to get this done – or have access to someone who knows. I’d call this a “intermediate” difficulty task – you need to know your way around, but don’t need to know too much.

It all hinges around code in two files (and one image for nice display). I’ve included a download link at the end of this post.

The code in the events-function.php file needs to be added to your WordPress theme’s functions.php file. Here’s what it does:

  • Adds a custom post type called “Events” to your WordPress backend.
  • Changes some of the admin info within the post editor to better suite the Events post type
  • Modified WordPress defaults so that posts in the future (scheduled posts) can be displayed
  • Note: You, or whoever is doing this adjustment for you, will have to modify the path to the calendar-icon.gif file, otherwise it won’t appear.

The code in the events-display.php file can be added to your theme wherever you want to display your events. As it’s set up now, it does the following:

  • Grabs the four Events with the highest date numbers (most recent or farthest in the future)
  • Displays the date and the content of the Events entry
  • Note: This code comes right out of my theme, you’ll need to style the Events area to suit your own site.

That’s it for theme modification – not terribly difficult at all. But here’s where it gets really interesting.

Editorial Calendar displaying Events post type in WordPress backend
Look at that! There's my next event!

Some WordPress plugins to amazing things on their own – and some of them jump through some really awesome hoops at unexpected times.

Install the Editorial Calendar plugin for WordPress – this helps schedule posts, and normally lets you keep a better handle on your posting schedule. However, with the Events post type set up, something interesting happens. Because we’ve set the Events post type to “post” – the Editorial Calendar plugin fires for our Events!

The result of having both the Events post type – whether you display your events or not – and the Editorial Calendar plugin amounts to a super-simple, portable, personal event organizer.

There’s a lot of opportunity to expand on this which I’ve intentionally not taken – changing the display code to show the next three events, for example (for people with many more events than me), or setting up a taxonomy to display only events labelled “Public” on the blog, and keep “Private” appointments from showing up. One could even build an entire events calendar page template, to do the job the Editorial Calendar plugin does in the back end, and let site visitors see all your events, past and future.

I stopped where I did with my work on this because, for now, this does exactly what I wanted it to. What else would you add to this?

Download the code (and the image) – and make sure you give @devinsays a shout-out for the handy stuff!

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy Tagged With: Blogging, calendars, events, hacking, platform building, programming, wordpress

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