Ian M Rountree

Copywriter, Project Manager, Digital Marketing

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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

Are People Actually Searching for Buzzwords?

January 8, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

Ever worry that Twitter is overtaking the blogosphere?

Well, it is. If you look at Google Trends and compare “blog” with “twitter” for search (like the screenshot below) you may think that Twitter has indeed taken over the search volume. However, looking at the numbers with a little more scrutiny, it’s entirely possible that searches containing “blog” are just as strong as it ever was, with Twitter accounting for more of the remaining available search statistics. This is probably a case of “everything is with, not instead of” (hat tip to Mitch Joel for that phrase).

Google Trends - Comparing Blog to twitter - Screenshot taken January 8th, 2011
Google Trends - Comparing Blog to twitter - Screenshot taken January 8th, 2011

Concerned that we’re too worried over Return On Investment?

This time last year, “Social Media ROI” was a massive idea – the concept of measuring the business value of human interaction is very appealing. but – was this because social media was on the rise? Or because people were more concerned with ROI itself?

Again, Trends gives us what we needed here – comparing Google Trends for “social media” with “roi” for search terms shows us that the latter saw very little overall fluctuation; our awareness of all things social media, however, increased very strongly. This of course must include ROI, as the social media ideal began to enter the business world.

Google Trends - Social Media compared to ROI - screenshot taken January 8th, 2011
Google Trends - Social Media compared to ROI - screenshot taken January 8th, 2011

It’s good to be aware of trends – but it’s also important that trends get some perspective. Scale, volume, and capacity don’t always mean the same things.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: analytics, blog measurement, Blogging, buzzwords, google trends, hack analytics, mitch joel, never mind the buzzwords, perspective, roi, social media, statistics, twitter

Book Review For A Cause – Six Pixels of Separation

February 3, 2010 by Ian 13 Comments

Well hey there, this is book review number three on IanMRountree.com, and it also happens to be Book Review For A Cause number one – so let’s go!

At the start of every interview, Mitch Joel drops the line “So who are you and what do you do?” It seems like a simple question, but as the channels Mitch talks about in the book become increasingly important, formulating an answer to “Who are you and what do you do” is swiftly turning into a complex proposal.

The point of this post is two fold. First, it’s a video book review for Mitch’s book, Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. Second, drawing from the inspiration of Joseph Jaffe and Mitch Joel, it’s also the announcement of a benefit auction for Haiti Relief. So, first the video, then the explanation of the auction.

If you look really carefully you can see the next two books I’ll be reading on the shelf behind me.

Now for the fun part!

In the spirit of Joseph Jaffe and Mitch Joel’s Keynote for a Cause auctions, I’ve decided to auction off my copy of Six Pixels of Separation, with the proceeds of the auction going to the Red Cross for Haiti relief.

So here’s how this works.

The winner of this auction gets the copy of Six Pixels of Separation I got for Christmas this year – with my name in the top corner of the inside cover (as shown in the video) and a shiny little card they can show off telling people how they came across the book.

If you’re interested in placing a bid, email me at “irountree” at gmail dot com.

I’m placing a reserve of $100 on this auction $35 (what I paid at McNally Robinson) because I want to make a splash. Don’t dally, I’m closing the bids on February 7th at midnight, central time when the book moves! No more deadline; until the donation is made. SOLD! See below!

Fine print? I suppose there must be some.

I’m recouping no costs from this; the book was a gift, so it will remain so. You don’t even have to send me the money – PayPall fees aren’t worth it. Make a donation to any Haiti-related charity you feel will do the best work, and email me the proof along with your address, and the book goes in the mail the following business day.(Updated Feb 6th, 2010)

Also, if once you’ve read the book, you find you’d like to do the same thing with the wood souvenir, be my guest – I’d encourage you to write a similar auction note, and sign your name in the cover to keep the chain of contribution going.

Finally, a Challenge!

If you’re a voracious reader, and have a mind to review books and share more than a few words about them, I challenge you to do the same. It doesn’t have to be for Haiti relief – further instances of this kind of review from me will be for other causes. Just keep the ripples moving forward, in every channel available.

Everyone is connected. Connect your cause to everyone.

Update – March 18th, 2010 – The book sold! A (currently) anonymous bidder finally took the book off my hands yesterday – we have success!

Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone.

Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone.<img src=”http://www.assoc-amazon.ca/e/ir?t=thewinofwaxpr-20&l=as2&o=15&a=0446548235″ width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″ alt=”” style=”border:none !important; margin:0px !important;” />

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: auction, book review, book review for a cause, challenge, haiti relief, joseph jaffe, mitch joel, video review

What is Marketing in 2010? (or) How Meta Can You Get-a?

January 30, 2010 by Ian 5 Comments

I’m still trying to figure this out. I don’t have a marketing background, a technology background, or even a business background. I have a sales background – I’ve been dealing with people, confronting their hangups and counselling them through difficult decisions for most of my life. Solving problems for people is a part of my make-up, a core piece of who I am. When people ask what I do at work, it’s difficult for me to admit I fall into the category of a retailer, or even a salesperson. Retailing and sales are related to marketing, certainly, but it’s more of a kissing cousins relationship than a fraternal twins relationship. The perception, however, is the same of all three; high pressure pitches, manufacturing concept whenever we’re not begging for coerced permission.

That’s not my process. I’m a facilitator. I build a bank of information, contacts and products and then I get people what they need.

So when I see companies purporting to do the same thing I do (whether in the same space or not), but failing terribly at communicating this, I get a bit frustrated. We all get a little freakedout by businesses behaving badly, even people pretending to be businesses, and its worse when I see it locally. Part of this, I’m aware, comes form my lack of understanding of the space – sales is as different from retailing as it is from marketing, after all, and with so many self-declaring experts around, it’s growing increasingly hard to tell who’s legitimate and who’s not.

Is it positioning, or is it posturing?

The first important question to ask if you’re trying to figure out anything about how someone’s acting is whether they’ve got something real backing them or not. Snake oil salesmen talk a certain way, dyed in the wool producers speak an entirely different language. Part of my job as a facilitator is to learn to speak every language there is, and communicate my bank of options to whomever I speak with in a way that matches their understanding and perspective. Still, it gets really easy to tell when someone wants a massive television because they think it’s going to be some kind of social proof for them, or when another person wants the same television because they sit ten feet back and have poor eye sight.

What does this have to do with marketing?

As I understand it, marketing is sales on a macro level. For decades, it’s been a disconnected medium, broadcast and wait. Over the last few years, the gap between people and their brands has been shrinking at an increasing pace, and the process is leaving a lot of brands frightened, stiffening like deer in the headlights of an oncoming locomotive. People are getting bigger than their own skins, and brands are getting smaller as their mass media efforts take more and more of a back seat roll in the sales and business growth cycle. Will these channels ever disappear? Not likely. But we’re certainly seeing other avenues become far more measurable, effective, and ubiquitous. Why? Because everyone’s participating. People are more interested when they can serve themselves.

Remaining Meta Together.

There’s a power to celebrity that’s universally enticing. We all like to escape, to believe we’re kings and queens. And when we all have the ability to move so far beyond facilities served by others – Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and so on – and build our own platforms, our own brands, and do our own marketing… Well, that’s even more exciting than following celebrity, it’s becoming celebrity. Creating these self-legitimizing personal platforms creates a kind of power for us we could never have had before, and it’s one that corporations aren’t yet equipped to process.

Because they can’t process it, the ball is in the court of anyone who can build that personal brand, and get just savvy enough to fake importance without looking too much like they’re posturing. It’s mostly a bluff. But it’s creating a brilliant, and very different skill set for those willing to explore the space with real curiosity, genuine interest, and an eye toward how the new world of ubiquitous, instant, and most interestingly thorough information exchange.

The place of passion in the land of liars.

As part of a promotion for The Art of Marketing, Mitch Joel ran a contest on his blog, asking for people to define marketing in 2010. Naturally, I tried to weigh in – but on further inspection, I think my answer was a little lacking. It felt like posturing, more than positioning. Mitch was asking about passion, drive, and innovation. Listening in on new channels, and deciphering their value is nothing new. There’s no innovation there. Is it necessary? Yes, absolutely. But it’s also done. Listening at the point of need is an integral part of what any business should be doing. Defining and recognizing new channels is nothing more than adding new sets of ears.

What is Marketing in 2010?

The short answer? I have no idea. So far, it doesn’t seem much different than marketing in 2009. Or sales in 2009, or 2008. What’s different isn’t part of what I’m doing yet. It’s nothing I can, in my daily work, do differently to increase my utility to others, their utility to each other, or my ability to grow the business I’m involved in.

The long answer? A lot more complicated. Whatever marketing in 2010 is, I’d love to find out. Because with all this attention and excitement going into it, I’m sure curious.

Wouldn’t you be?

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: art of marketing, be a facilitator, embarassingly meta, liars, market-forces, marketing, marketing in 2010, mitch joel, passion, retail, sales

Anti-Curating the iPad Launch

January 27, 2010 by Ian 20 Comments

Apple iPad on flickrThe bomb dropped this morning while I was out shopping for groceries. It’s not that I didn’t know apple was hosting an event today, I just didn’t care. With Robert Scoble on the scene to do what he does best and aggregate/contextualize and curate, nothing said of the countless blogs and other media outlets covering it as if it were, in Mitch Joel’s words, the MosesTablet, successor to the JesusPhone.

I’m not really down on the iPad, despite its stupid name, but I had better things to do today than play sheepdog with the rest of the blogging world. Instead, I’m going to tell you what I think of the iPad with only the input of my own gadget sense (Why, Read The Manual! style, that is) and armed only by the information available at Apple’s official page on its site for the iPad.

This is not a preview. This is what I’d tell you if you came to buy this from me when it launched, 60 days from now.

I don’t usually perform exegesis on my presentation style, but now’s a good time for a demonstration, because I think it’s the only fair way I can do this with the information I’ve got.

I asked for some non-news, non-curation related perspective about the iPad on twitter. @StevenHodson replied with “- it’s a nice toy .. nothing much more than that .. it definitely isn’t the savior of old media regardless of the hype.” I agree with that assessment, with a few provisos. I mentioned I expect to see a more than 10% return rate at the store for the iPad when it launches, @ChrisDca replied “Couldn’t agree more. People will take it home, play with it for a week and get bored quickly.” – A fair assessment.

I’ll have to explain first what I think the iPad is for, and what people probably think it’s for. This is always the difference between buying in, and returning a product.

We’re not seeing a reinvention of anything here; we’re seeing what Apple has proven themselves best at, which is a partial conversion between a number of devices. Obviously, the UI is designed with the iPhone and iPod Touch in mind, clearly well beefed up, and geared toward the app store. this is excellent because it’s a familiar platform, by now, and the concept is firmly set in people’s minds. Also, for those of us who are Windows junkies, the iPhone OS means we’re not really adopting Apple’s OS – this may seem trivial, but it’s a big deal. Not having to learn a new operating system accounts for nearly a third of the “don’t really want it” reactions for new computer buyers. We saw this with netbooks – now we have Windows 7 on them.

It’s possible for the iPad to win. Just less likely than the hype presupposes.

What the iPad is going to be great at is – you guessed it – exactly what the devices it emulates are. Like an iPod touch, it’ll have apps. Like a Netbook, it will be for portable internet. Like a Kindle, it will have eBooks, which may be the real killer app on the iPad. We’ll see.

The key here is that you have to actually be able to use the device. It’s not a netbook, and even with the keyboard attachment you can get, using it like a small laptop is a failing idea because there’s no current office app. Microsoft isn’t about to get OfficePod approved, and Google is likely focusing on its web-based If that changes, this application for the device changes.

It’s also not an iPod. As much as the possible top end of 64gb suggests that large amounts of music storage is possible, and matches the current iPod Touch and iPhone top end limits, the device itself is so multipurpose that using it exclusively as a music machine is broken. I ran into this when I bought my iPod Touch 8gb when they first launched. I swiftly had more apps and cache than music, which annoyed me. More memory is good, but people will have to be careful with their acquisition of junk apps. Until Apple works out expandable memory and partitioning, this will be a recurring issue for people less focused on curation of their libraries.

The iPad is also not strictly an eBook reader, though it will be easier to conquer this market than people expect. Where Apple has the real possibility to shine here is academia. Imagining a good iBook app is easy. Imagining the costs of college text books being replaced with the one-time cost of an iPad when you enroll to a high end school, and the further, far less drastic costs of textbooks as you take on courses is a stretch – but a very small one, assuming Apple jumps on the idea. Books are so thoroughly ubiquitous, even in today’s less-than-focused literacy culture, that really crushing the market is a simple prospect. People love to read. What they hate is cumbersome books and costly acquisition and maintainence. The iPad avoids both of these issues just like other eBook readers.

Not too many people will see the possibilities this way.

I’m betting a lot of the buying public will pick up an iPad and, as @ChrisDca’s tweet suggests, get bored within the week. Especially if they’re already exposed to iPod Touch and iPhones. It’s just a bigger screen for the same functions, with some new accessories, which are always a money suck. It’s also rather big for an iPod, which is how many people will see it, which makes jacking in your headphones and slapping this in a pocket a non-option.

It’s not a phone either. Perhaps the 3G model will have Skype, or somesuch, but that’s still not a universal fix. The iPad is not an all-around device. It’s not for gaming either. Much as I can imagine many rounds of Tap Tap Revenge being played, and racing games, and tower defense games on its massive screen being a huge upgrade from the iPhone experience of these games, there’s no inherent Flash support for now, and certainly no way to install non-App store programs. It’s a web productivity tool.

It’s also NOT a computer. Much as Apple hypes the micro-computer aspect of their portable devices, the iPad still runs on the iPhone OS. Local storage is not indicated, there are no USB plugs, card readers built in, or any other kind of file system accesses. This is a closed system running entirely on web access for its functionality.

But there’s potential here. Right? real potential.

Wait. You know what this reminds me of? A closed system, running entirely on the web. Could it be that Apple is going after ChromeOS with their own device? Now that could be an effective battle. Where Android is battling the iPhone in the smartphone market, the iPad seems, on its face, directed very much at the possibility of a web-computer culture.

I can see the productivity here. Bloggers, citizen journalists, any species of web native, will all see the potential here to become a very good access point. Not a toy, an access point to information, to the sites they follow, their own personal magazine daily, hourly, instantly. Both the iPad with its current iteration (because we all know this is only version one) and the promise of ChromeOS tablet and netbook computers foretell the possibilities that cloud-based operation holds. It’s a dream made of pipes, a series of tubes really – wait, that’s someone else’s analogy.

So what’s the bottom line?

No one is getting everything they wanted with this device. Few people are getting what they expected. If I had planned on buying one as it was hyped before the announcement, I would be disappointed with the run down I’ve seen so far, and likely begin to look elsewhere. However, enough people will get what they’re looking for that this will not fail as a product.

A caution, though, to people who have watched Apple’s trajectory in the past and are waiting until version two if the iPad. When not enough people adopt something early, companies like Apple don’t get enough feedback. Which means that version two will never come, or will not be enough improved over version one to merit the wait. If this looks at all like something that will do any version of what you want, go buy one. don’t be afraid to return it, just make sure you use the heck out of it (kindly) in the first week to know whether it really is worth your dollars.

You have 60 days to decide whether or not to camp out. I’m not getting out my sleeping bag, but if I get the opportunity to own one of these, I’m not liable to pass it up either. There’s no jury to be out or in.

I’m predicting a 15% return rate for the early adopters – high, considering between 8% and 10% returns on most consumer electronics.

Photo by d!zzy.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: anti-curation, ChrisD.ca, high return rate, iBook, iPad, iphone, iPod Touch, JesusPhone, Jobs, mitch joel, MosesTablet, preview, review, Steven Hodson

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