The next step in Social Signal’s evolution

by | Dec 7, 2009 | Social Signal

Since we launched in 2005 – a social media firm at a time when the term “social media” had yet to be coined – we’ve evolved constantly. No big surprise: this is a field that’s changing rapidly too.

Last month, we told you we were refocusing on capacity-building: helping other organizations, agencies and individuals to make the most of social media. We expected that would mean we’d support our clients through trainings and Concept Jam strategy workshops, while reaching a larger audience through blogging, cartooning and other media.

But no sooner had we decided to head in this new direction than Alex was approached about a position at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Emily Carr had received a major grant from NSERC to fund a new applied research on digital media, and they wanted someone with both an academic background in tech research, and real-world experience in the tech sector. For Alex, it was a perfect convergence of many of her passions… and the result is she’s the new Director of the Centre for Moving Interaction. (You can read her blog post about it here.)

Alex’s position at Emily Carr will bring a fresh dimension to her work as a tech capacity-builder, but Social Signal remains the hub for both of our efforts. I’ll be leading Social Signal and managing our day-to-day operations, client services and sales; Alex will partner with me to deliver Concept Jam workshops, group trainings and to provide advice on other projects as needed. Morgan will continue to support both of our work, working at Social Signal as our Operations Manager and as the new Partner Liaison at Emily Carr.

On projects that require additional expertise or more hands on deck, we’ll continue to draw on our great network of colleagues and partners.  Whether it’s Natasha’s technical prowess and project management chops, Aaron’s Drupal prowess and community animation skills, or Channing’s social media strategy insight and sharp eye for entrepreneurial opportunities for organizations, we like to know we can turn to the extended Social Signal family for a wide range of skills and expertise when the demand arises. (On that note, I’ve recently started working with David Eaves on our second engagement together. And between his grasp of negotiation strategy and keen understanding of organizational dynamics, he lends a whole new facet to what we can offer clients.)

We’re excited about this new structure, which focuses on assembling the best team for each specific project, as an extension of the trajectory we’ve been on for the past four years.When we first moved from doing all our development work in-house, to partnering with great developers like Affinity Bridge, Work at Play and Agentic, we discovered that we got better results – and the bandwidth to take on a broader range of projects – by selecting the best development team for each specific projects. Now we’ll have the flexibility to build the perfect all-around team as well.

Most crucially, this new structure gives Alex and me the flexibility to focus on the work we’re most passionate about: the teaching, brainstorming, training, inspiring and creating. Growing and running a company is its own full-time job, and as Social Signal has grown, that part of the job has become bigger and bigger. Instead, both Alex and I want to be working with our clients, their stakeholders, and the fascinating ideas, insights and discoveries that social media can offer. It’s been a great four years for Social Signal… and they’re just the beginning.

Attention, mobile shoppers

by | Dec 6, 2009 | Cartoons, Noise to Signal

Here’s one for all you holiday shoppers out there, fresh from ReadWriteWeb. I said over there that stores have good reason to worry about customers walking in clutching their iPhones, Androids and Blackberrys: Which means customers are bringing the competition...

Lessons from cartoon-blogging at the Real-time Web Summit

by | Dec 5, 2009 | Blogging, Conferences and workshops, Social Signal

October’s cartoon-blogging at the Real-Time Web Summit was a well-received experiment in innovative event coverage. The response was overwhelmingly positive, the Twitter stream showed people appreciated the added dimension to the event, and the organizers were more than pleased.

Now, two things:

First, the ReadWriteWeb report, The Real-Time Web and its Future, is now on sale. Edited by Marshall Kirkpatrick – one of the smartest guys I know – the report sells for $300, and distills interviews with more than 50 real-time web honchos along with insights from the over 300 folks who attended the summit. Plus there are 10 case studies, 20 profiles of leaders in the field… and a package deal on the report plus RWW’s guide to online community management. Details (and a free sample chapter) here.

And second, I just came across some notes I took on the experience, and I thought they’d be worth sharing. As with most experiments, this one held a few surprises for me – and some useful lessons. Since I want to offer cartoon-blogging as one of our Social Signal offerings, those lessons take on a special significance.

Here’s how it unfolded, and how I’ll fine-tune my approach next time:

  • I arrived with my MacBook Pro and Cintiq, and settled in at a table. Handy tip: bring a power bar. Conferences usually max out their electrical outlets, and being able to turn one outlet into many is a valued skill (and a not-bad way to make friends). I have a nice little Belkin that also happens to have USB ports, which can be handy if you want to charge, say, an iPhone. As it turned out, I needed to.
  • I had hoped to live-stream my cartooning on Justin.tv (one of the event sponsors). It worked fine on both the Vancouver International Airport and Holiday Inn wireless networks, neither of which was especially fast. But conference WiFi is notoriously unreliable, and bottlenecks and signal dropouts made live-streaming impossible. If live-streaming is anything other than a nice-to-have for you, make absolutely sure there’s a rock-solid Internet connection.
  • If WiFi fails, you’ll want to have a Plan B ready to go so you can at least upload your cartoons – or email them to comeone who can. In my case, it was tethering: connecting my computer to the net via my iPhone. (Given the cost of data roaming for this itinerant Canadian, my Plan B would also have involved a second mortgage and possibly a night job.) As it turned out, the wireless connection was reliable enough that I stuck with it.

Now, what I’ll do differently:

  • While the main room for the event had plenty of electrical outlets, the same wasn’t true for the breakout sessions. And for that matter, the Cintiq isn’t exactly a mobile device; picking up, moving and setting back up was a time-consuming effort. Next time I’ll take my sketchbook into breakout sessions.
  • My digital SLR broke down right before the conference, which meant that when I did use my sketchbook, I was shooting with my iPhone camera. That required a lot of Photoshop work… which I ended up abandoning: the quality just wasn’t good enough. Instead, I wound up redoing the sketchbook in the Cintiq, which doesn’t take as long as you might think but took longer than I’d have liked. Next time, if this comes up, I’ll do bigger, simpler drawings, and shoot them under bright, even light.
  • This was a day that relied largely on breakout groups rather than keynotes or panels. Since most of the ones I attended were facilitated rather than led, they were certainly interesting… but they lacked the narrative coherence that can make for good cartoons. Next time I’ll choose more carefully (admittedly, a little harder with the spontaneity of unconferences.) And when a session has me completely out of my technical depth (a debate over whether a particular app has a RESTful API is a solid clue), next time I’ll have the humility to smile and leave.
  • There were several sponsors there, and a few made it into one of the cartoons… but most didn’t. I wasn’t playing favourites, but I wouldn’t want to inadvertently put the conference convenors into an awkward position. Next time I’ll clarify with the organizers in advance how to handle sponsors.
  • I learned a lot about my own workflow in cranking out cartoons and getting them web-ready. I discovered, for example, that it’s a lot more efficient for me to work in batches: do several sketches, then polish them, and then fire them off. But I’d made some assumptions about how things would go on ReadWriteWeb’s end (through no fault of their’s) and when those proved to be mistaken, I had some scrambling to do. It all turned out fine, but next time I’ll make sure I understand clearly how the workflow will go, establish the organizers’ expectations for the pace and volume of cartoons, and make a personal plan for the day.
  • We could have done more to think about presentation: whether the cartoons would have a stream of their own, and where they’d live. As it turned out, they did perfectly well as part of the ReadWriteWeb blog flow, but if I’d cranked up my pace, the day’s blog posts might have been lost in a cartoon sea. (We could have done more to feature them on the Social Signal site too, but as it happened we had a little competing news that day.) Next time, I’ll work with the organizers to suggest ways of presenting the cartoons in a way that enriches the conference experience without detracting from other communications.

The fact I took away some important lessons doesn’t mean I didn’t have fun, of course – I had a great time, learned a lot and, I think, contributed something of real value. And I can’t wait for a chance to do this again.

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