Montreal Social Media

Rogers will definitely need some reputation management on their SERP… don’t mess with the geeks

The Story
Customers groan as Rogers sets iPhone prices from Reuters
Rogers announces iPhone 3G plans, unlimited data isn’t one of them from Engadget

The Customer’s Response
Fuck you Rogers | Screwing Canadian iPhone customers since 2008
Rogers Canada iPhone Data Plan Petition
The petition on Facebook

update: few days ago, the www.fuckyourogers.com site was redirected to RuinedIphone.com which is a little bit more politically correct.

How Canadian search industry is different than the American? According to Yahoo’s SEM National Director, Martin Byrne, Canadian companies might be missing the boat. We are way behind the States in SEM expenses. Byrne made a quick test to check how many paid results would show up for online banking services. While they are about 10 PPC ads in yahoo.com, there are about 5 sponsor results in yahoo.ca and even less when searching in French. These results show that Canadian companies don’t take all the opportunity available.

Eric Morris, Account Executive for Google Canada points out 3 main differences:
1- Canadians are very loyal to Google in comparison of other countries
2- We are facing a bilingual reality
3- the industry is much more developed in the States

According to Morris, US companies have already shifted budgets from traditional channels to internet marketing. While Canadian begin to use and understand all the possibilities of analytics, US companies focus on the next steps of search such as contextual targeting for mobile.

Last on the panel, Guillaume Bouchard from NVI presented a look a the landscape of the SEM in Province of Qubec. Guillaume said that online sales would probably be higher if debit payment was widely accepted because Quebecers use more debit than credit card payment which is not the case in the States. It seems that Quebec users trust their banks before 3rd party websites such as PayPal. Also good to know that Quebec online market is mainly owned by 3 actors: PowerCorp, Transcontinental and Quebecor.

I’m leaving today for SES Toronto ‘08 with 6 of my colleagues. Guillaume will be presenting on the State of Search Marketing in Canada panel and I plan to cover some of the panels during the two days event. I know that Simon and Louis-Dominic from Adviso will also be there. I don’t know about other Montrealers (I think Mitch is presenting also). In fact, I didn’t get the chance to take a look at the speakers but I’ve already selected few panels that I might be covering:

-Universal & Blended Search
-The State of Search Marketing in Canada
-Beyond Linkbait: Getting Authoritative Online Mentions
-What’s Different About B2B? Tailored Strategies
-Social Media Success
-Web 2.0 & Search Engines
-Giving Credit Where It’s Due: Which Campaign Sold What?

update: Some pictures from the SES Toronto Show, so far

Thanks for the people at PAN Communications who provided me a media pass for the whole event! More to come…

Wow this post is a entire copy and paste from a FB event, don’t know if I’ll make it but still… I definitely want to promote the event.

Montreal’s technology and creative communities are mobilizing against a new federal bill to restrict creators’ and consumers’ rights to use digital media.

On June 12th, 2008, Industry Minister Jim Prentice will introduce the amendment to the Canadian copyright act, commonly called “the Canadian DMCA”. The bill was crafted under pressure from American media cartels, and it’s expected to have a chilling effect on free expression and free speech in this country. It will restrict Canadians from freely using their computers and other devices to save, store, and play their legally-purchased media.

The Montreal Chapter of Fair Copyright for Canada is holding an emergency action meeting to respond to the new bill. We’ll have information for citizens to learn more about the Canadian DMCA, and materials for writing and sending letters to MPs asking them to oppose the bill.

Come meet others in the Montreal area who want a balanced, fair copyright system that works for all Canadians. Facebook Event, Meeting at Station C this Thursday 6:00 PM.

I do consider myself both very privileged and happy to work with great people such as the ones at Molson. As few of you might know, I do social media strategy with Molson Dry and sooner this year, NVI and Molson (our client) invited few bloggers to have an open discussion on how brands and corporations should behave in the social media space. Following this unusual meeting, our client’s marketing and communications departments came out with this great idea : creating a special event for bloggers and their communities.

More infos on the party the strategy
You will be able to have further information (in French) about the party on NVI’s SEO collaborative blog. Because one of the objectives of creating this event is to reward blogger’s community, I’ll take the opportunity to invite people that have commented on my blog in the past to join us on that special evening. Also, since we have previously presented our experience at Webcom, I’ll be pleased to answer questions that you might have regarding social media consulting and my work.

For the party, we’ve launched the contest last week, the response is very good so far and there is still room available, so I’m tagging Jay, Gab, JF Dubé, Fred, Patrick and Francis. Please read full details on the event at Go-référencement.

Everyday Normal Guy 2- Jon Lajoie

Who’s that Regular Everyday Normal Montrealer with over 4.5 millions views of his clips on YouTube and expected to become the next big thing in the States? Jon Lajoie, besides of staring in RadCan’s L’Auberge Du Chien Noir, is apparently on his way to become our first local comedian using social Medias and more especially YouTube in order to leverage an international career. More to come since he is currently negotiating with majors such as HBO to get something big.

Mighty ducks saved by montreal’s police officer

Forget about the police brutality cases and the more recent riots following Boston Bruins elimination. When they are not caught smoking in their cars, the Montreal police is always there to protect and serve!

MONTREAL CANADIENS 1993 ROAD TO THE CUP

It’s probably been too long since we have won the cup. Great memories Enjoy! (shorter version here)

Malajube “Montreal -40°C”

First band ever from Montreal making it to the top of the week on YouTube’s list with their Montreal -40°C song. see also Dave’s version with lyrics translated and Valgod1983’s cover.

From New York City to Montreal

IMHO: The way that Tourisme Montreal should promote the city.

Nadia Comaneci, Montréal 1976 TEN !!!

Yes, Montreal was once host of the Olympics and Nadia Queen of the Games!

Montreal: Two Minute Tour

Still the best Tour of the city that I’ve found. Informative if you plan to visit the city.

Snowboarding in the city - Sunset Films - Montreal

Bonus: love snowboarding, didn’t think that Montreal was offering that much opportunities.

With three different tracks all branded 2.0 (marketing 2.0, enterprise 2.0 and solutions 2.0) this year’s edition of Webcom Montreal was all about this move toward a more social, collaborative and interactive web. I didn’t get the chance to attend the whole event but since I was participating in Webcamp, the off-Webcom event, I was allowed to go to some of the keynotes.

Andrew McAfee from HBS on Enterprise 2.0
Andrew McAfee was first to present in the morning and I would say that the audience had large expectations regarding his conference. In fact, McAfee is credited with first coining the expression ‘Enterprise 2.0′, that definitely brings some authority to the guy. So, McAfee explained that the only reason why he looked at this 2.0 thing is because he wanted to walk away from this whole thing, to convince himself that he could quickly go back to his usual researches. But everything changed when he started exploring Wikipedia: he realized then that technology strongly impacts on the organizational environment. He gave us the example of Intrawest where an idea from a single employee shared all around the company resulted in half a million in savings. According to McAfee, the enterprise 2.0 is going to increase differences among companies and these differences will become much more important in the future. If you are interested in the topic, I would recommend you to check his blog where he goes deeper into concepts such as capturing and sharing knowledge across ties.

Pierre-Karl Péladeau on Quebecor 2.0
I know that PK Péladeau wasn’t really familiar with his speach sales pitch but he still represents a powerful media empire in Province of Quebec and since his company is a major Internet Service Provider, I think his point of view of the 2.0 thing was more than welcomed. Quebecor also has a huge presence into the traditional media landscape and PK Péladeau knows certainly that his corporation won’t have the choice to adopt new business models sooner or later. They are working on a community website called EspaceCanoe and they’ve been experiencing really good things lately: RSS feeds, embeddable videos , they have a community manager and blogs, they are feeding the community with contests and more. It’s always good to see mainstream Medias embracing some of the 2.0 tools.

What really brought the 2.0 to Webcom : Videopresse

Webcom organisation: Claude Thibault, Claude Malaison, Marc Chioini and Christian Aubry from Videopresse

I think that the greatest move from Webcom’s organisation was to partner with VideoPresse in order to broadcast live from the event. It’s pretty hard to make a conference really interactive, unless you present on a Q&A panel, but the broadcast brought another dimension to the whole event. In fact it gave access to the speakers to anybody on the web that couldn’t be part of the day. Greatest thing is that Christian Aubry and Laurent Maisonnave, who did the interviews, were also taking questions from the chat room. They managed to interview most of the speakers during the day, including me who spoke about Webcamp. My boss Guillaume went also in front of the camera since we (NVI) were presenting on two different conferences at this event.

Image credit: nicolask7

What is Webcamp?
Webcamp Montreal is a user generated conference about the web. The latest edition was on May 14th 2008. It was started by Sylvain Carle and the very first edition webcamp#0 was scheduled the same day as Webcom Montreal in november 2007. It can easily be defined as the off-Webcom event: the schedule is flexible, the discussion is open, the content provided by participants, thers is no salespitch as conferences and you can expect a lot of different topics covered. But what I really like about this camp is the fact that it’s neither the topics covered nor the presentations done that define the camp but surely more the participants. So the best way to talk about Webcamp#01 might be to present some of the people who attend the event.

Who is Webcamp?
Here’s a partial list of the people involved in the definition of this day (some spent the whole day, others came in order to discuss a specific topic and stayed few minutes) Martin Lessard (was also speaking at Webcom), Patrick Tanguay, Sebastien Paquet, Philippe Martin, Samuel Lavoie, Yannick B. Gelinas, Mario Asselin, Thierry Poitras, Bruno Boutot, Michael Boyle, Patrick Desmarais, Sacha Declomesnil, Geoffroi Garon, Laurent Maisonnave and myself (please feel free to contribute to the list if you know people that I forgot). There is also a wiki set for the event, that way we will try to leave usefull ressources from the event.

C’est sur le thème du référencement et du marketing de recherche (SEM) qu’avait lieu la Journée Infopresse du mardi 13 mai. Au menu de l’événement: 3 conférences et un panel du type questions/réponses. Voici les quelques notes que j’ai prises lors des trois conférences principales sur les types de référencement présentés, soit le naturel, le payant et le social.

Le référencement organique par Guillaume Bouchard - NVI
Deux éléments prioritaires à considérer avant d’investir en référencement: 1) faire une analyse complète de votre site: la technologie utilisée est-elle perméable aux engins de recherche? la structure du site est-elle optimale pour être indexée? 2) procéder à une recherche exhaustive de mots-clés : cet exercice est trop souvent baclé en début de projet alors qu’il s’avère pourtant primordial d’identifier les termes sur lesquels on investira. Ce n’est qu’ensuite qu’il devient stratégique de débuter les tactiques d’optimisation qui viseront notamment à augmenter le critère de popularité de votre site.

Guillaume compare aussi le retour sur investissement du référencement organique (SEO) avec celui du référencement payant (PPC). Il mentionne que le SEO offre une équité que le PPC (pay-per-click) n’offre pas. De fait en référencement payant, lorsque notre budget vient à échéance, il faudra réinvestir afin de conserver des résultats.

Le référencement payant par Pablo Stevenson - Ressac Media
Pablo présente le SEO comme le petit frère du référencement payant car 80% des investissements sont encore faits en PPC contre 20% en SEO. Quelques tendances identifiées : 1) les investissements sont prévus à la hausse 2) on fait face à une inflation: une hausse du coût par click est constatée. Quelques défis identifiés: 1) pisatge efficace du retour sur investissement (ROI) 2) compétition grandissante pour les 1ere position 3) inflation du CPC 4) fraude sur les clicks.

Le référencement payant offre énormément d’opportunités dont celle de tout mesurer ce que l’on fait. Il faut alors associé une valeur potentielle à tout ce que l’on essaie. Il devient souvent stratégique d’assurer un contrôle constant sur nos positions. On donne le cas de AbeBook.com qui a vu ses revenus augmenter de 28%, son ROI grimper de 83% et ses coûts en SEM diminuer de 30% suite à la reformulation de leurs positions.

Le référencement social par Brent Csutoras - consultant

La troisième conférence cloturant la journée était donné par Brent Csutoras, consultant marketing internet spécialisé en médias sociaux, en viral et en marketing de recherche. J’avais eu le prévilège de rencontrer Brent la veille en compagnie de Guillaume, Sarah et Véronique. Nous en avons profiter pour discuter de l’avenir des réseaux sociaux et plus particulièrement des sites de nouvelles sociales. Brent est un grand fan de Reddit et ce fut un réel plaisir de pouvoir jaser avec lui sur les changements que Reddit est en train de mettre en place. Selon lui, il y a un avenir dans la personnalisation des pages principales des Digg-like (un peu comme Mixx le fait déjà) et dans le développement de sous-communautés au sein d’un média social comme Reddit le fait présentement.

Quant à sa conférence, elle fut particulièrement intéressante car il n’a pas hésité un instant à partager plusieurs judicieux conseils sur les choses à faire avant de se lancer dans le référencement social. À ce sujet, n’oubliez pas de vérifier que votre serveur pourra suporter le dangereux Digg effect. Pour plus d’information à ce sujet, Louis-Dominic chez Adviso offre une excellente couverture de la conférence de Brent. Prenez aussi quelques instants pour visiter le blog de Véronique qui traite aussi du même sujet suite à sa participation récente à la conférence Search Marketing Expo (SMX Social) présenté il y a quelques semaines à Long Beach.

Bilan de la journée
En somme, la journée fut très intéressante, j’ai pu aussi constaté que je n’étais pas le seul préoccupé par le SEO à Montreal… Finalement, bien qu’il demeure difficile de plaire à tous, le feedback général fut très bon.

Mise à jour, voici les liens meant vers les présentations de Pablo (Ressac), Guillaume (NVI) et Brent.

Image Credit : slack12

My local chapter of the Canadian Marketing Association was presenting on April 23rd an event on corporate blogging. Louis Delage and Pascal Hébert were leading the presentation which quickly turned into a discussion about the best practices of corporate blogging. Here’s my notes, thoughts and other infos that I’ve added to their presentation:

Few corporate blogging cases worthed to study

blogging business case: Wal-Marting Across America
the story: Fake blog about two people RVing across the States (BusinessWeek’s coverage)
behind the blog: Wal-Mart and its PR firm Edelman.
main mistake: Edelman admits to “failing to be transparent about the identity of the two bloggers from the outset.”

blogging business case: The Zero Movement website
the story: Not only a fake blog, but a fake community supporting Coke’s new product (The Age’s coverage)
main mistake: no mention of Coke’s involvement
more on the topic: Coke does it again and Coke Lies, Misleads With Fake ‘Zero’ Blog

blogging business case: GM FYI blog
the story: NY Times’s columnist, Thomas L. Friedman, wrote that GM is “more dangerous to America’s future” than any other company, is “like a crack dealer” addicting helpless Americans to SUVs…
the right reply: While failing to publish their response in the paper, GM used their blog to push their version of the story
behind the blog: staff and friends of GM, including Brian Akre who wrote the famous post
more on the topic: GM’s Tom Wilkinson Engages In Epic “Battle Of The Toms” and Corporate Blogging Pays For GM

blogging business case: blogs.sun.com
the story: Sun is said to promote employee blogging more than any other technology firm and is the largest company with a CEO who blogs.
the question answered: Q:”Why does Sun’s CEO waste time writing that blog?” A: Because I believe in providing clarity surrounding our strategy and operations - not just once a year in the Annual Report. I believe clarity behind our direction is useful for our shareholders, customers, partners and employees (taken from Jonathan’s blog).
more on the topic: Corporate blogging done right

blogging business case: Dell Hell
the story: A consumer named Jeff Jarvis uses his weblog to expose his own personal problems dealing with Dell. The company ignored the writer until the story became a phenomenon over the net.
More on the story: My Dell Hell (Guardian)and Dell Learns to Listen on Business Week
the results: Dell has now an important place for blogging on their site Direct2Dell for products and services + Dell Shares for investors but more important, the company has opened the discussion with their customers.

As seen, corporate blogging brings a lot a opportunities but surely a lot of questions. If you read spanish I will strongly suggest you to take a look at Siete preguntas antes de arrancar su blog corporativo. Here’s few of these questions that you will face when business blogging: Do I need a corporate blog?, Who should blog?, Is transparency possible when blogging?, Is ghostwritting acceptable? and more. Have a nice post !