Blog & Free Advice
Living Rivers Trust Announced
Yesterday I attended the announcement of the Living Rivers Trust Fund, where BC Premier Gordon Campbell announced a tripling of the fund to $14-million. The story seems to have totally missed all local news outlets, with the except of the lamentable paywall at the Vancouver Sun, so here’s the story and some photos I took of the event. The Fraser River Park played host to the event held on a day when wind...
Work Industries Testimonial #3: Omnicom Media
The Work Industries testimonials keep rolling in. First Alexandre Brabant of e-Marketing 101 let loose with some kind words. Then Jill Smith of Intrawest made me smile and tell people about her wonderful style. The latest comes from Paul Jeszenszky, the Director, Search Strategies at Omnicom Group Digital (OMD). I worked with Paul every day for about a year at Teligence Communications. We built e-marketing campaigns, websites, content and product positioning for their brands and kick...
Canadian e-Commerce Grew 80 percent in 2005
Via Traffick, Statscan has announced that year-over-year Internet sales have grown by 80 percent from 2004 to 2005. Retailers reported online sales of $5.4 billion in 2005, up 80% from $3 billion in 2004, according to the report. Retail sales accounted for 14% of total online sales of $39.2 billion in Canada last year. That compares with 10.6% of total online sales of $28.3 billion in 2004. The percentage of retailers with web sites rose to 42% in 2005, up 10.5% from 38% in 2004. Overall, 38% of private retailers reported having a web...
The Economist Discovers Peer-Produced Media
A friend and I have an ongoing discussion about technology and change. It goes like this: change opportunities in the organization she works for only really exist once The Economist writes about them. Before that, as far as her boss is concerned, nothing noteworthy has happened. From my experience, this kind of follow-the-established-follower mentality pervades many organizations. So I want to let you know that you (yes, all of you out there with tremendous frustration...
Advertising’s Current Growing Pains
This past week I’ve come across some very good thinking and writing on the current state of the advertising business. It’s heartening to see, since so much of the current practice of advertising is simple tricks and tactics, hamfistedly imported from existing media. I’m thinking here of people talking about email as if it were just electric version of direct mail, of Google partnering with Sony to show The...
Work Industries Testimonial #2: Intrawest (RezRez)
Last week I asked a few folks I have worked with in the past to help me out with launching my new business, Work Industries. If they felt comfortable, I asked them to provide a testimonial about working with me. I published the first Work Industries testimonial from Alex Brabant of eMarketing 101 a few days ago. The second Work Industries testimonial comes Jill Smith, who I worked with for almost two years at Intrawest&lsquo...
BC Book and Magazine Week: Coming Soon!
(Cross posted from my Up in Ontario blog.) The week that runs from Saturday, April 22, 2006 to Saturday, April 29, 2006 is BC Book and Magazine Week in these here parts. I’m working with the folks at the Association of Book Publishers of BC (ABPBC) and the BC Association of Magazine Publishers (BCAMP) to promote BC Book and Magazine Week. So here’s the rundown of events and ways that you can get involved, attend...
Work Industries Testimonial #1: eMarketing 101
Last week I asked a few folks I have worked with in the past to help me out with launching my new business, Work Industries. If they felt comfortable, I asked them to provide a testimonial about working with me. The first testimonial to arrive was from Alex Brabant, someone I’ve worked with in web marketing for the past 6 years. At one time, for 2 years running, we managed the largest advertising budget in...
Blinksale 2.0 Announced
For invoicing, Work Industries uses Blinksale, a simple, web-based invoicing system. It lets us and our clients keep track of billables in one place. We just signed up last month, but already we’re pretty happy. Blinksale was recommended to us by the good folks at Hop Studios, and they deserve the discovery credit. Yesterday I received an email from Blinksale announcing Blinksale 2.0: With the rollout of Blinksale 2.0, we will also be raising our...
Creating Passionate Users, Notes from Audio
Update: Here is a link to the original post on Kathy Sierra’s blog about her talk, Creating Passionate Users. Via a roundup post of audio and video stuff to hear / watch on the pretty-much-always-excellent 37 Signals blog, Signal vs. Noise, I came across an audio recording of a presentation by Kathy Sierra on creating passionate users. The file is very large, many MBs, and about 1 hour long, in .m4a format, which seems to...