BC Book and Magazine Week Runs a Great Online Campaign

BC Book and Magazine Week is running an online campaign to promote BC Book and Magazine Week, which is April 21 to 28.

What are they doing that’s so great?

1. They have a fun blog with lots of great info about upcoming events.

• The blog uses photos to help promote each event. It looks like fun.
• The content is useful. Each post tells me about an event and all the details.
• The blog postings have a human voice. This doesn’t seem like marketing, spammy text. It’s a conversation.

2. They are contacting bloggers in a personal, one-to-one way.

• The email was addressed to me. Monique. My name was spelled correctly.
• The sender’s name and contact info was clearly visible. She identified herself.
• She indicated that she read my blog or found something on it directly related to why she was contacting me.
• She gave me information I’m interested in but didn’t push me to write a certain way or to post at all. How I use her info is at my discretion.
• Attached was a PDF of upcoming events. Nice and concise.
• Also attached was a nicely designed button that I could put on my website, if I wanted.
• She included the URL that I should link to. The URL is to the blog, where I can participate, where I can read more.

This is a great campaign.

It’s also well timed. Only a couple of days before the event so there’s some urgency in posting the information. I don’t have time to think, “oh, I’ll do that later,” and then forget.

Here is the web button:

The link is www.bcbookandmagazineweek.com

Here’s the post I made on my personal website, SoMisguided.com:
BC Book and Magazine Week Is April 21 to 28, 2007

As an example of a well-run blog campaign, BCBookandMagazineWeek.com is a Monique’s Pick.

Monique’s Picks are websites that deliver on their promise. They have strong design and great content, and they are good resources or example sites for subscribers to Underwire: Full-Support for Non-Techies.

eMarketing 101 Redesigns Its Website

Alexandre Brabant is a friend of mine and also one of Canada’s best search marketers. Alex is incredibly passionate about search marketing, and he’s been in the business for more than seven years.

As a passionate advocate for search (search marketing, search engine optimization), Alex truly believes that you are what you say you do. The advent of blogs, which are constructed to do well in search, presented an interesting opportunity for Alex to re-examine his own website, eMarketing101.ca. Like the shoemaker’s children, who don’t have shoes, he thought it was time to revamp the look of his site and time to try this blog business.

Alex hired the fine folks at Hop Studios, who we also partner with here at Work Industries, to re-design the site. To Alex, search is about traffic. Good, qualified traffic to your website. Traffic that converts into sales, newsletter sign-ups, whatever your site goals are. Hop Studios have carried that metaphor over into the design, and I love it.

If you have a website, you need to understand search. I highly recommend the eMarketing 101 blog.

Recent posts include:

Laura Thieme talks about personality types & gender preferences in search
Search Marketing 101: Getting Started Checklist

For search, from a Canadian perspective, eMarketing 101 is a Monique’s Pick.

Monique’s Picks are websites that deliver on their promise. They have strong design and great content, and they are good resources for subscribers to Underwire: Full-Support for Non-Techies.

What is Ning?

Ning is a service that let’s people easily create their own online social network.

Ning.com relaunched their services in Feb 2007. The service allows creators to customize the appearance and features of their website. The user interface is easy to understand.

Creators
1. decide on a web address, i.e., mysite.ning.com
2. drag-and-drop elements—such as text boxes, photos, blogs, video—into a template
3. launch their website and invite people to join

I created workindustries.ning.com in a couple of minutes and I can change the appearance at any time.

Also of note, Ning’s chief technology officer is Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape.

For more:
Read the CBC.ca article on Ning (Feb 28, 2007)

Check out Ning.com

4 versions of companies thinking green

Over the past few days I’ve come across the following thematic convergence of companies thinking about their impact on the environment.

• Over at the FreshBooks blog Mike McDerment has announced their green office initiative: “ways that small professional services companies (i.e. web designers and consultants, many of which are home-based) can operate their offices in environmentally friendly ways.”
• Fortune Magazine reports that Wal-Mart is going green(!)
• From the Patagonia website I learned about the one percent for the planet campaign, which sounds very cool.

Here at Work Industries I’m looking to get involved in a similar effort to that proposed by Freshbooks. As a start over the next few months, I’ll be contributing to a new project launched by Vancity called ChangeEverything.ca.

Check it out to see what folks are doing to make the world a better place, and, if you’re interested, join in and contribute to the effort.

Baby Name Wizard: Cool Interface Design

A friend linked the other day to the Baby Name Wizard. I just got a chance to play around with it and I like it. Type in a name or part of a name in the top left and the graph shows you the prevalence of that name. Segment by boy or girl names if you like. Then run your mouse over the graph to see the trends of name popularity over time. Very cool.

The Baby Name Wizard

My name, James, seems to have been very popular over time. In the 1940s and 1950s it was #1. But in 2004 it’s down to #17.

PS: No mom, this doesn’t mean anything.