What is Toluu?
Toluu is a free service for sharing the feeds you read and discovering new ones.		 Get Invite

Noise to Signal

Rob's cartoons


10 ways to maximize your blog's ROI - Part 2: Get high-value feedbackNovember 25

Times are tight for a lot of companies, governments and non-profits right now, and budget-cutters are going to cast a steely eye on social media projects. If you want to be able to defend your blog proposal - or keep your organization's existing blog going - then you need to be able to credibly say those three magic words: "return on investment."

We're here to help, with a 10-part series on how blogging brings value to your organization, how you can make the most of it, and how you'll know you're succeeding.

Part 1 (Put the "I" in ROI) is right here. For Part 2, read on:

Think for a moment about how much your organization spends to find out what its audience (a term we'll keep using until something better comes along, but it really isn't adequate in a social media age) is thinking.

Maybe you're doing opinion polling or focus groups. Maybe you have labs where your prospective customers are testing your newest products and services. Maybe you've hired consultants to mine your customer service logs for golden nuggest of insight.

Maybe you're just thinking of getting a psychic on staff. (Hey, we're located in Vancouver; we can hook you up with someone.)

Feedback is tremendously valuable stuff. And you don't just want to hear reactions to what you're doing and saying; you want to know what's on your audience's mind about the whole


The Obama online campaign, by the numbersNovember 22

The Washington Post's Clickocracy series has a piece on the Obama online campaign, and while the exclusive interview and anecdotes are well worth reading, it's the numbers that really tell the story:

  • 3 million online donors.
  • 6.5 million online donations.
  • 6 million online donations under $100.
  • $80 average online donation.
  • $600+ million raised, most of it online.
  • 13 million addresses on his email list.
  • 7,000 different email message sent.
  • 1 billion emails sent.
  • 1 million text-message subscribers.
  • 3 or more text messages to every subscriber in a battleground state on Election Day.
  • 2 million profiles on MyBarackObama.com.
  • 200,000 offline events planned.
  • 400,000 blog posts written.
  • 35,000 volunteer groups created.
  • 3 million calls made on the virtual phone bank in the campaign's final four days.
  • 70 million personal fundraisers on MyBO.com.
  • $30 million raised by personal fundraisers on MyBO.com.
  • 5 million supporters in other social networks.
This is a campaign that embraced social media with a vengeance, and social media clearly returned the favour.
Northern Voice 2009: call for speakersNovember 22

Northern Voice, the two-day social media and personal blogging conference, is gearing up for 2009 in Vancouver. And first on the agenda is a call for speakers:

The annual call for speaker submissions for Northern Voice 2009 is now open. If you have something that you’d like to present, be sure to go to our call for speaker’s page and submit your ideas, we’d love to hear them. If you are unfamiliar with the Northern Voice conference, take a peak at our speakers schedule for 2008.

The Northern Voice conference is a yearly blogging and social media conference currently in its 5th year. The focus of the conference is a coming together of all things blogging and social media to increase our knowledge base, while having a blast.

So if you're itching to share something with a diverse, engaged, informed and often-feisty audience, be sure to check it out. And block out the Northern Voice dates in your calender: February 20-21. You won't regret it.

Roundup: 50 suggestions for how President-elect Obama can use the Internet to governNovember 11

It's been one week since the greatest campaign the Internet has ever seen turned into the promise of the first Internet-era government. Both the traditional media and the blogosphere are overflowing with suggestions for how President-elect Barack Obama can translate his campaign's social media briliance into a model of government -- and particularly, a model of public engagement in government -- that is just as transformative.

Many of those suggestions come from friends and colleagues who have been working for at least a decade in the e-democracy trenches, uncovering opportunities to increase public participation and rebuild social capital online. In Barack Obama they (and I!) see a President with the experience, skills and inclination to realize the potential of online engagement with policy, politics and government.

In this post I round up a cross-section of the most intriguing ideas for how the President-elect can evolve his Internet-savvy campaign into Internet-savvy government. This is a mix of recommendations, musings, predictions and praise for the best of what's rolled out already. Most of these suggestions have appeared in the past week, though some anticipated Obama's election and made recommendations or predictions before the fact. Some come from colleagues who are articulating long-held visions; others come from bloggers who are just starting to imagine the possibilities of e-government, now that they've seen the power of e-campaigning. W

10 ways to maximize your blog's ROI -- Part 1: Put the I in ROINovember 9

Times are tight, which is the polite way of saying that your communications budget has probably been handed to Freddy Krueger for a light trim. So whether your organization is already blogging, or just thinking about it, you need to make a strong case for your blog's ROI.

So over the next few weeks, we're going to look at 10 ways that blogging provides value to your organization - whether it's a company, non-profit, government agency or community group. And we're going to talk about how you can get blogging to go that extra mile for you, and wring out every drop of golden ROI from your posts... while staying true to the principles of authenticity and transparency that give social media so much of their power.

(That may sound like a balancing act - but it actually it isn't. There's no trick to it. It's just a simple trick. Authenticity is actually the engine of the value of blogging, and the relationships and conversations it engenders. But I'm getting ahead of myself...)

So without any further ado, here's blogging's first source of value for your organization:

#1. Blogging lets your organization start communicating with a personal voice, and a human face.

Most organizational communications are impersonal. Vehicles like news releases speak with an institutional voice, and generally it's either flat and emotionless or full of PR hype. Either way, there's no trust and no connection betw