As I mentioned, I’d been speaking with some of my colleagues at Resource Interactive about a pitch for SxSW. Lara Lebeiko had the idea of speaking about women in the IT field. I have my notes from one of our phone conversations, where she said she did not want it to be a feminazi panel We talked a bit about women who go into tech and eventually leave, in some cases to start a family, and then do not return. I thought it was interesting, but as I am still IN the field, I didn’t have much insight on that. What I’ve found interesting, however, is how the male-dominated IT field is starting to see a significant number of women enter in the social media or accessibility space. I’ve seen others discuss the social media aspect of it, and the prevalence of women in the accessibility space is simply something I’ve noticed personally. (Sharron Rush, Glenda Sims and Marla Erwin are a few of the ladies that I had the pleasure of meeting at Access U).

A Pew Internet research paper on “How Women and Men Use the Internet” recognized these differences back in 2005, which is arguably before all this crazy “social media” hype really took hold. It was noted:

How Women and Men Use the Internet: Summary at a Glance

There is often a perception that boys like technology, and girls like dolls. However, I recently read something (in “made to stick”, I believe) that stated that girls are bigger consumers of personal electronics than boys (in every category except video game consoles). Think about teenage girls and their phones.. Boys and girls both buy iPods, but may use them differently. Boys will tend use the music to isolate themselves, whereas girls are more often to share their player, their music and therefore their experience with a friend. (I doubted this phenomenon, but a friend who teaches high school track ensured me that girls do in fact each share one earbud of a set to listen together).

I have always maintained that I enjoy technology not for technology’s sake, but as an facilitator. I like what we can achieve with it. When I built my first webpage in the late 90s, it was to share information with my friends. I was a geocities community leader, I worked on an online community targeted at at-risk youth. It was about community: about the relationships that could be forged via technology: it was not about the technology itself.

Using technology to connect with others evolves naturally into discussions of accessibility. When you’re looking at using technology to engage with others, you obviously need for those “others” to also be able to use the tools as well. I love to share the quote by James Edwards (co-author of “The Javascript Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks and Hacks) -

One person’s preference is another person’s real need. It may be that a group of users finds it easier with Ajax, but if another group of users finds it completely impossible then you’re cutting people out, and you’re doing it for basically nothing.

I think of it as a hierarchy, basically, where accessibility is the most important thing, and usability comes next, and preference and design and aesthetics comes next. All of those things are important, but if one affects the other then you have to think which is the most important.

And to my mind, accessibility is always the most important, because accessibility impacts on what people really need. Everything else is just preference.

You need to have community members to foster community, which means you can’t lock the doors and bar people from entry. How does the local Stitch ‘n’ Bitch group get translated to the online world? How do the different communication means and motivations of women and men relate to their approach to IT, and why does it matter?

Next Tuesday (July 29th), I will be presenting on Web Accessibility to Columbus Digital - the Central Ohio Adobe Users Group. Starting off the meeting will be a presentation on Usability on the Web.

Announcing this month’s Adobe User Group Presentation Night, hosted by Quest Software!

[Google Calendar Link]

6:10- 7:00: Usability on the Web
Chris Peters, Marketing Director at Quest Software
Chris Peters has been producing websites for almost as long as the Web has existed as a medium. He has been studying usability, accessibility, and human factors avidly since 2000. Chris has doubled paid search conversion rates since beginning his role as Search Marketing Manager for Quest Software, and he leads the open source ColdFusion on Wheels project in his spare time.

7:10- 8:00: Web Accessibility
Andrea Hill, Senior Developer at Resource Interactive
Andrea Hill is a Senior Developer at Resource Interactive, a leading independent interactive agency in Columbus, Ohio. Prior to starting at Resource, Andrea worked in the User Experience group at LexisNexis, coding prototypes for usability testing and serving as the company’s key accessibility contact. Andrea’s background in user-centered design has fueled her interest in usability and accessibility, and her experience as a front-end developer has provided her with the technical background to see how it all fits together. She recently graduated with a Master in Computer Science degree from Franklin University, where her research focus was on RIA Accessibility.

8:00: SOFTWARE RAFFLE
It’s time for our 6-Month software raffle. Come on by for $2000 worth of Adobe Software!

Directions
Take 270 to Tuttle Crossing Blvd. Turn West on Tuttle Crossing Blvd. Shortly after is Emerald Parkway, turn right. 6500 Emerald Parkway is on your right. Plenty of parking.

(totally stolen from the Columbus Digital site.)

The final session of the day that I attended was on strategies for blogging and social networking marketing. Some of the content was similar to the viral campaign session I’d attended earlier, I liked the use of the one specific case study to frame their work.

Right away speaker Bill Balderaz of Webbed Marketing laid out the three things you need for success:

1. a compelling hook
2. the right channels
3. identify client goals

In the case study he shared with us (Shizuka New York), the compelling hook was “bird poop facials”.

A good litmus test to whether or not your idea is compelling- would you talk about it at dinner? a new CEO hired from a competitor? Nah. But bird poop facials? Sure!

Bill mentioned four specific channels to consider:

1. SEO Press release
2. Blogger outreach
3. video
4. Social networks

I wasn’t really familiar with the terms “SEO Press release”, but it was quite interesting. Bill mentioned that they will search for specific phrases on search engines to ensure the uniqueness of their phrasing. That way they can be sure that when monitoring buzz or search queries, all the results are directly tied to their efforts. He did acknowledge that the most newsworthy your story, the more likely a journalist will snap up the idea and write about it in their own words. In this case, your carefully chosen phrasing is lost.

Through the presentation, Bill was very diligent at showing us the “before and after”, highlighting the importance of analytics and establishing your measures for success. We looked at google news, which had 2 links to the company in May, and roughly 50 post-campaign.

Blogger outreach is refers yet again to really figuring out the type of influentials to tap.

As for social networking, Bill said that they did not try to build for or leverage all the social networks. He said they actually received the most traffic from StumbleUpon, which was a surprise to me. I didn’t realize it was such a bg player. He also acknowledged that like it or not, you can’t ignore mySpace.

Supposedly CNN ran this story on the front page one day, but still 46% of the traffic came from social networks. While CNN gave a one-day spike in traffic, the networks were overall more significant.

Someone asked about the time this campaign took, and he said the video shoot was the biggest task, coming in at about 10 hours. The rest of the campaign and marketing was about 40 hours. In the end, the company saw traffic increases from all sources, not just referring sites. People weren’t just clicking on links they had presented to them; bird poop facials at Shizuka had reached a point where people were talking or thinking about them, and motivated to seek them out.

He talked some more about some compelling ideas and hooks, including the work they did for Hatteras networks (the cash cow), or the scantily clad etymologist at HotForWords.com

While I don’t know that this session really offered me many “strategies” for blogging and social media marketing, I did find the session interesting. I appreciated the focus on the results achieved, and how they were managed. I still feel in many ways that analytics is still in its infancy, and I appreciated the approach that was taken to demonstrate the campaign’s success.

The second session I attended was “Igniting Viral Campaigns”, by Jennifer Laycock. Her session was in such high demand that we had to change rooms to accomodate the number of attendees!

Jennifer presented an incredibly comprehensive slide deck on the topic. She started with an introduction to viral marketing itself, the premise being:

1. people distrust ads
2. people trust friends
3. people trust strangers
4. the web connects us

Initially I wasn’t sure I agreed with her “people trust strangers” comment, but as she explained it more, it made sense. She considered strangers to people we don’t know in real life, whereas for me, it’s people with whom we have no relationship at all.

She clearly called out the benefits and challenges related to viral marketing. While for many companies it may seem an obvious tactic given the low budget, but the challenge is in coming up with an idea that is genuinely buzz-worthy. The consumer needs to have some motivation to share it. Once again I’m struck with the idea that good marketing (as well as good design, good client relations, good anything) is just what I’d consider user-centered design. What consumer needs (realized or unrealized) are being met? Indeed, Jennifer referred to the customer reaction effect. That is, by empowering ordinary individuals to share and promote a brand, you are offering them some sense of celebrity and giving people a chance to talk about your product. In turn, the brand benefits from a level of increased credibility, as it is being ‘blessed’ with personal recommendations.
The potential downfall, however, is that you lose control over your brand messaging.

As for any project, it is important to establish goals to be able to measure the success of the project.

There are three questions to be answered when coming up with this idea:

1. what sparks passion?
2. what hasn’t been done before?
3. will they risk their reputation?

For an idea to catch on, it has to address the above questions. The last refers to the idea that a forwarder is basically offering his personal recommendation to whatever he is forwarding, and will need to believe in the message or cause.

Jennifer then did a great job at walking us through specific strategies to developing a campaign. She shared tangible examples to really drive her points home.

I was impressed with her specifics related to the delivery of the campaign. She warned us to be sure to watch out for scalability, inventory, sustainable ROI and backup servers. I suppose the idea is that you should always plan for the worst case (which in this case is the best: your viral campaign takes off!). This actually reminds me of when we helped out Wal-Mart with their holiday campagns last year. Evidently there had been some question about our use of Akamai, and someone had questioned “what if akamai goes down?” At the time, we all laughed. Our thoughts were that if akamai went down, the Internet as we know it would cease to exist.
Guess what, at the height of the campaign, Akamai went down.

She offered us a list of different campaign types: humour, debate, attack and fear. Along with examples, she listed out pros and cons for each campaign type. It was a wonderful overview while also offering us the benefit of her expertise.

The next part of the presentation specifically dealt with pitching bloggers, which is an arena where I’ve only ever been on the other side of the screen. As Jennifer went through her pitching checklist, I reflected on how I’ve been pitched to myself, and determined that I am way too easy-going I guess I don’t yet have any reason to be too picky!

Jennifer’s biggest rule was “respect the blogger’s time”, and many of her recommendations were based on this (for example, read at least 5 posts, write a few contextual comments). I also felt that this was simply good practice to ensure you’re on the right track. If you have identified this blogger as an influential, prove it by opening yourself up to be influenced

At some point during the presentation, Jennifer noticed that we were running behind, and offered to cut the presentation short. The room was unified in their desire to hear her entire presentation. It was truly an incredible session, well worth the price of admission

Jennifer walked us through a project they’d done, through using brainstorming worksheets to assessing capabilities and the actual execution of the plan. It was a great way to really understand their methodology and gave a lot of credibility to their process. While she was great in not using her presentation to pimp out her company, I was definitely interested in learning more about them, as it is obvious they shine in this area.

Afterwards I was following on twitter as Jennifer and the session attendee that was sitting next to me talked about #SBMU and despite the fact I don’t actually have a small business, I’m tempted to attend!

On May 20 and 21st, I was working at the “lifestreaming/blogging” station at the social media cafe at the iCitizen conference. The conference itself had the standard speakers and panels, and the cafe was a supplementary opportunity for conference delegates to learn more about, well, social media. There were four stations: “lifestreaming/blogging”, “community conversations”, “new media entertainment”, and “mobile”. Resource Interactive employees manned each of the stations, showcasing some of these new and emerging sites and services.

Social Media Cafe

Originally uploaded by leigh_householder

For the lifestreaming station, we started with a targeted platform/service base of wordpress, tumblr, twitter, facebook, flickr, digsby and socialthing!. I mentioned in an earlier post that in preparation for this event, I was reflecting on my current online persona. This was because in order to cut down on some of the noise related to showcasing these tools, I wasn’t really myself during the conference. In order to show people how these tools worked, I was officially “iCitizen04″ for awhile. That is, I would show people how to use these different tools (and how they connected) using the moniker iCitizen04. As it was, there was PLENTY of online iCitizen buzz, and I didn’t want to inundate my regular followers with our test posts. (According to summize.com, we were actually the #1 trending topic on twitter for much of the day!)

#1 trending topic on twitter
Originally uploaded by icitizen04

Overall, it was really interesting to chat with individuals, trying to figure out what the buzz was all about. Some folks were already well-established twitterers, while others were just catching a glimmer of what this service could do for them.

In the true nature of lifestreaming, looking back at the output from the conference tells a bit of the story about the event itself. the icitizen04 tumblog pulls in tweets and photos, as well as other posts, pictures and videos I posted as I spoke to different participants at the event. We looked at the services themselves and I also liked mention Summize and Twist (http://twist.flaptor.com) to illustrate how brands could use twitter as a very simplified version of buzz metrics. Searching for a brand on flickr or youtube was a good way to see what sort of user-generated content was already out there, and in both cases, identify some of those potential brand advocates (or see what sort of risk mitigation needs to take place!).

I was always very happy to introduce folks to digsby, which is an Uber-IM Client. It supports instant messaging, multiple web mail services, facebook and twitter. You can send and receive updates right from your desktop. It was a great service to be able to illustrate the ease at content pushes and updates.

Overall, I was really excited by what we were able to pull off during the course of the event. I have some more thoughts on the event itself, but I just wanted to specifically call out the social media cafe aspect of it.

Oh, and I HAVE to share the video some of my co-workers pulled together:

iCitizen Video from Mark Hillman on Vimeo.