I attended CaseCamp Toronto 6 and one of the presentations was about Levis’ “What’s Your Style” campaign.

Long story short: glorified model search for Levis ads at various youth festivals; on-site RV change room to try on Levis clothes; take photo; get vote ID; tell your friends to vote for you so you can win and become the Levis model; photo of you with vote ID saying ‘vote for me’ are downloadable to mobile phones; they can also be forwarded; great success; lots of contestants; high stats; everyone’s happy.

What intrigued me was the fact that some contestants continued the campaign after the festivals. On their own initiative. Levis didn’t tell them to do it (which was a good thing). Contestants made their own Facebook groups and MySpace pages hoping to get votes. One contestant put her photo and vote ID on a t-shirt and wore it around the festival.

So keep this in mind if you have elements of voting in your campaigns. Say you have 50 contestants and 5 of them creates a Facebook group with about 200 members each. You’re reaching an extra 1000 without having to ask.

Students are pretty resourceful as ever.

Bill Thompson wrote on the BBC News website about the nay sayers of the One Laptop Per Child project which I blogged about a few days ago. He reiterates what I feel: the nay sayers are sour grapes.

Traditional media like newspapers, tv and radio stations are usually the last industry that come to mind when you think about social media.

At the Talk Is Cheap social media unconference for PR I attended on Nov 15^th, I sat in on a fantastic presentation given by David Fleet about the opposite using the California wildfires as a case study.

The basis of David’s presentation was what the government of California’s website severely lacked in providing their people the information they needed during the crisis as compared to what the media offered: mashed up social media tools to get useful information out quickly to, say, cell phones. Because these days, those annoying little tethers let you surf the web even when you’ve been evacuated.

David’s presentation made me realize that social media tools are perfect for a crisis plan regardless if you’re the government, a corporation or whatever. Just make sure there’s already a process in place so your team will know what to do when everyone’s hyper.

And the best part is you don’t need to rely in IT or worry about any infrastructure issues.

David’s presentation goes into detail about the whats and hows so if you ever get the chance, don’t miss it.

Quite unexpectedly, I received an invite to Seesmic. Being the social media strategist I am, I signed up and took a look around. It’s fantastic! And I immediately came up with an idea for a show.

You see, I have a few paintings that didn’t turn out as I had expected (really, really ugly). But I never threw them out and I certainly didn’t hang them up on the wall as a grim reminder. So my first show is me showing 2 pieces that I’m not pleased with. One of them is downright frightful! :)

Normally, you only show your best work (like here). A site like Seesmic seems perfect for asking for opinions (I hope the comments won’t be too harsh!). Especially what to do with things like rating ugly, ugly art :)

My video is called What to do with bad paintings which I’ll probably call Chuck or Up Chuck if I have any future shows (um, not that I have that much bad art).

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is facing uncertainty by politicans who are afraid of risk, according to this BBC News article. To tell you the truth, I’m not surprised.

In generally, people all over the world don’t like change and tend to quickly prevent themselves from seeing the value of a school lacking basic necessities using laptops to teach their students. After all, we’ve learned math and how to read and write back in the 20^th century without computers, right? And eating, clothing and school supplies is much more important than a computer, right?

I haven’t looked into exactly what students are learning with the laptops, but I’m pretty sure they are learning how to read, write and do math the old way first. Or at least the laptops come with reading games and such. You get the idea.

No matter what you do— proposing the idea of corporate blogging, allowing Facebook at work, whatever— there will always, always be the majority who fear the unknown. And they always need to be shown why they don’t need to be afraid and sometimes this needs to happen in small steps.

In this case, it’s the politicians and education ministers who are afraid of risk. Check out the BBC News article where it describes how Bill Gates and Intel are sulking over being beat to their game (5^th paragraph below the video). Vista vs. Linux. Intel vs. AMD.

The big picture is providing these children the opportunity to someday work in the global economy which is dependent on computers and the Internet. This gives them the opportunity to learn English, French, German, Mandarin, Cantonese and perhaps Hindi (unless of course everyone’s learning business English anyway) through software and online websites such as livemocha.com.

I’m wondering if proceeds from the OLPC (or all those help fight AIDS in Africa initiatives The Gap and all the celebrities keep talking about) could fund the school’s infrastructure such as solar and wind power, water, whatever. Remember, the Western economy is taking full advantage on capitalizing on developing nations. In Africa right now, mobile phones are used for communicating over the Internet instead of blowing salaries on an expensive computer. I’m pretty sure Microsoft or Intel or some other tech company has invested in wireless towers in these areas.

Anyway, imagine once the students start blogging! Or posting photos on Flickr or… drawing their own comics on their website?

Social media in corporations will eventually become normal sometime in the future. Until then, we have to learn how to ease their fears of allowing just anybody say bad things about them if they, say, launch a blog.

Online conversations about your company will happen with or without you. So relax and try to realize that participating in the blog, interacting with the comments posted by your readers/customers/employees is really just a big suggestion box or focus group.

Public decency

Sure, any negative comments are public (gasp!) but so are your professional replies to them. The world (whoever stumbles upon your blog and traditional media when something newsworthy/damaging happens) will see that your company is a company which listens to its customers, take actions to correct any mistakes it might have made and take suggestions on improving its products or services (IdeaStorm). Why wouldn’t you want that to be public?

Blogging, podcasting, whatever, no matter which format, getting into social media successfully requires participation. Should the need arise, don’t be afraid to dedicate someone to social media relations.

Richard Binhammer of Dell has such a position. I had the chance to hear him speak at a social media gathering here in Toronto called Third Tuesday. Richard talked about Dell’s positive experiences with participating directly with the blogosphere and how it turned around the customer service and product quality nightmare they were going through at the time (Direct2Dell).

Respond fast

Timely replies to posts and comments on your corporate or anybody else’s blog is crucial. You can’t waste a couple of days going through bureaucratic approvals and the legal department. The issue would have spiraled out of control by then when a simple reply from the blogger relations dude (or dudette) in a down-to-earth tone would save the day in minutes.

Richard mentioned that every time he posts a comment on a blog, even when it’s a negative post he’s replying to, the blogger is impressed of his action followed by a positive post. The message being propagated is Dell listens to what bloggers (read: customers) have to say and they can help improve their product/service. Take a look at IdeaStorm. As of this writing, “The Dell Community has contributed: 7942 ideas | promoted 556417 times | 55845 comments”.

Stay engaged

Richard also stresses to participate in positive posts as well. The way I see it, those are your fans (read: satisfied customers) who will vouch for you when a crisis hits. In other words, participating in social media is all about building relationships.

Dell blogs and stuff

It’s a no-brainer that Dell feels comfortable enough to launch an investor relations blog called DellShares. Great idea and about time a corporation had thought of being a little more transparent to their shareholders. Kudos to Dell! Also check out StudioDell which is full of videos and podcasts about using Dell products (or as they say,”the full Dell experience”).

As you can safely assume, I’m an intense fanatic of moleskine notebooks. I even bought the one with sheet music. But I don’t know how to write (or read) music. Somehow, I’ll find an artistic use for this odd choice of artistic medium.

Sheet music comics!

If you are a musician who can read music, you might like this site. I draw comics and write music notes at random, post it as a pdf. You download it and record the music I wrote. Is there any melody? Upload your new composition somewhere and post the link on my site for everyone to hear :) Not this site. The Super Spud Soundtrack site at superspud.com/music.

Comet Holmes came as a complete surprise for me. I didn’t even know there was a comet in the sky.

Saturday night, I noticed something out of the ordinary in the nightsky after I walked out of my garage. There was a fuzzy ball that reminded me of the time I saw Comets Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake (I’m sure I mispelled that).

I looked some more and wondered. Could it be another naked-eye comet? I went back inside to get my binoculars (I still haven’t got around to buying a telescope like I always wanted) to take a look and yes, it was eerie. It looked like a fuzzy planet.

I figured it was a galaxy and went inside to check SkyNews.ca, a Canadian astronomy magazine that I subscribe to. The front page of their website confirmed it. It is indeed a comet!

Unfortunately, I’m surrounded by lights but fortunately, Flickr is popular so after I did some more comet-watching, I looked it up and saw everyone’s photos of Comet Holmes.

That’s the cool thing about Flickr. Chances are pretty good that someone will post photos of whatever event is happening. I discovered this with the last total solar eclipse I missed due to being in the completely wrong geographical area. I was doubtful that anyone would post photos on Flickr and to my surprise there was a truckload of photos on the morning of the eclipse (as in, within hours of it).

Anyhoo, I drew the above sketch this morning as I waited for my computer to finish backing up. It’s a little dark, yes, but that’s how the nightsky is.

Gotta run and observe the eclipse.

Just a quick note to mention that I’ve created a Facebook group for character designers. I’ve been itching to draw, draw, draw and really delve into freelance illustration when I suddenly thought of creating such a group for networking and fun. I don’t know anybody else who enjoys character design professionally or not.

That’s the beauty of social media and modern technology in general. I have the potential to meet fellow designers all over the world. Depending on hwo many people find the group, sign up and participate, of course! But you get my drift.

So if you have a Facebook account, feel free to join my Character Designers group. It would be cool to meet you.

You do realize that animals are running out of places to hide from us “progressive-loving” humans forever clear cutting their homeland.

I drew and inked the above artwork in my Moleskine sketchbook last June and thought it would be a great contribution for Blog Action Day.

Which reminds me, it’s Blog Action Day today where a whopping 14 thousand blogs are participating. 14 THOUSAND! The topic is the enviroment and unless you’ve been living under a rock with you fingers in your ears and your eyes shut, you probably noticed that we’ve done quite a lot of damage.

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