Design. Charity. Life.

What would you expect from a presentation by Facebook? A product launch, a sales pitch, a feature tutorial? The Group Director of Global Marketing Solutions at Facebook Canada, Steve Irvine, gave an impressive keynote at digital media conference Canada 3.0, covering neither of those things.

Steve manages a team focused on building trusted advisory relationships with decision makers at some of the largest brands and agencies in Canada. Steve is an executive and successful entrepreneur with a track record of success in the digital and social media marketing industry. He was an entrepreneur for 10 years before taking a corporate job at Facebook – here’s his full bio.

After attending several conferences recently, Steve noticed the topics were all either Big Data, Mobile, or Social Media. What he took away is that they seem insanely complicated. Recently a Business Insider article shows just that in an “Insane Graphic”  to show How Complex Marketing Technology, below.

On Big Data

The “Noise” is growing. Yet, our memory hasn’t changed – our ability to take in and process info is the same as it was thousands of years ago. What is the implication of this?

To filter the sea of information, people are turning to their friends. Word of mouth matters: If a business says they’re the best, only 14% believe it, but if an individual says that business is the best themselves, 90% of people believe it. That’s huge for so many reasons.

“The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close up.” – Chuck Palahniuk

On Mobile

Moving from the green “online” icon to always on. This changes the expectations of organizations and brands, but most importantly the expectations that customers have of brands.

Steve says we’re going to mess this up for a bit longer, when it comes to mobile, by not taking advantage of the power available. For example when TV became available as a new platform, they mainly sat and read information to you just like they did on the Radio, the previous platform.

The printed flyer has been the number one thing that drives people into stores, forever. But people under 30 for example, don’t subscribe to or even pickup a newspaper. Really, the flyer concept is simply pictures of flyers on sale – so it can be made digital and social.

On Social Media

Engaging in the conversation and humanizing the brand is what social media is about. He references Bodyform’s video reply to a Facebook comment of someone complaining about them not honestly representing what women go through every month (watch the video here).

“Don’t focus on the sites, focus on the people.” It’s about delivering great experiences to your customers. The new technology and networks are tools ho help. Over time, identity has caught up with technology. You can now build and maintain relationships (business and personal) anywhere in the world, rather than what limited you by distance or cost.

So what do people really want?

1. People want to feel unique.
2. People want to feel connected.
3. People communicate through many lightweight interactions.

There’s a ton of social media and marketing advice out there. But Steve shared a few of his guiding principles to simplify.

Guiding Principles for Social Media

1. Focus on Business Impact
2. Horizontal vs. Vertical
3. Always on vs. Episodic
4. People vs. Technology

When it comes to technology, the question is, what are the big problems we’re trying to solve for the people that matter to us? Then using technology and computing power to provide the best experience for users to solve these problems.

A Facebook Stories video was shown at the end – a pretty unique and powerful one. It was about an Indian man named Mayank Sharma, who, as Facebook describes, would “probably tell you that going through meningitis is hell — if he could remember any of it”. A great story:

It’s everyone’s responsibility to think about people, and how you provide them with what they’re looking for. Facebook’s mission is to make the world more open and connected. Steve is inspired by what Facebook and social media is able to do for people.

Should digital experiences should stop competing with the “real world”? As part of Canada’s annual digital media conference, Canada 3.0, a workshop answered this question with “No”.

As digital distribution disrupts media everywhere, audiences seek out concepts like ‘authenticity’ and less commodified ‘experiences’. Trends are changing, people are concerned, and there are concepts that use digital technology to enable offline activities, instead of striving to just replace them.

People exist inside their smartphones today. We become deeply immersed in whatever it is that’s happening on our phone (a text messaging conversation, a game, commenting on social media posts, reading blogs or articles, or just plain nonsense.) I’ve done it (and almost always when I’m at a store or long event), and friends around me do it (to the point where they miss things, people can’t get their attention). So this whole concept of not having digital experiences compete with the real world, but just be better integrated into it, really makes sense.

“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

Right now, you have one life and another life online. You can choose what to separate. You may have given away too much information, or that you know too much information. A cab company tracks your location automatically, you know someone’s phone number just by looking at them, you go to a new location of Starbucks and they know your order already. Of course these scenarios are odd and could be awkward, but the workshop facilitator is most interested in this these moments, and using them to our advantage.

One example was about the future of Google Glass: Visualizing beyond limitations. A company called Playground is trying to dissect the human-technology relationship, and they believe Glass represents information technology at its most intimate.

Everything is possible today: Workout Path tracking, Comparison Shopping, Advertising, Secure payment experiences (Wallet), Smart Shopping, Taxi using Location services, Sports Updates, Guitar Training, Emergency Services, Presentation Aids, Gaming: Device Awareness and Syncing, and Context-aware notifications for TV Alerts. You may think some are super helpful while some are excessive in the video below.

Beyond Google Glass, which I noted is constantly feeing you information, but not giving much of a social or sharing perspective, the presenter gave 2 examples:

Findery is an example of Making places come allive. Leaving invisible notes to eachother. In Toronto we have Murmur, where you can call a number to hear a recording at a specific location (a documentary oral history project that records stories and memories told about specific geographic locations).

The Conversation: Digital Experiences do not need to compete with real life

Who is working on this conversation about merging digital experiences with real world ones? Even Jones, Creative Director & Producer of Stitch Media, who I spoke with at Canada 3.0.

Instead of quick one-time sales or ads, Jones wants to create novel-sized, extra stories with more challenges – not simple, quick experiences that you see in an everyday online ad, for example. Clients approach Stitch Media to create interactive or entertaining ideas (TV production companies to compliment their shows, for example).

Evan Jones’ work at Stitch Media is about motivating people through great stories.

More About the Speaker: Even Jones
Stitch Media partner Evan Jones, is a two-time Emmy Award® winner whose innovative work on interactive content for primetime television, radio, web, mobile and games have established him as a pioneer in new genres of Alternate Reality Games, Locative Media and Interactive Documentary. His work was recognized as one of the ‘Top 10 New Media Groundbreakers’ according to the Bell Broadcast & New Media Fund. Evan’s international clients include Microsoft, Disney, FOX, CBC, Bell, Discovery and The Movie Network.

DataWind is Disrupting Education in Emerging Markets with the World’s Cheapest Tablet

The CEO of Datawind Ltd., Suneet Singh Tuli, spoke about how his company is disrupting Education in emerging markets by creating the world’s least-expensive Tablet, at this year’s Canada 3.0 Digital Media Conference in Toronto.

DataWind is a great success story of a Canadian company identifying huge market opportunity in an international market, creating the disruptive technology capable of harvesting that potential and continuing to lever the diverse and talented labour market in Canada to make education in the third world a reality.

Scale of the Challenge: India

With India’s large population, the issue – and opportunity – is presented on a massive scale. There are 140 Million kids in the K-12 age group that are not in school. Nearly half of students in grades 5-8 drop out, and nearly 70% drop out in Grades 9-12.

We are living in the age of mediocre education. Suneet stated the average teacher is no longer relevant. What happens when you have a bad teacher in school? You learn on your own. The internet now gives students the opportunity to get a quality education anytime – at the very least, it is a valuable supplement to their traditional education.

There is a strong need for affordability. But how do we bring this technology to developing nations? Through research, DataWind determined that to reach One Billion people, the computers would need to be priced under $50. This is based on a price that is less than 20% of the Monthly Income of the most people in India.

The Perfect Storm

You can see a market worth billions emerging – you want to get in right before it takes off. The people that saw cell phone usage spreading outside of major cities in developing nations are now in the wealthiest portion of the population; it is believed we are at this stage for computers as well. The perfect storm for this needs frugal innovation.

Frugal Innovation Requirements:

• Innovative Hardware Design
• Unique Business Model
• Technological Breakthrough
• Disruptive Distribution Model

Solving the Hardware Puzzle

For the Aakash tablet, the Research, Product Design and Development is being done in Canada. The multicultural mosaic brings skills and experience that are not available anywhere else.

Instead of focusing on building the “iPad Killer” like everyone else, they looked at building the key, core, basic features needed. Designing for cost, optimizing your feature set for the target audience. This is the opposite of feature over-kill, “good enough” for the consumer. What about the physical components, the supply chain? Suneet advices you develop the high-value components yourself, instead of going to the existing major players (Samsung’s tablet touch-screens, for example).

Technological Breakthrough 

Home Internet access is only available to 50 Million people in India today – but 900 Million people have Mobile Phones. To allow more people to connect, they made the congested networks more efficient. Because of this improvement, they can add in an online Advertising system, that could lower the cost of Internet on these devices to $0.

The World’s Lowest Cost Computing/Internet Device: The Aakash tablet that DataWind developed has the same CPU as the original iPad, double the RAM of the original iPad, yet it costs 10 times less.

Opportunities for Canadian Digital/Media Companies

There are 3 billion people with mobile phones, but with no Internet access. This poses a huge opportunity. For Canadian companies, one opportunity is to discover what the killer apps will be for the devices of future users. The focus should be on making useful apps that work without even being able to read! A point of sale terminal has been created, for example, that works where users take photos of their products and inventory, and use a graphical user interface – no reading necessary. To create more apps like this, there is a global call for Socially Responsible Apps to Empower Women – AppsToEmpower.org.

Getting Tablets to the People

The Indian Federal Government has made it a strategic priority to provide a nationally subsidized mobile tablet – that’s 220 Million Tablets. Other countries, such as Thailand and Turkey, also plan on providing Free Tablet PCs to all students – kindergarten to post-secondary!

What the Future Holds

How will the world change when the next 1 Billion people get on the internet? We know today, the Internet will empower the next level of education and action.

The customer service world has changed drastically in the last decade, with social media becoming mainstream. Yet it has not adapted fully to the new online communication methods many users and stakeholders relay on today. I have had enough experiences trying to get help or answers from certain companies to know this.

Customer Service in a Social World was a talk presented by Rob McDougall, the CEO of Upstream Works, at the National Business and Technology Conference.

Rob discussed the role and handling of social media in today’s economy, under-lining the effect it has had on the way customers interact with products. He highlighted the differences between pervasive and passionate social media, and shared his views on the dangers of having a differentiated service.

Most businesses don’t know how to handle the social stuff. They have perfected phone support over the years, for example, but social changes things too much, Rob explained.

If you phone a company, they won’t even know that you phoned them about the same thing 2 days ago; never-mind them knowing about what you tweeted them!

Companies want to fit you into a box. They want you to fit into their schedule, their platform, their procedure, their hierarchy. But that doesn’t work well today, when people like me are on the go and on multiple platforms.

With Social Media, they cannot properly filter you, and they cannot own the platform. Brands are trying to do things on Facebook but they can backfire dramatically (like when the fashion like tweeted that Aurora was trending on Twitter, meanwhile it was trending because of the tragic school shooting in Aurora).

The United Airlines disaster, where they broke a singer’s guitar, could have been avoided if the customer service was focused (the guy called 90 times without being helped, and resulted in him posting a Video which went Viral: United Breaks Guitars). This Customer Service Failure caused Untied AIrlines $180,000,000.

The big question is, how do Customer Service departments handle all the channels well? Even if the company is doing a great job on Twitter, they may not be ready to handle a significant increase in tweets.

Providing great Customer Service is the lowest cost.

The Shaping Leaders session on Networking and Personal Branding at the National Business and Technology Conference was hosted by Bobby Umar, P.Eng, MBA, the President of Raeallan, a transformational leadership and speaking company.

Bobby discussed the importance, the why, and the how of networking. He spoke about – and made participants try – proven strategies and tactics, through interactive activities. He made connections to personal branding in person and on the web.

What does leadership mean to you? Bobby says that we can all be leaders – the question is whether you want it or not. But what makes a good leader?

Leaders Connect and Question
Leaders know who people are, understand their stories, and what they mean to them. Leaders ask the right questions, like: What if we could land on the moon? How can we get computers in every classroom? What if we could hold the entire world in one hand?

How Can I Help You? – Leaders need to think how they can help others.
You Need to Want It – Nobody will force you to.
Power of Connection – Bobby often speaks about the Power of Connection. The key is to become an authentic networker.

Why Do We Network?

• Uncover new and unseen opportunities
• Get better interviews
• Enhance your credibility
• Less competitive circumstances?
• Gather valuable information

You’re always going to have to deal with people. You’re always having to deliver expectations. So get good at Networking!

Why Network?

• Easier to obtain meetings
• Information meetings more related, 2 way
• Even if it doesn’t get you a job, you get info and referrals
• The key to unadvertised positions
• Less people used this approach

What Networking is NOT

Networking is not standing around, being fake, or talking about the weather. It is also not:

• Asking for a Job (change of availability is small anyway; even people you know will shy away)
• Take, Take, Take (Just give, start a beautiful relationship)

Get Networking

1. Everyone is a potential contact.
2. Set up information meetings (phone, email, LinkedIn)
3. Follow-up (not following up makes networking useless)

Networking Strategies and Tactics

Every person is a bridge to someone else. And, Bobby insists, you gotta want it!

• The approach – don’t hesitate about entering a group conversation, give a very quick introductions (keep it short). User power words like: Excuse me, or sorry to interrupt.
• Go with the flow – don’t be against what anybody is stating. You can’t just interrupt or be irrelevant. Ask the right questions.
• Seal the deal – determine a follow-up. End the conversation. Keep moving!
• Shelve your shyness – 50% of people say they are shy.
• Engage the person you are speaking with – smile!

Bobby says networking is the beginning of a beautiful, authentic relationship. You can find a co-founder, partner, wife or husband, apparently.