Being Buff: Marketing the social economy

The most engaging speaker I caught at Podcamp Toronto 2010 last week was Karim Kanji of TechVibes.com. TechVibes bills itself as “a hyper-local technology blog, events calendar, job board, and company directory across a growing network of [13 North American cities].” Karim has been writing for TechVibes for just three months but has pumped out an amazing amount of content driven by his goal to write three articles a day. Yes, I said three a day – in addition to working full time and raising a kid. Karim said he focuses on the Toronto tech scene and tells stories too local for global online sources like Mashable and TechCrunch to touch. His claim was backed up by the fact that people from at least two of the companies he spoke of were in the room.

Karim shared some of the things he had covered for TechVibes including:

• Sprouter.com that enables collaboration and networking between entrepreneurs globally.
• Buzz Buzz Home - Canada’s Largest New Home Database.
  
• JetCooper – a digital experience agency specialising in designing smart end-user experiences for the web.
• Apple iPad – say no more.

Some of the key takeaways from Karim’s session were:

• If you write about local people and communities that already support each other they’ll support you too.
• Create lots of content.
• Use keyword-based Google Alerts to find stories.
• Companies need to physically get out into their communities more.
• Use spell check.

Enjoy!

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Posted in Journalism, Local | 3 Comments »

This weekend I was in Toronto with my family and experienced first hand the power of local mobility. The first example was my search for a grocery store…

Using my iPhone, I fired up the Maps feature, and searched for "grocery store". Almost instantly, a shower of little red push pins flew down from the heavens and landed on points on the map nearest to me, showing me the nearest grocery stores. Tapping on one of the pins gave me the name and address of the store. That evening I did the same thing to find a video store and for the whole weekend I used the phone to get directions to the next place we were headed.

These were powerful lessons.

Google is great for finding any information in the world but not great at finding the nearest place to buy milk. For that you need a GPS (Global Positioning System) enabled mobile device that tells the search engines where you physically are. Once you have that, the search engines, or your company or organization, can send people targeted information when they need it: on the move.

This means that companies that sell, say, fair trade chocolate, can get themselves into the Maps database so that when someone feels peckish for some slavery-free chocolate they just search for "fair trade chocolate" and their mobile devices tell them the nearest place to buy it. I did this just out of curiosity and was directed to the Kakayo Chocolate Company – 7 minutes from where I was. And the thing is, if I was really hungry for chocolate, Kakayo would have a new customer.

So my next bit of research is how Kakayo got in my search results but other organizations didn’t – and I’ll keep you posted on the results.

Oh, and have I said how much I love my iPhone?

Posted in Local, Mobile | 2 Comments »