business.creativity.life.

I love these videos! Can’t get enough of them!

After an impeccable presentation by Saul Colt at the SproutUp Ottawa meetup tonight I just felt compelled to relay the tips Mr. Colt so effortlessly indicated to us entrepreneur-hopefuls about how to run a business. His interesting approach of educating us about business by highlighting its parallels with the world of dating was just one of the ways he brought across thought provoking information in a refreshing manner. In case you weren’t able to attend, here are the details:

In any dating pursuit, you have the basic steps: 1. the introduction, 2. the attraction, 3. courting, 4. dating 5. love. Here is how each of these sequential steps can be used to establish happy, loyal customers in your business.

1. The introduction – you need to introduce the world to your product and do it well such that the user can interface with the product or service without your intermediary help

2. The attraction – your product needs to be attractive, people once introduced to it need to have an intrinsic need to want to know more about what your product is and what it can do for them

3. Courting & 4. Dating – Take the time and effort to make a strong if not personal connection with your customers. Let them know you care in simple ways, whether it be a hand-written thank you card or just some gratitude for a re-tweet

5. Love – You want people to fall in love with your product/service, because everyone loves to be in love which in turn makes them want to broadcast it or share it. 

6. ‘So now that you have love, what are you going to do with it?’ – This is where maintenance comes in. Once you have established a need for your product you have to continually produce functionalities and results that will grow and benefit your end users; because if they’re not going to love you there will always be more fish in the sea for them to love.

That’s the gist of it, @SaulColt delivered the talk with much more panache than I can deliver in a simple blog post, he is simply an awesome person with a wonderful sense of humor and extensive knowledgeability. He effectively made his own niche within the corporate world by working with companies such as FreshBooks and Zoocasa to get them to get more bang for their buck and maximize their ROI. If you ever get the chance he really is someone whom you should meet, they don’t call him ‘the head of magic’ for nothing!

SproutUp Ottawa was honestly my most anticipated meetup to-date. Sprouter is an online community geared towards entrepreneurs as it’s an online tool that lends itself to connecting veteran and budding entrepreneurs world-wide. To help promote the tool and the communities it is establishing, Sprouter has been to Toronto, New York City and now Ottawa to have face-to-face meetups for Sprouter members and those keen to join. This event definitely did not disappoint! With presentations from Aydin Mirzaee for Fluid Surveys, Scott Annan for Network Hippo and Saul Colt for Zoocasa the evening was filled with resourceful information, helping hands and most importantly: laughter!

Whether you are a dot-com-millionaire or someone who just heard about entrepreneurship 2 minutes ago, tonight’s SproutUp Ottawa meetup was a must-attend event. The overall environment and mood of the evening was one of ease and relaxation all revolving around the understanding of learning and meeting new people. Everyone was cheerful and friendly, all willing to share their entrepreneurial story and lend a helping in any capacity. Between the Girl Geek Dinner on Tuesday evening and today’s SproutUp Ottawa meetups I felt like I was attending a social media tour and collecting business cards as MVP trading cards along the way! In two days, the people I have met and the conversations I have had have been so intrinsically rewarding. Everyone hesitates to attend those pesky ‘networking events’ especially after a long day of work, but honestly at both events I never once felt like I was ‘networking’. Conversations and demeanors were similar to those with old friends full of laughter, funny stories and insightful information all over yummy food and drinks. I can’t wait for the next SproutUp meetup and am tempted to make a day trip to Toronto for their next monthly meetup (October 14th). Even if the trip doesn’t pan out I’ll be sure to maintain more of a profile of awesome upcoming events such as Girl Geek Dinner, SproutUp and more in the future.

Sprouter is yet another addition to the world of social media and online communities, except this time it’s targeted to one primary domain: entrepreneurs. The website is geared towards global networking and collaboration between entrepreneurs. Better yet, founder and CEO, Sarah Prevette, is a fellow Canadian! 

Sprouter is definitely a great initiative that enables valuable connections and information for anyone interested in entrepreneurship. But before you get too excited, unfortunately it’s still in private-testing and is issuing members by invite only. But there may be a silver lining for the eager entrepreneurs of Ottawa.Erin Bury, of RedWire, has taken liberties to create a ‘Sprout Up Ottawa‘ Meetup group for all of us Sprouter enthusiasts to get connected. Their first meetup is coming up fast: September 16 at The Velvet Room (see details below). So don’t wait, get involved and let your entrepreneurial ambitions sprout!

Sprout Up Ottawa Meetup Details

When: September 16 (6-9 pm)

Where: The Velvet Room

62 York Street
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A1
(613)241-6810 

Details: Sprout Up Ottawa Meetup Group

For the capital of a nation such as Canada, Ottawa brings ‘big city’ caliber with a small-town, homely feel. Amongst its eclectic mix of high-tech, politics and Government driven population, business and innovation are domains that have a large following but are often not recognized or even associated with Ottawa. So how do we bring these hidden gems to the forefront? The Ottawa Innovation Challenge is just one of the ways in which we can expose and highlight the emerging talent in business and innovation.

OIC is an event dear to my heart as I had the privilege to work with Steve Robins, Will Armstrong and Manu Sharma on this initiative from the day the idea was brought up in a casual TalentBridge Friday conversation. I’ve organized events before but working on the OIC was a unique learning experience in itself.  We had many discussions, debates and focus groups to make sure we were creating something of purpose and value to both students and companies.

Bringing an idea like this to fruition in just a matter of weeks clearly illustrates how much we believe in its purpose and what opportunities it can bring to the young entrepreneurial innovators of Ottawa. We are actively taking an initiative to establish a new name for Ottawa. One that connotates originality, creativity, forward-thinking, and opportunity. Please join us for the weekend-long event, that is sure to be filled with fun, learning and opportunity. If you are unable to attend but still want to be in on the action, feel free to follow the event via twitter (@innovateottawa) to have a live feed of the weekend’s happenings and please stay tuned for the next OIC!

What:      The Ottawa Innovation Challenge (OIC)

A 48-hour competition to find creative, entrepreneurial solutions for real business problems presented from Ottawa-based companies: Benbria and ThinkSM.

When:    Friday, August 21 @5pm to Sunday, August 23, 2009

Where:   Carleton University, Ottawa

Who:        Registered students from a recognized post secondary institution with an interest or background in entrepreneurship and business development are eligible to register. Applicants must be highly motivated, comfortable with working in a diverse team, as teams will be assembled by the OIC committee, and must have a keen interest in entrepreneurship

How:        Contact Steve Robins at steve@innovationottawa.com or Manu Sharma msharma@ocri.ca to register now! Find additional information at  www.innovationottawa.com

Why:

• Showcase your talents where it matters: in application to real-world problems 
• Become exposed to the realities of the business world, with the presented problems, developing teamwork strategies and working through a problem-solving pipeline
• Network with top Ottawa company executives and bright, young talent of Ottawa

With all this buzz about Twitter and Facebook more and more savvy entrepreneurs and business affiliates are seeing the wide range of opportunities that social media presents for marketing and advertising. 

Just so that we’re all on the same page, social media is media designed to disperse as a result of social interactions. Social media supports the marriage between technology and the human need to interact on a social level, some popular examples include: Technorati, Flickr, LinkedIn, Youtube, Wikipedia and more.  Social media supports: making a democracy of information and knowledge, of transforming one-to-many media dialogues into many-to-many social media dialogues, and converting people from content consumers to producers. So what does all of this have to do with marketing?

At the heart of marketing and advertising is to engage people such that they go from being interested in what is being offered to being a loyal consumer.  The problems with traditional advertising, ie: print posters, radio and television commercials, etc is that they rarely engage viewers and have become less personal, therefore leaving a detachment between a potential customer and the advertised company. Many viewers are left with the notion of ‘what will it do for me?’ This is where social media breaks barriers. Once you have joined and actively participated in online communities with valuable information, mere network connections start to build trust and recognize your output as valuable. This is exactly what brands and companies want to establish with their current and potential customers: trust. With the help of the Internet and social media these same companies can connect with people from all types of demographics, a task not easily carried out with traditional advertising and marketing campaigns. The reality of these online social communities is that they contain millions of people worldwide who have the potential, from a business perspective, to be converted into your next customers.

Yes, social media is the current trend and none of us can accurately predict how long it will last or where it will go. But one of the key factors to good marketing is staying with the trends, also known as ‘keeping up with the Jones’’; it’s where the leaders are and where most people want to be. Look at how marketing on the Internet has flourished. In the early 90s when the Internet first started, the average person didn’t really understand what it was or what purpose it could serve to them. The smart business and marketing people saw an opportunity, jumped on the bandwagon and are now veterans of advertising on the most used information platform in the world. For all we know, social media could be the tiny wave that is supposed to forewarn us of the Tsunami waiting to happen, so don’t let the wave pass you by.

This morning I had the privilege of attending Ottawa’s Social Media Breakfast, a monthly early morning event where Ottawa’s social media experts and beginners come together to eat, share and learn about the emerging trend of social media. At today’s event Toronto rogue entrepreneur, David Crow(@davidcrow), shared his thoughts on the growing craze giving not only insight on the topic but also how we can each tap into it and have it work for us. Encouraging quotes and thought provoking questions, both included below, were interspersed throughout his one-hour talk. 

“the future exists today. It’s just unevenly distributed” – William Gibson

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it” – Alan Kay

From the get-go I’ll admit that I was expecting to see an older gentleman standing before us, educating us on the wisdom he gained over the years, etc, etc. But instead Mr Crow was a fun, fresh, intriguing character who talked openly about current viral companies or ideas like: WillItBlend? and mentos + coke on David Letterman. He spoke candidly about his beginnings in kinesiology at Waterloo, and his reasoning for the degree being its higher female population, onto his days at Carnegie Mellon to now being at Microsoft and helping budding Canadian entrepreneurs in parallel. But sprinkled among his personal information was truly insightful information about how to capitalize on social media mainly through establishing meaningful experiences for users. At the root of all examples and inspirational stories, Mr Crow made it a point to repeat the point: stop accepting mediocre, build awesomeexperiences and always strive for greatness. After all the majority of social media outlets are available as the ‘digital glue’ for anyone and everyone to use as a means of converging advertising, marketing and customers. So how do you make your idea stick? Mediocrity is no longer an option; “don’t just sit back and [observe], take the leap, know you might fail but that you will learn [in the process]”.

The following are a few key points taken from this morning’s event:

• The essence of marketing (continuous cycle)
  • Attract > engage > excite
• Mankind extends by
  • Amplifying tools
    • Tools that help you ‘reach’   
  •  Goal cloning
    • Building tools that motivate people to do one thing (ex: how do you get the world to watch football on television?)
• Social media is one of the media facets, it is the digital glue
• The marketing landscape is no longer a ‘push’ method
•  There are millions of websites, it’s about the ‘data’
  • How do you track the site?
  • How do you manipulate it?
  • Need to track and understand what people are doing
• Markets are conversations
  • Need to engage
• Every business has 2 functions
  • Marketing
  • Innovation
  • **social media touches both sides of this equation
• social media tools don’t make conversations, they support it!
  • By understanding how social media supports human desire for conversations , businesses can open vibrant interactions with individuals and communities
• Generate memories and an experience, build an emotional connection
• Social media is:
  • The connection point
  • It is the glue
  • Is isn’t one channel, it’s all channels
  • It’s where your audience is
• 5 Principles of Social Capital (excerpt from Tara Hunt’s The Whuffie Factor)
  • stop talking, start listening
  • become part of the community you serve
  • create amazing user experiences
  • embrace the chaos
  • find your higher purpose

David Crow (@davidcrow)

•  www.linkedin.com/davidcrow
• www.davidcrow.ca
• His initiatives
  • DemoCamp
  • Founders & Funders
  • StartupEmpire

Recently I went out for a ‘night on the town’ in downtown Toronto with my friend and a group of her friends, whom I had never met before. As I introduced myself to this new group of people we engaged in a variety of conversations and a few of us ‘hit it off’. We soon began joking around and discussing topics as if we were long lost girlfriends. As I got to know a little bit more about each person, their educational background, their current careers, etc. I soon realized they were very accomplished individuals all in the early stages of accelerating up their respective corporate ladders. The thought did cross my mind ‘these would be great business contacts’. But I quickly shoved the idea out of my head because how could I befriend these lovely people and then ‘use’ them as business contacts? That would be dead against the ‘business 101’ rulebook, right?

I find we are often given this preconceived notion that business and networking is a regimented, serious affair whereas socializing is where you can ‘let loose’ and not necessarily be ‘professional’. Now a days with so much networking, and each person we meet holding value as a business contact, it can be difficult to remember everyone. Often it is the contacts that we befriend that stick in our minds most prominently. But why is it that these friends are higher up on our ‘go to’ list of contacts as opposed to that big wig CEO your boss just introduced you to? Maybe we feel they are more trustworthy because we see and interact with them in more vulnerable situations, or maybe it’s because we enjoy spending time with that person so using them as a business contact is just an excuse to engage with them more often.

Whatever the reasoning in this day and age there is a need for meaningful relationships between people in order to be remembered. Networking in itself is a means of socializing, but it is a more active form. Both parties in the newly forming relationship need to take initiative to follow-up with one another as well as find and use the other person’s valuable attributes while still maintaining a friendly, conducive relationship. This may sound simple when considering making and maintaining just one contact. But I met on average twenty new people in one evening’s social interactions. So let’s say I meet roughly 10 new people each time I go out for a night on the town, and I average 2 social events per week. That results in 20 new people per week, and up to 80 new potential contacts that I have to maintain per month. Suddenly hanging out with the girls sounds like more work than fun!

Five to ten years ago if someone mentioned a ‘creative’ job I would think of scruffily dressed, independent thinking artists with messy work tables filled with drawings and sketches. The word ‘creative’ was always something I associated with the arts. Now that I am a part of that very industry, I see creativity in a very different light. It also seems that many others are now realizing and understanding the benefits of a creative mind for industries other than the arts, as mentioned in Harvard Business Publisher’s article ‘Learning From How Designers Think and Work’ by Becky Bermont.

Ms Bermont examines how while managing graphic designers she understood that there is an entire ‘experience’ that a designer thinks about for an end-user or customer that is often forgotten by business affiliates. Creative minds have the ability to make information more tangible and interesting to users. Ms Bermont poses questions regarding how remarkable abilities such as these could affect and in turn help the business world.

The beauty of the creative mind is in its freedom to go outside the lines, to push the boundaries. I find myself, when in a creative-management situation, I often borrow concepts or ideas from varying silo-departments and mesh them together unconsciously. In the end the final product incorporates all that satisfies the end-user as well as meets the project objectives. So in response to Ms Bermont’s posed questions, I do feel there is tremendous potential for the creative mind in the business world. I also feel those in the creative industry if equipped with the right business knowledge would pose as a serious threat to existing business related jobs. Business is something that can be taught, whereas the ability to come up with innovative solutions is not something that can be learned. I think many are over looking the world of design, and as a result it is not being given the recognition it deserves. Designers are not just artists; they can also be strategists and innovators. Look at Apple; their primary goals are for user experience and aesthetics. If Apple can see the value in creative minds, why can’t your company do the same and benefit?

For as long as I can remember, I have always had keen interests in an eclectic mix of areas from fashion to construction, event planning to medicine. If I liked it, I just appended it to the growing pile of things that I had an interest in.  As a young child I was exposed to a variety of things that may have been contributing factors. For instance my mother’s sewing, my father’s home renovation projects, family socializing and talks with my family about stable career choices. These exposures in combination with being the eldest child provided ample opportunities for me to ‘get my feet wet’ and try new things. I am happy that I took my formative years to develop my skill set, but I can vouch that it wasn’t always an asset, especially where choosing a degree was concerned.

In my latter years of high school I was convinced that I would complete my undergrad in biomedical engineering and then consider medical school. Obviously that isn’t what materialized, but I did try out the engineering world for a little while. Little did I know what a crazy situation I’d be in when I realized after two years that it wasn’t the right avenue for me to pursue. I had worked so hard to get there, then I was faced with having to choose a new path, but which one do I choose? Career stability was a factor that obviously had to be weighed into the equation, but I really was in a fix as I was unable to choose just one area to develop a career. I felt I was sacrificing a passion in one area for the sake of a career in another. In the end, all worked out well as my bachelor of information technology, focused on interactive multimedia and design, perfectly melds my largest and primary interests of: technology, creativity and business.

Now with graduation just under a year away thoughts of my first full-time job keep popping up. Which area do I go into? How long should I stay in that field? Some inspiring videos, included below, by Stanford University professors Carol Bartz and Randy Komisar have proved that my eclectic mix may be beneficial in the career world. Professor Bartz discusses how setting a foundation is key in the early years of your career. The formation of your career should be shaped like a pyramid over time. It should start off broad and with time refined to your ideal profession. Which makes logical sense since by the time you settle into your niche, you would have tested the other avenues to be sure you are going where you want to go. As she mentions in the video, if you keep trying to climb the vertical, corporate ladder as you get closer to the top you’re bound to fall because you have no foundation. All that is holding you up are two stakes in the ground. Professor Komisar further supports this argument by detailing the journey through his career and how he is so well equipped now because of the extensive knowledge he gained from all of the positions he has held over the years. Although it may seem glamorous to run up the corporate ladder as soon as you land your first job you have about 40+ years of your life to work, so what’s the rush?

Pyramids, Not Ladders – Carol Bartz

The History of a Virtual CEO – Randy Komisar