The Canadian Social Economy Hub (CSEHub) is inviting proposals for research scholarships from practitioners and students under 30 years old who are working in the Social Economy.
This scholarship program is intended to promote original research by “emerging leaders” in the Social Economy that will advance knowledge for the sector, and enhance the capacity of successful candidates to further strengthen the Social Economy in academic and practitioner sectors in Canada.
The Program will provide scholarships of up to $3,000 per recipient towards salary replacement, national/international travel, or other actual costs of conducting research and producing a research report for publication by CSEHub.
Deadline for proposals is September 15, 2009. For more information, or to submit a proposal, e-mail secoord@uvic.ca, or visit www.socialeconomyhub.ca.
Canada’s first Advertising Week starts today, with events across the country. Speakers include Sir Richard Branson, and neural scientist – amazing speaker Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor.
In an article a few days ago in the National Post, the chief executive of Institute of Communication Agencies Gillian Graham argued that it’s the worst time to cut advertising spending:
“It has been proven that those who cut spending in these times will exacerbate their revenue challenges and ultimately, lose share.”
As with any statistics and most research, results are interpreted.
What the studies referred to above don’t do is compare revenue results if time and money is invested in advertising, versus less money invested and energy put toward getting free editorial.
In tough economic times, I’d argue, some of the advertising budget can be much better invested in publicity efforts. For far less money, clients can get more column 
inches, more airtime, more online presence and more visibility.
To get massive publicity coverage, you need:
- someone who’s a huge media consumer, across all media
- personal media contacts in your target market (I’ve re-thought this – I don’t think this it’s critical to already have these in place)
- a kickass, current media database
- a ‘hook’ – why this story now? why should readers/viewers/listeners care?
- a high-level (ideally, top) person who:
- will make significant time available to do media interviews, and will be willing to prioritize last-minute media requests for the length of the campaign push
- is a ‘good talker’ – articulate, energetic, can speak concisely, uses anecdotes/storytelling, and can translate more complex topics to layperson language
- someone other than your interviewee, to be the ‘pitch’ person
- great-quality visuals, minimum 300 dpi for most newspapers
- most of the publicity effort going to crafting individual media pitches
- a media relations professional who:
- has created and executed many campaigns
- genuinely believes in the cause, the event or the product that they are pitching
- ideally has worked as a journalist or producer themselves
In tough economic times, directing money to free editorial via publicity is the route to go.
photo by Altemark
I don’t like reading multi-page documents online.
I’m trying to be more environmentally responsible with the amount that I print, but like most people I scan rather than read online text. With more than a few pages, or with complex topics, online information just doesn’t lodge in my brain in the same way.
But I know I could do better with my tree-consuming behavour. So I was intrigued when I happened across FlipViewer. I don’t know if more book-like (‘multimedia interactive’) software has existed for a while, but this was the first time I came across an e-book that really felt like reading a book.
The Lancet sent out an email that they’re currently offering a free e-book online, Darwin’s Gift. The visuals are like real pages turning, and for me the experience is way more pleasant. I also love the cover art. There’s even audio of paper pages turning. So I’m going to try again to do more big readings online.
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My next quest in improving my environmental behaviour: an all-in-one printer that offers easy two-sided printing.
Any printer I’ve ever owned has pitiful functionality for two-sided printing. The whole document prints out on one side first, and then you have to manually feed the same pages back in again. Every printer I’ve ever done this with either misses a sheet, or sucks in several pages at once, and the numbering of the pages ends up chaotic – pages missing, pages only partly-printed, and a real annoyance to try to find pages as you’re reading through a document. Though at an office I almost always ensure I’ve selected two-sided printing, at home I’ve given up. If anyone knows of an inexpensive small office/home all-in-one printer that does an excellent job of two-sided printer, I’d like to know.
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The free e-book is a promotion to bring in new subscribers to The Lancet, but you don’t have to subscribe to read the book. I couldn’t find a way to download and read it offline, so from what I figure, you have to read it online.
This is an excerpt from the blurb (the links are mine):
Darwin’s Gift celebrates the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. You’ll find essays about Darwin’s life and work, and the enduring legacy of his remarkable theory of evolution. These were Darwin’s gifts to all of us.
One of the ways that Twitter is used is as a forum to post questions where you can often get surprisingly rapid, informed responses. So when I read that Twitter was used in an operating room, I hoped it wasn’t to ask what to do with a certain artery.
In fact, the Twitter feed #TWOR accompanied a live Detroit video broadcast to a medical conference in Las Vegas. The real-life operation was a robotic cystectomy and lymph node dissection on an unidentifiable male. A photo shows the doc’s at the keyboard with the operation in the background (wonder how they had to disinfect the laptop?).
The medical audience and the Twitter public could ask questions as the doctors posted updates about how the surgery was going.
I love that they thought of this idea, and I love that they decided to use publicly-accessible Twitter rather than an application that locked participation to the Vegas audience only. Patient education and patient-centredness are still so very weak, and I think the efforts – and the approvals – to take this step were important.
An interesting post by Shel Israel about this world first live-Tweeted surgery includes excerpts from an interview he did with one of the Twitter doctors who was in the OR.
There was one reflective and interesting comment from the doctor when he discussed potential uses for Twitter in medicine:
I’m speaking as a person here and not a hospital employee, in trying and frightening times I’d want to feel like I had any sort of additional connection to my doctor or hospital that I could. A tool like Twitter can provide another touch point.
Twittering is one step towards global education and collaboration but must be done carefully so as to avoid mis-information.
I’m curious whether the group discussed how Twitter would be handled in the unusual event that this surgery took a turn for the worse. If the patient unexpectedly got into real trouble, was the plan to continue with updates?
Having a live audience is intriguing – I wonder what other potential teaching or conference applications could there be for Twitter, beyond the scope of Skype conferencing and the like?
