Alexandra Samuel's blog | Social Signal

Today's Digital Economy conference has surfaced the hunger for a serious effort at moving Canada back into a leadership position in the global digital economy. As the day has unfolded, many people have noted that we need to meet that hunger with a concrete action plan. Here's my first crack at a set of recommendations, guided by our experience in the emergent field of social media, for both action and further dialogue.

Recommendations for future action:

1. Marry hardware and software. One of Canada's great success stories, RIM (of Blackberry fame) is here today. Another great success -- Flickr -- is absent. But Flickr shows what Canadians can do when they take the infrastructure of the web (mobile, wireles or wired) and marry it with our traditional strengths in community and content creation. Twinning hardware innovators with software innovators would be a great way to inspire software innovators to develop tools and business models that make the most of next-generation hardware, and vice versa.

I'm at a Canadian Government's conference in Ottawa today on "Canada's Digital Economy: Moving Forward". Over the course of the day we'll be covering the topics of business innovation, infrastructure, and e-commerce. You can read the background paper online, or watch the live webcast as it unfolds.

There's already a lively Twitter backchannel that seems to include a good number of people in the room as well as folks watching online, and I'll be live tweeting the conference myself.

This post is part 5 of a series, Getting the most from your new Mac.

You've fallen in love; you never knew it could be like this. When you compare the object of your affection to your ex, you can't believe what you once settled for.

But like any lover, you can't help but noticing one or two things that could be just a tiny bit better. Maybe your beloved even has a couple of quirks that are downright annoying. And isn't it your job -- the job of any admirer -- to bring out the best in your darling?

Happily, it's easier to tweak your Mac than to upgrade your boyfriend or girlfriend. Here are some adjustments that any new Mac user should undertake, or at least consider, until your computer is exactly right for you.

We can either follow our instinct
Or take advice from every joker
We can either be distinct, or wind up merely mediocre
I’d rather be nine people’s favorite thing
Than a hundred people’s ninth favorite thing.

For the past year, those words have been a mantra at Social Signal. When we tackle a new social media project, we're always balancing the size of the audience we'd like to reach (you know, a few hundred million or so) with the desire to engage meaningful participation. And meaningful engagement is most likely when you focus on becoming nine people's favorite thing.

When companies adopt social media, they get more than just the marketing juice they're typically seeking: they're inviting in a Trojan Horse full of questions about their offering, their approach, and even their fundamental value proposition. My recent blog post for Harvard Business Online looks at how companies can best engage the Trojan Horse of social media, and it's drawn some insightful comments.

This post is part 4 of a series, Coming out as a Mac user.

Switching platforms is disorienting, at least until you get up and running with the core software that gives you all the tools you had on your old machine. But you didn't switch to a Mac just so you could do the same old stuff. You switched because you wanted to rock the house, set the world on fire, and bravely go where no Windows machine has gone before. Here are four Mac-only apps that should fill your heart with joy at your newfound powers.

What are the essential tools for blogging and online conversation in 2009? Social Signal friend and advisor Leda Dederich recently asked me for an update to the post I wrote on this topic four years ago. Happily, SoSi staffer Karen Fung recently wrote an excellent post that ran through the specific tools I reviewed in 2005. But I thought I'd step back and offer an answer to the underlying question: what tools do I need to participate effectively in the thriving world of social media?

This is part 3 in a series, Coming out as a Mac user.

Like any passionate affair, your romance with a new Mac can fizzle when you discover the limitations of your beloved. Your new Mac is much less likely to drive you crazy than that old machine running Windows Vista, but it's not without the occasional quirk. Here are five highly recommended investments that will help protect you from software frustrations or hardware failures:

How can you use the web to engage your members, supporters or the public, and move them towards a specific action?

That's a common question from nonprofits who are diving into social media. Whether you're looking for your online visitors to contribute photos, forward your issue alerts, make a donation, or contact policy-makers, social media can be a powerful way of engaging your audience and driving them towards action.

But it's often hard for nonprofits to figure out how they can engage people effectively online. It's hard enough to get visitors to your site or social media presence, let alone drive them effectively towards action. In our session at NetSquared today, we used Social Actions as a case study in engaging online community participation, and shared two strategy tools that can help you make your nonprofit site more engaging.