The Acts of Sweetness Team is on the road, following the Tall Ships 1813 Tour, presented by our client, Redpath Sugar.

Our Redpath Team will be everywhere from Windsor in the east to Sault Ste Marie in the west of the province. A long treck for Divvy, the 1947 Divco and Acts of Sweetness truck. Check out the Acts of Sweetness Instagram account for some lovely pictures.

Redpath Sugar has a long and proud maritime history, relying on ships to transport raw sugar from the tropics first to Montreal, now to their plant here in Toronto.

What surprising passion do winter athletes Caroline Calvé (snowboard), Olympic gold medal winner Caroline Ouellette (women’s hockey), Valérie Maltais ( short track speed skater) and Marc-Antoine Gagnon (freestyle skier) have in common? When they’re not busy competing on the world stage or training in the arena, or on slopes, they all love to bake.

The other thing they have in common is that they are financially supported by CAN Fund , a not for profit organization devoted to raising funds and awareness of Canadian athletes, which in turn is supported by one of our clients, Redpath Sugar.

A recent contest we designed for the French Redpath Sugar Facebook page pitched athletes against each other in an arena where few of their fans will have ever observed them – the kitchen.

In front of an enthusiastic audience of Redpath Sugar contest winners, as well as friends and families, their natural competitiveness soon started showing, as pucks, boards and skates were swapped for sugar, flour and eggs in a race to a culinary finish line no less thrilling that any of the athletic feats they usually perform on ice and snow.

Referee and well known Montreal bakery owner Christine Mitton ensured that contest rules were kept to, no competitor’s eggs “accidentially” developed suspicious cracks and the heat of contest was kept at least somewhat below the heat of the ovens.

In the end, audience applause determined the winner. Caroline Ouellette walked away with top price for her white chocolate tiramisu, closely followed by Marc Antoine’s angel cake, Valerie’s goji berry bars and Caroline’s organic banana bread with pineapple.

The fisheye Montreal team had a great time putting this contest together.

We’re now proud owners of a DJI Phantom Quadcopter, complete with GoPro mount. Expect to see all kinds of cool aerial shots in our videos soon.

We started using NFC tags, in addition to QR codes, to give visitors access to guided video tours in prize homes for the Princess Margaret Hospital Lottery. Hugely popular, these tours are hosted by Jack Celli, the designer, himself.

While QR codes can be really useful, they require the download of a dedicated scanning app. Especially for non-technical users, this can make them difficult to access or understand. A NFC (Near Field Communication) tag is much easier to use – just place your NFC enabled phone on the tag and the requested link will open.

NFC tags are cheap to buy, less than $1.00 a piece and easy to program – here’s a link to Tagstand NFC Writer, the Android app we’re using.

Unless you’ve got millions of adoring fans hanging at your every word, clamouring for attention, chances are you’re not quite as interesting as you think you are.

Yet many twitter streams, especially those run by brands, are intensely self-focused, a never ending stream of vaguely promotional content with hardly any interpersonal communication.

That kind of behaviour isn’t social. It’s old school marketing in disguise, the kind that people go out of their way to avoid.

To get full value out of twitter, try the following:

1. Search for something that interests you, or where your brand can add genuine value.
2. Go through the results, look for tweets that stand out from the crowd. Is the author asking a questions, expressing frustration?
3. Interact. Offer an opinion or help out, agree, disagree, congratulate, communicate, build a relationship.
4. Continue doing this for at least 1/3 of your twitter interactions.

Doing this consistently takes more time and effort than just posting a copy of the latest press release, but it also builds meaningful, valuable relationships that translate into brand value.

Chat with Andreas on google+ or twitter

Redpath Sugar has a problem. The St. Lawrence Seaway, which is the route ships take to Toronto Harbour, freezes in winter, cutting the city off from the ocean. This means that for several months, no fresh deliveries of raw sugar make it to the Toronto plant.

To keep production going, Redpath stores raw sugar in Toronto Harbour, delivered during summer and ready for winter, safely tucked away in concrete basins underneath heavy duty tarpaulins.

Yesterday we climbed one of these sugar mountains to shoot a portrait of Jonathan Bamberger, President of Redpath Sugar. The view from the top was awesome, all over the city and Lake Ontario. We’ll post pictures when they’re ready for publication.

Chat with Andreas on google+ and twitter.

We’ve never made a secret out of the fact that we’re not huge fans of Klout, the social influence measuring service. As far as we’re concerned, the service has two fundamental flaws. It doesn’t take into account real world influence and the results are so easily gamed that bots, or automated accounts, have done so numerous times.

How easily? Take a look at this, Big Ben’s (unofficial) twitter account:

A fun, automated, account tweeting out the relevant amount of BONGs on the hour, every hour. It has a Klout score in the mid-to-high 70′s. Which is higher than, for example, Warren Buffet’s Klout score. We rest our case.

Chat with Andreas on google+

The Toronto Egotist is kicking off a new series on small agency office space with pictures of fisheye HQ here in Kensington Market. Thanks guys, we’re thrilled you chose us.

When we purchased and renovated our building, we put a lot of thought into the interior design. We knew we’d be spending a lot of time here, so we made sure to create a space that’s conducive to free thinking, as well as just nice to be in.

Some highlights:

• No whiteboards. We opted for a giant blackboard instead. The reason? Whiteboards make you think like ad execs, on a blackboard inhibitions fall away and people think freely.
• No office furniture. Because 99% of all furniture designed for the workplace looks terrible, works against the free flow of ideas and, in the case of sit down desks, actively conspires to kill you before your time.
• No landline. Few sounds are more annoying than “if you know your party’s extension number, dial it now”. We all have a personal number. When it rings, we answer. Simple.

We’re constantly trying to figure out ways to create the ideal working environment. Our latest addition to the building is our green roofed bike stand, protecting our bikes from rain and making the neighbourhood just a little greener.

We’ve been live streaming shows and events for some time now. While it’s a great tool for sharing engaging content with your audience, it did involve laptops running encoding software tethered to cameras we kept around only for their prized FireWire connection and constantly worrying about the quality and speed of the network that would be available to us.

In short, quite the kerfuffle.

Thankfully, times are changing. We’re now the proud owners of a brand new on-camera hardware encoding and streaming box, courtesy of livestream.com.

To get one of these for yourself, follow the link above and order a Broadcaster box. Yes, it’ll set you back $500, but if streaming live content is part of your service offering then, we think, it’s worth every single cent.

The encoder does a couple of things. It grabs video content from the camera via HDMI (hurrah and goodbye to FireWire – finally), encodes it to a choice of resolutions ranging from VGA to HD, then streams it out via WIFI, Ethernet or a 3G/4G modem.

To get our mobile internet on, we visited the nearest Rogers store – we’re in Canada – and purchased a LTE wireless hotspot. That means that (almost) wherever you’ve got a cell signal, you now have faster, wireless, broadband that most people have in their homes. Data is still expensive, we’re paying $80 for 6GB, but having a reliable connection makes up for it.

LTE modems offer blazingly fast upload speed, allowing us to stream in full HD. Getting up and running is easy. The encoder sits on the camera’s hotshoe. Switch it on, connect it to your modem via WIFI, plug it into the camera’s HDMI port and you’re up and running.

We now use our Panasonic Lumix GH2 for streaming because a: it does audio really well and b: it doesn’t shut off its screen when detecting an HDMI connection, unlike Canon’s offerings.

Conclusion? It all works beautifully. So far we’ve streamed from a remote cottage in Muskoka, from Toronto’s Sugar Beach and from our HQ in Kensington Market. Both the Rogers modem and the encoder have performed without any issue, running for several hours on one battery charge. If you’re frequently live streaming your events, this is the setup to do it with.

For our summer outing this year, we visited Black Creek Pioneer Village.

We talked about our plans for the coming months, checked out crafts, drank beer brewed in the style of the 1800′s and explored the buildings and farms. To get everybody there and back we tried out Toronto’s new Uber Car service, which turned out to be awesome.

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One of the many fun things our Redpath Sugar Acts of Sweetness Team gets to do: Drive to a berry farm, pick a bucket of strawberries, then make jam right there in the middle of the field.

The resulting video is part of our ongoing content production for the Redpath Sugar Social Media channels.

Of all the social networks out there, Pinterest is the one that’s centered most around self expression and curation. And with its current massive growth, brands have started to take notice. We use Pinterest for Redpath Sugar, to share recipes, and The Princess Margaret Home Lottery, to share interior design inspiration.

Now an Israeli agency called smoyz has devised a campaign for Kotex, sending out personalized gifts to influential pinners, gifts that were based on the content of their Pinterest pinboards. Take a look at how it all worked:

The result: Almost 100 per cent of the recipients posted about their prizes on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. This resulted in 2,284 interactions and 694,853 total impressions. Not a bad result for 50 gift boxes.

If you’ve ever watched any of the Harry Potter movies, you’ll know that the Hogwarts Express leaves from London’s St. Pancras Station, in King’s Cross.

King’s Cross is a fascinating neighbourhood with a rich history, in turns industrial, then taken over by artists attracted to cheap lofts and now increasingly residential.

The Guardian newspaper, with their headquarters close by, has released an app (iPhone and Android) that tells the stories of the neighbourhood. Open the app, select your location on the built-in map and start listening. In case you don’t happen to be in London, you can still access everything on The Guardian’s website.

The Redpath Sugar Acts of Sweetness program was featured on today’s webidiotz podcast, as an example of what happens when a brand does Social Media right.

It’s great to see that others are beginning to take notice of all the hard work we’ve been putting into this project.

The US Primaries are upon us and most Canadians look on with a combination of horror and amazement. For me, one of the biggest lessons is how not to be “Santorumized”. For a quick backgrounder on what that means, read this column from Saturday’s G&M.

Mr. Santorum has contentious and to many of us offensive views. While spreading his venom in the real world he neglected the cyber world – at his peril. Gay activist Dan Savage (who also started the inspired campaign “It Gets Better” and has a strong presence in the digital world) decided the best way to fight Mr. Santorum’s views were to give his surname a new meaning linked to something he opposes. At the same time Mr. Santorum was neglecting the digital world – an inactive website, no blogging, no social. He only recently has established a real web presence and has madly been playing a losing game of catch-up. The result? Try googling “Santorum” as many US Primary voters do and you get this redefinition.

Now his campaign team have asked Google to take down the offensive definition. Google’s response?

“Google’s search results are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the web. Users who want content removed from the Internet should contact the webmaster of the page directly,” the spokesperson said. “Once the webmaster takes the page down from the web, it will be removed from Google’s search results through our usual crawling process.”

Because Savage’s new definition of Santorum is linked to this candidate’s own anti views it is a legitimate search term.

The lesson for future candidates, companies and brands? Make sure you maintain a strong digital footprint so that you own your relevant search terms when googled. Otherwise you can be hijacked by a brilliant activist.

Some Principles that can help you Move Up in Google Rankings
While their algorithm is a black box and frequently updated to prevent “gaming”, these principles help.

Create Great Fresh Content
Great content gets shared more and that moves you in the ranking.

You can’t Separate Search from Social
Twitter and Facebook influence search – you can’t ignore them anymore.

Keep it Relevant & Keep it Popular
The more you stick to your chosen subject the easier it will be to find you. How many in and outlinks does your blog have? Linking to other blogs and popular sites like youtube increase your popularity ranking.

Everybody I know, of my generation, who went to art school learned their photographic ropes using a battered and student-abused Pentax K-1000. The K-1000 was the undisputed workhorse of the photographic world, so successful that Pentax only discontinued the model in 1997.

I just bought two of them, in great condition, with the stock f/2.0 50mm lens. What struck me immediately is just how heavy and well built these cameras are. The shutter clacks with the same satisfying solidity the door on a Mercedes Benz closes, everything is precise…and mechanical. The only electronic part is the light meter, returning an evaluative average of the entire frame. In other words, in order to use one of them you need to know your stuff.

I’ll be using them to teach our team, especially the younger members, how cameras actually work, how light behaves when it travels through a lens and meets a light sensitive surface, be that film or an electronic sensor.

Time to use a camera that doesn’t have a “scene” setting, facial recognition or anything auto at all and start by understanding the basics. Nobody has ever become a great photographer by relying on the auto setting.

I’ve always hated music CDs. Not because of sound quality issue, I just don’t like the way they look and feel. CDs never developed their own design language, instead they try and mimic the design of a traditional vinyl record, mostly without success. Pulling a vinyl record out of a sleeve, placing it on a turntable and lowering the needle is an experience, slapping a CD into a tray is the equivalent of microwaving popcorn.

So when mp3 players first came out, I jumped ship immediately. My CDs were first ripped and then banished to the basement, 90% of the time the music I listened to lived as a file on an iPod. In contrast, I always kept my record collection and when I had time to truly listen to music, I fired up the turntable. Even though it looked at the time that the vinyl record was finally dead.

Then something amazing happened. Bands started to release music as vinyl records again, recordings that sounded fantastic. Even more amazingly, they started to include a download code to a digital file of the recording. Now I had access to a beautifully designed analogue copy and the convenience of a digital file for my iPod. Heaven.

Sadly, this model hasn’t translated into books. I am an avid reader and I love having all my books with me on my iPad. But just as I love the vinyl record, I still love books that are made from paper. I love standing in front of our bookshelves, deciding on a book to read for the evening. Come next year, we’ll be remodelling one room in our house to be a library. Empty shelves, without books but with an Pad or Kindle on display just aren’t the same.

Today, if I want to own both a paper and an electronic copy of my books, to read while travelling, commuting, waiting in line, I have to pay twice, once for the paper copy, once for the ebook, something very few people are prepared to do. I get that the publishing industry needs to make a profit, but I don’t get why for a nominal extra payment, say $2.00, I can’t download an electronic copy of a book when buying the paper version.

Ebook versions are easily created, and this would create extra income for the publishers that otherwise they’d never see.

At fisheye we often talk to our clients about the need to Seed, Feed and Weed.

We find that the most successful client initiatives have a real world experience (Seed) that is then amplified via appropriate communication channels, often utilizing social media as well as earned media (Feed). Once that seed is planted and fed you then need to monitor and curate the conversation (Weed).

Our happy experience has been that when you build a healthy and vibrant online community they end up self-regulating so when someone makes a negative and false comment you and your client can take a deep breath, count to 100 and the community comes to your defense, correcting the mistruth.

I noticed a great seasonal example of seeding the other day with ebay’s popup Christmas Boutique in London. Companies like ebay and Amazon are using pop up (temporary) retail space to create a real world seed to fuel their online shoppers’ imaginations.

Items like foosball tables and designer purses are featured in the pop-up store with a QR code attached that the shopper can scan with their smartphone. They are then linked to a selection of foosball tables on ebay that they can purchase.

Clever!

The BBC has just released the iPlayer app for iPad here in Canada. Just under $9.00 a month buys you unlimited access to a vast and growing library of BBC created content, from drama to soap operas to documentaries and current affairs. Commercial free. Time shifted to your schedule.

At my house, we cut cable three years ago. That morning we’d received our monthly bill for just over $120.00, in the evening we were watching a movie. Towards the finale, commercial breaks interrupted the experience with ever increasing frequency. Finally, we got so frustrated that we switched off the TV and went out for dinner instead.

The next morning I called our cable provider and cancelled the service. We connected a Mac Mini to the TV, subscribed to netflix, used iTunes and other legal services to watch what we wanted to watch when we wanted to watch it, uninterrupted. As time passed, more and more stations added streaming services, the BBC being the latest addition with the just redesigned YouTube waiting in the wings.

Cable penetration is still high, at over 83%, but the question is how long that will last in the face of iPads, internet video and the upcoming Apple TV. While the older generation grew up with cable, Gen Y grew up with streaming video instead, has never paid for cable and doesn’t see the value in it.

To illustrate how fast technologies can become obsolete, all we have to do is look at telephone landlines, where the collapse in usage took just five years. In 2005, over 93% of households had a landline installed. In 2011, that number has dropped to just over 70%. How many of these lines are actually being used, rather than just installed as part of a bundle, is currently unknown.

For the cable industry, the number of cord-cutters like myself might be fairly small at the moment. The scary new demographic, that is coming up rapidly, is made up of cord-nevers, young people who never paid for TV and don;t see any reason to start now.

Credit Suisse analyst Stefan Anninger wrote in a recent report on TV media:

“They are growing up in an Internet-based video culture in which the mantras of ‘why would I pay for TV?,’ ‘pay TV is a rip-off’ and, ‘I can find that for free on the web’ are getting louder. We fear that some of these consumers will find pay TV far less relevant to their lives than do today’s adults.”

We’re hosting Paul Rosen at a fisheye Wisdom Event on Tuesday December 6th and you’re invited.

Paul is the Gold Medalist from the Torino Olympic Games, leading the Canadian Sledge Hockey team as the number one goaltender in the world.

As we go into the Holiday Season and start forming those personal and business resolutions for 2012 we thought it would be helpful and inspirational to have Paul share his story of achievement. We at fisheye are planning to write our resolutions on the chalkboard and take a photo with Paul so we can track our progress and stay inspired throughout the year. Drinks and nibbles at 4 pm. Inspiration from Paul at 5 pm.

rsvp jo-ann.mcarthur@fisheyecorp.com

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I often get this question from clients and prospective clients. And yes, fisheye does “do branding” work. We’ve been privileged to create new brands like Chatr for Rogers and rebrands for clients like ABC Life Literacy Canada.

However, I don’t believe that “Branding” should be thought of as a separate service offering. Just as Everything is Marketing, so does every customer experience ladder up to create your brand. The physical expression of that brand is important, but it cannot be considered in isolation to everything else the organization is doing.

Too often we meet clients who think a rebranding will be the panacea to all their problems. Alas, it is no quick fix. Great brands are the sum of the consumer experience. If your Customer Service rep has a bad day and responds poorly to that consumer’s complaint, you have just negated all of that time, money and effort you put into not only your rebranding exercise but also all of that marketing spend. Handle it well and that customer shares brand love with their increasingly powerful network.

Branding should be the cherry on top of that brand experience sundae. So yes, we “Do Branding”, but as part of that exercise we recommend looking at every consumer touchpoint. That’s how true brands are created.

I just removed myself from klout.com. For those of you who don’t know, Klout claims to be “The Standard for Influence” for individuals in social media. Klout claims to measure your social influence by applying a proprietary algorithm to your public activity on various social networks, such as twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and google+.

Unfortunately, both the idea and the execution are deeply flawed.

1. Klout doesn’t take into account offline influence

Klout only measures what it measures, but those parameters are telling only a very small part of the story. Warren Buffet, for example, is a hugely influential man. He doesn’t give a monkey’s backside who he follows or doesn’t follow on twitter, or how often he tweets. As a result, his Klout score is low, a huge distortion of the Buffet’s position in real life.

2. Klout begs to be manipulated

Tony Hsieh, Zappo’s CEO, tweeted it perfectly:

Too many marketers concentrate on building buzz. I can tell you that my mom has zero buzz, but when she says something, I listen.

One of the problems with Klout is that it rewards conformism. Tweet about what everybody else is tweeting, retweet trending topics, run with the pack and your score will most likely go up.

This point was recently very effectively illustrated by Neil Kodner, who created tens of twitter bots (based on Seinfeld, The Big Lebowski, and more recently Sarah Palin), some of which have attained Klout scores as high as 74.

When bots get higher influence scores than one of the richest men on the planet, you’ve got a problem.

3. Klout makes people lazy

People have been failing college exams because of low Klout scores. Others have been passed over for jobs.

Here’s what I think: If you’re an employer who uses a candidate’s Klout score as a metric to decide on a candidate’s employability, then you don’t deserve to be a hiring manager.

People, and the skills they bring to the table, are far more multi-faceted than what a Klout score can possibly reflect. Using a Klout score to make a hiring decision is like using research as a lamp post to lean against, rather than for illumination.

4. Influence needs to be relevant

Klout assigns one catch all number to an individual’s influence, but that’s not how things work. If you want to connect with Mennonites, a twitter account won’t do anything for you. Sponsoring barn dances just might, despite the fact that they come without a Klout score.

5. Klout is opt-out, rather than opt-in

Klout claims to only publish publicly available information, but there’s been recent concern about publishing information that was never meant to be public. Here’s an excerpt from an article in the New York Times:

In the days just before Halloween, Ms. McGary got the fright of her life when she checked her Klout profile. Hovering above her score were the faces and names of those over whom she had influence, as calculated by Klout. They included her 13-year-old son, Matthew.

The boy had never set up a Klout page for himself; he was only her Facebook “friend,” so she could monitor his interactions there. Klout had automatically created a page for him and assigned him a score. Then Ms. McGary’s 15-year-old daughter Mimi popped up on her Klout page — this time not with a Klout score of her own, just a nudge to Ms. McGary to invite Mimi to join.

“It freaked me out because these are my kids,” said Ms. McGary, 43, who lives in a suburb of Washington and handles social media for an association of health care professionals. “It’s wrong. They shouldn’t be marketing to children.”

Klout has since deactivated that functionality, but still automatically creates profiles for anybody with a twitter account, whether it has your permission or not. To check your own score just type in klout.com/yourtwitterusername.

Klout has, finally and grudgingly, given in to public pressure and now allows people to opt out of their service.

6. How to opt out of Klout

This might sound counter-intuitive, but to opt out of Klout, and to remove your details, you will first need to open a Klout account. Sign in with your twitter credentials, then navigate to the bottom of the privacy page where you’ll find an opt-out link. Follow the instructions and your information should be removed within a couple of hours.

About 15 years ago, when I first started buying computers, specs meant everything. Processor speed, amount of RAM, size of the hard drive; all were important product markers and differentiators. Similarly, when our dads went out to purchase a new car 20 or 30 years back, available horsepower was important.

Today, I have no idea how fast the processor inside my iPad is. I think it comes with 1GB of Ram, but I might well be mistaken. I simply don’t care enough to look it up. The experience the product provides is far more important to me than knowing what happens underneath the hood. I also haven’t got a clue how much power my car produces, or how fast our washer’s spin circle is or what kind of processor powers our TV. All I know is that they work to my satisfaction.

Amazon’s recent entry into the tablet market, the Fire, is under-specced when compared to its main competitor, the B&H Nook. Yet every single reviewer rates the user experience of the Fire higher, in part because Amazon, like Apple has done with Siri, decided to take some of the heavy lifting away from the device and perform it in the cloud instead. Doing so allowed them to create a superior user experience with lower-specced, read cheaper to produce, hardware.

The spec war is over. The human experience war, started by Apple, has just began.