I’ve resigned from BSTREET to accept a new role at RIM leading digital marketing for the North American market.

Over the last two years I’ve been able to help BSTREET build, expand, and evolve their digital capability to include in-house expertise in digital media, social media, and mobile. With a solid development team also now in-house, I’m leaving BSTREET in very capable hands and wish them great success moving forward.

As a mobile evangelist and digital marketer, working at RIM in this capacity is very exciting. I can hardly wait to get started on Monday

While skiers were golfing and dreaming of the first snow fall this summer, the digital team at BSTREET was busy working on a new website for snowpro.com – the National website for Canadian Ski Instructors Alliance (CSIA).

Our task was to create a site that better identified with the spirit of being a ski pro while making the user experience more intuitive and fun. Our secondary objective was to launch the site on a content management system (CMS) so that our client could easily manage content updates moving forward without the need to engage a developer every time there was a news update.

We used Joomla as our CMS and worked with the I.T. team at the CSIA to develop common CSS so that their back-end site mirrored our front-end site. The old site had multiple interfaces so when you jumped from a content area to a member area the navigation and experience was different.

Although we are continuing to refine and add elements to the site, the user experience is a big improvement over the previous iteration and feedback from members has been great to far.

On March 4th I’ll be making my second trip to Halifax to speak at the Canadian Marketing Association (CMA) inaugural marketing conference in Atlantic Canada.

Conference Highlights include:

Top global marketing thought leaders will descend upon Halifax for a day of discussion and debate on the latest trends in marketing today. This full-day event will consist of multiple sessions covering a range of hot topics and cutting-edge marketing strategies such as social media, mobile, search, branding, research, online advertising and more. An impressive lineup of speakers has been assembled, including:

• Paige Malling, Director, Interactive Marketing and Community, Sears Canada
• Andrew Lane, Director, Digital Engagement, Weber Shandwick Canada
• Phil Barrett, Vice-President, Digital and Mobile, BSTREET Communications
• David Alston, Vice-President, Marketing & Community, Radian 6
• Rachelle Deshaies, Partner, Researchology
• Ben Graham, Director of e-Commerce, Eldis Group
• Andrew Simon, Senior Vice-President, Creative Director, DDB Canada
• David Spriet, Vice-President, SIFT

For full conference details, click here.

I’ve been working on an updated mobile marketing opportunity deck that includes some updates stats (thanks to my friend Bryan Segal @ Comscore) as well as a new section – four ways to make traditional media undead with mobile.

If you are attending the conference, be sure to say hello. If your stuck in the center of the universe (Toronto), be sure to follow my tweet stream through the day or come back here on Friday for my tweet digest from the day. I’ll also be posting my final deck to my slideshare account before the weekend.

After a six week teaser campaign on facebook soliciting entries and proposals from BC based artists for a $120,000 local arts competition, we launched Absolutvancouver.ca which we also used as our platform to the world to announce the introduction of a limited edition ABSOLUT® Vancouver bottle.

The ABSOLUT® Vancouver bottle label was created by celebrated BC artist Douglas Fraser with the process facilitated by BSTREET.  Once the 60,000 bottles are only available in BC and once they are sold it will mark the end of an era with ABSOLUT® as they will no longer be commissioning or allowing their bottle to be modified for campaigns around the World.

Although we will continue to support the 1,600+ fans on facebook with content updates, the microsite becomes the focus over the next 3 months as we solicit consumer feedback on each artist submission through an online voting system we created.

Efforts to engage, educate, and amplify the bottle and the arts competition have also extended to twitter @AbsolutCanada where we’ve been asked to manage that account while ensuring integration of message and content with other digital channels.

I wanted to thank my digital Absolut team for another great job; Michael Palmer (CD), Daniell Hill (AD), Jason Jang & Hal Wong (developers), and Lauren Davis who has been our community manager for all 3 digital channels.

Last week we launched the new Country Harvest website at http://www.countryharvest.com – our third major launch in the last 4 months!

This time our assignment was to completely refresh the Country Harvest website to align with new branding and packaging initiatives. Although BSTREET had been actively managing the website for the last few years, we had inherited the site from another agency and it had become a bit of a franken-site as the site grew to over 100 pages with some of the richest content buried 3 or more clicks deep.

Our approach?

Create a fresh & updated user experience built on a content management platform so that we can manage content and features efficiently and cost effectively moving forward.  Once again, we decided on Joomla – an open CMS platform to build our site.

Our Objectives?

1. Create refreshed user experience that is best in class and aligned with the new Country Harvest brand
2. Enrich content and tools and make them more findable in search engines
3. Extend online experience to other digital platforms in order to engage the target demographic
4. Create an experience that will generate word of mouth (WOM) awareness and advocacy for the Country Harvest brand
5. Differentiate from competitor websites
6. Ensure the most important content is available within one click – and nearly everything else within 2

The new site looks great and we have met our objectives!

There are a few category innovation stories with this website we are especially excited & proud of:

1. First integration of facebook connect in the category. This means when you write a  comment on one of the products, recipes, or in the community section your  comment will not only appear on the website but on your facebook wall. The comment on our website also pulls in your fbook avatar. This will help us with amplification for CH product and content
2. Innovative navigation / information architecture – in  order to make all content available within 2 clicks, we have created an  accordion style navigation system on our products and recipe pages
3. The website is optimized for content syndication  beyond fbook connect with RSS feeds and “share this”  widgets

Everybody on the BSTREET digital team contributed to this project, but special kudos to Jason Jang who was the glue between the front and back office teams and is the one who largely built the site using the CMS and the creative assets developed by Michael Palmer.  Also thanks to Robin Judge who was the IA on this project & created our detailed spec document and wireframes.

This is only the first phase of the new website with more features, functionality, and content coming over the next few months. We’ll also be launching a facebook page this Fall to compliment a community outreach project called the Harvest of Hope.

What do you think?

This past week I was invited to speak a the AMA Toronto chapter event on Twitter 1o1 for Marketer. My task was to introduce some of the basics of twitter to the audience then sit on the panel after the keynote presentation by freshbooks CEO Mike McDerment (@mikemcderment)

I had never met Mike before and I was really interested in hearing his story on how freshbooks has leveraged twitter to “make love to his customers” as he put it. Mike was an engaging speaker and I was fascinated to learn how they engage customers on twitter to create real relationships that often result in reciprocal love for their product.

This was especially relevant for me as my team at BSTREET has recently launched what we believe to be an innovative integration of twitter into a brand site (Polar Ice Vodka) and have to follow that up with an ongoing twitter strategy that will allow the brand to engage with the fun seeker on twitter in a meaningful and sustainable way.

The panel was lively and included insights from top Canadian Tweeters Scott Stratten (@unmarketing) – President Un-Marketing, Candice Best (@candicebest) – Principal of Best PR Boutique, and moderated by Michael O’Connor Clarke (@michaelocc) – Vice President, Thornley Fallis Communications. If you aren’t already, I recommend that you follow all of them.

Below is a copy of the deck I presented.  You can also get a summary of tweets from the evening here.

Here’s  a copy of the presentation I gave at Marketing Magazine’s Mobile 2.0 conference in Toronto. Speaker notes are included – although what actually came out of my mouth was likely a bit different

The fonts are also a bit off here as I used fonts local to my machine for the presentation. Enjoy & comments welcome!