Alex and Rob's blog | Social Signal

On October 6, 2005, Alex pushed "publish" on the first official blog post of this blog.

In most other disciplines, five years would make us the scrappy up-and-comer, struggling to earn our street cred. But in social media, it gives us perhaps the closest thing there is to historical perspective. In fact, we're quite possibly the world's oldest 100-per-cent social media (or, at the time, "Web 2.0") agency.

Social Signal's 2010 Valentine is a celebration of how the Internet can help you find love and keep it alive.

A few days ago, we wrote about the social media options document that is the final deliverable in the Concept Jam. Today, the fine people at BC Children's Hospital Foundation have allowed us to release the options document we prepared for them last year after their Concept Jam workshop.

We deliver the Concept Jam to clients who are seeking their best social media opportunities: the campaign, site features or applications that can help them reach build relationships with their key audiences, generate revenue or deliver a key message.

Today, we're releasing three versions of the slide presentation we use in our Concept Jam workshops.

If you read part 1 of our Concept Jam series, you know that a full-day workshop is the heart of the Concept Jam process. We use slides to set the stage at key moments throughout the day, but we use them a little differently from the way many presenters use slideshows. Because the Concept Jam is so intensely participatory, the presentation doesn't account for the lion's share of the workshop. Instead, it supports and informs the discussion and brainstorming that really power the session.

It's Social Signal's fourth anniversary. But rather than breaking open the champagne, we're breaking open the vault that contains everything we've learned over the past four years.

We're taking the intellectual property we've generated and gleaned from Social Signal's four years of consulting, strategy and development and making it available for free online, under a Creative Commons license.

When Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani mocked Barack Obama's years as a community organizer at the recent Republican convention, they wanted to underline the Senator's supposed limitations as a real-world leader. Instead, they highlighted the Republican Party's own limitations in a world that will be crucial in determining this election's outcome: the Internet.

Once you've built the online community or social media application of your dreams, how do you actually get people to visit, use and contribute to it? The question of how to bring a community to life is at the center of our work, and recently we've been able to share more of our approach in a variety of forums: at NetSquared, in bed at Drupal Camp, and as of this week, in the services section of our own web site.