http://www.alterspark.com/about-us/php-mysql-consultant-needed

2. We are looking for a senior programmer who would like to collaborate and build applications for public good. See the add at the end of our junior programmer ad.

http://www.alterspark.com/about-us/senior-programmer-partner

This workshop will introduce a recent paper by Dr. Brian Cugelman and Matthew Potter, which has distilled Dale Carnegie’s wisdom into just 10 key principles of social media community management. The first half of this workshop will explain some of the science and theory that explains why most principles personal and social psychology operate in cyberspace. Then it will discuss the 10 key principles of persuasive community management. Afterwards, the presenters will describe a number of common, but painfully difficult community management challenges, and invite the audience to discuss how Dale Carnegie would handle them.

This session will be facilitated by Dr. Brian Cugelman and Matthew Potter. Brian Cugelman (@cugelman) has used the Internet for social change campaigns since 1998, working as a campaigner and evaluator for United Nations agencies, non-profit organizations, and private companies. Brian completed his doctorate in online social marketing with the Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group, a world leading team of Internet researchers. His research publications deal with the psychology of persuasive online interventions. He works as a freelance consultant with AlterSpark Consulting (www.alterspark.com).  Matthew Potter (@AskMP) is a Communication Design Technology Specialist and instructor. Matthew specializes in technology, design workflows and production processes. He is an active member of Toronto’s digital community, including the Toronto InDesign User Group, and  key member of several design-oriented start-ups and not-for-profits including the Toronto HTML5 Meet-up Group and CitizenBridge.org. He blogs at www.askmatthewpotter.com. Both Matthew and Brian are founding members of Toronto’s Social Media Café (www.socialmediacafe.ca).

Talk is Cheap 4.0

The Centre for Creative Communications
951 Carlaw Avenue, Toronto, Ontario
talkischeap.ccpr.ca

Room : 253
Time :   7:30 p.m.
Registration: 5:30 p.m

This presentation provides a simple recipe for designing more engaging websites, social media profiles, or technologies by leveraging the principles of cyber persuasion, through the digital persuasion equation and the eight spheres of digital influence.

Toronto’s Social Media Cafe is an informal networking event for people who share an interest in social media. It’s a casual forum for you to meet new people, share experiences, and drink lots of coffee. If you enjoy meeting likeminded people who use social media–professionally, personally, artistically, or for any purpose–then this event is for you.

We’ve set up a few places to organize the event. Please join us by signing up in these networks:

• MeetUp (www.socialmediacafe.ca)
• Twitter (@SMCafeTO)
• Facebook

If you have any ideas or suggestions, get in touch, or join our organizing meetings.

We look forward to meeting you.

Social Media Cafe Organizing Committee

• Location: Ryerson University, 80 Gould St, Toronto, ON, Canada
• Date: 26 February 2011, 13:45:00 – 14:30
• Room: Lecture Hall RCC 204

It’s not only your website’s information architecture that you need to worry about. You also need to think about your website’s psychological architecture.

The big secret behind successful websites is rarely a design feature that you can emulate or a marketing campaign that you can copy. Their “secret sauce” is something conceptual that you cannot directly observe. However, if you understand the psychological architectures that lay behind their success, you’ll be able to apply their winning principles to your own work, helping you to build better websites, mobile apps, social media campaigns, or other interactive technologies.

In this session, we’ll introduce you to the psychology of online design. We will show you a number of simple principles that you can use to understand website psychology. By the end of this session, you’ll be better equipped to understand why some online ventures are successful, and others miss the mark. We will give away a number of research tools that you can use to reverse engineer the psychological architectures behind successful websites, whether you just want to understand how they work, or whether you need to learn from their success to strengthen your own projects.

We’ll begin this session by discussing the psychology of human-computer interaction and then highlight some of the popular thinking used to describe the psychology of interactive design. Next, we’ll present a communication model that explains how people interact with websites and social media, which also offers a comprehensive system that you can use to explain the psychology of interactive design. We will discuss user psychology, user feedback, media channels, social networks, source factors, messaging, and how messages are expressed.

As an introductory session, we’ll just focus on a few principles of persuasive online design. Then we’ll review how these principles are commonly used in social media profiles, campaign messages, mobile apps, landing pages, and other examples. We will walk you through the first few examples. Then afterwards, we’ll invite you to participate in a group discussions where we explore the psychology behind several popular websites.

Your facilitator, Brian Cugelman (@cugelman) has used the Internet for social change campaigns since 1998, working as a campaigner and evaluator for United Nations agencies, non-profit organizations, and private companies. Brian completed his doctorate in online social marketing with the Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group, a world leading team of Internet researchers. Brian’s research publications focus on the psychology of online interventions that can influence individual and societal level change. At present, he works in Toronto as a freelance consultant with AlterSpark Consulting (@alterspark), where he provides strategic consulting and research services for online campaigns, projects, and social media engagement.

• PodCamp 2011
• Workshop details

On 29 November 2010, Dr. Brian Cugelman, Managing Director of AlterSpark and Lee Taylor, Senior Manager, Health Information Services, Heart & Stroke Foundation of Ontario will share their knowledge and experience with designing behaviour change websites that support major health promotion campaigns and strategies.

This Cause2Market Meetup (Twitter #Cause2Mkt) will feature a two-part presentation. Brian will start by sharing intervention design insights from his meta-analysis on the psychological architectures of health behaviour change websites, soon to be published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. Lee will follow by sharing her experience as a manager, developing, via 3 separate vendors, a complex online healthy weight program (My Heart & Stroke Healthy Weight Action Plan).

The $10 fee covers cost of light refreshments and any remaining funds will be donated to the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario.

• http://www.moflow.ca/blog/entry/health-changing-websites-toronto-cause-marketers-meetup

The workshop will provide participants with a brief overview of communication models, social media trends, and a bigger picture view on how social media has changed the rules of online engagement.  It will help participants better appreciate social media, assess its pros and cons, and evaluate if their organization should use or expand the scope of their social media activities.

Topics will include background information on social media; how traditional (one-way) communication paradigms no longer work in interactive media; and how two-way communication models operate online.

A key focus will be to help organization evaluate the pros and cons of social media, and then assess if social media offers any benefits to their organization. Participants will be asked to assess how social media can advance their organization’s mandate, whether it is a viable channel for their constituents, its pros and cons for their situation, and then to review other relevant assessment criteria. Midway through the workshop, participants will be invited to complete a paper-based form to help them assess if social media offers enough benefits for their organization to adopt or expand the scope of their social media outreach.

The remainder of the presentation will focus on practical guidance for organizations that wish to implement or expand the scope of their social media outreach. Topics covered will include reassessing organizational goals; researching constituents; starting an incremental approach to social media outreach; defining the scope of your social media activities; mainstreaming into institutions; daily operations; responding protocols; institutional policies; tools of the trade; and methods for prioritizing resource allocations.

Finally, the successive workshop on Internet research methods for impact assessments will also include a section on measuring social media campaigns.

For more information, visit OCIC.

Global Citizens Forum, Reaching the Canadian Public

Ontario Council on International Development, with funding from the Canadian International Development Agency