Tod Maffin

Chasing “It”: How Radio and Podcasting Need to Adapt

Deconstructing Viral: How to Build a Killer Viral Marketing Campaign

A New Presentation by Tod Maffin Now booking for Fall 2010/2011 Can blind luck be reproduced? Absolutely, says Tod Maffin. Today’s viral campaigns may seem like jackpots in a one-in-a-million lottery, but it turns out they are well within the reach of any marketing team’s grasp. All it takes is knowing the secret ingredients behind [...]

Klout and the Incalculable Value of Surprising Influencers

UPDATE: I did a segment on CBC Radio about this viral marketing campaign. Click the yellow Play icon on the bar below to listen. You can listen to it here. Kevin Rose had a fever. And, because he’s a nerd, he tweeted about it. That prompted the writers behind the deadpanned-but-hilarious TV ads for Old [...]

The Big List of CBC Facebook Pages

I’ve been slowly assembling a list of CBC Facebook pages. If you can suggest any changes, please note them in the comments. (I’m looking for actual Facebook Pages, not those automatically generated Community pages.) Thanks! –Tod The CBC Fan Club (huge, but unofficial) Platforms CBC News Network CBC Radio (alternate page) CBC Radio 2 (alternate [...]

Business Travel and My Rules of Two

I’ve been really lucky in my career to have travelled the world on business, consulting and giving speeches in Romania, Melbourne, London, Berlin, Stockholm, on a cruise ship, and more. Like everyone who does a lot of business travel, I’ve developed a set of little “rituals” to keep myself safe and and (relatively) sane. I [...]

It’s the return of the How To Do Stuff podcast!

A brief detour from social media strategies for a moment…. I wanted to update you on something I’ve launched (well, re-launched, really) that I’m pretty excited about. Back in 2006, I had one of the most popular podcasts on the Internet — the How To Do Stuff podcast. I always tried to make it a [...]

Selling my Nikon 50mm Nikon lenses

All of these are available for pickup in the greater Vancouver area. I’d prefer to not ship. SOLD Nikon 70-300mm (f/4-5.6G) auto-focus lens — $70 This is a great lens to have in your kit. I’m selling my great Nikon 70-300mm (f/4-5.6G) auto-focus lens. It’s in fantastic condition. Only selling it because I’m using a [...]

Vancouver Sun: Headline Writers on a Lunch Break?!

UPDATE: The Vancouver Sun agreed and corrected the headline in its second edition. See below for the update. Let’s see if I have this straight: Sensational Headline: Bi-polar patients can become violent. Actual story: Bi-polar patients probably won’t become violent. Come on. A little factual headline writing would be nice. In j-school, you’d get a [...]

eSpeakers: Screen-by-Screen Walkthrough

Last week, I posted “Ten Things I Wish I Knew When I Started As a Professional Speaker.” Truth is, there are eleven things I wish I knew when I started, and the eleventh was that I wish I’d started using an organizational system from day one. I used to keep my speech resources (contracts, notes [...]

Ten Things I Wish I Knew When I Started as a Professional Speaker

I’ve been lucky to have been speaking professionally since 1997 (when I was nearly chased off stage by the audience of teachers for suggesting the model of classrooms segregated by ages was outdated). Along the way, I’ve made my share of mistakes on the circuit. Here are ten things that I wish I had known [...]

Welcome, TUAW Readers!

A warm welcome to those of you visiting from my favourite1 Apple blog The Unofficial Apple Weblog. Subscribe to my RSS feed Add my Facebook page Follow me on Twitter Sign up for my weekly “Profitable Social Media Strategies” newsletter Or just enjoy the content you find on here! Tod by Tod Maffin: Web Site [...]

Ten Tiny and Amazing Mac Apps You’ve Never Heard Of

Air Video Server – Free This is a great little app that for people who have lots of videos on their computer, but want to watch them on your iPhone, iPod Touch, and an iPad. Previously what I had to do was to convert the videos to MP4 (often a very slow process), import them [...]

Shaw Cablevision and the Stupidity of Bundling

It seems that every time I contact Shaw Cablevision, I come away somewhere between disappointed and furious. After several months without cablevision, I decided to re-connect to watch my summer reality show guilty pleasures. Shaw — like many cable providers, to be fair — bundle their most popular channels, forcing you to pay arbitrarily high prices [...]

Apple’s One Big Design Flaw

There’s no denying that Apple makes beautifully designed products. From the simplicity of the Mac Mini to the impossibly tiny iPod Shuffle, Apple wins design kudos for form and function all time time. But there’s one big flaw in Apple’s design of the iPhone and iPad that still hasn’t been fixed — the onboard speakers. [...]

Do BarCamps Need a Mid-Course Correction?

Photo by _dChris on Flickr I notice that some of my social media friends in Vancouver have put together an excellent day tomorrow called WordCamp (a day about WordPress). There are sessions on using WordPress as a CMS, being curious for a living, SEO tips, and the inimitable Dave Olsen presenting “Art and Technology Are Old [...]

The Looming Crisis of Location Spam

Ten years ago, I was giving a lot of presentations on the topic of mobile commerce1 As I envisioned it, cell towers would be used to locate our phones and we would receive something similar to a text message when we neared an establishment with an offer to make like a special or time-limited discount. [...]

The Unlimited Web: Some People Don’t Get It

While helping a friend determine which stores had iPads in stock (here’s a hint: None!), I ran across this graphic on London Drugs‘ web site. It was in a block of rotating graphic. It got me thinking how absolutely out of date the phrase “See in-store for details” is. Print or broadcast ads, of course, [...]

When Virus Warnings Become Their Own Viruses

This morning, the University of Calgary breathlessly released a news release titled Danger in the Internet Café. It reports on a new computer virus that can sneak onto your computer from other infected computers via unencrypted wireless signals, like the ones typically found in Internet cafés. From there, like most viri these days, it plants [...]

My Podcasting Presentation… in Summary and Cartoon Form

I presented my “What It Is: Awesomizing Your Podcast Using Secrets From Radio” workshop this past weekend at Northern Voice, Vancouver’s annual blogging conference. (I’ll be presenting it again on June 20th at Podcasters Across Borders in Ottawa.) The basics of the presentation focused on what “it” was — you know, that little something, that [...]

Taking Crazy Back — Highlights from my F5 Expo keynote

Share Embed this on your own blog or web site: <p><object width=”560″ height=”340″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/W7ehviLPSv0&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/W7ehviLPSv0&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”560″ height=”340″></embed></object></p> Live Twitter Reactions Unedited live Twitter reaction to Tod Maffin’s Taking Crazy Back keynote at F5 Expo, April 7, 2010: Blog Reactions “Tod Maffin was incredible. This is the second [...]

How Are You Keeping Your Digital Memories?

Twitter and the U.S. Library of Congress announced today that every public tweet posted since Twitter started in 2006 will be archived digitally by the federal library. It’s not the first time some organization has tried to capture and store forever the Internet’s content. The most visible is the Internet Archive‘s “Way Back Machine”, which [...]

Project Simplify: Five Things I’ve Learned About Frugality

Over the last month, I’ve been undertaking a little project to simplify my living space. Part of that process has been to try to lower my living costs. Here are a few lessons in frugality I picked up that I thought I’d pass along: You Don’t Need Paper Towels. I’m a little embarrassed about this [...]

Digital Etiquette: Where’s Our Generation’s Miss Manners?

I was the luncheon speaker for a conference for realtors last month. Just before I took the stage, one attendee took the stage to give etiquette lessons on dining. It was one of the most entertaining and surprisingly educational ten minutes I’d been through. I thought I knew all I needed to about which silverware [...]

Why We Need Yet Another Twitter Tag

Poor moms. Just when we tell them to get on Twitter, we make them learn our strange character codes that mean things on the service. DMs, RTs, @replies, #hashtags, ^codes… it’s not exactly the easiest learning curve. That said, I think we need another tag. Here’s an example. I follow Klout‘s Twitter account because I’m [...]

Now available: My ebook for realtors

DRIVE! The Busy Realtor’s Guide to Profitable Social Media Marketing is a quick 60+ page handbook for any realtor who wants to get started in social media marketing. You’ll get an instantly downloadable PDF file, formatted just like a real book, that you can read or print out to take with you to read during [...]

Asus AiGuru SV1T Review – Skype Phone

Click to Play Tod Maffin (http://www.todbits.com) reviews the Asus AiGuru SV1T Skype phone. Overall, it’s a great unit — can be untethered for use via battery and wireless. Very simple use, big touch-screen, simple setup. Thanks to Jessica Samuels from AM 1150 Radio in Kelowna B.C. and Ben Eadie from MechanicalMashup.com for testing help. For [...]

Why Corporate Twitter “Conversations” Are Lies

Okay, folks, it’s time to interject a little honesty into the social media dialogue. Despite grand platitudes of how Twitter is ‘shepherding a new era of corporate transparency and a spirit of engaging with customers,’ the fact remains that even the best corporate examples of such engagement on Twitter remain trivial at best. Just because [...]

Tod to keynote F5 Expo

Tod Maffin and Malcom Gladwell have been selected as the two keynote speakers at the upcoming F5 Expo in Vancouver. Hear Tod’s story of how he went from being an always-on multi-millionaire dotcom executive to crashing into depression and addiction. A story of hope and recovery, with a lesson to everyone in the tech industry; [...]

News report about my “Leading the Facebook Generation” half-day seminar

Here’s how a local TV station covered my half-day workshop, Leading the Facebook Generation, in Medicine Hat last week. What the Meeting Planner Said “This event more than doubled any other event we have ever had so we were very pleased. The feedback from the evaluations provided was very positive… Everyone enjoyed Tod’s sense of [...]

How to Tame Your Voicemail

I don’t know why, but I’ve never liked picking up my voicemails. My entire communications system revolves around my email, so I’ve never understood why voicemails don’t show up in my email box. A number of providers can do this for you — it’s likely that your phone company offers this kind of service, where [...]

Why Automated Video Thumbnails (Frame-Grab) Suck

So Much for a Secure Airport Area!

Sometimes I really don’t understand airp0rt security. I’ve been having boarding passes sent to my iPhone for a few months now and generally love it. I tend to lose anything in my pockets. It struck me recently, that the screen you show to the security people when getting your carry-0n bags screened is pretty easily [...]

Debunking the Myths of Earthquake Safety

I thought I knew the right thing to do in the event of an earthquake — dive under a car or desk, right? Apparently, no. Not according to an email making the rounds, ostensibly from the Rescue Chief and Disaster Manager of the American Rescue Team International (ARTI). Here in Vancouver, we live near a [...]

Boost open rates in your email newsletter

As you probably know, you can only tell if someone has opened your email if they are using HTML email and have images enabled. (Each email is sent with a uniquely identifying tiny, transparent image. But if images are disabled on the receipient’s side, you won’t be able to tell if someone opened the email.) [...]

Why owe Facebook $51,313 for advertising

A funny thing happened on my way to my email account this afternoon. I got this email from Facebook: Thank you for your Facebook Ads payment. The details of the charge are below. Please note that, due to processing delays by some credit card companies, this charge may not show up on your statement for [...]

Download my iPhone App

In my ongoing quest to morph into Steve Jobs, I now have my own iPhone app. (It also works hella fine on iPod Touches.) It’s got my latest blog postings, tweets, and YouTube videos. You can even “favourite” items you’d like to read later. I’d have put more info into it, but, sadly, the iPhone’s [...]

Facebook Fan Page or Profile?

I can’t figure this one out. I’ve got a Facebook profile with about 660 friends on it. Those friends are a mixture of “real” friends, people who’ve seen me give a presentation, heard me on the radio, or just randomly shown up. I’ve also got a Facebook fan page with a few dozen people on [...]

Audio Interview: “Friends with Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook”

If you’re a small business trying to find your way around social media, a very solid resource has hit the bookstores. Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook was written for marketers looking to find new effective ways to sell products and services through social media channels like blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Julie Szabo [...]

Audio Interview: Building Influence, Improving Reputation, and Earning Trust Through Social Media

The new book Trust Agents has been generating a lot of buzz. Written by two social media veterans, they show readers how to tap into the power of social networks to build brands’ influence, reputation, and, of course, profits. [buy the book] I had the chance to interview co-author Julien Smith for about 20 minutes [...]

“Blazingly Effective Email Marketing” intensive workshop: January 20

Of all the social media marketing strategies, email seems to be the easiest, right? After all, you use email every day. Not so fast. Email marketing is one of the most effective tools, with one of the highest returns on investment, yet so few companies do it right. (Or at all.) Let Tod Maffin show [...]

Email 2.0: We Need More

With everyone distracted by the various shiny tech objects out there (Twitter, Facebook, and so on), we’ve been neglecting our loyal — if a little rusty — friend: simple email. Email, as we know it today, was developed in the early 1980s, a derivative of code from ARPANET made ten years prior. It went through [...]

The Real Cost of Multitasking

The Real Cost of Multitasking Embracing Unitasking for Better Productivity and Happier Living Let’s just say this — there’s a very good chance you’re doing three things right now. Don’t think so? Think about it. You’re reading this, you may have some music or talk show on in the background, your eye darts over to [...]

New Video: Tod giving Social Media Marketing presentation

Your Home Is Leaking Power

I turned my DVD player on last week for the first time in about six months. Only I didn’t really turn it on; I woke it from standby. I knew these devices were consuming power while “on” (evidenced by the little stand-by light) but I never really knew how much. BC Hydro has published a [...]

The First Slide in Your PowerPoint/Keynote Presentation

About four years ago while giving a keynote presentation about leading “the Facebook generation” in the workplace, disaster struck. I was about mid-way through the speech, talking about new models for employee benefit plans, when the following popped up on the screen — in front of 2,200 people: That might look like a three-inch wide [...]

Banned by Facebook: An Exercise in Futility

Some months ago, I logged in to my Facebook profile to throw a few targeted ads up. I’d done Facebook advertising before and found it to be moderately successful — enough that I aimed to do a campaign every couple of months. Imagine my surprise when I logged in one morning to find this: For [...]

This is how Twitter will die. And, thus, live forever.

UPDATE: November 12, 2009 Has the Twitter brand death-spiral begun? ComScore today released numbers showing that visits to Twitter.com declined eight per cent. Why visit Twitter.com when its API lets anyone access tweets from anywhere? Has the death spiral begun? ——— Perhaps the most difficult part of forecasting technologies’ pace is discerning which technologies will [...]

Friend Splitting: Doing Personal AND Business on Facebook

So you’ve got a Facebook account and added a couple of dozen friends. In time, you begin to add some business contacts as well. Since your business contacts can now see your profile, you’re faced with a dilemma. Do you stop posting any personal comments like jokes, updates about your family, etc.? Or do you [...]

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Podium

Just back from some engagements last week and thought I’d pass this funny little tale along. I’ve got a few A/V requirements when I present, notably that I like my notebook right at the lectern with me, and that I like the podium (stage/riser) to be free of anything else like chairs, tables, and so [...]

“Perfect storm” brewing within the workforce

VANCOUVER, Sept. 16 /CNW/ – Social media expert Tod Maffin says companies are about to face a mass exodus of employees due to a kind of perfect storm brewing within two key generations of employees. “With the Baby Boomers set to retire en masse, companies are going to have to find ways to replace them [...]

Business, Benefits, and Bargaining: Five Gen-Y Case Studies

This Tuesday in my newsletter, I’ll publish my report on how smart companies are changing the way they do business to better reflect the way new workers think and work. You’ll be able to read five specific case studies who had great ideas that turned into higher retention and more satisfied workers. How a national [...]

Want to recruit and retain Gen-Y? Help them change the world.

In researching and preparing for my keynote presentation Leading the Facebook Generation: How to Manage, Inspire, and Retain the Generation-Y Millennials, I’ve come across so many horrible myths about Generation Y in the workplace. The three most common myths: “Generation Y employees will quit their job just to go snowboarding.” (More likely, they were being [...]

Now watch online! “Swarm Communications: Protecting Your Brand When Good Buzz Goes Bad”

Want to see the whole 90-minute keynote presentation? You are viewing a selected portion of a longer keynote presentation I give called “Tweet Warfare: Protecting Your Brand from Online Attacks.” (Clicking won’t stop the video; it will open a new page up.) This keynote is for any public relations or communications person in an organization or [...]

Top Five Reasons Generation Y Workers Leave Their Employer

by Tod Maffin, Generation Y speaker (“The Facebook Generation”) Forget the recession — the biggest challenge companies will face in the next five years is yet to come: A mass exodus of employees from the workforce. Baby boomers have already begun retiring en masse and scant few organizations have any kind of succession plan in [...]

Why “template responses” should be banned.

I sometimes wish customer support staff should simply not be able to use canned response templates. More times than not, I find support people don’t read your email at all — instead they seem to glance at it, find a few keywords, and match it to a canned response they have. Prepared. Here’s today’s exchange [...]

Leading/Managing the Facebook Generation: How to Lead, Inspire, and Retain the Generation-Y Millennials

Managing the Facebook Generation How to Lead, Inspire, and Retain the Generation-Y Millennials In this follow-up to Tod’s massively popular presentation Recruiting the Facebook Generation, Tod will show your delegates the eight key ways your business must change if you want to engage and retain this new, young, and energetic workforce. From developing creative benefits [...]

Leading/Managing the Facebook Generation

In this follow-up to Tod’s massively popular presentation Recruiting the Facebook Generation, Tod will show your delegates the eight key ways your business must change if you want to engage and retain this new, young, and energetic workforce. From developing creative benefits packages to learning an entirely new leadership model, the presentation walks you through, [...]

Lies that the “Please Hold” Voice Tells You

I make a lot of phone calls in the day. Note that I didn’t say I talked to a lot of people. Rather, and probably like you, I spend my day listening to a lot of corporate “please hold” messages. It’s gotten to the point that I can pretty much guess at exactly what they’re [...]

Why I Know A Lot About You, David.

Hi. You don’t know me, David, but I know you. We were both in Toronto last week –me for some CBC meetings, and you because you were being scouted for a sports team. I’ll get into how I know that in a bit. As I was rummaging around my documents folder at the hotel, I [...]

Tweet Warfare: Building, Protecting, and Managing Your Brand Online

It’s clear now — the new war for market domination is being fought 140 characters at a time. Social media futurist Tod Maffin shows your meeting attendees how to join the battle — dominate market space online, access more qualified leads, pinpoint-measure your marketing efforts, and immediately counter negative online attention. In his new fast-paced, [...]

I decline peace of mind.

Sample Pre-Event Promotional Video Greeting