Tag - john koetsier

Speaking at SOHO YVR

Looks like I’ll be speaking at SOHO Vancouver in about a month. The topic? Social media, of course …

I’m looking forward to it, but I had to create/update a new bio to be posted on the site and in the conference literature. At first I sent in this:

John Koetsier is senior manager, online media for Canpages, the Canadian
local search company. He’s been connecting people and ideas online for over
15 years.

But our senior marketing manager, Cathy Greer, felt that wasn’t substantial enough. So, back to the drawing board …

Here’s what I came up with on the second go-around:

John Koetsier has been creating simple solutions for communication and connection for over 16 years.

He’s been director of product development for Premier (a division of one the largest education companies in North America, School Specialty), COO of a software startup, and has built 3 learning management systems for over 40,000 schools in the US and Canada. He worked with Disney to build a custom PC environment just for kids, and helped create the user interface for Intel’s Classmate PC project.

He is currently Senior Manager, Online Media for Canpages, the Canadian local search company, where he manages social media, search, and apps.

John has been blogging since the mid ’90s when he built his own blog infrastructure from scratch, and currently tweets (to over 4K followers), shares, updates, checks in, and Google+’s with alarming frequency. He’s spoken about technology, learning, and connecting to clients to audiences in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America.

He has a Bachelor’s degree in English from Simon Fraser University and a Masters in Educational Technology from the University of British Columbia, and is on the board of directors of DiverseCity.

Sounds good – I should hire this guy. Marketing, marketing, marketing 🙂

Visual.ly & me: trying out their infographic generator

Thought I’d give Visual.ly a try with their new infographic generator. The only module they have for public consumption right now is Twitter.

So here’s me on Twitter, according to Visual.ly. There’s a least a couple of massive errors: I tweet WAY more than .3 tweets a day, and I get far more than .13 new followers a day.

It’s a fun little tool right now, but they should really fix some of the issues, as people will be judging them based on their first efforts.

Why thanks, Google

The big G is getting helpful. Now Google is letting you know when your blog could stand some updating:

No, it doesn’t email angry missives with whiny you-haven’t-updated-your-blog-in-two-weeks messages. Instead, it just tells you when there’s an update available for the software that powers your site.

In my case, that’s invariably WordPress, and my portfolio site, johnkoetsier.com, needed some work. I don’t touch it very often … maybe once every couple of months … so sometimes it’s a version or two behind the current WordPress standard.

I think Google sends the update based on what it knows from Google Webmaster Tools. I’ve set up all my sites there, and sure enough, when I go check it out … there’s a message in my inbox that looks strikingly familiar:

I’ve had this site get infected before – there’s nothing like an older version of WordPress with known issues to draw the hackers/crackers – so I appreciated the warning.

And, of course, updated the site.

The very spot where World War II ended

It’s been tough re-adjusting to normal life after our Hawaii trip.

This morning was cold, wet, and punctuated by the arrival of 200+ stampeding emails flooding my work in-box. Ah well … it was great while it lasted.

Every so often, I’m going to post pictures of what we did and saw in Hawaii … and here’s the first one. It’s a photo I took on the deck of the USS Missouri, the ship on which General Douglas MacArthur accepted the Japanese surrender in Tokyo bay. This was the surrender that formally ended World War II.

And here’s the exact spot it happened:

The Missouri is now docked in Pearl Harbor, overlooking the last resting place of the USS Arizona. Ironically, that’s where the WWII began for America, when Japan launched a surprise attack on December 7, 1941, the “date that will live in infamy.”

Leadership @ work

I recently received a promotion, and I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a manager versus a leader, what kind of leadership I want to provide, and what kind of a leader do I want to grow to be …This is tough stuff, and I’m pretty sure I have a long way to go. But I think the critical piece is summed up in this advice that I found on PositiveSharing (the chief happiness officer’s blog):

A leader is best when the people are hardly aware of his existence,not so good when people stand in fear,worse, when people are contemptuous.Fail to honour people, and they will fail to honour you.But a good leader who speaks little,when his task is accomplished, his work done,the people say “We did it ourselves.”

The person who said that lived 2500 years ago in China: Lao Tzu.[tags] leadership, office, work, lao tzu, john koetsier [/tags]

Google has much better …

. . . Excel help than Excel.Every single time I need to find out how to do something in Excel, I try to figure it out from Excel help. Search usually gets me nowhere, but sometimes gives me a clue what I should actually be searching on. But the help I usually get is not very helpful.So I turn to Google, and usually on the first page of results, using the search terms that make sense to me (an admitted Excel weenie, and proud of it) I find the answer.Isn’t that bass-ackwards? Shouldn’t the best source of information about your product come from your company?

scheduling

Getting 6 people together at the same time on the same date at the same place (even if it’s virtual) is like herding cats.

So when a meeting fits in this nicely, it’s like the parting of the Red Sea … especially when our corporate meeting software shows busy times in red:

schedule