Jaime Woo

BETA: Check out my portfolio at socialmediabakery.com

I'm very lucky to do what I love. I work on a mix of social media and communications projects. To see some examples, head over to my portfolio at the Social Media Bakery. :D

Simple, great: the Google ads

Strong, clear messages will always prevail. Check out this simple, but effective ad from Google. It's not about flashy. It's about connecting with people's desire to hear a good story.

The value of criticism

On any given day, a graduate student, who has poured years of work into her research, will stand before three or four professors to present her work and then gets relentlessly grilled to make sure her work is relevant, thorough, and substantial. If they agree the work is, the student will end up with shiny letters after her name. If not, it's back to the lab to get it up to speed.

The process, while nerve-racking, is essential. It works as a check-and-balance to ensure students have put enough cognitive muscle into their work and that they are ready to contribute to the knowledge pool. On a higher level, researchers and academics have their work peer-reviewed before publication in an attempt for something similar. (There are flaws, as with any system, but it is a self-regulation that mostly works.)

On issues about the internet and technology, there are far less stringent protocols. Given the relative youth of the community, this is understandable. On one hand, you have armchair criticism resulting in the hatesplosion of YouTube comments, as an example. This is an eyesore, but easy to filter out. On the other hand, people also slip through anemic ideas and analysis that go unchecked, and this is much more problematic. 

How many posts and pages of social media expertise have we all gone through that are no more useful than the claims of penile enlargement and royalty's locked away wealth?

ChangeCamp returns to Toronto

I just registered for the new "Designing a Civic Engagement Toolkit" event presented by ChangeCamp, a gathering organized by Mark Kuznicki that wonders how to re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation.

I believe citizenship and having a participatory role is one of the greatest responsibilities we can have living in a first-world nation and was intrigued by the premise of ChangeCamp. While at Torontoist, I wrote about the event and asked of it:

While event participants were passionate about creating change, could anything tangible come out of it? (While arguably congregating and discussing politics is a good thing, it won't spawn a national movement without a product.) 

It's still a question I ask of the event today, except now I have a chance to get involved not as a reporter, but as a participant. I've already had a chance to help Mark work on his messaging and distill some of his progress and many ideas by producing a welcome video for ChangeCamp Edmonton late last year. 

It'll be exciting to see what has transpired since then until this upcoming event on February 16th.