“It’s popular, it’s difficult to manage, it’s something we need to be doing more of.” -Angus Frame, Globe & Mail Editor on community building

It’s been six months but CaseCamp came roaring back to Toronto last night with a really good end-to-end lineup of cases and a capacity crowd at the Century club last night. My notes on each presentation are after the jump.

Apropos of the Angus quote above, the other big news is that Eli has secured a deal with AchilesMedia (creators of the nextMEDIA series of events) to handle longterm sponsorship and event management for casecamp. This is great news for the growing CaseCamp community as it ensures as stable future for the event – and offloads some the painful work from Eli Singer who’s also been sponsoring a significant portion of CaseCamp out of his own pocket. So kudos to all and looking forward to CaseCamp7.

meanwhile, read on for the good bits of last night’s event…

Tom’s hasty CaseCamp 6 Notes:

First up, Mobile Marketing for Levis @ Virgin Fest Toronto
Brady Murphy, Managing Partner at Vortex Mobile

Levi’s brand challenge: How to be cool with kids.

Strategy is to “sit in aura of cool”, by aligning with concerts and extreme sports events. [ Confirming the suspicion that ‘xtreme sports’ are really just invented vehicles for brand marketing – but oh well, so be it]

First campaign was a model scout for a levi’s add, booth at events with levis stylists with model contestant and pics, jeans, and somekindof mobile unique id.

What they used was a mobile voting app. Much bigger uptake when they txted back feedback on ballot count. Key point: authentic feedback on interactions counts. Mobile replaced paper contest ballots, and a wildly better platform. Used mms to allow them to send pictures of the candidates to the candidate so the contestants can forward to spread the word.

[This is where the strategy goes explosively viral. Very clever, marketers try so hard to figure out how to exploit the new digital/social medias to reach the younger demographic. Key insight – why bother and risk screwing it up, just give the kids the right incentives and they themselves will exploit the crap out of these new media in an entirely authentic manner and promote you brand along the way ]

[To, to win the model contest and earn the most SMS votes [remember they are getting constant feedback on their ballot count]

Consumers created facebook groups, wall posts to promote themselves in the contest. 57% of this activity outside the event period. Consumers motivated to spread the word.

25 facebook and myspace, 2000 wall posts, 3500 facebook members. One contestant even had tshirts made.

Treehugger. – Lloyd Alter [both frank and funny about treehugger]

Some great photoshop work. You don’t need to be in a poncho to be green.

Clean modern design that was environmentally responsible. 2M unique s, no. 14 on technorati. From 3 writers and now 40. [that’s impressive]

Focused on international instead of local writers, this is the growing trend to group blogs dominating.

Blogging is getting harder, supply competition
25% of their hits now come from digg

Tried a green version of dig called hugg which didn’t really catch on
So what to to keep growing and ended up partnering to Discovery.

Virtual, I’ve never met the editor I work for. We’re not doing as good as we could we don’t have good comments or profiles but we’re working on it , we’re afraid of facebook and myspace
Other challenges Rss will kill us I’m on full intravenous drip for rss, no one ever sees the site.

Q: do you have a digg strategy? A: oh ya! We try to game digg all the time, it’s what you have to do

Angus Frame on introducing comments on every article to The Globe and Mail

2005, news websites had proliferated, breaking news was not good enough anymore to differentiate an online paper

What’s our asset? The globe audience. How do we take advantage?

Solution, let readers comment on every article – a radical step in 2005. Slashdot – no matter what topic a journalist is talking about there’s someone out there who knows more.

Launch supported by “join the conversation” campaign

Traffic grew 15% – [that’s it?]

Challenges – volume of comments made impossible for editors to read and approve all
Users became irritated, full moderation doesn’t work with 1000s of comments, so change to closed, fully moderated or semi moderated. Hundreds comments /hr

e.g. Court cases have no comments enabled until the jury has rendered verdict

Problem, with more volume quality declined. How do you mod up the good and mod down the benign and the offensive comments

Filters and tools help community filter, but they’d still like to do better

1st month operation, 5k comments we thought this was pretty good.
Last month 100k comments, 1.6M pageviews [ok that’s really good]

It’s popular, it’s difficult to manage, it’s something we need to be doing more of.
Nowadays comments are standard so building community now needs to go further, includes audience and the newsroom and the journalists and the newsmakers themselves and between readers.

Talking about comment threading and mod up down comments [ heh of course Slashdot was there a decade ago]

Answer to a question: Have about 30 online editors but not dedicated 100% to moderation

Will Pate – the social web spokesperson

[Eli has asked Will Pate to demo himself. This is daring but fortunately Will is adorable]
Social web is uncontrolled and can’t be trained for, even big firms with resources are not always good at it.

Will : I try to find things that are awesome, it is too easy to be critical of stuff out there [thanks for that Will I should find myself more things that are awesome to write about, been doing a lot of complaining about stuff lately]

Will pate is conceptshare and commandN [these are both awesome btw. esp ConceptShare]
I could stand out if I had a mohalk but on the internet there’s tons of ppl with a mohalk. You have to be yourself

The internet is kindof a great party until the marketing people showedup. The trick is not to make it lame.

Make it better. Be Present, be passionate about something, be Accessible.

Blogging, typically you can be consistent or prolific. Pick one usually.

Mistakes, no one wants to hear about life struggles. I once posted a youtube video about a breakup which then got dugg (oops), posted a pic of me smoking which created a mini internet war between militant pro/anit smokers (oops).

Will’s personal Brand – 1200 Facebook friends, 600 twitter followers

That’s it. thanks also to Microsoft and Freshbooksfor sponsoring CaseCamp6. Note: Freshbooks makes a great online invoicing and billing application for small/medium businesses. You probably have heard of Microsoft already (though thanks to David Crow for likely having some sponsorship influence there).