Make It With Michael

By Hootsuite Now, you can monitor Hootsuite streams, collaborate on customer support issues, and publish social messages—right from Microsoft Teams. It all started in November. Microsoft Teams—the chat-based workspace in Office 365—was revealed to the world. At the time, Hootsuite was also announced as an early developer partner (along with Zendesk, Asana, and Intercom) to extend and customize Teams. Today, we’re excited to show you what we’ve built. You’ll see how Hootsuite and Teams makes your social media workflows way more productive. Why use Microsoft Teams? You’ve probably noticed—the future of workplace communication is open and instant. Employees (especially millennials who will be an estimated 75 percent of the global workforce by 2025 ) look for flexible and collaborative work environments. Teams is the virtual equivalent of the modern office; enabling work to become visible and accessible. As their introduction video explains , Teams is a chat-based workspace. It giv...

By Ravi Bhatt Does it ever feel like you are doing everything you “should” be doing with digital marketing, but you’re still left with no leads? Generating leads online is no easy task, especially if you’re not sure which of your efforts will have the biggest impact on your business. But it’s not as hard as most people make it. Whenever someone outside the marketing world asks me what I do, I can’t simply say, “I am working to improve lead generation on my website.” It’d be totally lost on them, and I’d get some really confused looks. So instead, I say, “I am planning unique ways to attract people to my business”. That generally sounds better, and that’s exactly what lead generation is. It’s a way of warming up complete strangers to your business and getting them on the path to finally buying. Without lead generation, it’s virtually impossible to discover new opportunities and interact with loyal customers. When it comes to your website, lead generation really comes down to ho...

By James Mulvey It’s the dream of all marketers: create low budget videos, upload them to YouTube and Facebook, and build a global audience of raving fans. Lots of people talk about it. Lots of blogs write about it. But the indie band Walk Off The Earth did it. In 2006, Walk Off The Earth was an unknown band from Burlington Ontario. But their creative cover of Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” brought them 127 million views in four months on YouTube. Since then, they’ve proven to be consistent viral hitmakers with over 600 million YouTube views and successful branded content campaigns for Volkswagen, Pringles, Telus, and O2 Mobile. I interviewed Gianni “Luminati” Nicassio, a founding member and talented multi-instrumentalist. He reveals how the band approaches online video. Responses have been edited and condensed for clarity. If you were to start again and build a YouTube or Facebook audience from scratch tomorrow, what would be the first thing you’d do? I’d go and researc...