I'm going to Profectio's session on Search Engine Marketing

February 27, 2007 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

OK. So, I shelled out $75 to attend the session on Search Engine Marketing that Dave Forde has organized.

Actually a pretty interesting panel, including Eric Morris from Google Canada, Martin Byrne from Yahoo! Canada, from Microsoft Canada. I wonder how many compliments they’ll exchange.

I’ll post about the session when I get back within Wi-Fi range.

I'm not at podCampToronto

February 24, 2007 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

I’d printed my boarding pass before going to bed last night, showed up at the airport this morning an hour before flight departure, passed through security and made my way to the Air Canada lounge. That’s when the passenger agent told me that Air Canada had in fact cancelled my flight!

(I suspect the plane I was supposed to be on was transferred to the Ottawa-Vancouver flight. As I passed that gate, I heard the passenger agent announcing that, due to mechanical problems with the aircraft assigned to that flight, Air Canada had been forced to “down-gauge” the plane – and they would offer 10 passengers $200 each to give up their seats. “Down-gauge.” Now that’s a good term. Makes a passenger feel like sausage stuffing. Yechh!)

So, there I am in the passenger lounge at 8:05 in the morning heading to Toronto for the 10AM opening of podcampToronto. Air Canada had cancelled my flight. But they could put me on a flight at 1PM. Oops…

So I missed the sessions I was hoping to attend: Mitch Joel‘s presentation on Building Your Personal Brand Through Podcasting, Mark Blevis and Bob Goyetche‘s session on Building a community, Julien Smith on Giving your podcast a Google presence, Peter O’Connell‘s tips on audio tools, resources and production techniques, Mark Blevis’ Editing techniques, Tari Akpodiete‘s session on Getting started with videoblogging, Leesa Barnes on Planning a killer podcast and Mitch Joel and John Wall on What’s hot in Marketing Your Podcast. And I won’t get my long-overdue chance to meet Bryan Person.

I’ve tried to connect to the Quicktime video streams on the podcamp Wiki. But, so far no luck.

I’m hoping that those people who did make it to podcampToronto will blog about the sessions they attend. It’s not quite as good as being there. But this conference is just too good to miss completely.

Naked Conversations authors just keep giving back…

February 23, 2007 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

Shel Israel recently posted about the first anniversary of the publication of Naked Conversations. (Is it only a year? So much has happened in social media that it seems a lot longer than that).

I still recommend to people that they read the book. Some of the examples are getting a little long in the tooth. But the underlying truths and lessons for business people trying to understand the potential importance for blogging and social media is still as apt as it was at the time of publication. And yes, I encounter many (maybe the majority) of business people who are still social media sceptics.

Naked Conversations lives on in another real world way. And I saw another example of this Wednesday night in Montreal.

Since the book was published, both of its co-authors, Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, have travelled extensively. And wherever they have gone, they have provided the social media community with an opportunity and a reason to come together. I saw this when Shel Israel came to Canada in September 2006 and let Terry Fallis and me schlep him through six events in three days in both Ottawa and Toronto. The legacy was the successful launch of Third Monday and Third Tuesday – events which continue to grow and serve the social media community in Canada. I saw it again when I travelled to Chicago for the Ragan Conference. Kevin Dugan and Chris Thilk posted that they’d like to hold a bloggers dinner on the opening evening of the conference. I showed up. And so did Robert Scoble, knapsack on his back. And when Robert said he was going, the community came in droves.

I saw this phenomenon of giving generously to the community again on Wednesday evening, when Shel Israel decided that rather than go back to his hotel and put up his feet after an all day conference (and a cross-continent flight the night before), he would instead offer himself up as the rallying point for a bloggers dinner that drew together the Montreal social media community. At the end of the evening, one of the participants told me that Shel’s presence had attracted people from at least three separate social media communities. Bob Goyetche says something similar in his post about the dinner.

Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. Two classy guys who just keep giving back to the community. And that’s a standard we should all aspire to.