Marketing Monster

The Art of Marketing event is coming to Montreal on September 30, 2010 at the Palais des congrès. Check out this impressive lineup of speakers:

• Seth Godin on Leadership and Creativity
• Jeffrey Gitomer on Customer Loyalty and Sales
• Avinash Kaushik on Brand Measurement: Metrics and Analytics
• Mitch Joel on Digital Marketing and Social Media
• Max Lenderman on Branding and Experiential Marketing
• Andy Nulman on Strategy and Innovation

I’m excited about this event because with this group of speakers I know that I’ll learn something new about marketing that I can then apply to my clients’ business (and that of my own.) And with the start of September and the back to school season, learning is on my mind.

Win 1 of 2 pairs of tickets

To help you learn something new about marketing too, here’s your opportunity to win 1 of 2 pairs of tickets that I’m giving away.

Simply answer these 2 questions about learning in the comments section. One winner per question will be selected to receive a pair of tickets to The Art of Marketing (valued at $399 per ticket).

1. What skills or tools do you want to learn before 2011 to help you improve your marketing efforts or your professional skills?
2. What, specifically, have you learned since the New Year about marketing and social media that has worked for you and provided your business (or your clients) with value through results?

The contest closes at 11:59 pm EST on September 21, 2010.

Get a discount on tickets and a copy of Linchpin

The Art of Productions, who have kindly provided me with tickets to give away, have also given me a discount code to offer my readers.

Save $50 per ticket on orders of 1 or 2 tickets, or, save $100 per ticket on orders of 3 or more tickets when you use promo code AM26.

The first 10 people to use the discount code will also get a free copy of Seth Godin’s Linchpin – the book he said will be his last one published traditionally. If you are one of the first 10 people to use the code to order tickets, the book will be waiting for for you to pickup at The Art of Marketing conference.

Thanks to The Art of Productions for sponsoring this contest. Good luck and I hope to see you there.

Thanks to everyone who came out to my Social Media Breakfast Montreal session “Turbocharge Twitter with Apps.” Knowing that some people were new to Twitter and some were veterans meant that my presentation had to contain something for everyone. I hope that I was able to cover some of the basics while introducing some new apps to those who’ve been using Twitter for years.

For those interested in discovering how Twitter apps can turbocharge your experience, here is the presentation.

Let me know in the comments if I’ve missed something that you love, or if you found something new that will make Twitter even better for you.

My favourite discovery

By far, the happiest surprise I found when researching the apps for this presentation was Quote URL. This app allows you to drag and drop the URL for individual tweets into their interface from your Twitter profile or from search.twitter.com. It then arranges the tweets in chronological order and presents you with a permalink. Now you can send someone a link to an entire Twitter conversation or commentary. Even better, the conversation becomes embeddable for your blog. No more cutting, pasting and manual linking. For bloggers, this will be a great tool.

Here’s an example.

1. 
   MarkGoren @AdeleMcAlear waxing poetic about Twitter at #smbmtl. 25 Aug 2010 from Twitter for iPhone
2. 
   enkerli Discussing Twitter penetration/acceptance with @adelemcalear. Twitter seniority (mine: feb 2007) Locate power in app. 25 Aug 2010 from Ping.fm
3. 
   lucaconti http://ow.ly/i/3phK @adelemcalear started her twitter presentation. Le Bistrote is full of people! #smbmtl 25 Aug 2010 from HootSuite
4. 
   MarkGoren Great refresher on Twitter by @AdeleMcalear at #smbmtl. Look for the deck on SlideShare later. 25 Aug 2010 from Twitter for iPhone
5. 
   MarkGoren #smbmtl – nice shout out to @RowFeeder by @AdeleMcAlear. She highly recommends it. 25 Aug 2010 from Twitter for iPhone
6. 
   sebprovencher Thank you @AdeleMcAlear for mentioning @neediumhq (http://www.needium.com) during #smbmtl! 25 Aug 2010 from web
7. 
   JumboJet04 @AdeleMcAlear great presentation today ! Thanks for the useful info 25 Aug 2010 from Echofon
8. 
   MarcSnyder @AdeleMcAlear juste realised I joined twitter before you did 25 Aug 2010 from web in reply to AdeleMcAlear
9. 
   MarcSnyder Excellent #SMBMtl de @AdeleMcAlear et @sebprovencher, avec @newraycom, @enkerli, @lucaconti, @valeriewindsor, @valeriewindsor notamment 25 Aug 2010 from web
10. 
    KaiDesignStudio @AdeleMcAlear Thanks for sharing about Tweeter apps @ Social Media Breakfast, learned a lot! 25 Aug 2010 from web in reply to AdeleMcAlear
11. 
    vandy_pants Really enjoyed my first #smbmtl today, with talks from @AdeleMcAlear and @sebprovencher. And now, back to school mode. Rats! 25 Aug 2010 from Twitter for iPhone
12. 
    mperron Great presentations by @AdeleMcAlear & @sebprovencher at Social Media Breakfast Montreal. 25 Aug 2010 from TweetDeck

— this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

Thanks to Jeff Taylor and Dan Maitland from Heelatch for the opportunity to speak to such a great  crowd. And thanks to everyone who contributed to the great Q&A afterward.

Be sure to check out Sebastien Provencher’s presentation on the Group Buying industry. It was fascinating and enlightening.

See you next time!

I’m excited that my panel submission has been accepted to the voting stage of the SXSW Interactive festival, happening March 11 – 15, 2011 in Austin, Texas. More than 2,400 proposals have been submitted for consideration. Please vote for my session from August 9 to 27 to help it through to the next round of consideration. And, if you feel so inclined, please leave a comment on my session’s Panel Picker page, as this may encourage others unfamiliar with me or my work to vote for my proposal.

Avoiding Extinction in a Digital Dark Age evolved through speaking sessions that I’ve been doing over that the last year. It is particularly relevant to content creators and people who put so much of their work online. (Here’s Wikipedia about the possibility of a digital dark age.)

Avoiding Extinction in a Digital Dark Age

Here’s the session description:

Many think that the web is forever and our personal stories, work and files will live on stored on hard drives and online. Driven by low cost storage, easy distribution and social networks we’ve put our lives online at an amazing pace and converted analog to digital. But, are we inadvertently creating a digital dark age?

In the last 15-years, online photo and video sites, blogs, email and hard drives full of files have replaced the previous generation’s analog heirlooms.

Looking at an old family album from 1910, you’ll be able to view the photos today. Will your descendants be able to see your digital pictures 100 years from now?

The web is actually a fragile place where your digital life’s work and can disappear without warning. Stored data can suffer from digital obsolescence and become unusable.

To prevent the loss of historically significant records and collections, library and archival organizations have been working on digital preservation issues for years.

You may not be a person destined for the history books, but, to your family, friends, colleagues and descendants, your stories and work are just as important, and possibly even more relevant.

This session will look at what each of us can do today to preserve and pass on our digital legacy, how to determine what to save, what steps have happened at the institutional level and determine how they can be adapted for individuals.

If you are a prolific digital creator, this is a must attend session.

Five Questions Answered

1. Why won’t my digital content be safe forever on the Internet?
2. Isn’t the Internet Archive keeping everything?
3. Why is the archive of files on my hard drive/CD/DVDs at risk?
4. My data is insignificant. Why would anyone care about it in the future?
5. How do I ensure that my important digital files survive me?

SXSW VOTING

Here’s how the voting works:

• 30% Community Voting (that’s YOU); 30% SXSW Staff Picks; 40% SXSW Advisory Board Picks
• Voting runs from August 9  to 27, 2010
• First 200 sessions are announced September 20, with more following on November 8

To vote:

• Before Friday, August 27, 2010 go to PanelPicker.sxsw.com a
• click “Sign In” at the top right of the page
• If you have never registered on SXSW.com before, click “create a new account” and fill out the simple form
• Once you are logged into the PanelPicker, you can click here to get to my session, or navigate alphabetically to Avoiding Extinction in a Digital Age to vote.

Thank you for your support. See you at SXSW Interactive 2011!

Come catch me speak on making Twitter a more powerful tool for business at Social Media Breakfast Montreal, Wednesday, August 25th, starting at 9 AM.

Turbocharge Twitter with Apps

I’ll be speaking about Twitter Apps. Here’s the low-down:

With thousands of Twitter applications available, everyone has their favourites. If you use Twitter for business, we’ll look beyond the basics to introduce apps that will make your experience more relevant and valuable to your objectives. Whether your goals are competitive intelligence, lead generation, promotion, community building, monitoring or measurement, we’ll look at tools to turbocharge Twitter.

What Are Your Favourite Twitter Apps?

I’ve spoken on Twitter apps many times before, but the landscape changes so quickly that I’ll be revising and updating my favourites for this session. With so many tools available for such a wide range of purposes, it can be daunting to find your way through to discover the really useful ones. I thought I’d take a little survey at the event to see what attendees’ top 3 Twitter apps are and then share the results here on my blog afterward.

But why limit the survey just to attendees? Let’s share the love a bit. What are your top 3 favourite Twitter apps for your business? Tell me the ones that you find the most valuable, or that make the best use of your time, or that enrich your Twitter experience.

Feel free to share the survey with your network: http://bit.ly/SMBMapps

I’ll post the results right here on my blog after the Social Media Breakfast on August 25th.

Also at Social Media Breakfast

I’m honoured to share the bill with Sebastien Provencher, co-founder of Praized Media and the newly launched Needium. He’s also one of the world’s foremost experts on local search. Sebastien is so renowned that Google invited him to speak about local search to their staff last year. At Social Media Breakfast, he’ll be talking about the Group Buying phenomenon and what it means for local advertising. You don’t want to miss this.

Social Media Breakfast is also giving away two tickets to the upcoming Art of Marketing conference. (I’ve got some news regarding the Art of Marketing up my sleeve for you as well – stay tuned!) Tickets are valued at $399 each and the conference features a pretty stellar line up of speakers including Seth Godin.

Event Details

REGISTER HERE

Social Media Breakfast Montreal

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

09:00 to 11:00

La Bistrote

1510 Notre Dame Ouest

514.903.3858

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If I feel that a post I’ve written over on DeathAndDigitalLegacy.com may be of interest to readers of this blog, I may post an excerpt here. It is intended as a way to alert people to possible relevant content, without re-posting the entire piece. However, I recognize the sensitive nature of the topic may not be appreciated by all readers. Please let me know in the comments if you like or dislike this approach. Thanks.

Twitter Recommends Dead Friends

On July 30th, Twitter announced that it was releasing a feature to recommend friends to follow right on the sidebar of the site when you log into Twitter.com. It was only a matter of time before their Who to Follow algorithm turned up someone who had passed away.

My friend Dean Whitbread, @dfrw, alerted me this morning that upon logging in and seeing this feature for the very first time, he was disturbed to see his friend Ro, @lilyhill,  recommended as someone to follow. She had died unexpectedly of a stroke in May 2009. Two days later, Ro’s daughter used her mom’s cell phone to text a last message to the account to notify @lilyhill’s friends of her passing.

Continue reading Twitter Recommends Dead Friends at DeathAndDigitalLegacy.com.