• Shibi Mourad (Google): The Acceleration of Everything
• Connie Crosby (The Crosby Group): Adopting Social Media Inside the Enterprise
• Mark Goren (Transmission): Evaluating Social Media Monitoring Tools From A User’s Point of View
• Debbie Weil: Finding Your Social Media Sweet Spot
• Mitch Joel (Twist Image): CTRL-ALT-DEL – How to Reboot Your Marketing in a Connected World
• Geoff Livingston (Zoetica): Shooting the Social Media Messenger!
• Dragana Djermanovic (PRpepper): Social Web: in&out_come
• Maggie Fox (Social Media Group):Privacy is a Commodity, Not a Place
• Janna Anderson (Elon University/Pew Internet Project): Imagining the Internet

Ask Away

Can’t make it to Webcom Montreal? What would you like to take away from these sessions? Send me your questions, and I’ll do my best to report back the answers.

Running concurrently is WebCamp, an un-conference for developers to discuss the trends and issues evolving in web technology. (Sold out.)

There’s still time to register for Webcom tickets. The event is free to enter starting from 4 pm.

They were a great group who had lots of questions. Many of those in attendance had certainly experienced the let down that happens after you set up a Facebook page, get a few initial followers and then interest drops off when no strategy is in place to continue to engage fans of the page.

I also talked quite a bit about what to do when the shine starts to wear off the “Ooo! New Shiny!”. It’s hard for businesses of all sizes, but particularly small businesses with limited resources, to manage social media outreach when that is not your area of expertise. I commend all of the dentists and practice managers in my session today for understanding that they need to know more, and being open to hearing me bust some myths and shoot down the hype.

Here’s the slide deck to my session. It is applicable to most small and medium-sized businesses, not just dental practices. And, perhaps refreshingly, it stresses how to define your strategy based on your organization’s goals and objectives. Have a look and tell me what you  think.

Perhaps something drives you nuts, or, you really love something about New Twitter and want to give them a pat on the back.

Ou peut-être, vous parlez français et vous avez un problème avec leur support multilingue.

If you live in Montreal, tonight’s your chance!

Mark Trammell, Design Researcher for Twitter will be in Montreal tonight. Over the next few weeks he’s traveling and speaking with people about how they use Twitter.

Join us for a tweetup tonight from 5 to 7. Please RSVP here: http://twtup.com/c5hk8f

The winners of my Art of Marketing contest are:

Annabelle Agnew
(@sewlounge)

James Taylor
(@JumboJet04)

Congratulations!

Thanks to everyone who took the time to enter and tell me about what they hoped to learn by 2011 and what they’ve learned in 2010. I’ll be doing a follow up post that will take a look at those answers.

STILL TIME TO GET DISCOUNT & LINCHPIN

My readers can use discount code AM26 when ordering to save:

• $50 per ticket on 1 or 2 tickets
• $100 per ticket on orders of 3 or more

You’ll get a free copy of Seth Godin’s Linchpin if you are one of the first 10 people to use the discount code.

Thanks to The Art of Productions for sponsoring this contest.

Methodology:

As I knew several of the entrants, I used a list randomizer from Random.org to make the selection fair and impartial. I randomized two lists, one for women and one for men, for equal representation at the conference.

Disclosure: I have been provided with two tickets for the Art of Marketing conference in exchange for this promotion.

Once again, I am looking forward to a weekend full of tech, social media and great discussions around digital communications and community. There will be 3 tracks of presentations this year; 2 in French, 1 in English.

I’m privileged to be speaking once again. I’ll be presenting a session that is specifically targeted to digital content creators, and is part of my digital legacy series:

Your Web Content : Forever or Fragile?
In the last 15 years we’ve converted analog to digital and put everything on the Web and told that it will be there forever. What if we’re wrong?

Sunday, September 12, 2010
9:30  AM
Chaufferie (hidden away at 175, avenue du Président-Kennedy)
Google Map

The full weekend schedule, including information about Friday’s first ever MediaCamp and the kick off party is here.

Can’t make it to PodCamp Montreal? Check the session schedule to see which sessions will be live streamed to the Internet. (Yes, mine will be.)

Thanks to the PodCamp organizing team Michelle Sullivan, Sylvain Grand’Maison, Laurent Lasalle and Laurent Maisonnave who have done a great job pulling this event together.

Register here.

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.

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!

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

View Google Map

I’ve been thinking a lot about content creation lately. I haven’t been creating much over the last 6-months and it’s been bothering me. I was at lunch with a friend the other day who commented “Yeah, but you don’t really blog anymore, do you?” Oh, dear. What a terrible reflection that mirror offered. My blog has been on a very low simmer, I’ve not been doing any video, even my other blog has been kind of quiet. This has much to do with bandwidth.

Not the kind that my Internet provider offers, but the number of hours in the day. I will lament what is a fact for most solo-preneurs: I don’t scale. Try as I might, I can’t seem to change the limiting factor of time.

I attempted to create more time by sleeping less. Hey, if Martha Stewart and Chris Brogan can get by on 4-hours a night, why not give it a whirl? I trained my body to get by on 5-hours a night, but, it resisted. I was bleary and short-tempered after many weeks of my new longer work days. This was not doing much for my creativity either. So, now I’m back up to a robust 6 1/2-hours a night and feel much better for it. I guess I’m not cut out to be another Martha or Chris.

So, with only one of me, and 17.5 waking hours in my day, let’s lop off 4.5 hours for family time (non-negotiable if I want to maintain a happy life with a 5 year-old and a husband) and an hour for such luxuries as showering and having a lunch break, and I’m left with 12 hours.

That’s the time I have everyday for client work, new business development, staying on top new things in my industry, maintaining my social networks – digital and physical, sourcing and prepping for speaking gigs, project research for digital legacy, and content creation. Oh, yes. and a personal life.

At some point, something has to give.

I’ve never been the type of blogger to whip off short and breezy posts just to keep content flowing. You know the type of blog I mean. It’s like eating at an affordable family restaurant chain: not bad, but not memorable. I prefer to write longer, more analytical posts despite the extra time they take to create. But this means I don’t write as often. Some have suggested that I change the style of posts I write to be short and sweet to accommodate a faster turn-around and increase the volume of content on my blog. I’m undecided on that, but I’ve definitely taken the advice to heart.

It’s about habits, really. Some people blog daily and that frequency results in faster production. Practice, practice, practice. I’ll need to carve out time in my 12-hour a day to build some new content creation habits. I wish that I had minion clone to do my bidding. But, I’m not in the market to hire a ghost blogger.

How can I miss you if you won’t go away?

To be honest, the break away from content creation has been good for me in some respects. It has allowed me to concentrate on supporting my clients, building some new service offerings (to be launched in the fall) and to do a fair bit of speaking. And I’ve decided not to beat myself up over being absent. Sure, maybe I won’t be an A-list blogger on the AdAge Power 150 just yet, but, I’ve spent my time in other useful and productive ways that will benefit my business.

My break from content has also made me itch to start making it again. Recently, I spoke at the Podcasters Across Borders conference in Ottawa. For years I’d heard nothing but wonderful things about PAB and it’s single-track, laid back community and it’s intelligent and intimate approach. Sure enough, being in a room full of passionate content creators for a weekend re-invigorated my spark to express myself and get back to writing here and there and over there too, post photos (instead of hoarding them), and try to process the 15+ hours of video that I’ve amassed which is collecting digital cobwebs. (I *really* need a video editor!)

Pivotal moments in unexpected places.

On the morning of the first full day at PAB, Andrea Ross took the stage. For 3-years, Andrea produced a successful podcast about children’s books with her husband, Mark Blevis, one of the PAB co-founders. In her 5-minute presentation, Andrea crystallized what creating online content is ultimately about: real, human connection.

If you’ve ever wondered if the work that you put into your blog, your podcast, your videos or your time spent on social networking sites ever mattered, please watch this video.

Who am I kidding?

Earlier, I said that my lack of posts were to do with habits and scant available time. But, really, it’s about priorities. If this blog was a bigger priority, then I would develop better different habits and make the time, right? So, then what gives?

Andrea’s presentation humanized content creation for me again. I’d gotten caught up in the thought that, to be an integrated marketing consultant, I must blog because it’s good for business. It’s a central part (some would argue “THE” central part) of any online strategy. But, lately, it has been feeling more like a chore than a joy, something I had to do to be part of the game, and with that uninspired attitude, it was easy to rank it lower on my list of priorities.

Everything I created online had to have a business purpose – work, work, work – and I lost sight of the most important part of this exercise: people. I forgot about how what I create might have meaning and resonate with people. No, not just people – YOU.

So, if you take the time out of your busy life to read my blog, I want to thank you for spending time here when you could be doing something else. And I offer an apology for being absent, in heart and in spirit as much as in posts. I’m going to re-jig my priorities, cop a new attitude, do my best to learn some new habits and make this space special again.

If you have any tips for me, I’d love to hear them in the comments.

Thanks for sticking with me.