Ottawa’s jam-packed June
June 23, 2010
I’m not sure if it was intentional or not – trying to beat a pre-summer vacation frenzy? – but this past month, Ottawa has been jam-packed with with web-related events. Which is, of course, excellent news for our fair city. Our web-ian community grows!
A quick round up of those I was able to catch:
- GovCamp Ottawa, our local version of GovCamp Canada: “an open environment for conversation about the role of municipal, provincial and federal governments in cultivating the growth and prosperity of Canada’s vibrant communities…”. My first ‘un-conference’, and an intriguing experience. After hearing from a kick-off panel, the audience created the agenda on the spot. I joined a debate about how valuable (or not) subject matter experts are in an open government model, a discussion about inter-jurisdictional (federal, provincial and municipal) applications and a session about how to measure the impact of open government data using examples and success stories. Overall though, my favourite part was the live Twitter feed during the panel itself; highly amusing to be part of a top-trending topic on Twitter for a day…
- “Winning the War on Google” featuring Rebecca Lieb, presented by the nascent Ottawa Web Marketing Club.ca. Rebecca has an impressive search pedigree and covered a lot of the fundamentals of search. Unfortunately, the most interesting material – the future of search – came at the end with little time left. She touched on implications of universal search e.g. the blending of search results – organic, news, images, video, social, etc. to illustrate why it’s – truly – no longer about rankings. Also, intriguing stats from comScore: “In early 2008, 17 percent of searches contained some type of blended result. In late 2008, it was 31 percent of all search results.” Look out marketers!
- “Social Media Marketing Experts Reveal All” with panelists Scott Lake from SWIX, Erin Blaskie, Lifestreamer (my new favourite word – see BabyCenter’s research segmenting social moms) and Michele Bedford-Thistle from Microsoft, presented by OCRI‘s, Zone5ive technology marketing speaker series. Each panelist had an extremely different take on social and how they’ve incorporated it into their professional selves and businesses. Finally – concrete evidence about why organizations don’t need to panic about the ‘right’ way to ‘do’ social.
There were still other events I was not able to attend, including:
- “Wikibrands – Reinventing Your Business in A Customer Controlled Marketplace”, featuring Sean Moffit and presented by SMB Ottawa (Social Media Breakfast Ottawa). For reasons that I’m unclear about, there’s no reference to the event on the SMB Ottawa web page, but you can find the presentation on slideshare. Perhaps they are pure-Twitterists?
- MARCOM 2010 – “professional development and educational forum for public and not-for-profit marketers and communicators”
- Your Facebook Business Account – Turn “Fans” into Customers Session 3 of Using Social Media to Drive Business featuring Erin Blaskie, presented by the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce. Fortunately for me, Erin posted the presentation on slideshare.
If you were able to attend any of these, comment away – I’d be curious to hear what you learned at each.
And finally, although it not exactly an event, there is a deadline worth noting – CMA Ottawa is touting the fact that the entry deadline for the 2010 Canadian Marketing Associations Awards is June 24th, 2010.
Go Ottawa!
Customer Engagement through Social Media
September 25, 2009
On behalf of the OCRI Zone5ive Marketing Forum programming committee, I’m pleased to share details about our ‘season opener’ which will be held on October 8th, 2009.
Our speaker is Natasha D’Souza, Founder of Virtual EyeSee, who will be presenting Customer Engagement through Social Media:
If you are like many organizations, you have likely begun to add some elements of social media to your marketing tactics. But how do you leverage these new channels to truly engage customers in meaningful conversations, and to gather and respond to market feedback?
In this Zone5ive session, you will learn how to use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Blogs to listen to and engage your audience, and to build your own online community using open source tools and hosted services.
Some of the takeaways will be:
- skills to help you learn to listen to your customers
- approaches for successful customer engagement
- crowd sourcing your product development; and much more.
Natasha D’Souza from Virtual EyeSee will take you on a social media adventure and inspire you to engage with your customers. Whether you are on a shoestring, moderate or large budget there is solution for everyone.
Date: Thursday October 8, 2009
Time: 11:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m.
Location: Ben Franklin Place, Council Chamber – Main Floor, 101 Centrepointe Dr.
Register online or by contacting Tanya Calvo, Conference Administrator at 613-828-6274 ext. 224 or tcalvo@ocri.ca.
Web 2.0: The Human Web
April 14, 2007
Kudos to CapCHI, the National Captial Region chapter of ACM SIGCHI, for an excellent conference featuring Peter Merholz, Maggie Fox, Mike Atyeo and Derek Feathertone.