Ottawa Web and Social Media Events May 2011
May 13, 2011
Ottawa’s marketing community continues to impress me with its increasingly rich offering of web and social media related events. I’m sure I’ve missed several, but the month is flying by me and I wanted to get these one published:
- “Better Leads. Richer Insights. Bridging the web analytics and CRM divide“, presented by Zone5ive, OCRI‘s Tech Marketing Forum on May 12th, 2011 at the Marshes Golf Course. Kudos to Alex Langhshur and Tyler Gibbs of PublicInsite who presented a valuable case study on exactly how they’ve helped Ottawa’s own Dragonwave Inc to convince their sales team of the worth of the web channel by integrating web analytics data into Dragonwave’s CRM
- “Content Strategy from A Global Perspective“, presented by Content Strategy Ottawa Meetup. Billed as an informal night of networking, the group meets at Blue Cactus Bar & Grill in the Market on May 13, 2011 at 6pm
- Now SOLD OUT – “People Before Pixels“, a one-day user experience workshop offered by Follow the UX Leader, on May 16, 2011 at the Courtyard Restaurant
- “Between the Lines of Privacy“, a breakfast with the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Jennifer Stoddart, presented by WXN. the Women’s Executive Network on May 17, 2011 at the Rideau Club
- “Results, not more Reports“, a free web analytics seminar offered by Unilytics also on May 17th, 2011 at the Fairmont Chateau Laurier Hotel
- “Designing for Humans“, a presentation by Martin Gomez of Sparkart from SMBOttawa (Social Media Breakfast Ottawa) at 7:30am on May 18, 2011 at the Great Canadian Theatre Company
- “Stop Searching. Start Finding.” a full day of information architecture training provided by Follow the UX Leader at the Courtyard Restaurant on May18, 2011
- “Creating Web Content that Clicks“, a one-day web writing course also from Follow the UX Leader on May 19, 2011, also at the Courtyard Restaurant
- Ryan Short from Teknision will be the speaker at the next Web Analytics Wednesday at the Heart & Crown ByWard Market, hosted by PublicInsite on May 25, 2011 at 6pm
- FUN for Tech Women event to be held at DiVino’s at 225 Preston Street on May 30th, 2011 from 6pm-8pm. To register, call DiVino’s at (613) 221-9760
- Canada’s Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, or SEMPO Canada, is holding its first SEMPO Ottawa Members Only Meetup on May 30th, 2011 at 6pm at Johnny Farina on Elgin Street
- “New Era Marketing Mosaika: A Spectacular Multimedia Creation” with Guy Laflamme from the National Capital Commission, presented by CMA Ottawa on May 31st, 2011 at 11:15am at the Hampton Inn and Conference Room
If I’ve missed any, comment away, and I’ll be sure to add it to the information.
Hope to see all of you at one or more of these events!
eMetrics Toronto 2011 agenda posted
February 6, 2011
I’m very pleased to share the news that the agenda for the 2011 Toronto eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit agenda has been posted. It’s looking good, and I’ve already got my eye on several of the sessions including:
- Stéphane Hamel, famed analytics Immeria blogger on “Establishing your Web Analytics Maturity”; I’ve had the bad luck of conflicts at past eMetrics Summits when Stéphane has presented his web (now online) analytics maturity model. However as a long-time fan – that’s it this is my year!
- We’ve got a double serving of Canadian business icon Research in Motion (RIM) as Dan Quinn compares panel notes about “How Decision Makers Consume what Analysts (and Agencies) Produce” and Simon Austin will be tackling Social Media Metrics – more of that is always better…
- Anne Nash from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) will share stories about “What Happens when the Home Page is NOT your front door”
We’ve got attribution sessions, managing multiplicity (multiple data sources), measuring mobile, measuring video, best practices of testing, the value of data and more – tons of great topics. As usual, there’s far more sessions that I’m hoping to catch than I expect time will allow.
I’m also very honoured to announce that I’ll be speaking this year, with my web analytics compadres, Alan K’necht from K’nechtology and June Li from ClickInsight. We’re part of the eMetrics Campaign and Acquisition Optimization track where we’ll be answering audience questions on the Fundamentals of Acquisition Optimization. Our session will be held from 1:15 – 2:00 PM on Thursday April 28th, 2011. Hope to see you there!
Call for Speakers – eMetrics Toronto April 2011
November 4, 2010
Calling all Ottawa companies, organizations and associations – we need you! Toronto’s eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit is on the hunt for speakers for the April 26-29, 2011 summit to be held at the Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel.
The speaker submission deadline is December 12th, 2010.
In particular, eMetrics is looking for stories that tell the ” how-to and how-much, about the challenges you overcame, the experiments that failed, how you won a budget increase for online marketing because your ROI rocks! And, how you are evangelizing online marketing analytics and experimentation in your organization.”
In other words, open your measurement kimono! Consider sharing the good, the bad and the ugly from your recent analytics learnings. Why would we ask such a thing? Simply because it works – eMetrics is about receiving golden nuggets of learning from fellows and friends in our burgeoning analytics industry. Having attended three eMetrics summits myself, I can tell you the best presentations were those where practitioners described the particular digital measurement problem they tried to solve and explained the results. No holds barred.
Memorable speakers for myself include Breanna Wigle, who proposed an “RFF Score” (Recency+Frequency+Number of Facebook Friends) as a methodology for social network analysis for Military.com. Then there was Alain Tremblay from Bell Interactive who walked us through identified points of failure in a shopping cart, and explained how qualitative data analysis pointed them towards solutions. Wonderfully concrete. Or the always charming Vicky Brock who delivered a great case study on understanding visitor behaviour when you don’t sell online. She described specific content improvement actions that could be taken based on her analysis of a university’s onsite search engine data. Great stuff.
I’m hoping that Ottawa folks will consider submitting a speaker proposal – whether it be for an analytics or a social marketing outreach campaign within a federal government department, or a search marketing program at a private sector company, or a social media membership recruitment effort from an association. I know you’re out there, fellow Ottawans – let’s make sure we let the rest of Canada know it!
Please contact me if you have any questions about the event or to discuss ideas or topics you are considering. To help you brainstorm, the 2011 eMetrics content focus includes the following topics:
- Digital Management
- Media Analytics: Cross Media, Cross Platform
- Site Optimization and Usability
- Campaigns and Acquisition Optimization
- Social Mobile Marketing Metrics
Good luck!
GTEC, Gerry McGovern deadline & Zone5ive @ Brookstreet
October 6, 2010
What do these have in common you ask? Apart from the usual web-ian theme, they are also three of Ottawa’s events this month (so far!). Have I missed any?
1. GTEC (Canada’s Government Technology Event) is in full swing – if not nearly done – at the Westin Hotel (search for GTEC on Twitter to get a sense of the conversation…). Very healthy exhibitor floor and I caught a couple of sessions, including the G20 case study on Canada’s lead role in “the world’s largest social media project”. Kudos to Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada for opening the kimono and sharing details on how the whole project got off the ground, how things went during and what’s likely to happen next.
2. Zone5ive’s next session, “The Bigger Picture: Taking your Product into Today’s Market” is set for Thursday, October 14, 2010. This month’s speaker is Corien Kershey, Director of Strategy at Marketing Magnitude. In case you haven’t attended this year, please note that Zone5ive has moved to the Brookstreet Hotel in Kanata (who put on a great lunch in September – thanks Brookstreet!).
3. Although technically not an October event, NeoInsight and OCRI are offering an early-bird discount (until 5pm on October 15th) for their Task Management Masterclass with Gerry McGovern in Ottawa on November 3rd (and Halifax on November 1st). Having attended a previous Gerry McGovern event, I expect this one will be a sell out too!
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.
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