I do consider myself both very privileged and happy to work with great people such as the ones at Molson. As few of you might know, I do social media strategy with Molson Dry and sooner this year, and (our client) invited few bloggers to have an open discussion on how brands and corporations should behave in the social media space. Following this unusual meeting, our client’s marketing and communications departments came out with this great idea : creating a special event for bloggers and their communities.

More infos on the party the strategy
You will be able to have further information (in French) about the party on . Because one of the objectives of creating this event is to reward blogger’s community, I’ll take the opportunity to invite people that have commented on my blog in the past to join us on that special evening. Also, since we have previously presented our experience at Webcom, I’ll be pleased to answer questions that you might have regarding social media consulting and my work.

For the party, we’ve launched the contest last week, the response is very good so far and there is still room available, so I’m tagging , , , , and . .

Everyday Normal Guy 2- Jon Lajoie

Who’s that Regular Everyday Normal Montrealer with over 4.5 millions views of his clips on YouTube and in the States? , besides of staring in RadCan’s , is apparently on his way to become our first local comedian using social Medias and more especially YouTube in order to leverage an international career. More to come since he is currently negotiating with majors such as HBO to get something big.

Mighty ducks saved by montreal’s police officer

Forget about the police and the . When , the Montreal police is always there to protect and serve!

MONTREAL CANADIENS 1993 ROAD TO THE CUP

It’s probably been too long since we have won the cup. Great memories Enjoy! ()

Malajube “Montreal -40°C”

First band ever from Montreal making it to the top of the week on YouTube’s list with their Montreal -40°C song. see also and .

From New York City to Montreal

IMHO: The way that should promote the city.

Nadia Comaneci, Montréal 1976 TEN !!!

Yes, Montreal was once host of the Olympics and Nadia Queen of the Games!

Montreal: Two Minute Tour

Still the best Tour of the city that I’ve found. Informative if you plan to visit the city.

Snowboarding in the city - Sunset Films - Montreal

Bonus: love snowboarding, didn’t think that Montreal was offering that much opportunities.

With three different tracks all branded 2.0 (marketing 2.0, enterprise 2.0 and solutions 2.0) this year’s edition of was all about this move toward a more social, collaborative and interactive web. I didn’t get the chance to attend the whole event but since I was participating in Webcamp, the off-Webcom event, I was allowed to go to some of the keynotes.

Andrew McAfee from HBS on Enterprise 2.0
was first to present in the morning and I would say that the audience had large expectations regarding his conference. In fact, McAfee is credited with first coining the expression ‘Enterprise 2.0′, that definitely brings some authority to the guy. So, McAfee explained that the only reason why he looked at this 2.0 thing is because he wanted to walk away from this whole thing, to convince himself that he could quickly go back to his usual researches. But everything changed when he started exploring Wikipedia: he realized then that technology strongly impacts on the organizational environment. He gave us the example of resulted in half a million in savings. According to McAfee, the enterprise 2.0 is going to increase differences among companies and these differences will become much more important in the future. If you are interested in the topic, I would recommend you to check his blog where he goes deeper into concepts such as .

Pierre-Karl Péladeau on Quebecor 2.0
I know that PK Péladeau wasn’t really familiar with his speach sales pitch but he still in Province of Quebec and since his company is a major Internet Service Provider, I think his point of view of the 2.0 thing was more than welcomed. Quebecor also has a huge presence into the traditional media landscape and PK Péladeau knows certainly that his corporation won’t have the choice to adopt new business models sooner or later. They are working on a community website called and they’ve been experiencing really good things lately: RSS feeds, embeddable videos , they have a and blogs, they are feeding the community with contests and more. It’s always good to see mainstream Medias embracing some of the 2.0 tools.

What really brought the 2.0 to Webcom : Videopresse

Webcom organisation: Claude Thibault, , Marc Chioini and Christian Aubry from Videopresse

I think that the greatest move from Webcom’s organisation was to partner with from the event. It’s pretty hard to make a conference really interactive, unless you present on a Q&A panel, but the broadcast brought another dimension to the whole event. In fact it gave access to the speakers to anybody on the web that couldn’t be part of the day. Greatest thing is that and , who did the interviews, were also taking questions from the chat room. They managed to interview most of the speakers during the day, including me who spoke about Webcamp. My boss went also in front of the camera since we () were presenting on two different conferences at this event.

Image credit:

What is Webcamp?
Webcamp Montreal is a user generated conference about the web. The latest edition was on May 14th 2008. It was started by was scheduled the same day as in november 2007. It can easily be defined as the off-Webcom event: the schedule is flexible, the discussion is open, the content provided by participants, thers is no salespitch as conferences and you can expect a lot of different topics covered. But what I really like about this camp is the fact that it’s neither the topics covered nor the presentations done that define the camp but surely more the participants. So the best way to talk about Webcamp#01 might be to present some of the people who attend the event.

Who is Webcamp?
Here’s a partial list of the people involved in the definition of this day (some spent the whole day, others came in order to discuss a specific topic and stayed few minutes) (was also speaking at Webcom), , , , , , , , , , , , , and myself (please feel free to contribute to the list if you know people that I forgot). There is also , that way we will try to leave usefull ressources from the event.

C’est sur le thème du référencement et du marketing de recherche (SEM) qu’avait lieu la Journée Infopresse du mardi 13 mai. Au menu de l’événement: 3 conférences et un panel du type questions/réponses. Voici les quelques notes que j’ai prises lors des trois conférences principales sur les types de référencement présentés, soit le naturel, le payant et le social.

Le référencement organique par Guillaume Bouchard - NVI
Deux éléments prioritaires à considérer avant d’investir en référencement: 1) faire une analyse complète de votre site: la technologie utilisée est-elle perméable aux engins de recherche? la structure du site est-elle optimale pour être indexée? 2) : cet exercice est trop souvent baclé en début de projet alors qu’il s’avère pourtant primordial d’identifier les termes sur lesquels on investira. Ce n’est qu’ensuite qu’il devient stratégique de débuter les tactiques d’optimisation qui viseront notamment à .

compare aussi le retour sur investissement du référencement organique () avec celui du référencement payant (PPC). Il mentionne que le SEO offre une équité que le PPC () n’offre pas. De fait en référencement payant, lorsque notre budget vient à échéance, il faudra réinvestir afin de conserver des résultats.

Le référencement payant par Pablo Stevenson - Ressac Media
présente le SEO comme le petit frère du référencement payant car 80% des investissements sont encore faits en PPC contre 20% en SEO. Quelques tendances identifiées : 1) les investissements sont prévus à la hausse 2) on fait face à une inflation: une hausse du coût par click est constatée. Quelques défis identifiés: 1) pisatge efficace du retour sur investissement (ROI) 2) compétition grandissante pour les 1ere position 3) inflation du CPC 4) fraude sur les clicks.

Le référencement payant offre énormément d’opportunités dont celle de tout mesurer ce que l’on fait. Il faut alors associé une valeur potentielle à tout ce que l’on essaie. Il devient souvent stratégique d’assurer un contrôle constant sur nos positions. On donne qui a vu ses revenus augmenter de 28%, son ROI grimper de 83% et ses coûts en SEM diminuer de 30% suite à la reformulation de leurs positions.

Le référencement social par Brent Csutoras - consultant

La troisième conférence cloturant la journée était donné par Brent Csutoras, consultant marketing internet spécialisé en médias sociaux, en viral et en marketing de recherche. J’avais eu le prévilège de rencontrer Brent la veille en compagnie de , et . Nous en avons profiter pour discuter de l’avenir des réseaux sociaux et plus particulièrement des sites de nouvelles sociales. et ce fut un réel plaisir de pouvoir jaser avec lui sur . Selon lui, il y a un avenir dans la personnalisation des pages principales des Digg-like (un peu comme le fait déjà) et dans le développement de .

Quant à sa conférence, elle fut particulièrement intéressante car il n’a pas hésité un instant à partager plusieurs judicieux conseils sur les choses à faire avant de se lancer dans le référencement social. À ce sujet, n’oubliez pas de vérifier que votre serveur pourra suporter . Pour plus d’information à ce sujet, offre une . Prenez aussi quelques instants pour visiter qui traite aussi du même sujet suite à sa participation récente à la conférence (SMX Social) présenté il y a quelques semaines à Long Beach.

Bilan de la journée
En somme, la journée fut très intéressante, j’ai pu aussi constaté que je n’étais pas le seul préoccupé par le SEO à Montreal… Finalement, bien qu’il demeure difficile de plaire à tous, le feedback général fut très bon.

Mise à jour, voici les liens meant vers les présentations de , et .

My was presenting on April 23rd an event on corporate blogging. and were leading the presentation which quickly turned into a discussion about the best practices of corporate blogging. Here’s my notes, thoughts and other infos that I’ve added to their presentation:

Few corporate blogging cases worthed to study

blogging business case: Wal-Marting Across America
the story: Fake blog about two people RVing across the States ()
behind the blog: Wal-Mart and its PR firm Edelman.
main mistake: about the identity of the two bloggers from the outset.”

blogging business case: The Zero Movement website
the story: Not only a fake blog, but a fake community supporting Coke’s new product ()
main mistake: no mention of Coke’s involvement
more on the topic: and

blogging business case: GM FYI blog
the story: NY Times’s columnist, Thomas L. Friedman, wrote that GM is “more dangerous to America’s future” than any other company, is “like a crack dealer” addicting helpless Americans to SUVs…
the right reply: While failing to publish their response in the paper, GM used their blog to push their version of the story
behind the blog: staff and friends of GM, including Brian Akre who wrote
more on the topic: and

blogging business case:
the story: Sun is said to promote employee blogging more than any other technology firm and is the largest company with a CEO who blogs.
the question answered: Q:”Why does Sun’s CEO waste time writing that blog?” A: Because I believe in providing clarity surrounding our strategy and operations - not just once a year in the Annual Report. I believe clarity behind our direction is useful for our shareholders, customers, partners and employees (taken from ).
more on the topic:

blogging business case: Dell Hell
the story: uses his weblog to expose his own personal problems dealing with Dell. The company ignored the writer until the story became a phenomenon over the net.
More on the story: (Guardian)and on Business Week
the results: Dell has now an important place for blogging on their site for products and services + for investors but more important, the company has opened the discussion with their customers.

As seen, corporate blogging brings a lot a opportunities but surely a lot of questions. If you read spanish I will strongly suggest you to take a look at . Here’s few of these questions that you will face when business blogging: Do I need a corporate blog?, Who should blog?, Is transparency possible when blogging?, Is ghostwritting acceptable? and more. Have a nice post !