Montreal Social Media

Image Credit : blork

A day in a life : Jeudi 13 Mars 2008
6.08am: Woke up, got out of bed, essaie de pas réveiller celle qui dort à mes côtés parce que c’est sa journée de congé
6.12am: verre de jus et céréales, besoin de mon fix: lecture emails, rss reader, réseaux sociaux,…
7.09am: douche + préparation à partir, descend l’acadie puis parc, arrive au centre-ville
7.51am: cherche un endroit pour acheter des muffins, n’en trouve pas, me présente sans muffins à mon groupe d’échange Think Thank de l’AMM
8.05am: premier meeting avec Claude, Diane, Stéphane et moi (on cherche d’autres gens pour réseauter sur le développement d’affaires en marketing)
9.51am: rencontre très agréable, doit retourner au bureau, pogné dans le traffic en arrière d’un camion de livraison arrêté et qui occupe l’unique voie dans la rue
10.15am: découvre qu’il y a une SAQ dans le même édifice que notre bureau, retour à la job
12.26am: retour de dîner, rencontre mes twitter friends: SammyQc, isaSuperstar et eduplessis au coin St-Laurent et Mont-Royal
12.33: reçoit un appel d’une fille qui a le même nom que ma chatte grise, 1ere fois que ça arrive, curieux… retour à la job
2.15pm: meeting de pre-prod avec les gens de Mount-Royal Walsh pour débuter la refonte de leur site, efficace
3.57pm: meeting over, doit faire propostion pour site tourisme Bas-Saint-Laurent, faire un suivi sur le dossier des RP de NVI, faire plusieurs suivis
5.01pm: je vois YulbizQc sur mon agenda, je crois que ça sera pour une prochaine fois, j’ai une pensée pour les gens de Qc qui tente cette fois ci de mettre l’événement à 17h plutôt qu’à 19h, je crois que c’est une bonne idée, faudrait voir comment ça été
5.26pm: me pousse du bureau, monte parc, puis l’acadie
5.51pm: back at home, prend un courte marche pour aller porter un dvd + aller chercher une bouteille de vin, souper avec Mary
8.01pm: arrive aux grands explorateurs à Laval et me rend compte que le jeudi ça commence pas à la même heure que le mercredi, j’arrive donc à l’entracte et manque la moitié du show
8.42pm: écoute le film et me rappelle ma croisière sur la côte ouest du Mexique en novembre 2006
9.33pm: back at home, spending some quality time w/ my love
11.41pm: dodo

voilà pour les gens qui se demandent ce que je fais dans la vie, c’est une journée pas mal typique.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/

Entering the world of non-business blogging

Most of the people that I know are blogging for business related reasons. In fact, it becomes obvious that blogging can be more than efficient to create a communication with your users, customers, providers, fans, employees… By giving people a quite easy way to open the discussion with your organisation, not only they will take part in the discussion but they will involve themselves (if it’s not already done) into the creation of their own personal space on the web. I spent part of yesterday going through some of these personal spaces, journals and other web logs created by Montrealers. I’d like to share what I have found with you in the following post.

Who is blogging in Montreal?

It could be anybody. I mean, seriously: it could be the teacher of your kids, the person who is coming to your place to fix your mechanics, the student sitting beside you in your literature class or that guy at your job that you`re talking once a day over the phone. What are they blogging about? I would say their life: work, happiness, failures, love, lifestyle,intensity, feelings… Let’s take a quick look a some of the most visited blogs in the city and others that I found interesting).

1. Midnight Poutine: Montrealers need Midnight Poutine. It’s a personal ongoing account of the city’s happenings. It’s a delicious high-fat source of rants, raves and musings. … It is a blog about Montreal music, arts, film, events, people, places and other happenings.

2. Vu d’ici - seen from here: Un blog, un collage d’idée, de photos, de pensées & observations, un magazine, un podcast, un videocast. Your daily dose of inspiration - for late and early adopters - since 03/2002. MC describes herself as an artist interested in people, life, technology, and the creative potential of web publishing tools.

3. Blork Blog: This blog turned seven years old on December 27. Hard to categorize, the blog was nominated in 6 categories at the Canadian Blog Awards ‘06:best blog, best photo/art blog, best personal blog, best blog post, best blog post series, best activities bog. Still about Montreal lifestyle but coming from somebody that was born and raise in Nova Scotia.

4. Fagstein: Steve Faguy describes himself has a twenty-something geek freelance journalist who lives in Montreal. I would say that if trad journalism has difficulties to reach a younger audience, that’s partly because of blogs like his where you can find all the news about the city plus a lot more.

5. Histoires de geek: Seen on his blog, msg to his girlfriend : Comment ça va se matin? Moi, présentement, je commence à être saoul. On a eu beaucoup de plaisir ce soir/nuit/matin (il est 5h46 présentement) à boire et niaiser. Trois personnes de Lachute on décidé qu’il était plus tuff que mois sur l’alcool mais bon, as usual, il se sont poussé avant d’être humiliés… Tu sais comme s’est!

6. Amours, vertiges et chlorophylle: carnets naïfs d’un homme face a la vie et au VIH. I won’t say more, please read the first note that he wrote explaining why he’s blogging.

7. LightSpeedChronicles: She is a video game producer living in Montreal, talks about her life in general, running, and quite often speaks of gaming and game development to a non-gamer audience. They call her lightspeedchick… find out why on her blog.

Your blog DNA

So many blogs, so many reasons to write, to publish… As seen on Zero Seconde, here’s my top 10 9 reasons why I blog: 1-To communicate, 2-To define myslef, 3-To learn, 4-To network, 5-To be seen, 6-To inform, 7-To sell, 8-To influence, 9-To remember. May I ask you whats are yours?

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This post was mainly inspired by the feedback that I received on my blog lately, I was asked to share about or experiences working into internet marketing. Few days ago, NVI (Guillaume) had a meeting with the whole marketing management of a company offering several of the most popular brands in Canada. One of the vice-president’s questions was about understanding social media marketing (who’s reading blogs, what are they?-blogs-, who’s commenting?). These questions were justified considering that their top marketing agency that they deal with advises them the best they can but sometimes doesn’t have answers to questions such as, where should we go?, how can we reach our customers, what should avoid and why?…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/slyder/

Montreal social media marketing blog in 2007

I started blogging few months ago without any specific strategy to experience what blogging was all about. I began writing about events in Montreal related to the internet marketing industry: BarCamp Montreal 3, Facebook Camp, Interactive to the max, Webcom, Webcamp, Yulbiz,… but the articles that have received the most attention viewers were those with topics non-related to Montreal and focused on social media marketing (Is digital interactivity changing marketing and The rise of social media marketing). But regardless the visibility, the most valuable thing that blogging gave me is the opportunity to meet a lot of people here in Montreal (mostly bloggers).

Happy New Year 2008

I’d like to take the opportunity to wish them a wonderful year 2008 and tell them that even if I’m not commeting on their blog, I still pay attention to everything they write. So let’s start with the Yulbiz gang: Philippe Martin, Martin Ouellette, Claude Malaison, Michel Leblanc, Mathieu Bélanger, Kim et Jerome. People that I met randomly in different activities : Pierre-Antoine Fradet, Gab SEO Goldenberg, Jonathan Moquin, Jonathan Stoikovitch, Heri Rakotomalala, Simon Law, Michelle Sullivan, Mitch Joel, Joseph Thornley, Sylvain a frog Carle, Jean-Marc Langevin, Marc Laporte, Patrick Tanguay, Guillaume Brunet, Mylène Forget. Since I don’t have any blogroll, I’ll continue my list of Montrealers that I’m following via my feed reader (and that I’d surely like to have a quick chat with all of them in 2008): Eric Kucharsky, David Hamel, Pierre Coté, Ben Yoskovitz, Marc Snyder, Pierre Bouchard, Vincent Abry, Yves Williams, Martin Lessard, Alexandre Taillefer, Eric Baillargeon, Andres Restrepo.

To all of you, I wish you the best with your family, and of course your projects and business.

Special wishes and thanks to Guillaume Bouchard who introduced me to the internet marketing and nicely brought me on his amazing crew at NVI.

Looking forward at 2008 (things to achieve)

1. Structure and lead our sales department
2. Find myself a clear role into our internet marketing team
3. Define a strategy for MontrealSocialMedia.com
4. Make Third Tuesday Montreal a success
5. Plan an event for SEO in Montreal (maybe related to la journée Infopresse on SEM, don’t know yet)