Montreal Social Media

I’ll be one of the next Webcom speaker on November 12th. Here is the description of my session:

How to measure the impacts of SMO with 10 business cases made in Quebec
Because marketers sometimes find it difficult to have a fair measure of their ROI when it comes to the social media space, the conference aim to share results from a study on more than 10 SMO business case made in Quebec.

Over the last 12 months, NVI has collected data of more than 125 stories that were brainstormed, written, submitted and pushed to the top 6 news social site (digg/reddit/mixx/propeller/stumbleupon/yahoo buzz!) for medium to large Canadian brands. Let’s take a look at what SMO brought to these companies.

Even if the topic is already chosen, I’m still in the process of building the presentation. So, if there is anything that you would like me to cover during that 55 minutes speach, please let me know. For your information, I mainly plan to focus on social media optimization through social news sites but also want to bring as much as possible concrete examples made in Quebec. I’ll add more information on my conference in the following days/weeks within this post.

update 10.14.2008
Webcom was yesterday and everything went well. It’s always a pleasure to meet everyone from the industry. And as for my conference, i received good feedback, some told me that I was a bit nervous but that the content was really good. I mainly gave examples of concrete applications of the use of social medias to support your SEO efforts and to help creating a buzz by doing online PR. There are the business cases that I’ve mention during my talk:
-Canpages.ca [business case, results, a blog post]
-Tourimsme Alma [blog]
-Bounty Fishing [business case, a blog post]
-Pros du Party (Molson Dry) [le concours]
-Légendes urbaines (Canal D) [the viral clip, the release]
-débatpourtous.net
-Usernamecheck: interesting tool to check where your username is still available

With three different tracks all branded 2.0 (marketing 2.0, enterprise 2.0 and solutions 2.0) this year’s edition of Webcom Montreal 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
Andrew McAfee 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 Intrawest where an idea from a single employee shared all around the company 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 capturing and sharing knowledge across ties.

Pierre-Karl Péladeau on Quebecor 2.0
I know that PK Péladeau wasn’t really familiar with his speach sales pitch but he still represents a powerful media empire 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 EspaceCanoe and they’ve been experiencing really good things lately: RSS feeds, embeddable videos , they have a community manager 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, Claude Malaison, Marc Chioini and Christian Aubry from Videopresse

I think that the greatest move from Webcom’s organisation was to partner with VideoPresse in order to broadcast live 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 Christian Aubry and Laurent Maisonnave, 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 Guillaume went also in front of the camera since we (NVI) were presenting on two different conferences at this event.

1. for the event: for anyone into internet marketing, web design industry or communication agencies, it is going to be the place to be! The event should also get a lot of coverage from traditional medias.

2. for the speakers: impressive list of people truly connected to the social media hype. The speakers should talk about very different and specific topics such as corporate blogging for Debbie Weil (The corporate blogging book), social networking for Robyn Tippins (MyBlogLog-Yahoo), social bookmarking and tagging for Thomas Vander Wal (InfoCloudSolutions), interactive marketing for Louis Gagnon (Montreal jobs) and digital marketing for Mitch Joel (Twist).

3. because we’ll be presenting: For those of you who will be following the interactive marketing track (other tracks are interactive communication and interactive solutions) you will see Guillaume Bouchard (our CEO) on the panel called : how to increase your traffic and visibility with search engine marketing.

4. because $$$ : considering that the ticket is 395.00$ CDN (not talking about $US), it should be a good reason to attend.

5. to optimize my ROI : In the past, we have manage to get a lot of good deals when we go to these kinds of events. When Guillaume talked about social media marketing at the Journée Infopresse, a lot of people came to us to get further info (and later projects). Even when we are not presenting we have a lot of good leads. As for example, when Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz) came to Montreal in september to speak at the Future of the Internet Conference, only the fact the he pointed at us giving our work as an example of social media optimization, brought us a lot of visibility (and even more…)

Hopin’ to see you @webcom ! EVENT ON FACEBOOK / GROUP ON FACEBOOK