Taking advantage of the pre-electoral climate, Quebec business bloggers write an open letter to Prime Minister Jean Charest to request an action plan in favor of supporting the digital economy.

The initiative started when internet marketing strategist wrote the open letter and published the piece on her professional blog on October 28th. In less then 24 hours, the letter was found in more then 30 other blogs from Quebec and a was created for the cause. The letter already signed by many leaders of the Quebec e-business industry such as Adviso’s , former Montreal Marketing Association’s president , well known e marketing consultant and many more, states interesting statistics showing that if Quebecers buy for 3.5 billions online, the third of these sales are made out of the province. Some others statistics reveal that only 52% of small to medium enterprises do have their own website.

There are the four main requested actions identified in the letter:

1- Give full access to all Quebecers to networks and digital services while eliminating barriers related to online transactions.
2- Increase and diversify the use of Internet into enterprises, particularly into small to medium businesses.
3- Make sure to provide training in the use of information technologies for younger.
4-Create a digital governance.

I think that it will be very interesting to see if any of the provincial partys will react to this letter because not only they send this letter to the Prime Minister Charest but they’ve put a special attention to deliver this to all members of our Parliament.

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I’ll be one of the next 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 [, , a ]
-Tourimsme Alma []
-Bounty Fishing [, ]
-Pros du Party (Molson Dry) []
-Légendes urbaines (Canal D) [, ]
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-: interesting tool to check where your username is still available

Good question seen on twitter few minutes ago: Where do you get upcoming information about event such as Yulbiz, Webcom, Podcamp and other meet-ups? Of course, there are personnal blogs, , Twitter updates, Facebook Groups and Events and other social sites but in order to get a maximal exposure should we have one place to look for all events? Or let me put it this way: should we take for granted that people interested in web related events are already social media users?

A good example of promoting events and keeping the community informed of what’s happening is what does with the right column of his blog: quite simple but a good way to showcase the different venues. As for internet marketing events or other social media meet ups, ’s tweet gave me the idea of builing a work in progress list or these types of events, I’ll defenitely take much time later to complete the list but please also feel free to contribute in the comments.

Social Media Events in Montreal

1. Yulblog

Once a month Montréal bloggers get together in a very friendly and relaxed atmosphere. Usually 1st Wednesday of every month at . to who’s been taking care of the event for the last 3-5 years, ”it’s just an occasion to meet people and grab a beer. There’s talk about pretty much any and all subjects, not that much talk about blogs actually, aside from what’s your URL and what do you write about. There is no agenda and no organized setup, we just go there and meet people.”
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2. Yulbiz

More business oriented than Yulblog, Yulbiz gives a monthly opportunity to network with bloggers on every last Tuesday. Event takes places at Café Méliès. The concept was exported to many international cities such as Bordeaux, Barcelona and Strasbourg. that she and have started the meet-up when they both wrote an open invitation on their blog to reunite Montreal business bloggers.
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3. Yultour

Yultour réunit les gens de l’industrie touristique qui s’intéressent aux technologies et au e-tourisme en général ainsi que les blogueurs d’affaires qui s’intéressent au tourisme. Yultour is directly inspired by Yulbiz and targets the tourism and cultural industry. Yultour started in 2007 and doesn’t take place on a monthly basis. So far, there has been three meetings covering topics such as the use of Facebook in tourism industry and the culture 2.0. The main differnce between Yultour and Yulbiz is that the event always features a 10 to 20 minutes conference while the rest of the evening is mainly about networking.
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4. 3e mardi | 3rd Tuesday

3e mardi |Third Tuesday Montréal is a monthly meetup to learn about and discuss the practical applications of social media within their industry. PR and marketing professionals interested in the social media phenomenon meet on (or around) the third Tuesday of each month to hear from and speak with guest speakers who are experts in the field of social media. The informal conferences are also a great opportunity to network with peers who are active in the field. The meet up features a presentation from an social media expert covering topics such as social media PR, online video or business cases involving social media marketing. 3rd Tuesday also takes place in Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver and other Canadian cities.

[ | sponsors: CNW Telbec, Massy-Forget relations publiques, K3 Media, 76designs]

5. Podmtl

PodMtl (Pod Montreal) is a gathering of podcasters, listeners and anyone that is interested in this new phenomenon that is podcasting. The event is open to everyone and is occuring every months. Event takes usually place at .
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Between a kick-off event and a Cross-Canada road show scheduled to visit Halifax, Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB Canada) has stopped today for a full day conference in Montreal. Even if the conference name has changed (it used to be branded as Interactive to the Max, the concept stays the same: conferences and panels sessions about interactive media advertising.

After a very welcomed but quick networking breakfast, well-known blogger and internet marketing consultant Michelle Blanc first took the stage to present a conference called: Building Your Business By Blogging. Blanc introduces blogs as an editing technology combined with a communicational philosophy. She notes that every company in every industry can blog and surely can gain something out of it. She gives the examples of few companies from Quebec that have experienced important success with blogging such as , , and . Michelle Blanc suggests that any given company should start with an internal blog in order to get use to the practice and once comfortable, they could use the tool to share their knowledge and their expertise beyond the borders of their enterprise. According to Blanc, blogs offer an incredible opportunity to show the world how you master some specific topics related to your industry. If you read French than you can take a look at her slides .

Following Michelle Blanc on the stage was a pannel of experts on the video’s next generation of advertising products. Speakers were Neil Sweeney (StreamTheWorld), Jeff Sundheim (Yahoo! Canada), Mark Coleman (DoubleClick/Google), Chris Johnston (Brightcove) and artist Pierre Côté (Gramsclo). If it wasn’t clear for some before, we’ve understand during the session that there is no single right format for the advertsing video industry. It seems that expectations for video revenu are high and that viewers tolerate ads as they don’t have any other choice to live with them. It also seems obvious that people prefers 7 seconds pre-rolls spots rather than 15s or 30s ones, in fact users tend to remove all video ads when possible. Besides that, video ads are facing other challenges as they will need to improve their solutions for local adverstising as well as they will need to incorporate better SEO in the near future.

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Kudos to the organization of Mixx Canada for making the conference a completely carbon neutral event and also for inviting bloggers (including myself) to cover the day. It’s always great to hear about what people is doing into our industry and I’m always pleased to meet and exchange with such great folks.