Good intentions : Conferences to attend in 2008

I have high hopes for 2008. Social media is starting to pick up steam in Quebec PR circles, and we should start to see some interesting campaigns gear up over the next few months. I'm contributing in my own small way : a group of us are bringing Third Tuesdays to Montreal as of February. The official promotion should begin mid-January.

There are already some not-to-miss conferences/PR & social media activities on my calendar for 2008. I'm organising or participating in some of them and hoping to be able to make all of them:

• Jan 15: SQPRP panel disussion on social media (with yours truly)
• Feb 19 : Third Tuesday Montreal kickoff
• Feb 23-24 : PodCamp Toronto
• March : SQPRP youth-wing conference on media relations
• March 18 (to be confirmed) : Third Tuesday Montreal #2
• May? : Mesh
• June 22-24 : Podcasters Across Borders
• October? : Podcamp Boston

And, of course, I'll try to catch as many monthly YULBiz, YULBlog and PodMTL meetups as possible. Now that I've launched my podcast, the PodMTL people can count on seeing me around quite often. The first of these monthly events is YULBlog on January 9th. So popular, the members didn't want to skip a month.

Hat tip to Joe Thornley, who has drawn up a list of not-to-miss conferences of his own. Check them out.

All the best to you and yours for 2008.

Dell @ Third Tuesday

Marquez vos calendriers : Richard Binhammer, directeur des communications d'entreprise de Dell, sera à Third Tuesday Ottawa et Toronto les 3 et 4 décembre 2007.

Info ici

Dell is a prime case study of a company that took its lumps through social media. In the summer of 2006, the company was hit by two social media crises: Jeff Jarvis’ Dell Hell meme over his unhappiness with the company’s support service followed by exploding batteries on YouTube

Dell also is a prime example of a company that adopted social media as part of the response to its problems. The company launched Direct to Dell, a blog where real employees talk about Dell’s products and services and answer questions and issues raised by people in comments or in posts on their own blogs. It has buttressed that with a program of blogger relations, reaching out to bloggers to get to know them and become part of their community. It also has launched Dell IdeaStorm, a site that allows consumers to make suggestions to Dell and then enables the community to vote for or against these suggestions.

source: Joe Thornley, Pro PR

Si tout va dans le sens souhaité, dès le mois de janvier vous n'aurez plus à vous déplacer en territoire ontarien pour profiter de Third Tuesday. On se croise les doigts.

Vancouver : staying connected

Have I mentioned that I'm spending the summer in Vancouver? Taking advantage of my time here to hook up with some local social media illuminaries, including Tod Maffin and Kate Trgovac.

The great thing about social media is how effectively it can be used to network. I've taken advantage of LinkedIn to book meetings with Vancouver's telecom upper management in order to do some outreach for my Hall of Fame client. Very effective.

And just minutes ago, I had the somewhat mindblowing (one would say for small minds) experience of spotting a post on Kate's blog about a Vancouver Third Tuesday organizers launch meeting with Joseph Thornley next week, moving over to Facebook to message Joe to see if I could crash the party in the hopes of gleaning info that would be useful for starting up the Montreal chapter, and finally moving back to my Facebook homepage only to discover that Joe had already or had simultaneously sent me an invitation for the event.

Smooth.

As the tagline goes : Now if only life were like that ...