Podcamp Toronto Recap

by June Li

 PodCamp Toronto 2009 was a resounding success! Kudos to the organizers (Connie, Eden, Dave, Jay, Rob, Sean, Tommy). Awesome sessions, awesome energy.

When last I checked, video of all sessions have been posted, as well as available presentations.

Total number of attendees estimated 500+. I attended Day 1 in person and Day 2 by remote feed and Twitter.

Day 1 (Attended in person):

• Started with panel session Building Relationships with Word of Mouth and PR Practitioners While Maintaining Credibility with Your Audience. Keith McArthur moderated an animated panel of Anita Clarke, Eden Spodek, David Jones, and Matthew Stradiotto. Discussions on importance of defining objectives; challenges of blog traffic analysis; defining baseline and improvement rather than fixating on absolute numbers; return on campaign spend and challenges of measuring success.
• Followed with Sean Power's Stalking Your Audience for Fun & Profit – Monitoring Your Community & Competitors. Sean is co-author of the upcoming O'Reilly book "Complete Web Monitoring". After a bit of a wandering start to this presentation, Sean gave the audience very good questions to ask so that they can obtain useful numbers from a variety of web tools, not just a deluge of data. Looking forward to the book and seeing Sean when we're both speaking at eMetrics San Jose.

Learned lots about widgets, micro-fundraising (twitpay, etc) and other tactics from John Sheridan in Social Media for Special Causes. Excellent case study examples.

Dave Fleet unfortunately had the room go against him (fuse blown?) as the laptop shutdown and screen retracted in the middle of his presentation on Social Media Monitoring and Analysis. Excellent process discussion. Question from audience to Dave "if all these tools are free, why should I hire you" deserves a separate blog post. Tools do not deliver analysis and insight, people do. Tools are enablers.

Gem from Mike Kujawski's presentation on Government 2.0 is finding out about cases posted at government20bestpractices.pbwiki.com. Watch the video for excellent balanced discussion about handling of Canada Revenue Agency's YouTube contest.

Bill Sweetman (The Secret World of Domain Names) shared interesting inside perspectives and tips about generating new domain names (what tools & sites can help – check his blog later for the presentation), the secondary market and investing in domain names.

Mathew Ingram's packed session Making Traditional Media a Little More Social about The Globe and Mail's use of using Twitter, wikis and live-blogging could have gone for double the time. Very interesting to hear of the challenges of encouraging writers to engage after the article is written (i.e. blog-like).

Closed with A Social Media State of the Union Discussion facilitated Collin Douma. High audience participation about the impact of the entry of professional media into podcasting and blogging. Will that change/weed out/stifle the hobbyists? I think not. This is an evolution. Media monitoring now has to be 24/7. Lots to think, blog and tweet about.

Day 2 (Watched remotely and participated via Twitter):

• Dawn Boshcoff discussed the challenges and nuances of Journalism New Media Communications This presentation provides useful language that can be used when speaking to writers who have primarily worked in print media.
• Catherine Moelker, comScore presented Canadians & Social Networking Tools, the latest stats on Canadian use of social networking tools. 50+ age segment is growing fastest. Google is now the #1 go-to Internet property, bumping Microsoft in the last 6 months. Couldn't see the slides via live feed. Hope the slides are posted.
• Tried to watch Jeremy Wright, b5media present Web Metrics Suck, (Or: How to Use Metrics to Get Sh*t Done). Live feed wasn't up so I'll have to review the video. Only saw the Twitter side of the stream.

Now that media for all sessions are posted, I'll catch up on the other sessions I missed 🙂 Lots to glean from the session videos – and check out the National Post article "Out from behind the Laptop" covering PodCamp Toronto.