I like keeping myself and the staff up-to-date with technology and services. To keep ourselves informed of the most current fads, Shawn, Kendra, Dan and I recently jaunted over to the Social Media Camp Conference. Hosted at the Victoria Conference Center, it was the largest social media event to date in Western Canada and brought together many experts in various fields of media. We all attended numerous sessions, here I’ll mention just a hand-full.

I attended the welcoming address given by Dana Hutchings, Paul Holmes and Chris Burdge. I went to an informative workshop called ‘Advanced Twitter Strategies,’ with Terri Davies and Juhli Selby. They talked about strategies to better utilize Twitter and really get yourself known

In ‘Real People Build Communities’ Angela Crocker discussed how the core of a community is the people who make it vibrant, interesting and dynamic. She gave specific strategies on how to build a community and turn strangers into good friends.

I went to ‘Blogging for Business’ with Rebecca Bollwitt, which was about how to use a blog as a marketing tool for a business, and the type of content you would want to include in it. I also went to ‘Social Buying’ with Jason Scriven and Annalea Krebs. They shared the best practices for group buying promotions, which was interesting but not that helpful for us at Radar Hill.

I went with Shawn to ‘The Virtual Marketing Platform for Small Business’ with Robin Heppell. It was an excellent talk on how he used social media to help his family business. His approach to Social Media and other technologies is that they are current tools that businesses can use for deploying established principles and strategies such as relationship marketing.

I also attended the keynote addresses by Amber Naslund and Jay Baer, co-authors of The Now Revolution. The talk by Baer was awesome. He talked about the new era of instantaneous business. He explained how you must adapt you and your business to a market vastly different from what it was even a decade ago. I took so much information away from all these experts that I’m still distilling it all. Even so, I’ve already employed some of their wisdom with profitable results.

Shawn attended the Saturday sessions of the conference, which included the keynote address by Amber Naslund. She spoke about her book ‘The Now Revolution.’ For those who weren’t there, some attendees live-tweeted the talk.

Shawn found ‘Social Media for Non-Profits’ with Janis La Couvée to be helpful for some of our clients and some of the groups we support. He thought several things were notable to mention about the talk, such as that non-profits should have a media package (press releases etc.) and cultivate relationships with media. La Couvée also said that people get disappointed when traditional media does not show up for their events, but there often just isn’t the staff (reporters, photographers) to cover the events like there used to be.

Shawn listened to ‘Think your boring old business can’t be social? Think again!’ with Tim McAlpine. He found it to be an interesting and fun talk, but useless for us and most of our clients since it was about a very different type of clientele from the one we work for.

He went to a panel with Dr. Janni Aragon, Michael Geoghegan and Mat Wright called ‘Politics and Social Media.’ The three speakers talked and took questions from the floor about how politics affects social media. Shawn had his own interesting experience with social media during the talk as he tweeted and messaged other attendees he knew. It made him realize that, in any such venue, there is the public conversation, what the speaker is saying, and there can also be an underlying conversation going on with attendees and non-attendees. It will be one of the big uses of Twitter, and how journalists and strategists can get the perception of a political speech in real time.

Shawn’s favourite session was ‘YouTube 101’ with Rebecca Coleman. Shawn found it to be the most enjoyable and most useful sessions with the best presenter. Rebecca Coleman was knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and full of energy. She spoke about the enormous impact of video and how businesses can put it to use as a marketing tool. Coleman gave examples of the kinds of videos businesses could make, as well as demonstrated how to use and utilize YouTube for marketing purposes.

We all took away a lot of useful information from the Social Media Camp that we’re eager to put to use for our business and clients.