Lowther Rinse Repeat

As most of you probably already know, Northern Voice is just around the corner - it’s kicking off on Thursday night with an evening of fun and dancing at Fredrico’s Supper Club, followed by two days of what - in my opinion - is set to be one of the best blogging/ social media conferences in Canada this year.

What you may not know is that this year I’ve been involved with the organizing committee and I will be speaking on a panel. Prior to this year, I’d not been on an organizing committee for a conference and I had no idea exactly how much work was involved to put on an event this size. Added to this is the communities passionate and vocal interest in the conference - which is absolutely amazing. The team behind the conference are all passionate, busy, and ultimately dedicated to making Northern Voice a smashing success for the 5th year in a row. The other organizers behind Northern Voice this year are Alexa Booth, Brian Lamb, Cyprien Lomas, Dale McGladdery, James Sherrett,  Julie Szabo, Kris Krug, Lauren Wood, Lori Pike, Roland Talango, Shane Birley, and Travis Smith.

The panel I’m on is Who Are You? Defining Yourself in the Online World. I’m really excited about this panel, as I will be joined by some of my favorite Vancouver social media ladies - Nadia Nascimento, Rebecca Bollwitt, and Linda Bustos with Monica Hamburg moderating - which will be a full time job as the four of us can really get going.

The panel will discuss the various social networking sites that can be utilized to build your brand online, and identify advantages and pitfalls of these sites, their usage, and their relationship to one another. During the discussion, they will provide context for the growing significance of social networking for personal brands, as we discuss the paths each of us took in order to build our personal online reputations.

As well, we will go through the paths that we each took build our personal online reputations. Along with the steps that we would do differently if we were to do it over again. In the spirit of social media, we will end the panel by opening the floor for a group conversation.

Immediately following Northern Voice is Illuminate Yaletown - this event is unrelated to Northern Voice but looks like it will be a great way to end the conference. This event will be a great opportunity for everyone who attended PhotoCamp at Northern Voice to put their new skills to use.

Miss604 - who also happens to be on my Northern Voice panel has done a great review of the event. The event takes place from 5:29pm to 9:29pm in Yaletown’s heritage district (Hamilton and Mainland between Davie and Nelson) everyone is invited to come and enjoy light installations, music, colour-changing helium orbs, light graffiti, fire breathing and many other dazzling displays.

As the only outdoor event to take place in Vancouver at this time of year, this event will bring light to a gloomy night. Featuring light installations developed by artists and architects, cutting edge music and interactive activities, illuminate yaletown will allow attendees to see Vancouver as it has never been experienced before. [Yaletown]

6S Marketing is a sponsor of the event and we will be putting on a light show from our office. We’re located at 402-1120 Hamilton Street, near the intersection at Helmcken Street. So if you make it out to Illuminate Yaletown, make sure you keep an eye out for our display. We’re helping to put together the 2009 Illuminate Yaletown Photo Contest that is being hosted on Flickr. More than $500 in cash and Yaletown restaurant gift certificates are available to be won for online photo entries including best photos by popular vote, best photos by judges selection, as well as “best collection” “fastest uploads.” So make sure you bring your cameras and add your pics to the flickr group.

Along with all of the other fun and exciting things that have been happening in my life, I’m now a contributer to the Georgia Straight Tech section.  I’ll be writing a post every two weeks for the Straight - some of which will live online and some of which will make it into the print paper.  This week, I wrote about trends in social media, I’m not sure what my next post will be on, but it will have a bent towards social media and tech.

This is a really fun addition to everything that’s been happening - starting a new job, helping organize Northern Voice, getting ready for my panel at Northern Voice (a post on this will be coming soon!), and starting bootcamp again in the morning (brr it’s cold out in the morning right now). I may also have another big announcement coming soon, but I’ll wait till it’s confirmed before I let you know about it.

For those of you who haven’t heard, today was my first day at 6S Marketing - I think I’ve done a somewhat poor job of keeping this quiet over the past month and a half. This morning I was filled with both excitement and nervousness, but today was amazing - getting to know the people that I’d not met yet at the company and getting settled into the new office (check out my new office set up below, it’s pretty sweet!).

The opportunity that I have at 6S is an amazing step for me in my career. They have brought me on as the Director of Social Media and they’ve tasked me with building a social media department within the company and creating strategic relationships with other Vancouver technology firms. I think that this is a great fit for me, as they’ve done an amazing job over the past few years of building one of the most well known and respected Internet Marketing companies in Vancouver and Canada.

Over the past year particularly, I have really started to take notice of 6S with the steps they’ve taken within the Vancouver technology and social media scene.  As many of you know, they have really stepped up to the plate with participating in, learning about, and sponsoring events. Recently, 6S has become a sponsor for WordCamp Whistler, Northern Voice - which I am on the organizing committee of and will be speaking at, and Twestival. This demonstration of interest in and desire to help through their sponsorship of events - these great events really aren’t possible without sponsors - really helped me to solidify my desire for working with this company.

I’ve had the opportunity to meet with many of people who work at 6S over the past month, including spending this past weekend with them in Whistler for WordCamp and have been overwhelmed with how friendly and accepting they have been with both myself and the changes that are happening within the company with the creation of a new Social Media division.  6S has built an great crew and I am proud to say that I am now a part of.

You can expect to hear a lot more things coming from 6S about social media and my involvement with the company, including me joining the organizing committee for Ideas on Tap.

Photo Credit: Rebecca Bollwitt

I’ve been on twitter for quite a while now and I absolutely love it. It’s a great way to learn and keep up with friends, but as twitter grows, so to does the base of people who begin to friend you on the site. With this, I’ve stopped following everyone that adds me back - well I never actually added everyone, but I am far more selective now than I was when I first joined the site. Whenever someone I don’t personally know adds me, I take a peek over at their twitter page and do a quick mental judgment of whether or not I want to add them back. I though I’d share with you my quick mental checklist, so if you’ve added me on twitter and I’ve not added you back, now you know why.

1. Your profile looks like MySpace. For the sweet dear love of god, one MySpace is more than I can take - please reconsider that really flashy busy picture that you’ve got tiled across the background of your MySpace twitter page and your animated flashing GIF (see point 2).
2. You have a flashing animated GIF for your avatar. This is ancillary to #1, visual assaults on my eyes are in no way appreciated or wanted, if you’re page makes me want to jab things into my eyes, I’m going to run away as fast as humanly possible. Thankfully, I’m only following a couple of people who have done this and only because I was following them prior to twitter allowing people to use these and everytime I see their avatar, I start to reconsider it.
3. You have no avatar. This is a social networking site, be social and share a bit of yourself.  It’s not a dating site and you don’t have to worry about the person sitting next to you at work seeing you on the site - and even if it was a dating site, your buddy was on the dating site as well, so open up a bit - I promise no one is going to laugh at you:)
4. You follow way more people that follow you back - this goes doubly so for accounts with almost no tweets. If you’ve got 100 followers, but you’re following 2,500 people and you’ve only got 5 tweets, sorry I’m moving on.
5. You only promote your own links without adding anything else back to the community. Twitter is a two way communication tool, not a platform to send out one way broadcasts - this only works if you’re the New York Times and trust me, you aren’t. We all promote our own posts on twitter, but if that’s all you do, no one is going to want to listen to you - you are pure noise.
6. You’re a one way tweeter. ie/ you have no @’s in your twitter stream. The brilliance of twitter is the two way nature of the platform, learning and communicating with others that you find interesting. Please reference my previous point.
7. You mention going to the bathroom anywhere in your twitter stream - I’m looking at you Ehsan on this one:) You’re lucky I know you IRL.
8. You’ve got protected tweets. Unless I personally know who you are, I am not going to follow anyone with protected tweets. I figure the only reason to protect your tweets is to limit your tweets to personal friends, hence the lack of follow back.
9. You never shut up. Yes twitter is a communications platform, but I don’t want my entire twitterfeed to be dedicated to your ramblings. This is a pretty subjective one, but if you put out more than about 15 tweets (excluding repies) a day, they’ve got to be pretty damn good and insightful for me to add you.
10. You’re twitter profile is a dead end with no bio info. Tell me a bit about yourself, why do I want to listen to you?

I’m sure I’ve missed a ton and will most likely update the list as new pet peeves come to me. I’d love to hear what bugs you the most on twitter and what makes you not want to follow people.

I know that this blog post is a few weeks overdue, but better late then never! I’ve finally done it, gone in front of a video camera. Anyone that knows me, knows that family videos scarred me as a child and I’ve been reticent to actually get in front of the camera.

The original idea for this podcast was hatched at Launch Party 1 with myself, Bradley, and Tod. Things have changed quite a bit since the original concept - including the awesome addition of two of my really good friends, Nadia Nascimento and Grace Carter.  Currently, Bits n’ Sass is living as a segment in Bradley’s Connected Life podcast, but if all goes as according to plan, we’ll soon be hosting it solo. Exciting I know!!

Our first episode was super exciting and nervous all at the same time, but in the end with the help and encouragement of the awesome staff at M2O (special thanks to Brian, Paul, Jack, Tris, and of course Bradley), I think it turned out wonderfully in the end.

Currently, it’s been hosted on MSN and they won’t let me embed the video here (that totally sucks!), so you’ll have to follow the link to their site - sorry in advance if you’ve got to watch an ad. I’m working on getting a copy that I can embed here, probably won’t happen until after the holidays though.

Connected Life: Bits N’ Sass

Let me know what you think.