Luke Armour – Digital Marketing and Public Relations Observations, Commentary, Frivolity

My first (real) social media meet-up and unconference was an outstanding success. Pounding the pavement in the Hockey Hall of Fame was a nice addition as well. Pictured is me and my good friend The Stanley Cup along with Terry Fallis of Inside PR and The Best Laid Plans book podcast. Terry was a perfect gentleman and chauffeur all weekend. If you need driven around town by the president of a very successful international public relations agency, I suggest him. Tell him Luke sent you.

Podcamp was a mind-blowing experience. Unfortunately I was mildly distracted by the relative star power. Of course I still learned quite a bit with the sessions I attended, but I’m incredibly grateful for the video of the entire conference posted on the wiki. To quote Mitch Joel, “I can’t believe all this content is free!”

I, for one, am going to have to revisit every session taught by Christopher Penn of the Financial Aid Podcast/Student Loan Network one tidbit at a time if I’m going to retain anything he said. Here’s a fanatical tech guy who actually understands the technology, grasps the communication aspects of the tools AND can talk intelligently about it. A rare breed of genius, that guy. He provided great hacks on increasing the podcast audience and marketing, for instance. Mitch and John Wall dropped some creative ways to SEO and Google juice your podcast in my last Saturday session.

The geek dinner with Mitch, Donna, Bryan Person of the excellent New Comm Road podcast, the lovely Carin, and John Wall, with a rock star cast at the table behind, fed my mind and body. Donna, in exceptional geek fashion, set up her rig and recorded for posterity. Should be on a future Trafcom News Podcast if it turned out. The night rolled right into a rocking good time at C’est What? with Uncle Seth. I’m a converted fan. Chris Clarke finally woke up long enough to steal $20 from me and keep me up way too late.

Our Sunday morning panel (photo) (video) was recorded and the audio was inserted in Mitch’s podcast this week. Great minds surrounded me as we tackled the question, “Should your company be podcasting?” Awesome insights from Donna, Terry, and the ever articulate Michael Seaton, who, by the way, is the only person I personally know getting paid to produce a podcast (okay, sure he does a myriad of other stuff, but still). He detailed some great info in his session (link to his video) on how to get buy-in from a huge multinational organization.

Without reviewing the videos, the most concrete things I walked away having are some outstanding new tools like StumbleUpon, Twitter, Mobatalk (met Michael Bailey by chance in the elevator Friday night, I love this stuff), and MyBlogLog. Too much to mention, but I hope to be using some of it soon.

Check out the tagged photos on Flickr and Chris’s blog post. Thanks to John for posting this snap. Bob and Donna both have good recaps of events as do many others.
I’m still crying myself to sleep about missing David Jones, but I hope to someday get over it. Why, David, WHY have you forsaken me?

Thanks to all those who took the time to share insights and chat about their knowledge. Shout out to Brogan and Casey & Rudy from Galacticast (a hilarious geek-focused comedy videocast) hope to see you all again soon. Apologies to the dozens of great folks I never had a chance to meet. Special thanks to Leesa and Brent Morris of The Closet Geek Show, Jay Moonah of Uncle Seth and Online Music Marketing, and Julien of the In Over Your Head hip hop podcast, and Mitch for all their hard work.

update: added a few more links to posts I missed earlier

Filed under: Podcast, podcasting, Social Media | Tagged: geek dinner, podcamptoronto2007 | 8 Comments »