event notes Archives | Ian M Rountree

I had the extreme honour of being part of the Modern Earth Tweet Team covering TEDx Manitoba yesterday – Susan Hurrell and I spent 12 hours yesterday with our duelling laptops doing the platform journalism on Twitter for the event.

Susan Hurrell and Ian M Rountree - Modern Earth Web Design Tweet Team - TEDxManitoba — Susan Hurrell and Ian M Rountree – Modern Earth Web Design Tweet Team – TEDxManitoba

But, I can’t talk about it. Not properly. Not yet. My head is still swimming a bit, from lack of sleep, 12 hours of extreme Twitter goodness, and a number of fantastic talks.

If you want to get a sense of how it went, though…

The Modern Earth Facebook page has some pictures from the event in a #TEDxMB Photo Album.

Check out the What The Hashtag stats and see the transcript. We owned the trends in Manitoba, were number 2 in Canada for the majority of the day, and got into the top 40 trends in Canada according to Trendsmap. More than 1200 tweets were sent with the tag #TEDxMB on the day, from more than 200 participants, from 5 countries on 4 continents. We’ve got tweets from Canada, the US, Hong Kong, Ghana, and Guatemala.

To put that in perspective, that’s fully one third of this week’s #blogchat activity, or two #tweetdiners, with a very niche audience, a closed attendance list, and a livestream. Very little non-new-media promotion before the event, and mostly guidance from the Tweet Team and those on the volunteer crew who were digging in as well. Not too shabby.

The Winnipeg Free Press’ Melissa Martin wrote up a pair of great recaps, as well as an article about “Fast Flying Ideas at Conference” relating the nature of the event’s speed.

UPDATE: I don’t know how I forgot to mention, but I also met Kevin Hnatiuk, Leanne Havelock, Lisa MacKenzie, Ryan Caligiuri, Matt Shepherd, Kevin Glasier and Erica Glasier at the event, and made a point of saying hi to David Pensato again – all of whom I follow and most of whom I’ve spoken to for some time on Twitter. I’ve met many people I’ve known online before, but never so many at a single event.

I’ll say more when I can. Promise.

Last week, I had the pleasure of presenting a class about Online Marketing to one of the Creative Communications programs at Red River College here in Winnipeg. It was a new experience for me – I haven’t set foot inside a classroom in any meaningful way since leaving high school in 2001.

Teaching, bizarrely, left me with a lot of personal lessons.

For one, never apologize for having a small powerpoint presentation – or for not using it in any meaningful way. While people appreciate not-death-by-powerpoint, apologies set a poor tone.

Still, it was interesting to note what bits of information resonated with the students. The program I presented to was the Library Technicians – who, as I told them, are uniquely suited to dealing with the online world. In part, because of their catalogue-oriented skillset, and in part because that experience with managing huge banks of information helps navigating the ubiquitous plains of the web a very different adventure than it is for the rest of us, stumbling along and finding only what we need.

Over the next few days, I’ll be pulling apart the lessons I took from my teaching experience, and turning a few of them into much longer blog posts. for now, however, the important points:

There are essentially three places on the web; your back yard, the street corner, and their backyard.
The web is full of communities – we’ve known this for a while. What’s important is to realize which parts of the community are the street corner, and which are someone else’s back yard.
Becoming the Tim Horton’s of the Internet isn’t the greatest goal; there already is one, and nothing much gets done there most of the time.
The three most important things you can do on the web (in any variation) are;
1. Make your knowledge available to an audience
2. Identify who you want your audience to be (and stick with that identification)
3. Make it really, really clear what you want people to do with the information you give them.
Don’t be all flash no content – it’s not productive.
Bonus points: respect the bouncing head for what it is. Love it, hate it – understand why it’s there, before you pass judgment on it.

The bonus points are often the most important ones to keep an eye on.

Instruction – teaching – is a big part of integral leadership. When was the last time you acted as an instructor? Is it a familiar skill, or something you want to work on?

#TEDxMB un-Wrap-Up

Lessons from Teaching – Online Marketing