Welcome to meshmarketing ‘10!
Last year, we took a major step forward with the launch of meshmarketing, a one-day event focused on providing engaging, hands-on and stuff-you-can-use sessions about the fast-changing digital marketing landscape. It was a major success with lots of terrific feedback about the workshops and panels.
So, we’re really excited to pull the covers of meshmarketing ‘10. meshmarketing is happening on November 17, 2010 in downtown Toronto. (We’ll announce the location soon.) Tickets are $489 (plus HST) before Sept. 17, and $539 afterwards. There are also 50 student tickets for $99 each (plus HST). And, of course, we’ll have a social afterwards. Tickets can be purchased here.
While we’re keeping the same focus and approach, there are some wrinkles that we think are going to make meshmarketing even better.
First, we’ve partnered with Trina Boos, who has been running the successful Ad Lounge events. Trina delivers terrific insight into the advertising and marketing worlds, as well as a huge community that she has nurtured and built over the past nine years. As meshmarketing’s programming director, Trina is the driving force behind the event’s sessions and and speakers, and we’re overjoyed about her key role within meshmarketing.
Second, we’ve tweaked the programming format. Rather than have a single keynote, we will kick off meshmarketing with two keynotes – Michael Slaby and Marian Salzman – along with a super-presentation by Lee LeFever. Part of the change in format was our excitement about several speakers. Rather than pick only one, we decided to go with a three-pack.
Michael Slaby is executive vice-president and global practice chair of Edelman’s digital practice. Before joining Edelman, he was a technology and new media advisor to the Obama administration where he led operational and long-term planning for technology including web strategy and utilization, and data integration opportunities.
Marian Salzman, one of the world’s top five trend spotters, will offer insights into the future of digital marketing and communications. As a leading communications professional, digital marketer and author, Marian will provide her insight on what’s on the horizon and what we need to know now to prepare.
And for those not familar with Lee LeFever, he (along with his partner and wife, Sachi) are the brains behind the popular Common Craft video series that provides user-friendly insight into technology and technology trends that everyone can understand.
As for the rest of the programming, we’ve got a great line-up of speakers, panels and workshops – everything from the ROI of social media customer and trans-media storytelling to how retailers are using location-based services, and future of social TV. For more details, visit the speaker and schedule page.
meshmarketing tickets can be purchased here. Don’t forget to take advantage of the early-bird special until Sept. 17.
Tags: conference, marketing, mesh, meshmarketing, social media, Toronto
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mesh Workshop, Anyone? (Part 2)
In the previous post, we talked about how the workshops at mesh are extremely popular with standing room-only attendance. This is probably because they are hands-on, interactive sessions led by people in the trenches. As a result, they deliver tangible, real-world lessons that people can quickly take from workshop to workplace.
Here’s an overview of the the other workshops on the schedule.:
“Building a B2B Community”: High Road Communications’ Eden Spodek will talk about that while building a personal online community is relatively easy, building an online business community for existing and prospective clients can be more challenging. Eden will highlight real-life examples of companies (primarily Canadian) leading the way in B2B community building along with tips, challenges and success stories of those who do it well.”
“Getting Your Start-Up Ready for Investment”: Mark MacLeod (aka @startupcfo) will lead an interactive workshop that explores the key questions around startups and fundraising such as The pros and cons of getting outside capital? If yes, how much do you need? Angels vs. VCs – who, how, where, when, why? What do you need in order to raise money? How does the money-raising process work? Who’s got money? Who doesn’t?
“The Olympics as a Case Study”: Alon Marcovici, VP, Digital Media and Research of Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium, will about what it’s like to put together a major multimedia online campaign for a national and international event, and Kim is talking about what is involved in being a “user-generated content editor” and social-media co-ordinator for a major media website.
“Social Media and User-Generated Content in the Newsroom”: Kim Fox, CBC News’s senior producer of social media, will do a workshop looking at what’s involved in being a “user-generated content editor” and social-media co-ordinator for a major media website.
If you haven’t purchased your tickets to mesh, I would encourage you to get them soon because there are only a handful left. You can purchase them here:
Tags: conference, mesh, Toronto, workshops
mesh Workshop, Anyone? (Part 1)
When mesh was started in 2006, we decided to add some workshops but didn’t expect they would attract a lot of attention because they were scheduled at the same time as two panels.
Much to our surprise, the workshops were jam-packed, which made it abundantly clear there was demand for hands-on sessions that provided people with tangible insight, case studies and information that people could implement when they got back to the office.
Over the past four years, the workshops have become a core part of mesh even though they probably don’t get as much and attention as they deserve. We’ve got a great workshop line-up for mesh ‘10. Here’s a sneak peek of some panels – with some previews coming in a subsequent blog post.
- Death and Digital Legacy: Adele McAlear will examine the intersection of death, social media and technology and look at the ripples that are created with loss. This workshop explores the chasm between online communities and families; legal, privacy and security issues; policies of online services; the impact on businesses; and what each of us should do today to prepare our digital assets.
- The Art & Science of Scaling Social Media: Bringing together earned, paid and owned social media, when done correctly, can generate a perfect storm of credibility and reach – in many ways, the Holy Grail of the social web. Earned is highly credible, but expensive to generate, paid has mass reach, but do users really pay attention? Maggie Fox will lead a discussion on how companies can scale their social media efforts.
- How Small Businesses Can Survive and Thrive by Being Creative with Social Media: RightSleeve’s Mark Graham will offers tips, recommendations and real-world examples of how his promotional marketing merchandising company has thrived in a competitive marketplace by leveraging social media.
- Managing the Transformation to a Social Business: David Bradfield will explore how global organizations and Canadian innovators manage the transition from control to collaboration. Bradfield will talk about how many companies are grappling with the impact of social media on traditional business and marketing models.
To purchase tickets for mesh10, here’s how you can register.
Tags: conference, mesh, Toronto, workshops
Wanna Be Practically meshU Family?
We created meshU in 2008 because the community told us they wanted an event that offered hands-on workshops about Web design, development and team management.
The past two years have been terrific with great speakers and an enthusiastic reception from attendees. We’ve also had some great support from sponsors – without which meshU and mesh couldn’t happen.
To support meshU, we’re rolling out a new sponsorship package called “practically meshU family”.
What you get when you join the family is five regular tickets to meshU, your logo on the Web site and at MaRS, and a table-top for your use during the event.
More important, a “practically meshU family” will let us open the student tickets category by 10 more tickets. In essence, you will be sponsoring 10 students who wanted to attend meshU but couldn’t.
This year more than ever before, we’ve received a lot of requests for additional student tickets, but the event can not sustain itself if we open up additional tickets in this substantially discounted category.
That left us thinking that maybe there may be folks in the community that believe in meshU and thought that they could help others so they could benefit from these tickets. Hence, this category was created.
If you’d like to become “practically meshU family”, please contact info@meshconference.com.
Tags: conference, mesh, meshU, sponsorships, students
Posted in meshU | 2 Comments
Spotlight on mesh Keynotes
With mesh just about two weeks away, I thought it would be a good idea to talk about the keynotes that we’ve lined up.
In many respects, this year’s keynotes offer a fascinating mix of people who will be talking about a variety of topics – everything from how a newspaper is using APIs to grow its business, and the troubling world of cyber-hackers, to online payments and social networking.
The keynotes include:
Chris Thorpe, the Developer Advocate for the Open Platform with The Guardian, will talk about the newspaper is working on ways to integrate its content, data and APIs with other people’s technology and businesses.
Joseph Menn will provide insight how cyber-criminals are hacking to major government and corporate computer systems, and how governments of Russia and China are protecting and directing their behaviour.
Scott Thompson, the president of PayPal will provide his take on how the company has maintained its status as the world’s leading online payment system, and where e-commerce and online payments as heading.
Given LinkedIn’s rapid growth over the past year and its decision to add more feature, Arvind Rajan, LinkedIn’s Vice President of International, will talk about what’s driving the company’s growth and where it sees the social network marketing going.
Tickets to mesh can be purchased here, while tickets to meshU, the one-day event featuring hands-on workshops about Web design and development, can be purchased here.
Tags: conference, keynotes, mesh, Toronto
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The mesh Rainbow – Green, Blue, Red and Orange
Thanks to the work of Jeff Sarmiento and Seth Singer, the mesh Web site is a thing of beauty – terrific design and lots of colours.
What you might not realize is there is a method to the madness of the colours – in addition to the fact we think it makes the Web site look purdy. Here’s a break-down on the mesh rainbow.
Red – Red is media, which covers our keynote (Chris Thorpe), panels and workshop about things such as real-time content, user-generated media, the battle between machine-generated and human-generated media, and a case study on the Vancouver Olympics.
Orange – Orange is our society stream in which you will learn more about hackers from keynote speaker Joesph Menn, how Médecins Sans Frontières is using social media, and panels about the growing issue of online privacy and what’s going on with open government.
Blue – For the marketers in the crowd, blue is your colour. Blue covers our keynote speaker, Arvind Rajan, from LinkedIn, as well as panels on real-time and how it forces marketers to be real, what businesses should really do with Facebook, and workshops on how to scale social media, and 10 no-nonsense ways social media can be applied to your business.
Green – Like the colour of money, green is our business stream, led by keynote speaker Scott Thompson, who is president with Paypal. Green also accounts for panels on the state of Canada’s seed and start-up landscape, mobile as a way to drive business, and why real-time matters.
So, there you have it – the mesh rainbow explained.
To purchase tickets to mesh, head on over this way.
Tickets for meshU, our hands-on workshop event for people who design and development online services, and people who manage designers and developers, can be purchased here.
Tags: conference, mesh, social media, streams, Toronto
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What’s meshU? Who Should Go?
I had coffee earlier today who someone who told me that she thought the difference between mesh and meshU was that mesh is for adults while meshU is for young’uns looking to learn about technology.
It’s not an accurate description but I embraced it as much-needed constructive criticism given we haven’t done a great job of really explaining meshU and why people should attend. So, here’s meshU in a nutshell:
We started meshU in 2008 after getting a lot of requests from mesh attendees to create an event that would deliver hands-on workshops about new ways to design and develop Web sites, as well as insight into how to manage teams developing and designing these services and applications.
The workshops at meshU are led by some of the Web’s best and brightest people. These are people who are talking the talk and walking the walk. They are people starting and building leading-edge Web sites and online businesses, which means they bring real-world insight and experience to the table.
This makes meshU is a place where attendees can walk away with new insight, knowledge and information about how to do their jobs better, more efficiently and more successfully.
If you’ve been to meshU before, there’s a lot of discussion happening and a healthy amount of note-taking.
Here are the top reasons to attend meshU:
1. Gain insight and knowledge from people such as Bill Buxton (our keynote speaker) Joe Stump, Dan Martell, Sean Ellis and Isaac Garcia – knowledge that you can bring back to the office and put into action right away.
2. Build new relationships with people within Toronto’s Web community who are developing and designing services and applications, or managing teams making it happen.
3. Support meshU, and its role in providing workshops that provide a different and unique perspective.
Here’s where you can buy meshU tickets. If you’d like to support meshU by sponsoring, you can contact Stuart MacDonald at info@meshconference.com.
Tags: bill buxton, conference, meshU, Toronto, workshops
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meshU Speaker Spotlight: Dan Martell
At the meshmarketing conference last October, Dan Martell rocked the house with a presentation on how to build Web sites that convert into business. We were so impressed that we asked him back for meshU, a one-day event for Web designer, developers and entrepreneurs that happens on May 17 in Toronto.
Dan, a Canadian living in Silicon Valley who co-founded Flowtown.com, will be doing a workshop on “Lean Lean Product Development: Learning is the Killer Feature”.
Here’s a summary of what he’s going to cover:
“In todays world of open source, cheap computing power and APIs, it’s not if you can build it, but should you build it. The #1 startup killer is running out of time to “figure it out” before you get traction. Lean product development is the methodology that allowed companies like PayPal, Yelp, Ardvark and up and coming Flowtown.com (profitable in two months) to pivot into their market to become a dominate player.
There is a science behind the approach and in this talk I’ll go over customer development, feature prioritization, split testing, product metrics and agile development as approaches to increase your probabilities of succeeding as a startup.”
Dan is just one of the great speakers we’ve lined up for meshU, including our keynote speaker, Bill Buxton. For more information about the event, visit meshu.ca. Here’s where you can buy tickets.
Tags: conference, dan martell, flowtown, mesh, meshU
Coming This Week: meshmarketing!
Just after the mesh conference last April, the mesh gang got together to for a wrap session and, of course, a few celebratory refreshments. In going over what we heard from attendees, a strong theme was the request for more hands-on and tactical sessions about digital marketing – what to do and how to do it.
After a lot of thought, we decided to do a marketing conference. It was a big decision because putting on meshU and mesh is a lot of work, and doing a conference in October meant working on it over the summer. Still, it was something we wanted to do so meshmarketing was born.
Over the past five months, there’s been a lot happening behind the scenes (particularly by our event planner extraordinaire, Sheri Moore), so it’s really exciting that meshmarketing is now only three days away (Oct. 22.)
We’re particularly satisfying is the high quality speakers that we’ve been able to attract – everyone from keynote speakers Hugh MacLeod, Ferg Devins, Katherine Fletcher and Mitch Joel to Dan Martell and Amielle Lake. And we believe the concept – a morning of a keynote and panels, followed by eight workshops – is the right content mix.
As well, it’s also been rewarding to see that the decision to hold meshmarketing was the right one – people are still looking for insight into what to do when it comes to digital marketing and, as important, how to do it.
For those of you attending the conference, things kick off at 6 p.m. on Wednesday at The Drake Hotel (Underground) with a pre-party featuring the artwork of Hugh MacLeod.
See you there!
Note: If you haven’t registered yet, you can do so here.
Tags: conference, marketing, mesh, meshmarketing, Toronto
Posted in meshmarketing | 3 Comments
Would You Like to be a Friend of mesh?
One of the new things we launched for mesh ‘09 was the Friends of mesh program, a user-friendly way to get involved as a mesh sponsor.
We’re started to see a growing number of inquiries of what’s involved so here are the details:
For $1,500, you get a ticket to mesh, your logo on the mesh Web site and on screen at the conference, as well as an invitation to only VIP social function. You can register here.
Tags: conference, friends of mesh, mesh
