This past week I attended AIM (Atlantic Internet Marketing) conference in Moncton. Organized by Rob Swick and Peter Sickles of alpha search.

We started off with some networking events on Sunday. Several of us joined in for a game of foam ball (paint ball with foam balls instead). We donned our helmets and airguns and snuck in behind bunkers as we got to know each other by pelting each other with foam balls. My first hit was Peter Sickles and that’s how I got to know him. The bruise on his arm evidence in the coming days;)

As usual with conferences, we can never attend all the talks and have to narrow down to a choice for each time slot. Some of my favourite talks from this year were:

Actionable Analytics/Writing for the Web by Stephanie Lummis of ISL

Website Usability and Conversion by Rob Swick of alphasearch.ca

The Authentic Web also by Rob Swick and Jeff White of Brightwhite Design

Marketing yourself as a free-agent on the Internet by Harold Jarche of Jarche Consulting

Location Marketing by Malcolm Fraser of ISL

The panel critiquing websites was very popular with everyone. Those who offered the sites up for examining have got courage.

There were a few of us twittering the events. A quick tweetscan picked up these;

brightwhite :

watching peter sickles review a aim conference attendees website

2008-05-06 07:07:10

jbignell :

Great day at the AIM Conference, now off to play rubber ball!

2008-05-05 17:12:48

walkinggal :

listening to Rob Swick from alpha talk about Gary Vaynerchuk’s how to cut through the noise, http://garyvaynerchuk.com/

2008-05-05 15:22:04

Some suggestions for next year’s conference:

1. offer more advanced talks/seminars

2. topic suggestions - monitoring your personal/company brand online, social media measurement, e-commerce conversion, advanced web copy (writing for personas)

3. more case studies

4. more booths? with more swag;) Note to the Yahoo table, we were so disappointed the yahoo swag didn’t make it in time;)

I have to say that the atmosphere of the conference was fabulous. I made lots of new friends and contacts. We’re connecting up through twitter, linkedin and facebook and I hope to meet up with everyone at next year’s conference.

I’ve noticed lately that we’ve had a great shift towards information collaboration in the IT industry in NB.  It’s something this province really needed because of our geographical spread. Twitter has definitely played a role in that. I’d like to bring attention to a couple of great new or relaunched blogs that have cropped up. And I’m sure they’ll be posting more regularly than I do;)

Moncton IT Alliance (follow John on twitter at http://twitter.com/johnsgunn)

“We believe that Moncton has among the best and brightest IT talent in eastern Canada. Education, entrepeneurs, and innovators are among the power behind our IT community. Even Apple Computers co-founder Steve Wozniak compared us to Silicon Valley during the ’70s while touring Moncton and Sackville last year!”

From My Eyes to Yours (follow Philippe on twitter at http://twitter.com/lpgauthier)

“I love business and technology and this is my little corner off the Internet where I experiment and share the things that I find interesting.

I pass it on, from my eyes to yours.”

I’ll have an update on AIM (Atlantic Internet Marketing conference) later today.

Thanks to David Alston at radian6, we’re having our first Third Tuesday (actually being held on Wednesday) Social Media Meetup in Fredericton (January 9th, 7:00 pm).  Jason Falls, Social Media Explorer from Kentucky is in town next week and we’ll have the opportunity to talk with him.

As David says;

Jason is definitely a pioneer when it comes to social media. If you are on Twitter you would probably be aware of his social media experiment with Robby Gordon’s Baha1000 race. Not only is Jason extremely knowledgeable in the use of social media but his posts are very entertaining. He has a great sense of humour and uses it to convey his points on a regular basis. It promises to be a great evening of sharing, stories and networking. Make sure to RSVP and bring along a guest.

As I mentioned in my previous post, this year is about making connections in real life. So let’s start off the New Year right.

You can follow Jason on twitter.  Join Third Tuesday NB Social Media Meetup to find out more details about the event.

I’ve started to build an Atlantic Canada twitter list of those in technology/marketing/ social media and related fields on the right sidebar. If you want to be added to the list, you can follow me on twitter or you can contact me. On the flip side, if you want your twitter removed from the twitter list, let me know and I’ll remove it.

If you’re new to what twitter is, from wikipedia;

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, email, or an application such as Twitterrific. Twitter was founded in March 2006 by San Francisco start-up company Obvious Corp.

Caroline Middlebrook has a very comprehensive Big Juicy Twitter Guide. 

 My reasons for using Twitter:

1. it’s easy to use and doesn’t take much time
2. it helps build relationships with others
3. you’re usually the first to know what is happening
4. if you can’t attend an event, you can often follow a twitter on the event, ie. http://twitter.com/forrester
5. it’s fairly viral with followers and who you’re following, lots of marketing opportunities
6. it’s indexed by google, useful for seo

Most of all, I really enjoy the diversity of people out there and getting the big picture in a micro way of the world outside of mine.