When I opened the email on Tuesday morning, I was paralyzed. My friend, mentor and fellow Toastmaster, Marcel Boudreau, had died in a car accident the day before. His forty-second birthday is in a few weeks.

For most of the week I’ve found it difficult to breath and sleep knowing that I will never again have the opportunity to exchange ideas with Marcel. I’ve been fluctuating between coherent and confused states of mind. I’d guess that this is what all of Marcel’s friends are going through. I can’t imagine what his family is going through.

Today, the Toastmasters club of which I am a member (Causeurs Sussex Speakers) gathered at our usual meeting time to support each other. It was amazingly therapeutic to be with my good friends, each of whom Marcel took specific time to get to know. We shared stories, laughed and cried. I had two stories in particular I wanted to share and wasn’t able to get the words out of my mouth. Instead, I’ll blog them.

When Marcel was Toastmaster of a meeting last November, he decided to pick the theme ‘take a chance’ and lived the theme by not contacting those with roles. I was among those people and two days before the meeting became concerned that something was wrong. I was the second person to call him to find out what was going on. Marcel was pleased with himself and he was particularly proud that his experiment succeeded and enjoyed that Dave, the General Evaluator that day, pointed out how lucky he was that it had worked. In an email following the meeting, Marcel included this quote:

“Take a chance! Life is a chance. The person that goes the furthest is generally the one willing to do and dare. The ’sure thing’ boat never gets far from the shore.”
– Dale Carnegie

On April 25, as elections for the 2008-2009 executive were approaching, I asked Marcel if I could nominate him for a position. I was being selfish. I was the only nomination for one of the positions and felt that for more reasons than I can describe here, but that those who know Marcel understand, he belonged on the executive. He took the request very seriously and suggested that we go for a walk to talk about it. We were a few seconds into the walk when he said ‘Do you always walk this fast? You have to slow down or you’re going to miss everything there is to see, smell and experience.‘ We walked for twenty minutes. It was a walk I usually do in about five minutes and I had never really experienced the feeling of being passed by other pedestrians on the sidewalk. He walked completely past his office, to mine, so that we could talk about his nomination and how important it was to him to do the most with the position. We talked about public speaking, life and family. We talked about the woman at Bell Pastry who always kept his favourite muffin set aside for him each day just as he liked it — not wrapped in plastic. On May 1, he accepted the nomination and was elected to the position of Sergeant at Arms.

Causseurs Sussex Speakers is notorious for its free-exchange of hugs. I will miss Marcel’s hugs — especially because he’s the only other member pushing six-foot-four. I will miss joking around with him, including the time when I spontaneously selected him as ‘the trouble student’ when I led a meeting themed on teachers that had an impact on us. I will miss seeing his smiling and curious face when I deliver a speech. I will miss talking about what to do with long arms during a speech. I will miss all of his insights and I will miss the opportunity of working with him as part of the executive.

Marcel is one of the teachers that had a big impact on me. Thank you, Marcel, for everything you taught me, including one of life’s greatest lessons: slow down or you’ll miss everything there is to see, smell and experience.

Last year it was Quechup; now there is a new unscrupulous social networking site.  PAGII is spamming the contact lists of new registrants as a way of attracting more new people and artificially building its strength.  In the process, it’s upsetting a lot of people who feel duped by the lack of transparency in the registration process.

If you get an email from PAGII, ignore it.  It was likely sent without the knowledge of your friend.

Based on a few requests I’ve received and feedback from my last webcast, I will be hosting an online session on interview skills at 8:00pmET on Monday, June 9. The session will cover techniques to prepare for and lead an interview for an audio recording, video recording or live event.

Space is limited so be sure to register.

Note: If you register and discover you cannot attend, please be sure to cancel your registration so that someone else can attend.

Congratulations to Ian Graham. His vision of a collaborative, co-working space becomes a reality later today when he hosts an open house at The Code Factory, 246 Queen Street (Ottawa), second floor.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend the open house. Instead, I dropped by The Code Factory to congratulate Ian and Jocelyn Kartes (Minister of First Impressions) during lunch, yesterday. The space looks great!

Ian will be organizing a series of lunch-and-learn sessions for the community. He showed me a wish list of sessions and speakers and it looks like a great lineup.

From Stevie Z of The Sieve comes this great, monster-truck-rally-inspired promo for the 2008 edition of Podcasters Across Borders (PAB2008).

As the promo says, don’t forget to P A Be there!

 

 P A Be There [1:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Thank you to everyone for commenting on my site, sending me emails and Twitter messages, and stopping me in the hallways at Mesh to talk about and support my coverage of the conference.  I didn’t expect this kind of response.

Despite all of that, I’ve learned my lesson.  I will again never live-blog a conference!

Sociologist Sam Ladner was direct when she opened her session on reputation management and monitoring. “We won’t talking about reputation systems”, she said. “eBay reputations will not be part of our discussion. Read Bryce Glass’ blog if want to know more. He also has a Slideshare called Designing your Reputation System“.

In fact, Dr. Ladner led an amazing session in which she explored the meaning of reputation, attributes of reputation and the impacts and contexts of brand conversations that could be reputation impacting.

Despite the response of McNeil and the amazing brand-recovery case study that is the Tylenol cyanide poisoning incident of the 80’s, the company still took six days to respond. Can you imagine a six-day response time today? How would a six-day delay convert in a twenty-year span?

To setup the discussion, Dr. Ladner presented the three elements of the Looking Glass Self:

• We imagine how we appears to others
• We imagine how others judge that appearance
• We react to that imagined judgment

Consider that reputations cannot be managed. To help understand why, Dr. Ladner outlined the three key attributes of the Online Self:

• Hidden (online sources lack contextual cues)
• Digital (easily broken down, re-arranged, mashed-up and rearranged)
• Proliferating and Permanent-ish

What’s most interesting is where brand discussions are taking place and how that context affects the brand reputation and the opportunity of individuals and corporations to participate in that discussion (Forester Research and Statistics Canada):

• 48% of North Americans participate in social computing
• 30% of Americans have posted online ratings
• The average Canadian spent 35% more minutes talking on the phone in 2003 than in 1997

Dr. Ladner walked through a number of online tools and services that allow individuals and companies to monitor reputation.  There are several classes of tools available:

• Social Media analytics (Technorati, Google Trends, ePinions, etc…)
• Social Media observation tools (Neilsen Buzz Metrics, Cymfony)
• Social Media Response Tools (Umbria, TruCast)

Using examples that involved these tools, we learned of a number of studies in which included brand reputation of breakfast cereal based on health and nostalgic references, and brand reputation based on online attitudes on sustainability.  The examples were incredibly interesting and I would have been grateful for an extra hour to explore these examples in more depth.

Before leading a more interactive discussion, Dr. Ladner proposed some reputation monitoring best practices:

• Systematic (develop standard metrics, stick to them)
• Regular (measure at consistent intervals)
• Governed (assign accountability for metrics, create a task force)

We were all encouraged to use Google Labs to do our own research on reputation conversations, offering that we research Dell and Best Buy together over a period of time and look for when the Dell announcement on selling their computers at Best Buy.

We were able to wrap up with a more lighthearted discussion on the doppelganger effect.  I guess there are some advantages to having a one-of-a-kind name.

Note: this session will be available in slideshare.

Given my involvement in reBookMe.com, I decided to hear the CEOs Julia Johnston (mEgo), Leah Culver (Pownce) and Ryan Carson (DropSend) tell their stories in a discussion led by Mike McDerment.

Conversations that are based on stories are incredibly engaging. In that respect, this panel was strong. More importantly, they engaged with each other. They were energetic and dynamic in a way that no other panel or session has been so far.

Ryan waxed poetic on various topics throughout the session. In particular, he offered some interesting sound bites including marketing a web app is a full-time job, the hardest thing for an entrepreneur is focusing on one thing, don’t hire friends and don’t take money if you don’t to.

Julia joked that her hope is to sell out to Google. In the meantime, unique opportunities such as a global promotion with Adidas, strong angel investment and revenue through banner ads keeps the company financially strong.

Leah, who was surprisingly quiet most of the time and burst with excitement at others, signed with relief when she announced that Pownce is about one-year-old and things are much easier now than they were when the team first started out — it’s trying on your mental health.

Each company monitors uninstalls and departures and depends on their community managers to follow up on departures. Clearly, they all take this role very seriously.  Ryan also offered that entrepreneurs would be wise to read all customer feedback.

Ryan was a standout when I asked for each panelist to give a 15-second Purple Cow pitch of their company and products. Even though he didn’t detail why I’d want to use his product, it took him no time at all to describe a team and company culture that would be the envy of anyone.  Julia took about a minute to itemize the features of a great sounding service and Leah struggled to summarize Pownce as being remarkable.

Being remarkable is key to the success of a startup.  The question becomes how do you define success in relation to the rest of the web — can you co-exist with your competitors or do you stand out?

This panel was very solid, entertaining and loaded with valuable information.  I can’t help but feel that each could have spoken at depth for more than an hour.   This was definitely a standout session.

In case you hadn’t heard, GM announced in March that they are moving half of their $3 billion marketing budget, to third largest in the United States, to digital and one-to-one initiatives (GM Changes Game, Puts $1.5 Billion Online). That’s a full $1.5 billion dollars, a sizable portion of which will likely end up on the web.

It’s my curiosity on how enterprise money is being spent that led me to attend a discussion on Social Media and the Enterprise with panelists Natalie Johnson of General Motors, Chris Reid of Yamaha Motor Canada and Jenny Bullough of Harlequin Enterprises Ltd., and moderated by Michael O’Connor Clarke. Michael’s mere appearance on the stage resulted in a dramatic hush coming over the room.

Following pleasantries and introductions, Michael kicked off the discussion with a quote from The Cluetrain Manifesto:

“…companies so lobotomized that they can’t speak in a recognizably human voice build sites that smell like death.”

Harlequin enjoys strong brand reputation. This means that there’s a community built on decades of publishing books that appeal to a specific and demanding niche. In fact, Harlequin publishes 120 new books each month including electronic selections of their back catalog based on user demand through their website. Also interesting is that Harlequin still accepts unsolicited manuscripts.

One of Harlequin’s greatest successes is a series of meet-the-author podcasts that connected aspiring authors with potential readers and meet-the-editor podcasts which educated aspiring authors on the Harlequin approach.

Nathalie talked up General Motors’ social site imsaturn.com (though her way of saying I M Saturn was confused by the entire room to be I Am Saturn which led us to the website of a hip-hop musician). Another initiative that connects their customers with the organization is IGotShotgun.com which features behind the scenes videos. The greatest challenge to moving to the social web has been securing the support of the upper ranks and steering the corporate culture of 266,000 people in a new direction.

Yamaha brought in an outside expert to educate senior management on the value of social media for brand value and online reputation. Chris described how he could see the lights go on during the session and that having an outside expert added credibility to the campaign, that he alone would not have had the same impact despite the fact that he is the in-house expert.

While each organization has corporate blogging policies, each approaches participation in online communities by employees a different way. Harlequin’s multi-page policy comes down to ‘don’t be stupid’; don’t blog about authors, don’t blog secrets, etc… The brand is well defended by a large and passionate community. This means that Harlequin watches as the community responds to negative comments. GM allows employees to participate in online communities provided they are transparent about their employment. They moderate comments for foul language and offensive remarks. Otherwise, they allow negative remarks and criticism in order to be transparent and to learn from the community. Yamaha only allows internal blogging and does not permit employees to represent the company online.

When the panel was questioned about their organizations’ commitment to social media, Michael noted that the panel represents a new environment in which companies are dedicating full-time positions to social media engagement.

Today’s second session was a conversation between Mesh organizer Michael McDerment and Garrett Camp. Garrett is a co-founder of StumbleUpon, a social sharing site bought by eBay in 2007 for $75-million.

StumbleUpon’s origins are in Calgary which makes it one of many Canadian web 2.0 success stories; stories that include Flickr and Club Penguin, both of which got their start in Vancouver. At the time of the purchase, StumbleUpon was looking for more venture capital to augment their $1.5-million in working capital.

According to Garrett, StumbleUpon is a tool that best serves visual content and websites. People can share their findings such as a site that a group of us found through StumbleUpon this morning that shows a collection of bad album covers.

eBay allows StumbledUpon to function as a startup within a large organization. This affords Garrett and the team the autonomy to self-direct their development in the best interest of the tool that they built and the spirit in which it has been embraced. It’s refreshing to hear stories about big companies buying startups and letting the founders continue with their vision.

Given my recent experiences with the Ottawa Web Weekend — which was largely about the coming together and collaboration of thirty-six strangers — I find it particularly interesting that Garrett felt he waited too long build the team out.  That’s significant when you consider the size of the eBay purchase.  His focus now is how to build the team, spread the knowledge and try to build the business to be strong in the same was as Facebook.

Garrett suggested that he’d like to explore social advertising which would target ads to individuals based on recommendations by their StumbleUpon friends. This presents a more obvious fit with eBay.

The session was dry and skewed, heavily, to venture capital and corporate purchase. The key takeaway from that discussion is that the money is in the United States.