Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: Minneapolis (Page 2 of 5)

My Talk on Blogging and Social Media at ‘Club Entrepreneur’

February 14, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I gave a presentation on blogging and social media recently to the monthly lunch meeting of our local "Club Entrepreneur," which was launched within the past year by Rick Brimacomb. ClubEntrepreneur-logo About 60 people attended, more than they'd had at previous meetings, so we got to meet in the larger, main dining room of the Minneapolis Club — which is just awesome (quick iPhone photo included here, which I shot afterwards).

What a treat to present in such an historic place!  MplsClub The date was February 4, 2010.  After the event, I uploaded a pdf of my 64-slide deck to SlideShare: I titled the talk, Why Launch a Company Blog and Use Social Media.

I originally created the presentation in Keynote on my Mac, with lots of nice transitions and builds, which you can't see on the SlideShare pdf, of course.  You can in the QuickTime movie of the Keynote file that I also created, but that's 238 megs, so I won't expect you to download that… 🙂

(Note: A shout-out to authors David Meerman Scott, Debbie Weil, Brian Solis, Ann Handley, and Tara Hunt, whose work I cited in parts of this presentation. They are all heroes of mine.)

Also, I audio-recorded myself making the presentation, with my little whiz-bang podcast machine — my Olympus LS-10. So, if you'd like to listen as you go through the SlideShare pdf, here's the MP3 file:

• Download or listen to Graeme's presentation at the Minneapolis Club, "Why Launch a Company Blog and Use Social Media (MP3)".

The talk was 45 minutes, with about 12 minutes additional of Q&A at the end. You can't hear some of the audience questions very well but, overall, the recording turned out better than I thought it would — I just tried it as an experiment, setting the device on the projector table (mounted on a mini-tripod), about 12-15 feet away from me.  It worked well, though next time I'll get closer to the LS-10, so the volume level will be a little better.

If you'd like to have me give this presentation, or a variation of it, at your company, or as part of a workshop for a group of employees, please hit my email link at the top right. Thanks!

So, I Went to the MIMA Summit… Maybe You Heard About It?

October 8, 2009 / / 0 Comments

It was October 5th at the Minneapolis Hilton. And if you didn’t hear about it, where were you?  Well, at least if you’re from these parts. Because, when marketers gather for an annual confab, they know how to hype it — especially our local marketing community.  MIMA-logo I said the same thing in my coverage of last year’s event.  Except, this year, the local crowd brought new meaning to the word noise, owing to the fact that — unlike last year — they now seem to have fully embraced social media.  Yessirree, can you say… Twitter, Twitter, Twitter?!  Matt Wilson, current/outgoing president of MIMA, said from stage soon after the event was underway, “You know we’ve made it when our Twitter hashtag has already been flagged as spam.” MIMAsummit09-logoAnd that wasn’t even the only hashtag — there were other variations being used, too, by what had to be a large majority of attendees pecking away on Twitter apps all day long, most from their mobile devices. (You could spit from any spot in the Hilton and hit an iPhone.)MIMAsummit09-ballroom

But myself and my colleagues from Minnov8 decided, as we have for other recent conferences we’ve covered, to skip trying to live-Twitter the whole thing — so limited by 140 characters and all — and live-blog it instead using a tool called ScribbleLive.  And, when we wanted to tweet — or when we needed to, when the wi-fi was challenged (which it was a lot) — we had it set up with our Twitter streams feeding into that live-blog window, too.  So, all four of us had our mobile phones at the ready to tweet, as well as our laptops open to live blog.  We were jumping back and forth between the two, but it worked pretty well.

So, here’s the result of that live-blogging/Twitter-feed combo: it’s now archived here at Minnov8.com. And there’s other Minnov8 coverage of the event as well from my colleagues: Steve Borsch did a great recap post, and Phil Wilson shot and edited a nice FlipHD video, interviewing attendees at the closing reception to get their takeaways.

I did some audio interviews, which you can listen to or download here:

• Graeme interviewing Rohn Jay Miller of interactive agency IconNicholson

• Graeme interviewing Mark Kurtz, VP New Media at Gage Marketing, a sponsor of the event

• Graeme interviewing Scott Severson, CEO of AdFusion

• Graeme interviewing Lee Odden, SEO guru and head of TopRank Online Marketing

Here’s my Flickr set of photos from MIMA ’09, such as they are (can you say grab shots?):

And, just for fun, here’s a quick Animoto video I made for free using that photo set:

Finally, here’s a video I shot with my new iPhone 3GS before the morning sessions got going:

Quick Video of My Pix from ‘Social Media Breakfast’ Today

August 28, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Just created another Animoto video from the photos I shot at this morning’s “Social Media Breakfast-Twin Cities” at the Minnesota State Fair. What a hoot it was! I didn’t shoot all that many pix. I couldn’t — I had so many people wantin’ to schmooze! But, hey, that’s the best part. Sometimes I think, if it weren’t for SMB, I’d never break away from my computer….

For this video, I decided to use music from one of my own iTunes tracks. (Again, Animoto is a free service if you’re just creating 30-second videos, like this one, but you can buy an annual pass to create longer vids.) This video starts out with a shot of me in my cowboy duds on my deck before I left…

This was the 18th consecutive monthly SMB event here, which makes ours the longest continuous such group in the country! The day started out on a questionable note, with light rain falling as we all converged on the fairgrounds in St. Paul — in grid-lock traffic — for the 8:00 am start. But, thankfully, we had a big tent reserved for us in the Blue Ribbon Picnic Area, just on the north side of the Midway, so no one really got too wet. And the sun broke out by about 9:00 am, making it a gorgeous day at “the Great Minnesota Get Together.” Many of those attending the event hung around to spend the rest of the day at the fair…

Thanks to the Minnesota State Fair folks (@minnstatefair on Twitter) for hosting us, to Fox-9 (@myfox9) for the TV crew (watch tonight at 9:00 pm!) — and, especially, to my buddies Rick Mahn (@rickmahn) and Mykl Roventine (@myklroventine) and their crew for organizing such a fun event!

The highlight for me was the reading of the winning entries in the “Bacon Haiku” contest — one of which was mine! Myself and the rest of the 10 winners each got a cupful of chocolate-dipped bacon strips… mmmmm! And another nice touch at the event was Chris Lower (@MrChristopherL) getting our famous local No Name meat company folks (@NoNameSteaks) to show up and hand out free coupons for a package of their great bacon! Hey, now that’s social media word-of-mouth at its finest, huh?

A Quick ‘Blogwell-Minneapolis’ Video (My First One Ever Created with Animoto)

August 26, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Just for the heck of it, I decided to try a service called Animoto, which promises to lets you create videos in minutes from your own photos, letting you add music you select from their site, or you can use your own track. It’s free for creating 30-second videos (like the one here), or, if you want longer videos, it’s just $30 for a full annual pass, to create as many as you want.

I just uploaded a selection of my Flickr set from the Blogwell event, which I attended a couple of weeks ago (see previous post), chose an instrumental track, and — sure enough — I got the end-result in minutes. Pretty cool. Kind of a poor-man’s way to do video… 🙂 Especially if you’re like me and shoot a ton of stills at events of all kinds. Man, do I have the archive.

Hey, I just might make another video with the pix I shoot this Friday, August 28th, at our next Social Media Breakfast-Twin Cities — it’s at the Minnesota State Fair. That’s right, “Social Media on a Stick!” I just might wear my cowboy boots and hat…

Wonder what music track should I use for that one? Hmm, the possibilities boggle the mind…

Upcoming Event to Focus on the ROI of Digital Marketing

April 12, 2009 / / 0 Comments

A Twin Cities event for senior executives and marketing professionals has been announced by long-standing Minneapolis web marketing firm Ciceron.  Entitled Radical ROI: Seizing the Potential of the Digital Marketplace, the half-day panel will be held Monday, May 11, 2009, from 8:00 to 11:00 am at the Midland Hills Country Club in St. Paul.

RadicalROIForum-051109


The event offers attendees a chance to hear how a panel of local business leaders have transformed their organizations to thrive in the digital marketplace — and I am privileged to be one of those panelists:

• Paul Douglas: CEO, Weather Nation (and former chief meteorologist, WCCO TV)

• Jan McDaniel: CEO, JTM Vision (and former CEO, American Red Cross Twin Cities)

• Phil Hotchkiss: Founder, BigCharts.com

• Joel Kramer: Founder, MinnPost.com (and former Publisher, Minneapolis Star-Tribune)

• Graeme Thickins: Founder, GT&A Strategic Marketing

• Andrew Eklund: CEO, Ciceron Digital Marketing

A special reduced rate of $195 per person is available till May 3 at this registration page, with a group rate of only $395 for up to five people from the same organization.

Ciceron is a web marketing and consulting agency based in
Minneapolis. It offers full-service solutions from
professional search engine optimization and email marketing programs to
in-depth metrics and performance tracking.  Its clients have included such major brands as Home Depot, Nascar, USBank, Andersen Windows, Best Buy, Target, and Pepsi.  For more about Cicero, check out their about page, their full client list, and here are their management bios.

I hope to see you at "Radical ROI: Seizing the Potential of the Digital Marketplace" on May 11. Again, use this registration page before May 3 to get those preferential rates.

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