When John and I started up our company there were several resources and tools that helped us through the entire process. One of those resources was Small Business BC online and in Waterfront Station. We got forms, advice, and flipped through micro-fiche listings of business names before we settled on sixty4media.

Next month Small Business BC is hosting the Successful You Business Awards and we’ve been invited to check it out.

The event will announce the winners of the Successful You Awards and provide a unique opportunity for aspiring entrepreneurs and the media to network with over 350 local business professionals and successful small businesses. Keynote speakers, Larry Finnson and Chris Emery, founders of Clodhoppers Candy, will share their success story of making Grandma’s candy recipe into a recognizable worldwide brand. [Small Business BC]

Where Birks Flagship Store, 698 Hastings Street
When Thursday June 10th from 5:00pm – 8:00pm

If you’re a small business and aren’t familiar with the services offered by Small Business BC I highly recommend checking them out or at least coming by the event. Tickets for the awards event are currently on sale starting at $36 (early bird) and $60 (then $70 at the door).

We’re at WordCamp Victoria 2010 today. Rebecca just wrapped with the blogging panel during the lunch break with Raul and Lorraine, so we’re taking a break to get caught up on some food, post some photos, and catch some of the chatter over various WordPress related topics.

There are a lot of great topics being discussed here. Lloyd Budd gave us some great insight on what’s to come from WordPress 3.0, even giving a slight plug to WordCamp Vancouver that we are helping put together with our friends from BraveNewCode, John Biehler, and Kulpreet Sing on June 12th.

If you are interested in WordPress and want to find a way to learn more about it, WordCamps are a great resource to do this. I know I always walk away from these events with something new that usually ends up in a project somewhere down the road.

You can see more of my photos from today on my Flickr set, and there is also a yyjWordCamp Flickr Group to check out as well.

Cross-posted from Miss604.com

To many people, Facebook is the internet. It’s open in a browser throughout the day, it could be their home screen, and on average users are connected to 130 “friends” at a time [Facebook: Stats]. However, even with close to 400 million users (11 million in Canada alone) Facebook isn’t on everyone’s friend’s list.

Recent changes from everything to layout, policies, and terms of use have some people wanting to quit the platform. This has prompted the creation of “Quit Facebook Day” which will be coming up May 31, 2010.

For a bit of background as to why the extraordinarily popular site is seemingly losing momentum, here’s a brief history of Facebook:

Facebook Timeline

2004
February: Mark Zuckerberg and co-founders Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin launch Facebook from their Harvard dorm room
December: Facebook reaches nearly 1 million active users

2005
August: The company officially changes its name to Facebook from thefacebook.com
September: Facebook expands to add high school networks
December: Facebook reaches more than 5.5 million active users

2006
August: Facebook and Microsoft form strategic relationship for banner ad syndication
September: Facebook expands registration so anyone can join (not just school networks)
December: Facebook reaches more than 12 million active users

2007
February: Virtual gift shop launches as a feature
March: Facebook reaches over 2 million active Canadian users and 1 million active UK users
July: I wrote a post about why I use Facebook (and you should too)
October: Facebook and Microsoft expand advertising deal to cover international markets; Microsoft takes a $240 million equity stake in Facebook

2008
January: Facebook co-sponsors Presidential Debates with ABC News, Vancouver hosts first Facebook Awards
April: Facebook launches Facebook Chat and releases Translation application to 21 additional languages
August: Facebook reaches over 100 million active users
The Privacy Commissioner of Canada launches the world’s first investigation into Facebook’s scanty privacy safeguards [Globe&Mail]

2009
February: Facebook updates its Term of Service, backlash follows: “Facebook’s terms of service (TOS) used to say that when you closed an account on their network, any rights they claimed to the original content you uploaded would expire. Not anymore. Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later. ”

December: Facebook reaches over 350 million active users

2010
February: Facebook reaches over 400 million active users
April: A new privacy setting called “Instant Personalization” was launched. It shares data with non-Facebook websites and it is automatically set to “Allow.” Go to Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites and uncheck “Allow”, then repost this to your profile. “Many users take issue with the social network’s now-default opt-out inclusion of its users in new features and services and “How do I delete my Facebook account” has become a top search suggestion on Google.”[ReadWriteWeb]

Quit Facebook Day

When I give presentations about social media for business I usually focus on Twitter and blogs however Facebook always comes up. It’s a great way to connect with millions of users and it’s good to have a presence there. However, in every presentation I have at least two people who were completely unaware about Facebook’s Terms of Service. What you upload to Facebook, belongs to Facebook and they may share your information at will. See: “Shocker: Facebook Does What’s Best for Facebook“.

That being said, many users are rightfully unhappy about the “opt out” information sharing that can now take place on Facebook. This is where “Quit Facebook Day” comes in. Created by Matthew Milan and Joseph Dee they are hoping to organize a mass exodus of users from the platform.

From the campaign’s website:
“Why are we quitting? For us it comes down to two things: fair choices and best intentions. In our view, Facebook doesn’t do a good job in either department. Facebook gives you choices about how to manage your data, but they aren’t fair choices, and while the onus is on the individual to manage these choices, Facebook makes it damn difficult for the average user to understand or manage this. We also don’t think Facebook has much respect for you or your data, especially in the context of the future.”

Still, ReadWriteWeb has us ask ourselves some valid questions:
“And while the sharing of your data sounds quite scary, we have to wonder if this reactionary unchecking is causing some who would otherwise benefit to miss out. After all, are we really all that concerned about Pandora knowing, from the moment we load the site, that we’re huge Weezer fans?”

You may take a look through the updated policy (with changes highlighted) in order to form your own opinion on the matter.

Cross-posted from Miss604.com

Twitter was experiencing the effects of a bug this weekend that exploited the following/follower method (as this post on Mashable explains). This morning, as an after effect of this bug, all users have noticed their following and follower numbers have dropped right down to zero. This means the little corner store down the block has the same follower count as Ashton Kutcher or CNN at the moment.

I’m certain Twitter is working to rectify the problem and it’s not something permanent as timelines are still filling with updates. However, things like this always seem to cause panic, mass hysteria, and the inevitable shouting at inanimate objects such as a computer screen or iPhone. To alleviate some stress in the future, here are a few ways you can back up your Twitter account.

Backupify
John Biehler clued me into the Backupify service a few months ago and it can be used to archive and back up your accounts from Twitter to Flickr, Delicious, Google Docs, WordPress, Blogger, and Facebook. The very basic service is free (although they do have premium options) so there’s sanity to gain from simply singing up.

Backup My Tweets
The Backup My Tweets service will back up your Tweets since they have a limited shelf-life on Twitter.com. It doesn’t back up your followers as Backupify does, but it will provide you some peace of mind. There is a program you can download for your PC that will backup your friends however I have not tried this so I cannot guarantee its security.

The best thing anyone can do right now is wait this out. Do not go on a mass re-following spree as I can only imagine this would muck up any backups or restoration process they might have Twitter has posted an update saying they have suspended following until this is resolved. Stay tuned to Mashable.com or @Mashable for updates since they have been crowned the most influential account on Twitter (well, at least up until this morning).

Update All is right with the world. From the official Twitter account: “Follow bug discovered, remedied. Read our status blog for details. http://bit.ly/dhQ3fF“.

Going through some photos today, I rediscovered one that was worth noting in the realm of social media marketing.

In case you’re not familiar with Steamrollers, here is how they describe themselves on their website:

Steamrollers is a unique Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) concept. We serve a menu of west-coast style burritos called “Steamrollers”. Steamrollers are unique, in that ALL of the ingredients are cooked exclusively with steam. In fact, we are the only QSR concept that cooks ONLY with steam! Cooking with steam prevents shrinkage, locks in moisture and nutrients and tastes great!

Their sign at the counter is a great way to promote their presence in the social media space (Twitter in this case) and what extra benefits you get as one of their followers. It’s a clever way, albeit analog, to pick up followers who are mobile based while they pay at the register and wait for their food to be prepared.

As people often ask us how one gets more followers on Twitter or Facebook, this is a simple technique if you’re a business looking to expand your presence.

Example of a tweet by Steamrollers on Twitter.com

However, don’t forget to keep up with what you promise as well as engage the audience you already have with worthwhile conversations. Thousands of followers are great and make you look popular, but when you have all of that attention, it never hurts to have something worthwhile to say to the community you have created on a two way street of communication.

We’ll try to do posts like this more in the future as we spot social media marketing like this in the real world.

I’ve been interviewed at least a dozen times about how social media people are covering the Olympics in Vancouver. However, I think an equally interesting story is how traditional media outlets are using social media to add to their coverage.

CTV Olympics Video
The official broadcaster of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games has been posting footage to YouTube. The type of event action videos that would get pulled down with a cease & desist letter from the IOC are up and running in full glory on the CTV Olympics channel. Although you cannot embed the videos, you can watch clips of medal moments and even streaming replays of televised events on their main website.

Government of BC
The Province of British Columbia has been capturing Olympic moments and posting them to their official YouTube channel as well. They have athlete interviews, montages, and even an interview with yours truly.

They don’t have Games footage but they have been everywhere around town, profiling businesses and the fan experience.

Global has added a video section to their website and although they’re not posting the videos as shareable items on YouTube, they are blogging and tweeting to enhance their coverage. Same goes for the CBC who has a Road to the Games section of their site, acting as a 2010 newsroom complete with sidebar event listings. You can read more about their coverage game plan in my post from last week.

With such restrictions for non-official broadcasters these Olympics haven’t necessarily made journalists out of citizens, they’ve made the mainstream realize that social media can help them with their coverage — and it can make it that much more interesting.

This weekend I presented a quick “Who, What, When, Where, Why” of blogging and online branding for the Travel Media Association of Canada. The conference took place at the brand new Pinnacle Pier in North Vancouver and had a spectacular view of Vancouver from across the inlet. Unfortunately I couldn’t setup my shiny new Epson projector (due to the shining sun through the un-treated floor to ceiling windows) so I did the talk unassisted. I did however promise participants that I would post my slides on Slideshare regardless.

| Get your Presentation Pack

This is my presentation pack from Slideshare in case you would like to view any of my recent slide decks from speaking engagements. The one for TMAC does not have accompanying sound but I’ll try to make it a slidecast in the near future. Enjoy!

WordCamp is returning to Vancouver in the summer of 2010, welcoming WordPress developers, enthusiasts and bloggers once the Olympics have moved out.

We have a great group of people signed on to organize so far who all want to see this event become a smashing success.

It’s still very much in the planning phases so please follow @WordCampYVR for updates from Duane Storey (BraveNewCode), John (sixty4media), or myself. The website will be up at WordCampVancouver.com and it’s already listed on the official WordCamp directory.

Related: See John Biehler’s post about WordCamp Vancouver 2010 as well.

I recently discovered that my account on Twitter now has the “Lists” capability so I thought I would produce a quick screencast to help others understand this cool function that was introduced last month.

You’ll also find roundups or mass postings of lists on blogs in the coming weeks, such as ReadWriteWeb’s “10 Twitter Lists You Should Follow” or the mega directory over at Listorious.

Update November 2nd, 2009: Mashable has also put out a “HOW TO” for Twitter lists using images.

Technorati, the authority on blog listings and ranks, has released their 2009 State of the Blogosphere. This annual report looks at household incomes of bloggers, genders, topics, measures of success and more. Here are a few interesting stats:

Who are the Bloggers

The “Why” of Blogging

The “How” of Blogging

Each part of the report is being released day by day with new articles to follow later this week.

I few weeks ago I was asked to take part in the Cool Twitter Conference, a global event circuit that is making its way to Vancouver this Friday, October 23rd.

CBC Radio’s Steve Pratt will be the keynote and speakers include The Vancouver Sun’s Gillian Shaw, The Georgia Straight’s Stephen Hui, Adam Loving, Eric Becker, Kari Quaas, Ray Levesque, and Lauri Stevens.

My talk will be about using Twitter for personal and business use — knowing when to separate them and also how to remain professional while still being personable and friendly.

Tickets for the event are currently on sale and you can also purchase a voluntary carbon offset. After Vancouver, the conference moves to Anchorage, then on to Orange County, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and off to Dubai November 18th.

To say that Twitter is huge in Vancouver is an understatement. During Vancouver Canucks hockey games the word #Canucks is often within the top ten trending topics on the service which is used by millions worldwide. Combining Vancouver and top trending topics has been a bit impossible, until now.

This afternoon Mashable featured Trendsmap, a way to find the hot topics specifically in your area. The big football match in Buffalo might not be on your top trends list however if you’re based in Vancouver perhaps you want to see why so many people are talking about the Olympics, traffic, weather, or the latest celebrity sighting.

As of this afternoon, the top trends in Vancouver are: Organic, Olyimpics, Oakridge (I assume because we have a new Apple store opening up there), Canucks, Climate, and Craig Ferguson. The Trendsmap packs hundreds of cities’ information into an interactive Google Map so it’s a big clunky right now, however the information it provides is pretty interesting. I see this being useful for hyper-local news agencies, businesses, and individuals who would just like to keep on top of what’s being talked about the most in Vancouver at any given time.

WordPress version 2.8.4 came out in early August, and now there is a serious issue that has come to light for users whose installations are operating with previous versions.

Otto42 of OttoDestruct, a key WordPress developer and supporter, reports that there is an “attack” on older versions of WordPress right now. The number of sites hit by this is growing every hour. Protect your WordPress blog now: UPDATE NOW!!! [lorelle.wordpress.com]

Lorelle’s post is very in depth regarding the various aspects of what this major security vulnerability entails and should not be taken lightly.

In addition, Matt Mullenweg has an even more informative post on the official WordPress.org Blog with even more specifics of these attacks and the severity of them.

Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.

The tactics are new, but the strategy is not. Where this particular worm messes up is in the “clean up” phase: it doesn’t hide itself well and the blogger notices that all his links are broken, which causes him to dig deeper and notice the extent of the damage. Where worms of old would do childish things like defacing your site, the new ones are silent and invisible, so you only notice them when they screw up (as this one did) or your site gets removed from Google for having spam and malware on it.

I’m talking about this not to scare you, but to highlight that this is something that has happened before, and that will more than likely happen again. [wordpress.org]

The battle wages on. The full read is very intriguing and worth the click to finish reading.

For information about how to upgrade your WordPress on a self-hosted installation, the WordPress Codex offers directions on how to do that. If you need assistance getting the upgrade done, feel free to contact us so you can get your content protected as soon as possible.

The South by Southwest festival brings together music, entertainment, film, technology, social media, and a whole lot of BBQ each year down in Austin, Texas. There has always been a strong Canadian contingency, in particular from the Vancouver area. In preparation for next year’s SXSW Interactive, submissions have been collected and the public is being asked to vote on their favourite topics, which they will see presented in March of 2010.

I took a look through the 2,219 submissions in the PanelPicker and have weeded out some of the gems that are being proposed by some of our own local talent.

• Our good friend John Biehler is putting together a panel about the way we do business: Do Cool Kids Leave When the Suits Arrive?
• With the Olympics coming to Vancouver in 2010 this session proposed by Robert Scales is of great interest: Social Media and the Olympics: A Case Study
• Another one of our good friends, Dave Olson, has prepared: Hitchiking to the Boardroom
• James Chutter has two talks up for your consideration: Ubiquitous Participation: Graffiti Streets to Social Networks and the other is Beta Campaigns: Planning for User Driven Advertising
• Cecily Walker from the Vancouver Public Library proposed: Can I Reserve This Book With My iPhone?
• Ellitot Hurst from Supernova.com wants to talk about things like the CFOX Vancouver Seeds competition: Online Community Saved the Radio Star
• SXSW veteran and photographer Kris Krug is pitching the following: Your Content is You, Your Website is Dead and Listening the the Internet: Online Media Monitoring
• Not from Vancouver but our friend Meghan at Hill & Knowlton has proposed: Passionate People: The Key Ingredient to Social Media Success

The public vote counts for 30% with another 30% coming from staff and 40% decided upon by an advisory board. Should you have a panel submission you’d like us to check out, please feel free to link to it in the comments of this post. Best of luck to our peers and counterparts from Vancouver and we look forward to joining you down in Austin.

On August 22nd we’ll be participating in the second WordCamp Fraser Valley. The day will be laid out in tracks for beginners, intermediate users, developers, and a track just for Twitter use with WordPress.

This will also be our third WordCamp this year, having organized WordCamp Whistler, and attended WordCamp in San Francisco. My specific talk will be about how WordPress can be used for much more than blogging.

I’ll be giving examples of websites powered by WordPress where a blog is not the main feature and sharing some tips on how to achieve this use of the platform. It is in the “beginner” track so it will be far more educational than code-heavy. My hope is to spread the word that WordPress is powerful and easy to use but not just for blogging although that’s how my experience began.

WordCamp Fraser Valley is 9:00am – 5:00pm August 22nd at the SFU campus in Surrey at Central City. Easy to get to by SkyTrain and transit, with plenty of parking as well. Each track is $25 or you can get a ticket to all tracks for $75 by registering online.

To help aid the abundance of folks who are finding their way to Twitter, the one element that I find to be poorly used is the way people share URL’s in their tweets. I know that sounds very picky, but there are more effective ways to do this so you maximize the overall reach of what you are trying to share with your Twitter followers.

So why is this a big deal? Why can’t you copy and paste any URL from your browser and post it to Twitter?

Well, the answer is that you can. There is nothing to stop you from doing that, and if that is the way you want to do things, then keep doing what you are doing. However, if you want to be sure that people follow through on viewing that link, you might want to think a little differently as to how you do this because not everyone uses Twitter the same way.

Third party applications don’t display links the same way as twitter.com

The biggest thing to remember about Twitter is that it is not a strictly web based service. The advanced user will tell you that Twitter.com is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to telling the world what you are doing in 140 characters. Stand alone applications and mobile devices are among the numerous ways that updates get sent to Twitter by various users, and each one displays those updates in their own way.

For example, I’m using a local Vancouver radio station, 99.3 The Fox, and their Twitter stream to exemplify what I mean because this isn’t a matter of what’s right or wrong. The point is to show how you can be doing this better.

The following is a screenshot on Twitter.com of an update they made that has an intention of driving users to their website. You can see that the website address is automatically linked because of the way the Twitter developers have programmed their service.

The major issue with this is not everyone interacts with Twitter the same way. For myself, I know that my main method of interaction is a third party extension for Firefox called Twitterfox, a tiny application within an application that allows me to view and send tweets from within a browser window.

So in comparison, this is how the same tweet up above from @993thefox looks like in Twitterfox.

Notice how the same, implied website address isn’t actually linked when viewing this same tweet in this application. When you consider that there are multiple applications for Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, Blackberry, video game systems, and so on, I find that to be a negative impact on the reach your trying to accomplish. Without having that URL being automatically linked, you’re missing out on someone going directly to it as soon as they see it.

So, how do you do this more effectively?

Use “http://website.com” for links, not “www.website.com”

In the world of Twitter, you have 140 characters per tweet, so the key is being direct and to the point. Have a message and get your followers to click on your link as soon as they see it, and the easiest way to do that is to drop the “www.” and put “http://” ahead of your domain name.

As you can see in these two examples, each of these users that I follow on Twitter have made tweets that include URL’s with no “www.” but include an “http://” on the front of the websites they want you to visit. Additionally, this type of addressing crosses over from third party applications like Twitterfox to Twitter.com itself. Ultimately, you increase the amount of possibility that someone will follow that link back to where you are trying to drive traffic to.

But what happens when you don’t include either “http://” or “www.” in your URL?

As you can see, not using either won’t have the URL linked either way (even though I don’t have the update from Twitter.com as a screenshot, this address was not automatically linked as well). Is this the wrong way to use Twitter? No, but it’s not as effective.

Keep your URL’s short and sweet

Keeping the 140 character limit in mind, not all URL’s are as short as we’d like them to be, especially for Twitter. So what do you do when you run into a link you want to tweet but doesn’t leave you very many extra characters to say anything else?

There’s nothing worse than having your update get cut off or Twitter telling you that what you’re trying to update with is too long. Fortunately, there are services out there to help you make your URL’s shorter.

TinyURL is often a popular one that I’ll use for this example, but there are many others like Bit.ly, Tr.im, etc.

@ctvolympics is the official Twitter account of ctvolympics.ca, a website dedicated to CTV’s coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, and every update they make to their website gets a tweet with a URL to the post.

The address for the page here is:
http://www.ctvolympics.ca/news-centre/newsid=11000.html?cid=rss

Using TinyURL, anyone can easily “shrink” the length of this URL, making it perfect for a tweet.

In this situation, ctvolympics.ca has all of their posts automatically updating their Twitter stream, and this is a great way to drive traffic to your site. It’s worth noting that a great plugin that can do this for your WordPress installation is WordTwit, made by our good friends at BraveNewCode and used on our site as well.

If you are looking to use Twitter to drive traffic to your website or to any other location on the web, this is something you should consider when trying to spread the word. It sounds picky, but if you make it that much easier to someone to go through one motion of clicking on a link, then you’ve upped your chances for accomplishing what you want to do.

With all the social networks that are out there these days, it’s so common to get into conversations and have someone ask you, “Hey, are you on (insert the name of specific network here)?”

More often than none, you want to say that you are, following that up with an easy way for that person you just met at some great networking event to remember how to find you on that specific website. Be it Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn, there are multiple sites that all have different ways for you to be found on their service. It could be a search based on a name or email address, but how could you simplify this process that makes it easy for this person to find you?

These following is going to get quite technical, so if you’re uncomfortable with the following directions or just don’t like dealing with the settings on your web server or getting into code in general, don’t let this overwhelm you. Look over the idea and consider using this with your web presence. After that, consider finding someone with the skills to get this implemented.

Just as an example, I’m going to use Twitter. To find anyone on their service, you can usually find someone by typing in the following URL into any web browser:
twitter.com/mybrand

It’s fairly easy to tell someone that URL, but there is actually a way to make your website’s domain name, what you should also consider as your brand, do a lot of the work for you. Using what is known as URL redirection, you can use a simple, one line of code to use your brand to promote your presence on a particular social network. This is where we get a little more technical.

In my example here, I’m using some simple code in the htaccess on my website’s server. It should be said that you need to be very careful when editing this particular file on any website because altering it incorrectly can cause problems with the overall function of your domain. Of course, not all web servers are the same, so consult your host if you are not sure where or how you can implement this yourself.

Redirect /twitter http://twitter.com/mybrand

Once you have added that to the bottom of your htaccess, test it out by going to:
mybrand.com/twitter

Once you have this working, you should be able to go to that URL and have it automatically send anyone who visits that address to your account on Twitter so they can find you easily, efficiently, and, ultimately, follow your Twitter stream.

This also cuts down on any confusion because what if your brand’s name is hard to spell or there is another account on Twitter that has an account such as “twitter.com/my_brand” or “twitter.com/mybrands”? Having this redirect in place will save someone time and any confusion over who is who on any social network.

A live example of this would be the Flickr group that we just started. Since Rebecca and I both have our own accounts on there, we decided to create a pool of photos of all things related to sixty4media.

Here’s the actual address to the sixty4media Flickr Group:
http://flickr.com/groups/sixty4media/

To simplify things, I’ve used this trick to create:
sixty4media.com/flickr

When anyone clicks on that URL or types it into any web browser, they will be directed to the appropriate page on Flickr to see our photo group there. I’ve even gone a step further and added another line to compensate for any misspellings in the event that someone tries to type in “sixty4media.com/flicker“. It’s really up to you as to how specific you want to get.

This concept was something I caught wind about via a Twitter post by John Chow, and it made a lot of sense to me as soon as I saw it.

My instant thought was how much it would make sense to be able to hand someone your business card at an event. Since your website is usually on the card with all the rest of your contact information, telling that person how to find you on Facebook or LinkedIn is easier because all you have to do is point out your website on the card and tell them it’s “slash, (enter name of social network here).”

The following is cross-posted from Miss604.com

I have the fortunate opportunity to participate in two upcoming conferences, both of which are geared for entrepreneurial women.

The first is the Enterprising Moms Network Conference on June 13th at the River Rock. It will run 11:00am until 5:00pm and sixty4media will have a swag table setup as well. My talk will be at 3:15pm and will be about social media basics specifically used for business. Other speakers that day include travel guru Claire Newell, Rita Kim of the Business Development Back of Canada, Fiona Walsh and many more. The Enterprising Moms Network is a community of business-minded working mothers who meetup regularly for workshops and events. Chapters span from Prince George, to White Rock, and down through Seattle. Proceeds from the conference on June 13th will go to Ronald McDonald House.

My next speaking engagement will be at the Chicks Who Click. It has been held in Kansas City, San Jose, Dallas, Raleigh, and now in Vancouver on June 27th at the Listel Hotel on Robson. Megan Cole, Monica Hamburg, Victoria Revay, Maura Rodgers, Erica Hargreave and Gillian Shaw are all my esteemed co-presenters throughout the day. I’ll be on a panel with Gillian and Erica talking about privacy and transparency online. There will be a tweetup the night before and you can follow all Chicks Who Click updates on the conference blog or Twitter by searching the tag: #CWC09.

After all the planes, trains, and automobiles, we have made it to and from San Francisco. WordCampSF 2009 was very much a success, and the event was a great chance to hear about all things WordPress, organized by the company that heads the core development of the platform, Automattic.

Photo by Rebecca Bollwitt

Photo by John Bollwitt

Photo by Rebecca Bollwitt

Photo by Rebecca Bollwitt

Photo by John Bollwitt

Photo by Rebecca Bollwitt

See more of our coverage on johnbollwitt.com and miss604.com that are tagged with wordcampsf.

Many thanks to the organizers, volunteers, and sponsors who helped to make WordCampSF 2009 a success. Already looking forward to the next one!

Fisheye shot of WordCampSF Welcome (Photo by John Biehler)

We’re spending today at WordCampSF 2009. We hope to learn and share a lot of knowledge about all things WordPress, and you can following along Rebecca’s blog post that she is updating throughout the day.

If you’re here, stop us and say hello!