Social Media Spotlight: Conference offers ‘practical, tactical’ social skills

iMedia Conference

iMedia 2014 takes place March 15, 2014 (with a tweet-up on March 14!)

Conference offers ‘practical, tactical’ social skills

By Linda Hoang

Organizers for an upcoming Edmonton social media conference want to help you take your online presence to the “next level.”

iMedia 2014 organizer Morgan Hrynyk says the annual conference, featuring sessions led by an all-star team of local social media professionals, is meant to arm attendees with skills to grow their personal brand or business online.

“Everything with this conference is no fluff,” Hrynyk says.

“We’re giving you practical, tactical know-how, so you can move forward in your online presence. Quite frankly, none of us have time to waste so all of the sessions are truly designed to give you practical, tactical tools and ideas.”

This is the third year of iMedia, and this year’s event is more focused than previous conferences – with three different conference tracks to help guide Edmontonians through 12 different breakout sessions led by local social media experts.

“We have a more social media basics track, we have a communications and branding track, and we have a technical, how-to track,” Hrynyk says.

“We’ve been seeing a lot of people mixing and matching between tracks to find courses they’re super interested in.”

The sessions are:

Social Media Basics

  • Managing the monster: social media community management for smarties
  • Social from scratch: a beginners’ recipe for social media success
  • Getting to know your social customer
  • Strategically social: choosing the best sites to spend your time on

Communications & Branding

  • Putting the idea first
  • Quality over quantity: the PR approach to social media
  • How to take an online business offline
  • To ad or not to ad: the crucial conversation in today’s social media scope

Technical How-tos:

  • Data drive social media
  • Extending WordPress for social media engagement & content cross-distribution
  • Practical SEO
  • Google Analytics beginners bootcamp

Session facilitators include familiar names on the local social media scene, including Adam Rozenhart (@bingofuel), digital strategist of Caldar Bateman Communications, Chris Tse (@ChrisTse), co-owner of Blitz Conditioning Inc., and Bree Emmerson (@BE3Designs), principal at BE3Designs.

Click here to see all session facilitators.

Hrynyk says the local expertise speaks volumes about the social media community in Edmonton.

“It’s just really exciting to be able to pull from our own talent and put together a high-calibre conference,” she says.

“We say Edmonton is one of the highly-engaged communities. It obviously is.”

iMedia Conference

iMedia 2014 features three different conference tracks to help guide Edmontonians through 12 different breakout sessions led by local social media experts.

Kendall Barber, co-founder of local success story Poppy Barley, will be delivering a keynote along with Greg Hounslow, who manages WestJet’s social media accounts and develops the company’s social strategies.

“WestJet is the prime example of a corporate communications department using social media to really engage their community. I try to find a better example than WestJet and I just can’t. They’re just doing such an amazing job across the board,” Hrynyk says.

“I don’t think there’s anyone in our community doesn’t know about Poppy Barley and how they’ve built their online base and really just completely taken things to an incredible place with how they’ve built their brand.”

Along with the full-day conference on March 15, there will also be a free kick-off tweetup on the evening of March 14. Following the conference will be a VIP speed networking event where attendees will also get a chance to have more one-on-one time with session presenters.

Tickets for iMedia are $130 and will be on sale until March 12.

Is the cost is worth what you get? Hrynyk insists it is – highlighting the calibre of local experts and variety of session options. As someone who – for a living – holds social media workshops to help Edmontonians figure out how to better navigate into those sometimes murky social media waters, Hrynyk says even she will find high value by sitting in on these sessions.

“I’m so nerded out by this,” she says with a laugh.

Her excitement for the event is contagious.

She’s hoping to fill the seats with 200 Edmontonians interested in getting socially savvy.

Click here to learn more about iMedia 2014.

Click here to purchase tickets.

Note * I will also be the emcee for this year’s conference! Hope to see you there.


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