Northern Voice 2011 Review

For the first time, I attended Northern Voice up at UBC over the past two days — while it was a last minute decision to go, I was pretty impressed.

Dubbed as a “two-day, non-profit personal blogging and social media conference” it caught my interest, along with seminar titles including “Your Blog is Boring and Your Photos Suck” and “Awesome-Izing Your Podcast: Secrets from Radio.”

Going into it, I didn’t know what to expect. I’ve been to other marketing events through BCAIM and IIMA, and they tend to be extremely polished with really established speakers. Northern Voice, on the other hand, wasn’t as much — but thats what made it interesting.

Starting with the keynote, April Smith spoke from her first hand experience of the infamous Vancouver East side, and shared her unique story from struggling on the street to being behind a blog documenting the community she lives. It showed the power that social media can have, and how it can help share stories that may never reach the masses.

From there, came the breakout sessions — everyone could pick between 3-4 sessions, depending on their interests. I chose a panel on Social Media and how its impacting the news, followed by a discussion on online defamation, by the team at Vancouver Sun. Both were enlightening just how news organizations are having to change their perspective on how they communicate news. While the underlining method (telling a story) hasn’t changed, the new mediums have had a substantial impact on the speed and style of news.

Later that day, I took in a session on “How to blog funny” with Mike Vardy, which was an entertaining presentation around actual tips/ideas to make content more compelling. As you can read, I have learned nothing. After that, was a presentation around building strong communities online with blogs.

Day 1 ended with wine, followed by an after party at Academic – nice venue, just couldn’t stay too long.

The second day in, a Saturday, was a bit harder to get started. Aside from having to wake up on a Saturday, I had to figure out a different bus route to get out to UBC (I hate transit). But, I still managed to make it on time. Day 2 kicked off with Chris Wilson reminiscing about the good old days of the internet, along with interesting observations about where we’ve come in the past 20 years.

Following that, was more breakout sessions — starting it off was a pannel about creating online movements with no budget. It chronicled the recent election, and grass roots campaigns including “Harper Chooses Donuts Over The Planet”. It showed that even with no money, you can still compel people to take action. Following that, was a bit more technical presentation on how to write an ebook from an actual teacher, Cyri Jones… BCIT represent. (Interesting, as I’ve seen first hand how much text books cost, and how little of it actually gets used. After that, was a presentation titled “Stop Apologizing for Your Online Life,” all about breaking the stigma of ‘online’ life, versus ‘offline’ life. (wait, theres an offline?)

Finally, after two long days, the conference ended with a presentation by Tod Maffin who explained the process of “Awesome-Izing Your Podcast.” While Im fairly sure ‘Awesome-izing’ isn’t a word, he pointed out things people take for granted in any sort of video/audiocast — timing, music and tone. All of which, can take a podcast from just being another presentation, to being something more. This presentation dived deeper than any other, in my opinion, and was a great way to end the conference.

All in all, Northern Voice was a really well done — but long — two days. Seeing as it was a whopping $90 to go (probably the cheapest convention I’ve been to), I’d definitely buy tickets next year. Not to mention, I had the chance to meet a bunch of interesting people really passionate about online.

After Northern Voice, I’ve been inspired to blog a bit more, and get more active on Twitter…. two things that I’ve been half-assing for quite some time now.

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