I had the opportunity to join two panel conversations the last few weeks.

The first one was at the Online Revealed conference in Calgary where I joined Terri McCulloch, Tom Wilson,
Jens Thraenhart and Stephen Joyce. Alicia Whalen and Phil Caines did a great job moderating. I particularly like Phil’s live web servicing to show the websites we talked about. This was the third time we took the Tips from the T-List on the road and it was another great session where we discussed and debated the opportunities blogs, User Generated Content and Social Networks provide for the tourism industry. I like these sessions because I represent myself as a travel blogger and Tourism BC for our HelloBC Blogs initiative. It was the first time I met Terri and Tom, and they provided great insights. I’ve been a fan of Terri’s blog for a while now and Tom’s work is a great example of maximizing the medium with limited resources.
Thank you Patricia and Alicia from a Couple of Chicks marketing for inviting me. You’ve done a great job again.

Today I joined Ben Stringfellow (Director of Internal Communications, McDonalds USA), Thierry Hay-Sabourin (Senior Ecommerce Manager, Future Shop), William Azaroff (Interactive Marketing & Channel Manager, Vancity) on a panel called ‘Giving Your Brand Away’ at the Convergence 2008 conference. It was a pleasure to share the stage with this diverse group who’ve all done great things with building communities.
Ben gave us the story and result from a brand new closed community for McDonalds’ staff, reducing cost of printing newletters and creating efficiencies through shared learning between the restaurants. William gave us the remarkable story behind the Change Everything community while Thierry provide insights into Futureshop message boards, including Aaron, the search guy.
The biggest take-away I got from the session was that the first 500 members of your community will set the tone. So it’s important that the first members set the right tone, otherwise it will be hard to recover from that. Thierry shared that the tone on the English boards is very different from the French boards for example. At our HelloBC Blogs, we accidentallyThak did the right thing by starting our efforts with staff and our visitor centres, who set the right tone for consumers. Sometimes you need a bit of luck.
Thank you Sandy from Fjord Interactive for inviting me and a great conference.