Marketing Safari

Social Media Workshops and Internet Marketing Courses

It looks like it's going to be a busy year in teaching and talking. The first course of the year will be a two day Internet Marketing course in Reykjavik, Thursday and Friday next week (January 21.-22.). The week after I will be in Denmark. I've got two social media workshops planned in Denmark, one in Århus on the 28th of January and another one in Copenhagen on the 29th. I will most likely be doing several more in other European cities in the coming months, so stay tuned for updates.

I've got two other courses planned in Reykjavik, a weekend course over two saturdays, the 13th and 20th of February and then another one on March 18th-19th.

If you want any further information on the courses or want to sign up, you can send me a message to hjortur (at) scope.is - or if you want me to set up a workshop in your hometown.

Cheers
Hjörtur

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Highlights from the 140 Character Conference in New York

I am writing this as I'm flying back from the 140 character conference in New York where I've had two great days with Jeff Pulver (@jeffpulver) and a fantastic cast of characters. This conference was different from many other conferences. Jeff managed to gather a great variety of people who had different uses for and experiences from twitter.

Starting with two legendary people in social media, Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly media (@timoreilly) and Jack Dorsey founder of Twitter (@jack), the conference continued peaking with an interview with Wyclef Jean (@wyclef) and a panel on twitter for news gathering for traditional media that included Ann Curry of NBC (@anncurry) and Rick Sanchez of CNN (@ricksanchezcnn). Ann Curry was absolutely fantastic on that panel. Both sessions can be watched at videos on the 140conf site.

Other favorites from the conference include Laura Fitton's (@pistachio) Love Story, Israel's use of Twitter for public diplomacy (@davidsaranga), the video blogging panel and the social media for social change panel with inspirational people like @drew (#blamedrewscancer), Liane Thomson (@missilecitykids), @amanda (Twestival) and @StaceyMonk (Epic Change). For more techy or geeky stuff, you might like Kevin Slavin's talk about things that tweet and for the talk with the most f-words, check out Chris Weingarten's (@1000timesyes) brilliant talk.

Interesting topics that weren't covered but might be covered on the next 140conf were twitter for travel and more on twitter for marketing. If I were to say in two or three sentences what the outtake of the conference was, I would say it was this:
* Many people shared their rules on what was accepted and what not on Twitter - and they contradict each other. That tells us Twitter is only a tool and every man has to make his own rules on how to use Twitter most effectively. I'll write another post tomorrow on my view on the different rules.
* Twitter is changing the world, 140 characters at the time. The fundamental change is that things are now happening in real time. We can follow events and opinions developing as they happen. And we can use twitter search and hashtags to follow those events. This is influencing business, news gathering, politics, celebrities and pretty much all levels of communications.

The events in Iran and the use of twitter to organize the demonstrations in Tehran was a very fresh issue. Two discussion that were taking place in the hallways and on twitter was if people should be changing their location to Tehran to show support and make it difficult for the Iranian government to track those on location who are using twitter, or if it was obscuring the news and which news were from authentic saurces and which not.

Another discussion was about the green avatars but people are turning their avatars green to show support for fair elections in Iran. That effort has been criticised for being useless but as @anamariecox puts it:

You can watch videos from the conference at http://140conf.com/watch. And here is my own talk on "How I Became a Twitter Character", as Jonny Goldstein (@jonnygoldstein) expressed it in his visual notes:

More of Jonny Goldstein's visual notes from the conference can be seen on his in his 140conf set on his Flickr account.

Jeff is planning two other 140 character conferences, one in London Nov. 10th.-11th. and one in Los Angeles in October. There's an open call for speakers if you'd like to see someone speak, or have a story to share.

Tweet you later
Hjörtur

Who's Going to the 140 Character Conference?

Jeff Pulver has organized a very interesting conference in New York which he calls the 140 Character Conference. As you may have guessed, it's all about Twitter. There will be a lot of great speakers like Jeff him self, Tim O'Reilly, Chris Brogan, Liz Strauss, Howard Greenstein, myself and loads of other excellent tweeple. So if you'll come to the 140 conference, we'll have a chance to meet in person. If you haven't registered already, use this special "Marketing Safari's Readers Discount Code": FQSMJKVX.

I'll be on the road in the upcoming weeks (not that roads can take you far here in Iceland, they only go in circles, so I'll be doing some flying too), if you'd like to meet. I'll not only be in New York at the 140 conference on June 16th and 17th, I'll also be in the Faroe Islands this week (I'm actually somewhere over the North-Atlantic Ocean on my way to the Faroe Islands as I'm writing this) and might be doing some talking in Spain by the end June. I'll be running a two day course in Internet Marketing in Danish in Torshavn on the 6th and 7th of May. For my local readers, I'll be running a two day course in Internet Marketing in Icelandic on the 14th and 15th of May at my office location in Iceland.

If you're interested in some of those events, let me know. If I'm not coming to "a theater near you", that may be arranged.

See ya
Hjörtur

Twitter Conference for Arctic Trucks

We are doing a little experiment on twitter - holding sort of a press conference for the people on Twitter.  It's for Arctic Trucks, a company here in Iceland that rebuilds trucks so that they can be driven over glaciers, rivers and just about anything else that might be in their way.

In 2007 they drove to the North Pole with Jeremy and the Hamster from Top Gear. This year, they drove to the South Pole, a much longer expedition called the Antarctica Challenge. The drivers, Emil, Hjalti and Gisli will be answering questions about the expeditions, about the cars and about driving and modifications in general.

So if you want to meet the drivers from Arctic Trucks, sign in to the #arctictrucks room on tweetchat.com using your Twitter id (you do have a twitter account, don't you?). We start at 5pm today GMT (that's 6pm in Western Europe, 12pm in New York and 9pm in LA).

Tweet you later
Hjörtur

Iceweb 2008 - A Great Excuse To Come To Iceland Next Week

As you may have read, either here on my blog or elsewhere, Iceland is extremely affordable at the moment :) Even the beer is cheap for tourist, for the first time in more than 800 years. So if you ever wanted to go to Iceland and experience the Northern lights, the night life, the nature, the women culture, now is your change.

Next week there will be an Internet conference in Reykjavik that might interest you - Iceweb 2008. Among the keynote speakers are Kathy Sierra, Chris Mills, James Cridland, Mark Boulton, Nate Koechley, Per Rasmussen and myself. I will be doing my "People Will Tell - How Social Media Is Changing The Way We Do Business and Marketing".

Check out the agenda and take a refreshing trip to a conference in Iceland.

Hjörtur

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