You can view more images in the portfolio section.

This year’s hand-blown Ted Jolda ornament promotion for BC Ferries will be onboard in just a few days. For the past three years, I’ve worked with Ferries to create an arresting series of materials that showcases the beauty of the ornaments in their onboard retail stores. Each year has been a great success, with the ornaments selling out early.

This year’s may be my favourite with its rich purple and green colours – check it out in Passages Gift Shop while onboard. You can also view the work from past years’ promotions in my portfolio.

I’ve now updated the portfolio section with a few examples of recent promotions. Check them out.

First off, as someone familiar with social media and a regular (if casual) user of several of the more mainstream tools (Facebook, Twitter most often), I was looking for insights and advanced techniques, best practices and case studies from the speakers who, I assumed, were far better versed than I. In this respect, I was sorely disappointed.

I didn’t attend every session, but based my selections on the descriptions found on the SMCV11 website. These descriptions were usually quite vague, and even missing altogether – leaving me to select largely by title. A note to the organizers: detailed session descriptions allow attendees to make educated selections they are more likely to get value from.

The ‘Build the Ultimate Facebook Business Page in 60 Minutes’ workshop, wasn’t a workshop, and was only a regurgitation of the basic procedure for configuring a FB page – nothing covered was anything you couldn’t get from Facebook or a quick Google search. The presenter, a local social media consultant, didn’t give any insights as to best practices, or share helpful anecdotes or research from his experience working with clients. The second half of the presentation was given by a representative from Telus who basically just tooted his company’s horn about a successful campaign run last year that had a Facebook component to it (but was also driven by multi-channel marketing). He tried to make out that Telus is responsible for ‘changing the world’ and ‘saving lives’ because the initiative raised $2.5 million for mammography screening. He failed to disclose how much money Telus spent promoting it (I would suggest it cost at least 3x that amount – which would have been far better used as a direct donation). A great example of how not to do corporate responsibility – and had nothing to do with the session I signed up for.

Other presentations were frustratingly similar: very elementary info or thinly veiled sales pitches for products (ConstantContact, I’m talking about you) or books the speakers had written. Another presentation consisted of a presenter showing a series of YouTube videos and hardly saying a word. I think I’d be far less upset if the conference were free, but paying for presentations usually delivered for free definitely rankles.

Overall, despite the titles of many of the presentations, the info was decidedly elementary. The two keynote presentations were pretty good, but I actually left almost every presentation early because I just wasn’t learning anything. If you’re unfamiliar with social media, then the conference would probably be decent value – but for anyone already active in the space, I just didn’t see any value beyond the connections you might make with other attendees.

I was also surprised at how little social media was actually integrated into the conference; I was expecting a Twitter feed of questions for presenters/panelists up on a screen or other examples of ‘walking the talk’.

I’d like to end with a final note for the organizers: for panel discussions, it would be helpful if the moderator didn’t rely solely on the audience for questions, but had a stack of prepared, meaty questions to fill audience gaps. It would also be greatly appreciated if they would repeat each question for the whole audience before the panel answers; anyone sitting behind the person asking the question had to try and figure out the question from the answers provided. The frustration caused by this sums up my experience at SMCV11 quite well.

Needless to say, I won’t be attending next year.