Photo courtesy of @HiMYSYeD, from the PCTO Flickr pool

With Toronto being the media centre of the country, it’s no surprise that there are countless high-priced digital-related conferences held here on a regular basis. However, PodCamp stands as one of the best free meet-ups for people working and/or playing in the new media sphere.

Held yearly at Ryerson University’s Rogers Communication Centre, PodCamp attracts professional marketers, amateur bloggers, traditional media types, and social media mavens with varying degrees of skills and know-how. Here’s a quick snapshot of the city’s favourite self-described unconference—one of the few get-togethers #forthepeople #bythepeople:

Pinterest Wins Our Pins
It seems as though Pinterest—the suddenly uber popular social bookmarking site—has become the darling of the webisphere with an entire PodCamp session dedicated to it. If you’re not on Pinterest, you better move quick and request an invite as it’s only going to grow in popularity (yes, you have to be approved first, based on… nothing really). What does it do? It allows you to “pin” your favourite images from across the web to different mood boards. Sounds boring you say? Oh, you’ll see. Once you’ve signed up you’ll spend hours getting lost down that rabbit hole.

Here are 3 Pinterest accounts I learned about at PodCamp this year:

• GE’s Big Ass Machines
• The US Army (yes, they’re on Pinterest… who knew? I’m looking at their Army Style and Fashion board right now…)
• Graphic designer Jennifer Chong – One of the most followed women on Pinterest with over 1.2 million followers

Content Curation is the Future

Leona Hobbs of the Social Media Group gave a great presentation on the tenants of content marketing, including a section on content curation. If social media was the buzz phrase of the past few years, content curation will take it’s place moving forward.

“Content Curation is a term that describes the act of finding, grouping, organizing or sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific issue.” – Rohit Bhargava

Pinterest (yes, here it is again!) is basically a content curation tool—it allows people to gather interesting content objects (in this case, mostly photos) from across the web and share it with an audience (as does Tumblr, as does Posterous… Pinterest is just the easiest of the bunch to use it seems).

If you’re looking to incorporate content marketing into your mix, then you should realize that your goal is to get your content into one of the “streams,” to hope and pray that one of these curators (the new influencers who are always on top of the latest news, memes, videos, etc. and are also always the first to share across their social networks) will pick it up and broadcast it to their audience.

Transmedia Goes Academic

The Transmedia session took an approach I hadn’t seen before: focusing on the academic theology of the field, versus the actual tactile execution. Transmedia (telling a story across multiple platforms such as TV, radio, print), isn’t a new concept, but I’ve never really known about the history behind it or the thinkers who had shaped it. Presenters Veronica Heringer and Renee Mitson are students in Ryerson University’s Masters program in Media Production (I barely had a web course in my undergrad days—let alone a MA option in transmedia… times have changed!).

“Fans are the dream consumers.” – Veronica Heringer and Renee Mitson

One of their case studies involved the sci-fi program, Dr. Who, which went off the air in the 80s, but was kept alive by fans who began creating their own storylines and comic books based on the series.

In fact, this notion of “the fan” is one they stressed was an important part of potential transmedia campaigns. As they noted, fans are no longer a niche market. Hunting down more information on an obsession (say The Real Housewives for instance) is becoming the norm. We’re all trained to think that if we consume something in one form (say television) then we should be able to seek out additional information on another platform (like the web). As they described it, “Fans are the dream consumers”—motivated, invested, brave, loyal, and social.

Kick-Ass Women II

Ah, yes, and one more thing, the panel. This year’s PodCamp was extra special for me as I was asked to sit on a panel featuring “kick-ass women of digital media” (no, I’m not being cocky, that was the actual name). They included: Deborah Day (Social Media and Digital Media Strategist), Patricia Lee (Manager of Development, TV Interactive, Corus Entertainment), Melissa Shin (Managing Editor, Advisor Group, Rogers Publishing), and Lianne Stewart (Digital Strategist at Venture Communications). It was an exciting opportunity, and an awesome experience. Hopefully, I’ll have the cojones to do more of these types of presentations in the future.

All in all another enlightening PodCamp. Although once again I missed the legendary PodCamp party—and, for that I am thoroughly saddened. But, there’s always next year…