Upcoming: Social Media Breakfast Ottawa 4

Marketing guru Seth Godin has blogged that the ‘Online Community Organizer’ would be the number one job of the future:

“Somebody to create and maintain a virtual world in which all the players in an industry feel like they need to be part of it . . . Like being the head of a big trade association, but without the bureaucracy and tedium . . .

If you were great at this, I’d imagine you’d never ever have trouble finding good work.”

For Breakfast 4 hosted by our new series sponsor – Gowlings – we’ve found some Ottawa greatness for you and will be bringing together a panel of experts to talk about Online Communities:

Luc Levesque, Founder & General Manager, TravelPod (A TripAdvisor / Expedia Company)

Gérard Métrailler, Senior Director, Product Management, Graphics, Corel Corporation

Ian Skerrett, Director of Marketing, Eclipse Foundation

Moderating our panel will be Jen Evans, Founder & Chief Strategist, Sequentia Environics.

Join our experts as they discuss how they have leveraged various forms of social media to cultivate online communities to help:

• engage stakeholders for business insight
• connect with customers to promote their brands and to monitor & protect their firms’ reputations
• leverage ‘conversation’ for the traditional marketing and public relations functions
• gather enthusiast customers to improve products & services and hone messaging
• access and harness the collective intelligence of its market to solve customer care issues
• promote and leverage an open source development environment

In what promises to be a lively conversation, hear about the best practices and lessons learned from experienced community practitioners — valuable information we can all use when considering and implementing online community building activities during an economic downturn!

Interested? Sign up today by selecting the ‘Register Now’ button at http://smbottawa4.eventbrite.com.

Some Breakfast Business

Post Breakfast 3, we did a draw for the door prize of a bamboo cutting board (with carving knife and fork) provided by our event sponsor, the Chicken Farmers of Canada. Amanda Hudson is our winner! Congratulations! We’ll be in touch to get it out to you in time for the weekend ‘Chicken’ Day festivities!

If you have any announcements appropriate to the Breakfast 4 audience (e.g. upcoming events, job openings, etc.), please contact the author (Simon Chen) directly. Said author was also remiss in not sending out a Breakfast 3 Feedback Survey – please contact him with any comments and suggestions.

We know many of you have blogged, Twittered, podcasted, posted pics and vids about our Breakfasts. Thank you for that! To make your content findable and discoverable, please use the tag: SMBOttawa

Finally, please keep in touch with us at this blog, on Facebook and LinkedIn. Going forward, we’re going to build and make use of a public group located at http://smbottawa.sixent.com — Check back next week as we’ll have some interviews with our Breakfast 4 panelists linked from there.