Social media | BCBusiness

Tony Wanless | Image: iStock | Published: April 04, 2008

A few weeks ago, a fourth annual industry convention in Vancouver drew some 350 participants from as far away as New York. Yet hardly anyone in BC has heard of Northern Voice.

That's because it's not a typical convention, with squads of people in suits and a hierarchical, rigid framework for the weekend's events. Instead, in a loose structure featuring such charming names as Moosecamp and Northern Voice Wiki, it was a series of gab fests (online and offline) among people working in the new field of social media.

Social media takes in a lot of things that most people have heard of, but don't really connect. At its core it's an information industry, primarily concerned with publishing online. Blogs, like this one, are an essential element, but Wikis – basically, newsletters to which anyone can contribute – social networks (think Facebook), e-books, online news operations, digital press materials, and other new communications tools are also becoming more common as citizens of the social media community mash together different techniques to create new uses.

Most business people tend to think of this as the realm of youngsters who spend all their time hooking up on Facebook, or texting each other on where they are. (That does exist, by the way, on a social media site called Twitter, where people literally post what they're doing at that moment.)

But social media is emerging as an industry that serves more traditional business operations. For example, my favorite social network, LinkedIn, is a community of professionals that can be used as a base for local business groups. And in a climate where talent is the new prized business asset base, Human Resources people and Corporate Communicators are showing a lot of interest in wikis as a way to inform and educate (and, thus, keep) employees.

In the past three years, Vancouver has become one of North America's hotbeds of social media businesses, probably because it offers a friendly, co-operative atmosphere that attracts the open-source, collaborative types who populate the industry. For example, recently, CasecampVancouver – an “unconference” of marketers who use social media -- drew almost 80 people to a Gastown pub to share stories, business cases, and social media marketing techniques.

Casecamp and Northern Voice are unstructured “defacto industry associations” for social media, says Kris Krug, President of Raincity Studios, and a pioneering leader in the social media space.

“There's a

very strong community here, and it is based very much on co-opetition,” he explains. “It's emerged in other places like San Francisco, but the Vancouver community is different and very respected, probably because it's so welcoming.”

Typical of Vancouver, the local social media industry has sprouted relatively unnoticed at home, probably because it's still...well...social and so isn't netting the big bucks just yet. But it's drawing attention from far outside its Gastown base. Governments, financial institutions and other “straight” business sectors are recognizing the value of social media tools, and so are starting to engage social media companies to help them.

So, who knows, once the money starts flowing, some of that attention might even come from its own backyard.