raincoaster media and The Cryptosphere go to camp!

Social Media Camp, that is!

Social Media Camp

It’s that time of year, kittens: the time when we pack up the Cray, break out the cutoffs, and head to glorious Victoria, BC, to present a talk at Social Media Camp, the premiere conference of its kind in Canada, and that’s saying something.

The conference starts with a soft launch today, a sort of pre-party called Explore Victoria that you have only two hours to get to: we’re taking a swanky limo to Butchart Gardens, lolling around in fabulous foliage until we are sated with Earthly beauty, then heading to Catalano restaurant downtown for lunch and, immediately after that, the daring among us are taking to a Zodiac to do some whale watching with SpringTide. Ah, flashbacks to my Greenpeace days! After that, for those of cast iron constitutions, there’s an after-pre-party party at the Sticky Wicket pub. For those who don’t know, the Sticky Wicket is a sort of TARDIS of pubs. You go in the pub, and there’s another one behind it. And another behind that. And so on. And another on the roof. And they’re all different.

Thursday, there’s orientation, a photowalk, a social media panel, social media “talk show” (isn’t that redundant?) and a keynote by Marc Stoiber. Friday is the day you don’t want to miss, because your humble editor of The Cryptosphere ie me will be co-presenting with Social Media Camp founder Paul Holmes at 9:55 on “Culture along the Social Media Fringe,” which is to the rest of the marketing-focused conference as your crazy cousin who was a roadie for Miley Cyrus and ran off to Costa Rica to marry his spirit animal, a Tribble, is to the rest of the family.

If you’d like to learn how to market your business on Reddit, this session is not for you.

Paul and Lorraine explore many facets of the digital fringe, including what you might discover at websites like Reddit, 4Chan, and the like. We explore cultural phenomena like memes, digital currency, hacktivism, Anonymous, and all the things everyone thinks a smart person like you already knows about.

This session is guaranteed not to help your business at all, beyond impressing people at cocktail parties with your amazing knowledge of online culture.

 

Paul and I are, as you can see, going to be talking about the weird stuff. The scary stuff. The stuff you’d find … here. From 4chan to memes to Anonymous to Bitcoin to Reddit to Deep Web to Cypherpunks to…whatever randomness springs to mind. To give you an idea of the tone, this is one of the images I suggested for our slide deck, to represent 4chan:

I mean, dude, we have to visually represent 4chan. FOUR CHAN

Paul nixed it. Can’t think why.

Anyway, tl;dr, register already! I need to stock this conference with people who think I’m smart!