Meet our speakers – Glen Gower

Posted by Karen in Blog      1 comment

Jul
4

Glen Gower is the man behind OttawaStart, a site he started back in 1998 to highlight and promote useful web sites about Ottawa. Glen clearly believes in the power of social media because he’s been involved in it going on 20 years. (Yes, it’s really been around that long.) As our keynote speaker, Glen will take us through the past, present and look at the future of social media with his thoughts about how its power can be harnessed to make Ottawa (or any other city) a better place to live.

1. Describe yourself in three words.
Busy, Busy, Busy.

2. How long have you been involved in Social media?
I joined the National Capital Freenet back in the mid-1990′s — I think that counts as a early type of social media.  And even before that I was a member of several Ottawa BBS’s — which were online gathering places for local geeks.  (That was back when a 2400 baud modem was considered super fast.)

3. Which social media tools do you find the most valuable or useful?
Google Reader – The most efficient way to keep track of blogs and other frequently updated content.

Tweetdeck – To manage multiple Twitter accounts and keep track of what’s happening in our city.

Feedburner – A quick (and free) way to syndicate RSS content to multiple platforms.

4. What do you think social media newbies need to know about it?
You’ll get so much more out of social media if you contribute something.  Write a comment on a blog, reply to a question on Twitter, share something you enjoy on Facebook.

5. Share with us a hidden treasure or gem you have discovered.
Some shameless self-promotion: OttawaStart’s Best of Ottawa Blogs RSS feed – our curated list of great local blog posts.

6. What’s the next big thing?
The next big thing is hyper-local community web sites.  These will be written by people (or groups of people) who obsessively track everything about the neighbourhood — and in turn everybody in the neighbourhood will subscribe and contribute.

There are several great ones that already exist in Ottawa like Eric Darwin’s West Side Action,  and I see more and more of these popping up every month (like this Bells Corners Blog I just found last month).  And in the next couple of years small businesses will catch on and we’ll finally see them shift ad spending away from community newspapers and direct mail to take advantage of the trend.

7. Why do you think Ottawa has such a strong and vibrant social media community?
For the same reason that we have a strong and vibrant community, period: people in Ottawa genuinely care about making this a better place to live.  Maybe that’s part of the culture of living in a public service town?  We have so many passionate, tireless leaders in the social media community.  Like the foodieprints gang who are doing so much to improve Ottawa’s culinary scene, or Apartment 613′s attention to the cultural scene, or the organizers who put together this year’s Twestival… I could go on but you’ll have to wait for my talk at the conference!