Attention marketing, communication, and social-media fans: Social Media Camp is coming soon. Co-Producer Paul Holmes started doing events based around website software WordPress in 2008, and things have been going strong since.
“We ended up running those for five years,” he says. “People were very interested in what was happening with WordPress.”
The strong interest in this led to the idea of creating an event for social media, which had become the latest buzz in the industry.
“Very quickly, social media became the topic of interest,” says Holmes. “One of our speakers came up to me after one of the events and said, ‘This is crazy, how many people showed up; do you think we could do something like this for social media?’ I said, ‘Sure,’ and the rest is history.”
Social Media Camp’s first event took place in 2010; Holmes says it attracted around 450 people and became Canada’s biggest social media conference. And despite the event’s name, Holmes says it has something for just about everyone.
“What makes us unique is that we aren’t just a marketing conference,” he says. “We capture the whole spectrum of social media, so we have stuff that’s targeted towards politics, journalism… [things] that are topical, but it’s not a marketing conference.”
And with Victoria’s booming tech sector, it makes the city the perfect location for this event.
“A lot of people don’t realize that technology is our top industry, and a close second is tourism,” says Holmes, “so everyone wants to come here, and we already have a technology base.”
Holmes says social media has been the most disruptive of all technologies in the last few decades.
“It has cracked open every industry and every sector,” he says. “There is nothing that isn’t affected by social media. Because it’s ever-changing, you have to be creative, you have to think outside the box, adapt.”
Social Media Camp
May 5 to 7
$699.99 and up (for 60 percent off student ticket, use the code “camosunstudent”)
Victoria Conference Centre
socialmediacamp.ca