Post your questions to @marinamann

We have a superb panel line up and what promises to be a heated discussion on social commerce including a few case studies, insights and strong opinions.

Social Commerce, The New Normal Influence Economy 
Most customer interactions with your brand and the customer buying decisions that goes along with that – won’t happen on your brand’s website. In 2010, U.S. e-commerce sales totalled $165.4 billion, up 14.8%. Opportunities are burgeoning as the cost of eCommerce operations drops and customers procure more goods & services online. In this session see case studies of how innovation in social media can drive the overall commerce model and enable brands to connect with customers and their friends to create value in earned media.

The panelists included:

Rochelle Grayson, CEO of BookRiff Media Inc., and Program Advisor, Industry Chair for the University of British Columbia’s Social Media Program @RochelleGrayson

Rochelle Grayson is CEO of BookRiff.com. BookRiff let’s consumers creates and publish their own books by mixing and matching content from published books, BookRiff creators and the Internet. Anyone can create a book compiled of riffs from start to finish in 48 hours and make it available for sale as an ebook or in print through bookriff.com. Along the way every content creator get’s paid for their used piece of mirco-content. Rochelle is a serial entrepreneur. She’s also Industry Chair for the University of British Columbia’s Social Media Program and instructor of Social Media monetization at UBC. Welcome to you.

Harley Finkelstein, Chief Platform Officer at Shopify; Harley explains his role in Fast Company

Harley Finkelstein, is chief platform officer at Shopify.com. Shopify is an Ottawa based eCommerce DIY platform used world wide. Sopify lets anyone set up an eCommerce store in 15 minutes. In the last 5 years, the startup has grown to power 16,000 stores in 70 countries and generates over 100 million in annual sales and growing. Harley is also a busy entrepreneur, MBA and lawyer.

Matthew Bertulli, CEO and Founder at Demac Media and Co-founder, Socialgift.com

Matt Bertulli was one of the first angel investors in Socialgift.com – Socialgift is a group buying startup that makes is easy for your friends to decide on a group gift and chip in and buy you something they agreed you’d love from a participating retailer or allows friends to contribute whatever amount they’d like to your gift. Matt is also co-founder and CEO of Demac Media, an e-commerce professional services solution agency in Toronto.

SocialGift from Mango Studios on Vimeo.

Daniel Patricio, Founder and Product Manager at Pinpoint Social @danielpatricio

Daniel Patricio is founder and product manager of Poinpointsocial.com, Pinpoint Social, is a self service platform that makes marketing on Facebook simpler and more effective. Pinpoint Social enables you to create dynamic Facebook fan pages and allows you to create customized campaigns, promotions or contests without the need to write a line of code. Pinpoint Social also provides detailed customer analytics.

See you there!

-Marina Mann  LinkedIn or Twitter @marinamann

A few winners that rode into the sunset on the virtual horse include these four group text (yes text) not-so-startup startups: GroupMe , Yobongo , Beluga and TextPlus

Hashable – a potential replacement for Linkedin where you check in to people, not places.

And of course SXSW is the best place to use Foursquare. You can really see the benefit + utility of the app in context. It’s easy to get hooked lurking to see where your friends are in your search for the best session at any given time or who’s at what party. This year, Foursquare also launched a number of new features and a serious integration for discounts on  AMEXs new platform for realtime checkins.

• Should financial institutions bother with Social Media?
• Is Social Media a revolution?
• Do communities dominate brands? And who is generation-C?
• What is a Social Media strategy?
• Will the combination of technology and strategy change the basis of competition?
• What are the next practices for Social Media in financial services?

Follow my twitter stream of the event here.

The quality of the sessions was high, many were insightful and interesting. This year, because of the combined event, I spent a bit more time attending the TV sessions which expanded my thinking on storytelling and the cross-over from the narrative we know to the branding of the narrative that will be more and more transparent and pervasive. Given the medias’ pandemonium on the demise of TV, branded content seems to be the destiny of both the red and the blue pills.

A few sessions really stood out for me. An interview with Ricky Gervais – if you have the chance to see this man speak don’t miss it. Matt Mason‘s presentation on media and piracy was an excellent framing of the issues related to piracy. His book The Pirate’s Dilemma is a recommended read and a great continuation of what Lawrence Lessig started.

Faris Yakob: Stuff That Doesn’t Work Yet was a treat. His talk, albeit a bit silly at start, drew me in by the way he framed and articulated the gravitas (love using that word) of the media moment we’re in. Yakob lead me to Henry Jenkins, MIT Professor, media scholar.

Henry Jenkins is the author of several books including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture and Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. His point of view of today in media is insightful. He says:

On participatory culture: A world governed by participatory culture has the potential to be much more diverse in a world controlled by a small number of media producers. As average people develop the ability to tell their stories, we’re seeing different perspectives emerge. We’re seeing different groups gain representation, we’re seeing groups challenge the dominant media images that have been constructed for their lives. And the challenge for those of us caring about social justice issues is to make sure that these tools get into the hands of those people who have been the most oppressed and most dispossessed to get their stories out and get their stories into circulation.  As we expand who has the power to tell stories, we have the potential to tell stories that grab our imagination, to touch our hearts, that come not from entertainment infrastructure but from some average citizen who’s reality has never been depicted on the screen before. And I think that’s the real excitement of our present moment of media change.

Explaining the concept of convergence media: Every story, every brand, every image, every relationship plays itself out across a maximum amount of media channels. The information system is converged, it’s integrated. We carry pieces of media with us all through the system. And that’s being shaped top down by decisions made in corporate boardrooms and bottom up by decisions made in teenagers’ bedrooms. In other words it’s shaped by the integration of the media industry so the same company may own interest in all media platforms and it’s shaped by teenagers wanting the media where they want it, how they want it, in the form they want it, when they want it. And they’re willing to take it illegally if it’s not available to them legally. Those two pressures are working together to create a much more integrated media sector than we’ve seen before.

For more on Henry Jenkins, check out the video below.

Thanks to Mark Greenspan, Amy Davies and the entire team at nextMEDIA and Banff 2010 for a great conference!

The game-changing news is that Apple has done away with copy protection technology known as digital-rights management or DRM. “DRM-free” means music can be copied an unlimited number of times, to any device. It remains to be seen if this change in business model drives net new paying customers to iTunes (or those previously known as the pirates).

Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law

This evening, exhausted and talked out from SXSW in Austin, I attended a charged discussion on Canadian Copyright reform in Toronto.

The panel included NDP Digital Affairs Critic and MP Charlie Angus, Victoria Owen (representing the Canadian Library Association), Stephen Waddell (ACTRA), and Don Quarles (Songwriters Ass.) Michael Geist, who remains leader in the cause, posted his opening remarks here.

If  you’re working in Digital Media, Branding, Marketing & Advertising or otherwise consuming, creating or sharing content, I urge you to get involved in copyright reform because these reforms will impact how you deliver content to your audience and how your audience consumes your content. Consider this: your audience will need to pay more to get online and interact with your branded content, send you an email, and even see  your display ad.

The problem: Lobbyists wish to legislate compensation to agencies and corporations for alleged lost revenues due to online pirating .

The Proposed solution: a Canada wide ISP (Internet Service Provider) tax levy.

To convert piracy to a new royalty stream, it is proposed that a ~ $5 monthly licensing fee be included in Canadians’ Internet bills, in addition, Canadians may also pay for content at every access point. This blanket license is modeled after the tax levy on blank cassettes in the 70′s, 80′s and 90′s.

You may remember that his idea was inspired by imposed “copy fees” on cassettes in the 1980′s. Although this concept worked in the physical world to some degree, in the virtual world we need to experiment and innovate to find a variety of solutions that favor all content creators not just a select few.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume a Canadian ISP tax levy could work. We’d have to establish a whole new level of bureaucracy to police the following:

• Make all media freely copyable in Canada. Read: users will be able to pay for their media once, and freely copy and share it without limitation (case and point: the Batman, Dark Night DVD was sold with an easy-to-ripe, DRM-free copy).

• Canadian film makers, song writers, writers, directors, producers, artists, and [actually] all Canadians could register their created media with some central bureaucratic agency, and as such, receive compensation for their content based on defined criteria like file downloads and bandwidth.

• The government agency, would need to track content creators and copyright owners as well as public domain content and know who to pay what in some sort of timely fashion; they’d need to keep track of  who’s revenue license was valid and who’s expired (you get the idea).

All this to say, in my humble opinion, government should encourage innovators to innovate a series of business models that adapt to the times and the paradigm rather than legislating a business model.

What can you do? Find your Member of Parliament and send them an email, a video, a photo, a podcast, a song and maybe a piece of your mind.

For more reading on the issue, check out: CreativeCommons.ca, and Chris Anderson’s Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business.

The 6th Innoversity Summit hits Toronto on March 9 and 10, 2009 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. The summit is dedicated to promoting innovation, creativity and diversity.

The Innoversity Summit brings together hundreds of thinkers, doers and influencers from media, culture, public service, community, academia, the private sector and elsewhere. A number of great panels are scheduled for both days.

On Monday, March 9th at 3:45 join me and my panelists at “The Virtuous Circle” for a heated discussion on cross-platform success and failures.

Moderator:
Marina Mann, Digital Marketing Strategist

Speakers:
Jeff Leake, Director of Music Program, XM Satellite Radio
McLean Greaves, VP of Interactive, Zoomer Media
Ryan Trotman, Director of Digital, CTV Music & Youth Services
Ray Philipose, VP Strategy & Product Development, Canwest Digital Media

You can register for a day pass or for a-la-cart attendance starting at $20.  Onsite registration is on the 700 level of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, South Building, beginning at 7:30 am on Monday, March 9, 2009.

Onli

But how can corporations protect their content without surveillance and copyright protection. How do they face the question:  Do you want to sue your customers?  And more importantly will your customers want to sue you? Add branded-content and user-generated content models and there’s a slew of issues to consider in terms of the balance between rights we protect and the interests of the customer to engage with the protected works. “So the limits are equally important as the rights we create.” There in lies the dilemma.

In June 12, 2008 Canada’s Industry Minister Jim Prentice introduced copyright reform legislation which triggered considerable debate over the future of Canadian copyright policy. Michael Geist, leader in the cause, is the research chair of Internet and e-Commerce at the University of Ottawa. By summer 2008, Geist had 90,000 people join his “Fair Copyright” group on Facebook  and in so doing, started a grass roots movement to debate the issue.  YouTube, Wikis, bloggers and even Boing Boing picked up the cause and sprouted international media stories about Canadian copyright reform. In this documentary Geist goes to the people to try to explain “Why copyright emerged as such an important issue to Canadians today?”