Today, I was scheduled by the wonderful Stephanie Leung (whose website is currently under construction) for live blogging. It was my first time ever live blogging anything, but I was lucky because I had wonderful partners at the first event. Michael Gleboff was scheduled to cover the Brian Solis keynote in the morning, and Erin Raimondo joined us at the live blogger’s table in the far back. Three live bloggers covering the first major keynote of the day? Bring it on! And this time, I made sure my camera had fresh batteries… but as the following photos will show, I clearly need photography lessons.

Having three live bloggers for one event was a definite challenge all around. Both Erin and I are pretty fast typers, which left Mike deleting a lot of what he typed – either Erin or I caught it before he had the chance to. This was pretty nice because it lent local ‘flavour’ (as per Deborah Chatterton’s remarks after the session) to the blogging, leaving people with a bit of our own personalities instead of just having a bunch of random sentences flying at the reader.

One of the things that I truly appreciated from today’s MC, Joanna Wyatt, was that she actually announced that there would be live bloggers at the keynotes and workshops. They introduced us by name for the morning keynote, which was especially nice because it also allowed people to tweet back to us if they had any questions about the conference.

Brian Solis: Social Media – The New Battleground for the Control of Communications

Brian Solis’ keynote was really interesting, complete with super complicated slides. In fact, Erin described one slide as “There is now a flowchart in the presentation… that I have no hope of explaining.” Click here to see our coverage of Brian Solis’ keynote.

CEO Panel – What Communicators Should Do, but Don’t

After Brian Solis finished his presentation, we went straight into a CEO panel, featuring Chris Zimmerman (Vancouver Canucks), Virginia Greene (Business Council of British Columbia), David Hahn (BC Ferries) & Chuck van der Lee (Rogers Retail). The switch was fairly smooth from the beginning, but as Erin was just leaving, both Mike and I were reorganizing cables and I was running around to try and take a photo of the panel. What I ended up with was a fairly blurry picture of the four CEOs on stage.

Click here to read our live blogging session of this panel.

Darren Barefoot & Julie Szabo: Campaign Killers and Online Faux Pas

Once the panel finished up, I rushed over to my next session, which was a solo gig. Luckily, I’d received Darren’s presentation the night before (oh the power of Twitter!) by email so I was slightly more prepared for the presentation for this solo presentation than the others. The presentation itself was very good – Darren & Julie used relevant and current examples of what to do and what NOT to do for social media campaigns, and they made it a fun, inviting presentation to be at. Last night, Darren had asked me to say nice things about their presentation, but honestly, no encouragement was needed. The presentation was spot on, it had people laughing, and it engaged the audience in asking questions at the end. It really made me strongly consider joining their social media bootcamp in the future, but the price tag is still so pricey, especially for a starving college girl like me!

Click here to read my solo coverage of this workshop. Please be kind! I was a little flustered.

Social Media Across Technologies, and Timelines – Della Smith & Ruth Atherly

After lunch, Alyssa and I covered a social media workshop that was a bit of a first for this conference. One of the presenters was on Skype, and was in New Zealand! Both presenters pointed out that if anything were to go wrong in the conference, it would most likely happen during their presentation. The presentation did have a couple glitches, but overall, it was definitely a different experience. I also tried taking a picture and live blogging it at the same time – worked out well when there was another person there, but I’m not sure I’d be able to do it if I were on my own. There’s gotta be a better way to blog & take pics at the same time!

Click here to read our coverage of the workshop.

The Real Value of an APR – Susan Jamieson-McLarnon

Interestingly enough, I’d met Susan Jamieson-McLarnon the night before at the Richmond Oval event (she was behind me in a food lineup), and after I learned her name, I realized that I’d originally met her at my first ever CPRS student event back in January. She is the Chief Examiner for the National Council on Accreditation for the CPRS and introduced the recently accredited PR professionals who were on the panel to answer questions for this workshop. This was my second (and last) solo live blogging gig for the day, and I was glad for it.

Click here to read my other solo live blogging coverage!

So that’s it. Five sessions, two solo, three with partners. Even though it was my first time live blogging, I came away from the experience thinking that if you didn’t like to tweet, you probably wouldn’t like live blogging. Since I love tweeting and keeping channels open for conversation on the internet, this was pretty natural for me. Throughout the sessions, I was jumping back and forth from Cover It Live and Tweetdeck to make sure that I caught everyone’s tweets, responded to people and provided useful information. I was also jumping from one window to another, furiously googling and looking for youtube links for more interactivity with the live blogging and to try and create the “OMG I’m actually here!” feeling. I’m not sure that I achieved that, but I hope I did!

Would I do this again? Definitely! If you’re looking to hire a liveblogger, shoot me an email! I’ve got my own transportation and equipment – you just have to provide the event and a blogging platform! (kidding… mostly!)