Erin (@ewormsbecker) and I drove into the parking lot right on time to arrive for registration, not to early and not too late. We were excited and didn’t know what to expect from the personal blogging and social media conference Northern Voice 2011.

When we entered the Atrium there were a smattering of people grouped around the tables networking and glued to their various mobile devices. They had phones, tablets, laptops, and cameras and everyone was multitasking chatting with the people there and chatting with their twitter followers. The air was vibrant, motivated and geeky 🙂 The hard part of the conference was choosing which presentations we wanted to go to. There were between 2 – 4 talks going on at the same time through the day.

The Keynote was by Chris Wilson (@cwilso) who talked about his journey with the Internet featuring his experience with Mosaic (the web browser credited with popularizing the world wide web) and Internet Explorer browsers.

We then chose to go to “How Do You Run a Successful & Engaging Online Movement Without a Huge Budget? – Lessons from the Three Grassroots Campaigns for Change” and found out about how political campaigns use social media and crowd-sourcing to influence political change. One of the panelists told us some interesting experiences he had working on the Canadians for Obama campaign. A key messages I took away with me was an answer to the question: how do we affect change with a majority government? The panelists’ advice was to organize people online but then make sure to move offline so media can see your voice. Many have trouble influencing change because they just stay in the online universe. Panelists: Ajay Masala Puri (@masalapuri), Jamie Biggar (@jamiebiggar), Steve Anderson (@Steve_Media).

After all the politics and the great Mexican wraps for lunch we went to “Creating Student Written e-Textbooks with WordPress, Leanpub & Anthologizer” which discussed how the education system was changing from a hierarchical system, where the teacher is like a bottleneck to learning, to a networked system where students work together to learn facilitated by teachers. Then there was a bit of technical demonstrations showing how ebooks could be exported from blogs and how this could be used on blogs with student posts to make class textbooks. Very interesting stuff, presented by Cyri Jones (@cyrijones).

Then came a talk on “Dueling Personalities: Managing Multiple Identities Online” which I found really interesting because it’s something I’ve been looking into a lot lately. There were 3 panelists who all were responsible for maintaining multiple twitter accounts for business and personal. One of them had only one business personality (she tweeted for Rogers) but the other 2 had multiple clients and shared some great advice about keeping it all straight! Panelists: Jenn Lowther (@jennmae), Miranda MacDonald (@RogersMiranda), and Conner Galway (@Conner_G).

We then made our way to a talk about Community Management, where Crystal Henrickson (@yelpcanada) gave us the lowdown of how she deals with managing communities at Yelp. Wow! What a job! The audience gasps when she shows the weekly schedule (above)! It’s only slightly less scary when she explains that it’s the schedule for 10 CMs and not just one. Still.. Wow!

Lastly, we went to a talk about Gamification where Travis Boisvenue (@Travisboisvenue) challenged us with the question: how can we apply game rules to reading the news and make it fun? I loved this talk. It got me thinking a lot about how to improve user experience.

I left the conference inspired by the great community of people there to tweet and blog and connect more than ever, and to dig deeper into everything I’d learned and apply it to what I was doing in my online life.

I’m looking forward to next year!

–Petra