Business Strategist and Invoke Partner, Dario Meli, will be a panelist at the Banff nextMEDIA conference taking place June 5-7. Speaking to representatives from companies such as Microsoft, RIM, Globe & Mail, MTV networks, Canwest and Ubisoft, Dario will join fellow Social Media experts to explain how best to engage the social media space. Fellow speakers on the panel Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin: Anyone else having trouble keeping up? include Chris Becker, CEO of FileMobile, Maggie Fox, Founder and CEO of Social Media Group, and Shira Lazar, maven of both new and traditional media. The panel is to be moderated by Kris Krug, President of Raincity Studios.

Now in its third year, the Banff nextMEDIA conference is recognized as one of North America’s most influential digital media events. In a move to fuse the creative energies of the digital and film communities, the Banff World Television Festival will follow directly after the nextMEDIA conference. Invoke’s experience increasingly demonstrates that major media properties, many representatives of which will be in attendance at Banff, are no longer able to ignore the titan power of the Internet. Traditional media wants to know more.

Invoke is delighted to be recognized as a thought leader at both events as we work to bridge the gap between social media and the world-at-large.

Dario and I just got back from Banff where we attended nextMEDIA: The Future of Digital Content conference.

Photo Credit: Kris Krug

They couldn’t have picked a more serene location to host the event. It was held at the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel – it really looked more like a castle.

There were quite a few people at the event that were live twittering. You can see the aggregate of everyones tweets here or you can follow just mine here.

The conference “is where the world’s leading edge content creators, aggregators, and most influential solution-providers meet to develop key business relationships. Set in spectacular Banff, Alberta the conference once again links schedules with The Banff World Television Festival to take advantage of the synergies connecting these two media communities.” (I’m going to ignore the fact that they used my least favorite word ‘synergy’ in their description).

Overall, I’d have to say that the conference was a great success. We met some amazing people and saw some great new products that are just coming onto the market. My favorites were Overlay.TV – a new online video advertising company – and ScribbleLive – a live blogging platform, amongst many other great companies that I look forward to seeing in the future.

My favorite panel of the conference was ‘Harnessing the Power of Social Media Platform’. It was moderated by Vancouver’s Kris Krug with Jennifer Ouano – Elastic Entertainment, Steve Pratt – Radio 3 & Radio Digital Programming – CBC, Matt Toner – Zeros 2 Heroes Media, Sarah Blue – Cambrian House, and Ron Martin- ISWID Productions Inc -speaking on the panel.

They discussed how to nurture and build communities, ways to utilize social networks to build your communities, and calls to action they have used in the past that have worked amongst many other topics. Mack from Tech Vibes live blogged the panel and has an excellent recap. I found this panel to be the only one that really covered New and Social Media well. They had speakers that are active in the space and could provide concrete examples of work that they’d done in the past.

Photo Credit: Megan Cole

Jim Louderback of Revision3 had, in my opinion, the best keynote of the conference. He spoke on ‘Building a TV Network for the Internet Generation’. It was really interesting to see what he had to say about developing an Internet TV format that works and showing us examples of what has worked in the past. He used Diggnation, Ask a Ninja, and TikiBar. He explained how shoveling content onto the web just doesn’t work, why their (Revision3) ownership of their content is important, and how video on the Internet is rewriting the rules of viewing content. And he had one of my favorite quotes of the weekend “DRM is Dead”. Many of the other speakers and panelists would have done well to listen to Jim – and I am mainly pointing at you Malcom Wall of Virgin (your keynote was a complete fail and that seemed to be universally agreed upon). Again, Mack from Tech Vibes has done an excellent live blog covering the event.

Photo Credit: Kris Krug

There were lots of other panels and speakers throughout the event. I have to say that overall though, I was really disappointed in the speakers and panels – although there were some great ones. But, given that this was meant to bring New Media and Traditional Media together, it was definitely skewed to Traditional Media talking about New Media. As someone who works full time in New Media, I found that Traditional Media has a skewed perspective on what it means.

For next year, I would highly recommend that the organizers bring in speakers and panelists that work solely in New Media. I think that this would give the topics a more balanced approach to what the actual landscape looks like and will help to bring the two sides together. This was the stated goal of the conference and I’d have to say that it failed on this front. As it stood, it was more of a welcome to the Internet in 2002. This is a start to what could be an amazing conference, but there is still room for improvement. That said, I do plan on attending next year – I’ll just have a better take on what panels and sessions aren’t worth my time and I’d be better meeting and talking to the awesome group of attendee’s that went to the event.

You can find more coverage of the event here, here, here, and here.