Thanks to the great people at Refresh Events I was able to attend CaseCamp this year. This was my first time and while most people thought it would be about social media it was really about internet culture.
All procceeds from the event go to an amazing cause that being SickKids in Toronto.
How it is structured was in short talks given by several people many from the US who work in the Internet space.
So what was it like and what did they talk about?
While they said it was about internet culture the spotlight was obviously on social media.
They had Jason Scott who was made famous on twitter because of sockington the cat who has a twitter page for fun. What I got out of his talk was that don’t become a laughing bastard and we have all seen those and that don’t hate marketing, hate BAD marketing.
Then there was the science of Memes and what is a meme well according to its Wikipedia entry it is a postulated unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, and is transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena.
With an internet meme being one that spreads through the internet and their example was the Kanye West and Taylor Swift example that blew up after his drunken escapade at the MTV Video Awards.
The best was saved for last not that the others didn’t all have some relevance but College Humor’s Sam Reich talk on how to make viral videos that work every time was very insightful. It discussed classic examples like the star wars kids and went into the steps to help make a viral video work.
So overall it was a good event at times because the talks are so short it is sometimes hard to really get a lot out of the, and the due to the size of the event hard to really get a lot of conversation going and when some of the speakers tried most including me didn’t go up to bat.
A lot of what was discussed has probably been talked about at every marketing or advertising conference for the last year. I give my congratulations to everyone involved and maybe I will head back next year.