BandwidthCamp

Sean Moffitt over at Buzz Canuck is helping co-chair the Canadian Marketing Association’s first annual conference dedicated to Word of Mouth called “From Mass to Grass”. Some of the topics at the event are the following:

• Consumer Generated Content

• Social Media, Networks & Virtual Communities

• Grassroots Community Building

It looks like it’s going to be a day packed full of insightful and engaging information as we hear from people who work with such brands as Steam Whistle, Vespa Canada, West 49, lululemon, Monster.ca, Nokia and Yahoo. I’m really looking forward to West 49 as it’s a store I shop at, being a snowboarder, and a brand I’m engaged with more then any other at the conference with the exception of Yahoo through the use of my Flickr account. I can’t wait. You can check out Sean’s post about it here.

On Monday, I had to ask myself that very question. What are the protocols for doing this? Do I go into great detail or simple say we are having creative differences? The hardest part wasn’t actually firing my client. It was maintaining a professional attitude while my client chose not to. I made sure to cover all my basis and double check my contract, which I didn’t breach. But I still feel funny about the whole situation.

It’s funny how people change the minute you don’t want to do business with them anymore. The one thing I need to learn to do is more (read better) due-diligence when it comes to signing with a new client. I would rather not have this situation happen again. Starting my own shop has been a great learning process and this is going into the vault of knowledge. The things I’m learning and realizing I don’t know the answers to are profound. This may not be my crucible, but I’m going to find out as I continue on my journey.

Have you ever had to fire a client? How did you go about it?

I’ve been meaning to write about this since last week. BusinessWeek had a great article called Why Leadership Means Listening.

Today’s employees want to be asked for feedback and they want to be heard. Here are four tips to help you become a better listener.

The four tips they mentioned were the following:

1. Fix your gaze
2. Ask questions in response to a question.
3. Incorporate feedback.
4. Be available for the tough questions.

I think it’s a great list and I would add just one tip to the list. It’s important when doing all of the above that you don’t start formulating your response as the person is asking you a question. I know I’ve been bad at this myself. You’re all ready with an answer to their question before they even finished asking it. I heard this on television, from all places, when I was in my early teens. Really focusing on the person and you to can become a great listener.

Kotaku is pointing to a cool write up at Law.com about lawyers who have some nice diggs in Second Life.

[tags]Kotaku, SecondLife [/tags]

The CBC is going to air a documentary tonight the video game industry, called GAMER REVOLUTION. The show is going to repeat again on February 8, 2007 at 8pm. Unless it’s a two part documentary, we’ll find out tonight I guess.

A groundbreaking leap into the new cultural frontier, GAMER REVOLUTION is an intelligent, pop savvy and visually stunning look at how computer games are changing the world.

Red Apple Entertainment is behind this documentary. They also happen to produce Opening Soon on the Food Network, which I love to watch.

[Update] Next week is not a repeat but part two of this documentary. They plan to look at online worlds including Second Life, WoW, Entropia and The Sims Online.