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We’ve had a pretty active couple of weeks, the highlight of which has to be attending CIX on Dec 1 at MaRS. Nexalogy was selected to participate as one of the top twenty innovative startups at CIX. There were great presentations of startups to a room packed with VCs. In spite of a a technical hiccup, we managed to place fifth overall and were chosen to participate in a three month stint in Silicon Valley courtesy of the Canadian Technology Accelerator. We’re following in the footsteps of Context.io, who won the same award last year. It was a huge honour to be selected by CIX and the result certainly exceeded our expectations.

On a personal note, it gave me occasion to make connections with a couple of entrepreneurs – one of whom lives in my own backyard of Montreal – at the speakers dinner. Mark O’Sullivan of Vanilla Forums is facilitating communities everywhere a phenomenal 300,000+ forums around the world. Over dinner I had a great discussion with Allen Lau, CEO and Founder of Wattpad on different forms of social data (ebooks are social data too!). I learned about the surprising intersection between commercial real estate architecture and Virtual worlds from Colin Graham, CEO of Arcestra.

In the meantime, the team is hard at work putting the final touches on the UI for our first product, Nexalive.

Exciting times!

Not Mars the planet! MaRS Discovery District, the Toronto-based incubator for science, technology and social entrepreneurship plays host to CIX this December 1, 2011.

Nexalogy is proud to have placed in the top 20 Canadian companies for The Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX). We’ll be heading to Toronto to represent Montreal startups alongside Recoset, Vanilla Forums and Woozworld.

CIX is an annual event that expertly curates for potential partners and venture capital to watch a demo and meet the entrepreneurs. Companies are judged on a number of key factors including: product/service offering, depth of management, market opportunity and business model. There were hundreds of startups that applied so it’s a great privlege to be selected.

If you think you want to come along to cheer us on in person, you an also register here. And check out the schedule too; looks like it’s going to be a packed day!

A shorter version of this blog post can be found on the Toronto Board of Trade website (link)

In one of the more important turns of the campaign David Suzuki endorsed Dalton McGuinty and the OLP. Green Energy is a top issue associated significantly with the Liberals; on Twitter over the Sept. 17th weekend their environmental record was significantly discussed. The Green Energy discussion also links to the major campaign theme to date of Jobs, as jobs are discussed in terms of environmentally friendly job creation. This shows that the previous weekend’s trending of green jobs really got traction in the week of September 12-16th.

For Sunday Sept. 18th, “Vote” was the top word, associated in particular with comparisons of the voting record of Andrea Horwath to Tim Hudak in the Ontario Provincial Parliament. Many Tweeters retweeted the message that Horwath and Hudak voted the same way more than 150 times despite their ideological differences. “Job” continued to be strong, with Tim Hudak’s announcement of a five-point job plan getting some traction on Twitter showing that the progressive conservatives know how to react to the biggest topic of the election campaign so far.

Health care began to trend for the first time on Sunday the 18th in the Twitterverse as a campaign issue with Dalton McGuinty visiting the sick kids hospital to emphasize the OLP’s record on health care garnering a number of tweets. Multiple tweets critiqued the PCPO and Tim Hudak for dismantling hospitals in the past and lacking plans to fund hospitals in the future. In a reflection of how the OLP is engaging well with the Twitterverse, a number of tweets associated the Party with an elevated level of trust compared to the other parties when it comes to guiding the Ontario health care system.

Overall Timeline

Timeline for the weekend of September 17th and 18th

Top Words reflect Green Jobs, and the David Suzuki endorsement of the OLP

The top publishers e.g. those Twitter accounts that produced the largest number of tweets are as follows:

However, the most important accounts based on interaction, our “Top Tweeters” (mentions and replies, but not retweets) are as follows and show that Horwath garnered the most discussion over the weekend, followed by Hudak. McGuinty was not discussed as much this weekend by name.

Top Shared Links

1. Similar to the previous week, an attack site against Horwath tops the shared links
2. The official Dalton McGuinty OLP Facebook page, with multiple videos
3. An OLP ‘rogue’ website comparing the voting record of Horwath and Hudak
4. The official Andrea Horwath NDP website for NDP videos
5. A video that has now been removed from YouTube by the original poster, which was the endorsement of Dalton McGuinty by David Suzuki

So I really, REALLY wanted to go to NXNE this year. Really. Unfortunately, at my age you (usually) can’t just hop into a car for a week-long music bender in Toronto. For those who aren’t familiar with the Festival, North By Northeast is a world-renowned event dedicated to new and emerging talent, featuring up-and-coming unsigned bands, indie veterans and respected major-label artists. Basically, it’s totally awesome. This year’s Festival included a free (!!!) show by The Descendents, and sets by Swervedriver, Deerhoof, Montreal’s heavy, heavy AIDS Wolf, and one of my favourite new Canadian artists, Vancouver’s No Gold.

Did I mention that pretty much everyone I know was going?

I wanted to keep up-t0-the-minute on NXNE happenings and I knew people were tweeting about it like crazy. However, being more than a bit behind the times when it comes to technology, I don’t have a Twitter account or a Twitter-compatible telephone. To the computer!

It was easy to find what I was looking for. Posts mainly consisted of favourite shows of the Festival and the most popular venues, which included many bars my own band played way back in the day like Sneaky Dee’s, The Horseshoe Tavern, and The Rivoli, and newer venues like The Garrison (one of my favourites – check them out at http://www.garrisontoronto.com/). There was also a lot of discussion about the controversy surrounding the band F**ked Up – but then again, they’ve always attracted controversy, for more than the one very obvious reason. I read that the concert experience was akin to a riot, completely incendiary (http://therewasnosound.tumblr.com/post/6629428153/yonge-and-dundas-square-comes-to-life).

I also checked out the most tweeted links: Men Without Hats’ Safety Dance was tweeted about 80 times. Seriously. Before I knew it, I had spent two hours noodling away on the interwebs, reading about the experiences of festival attendees and artists alike.

There you have it! I experienced the entire Twitter conversation, and was even able to locate my friends’ tweets, giving me a deeper experience of the Festival without actually being there.

Resources :

• Our microsite of the event on tweeter.
• Tweeter statistics on the event.
• The Garrison.
• There was no sound.

I just spent the last two days at the MARCOM conference in Ottawa at the newly opened Ottawa Convention Centre. The conference was organized by CEPSM and we were happy to go live with a dynamic twitter graph of #marcomforum related tweets in real time.

I enjoyed learning about the differences between public sector marketing and private sector marketing and how social media can bridge the two. Jim Mintz‘ talk on Wednesday morning focused on public sector branding and emphasized that determining brand position and competitors is essential, especially given that branding takes place in social media whether public sector actors expect it or not. Jim made a good point that public sector branding doesn’t have to be expensive if you communicate to clients and stakeholders with a consistent effort over time. Josef Jurkovic discussed the special concerns of public sector actors but still held that it is “a horizontal world where partners and issues matter.” The presentation finished with an interesting discussion of which government departments have good branding: CMHC, SSHRC, Service Canada and Health Canada were pointed out, but in my opinion the social media receptiveness scale runs from Service Canada to Canada Science and Technology Museum to Canada Revenue Agency and Health Canada.

However, next to the keynote by Brian Solis, the presentation on crowdsourcing by Pierre Bisson and Jon Juane from Service Canada was my favourite presentation of the conference. The presentation explained the Service Canada Centres for Youth #sccy crowdsourced video contest and evaluated the key concerns and benefits of crowdsourcing for social marketing:

- Brand reputation

- Evaluation

- Crowd control

- Peaks & valleys

- Policies & guidelines

- Creating content

- Building the community

- Marketing and promotion

There was a lot of activity at our booth, which was next to Radian6‘s (Jon McGinley from Radian6 argued that social media represents revolutionary democratization), and the conference participants I spoke with were interested in the power of social media for gauging reactions, issues, actors and reputations related to public marketing campaigns a set of concerns related to social media that public sector actors will increasingly need to face and master.

Resources :

• Microsite for following the Marcom Forum
• Environics social media tool kit

We’ve joined the Environics family of companies, and will be working alongside Environics Communications Inc. and Environics Research Group to continue to strengthen our efforts to define the gold standard in social media analysis and bring this approach to a wider audience.

We’re also very excited to work with our new corporate siblings, both in Montreal (Capital-Image) and in Toronto at Sequentia Environics whose innovative approach to social media marketing and communications is very closely aligned with our philosophy and approach.

Bruce McLellan (the President of Environics Communications) wrote a really nice blog post about this news on the ECI blog, Thanks, Augie.

Here are the links to today’s media release: English; French.

Caroline was also mentioned in both Michelle’s and Bruno’s personal top 25 lists.

Exercises such as this one can be difficult, as Martine Pagé pointed out so well yesterday, but to their credit the panel seems to have taken their role quite seriously.

In particular, Michelle Blanc’s first selection is worthy of note. She reserves the top spot in her list for the vibrant Montreal community that has developed around a large (and growing) list of absolutely wonderful events that are held throughout the year.

Congratulations to everyone who made it on any of the lists that are circulating now!