Community Marketing Conference in Vancouver was GREAT as usual!

It seems like this past week has been a whirlwind. We all arrived in Vancouver on Sunday night, October 5th, for the opening night cocktail reception at the Sheraton and as usual, this night proved to be a prelude to what turned into a fantastic week of workshops, panels, seminars and good old fashioned networking with some of the leaders in the GLBT travel industry.

Highlights include the party at Celebrity's on Tuesday night, hosted by Mya Lake Reyes of the Las Vegas CVA. But that was the closing night party... in between Sunday and Tuesday night, we were entertained by Travelocity at an incredible party at Oasis, as well as some over the top dinners with our friends at both PlanetOut.com (thanks to Gus Preston and Scott Furman) at Delilah's and Logo.com thanks to Matthew Habib.

At the workshops, some of the new information we learned included the Bear market thanks to Stevo of A Bear's Life Magazine (but Stevo, some of those video clips were just a tad over the top!) as well as the youth market thanks to Scott Marquardt of Chester + Company from Halifax. We also learned more about the concept of marketing to "personas" or types, helping everyone in the audience understand better about the wide variety of folks in the GLBT community, ranging from party boys to yuppie professionals to seniors to adventurers, just to name a few.
The travel expo, open to the public, was fun and included our famous Dallas Cowboys (no, not the football team) posing for us, as well as the hot Mr Gay Priape of Vancouver strutting his hot stuff! Yolaine of the Canadian Tourism Commission stopped on by with her beautiful 2-month old baby daughter... I thought Christian might have been the father, but alas, it wasn't to be the case!

As we wound down Wednesday morning, about half the crowd had already gone home, but for those that stayed, we had a really entertaining and educational panel on topics ranging from Web 2.0 and the GLBT market to the online lesbian market to advanced banner advertising concepts, and wrapped up with a very dynamic presentation on mobile marketing.

All in all, another incredible event put on by Tom Roth, David Paisley and the entire Community Marketing team! Looking forward to next year's events in London and Boston.

Photo album: http://picasaweb.google.com/mattskal/CMIConferenceVancouverOct582008

Links:
- www.communitymarketing.com
- www.gaytravelexpo.com