Thursday, September 03, 2009

HNT - Technophobia

This week's HNT is a picture of me overlooking an article in the recent issue of Canadian Bookseller magazine.

The article, written by Joy Ferguson, very nicely covers a CBA Summer Conference session I hosted with Christopher Smith, co-owner of Collected Works bookstore in Ottawa.


In the session, Christopher and I helped booksellers overcome their fear and trepidation related to social media, discussed why we thought it was important to use these technologies, walked them through some of the basics of getting started, and tried to illustrate how they could get started in that area.

The session was a blast. Christopher and I had a good time working on it (we used Skype several times while doing our planning rather than just email or the phone -- being able to see each other while discussing concepts was a lot easier) and an even better time in the packed room with booksellers from across Canada. (A small selection of pictures from the CBA Summer Conference can be found here.)

My only regret is that we didn't record the session so we could later release it as a podcast and allow booksellers who weren't there a chance to catch the session. However, Joy Ferguson's wonderful article in Canadian Bookseller magazine does an excellent job of capturing details from that session, proving that while social media is useful and powerful, traditional media (like print), still serves a strong purpose that we shouldn't overlook.

No comments: