Dustin Plett

Eight years ago company X was started by a serial entrepreneur. Company X was started as a result of this entrepreneur unable to find a support service for another of his startups - company Y.

Fast forward two years. A major Canadian network television station is launching a new channel and also requires the very specialized services of company X. Company X begins work with said station.

Fast forward one year later. One of the biggest consumer brands in the world launches a campaign that will change the advertising industry forever. For this campaign they will require the services of company X. The serial entrepreneur sees the future of business and shuts down all other companies and focuses his efforts on company X.

Fast forward four years. Social Media has been a buzzword now for a couple years. “Web 2.0” is already sounding dated. Company X has now grown to be the world leader in its industry. Company X is now working in the biggest online communities and working with many of the world’s biggest brands and agencies from around the globe. All the while proving a business model as revolutionary as the assembly line - this might be an exaggeration, trying to keep this entertaining.

Fast forward one more year. Until now company X has grown entirely by WOM. Marketing and ad budgets have been non-existent. Company X revenues continue to exceed all expectations. Company X is or has now been involved in 100’s of high profile social media strategies and campaigns.

Fast forward to seven months ago. Company X makes a conscious effort to be where its clients are - or could be - and move its business development manager to Toronto from company X HQ in Western Canada. Business is exploding south of the border and overseas and company X wants to focus on owning its “backyard”.

Fast forward to two months ago. Company X hires senior level management to support the growing Toronto market. Company X is now working alongside the most successful and influential agencies in Toronto and partnering with Canada’s most recognized brands.

Fast forward to 20 minutes ago. Company X business development manager wrote this blog and published it on his blog wondering why he hasn’t read this story somewhere else yet…

By popular demand… The Kilimanjaro Song. Here is The Kilimanjaro Song in its entirety. 

This song is sometimes sung by porters and guides upon returning from the mountain. It was a surprise to me and a really touching moment. I had seen videos of this song on YouTube and was taken back by the enthusiasm and appreciation these men showed.

I think tourist climbing the mountain often don’t take the time to get to know these men and view them as part of the trek and not as people and in doing so miss an incredible opportunity to better understand the Tanzanian people.

Getting to know our team made the trip very special. We went from five buddies climbing the mountain to 26 buddies climbing the mountain over the course of those 8 days.

We mad a great effort to include our guides, Emmanuel - in the white hat, and Frank - in the yellow jacket, in our trek and I think it shows in the enthusiasm of this song.

To get accurate numbers on how much porters and guides make is hard. We asked, but between what their bosses want them to say and their pride it is hard to figure out exactly what they are working for. I heard a rumour that some of these porters are working only for tips, a scary proposition when you consider in many countries it’s not common to tip. From what I could determine most porters were working for between $5 and $10 USD a day. 

These porters generally don’t own hardly any of their own gear and generally rely on a co-op of sorts that has equipment such as jackets, sleeping bags and boots to borrow for the climb. 

Upon leaving we left our own stuff behind in an effort to make these men’s lives easier. We left a sleeping bag, two winter jackets, and a couple Thermarest sleeping mats to the guides who placed these items in the co-op for the porters to have access to. 

During this song you meet the four guys I went climbing with. First Thomas, my brother in law. Then Satjeet, Steve, Clayton and finally me.

Enjoy.

I got home yesterday evening, October 4, and soon realized I would have to produce pictures and video asap. I threw together these clips this morning very quickly to give you a a taste of the trek. In the days to come I will spend some more time working on this and put together a little more comprehensive and better edited video.

I apologize in advance for some of the audio. It was windy and my Flip camera does not like that at all. The point where I’m sitting talking to the camera in my brown jacket I had just reached Stella Point, that is the crater’s edge. From there it’s a short 45 minute walk to the summit, at this point the hardest part is behind me.

I didn’t realize when filming this how slow I was talking sometimes. As you will see in this video my energy levels rise and fall. 

The song at the end is one of the greatest things of ever heard. This was our two guides and our porters signing to our success at the end of the trek. I will post the song in its entirety soon as well. 

Pictures of the trek, and photos of ICUC at the summit are still on the way and should be up soon. 

One of the first things our guide Emmanuel said to my friends and I was, “you climb Kilimanjaro in your mind.” I smiled and thought, “I have a strong mind, this should be no problem”, followed immediately by “I have a history of disappointing myself, I’m in trouble.”

This ran through my head over and over for the next six days. Sometimes the trek was very enjoyable, most of the time it was testing me in ways I wasn’t sure I was ready for.

One nagging thought with me throughout the climb was if I do not complete the climb nothing bad will happen to me. The people that love me will still love me. The company that supported me will still employ me. And the life I lead will continue to go on.

I thought, the only person I would disappoint would be myself. And as we began our climb to the summit on the sixth day that simple thought evolved into: can I live with disappointing myself? And then: if so, what is the greatest disappointment I will allow and what is the least, or is it all the same? And finally: how much, or how much more, disappointment am I willing to accept?

I began to think my life, and likely most others’ lives, are a result of how much we let ourselves disappoint ourselves. If I let myself disappoint myself on this mountain, what’s next? Maybe next time I’m out skateboarding and a trick will push the limits of my skill I will hold back? Maybe next time I pitch a client I won’t have the enthusiasm I should have and will not close the sale? Maybe next time a friend asks to talk I will be there in body but I won’t put the effort into actually listen?

These are all things with ranging consequences in the world around me but always huge consequences to me and who I am. This trek made me aware of those times in my life when I made a decision that let “me” down. The trek let me find the places in me where the results of those decisions hide and it revealed the way they surface. I understood for the first time the connection between my actions and my actions.

I saw, felt, and realized that I am a result of myself. If I allow myself to disappoint myself I allow myself to be disappointed. Disappointment makes me sad, to put it plainly. When I’m sad I loose interest, become unhappy and blame things and people around me. When things and people around me are to blame for my unhappiness I escape or leave the situation. When I escape or leave instead of face the issue or situation I disappoint myself. And, the cycle continues. (I just tried to write the continuation of this thought and realized I would need a few hours that I just don’t have right now, so we will leave it at this for now. In case you’re wondering, the negative tendencies come out during the escape process.)

These are the doors I walked through in my mind as I struggled to put one foot in front of the other on my way to the crater’s edge of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

But this is what Emmanuel meant. Positive thought isn’t “I can do this, I can do this.” Positive thought is thought that moves you and your life in a positive direction.

At least that’s what I think. If you want to discuss this more let’s grab a coffee, I have a feeling I won’t tire of talking about this trek anytime soon.

As for the goal of tweeting from the top, it was achieved. I struggled for the next 36 hours to remember what the tweet said but I knew it was sent. I blame the minus 20 degree Celsius temperature, the howling wind and the thin, thin air at 20,000 feet for my lack of memory.

I also checked into Foursquare as I had planned. This I was less sure of as it had to be done on my iPad with my fingers exposed to the elements. I was rushing while I was up there, and with a window of only a few minutes before I had to start my descent I wasn’t sure it got out. I tried a number of times and was glad when I checked earlier today and saw it went through.

Officially Uhuru Peak (5895) @ Kilimanjaro has been checked into by six people before me but I have my suspicions. I’m back in Mooshi now, 15-20km away, and it still comes up as a possible place to check in. Foursquare, you need to fix this.

I got some great footage from the trek and some great photos to prove ICUC Moderation Services made the summit of Kilimanjaro.

I will post what I have as soon as possible but for now I will enjoy my vacation, which includes some much needed relaxation, a safari and possibly a trip to the Serengeti - time permitting. 

For now, a huge thank you to Keith Bilous for making this possible. Thank you for providing me with a great place to work and I’m glad I work for a company that I don’t mind sharing my vacation with. And thanks to the rest of ICUC for making the last year so enjoyable. I will see, talk, gchat, tweet, or Facebook, you all again soon. 

As a side note, I did summit on my 26th birthday, September 26. Hooray!

Last night Ian Penney (@cr03) aka “The Crow” - because of his Twitter handle - and I spent the evening at the office insuring the system that would allow me to tweet and check-in on Foursquare on the summit of Kilimanjaro was possible. In essence, we were making sure #ICUC2Kili was possible and ensuring it could happen. The tweets we found were easy. But to check-in on Foursquare presents a hole host of challenges. 

The following is Ian describing in his own words what he did. I couldn’t begin to explain it and quite frankly I’m still in aw of what he accomplished. Thanks a lot, Ian. Without your help this would not have been possible. I hope I can make you proud.

“Our main goal was to enable either a GPS enabled Blackberry 9600 or an iPad to check into Foursquare from a remote location via BGAN,” said Penney. “The devices have real GPS chips built in, so as long as we could get one of them online, we figured it should work.”

We exhausted a lot of potentially easy solutions at first. 

The Explorer 500 BGAN access point has Ethernet, Bluetooth, and a USB mini port. The USB port can only be used to get a real computer online, and we already had Ethernet for that. 

We paired the BlackBerry to the access point only to find the Explorer 500 only supports Bluetooth voice profiles. No tethering for data, so in this case Bluetooth was effectively useless for our purposes.

This meant we’d have to use Internet connection sharing from the Netbook to one of the devices via ad-hoc WiFi. Unfortunately, the Windows 7 Starter OS that came on the Netbook doesn’t support ICS, and we eventually found Windows XP Pro SP3 didn’t have appropriate storage drivers for the Netbook’s SATA controller. 

At this point, since the disk on the Netbook was blank from a failed XP install over USB, I decided to try Ubuntu 10.04. 

This turned out to be even easier than I expected. We used UNetbootIN to make an Ubuntu install USB key, had the machine running in less than 15 minutes with full driver support. We easily setup NAT between the Ethernet port and a simple ad-hoc config on the wireless device using the Ubuntu network preferences GUI.  

The BlackBerry 9800 could not see the ad-hoc network, but the iPad could, and that night, on the deck at our office, after 4 hours of hacking, we successfully checked into Foursquare via satellite.  

This has definitely been one of the most exotic technical challenges I’ve faced, even though most of the functional components (WiFi, NAT, Netbooks and iPads) are very domestic. “I wish good luck to Dustin and his team,” said Penney. “I can’t wait to see the tweets roll in from high above.” 

I’m climbing Kilimanjaro next week!  I’m all about sharing the experience, I’m going to be using the hashtag #ICUC2Kili - it’s going to be fun.

I’m flying out to Amsterdam this Saturday evening and hopping down to Nairobi on Sunday. Monday I’m travelling from Nairobi to the base of Kili and then Tuesday, bright and early, we get rolling. My hope is to summit on my birthday, September 26. As an aside, this is also my champagne birthday. As an aside to that aside, this trip is also a personal celebration of my sobriety and passing a significant milestone in that struggle. The irony of the champagne birthday is not lost on me.

The team includes my brother in law, Thomas, our friend, Sat, and their friend, Steve, who I’ve never met and it’s been said our personalities might clash.

We are taking the more isolated Lemosho Route. This is considered the most scenic route but is less travelled because of the extra days, and the extra travel and costs associated with getting to the western side of the base.

I would like to say I have a romantic story about wanting to climb Kilimanjaro since reading about it as a child in a collection of Hemingway’s short stories but that’s just not true. However, I have wanted to go to Africa ever since I read Roots, by Alex Haley. But that was only a few years ago when I was holed up in my parents basement having just moved home from Alberta trying to figure out how life could get so sideways.

The trek has been in the works for about six months and needless to say I’m ready to get going. I’ve trained for it, lost some weight (and muscle, that sucks), got used to the idea of walking a lot, got my shots, got my pills, got my confidence. I’m very ready.

This will be my first time overseas and my first time outside of continental USA or Canada. I once walked across the border in Tijuana but that hardly counts as international travel.

As much as I am stoked to get going I’m going to miss my job – is that weird or what? Just this week I told our new Sales Director, Thomas Ephraim, I was looking forward to getting back to Toronto to get to work on some new ideas and strategies.

As for this job I speak of… I’m in my second fantastic year with ICUC Moderation Services and my great company has graciously sponsored my trek by providing financial support and providing the communication hardware to keep me connected as I travel, climb, think, and learn. I will be posting new content whenever possible as I make my way to the roof of Africa.

As I said in the opening, I’ll be using the #ICUC2Kili to post and read content on Twitter. I’ll also be using my blog www.dustin2to.com to share video, pictures, comments and thoughts on the trek.

With that said, let the countdown begin. About 60 hours to boarding…

This is a few quick shots from the day I spent in Chicago earlier this month attending Blogwell and SummerMash. ICUC has been a sponsor of Blogwell for a while now but this was our first time sponsoring a Mashable event.

Both events turned out to be a success as they were great opportunities to make new business connections and socialize with new and old friends, both events not necessarily in that order.

For Keith Bilous, ICUC President seen speaking under the ICUC slide, and I, it was a quick one day trip. I wasn’t even in Chicago 24 hours - but my goodness was it fun.

I love Chicago, I have since the first time I visited years ago. But as I get older my appreciation for the town, its people and its buildings grows. I look forward to getting back there soon, hopefully next time for a little longer.

One obvious highlight for me was going to Hamburger University, this is where the Blogwell conference was held. It’s a place I’d always heard about and never thought I’d get a chance to see with my own eyes.

I left with a new appreciation for the McDonald’s corporation. Love them or hate them, they’re making billions of dollars a year selling hamburgers and fries - you have to respect that.

This article is reposted from Snoo.ws - http://snoo.ws/2010/08/13/icucs-most-successful-blogwell-event-so-far/

ICUC’s most successful BlogWell event so far

August 13th, 2010 (8:24am) Dustin Plett

This past Wednesday ICUC Moderation Services sponsored and attended our third – and best yet - BlogWell event on this year’s tour. Past tour stops ICUC has sponsored and I have personally attended included Cincinnati and Seattle, both good events but this event was different – it was great. I suspect its close proximity to Chicago and the McDonald’s Campus location of this event drew a more senior level crowd then I have come to expect from BlogWell events, and this was a positive for ICUC and other sponsors such as Radian6 and Marketwire.

The BlogWell tour is series of conferences that happen around the U.S. throughout the year. Each conference has a new line up of case studies presented by big brands highlighting successes and failures they’ve had using social media. This event was held at Hamburger University on the McDonald’s campus just outside of Chicago. Presenters included Joe Curry (@joejcurry) from McDonald’s, Robert Raines (@robertraines) of Chevron, and Joe LaMuraglia (@GM_Joe) of GM.

The reason I say this week’s event was special was because it helped ICUC do something we often struggle with: reaching key decision makers inside these mega brands. A challenge ICUC faces when selling is that our services become more valuable the more traffic and the more content a brand is generating. Big brands are generating the levels of content that makes ICUC’s services very appealing and therefore the most likely partners. But therein lies the problem.

The challenge is often finding the one key person inside a company employing thousands – if not tens of thousands – of people.

This soul individual can wear many hats. They could be a member of the marketing team; the PR team; they could be a member of the legal counsel; the social media strategy could have been the responsibility of the intern who just went back to school so it’s kind of in limbo; or it could be a joint effort between an agency and an in-house team and the decision maker is neither.

It’s an everyday problem for me but events like this weeks BlogWell that can attract and provide value to these key people and then provide vendors like ICUC the opportunity to meet with them are a tremendous opportunity and honestly quite hard to come by.

GasPedal, the agency behind BlogWell and the Social Media Business Council (SMBC), did a great job this past week of attracting these people - from whatever department they happen to work in - who were making decisions and actively working on strategies and implementation of social media for these big brands. This last week’s event set the bar high and really has me looking forward to November’s event rumoured to be happening in Philadelphia.

I encourage more brands that are members of SMBC, or at the level of those in the SMBC, to get involved with these BlogWell events. I am keenly aware the SMBC is a vendor free zone and I can respect this but these supplementary events are a great way to meet vendors who are creating solutions for the biggest and most recognizable brands in the world.

This article was reposted from Snoo.ws. See original story at  http://snoo.ws/2010/08/06/forecasts-and-projections-at-icuc-moderation-services/

Forecasts and projections at ICUC Moderation Services

August 6th, 2010 (8:36am) Dustin Plett

ICUC and I have a few things in common. We’re both young – sort of, we’re both human powered, and we both call Winnipeg, Manitoba, home. I spent a week and a half of July in Manitoba seeing friends and family, and meeting with co-workers at our annual meeting.

The annual meeting covered topics such as marketing, finance, and sales with overviews of the last six months and forecasts and projections for what’s on the horizon for the remainder of 2010 and beyond. Like any company, it’s important we know where we are, where we were, and where we need to be. I think this is especially true for our company that works in a space evolving at the speed of conversation.

For me, the highlight at this year’s meeting was seeing a slide presented featuring the logos of all the new brands we’ve added to our client list this year alone. It was inspiring to see how far we’ve come in such a short time and I couldn’t help but to day dream a little about where this little company - from a place most people have never heard - has the potential to go.

From a sales point of view the future is very bright. We continue to explore new verticals and grow as a company, expanding our offering while staying true to the fundamentals and ethics that have gotten us here. Looking back is exciting but not half as exciting as looking forward.

From what I saw last month in Winnipeg the second half of 2010 is going to be a great time to be a part of ICUC Moderation Services. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else – stay tuned for some big announcements.

I was in New York last week to meet with PR, advertising and marketing agencies interested in ICUC Moderation Services. In total I did eight capabilities presentations and I’m very pleased with the reception I received and I’m looking forward to working with some great agencies on some exciting new projects.

I got to town late Wednesday night for meetings on Thursday and Friday. The first evening and most of the second was spent putting proposals together and planning the next day’s events.

This video was shot the second night when I was able to put the work down for a couple hours and take the deck out for a ride sometime around 9pm. I skated over to the UN building past the Chrysler building and then took a cab down to the Brooklyn Bridge. I skated down through the financial district to get a view of the Statue of Liberty. Much to my surprise there were fireworks on Liberty Island - this was a pretty righteous bonus.

From there I headed back North by ground zero and through Greenwich Village by the famous White Horse Tavern and eventually back up to the Empire State Building - where I was told to beat it - and finally on to Times Square.

I had fun shooting this, amazingly the camera was never stolen as I had to leave it alone a few times. Good thing it’s small I could hide it in bushes and under garbage.

I hope this makes you smile, maybe even laugh. Have a great Monday. :)

There are many places an agency can bring in partner solutions to increase margins yet outsourced UGC moderation is still a relatively new and unknown option. Agencies, like every other company, are constantly looking to be more profitable, or simply stay profitable, and a content moderation partner can open the door to new revenue (or increased productivity, and this should mean more revenue).

By outsourcing content moderation agencies can not only free up creative staff to do what they were hired to do but now an agency can offer a service that requires a lot of manpower without having to worry about the HR issues.

Content moderation is a tedious task if done by an experienced moderator can be done a lot quicker and with less error than by someone who has 30 tasks to complete and moderation is just one of them. By focusing on one task moderation companies can generally go through content a lot quicker than agencies are able to do in house. This translates into less hours and less money.

Another benefit of the outsourced solution is the cost per hour. Content moderation services from Winnipeg to London to New York are all in and around the same rate. Depending out what they’re doing and how many hours a day they are putting in you can expect to pay no more than $50 per hour - drastically lower than agency fees.

These savings can either be passed straight through to the end client or treated as a white label solution and billed as agency hours. Suddenly the outsourced content moderation solution starts to make a lot more sense.

What’s important to keep in mind here is the volume and the time it’s taking to moderate the content. If it’s a situation where the client is happy if the content is moderated once per day and in house staff can do that in a few minutes - and they don’t mind moderating on the weekends and holidays, than an agency will likely not benefit from working with a moderation partner.

But if you have content that needs to be moderated on a strict schedule with a quicker turnaround, or there is just enough content to be burdensome, agencies may want to look into what options are out there. It’s possible this obstacle has just become an opportunity.

Here are just a few shots I took while in Seattle for the Blogwell conference last week.

Shots include the first Starbucks, Pike Place Market, the most amazing wood sculpture I’ve ever seen - I found this at the Seattle Art Museum - and of course some obligatory shots from atop the The Space Needle. Also, there is one shot that is strictly a nod to welders - those brave, determined souls.

Enjoy!

I’m back on the road so it seems like the perfect time to reflect on the past two weeks of solid Toronto time. I made some friends, met a lot of interesting people and had some very unique to Toronto experiences.

I’m a social person so I generally like running into friends wherever they may be. Out here friends are few and far between so what’s been great has been being lucky enough to run into people I’ve met through business. I’ve ran into more than one client of ours on public transportation - I’ve been told this is common in the downtown Toronto area. It’s a great feeling to see a familiar face. I’ve also run into people  on the side walk who I’ve been making efforts to speak with - those chance meetings are very valuable and just won’t happen in Winnipeg.

Living here has been easy, spreading the word of ICUC Moderation Services has definitely been a challenge. Talking about what ICUC does and the value of our services is an easy conversation to have because the value is easy to see – getting people to sit down and have that talk is where the challenge exists.

My job has been just as much about educating and informing as it has been about selling. We are in a unique space where our core competencies center around moderation when most people are talking monitoring – two very similar words with very different meanings and often used interchangeably incorrectly.  

When I’m out there sending emails, making calls and reaching out to those who work in social media I still come across, “we already have a monitoring solution” or “we don’t do monitoring yet”. I say, “that’s great, can we talk about moderation?”

To me it’s like being in a furniture store and saying to the salesman, “listen, stop showing me sofas - I already have a dishwasher.”

It’s a tough row to hoe but it’s getting better. It seems with every call I make and every day I spend talking about ICUC, our moderation service and our people powered solution the awareness grows.

The bottom line is I’m having fun and making progress and I get the sense most of ICUC – getting close to 150 of us by now – are having just as much fun as I am. 

I flew from Cincinnati down to Orlando to participate in the trade show aspect of this years NAA MediaXchange conference.

I arrived Friday afternoon and headed down to the Amway Arena to see the Magic and the Knicks play - the game was fun, I had a great conversation with the guy beside me as we watched the Magic run circles around the Knicks.

Saturday I meet up with Chuck Dueck - ICUC’s Director, News. Although I’ve talked to Chuck many times this was the first time I actually got to meet him in person. Not getting to meet your co-workers is an unfortunate side affect of an entirely virtual office.

Chuck use to race cars, something I did not know until I met him in Orlando. He invited me to come along to a dirt track an hour and a half North of Orlando for some racing on Saturday night. Initially I was hesitant to go along, mostly because of my own preconceptions about what happens at the track. In the end I did and was glad I went.

At the track I was really outside of my element. It was a new experience and I did not realize it would be as profound as it was. I found the racing to be entertaining but what I found more entertaining than the cars was watching the people watch the cars. It’s hard to explain, but if you ever get a chance to visit a dirt track on a Saturday night in northern Florida, I suggest you go - and then call me, I would love to hear about your experience.

The next day we visited a blues bar for supper, another great experience I was lucky to share with Chuck and his wife.

Monday the trade show started and went until Wednesday. It was interesting to see the various reactions of the people who stopped by the booth. From, “Why would I pay you to do that?” to “Thank God I found you. Please, please help.” Guess who of these two people generally had the larger online community.

Keith came down for a day to speak at the conference about the benefits of having user comments professionally moderated. His talk drove home the point of consistency: consistency in time the comments will be viewed, taken down, or responded too and consistency in moderation guidelines. All very important - if not the most important - things when news organizations are attempting to grow online communities and in turn online readership.

Wednesday the show ended mid afternoon and Chuck invited me to go for a drive with him and his wife down to the coast. I had never seen the Atlantic Ocean so I was more than willing to go along. It was beautiful and exhilarating and another moment I will remember for years to come.

The visit to Orlando was a success in many ways. ICUC has new business and many new contacts and an understanding of the MediaXchange event. And I have a much better understanding of our company, I have a much better understanding of the pain points of the news industry and I have two new friends where I use to have two distant co-workers.

What does ICUC see at NAA’s mediaXchange?

April 13th, 2010 (8:32am) Dustin Plett

As people passed the ICUC Moderation Services booth at mediaXchange yesterday afternoon I found myself imagining what a similar trade show would have looked like in the past. When traffic slowed I let my mind wander…

It was easy to imagine groups of men and woman standing in front of the latest printing press technologies and endless aisles of paper and ink suppliers. I imagined pens, pencils and pads of paper. I imagined typewriters and eventually micro-cassette recorders and finally digital recorders and computers and word processors. I imagined what this would have looked like only five years ago when the thought of putting content online for free seemed risque and ridiculous and no one except a few kids from Harvard College had ever heard of Facebook.

When I would snap back to reality I would see the people I had imagined, only a few years older, but instead of excitement there was a general sense of unease and trepidation. This is not the same universe that surrounded the print media world only a few years ago and everyone in attendance is keenly aware of this.

I watched as many people who have been in the journalism field for many years walked up and down aisles with blank looks as they passed booth after booth of tech solutions to help monetize everything from new content, to outsourced content, to re-purposed content. And software solutions that promised to add value to publications by supplying endless amounts on data on readership location, readership engagement and reader sentiments.

I felt sorry for the old guard who had made this the proud medium it is today and who now seemed to be on the outside looking in. And truth be told that time they remember, that simpler time, is something I envy a little.

However, that feeling of longing for a simpler time is always replaced by the excitement of what is happening before my eyes. News is reaching more people and becoming more accessible than ever before – that’s exciting. And I can appreciate when you take the tangibles out of an industry that hinged on a deliverable that was always held in two hands it does seem bizarre. But it doesn’t have to be scary.

For the new journalists and the men and woman entering this industry in a variety of capacities there is enthusiasm about being on the cusp of something new and grand. There is excitement in being a part of something – or a time – that will be looked back on as a revolutionary time for the industry.

ICUC Moderation Services is enjoying this ride and we love being a part of giving every single reader a voice. We invite all those attending this year’s mediaxchange event to join us in welcoming in this new era of truly social media. ICUC Moderation Services is a small piece of the puzzle but we can’t help but to think professional reader comment moderation is – and will continue to be – an integral part of any successful newspaper’s online property.

If you want to talk social media and find out how effective moderation can enhance your online properties consistency, value, and bottom line come find me at the ICUC Moderation Services booth on the trade show floor.