Speaking at SOHO YVR

Looks like I’ll be speaking at SOHO Vancouver in about a month. The topic? Social media, of course …

I’m looking forward to it, but I had to create/update a new bio to be posted on the site and in the conference literature. At first I sent in this:

John Koetsier is senior manager, online media for Canpages, the Canadian
local search company. He’s been connecting people and ideas online for over
15 years.

But our senior marketing manager, Cathy Greer, felt that wasn’t substantial enough. So, back to the drawing board …

Here’s what I came up with on the second go-around:

John Koetsier has been creating simple solutions for communication and connection for over 16 years.

He’s been director of product development for Premier (a division of one the largest education companies in North America, School Specialty), COO of a software startup, and has built 3 learning management systems for over 40,000 schools in the US and Canada. He worked with Disney to build a custom PC environment just for kids, and helped create the user interface for Intel’s Classmate PC project.

He is currently Senior Manager, Online Media for Canpages, the Canadian local search company, where he manages social media, search, and apps.

John has been blogging since the mid ’90s when he built his own blog infrastructure from scratch, and currently tweets (to over 4K followers), shares, updates, checks in, and Google+’s with alarming frequency. He’s spoken about technology, learning, and connecting to clients to audiences in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America.

He has a Bachelor’s degree in English from Simon Fraser University and a Masters in Educational Technology from the University of British Columbia, and is on the board of directors of DiverseCity.

Sounds good – I should hire this guy. Marketing, marketing, marketing 🙂