2010 was a very good year. I was born in the year of the Tiger so maybe that had something to do with it.

2010 was also bWEST’s first full year, a bit of a milestone. I feel truly blessed to be where we are today and it was in no small part in thanks to the #YYJ social media community – ya’ll rock!

Following is a collection of events and anecdotes from 2010, a year I will look back on fondly.

Tweet-ups: went to a bunch and met some amazing people. Actually many of the amazing people in my life today I met at a tweetup over the last 18 months

§  Probably the most awesome tweetup was on January 21 at the Morningside Estate – the guest of honour was non other than Julien Smith who I met at Social media Club the night before. That was, as Julien would say… F#ckin cool!  

§  The grandest tweetp of all was the Twestival on March 25^th at the Bard & Banker. Was also where I met Renaat from Wannawafel. He was trying to talk to me and it was so loud I couldn’t hear a word he was saying.

§  Organic Islands Festival – tweetup at the main stage

Events:

§  Started the year off with our Olympic Gold Medal Game contest and party at the Parkside Victoria Resort and Spa.

§  bWEST was honoured to be  nominated for the “Online Strategy of the Year” award in the VIATeC Awards

§  The highlight of our year was producing and hosting Victoria’s first annual Social Media Camp where I met and hung with @UnMarketing – an awesome dude

§  Was honoured to be elected to the VBN Board of Directors

§  I was honoured to be the digital team lead for Movember which gave me the perfect cover to grow a hideously lame mo, but have a lot of fun while raising awareness and funds for prostate cancer research. 

Speaking gigs:

§  Canadian Management Consultants Conference, BC Social Media Summit, Food Matters, Cowichan Valley Small Business Summit, YYJ WordCamp, National Kitchen & Bath Association, CPRS, VBN, etc, etc… 

§  Did a bunch of radio interviews including CBC Radio 1 and CFAX with Patty Mack and a series about social media on CHEK NEWS’ Island 30 with Dana Hutchings

bWEST workshops: Planned and conducted 14 Social Media workshops training more than 300 business people to leverage social media to grow their business.

§  The highlight was a workshop I did in Yellowknife for Kellett Communications (ad agency), special thanks to Doug Brown for the introduction.

Earned the trust of many new clients. Too many to mention and I wouldn’t want to leave anyone out. But thank you to all of you. We are grateful for your business and excited to be working with you. 

New Hire. In May of 2010 we welcomed Kim Perkins to the team to help manage all the client work.

Family:

§  The kids are our joy and passion in life. They remain very active and continue to make us proud. Our daughter competed in her second Victoria Junior triathlon. Both are very active in hockey and enjoy it as much as their father does.

Physical activity: 

§  I ran the TC10K for the third year in a row and recorded my personal best time of 55:12 (as lame as that is). I hope to break 55 minutes this year.  Also had the honour of being one of five Times Colonist TC10K Bloggers.

§  I continue spend lots of time in arenas playing lots of hockey myself as well as doing the assistant coaching on both kids teams.

§  Received stitches in my noggin from a couple of hockey/skating related mishaps   

Travel: we were fortunate to be able to travel more this year than the past 3 combined. Being able to work from just about anywhere definitely helped.

§  Salt Spring: We spent an amazing week on Salt Spring Island at Foxglove Farm, a 120 acre organic working farm, where our bodies, minds and souls were nourished with the most awesome food, hikes, swimming and all around beauty. I’m reluctant to tell the world about this jewel, as I know it will become hugely popular and we already have our reservations in for next summer.

§  Tofino: spent a glorious week on Chesterman Beach in Tofino thanks to Tofino Beach Homes. While we were there I was able to pull together a Social Media Workshop at the beautiful Long Beach Lodge and with the help of Gord Johns from the Tofino Chamber of Commerce we sold out and filled the joint to capacity.

§  Yellowknife: a trip to the great white north that was shorter than I liked but long enough to see the whole city

§  Japan: the highlight of our travels was a trip to Japan. Lots of incredibly delicious food, amazing hikes, beaches, temples and shrines.  I was able to hit 5 Starbucks including the biggest Starbucks in Japan (possibly the world).

Blogging: was honoured to manage the live blogging team at the Organic Island Festival again in 2010. Was selected to be a TC10K blogger and continue to be a guest blogger over at Sage Internet.

Purchases: we acquired the “swagger wagon” our 2010 Honda Odyssey after an unfortunate accident sent our faithful Mazda wagon to the scrap heep.

What I’m looking forward to in 2011: 

1.     Well SMCV11 of course. Hope to see you all there on June 3 & 4

2.     Twestival 2011

3.     The people I’ve yet to meet online and IRL at tweetups, events and the like

4.     Redesigning the bWEST website

5.     Doing a sub 50 minute 10K

6.     Attending a few social media conferences outside of BC

7.     Actually entering a half marathon instead of talking about it

8.     Doing more personal blogging at my VicLife blog – not going to post the URL till I have something worth linking to

9.     Seeing the last of some Twitter standards like #FF, S-P-A-M-M-E-R-S, auto DMs and TrueTwit validations, puleez! Oh, and posting tweets to Linkedin (pls stop that. As UnMarketing would say "you’re killing unicorns")

10.  Launching a couple of other projects I’ve been working on including

a.     0MileDiet – the blog and social media experiment

b.     DigitalHomeIntegrators – another personal project details TBD

A whole lot of other cool stuff happened but this post is already too long so I’ll leave it at that, except to say that, I hope to meet a few, a bunch, no a peck of you along the way in this Year of the Rabbit. 

How was your year? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below…