Here’s my keynote presentation from Infopresse I gave last month “Social Media and the Food Industry” .

The toplines:

- 16 insights

- 6 reasons why your company should lead this effort

- 9 Essentials to get this world right

- 20 great food examples

Let me know your thoughts and and other great industry examples or insight.

We’re in Montreal this week with our ever-delightful and engaged friends at Infopresse presenting “The Food Industry and Social Media”.

Always enjoy our trips to Montreal and always impressed with the “lean-forward-ness” of the Infopresse audience. April 14th is the date at the Park Hyatt Regency Montreal.

Hopefully we can parlay some of the leanings from our book Wikibrands alongside our command of great social media done well in Food, to educate and trade conversations with an engaged audience.

I’ll be sharing the stage with other fellow foodie/business potentates - Luc Durand from Ipsos Descarie, Pierre-Bernard Dow Blanchet from Taxi and Patrice Resther from Haussmann Conseil to give a full 360 degree view of how to do business in “alimentation” for 2010 and beyond.

Please feel free to chat with us after the session as we have dedicated the afternoon to meeting some of Montreal’s finest digital players, progressive marketeers and engaged business people.

Candidly I’m not surprised. For a good decade, the culture of our agencies have been lagging the culture of our customer.

At Agent Wildfire, we have spent the time to know how to get the world of “word of mouth, social media and effective customer engagement and collaboration” right. We have put the time in, asked the best in the business on how they do it, spent the long nights engaging with our audiences and orchestrated ourselves to be the top services firm in Canada geared to social influence marketing.

We like a lot of agencies, don’t get us wrong. But trust me when I say, the moment a client brief says we need some social media, digital engagement or influencer outreach in this year’s campaign or new launch, most start running for the hills. Sure, we get the phone calls to come in on pitches, but by force of nature, passage of time, greediness and/or arrogance, the agency tries to execute it themselves, leaving the industry of “social media” pockmarked with another failure by an agency that overstretched their experience and knowledge base.

Here’s the big problem - finding good talent in this space is difficult, keeping good talent in this space is difficult, doing it in an environment where the agency culture doesn’t respect the impact that social influence  can have is a Herculean task.  Add on top of that, having senior people who have built their careers on mass advertising trying to consider consider the alternative/the future, changing the closed agency culture that is geared to being the creative savants and strategic wunderkinds for their clients and given their current structures, having agencies pay enough attention to this new media that has less standards, less algorithmic predictability and thus, less ability to monetize is glacial in its slowness to adapt.

That’s why you need us. We’re geared for conversation and hungry to prove we’re the best. We have a simple mission of getting our clients noticed, talked about and advocated. It’s a very different mission than our agency brethren. They want to convince masses of consumers that the product is right, superior or well-differentiated for your appetitites.Some do it very well and it works despite our era of media fragmentation and limited attention spans.

We instead want to get customers to participate in the brand, because we know if they do and have a good experiecne, they will become advocates, evangelists and ambasssadors. It is the new currency of marketing and it’s what makes 2/3rds of our economy tick.

And this evolution - requires markedly different talents and infrastructure for getting it right. We believe we have the right alchemy of people, passion, assets and processes to get it right.

Below, you’ll see our overview of why we’re geared for conversation across all key 9 components of building communities/campaigns/buzz more than any other type of services firm in Canada:

Dare you, give us a shout and we’ll stack our skills and abilities up against any top 10 agency in Canada not in TV, radio or outdoor - they would kill us - but smart, engaged grassroots marketing and media - game on!

Looking for 5 key potential roles to fill given our expected 2010 activity. If you want to create impact on cool projects from day one, work hard and play hard - we want to hear about from you. :

Word of Mouth Project Leader - (Full Time and Part time, contract) you are the hub that turns our community and word of mouth wheel - having a great intellectual curiosity, penchant for above-and-beyond client service with a capacity for overcoming hurdles and conceptualizing, planning and delivering not just good but awesome stuff that gets noticed and talked about. You love variety, are comfortable working in new environments/situations and also have a discipline for getting the job done. Social media savvy for our clients, socially likable for our partners and socially connected to our influencers are essentials.

Trend-savvy, Lead Tastemaker (Intern) - you have an instinct for what’s next, can intelligently identify new breaking and creative stuff and can write conversationally about all of it - more than just fashion, or gadgets or mashing numbers and research - you drink up culture in full gulps - the interesting fads, the seasonal styles, the cultural trends and long range futures (but please no divas or egomaniacs)., You’re comfortable in helping build aesthetically pleasing print and web stuff and hosting an extended community of Canadian tastemakers and trendspotters

Active, Fitness and Sports Sherpa (Intern) - you can’t sit still on the couch, you have a try anything once attitude to fitness, outdoors, health, play, sport, gear, style and adventure - you are a passionate active-ite, word hard/play hard and have experience in social media, building community and building grassroots events/experience and activation programs. Sponsorship, business development and online content management are also key needs. A perfect passion play for somebody that leads this lifestyle and wants to work in an entrepreneurial environment.

Community Portal Web Developer/Producer - you have a clear understanding and history of building good user experience-driven environments, although you understand the tech and are smart at the code, you actually care about the eventual use of the web environment, understand its connection to affiliated social networks and also put a high premium on design. Oh, and deadlines are important to you. If you’re interested in leading some of the best leading edge work in Canada, this is your job.

Wordpress Expert - you not only know how to develop in Wordpress, you know how to integrate into other platforms, effectively content manage it, have a keen design eye to tailor it and can break it in order to provide the functionality our blogs and websites need. Wordpress and guru have been placed next to your name at some point in your life.

If interested, send along a brief cover letter that grabs our attention and a CV or portfolio to match to: spreadtheword@agentwildfire.com