There’s really no introduction needed to this blog post. Please, just read.

Read why the guy behind @BPGlobalPR set up the satirical Twitter account, why the public support behind the cause is so important, and its significance for the world of branding.

If you’re not familiar with what happened here, in response to the environmental crisis posed by the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico - and out of frustration by BP’s all-too-typical highly filtered public relations messaging - this member of the general public decided to impersonate BP’s public relations department, satirizing them as a laughing stock.

This is a textbook example of what happens when the public turns its back on a brand they no longer respect; and how ultimately a brand is always owned and controlled by the public… not pr professionals.

In March, I had a spectacular honour: my alma mater the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto invited me to deliver a speech to the 2010 graduating class.

This speech is called the “Last Lecture,” and is a tradition at many universities stemming from a famous, inspiring speech professor Randy Pausch gave at Carnegie Mellon.

At Guelph-Humber, one professor, one graduating student and one alumnus are chosen each year to deliver some inspiring words to send the graduates off on their life’s journey. You can watch my speech in the player below (or view the speech on vimeo if you can’t see the player). It runs 19min15; so pour yourself a coffee.

You might know that I’m a writer and have done speech-writing before; but not many of you have seen me deliver a speech. I hope you like it, and I hope that the speech might be inspiring to you as well. I’d love to hear your feedback.

On Saturday I crossed a major milestone in my career: I delivered my first work-related seminar.

For a little while I had been going to conferences and seminars to learn more for my career, and it slowly started to hit me… this question of “how do I get to the level where I can start speaking at conferences?” I have always enjoyed public speaking and thought it would further my own skills if I started sharing at conferences. So I set a job goal with my boss: within the year I will become a conference presenter.

This weekend I achieved my goal at the PodCamp London unconference. I took what I’ve learned through my job as web producer at St. Joseph’s Health Care, London about building content for the Web and produced a talk:

“Writing for the Web - plain and simple”

watch the “Writing for the Web - plain and simple” slideshow
(Quicktime… press space bar to watch the slide transitions)

or view the slideshow without the nifty transitions:
(save/print this presentation)

I was amazed to see the level of interest around a presentation about web writing best practices. I booked a room for my talk for 40 people since I didn’t figure I’d generate a huge turnout compared to the other awesome presenters at PodCamp. Much to my surprise, I had a standing-room crowd spilling out into the hall.

I hope that the audience gained something from my talk, and will use some of this knowledge to enhance their online writing. Writing online is a lot different than writing for print… mainly because of the way humans look at screens. Short, simple sentences that capture the viewer’s attention are challenging to compose; but lead to successful web sites.

I certainly gained a lot from my experience presenting. I also gained a lot of inspiration from PodCamp - a gathering of truly intelligent people with great ideas and a willingness to share. Jeff Sage wrote a great post about why the unconference model of PodCamp was so innovative.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on writing for the web, PodCamp, or any feedback on my talk.