Spain keeps amazing me for the vitality of its digital market and the dynamism of the local players. I have been living, working and networking in Spain over the last few years, moving to Oviedo, Asturias, back in 2007 to be able to follow closely and launch the Asturias Paraiso Cultural ^[1] project, a project that unfortunately didn’t take off. Bummer.

Since then, while keeping speaking at conferences around Europe and the United States, I also started to be more and more active on the Spanish online market, scene, and network, mostly thanks to my good friends at SEMPO Spain ^[2] who kept me inviting me at the events they were partnering, calling me in to speak at conferences such as SMX Madrid, OME Barcelona, and the awesome local search marketing conference series Search Congress ^[3], for which I turned out to be involved at all Search Congress events to date held in Barcelona, Valencia and Bilbao.

^[4]Even if I have been professionally active in the Spanish Basque Country (Euskadi, in basque), offering Travel 2.0 training workshops ^[5] at the Parque Tecnologico of San Sebastian, search and social media marketing workshops at CEBEK in Bilbao ^[6], and several collaborations with my friends of the spanish search marketing agency Overalia ^[7], it has been thanks to Search Congress Bilbao ^[8] last January that I got involved with the event that possibly gave me the most satisfaction since I started conferencing around: the Nonick Conference.

^[9]Organized by the Basque public TV broadcaster EITB ^[10] (Euskadi Irratio Telebista), Nonick 010 is the successor of a previous event called Blogak (“blogs” in Basque), created in 2006 as the first Web 2.0 event in Spain.

Last May 14 and 15, 2010, the new and improved Nonick 010 focused on online communities, exploring the topic not only with a conference packed with international keynote speakers, but also with workshops, the first European Community Managers Summit, a Start-up 2.0 Competition and Award, and great networking moments.

How did I get involved with Nonick and EITB? As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I moderated Search Congress Bilbao ^[8] back in January and EITB was one of the media partners of the search engine marketing event. With their TV experience and state-of-the-art studio technology, IETB secured a stable and continuous web streaming for Search Congress, and secured also some TV passages. The web streaming went very well, with hundred people following Search Congress Bilbao from the entire Spain, South America and the United States, and interactions and input also via Twitter. Very good job from EITB. Kudos.

So, when at the end of the conference Lorenzo Sainz Nieto of EITB told me about the upcoming Nonick conference and invited me to moderate the event, I immediately knew that I was going to work with top TV professionals who would have secured the success of the conference. Lorenzo (also known as Lontzo ^[11]), myself and Euskara ^[12] star Maite Goñi Eizmendi ^[13], also with the support of the amazing EITB team, have been working for a few months to make sure that Nonick 010 would have had compelling international content, and awesome networking, knowledge sharing and learning opportunities. I think we made it, and I feel proud of my contribution to the event. But let’s see what Nonick 010 has been, and let’s have Lontzo telling us in the video here below (in Spanish, with subtitles in English and Spanish).

As Lontzo sais in the video, we had the original challenge to get all the speakers to Bilbao from all over Europe and the United States, as the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull ^[14] went for the second wave of trouble in European skies right the day before the kick off of Nonick 010, and several speakers got stuck in Madrid with no available flights to Bilbao (we had to arrange some cars to go get them in the middle of the night).

Even with this initial challenge, on Friday morning May 14 we kicked off the event in a very successful way, also thanks to the amazing line up of international speakers.

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The event started with the great video about the State of the Internet 2010 ^[16] by Jesse Thomas (video embedded here below), that officially opened Nonick. After a brief introduction and welcome by Maite and myself, the stage was all for Jennifer Preston ^[17], the Social Media Editor-in-chief of The New York Times, who delivered a very interesting keynote about social media and news, and “how they do it” at The New York Times.

Right after Jennifer Preston’s presentation, Washington DC-based branding experts Jesse Thomas (also known as Jess3 ^[18]) and his partner (at work as well in real life) Leslie Bradshaw took the stage for a powerful presentation on branding and design for social media. By the way, Jesse Thomas is the co-author (with Brian Solis) of the Conversation Prism ^[19], one of the most inspiring social media infographics seen over the last months (that I call “social media mandala“).

^[20]The conversation prism (click on the image to view a larger version) is a global analysis of the social media network ecosystem but it’s still too focused on the major US social media landscape, so Jesse and Brian started collaborating with people from other parts of the world to create localized Conversation Prisms – if I remember well Jess told me they are working for a Russian and a Japanese Prism, and we discussed my support to create some localized versions for European countries – stay tuned on that! =)

After the opening keynotes, the stage of the Euskalduna Conference Center ^[21] hosted the presentation of the European Start-Up 2.0 Competition, with the presentation of the smart ideas for new 2.0 start-ups by the 5 finalists voted among more than 100 ideas participating to the contest.
The finalists 2.0 start-ups at Nonick were:

^[22]Stereomood.com ^[23] – Italian start-up presented by founders Eleonora Viviani and Daniele Novaga for a community that shares music playlists in tune with emotions and moods. The free music (no registration required) served by Stereomood emotional radio through a brilliant mashed-up interface goes with users’ moods, and aims to be the perfect soundtrack to whatever activity users are involved with.

^[24]Askaro.com ^[25] – presented by Cuban founder Ubaldo Huerta, this new Spanish social site let you explore and discover new places recommended by local users at several destinations worldwide. Neat interface and “Craigslist-like” navigation with mash-ups, the site is ready to be launched worldwide, while now is mostly focused on Spain.

^[26]Sopo.it ^[27] – another Italian finalist idea for the start-up of a site, presented by founders Stefano Parisi and Amalia Mariotti. Sopo.it is an independent user-generated portal where to learn about workplaces though the (anonymous) opinion of other users who rate their companies and their workplace. The site (also in english) allows to compare workplaces by parameters chosen by the user, and helps take the best desicion about accepting that job offer or not.

^[28]Submate.com ^[29] – presented by French founder Laurent Kretz, this new web/mobile social network (also available as iPhone application free to download) allow people who commute to get to know people with the same interest who commute every day on the same route using subways / metro, bus, or trains, and to discover cool things to do close to where people works, live, and in the commute in between.

^[30]Minube.com ^[31] – presented by the creator team guided by Eduardo Gomez de la Mata, Minube.com is a travel community for travel lovers that allow its users to get inspirations and travel tips from media shared by other users on several destinations worldwide. Minube focuses on travel experience and presents the mash-upped user-generated content in a cool editorial way.

The finalist got the final vote from the Nonick public, and the winner has been announced, after the screening of all the votes, before closing the conference on saturday. So I will keep a little suspence also in this blog post and will announce the winner of the European Start-up 2.0 Competition a little further down. Just let me say that all the idea that got to the final were amazing, as I’m sure were also most of the other 100+ start-up submissions, that i didn’t had the pleasure to screen. Bravo! to everybody!

After a lunch break with incredibly tasty and well presented food (Euskadi has a tradition for top cuisine), Nonick continued with the 1st European Community Managers Session, that started with very interesting presentations by Petur Johannes Oskarsson, Community Manager at EVE Online ^[32] (multigame community) and Alberto Knapp Bjeren, presenting the social network The Cocktail ^[33], of which he is the CEO. Incredibly, while Petur from EVE Online, headquartered in Reykjavik, made it to Bibao, Luca Messaggi, Managing Director Europe at Zooppa.com ^[34], the user-generated advertising platform and community with offices in Italy, was the only one speaker that got irremediably stuck with flights and couldn’t make it to Nonick. Sorry Luca!

After Petur and Alberto’s presentations, the Nonick stage has been dedicated to the 1st European Community Managers Session, with an experiential round table that included Petur, Alberto and also Mark Ralea of the German Community Management Association, Kirsten Wagenaar of Netherland’s Community Management Association, Blaise Grimes-Viort, Head of Communities & Social Media for The National Magazine Company, and Gabriel Aldamiz-Echevarria of Spanish web portal Chicisimo.com ^[35]. The Community Managers Session has been moderated by Jose Antonio Gallego of the Spanish Community Managers Association. The output from the round table confrontation channeled into the last Nonick activity for the day 1 of the event, the creation of a wiki for Community Managers’ best practices, coordinated by Amaia García.

The first day of event has been so successful that the #nonick hashtag ^[36] on Twitter climbed its way up to be number two Twitter trending topic for Spain on Friday May 14, and couldn’t get to number one as it was impossible to beat #followfriday! Do you want to know more about the first day of Nonick? Let’s ask Monica, Virginia and Isabel, three among the participants to Nonick 010!

At the end of day one we had a great networking “dinner and drinks” night at the iconic Kafe Antzokia ^[37], an institution of the Bilbao nightlife, which was a follow-up of the speaker-only dinner we had the previous night – not really a dinner, more than a sensorial experience involving food and all senses prepared using molecular cuisine techniques by the Chefs at the Michelin-starred Etxanobe Restaurant ^[38]. Here are some pictures from the networking moments – just click on the image to see the full photo set on Flickr.

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The second day of the Nonick Conference started with a full morning of workshops about several online marketing topics, including a workshop on search marketing held by my good friend Ouali Benmeziane of Search Congress. Right after the workshops, distributed across several meeting rooms of the EITB headquarters, we got back to the EITB Auditorium with two great closing keynotes, the first one from the one and only Andie Grace ^[40] from the Communication Team of the Burning Man organization in San Francisco.

^[41]Andie inspired the audience with the visuals and the values of the Burning man community ^[42] and pointed out the fact that, while the Burning Man community is a real life one, the “burners” worldwide keep in touch and develop collaborative projects all year round using a wide range of online tools, from newsletters to blog, wikis, social networks and even video podcasting, like the one on Current.tv ^[43] and iTunes.

Also like the multi-author blog created pro-bono by Global Search Interactive for the Nowhere Festival ^[44] (the European Burning Man regional festival), more specifically for the Growing Nowhere ^[45] art retreat, when 25 artists from all over Europe (including myself) met in Reus, Catalunya (Spain) last November to discuss and create collective art projects.

As you can probably imagine, I was the one who proposed to invite Burning Man at Nonick 010 and I have been the happiest conference moderator (and burner) in the world when Andie Grace accepted our invitation to the Nonick Conference.

I am always evangelizing Burning Man, its (our) community and the values that are inspiring hundreds of thousands people around the world, and to me the participation of the Burning Man organization to a world class online marketing event I moderate it’s just the perfect match between the things I like most in both personal and professional life.

I have a brief video interview to Andie Grace for you. Sorry the audio quality is not excellent as it has been recorded on a very windy day, but yet you can enjoy a nice message from Andie! Thank you, Actiongrrrrrl ^[46]!

I know I’m very passionate about the Nonick Conference, but I cannot go on forever with this post, so let’s go back to the Nonick content. After Andie Grace, the closing keynote was a very interesting speech by Zaryn Dentzel, the founder of Spanish successful social network Tuenti ^[47], who talked about friendship and collaboration in local communities. Beside of stressing out the importance of being very relevant locally and to real friends and connections (hence Tuenti’s focus on Spain and the private, invite-only access to the social network), the most important take in Zaryn’s talk has been about privacy on social networks. In the days of concerns about Facebook privacy, Zaryn Dentzel confirmed that Tuenti gives the user full control over their privacy settings, as in the EIBT video below (in Spanish).

Final act for Nonick 010 was the award to the best European Start-up 2.0, as voted by the Nonick pubblic. And the winner of the European Start-up 2.0 Award is… Submate.com! Here is an interview to Laurent Kretz, the owner and founder of Submate, interviewed before he knew he was the recipient of the award. Congratulations, Laurant!

Final word on Nonick: thank you very much to all the Nonick speakers, the public, the Basque Government (one of the few in Europe with cutting edge vision on digital society) and, most of all, Eskerrik Asko (thank you in Euskara) to the amazing team at EITB, who made a great job to secure a great success for the Nonick Conference ^[48]! I hope to work again soon with Lontzo and the EITB team, stay tuned for updates from Euskadi!