Just over a week ago I attended an event at the Lamplighter in Vancouver, called CaseCamp. The premise of these events is a networking opportunity for people in the Marketing Communications, PR, advertising, social media and other worlds to get together and listen to a few case studies. For this session, there were four case studies — Saint Bernadine Mission spoke about its rebranding program for Brewhouse Beer; Kris Krug of Raincity delivered a presentation on using social media to gather phones for Fearless City; Noise Digital presented on how a dating site for the undead (zombiesingles.com) was used to build interest in Nokia’s mobile gaming platform; and Spring talked about how they took over the first day of “spring” to blatantly self-promote themselves, and raise some funds for charity. Overall, the presentations were quite good and informative. They had to stay within a 15-minute timeframe, which is really great…keeps people’s attention.
The concept of these networking/learning events is quite interesting, and I think they can be very informative. Hosting in a bar can be a bit distracting — people tend to lose focus after a beer or two! But at the end of the day, it’s a great opportunity to get out and meet some new people, learn a bit more about what else is happening in the marketing communications industry, and have a cold beer! 
My only real issue is the name “Case Camp.” I have no idea where this whole “Camp” trend started, but really think it’s overused, and hope that it soon morphs into something else. Whatever happened to terms like: event, party, get-together, or session? Any other suggestions?