Institute of Chartered Accountants of Alberta

Yesterday I had a wonderful time at the Jasper Park Lodge presenting to NOT the Certified General Accountants of Alberta as I blogged about in my previous post but the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Alberta (ICAA).  I must be getting old, I’ve never got the association wrong before like this.  This was (in my terms) similar to when the lead singer for a major music act exclaims they’re totally stoked to be in “Calgary” when they’re actually in “Edmonton.” I start talking about why those in the room should consider becoming a “social accountant.”  Ok, so far so good, they’re all accountants.  Then we start digging into specifics and I realize, yes we’ve got a different designation in the room.  Now I explained early on that I was taking the approach of looking at the accounting industry as a whole anyway, so the impact in terms of data was still there.  I talked about CGA’s, CMA’s, even a group of accountants from Ireland, all as examples to communicate various points.  Still as a professional speaker this is not something you want to get in the habit of doing, I won’t do that again and my apologies to the Chartered Accountants in the room .

Everyone was pretty good about the little slip-up, although in true social media fashion, there is a tweet explaining the mistake I made and I couldn’t resist and also had to blog about it too.

The Giant is Asleep

In a room of just under 50 professional people, (2) were on Twitter, that’s not entirely unexpected for this industry after my preliminary research.  There were also (2) self-proclaimed bloggers in the room, one of which I found out later was actually a teacher.  That too was lower than expected.  However, I believe that many started putting serious thought into taking some action towards becoming a “social accountant.”  I can extrapolate this from the questions that were asked after my presentation was completed.  Discussions of how to reduce white noise or irrelevant information flow, pilot projects  and where to start, this was a very friendly and engaged group.

Admissions of the beginning of Linkedin profiles and Twitter accounts.  By enlarge, this industry is dormant in terms of social activity.  Certainly with respect to Alberta, we have a long way to go before anyone could state that our regional accountants of any designation are truly invested in social.  My hope is that for one person or organization, yesterday’s presentation was enough inspiration to take action.  I did receive a little feedback from folks which I always appreciate as it helps me improve.  That despite the faux pas mentioned above was quite positive and I feel really good about the experience as well.  We’re all human after all and prone to mistakes, it’s how we learn from those experiences that is the real story.

I want to thank the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Alberta for the chance to speak at their wonderful event at the Jasper Park Lodge and for the wonderful speakers gift too.