1. Submit a proposal for the upcoming District 30 Spring Conference to present a session on Social Media, in particular how LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter can benefit Toastmaster members -  in particular obtaining information not found by their club and district leaders, as well as publicizing the organization to their friends, connections and followers.  If the conference committee are not interested, I hope this would be considered for the next Summer TLI.
2. Plan to give more speeches as I only gave one in 2009 and that was for the International Speech Contest.  Some of the speech topics I plan to present are using Social Media, promoting Scott Berkun‘s Confessions of a Public Speaker book, the Tiger Woods scandal, and Curling, which is my new interest this winter.  I need to make use of the speech skills and experience I obtained throughout the years as I don’t have many opportunities to speak outside of Toastmasters, plus give speeches on topics that matter to me.
3. Avoid being a club officer after June 30th – I haven’t done much as the Arlington Heights‘ PR officer, so my goal should be the lay the foundation for my successor to build on.  The club is doing well with membership so we should not have a dearth of members who are willing to step up and become officers for the upcoming term.  While I plan to remain a dedicated Toastmaster member for my two clubs, my days of being heavily involved in the clubs should long be over and I need to move forward in becoming a more well-rounded Toastmaster member, especially with speaking.

There may be more things I plan to do for this year, I’ll post updates throughout the year.  I’ll continue to update the blog on a variety of Toastmaster topics, including observations on District 30 and Toastmasters International.  So stay tuned…

One video that I enjoyed which I was not present for was the DTM ceremony.  As in a previous post, I was concerned about how they can fit 12 new DTM medal recipients in a short time.  Well they opted for the “high-five” ceremony where the new DTMs run down the front of the stage high-fiving the other DTMs as if they were introduced as starters for the Chicago Bulls!

Tim mentioned when I was there that he was planning to start putting videos up late this week, I replied that he should not make these promises public unless he’s definite that they’ll happen.  Well he supposedly not made any guarantees to the crowds unlike the last conference and he actually delivered his work very quickly.  Way to go Tim!

Well as you see from this picture, that was what I did for a significant time at the conference.  Anything that I observed that was worth mentioning in my view gets posted.  It made an otherwise uneventful conference fun, and I admit that it made me want to get back to the conference site early Saturday morning instead of sleeping in.  Of course I got to meet with many old friends and meet some new ones, a few even mentioned that they read this blog.  The events I attended were OK, but they weren’t much different from past conferences I attended.

What is great about using Twitter is that I was able to enter what I feel like without any interference from others, without being part of someone else’s agenda.  That was a major reason why I’m no longer involved in District 30 and why I turned down being the Evaluation Contest chair for this conference as there are many in leadership here who are more concerned about their view of the world than letting those who volunteer at the event do their jobs and grow from it.  I went as far as pushing the limits of what I write by referring to the business meeting as the “bs meeting” (I admit it was intentional and not use it as an abbreviation) and mention the first sentence of this paragraph as my parting shot before I left the conference.  Not sure if the conference committee and D30 officers read what I wrote, they may be too politically correct to not want me to do this again or restrict or drop using Twitter, but it is worth a try.

On the other hand if more Toastmaster members are aware of using Twitter, more could check out the feed when they’re unable to be there.  They can even get an instant announcement as to who was a contest winner, which I did for Friday’s Evaluation Contest (too bad no one put one for the Humorous Speech Contest in my absence).  Someone in the volunteer desk mentioned it can be a great way to tell if there were concerns or issues about the conference so the committee can learn from them, such examples that I entered include:

strange they’re asking someone from each 7-officer trained club to go up and shake the LGET’s hand and leave the stage w/ nothing!

and

main room seemed dead during lunch and c&l now it is packed for main educ session with the ID!

I was excited on using Twitter to report from the conference, even forward my tweets to my Facebook page.  Only four others used it during this conference, if there is more publicity on it perhaps we can get more to tweet in the 2010 Spring Conference.