After a frantic few weeks Don't Panic finally shut up shop and sneaked off to Toronto for a bit of R&R and plenty of Xmas retail therapy.

We were working right up to the day before our departure with a major event on behalf of Fresh Consultants and Rochdale MBC and also the CIPR Xmas party in Leeds earlier that week.

Canada's a fantastic country and Toronto is certainly one of North America's great cities. Sadly we didn't get the usually guaranteed snow as Ontario basked in some unseasonably warm (ie above zero) weather.

We still managed to cram a lot into our week away and met up with friends for drunken nights in Parkdale, caught the streetcar to The Beaches, took a trip to Niagara and probably doubled the takings down Queen Street West.

We also caught the Cavalcade of Lights free event in Nathan Phillips Square which features live music, an ice rink and an amazing fireworks display off city hall every Saturday in the run up to Xmas.

Eating out is particularly good in the city although there's something slightly obscene about North American portion sizes and the amount of food wasting that goes on. We'd booked ahead for dinner at the 360 restaurant atop the CN Tower and have very fond memories of some great diner breakfasts...

It was also a good opportunity to think back on what's been a phenomonal year for our events company and focus on the slightly frightening thought of expanding for 2007. As the song goes, 'Later on we'll conspire as we dream by the fire, To face unafraid the plans that we've made, walking in a winter wonderland'.

It's probably the best time of year to reflect on how lucky we are and we want to wish PR student blogger Richard Millington all the best as he soon sets off to cycle 400km in five days across Kenya to raise money for a PC lab in one of the country's schools. He's not quite made his £2,500 fundraising target yet and anyone interested in helping him on his way can do so by following this link.

We'd like to thank all our clients, speakers and delegates for making our first year in business so fantastic and wish you all a great Xmas.

Finally Neville Hobson has thrown down the gauntlet by tagging me with the 'five things you didn't know about me' game. Well here goes -

1. In the early 90's I made it to the last two in auditions for a new presenter for Channel 4's youth music show The Word.

2. Also around that time I was a paid go-go dancer at Manchester's Hacienda nightclub.

3. I got married in Jamaica in 2004 to the sounds of The Durutti Column and Virgina Astley.

4. On seperate occassions I refused entry to Steve Coogan and Sarah Cox's dog and shared a lift with George Michael when I worked on the door at Manchester's Mash and Air restaurant.

5. I saw the original Take That about five times including their last ever invite only performance at Manchester Town Hall.

In my younger days I had a bit of a crush on Tina Weymouth and when I was putting together the soundtrack to the ultimate conference on word of mouth communications, Tom Tom Club's Wordy Rappinghood was an essential choice. Sadly the CD never got played but more of that later...

The ultimate conference on winning the battle for word of mouth was the brainchild of Andy Green of GREEN Communications who pulled together a dream line up of speakers from the worlds of marketing, PR and advertising for a get together at London's Dental Institute last Friday. Andy kicked things off with his meme judo session on personal 'brandcasting' which had very little to do with martial arts but set the tone beautifully for the day.

Self confessed Lemsip junkie Mark Borkowski didn't allow a dose of the man flu to interfere with his theatrical take on the history and role of publicists in the art of word of mouth. Everyone who's criticised the pure genius of the recent Borkowski Movey is just jealous!

Later in the morning William Ostrom of The Number gave us an insight into the 118 118 story who's Seventies runners have legged it into advertising folklore. Ivan Palmer of Wildfire Word of Mouth Marketing looked at how you can make your wom experiential and Fergus Hampton of Millward Brown Precis led us into lunch with an overview of research into the power of wom as a marketing tool.

The afternoon featured presentations from conference chair Steve Barton of Keevil Barton Kershaw who looked at the phenomenon of the 'broadcasters' and 'followers' amongst consumers, Robert East of Kingston Business School on academic wom research and Graham Goodkind of Frank PR on the whole issue of talkability.

Graham certainly stood out as one of the highlights of the day and his presentation featured the Frank PR case studies of Wimbledon pigeons ethically branded to advertise a tennis computer game, advertising opportunities on tombstones and the HP Sauce branded snooker ball and sponsored Jimmy White name change to James Brown.

The other highly entertaining campaign was for a condom company and allowed women to unscientifically measure up the size of their prospective date online by selecting various signifiers such as hand, foot and nose sizes. Andy Green was our guinea pig and seemed disappointed with the accuracy of the answer!

Simon Collister of GREEN Communications gave a social media perspective on wom and looked at how blogs can be used to spread messages. Thresher's recent 40% off promotion is a case in point and the national news stories it's generating on how a million people have downloaded the voucher looks less like a bad backfiring and more like a very clever PR stunt. Interestingly about the same percentage of our marketing and PR audience raised their hands when asked who was blogging.

The conference took place in the Henriette Raphael room of the Dental Institute at King's College in London Bridge. It's actually quite a nice space but sadly our experience on the day means we wont be using it again.

On arrival the room doors were locked, the AV equipment wasn't wired for sound until lunch time and we had to contend with sporadic banging throughout the morning. On top of that the CD player we'd requested never arrived and the venue's conference organiser didn't even return our phone calls let alone show her face to resolve the issues we'd raised.

Thankfully it didn't detract from the strength of the conference but it's poor service like this which can ruin a venue's reputation. Having read our delegates feedback the venue received an overall thumbs down for being hard to find, noisy and having the most uncomfortable wooden seats in London. The only saving grace was the quality of the buffet.

Despite all that and the lack of sleep due to a four hour drive through the night, we really enjoyed the day. Events are rarely as much fun as this and audience participation included Chinese whispers, Mexican waves and a rendition of Agadoo!

Lots of people have already blogged about the event and you can read their posts from a PR perspective by clicking these links - Simon Wakeman, Ian Delaney, Heather Yaxley, Simon Collister and Mark Borkowski. There was also talk about taking a version of this event on the road next year so watch this space and we'll keep you informed.

Finally, many of our delegates asked if they could get hold of the presentations so out of courtesy we'll seek the speakers approval and then add as much as we can to this post soon...

UPDATE - The following speakers have agreed for their presentations to be made available as PDF's - Simon Collister, Robert East, Andy Green, Fergus Hampton, William Ostrom and Ivan Palmer. Please click the links to access the documents.