I’m a member of the Montreal, Quebec internet marketing community and as such, I like to participate in monthly meetups we have, aka Yulbiz. I met a bunch of people and had a fantastic time catching up with old friends. I also had the pleasure of bringing my friend Victor Benaderette, who is an expert salesman and who happens to be looking for work now, if you’re in the market. Contact me and I’ll put you in touch with him.

Here are the interesting folks I met, in no particular order.

Claude G. Théoret of Exvisu – As their services page hints at, Exvisu are in the data mining business. From what he explained to me, I understand that they have an innovative keyword research tool coming out soon, so keep your eyes on them.

Josh Nursing – An old pal from a previous Yulbiz experience, I was pleased to hear that Josh has now joined web dev firm Alogient.

Fady of Blue Sponge, which is a Montreal interactive agency with a few awards under its belt.

Aleece Germano of X Media , who is both a very sociable and generous person as she connected me with Claude, after I told her I was into search marketing.

Bernard Le Grand of Le Grands Foods told me about his salad dressing business oriented on Mediterranean ingredients.

Josh Koopferstock of Feeling 3D Software Consulting had some bright criticisms of my retargeting technique, highlighting why it would not be as effective as real retargeting, which is a fair point. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it to make your ads more effective though, especially when you can implement the idea free.

Alain Tanguay is a fellow web marketing consultant and he was generous with his knowledge, sharing the fact that UBC is giving web analytics courses. News to me, and a positive development in the Canadian university landscape. How long till McGill implements one?

And of course, this being what an internet marketing / blogosphere meetup, I naturally ran into my friendly competition, including JF Renaud of Adviso Web Strategy, Nic Cossette of NVI Internet Marketing and Eric Baillargeon of Rayonnement Web . Eric shared an interesting story of a positive Googlebomb he launched to promote Obama and that ended up netting him about 100 links! Nice piggy-back marketing there Eric !

Yulbiz happens on the last Tuesday of every month from 5:30 to about 9:00, usually at Cafe Melies, but sometimes elsewhere when the cafe has been reserved. This month we went to Chesterfield.