I was asked to speak at Social Media Influence, an event about social media and business, which took place today. Here are some photos from the event, a photo of me that Robin at the BBC took from the audience, and if you like grainy videos, people were recording mobile videos and streaming them on to Qik from the event too. Here's the event's Qik channel (screen grab on the left here from one of the videos on Qik).
My session was a panel on PR in the social media age. Putting the public back into public relations was the name. It was quite a dry session, compared to the E-Consultancy or LGComms events I was at the other week for example. I'm not sure why. But today's event was great networking. It was good to be able to meet so many digital practitioners, companies and brands in one place.
The other thing I saw from the event was just how you can foster a participative audience by giving them connectivity. About a year ago I would be telling a tech company setting up a conference to put on free wifi and promoting the wifi address, to promote blogging. Now you have to promote your backchannel, Flickr group, tags, Qik channel and give them good 3G access too. If you do it helps create huge online buzz for the people that cant ake it, and it lasts. And even though thi group of early adopters is a little ahead of the curve, I think it'll become much more mainstream and very quickly too.
Great to meet you Drew! It was all quite polite wasn't it but maybe we were all in perfect agreement... from the questions and conversations afterwards my outtake was that brands are at very different stages of wanting to participate in social media. As the early adopters have success, that breeds greater confidence among others.
Posted by: Helen Nowicka | June 05, 2008 at 09:27 AM