It's certainly been a while since I last posted something.
Truly sorry about it!
A few colleagues and I were attending the International Academy of Business Discipline (IABD) conference held in St Louis, Missouri between 2 Apr and 5 Apr in the dual role of the event's publicity team (fueled totally on Emerson student power, I must say!!!) and also to make our own individual presentations.
Hosted at the Hilton St. Louis at the Ballpark, this edition of the IABD drew some 135 participants from colleges and universities in the States. There was also a sizeable international crowd as well (Iran, Portugal, Spain, and the U.K., just to name a few).
As you can see from above, I was also here to make a presentation the communication strategies and lessons learnt from the 7th July bombings in London (click here to view the powerpoint slides).
But for me, this whole trip has been a learning experience on a grand scheme of things, especially on the social media front! Look out for my subsequent blogs where I'll discuss some social media elements from my paper, as well as some nuggets I mined from a panel discussing Web 2.0 technologies.
Now back to this…
Since I’m the owner of a fairly new Cannon Rebel DSLR, I was voted as the official cameraman in my team of five (I've embedded the photofeed from Flickr just to give you a flavor of the event).
In addition to that, all of us were also running around with Flip Video camcorders (made by Pure Digital Technologies, a company bought by Cisco Systems in March of 2009 – click here to read the background) and digital voice recorders.
Accounts on multimedia photo and video platforms like Flickr, Youtube were created, and we were all given authorship access to it. This was strategic because it gave everyone on the team plenty of mobility, not to mention scalability and responsiveness to the dynamic situations on the ground.
Basically what happened for us was that we were frantically going around from breakout session to breakout session to either record a snippet of the discussions, or find someone to interview (as I recall, we often did both). And then we had to grab hold of the lull time in between sessions to upload our content.
It was, for me, a new experience in the world of User Generated Content (UGC) since I had never really got my hands dirty doing vlogs (video logs) or podcasts.
Apart from that, this was also the first time that we were using Twitter to add some jazz and buzz to the events – at least as far as we could – through regular updates throughout the day. I remember trying to upload fresh photos on Flickr in between catching a quick breather at the hotel lobby (where WIFI access is free)…
In the picture below, for example, one of my colleagues was in the midst of uploading fresh tweets after the speaker (foreground) had made an interesting point.
Observations and Some Lessons Learnt
First and foremost, I think the overall concept of operation has been a sound one – and one that also makes it easy for any in-house PR team to adopt.
Using a blog platform - check out the IABD Press blog that was created for this event - as the flagship site to talk about the event was a great idea because it makes it easy to manipulate with little need for HTML knowledge (though that would be an obvious plus).
It also allowed us to integrate other freeware applications like Flickr and Youtube to jazz up the interactivity of the entire content and presentation.
I was in fact really thrilled each time I had a fresh batch of photos to upload. I suppose it’s the thrill of being able to see the content you’ve just produced put into its proper paces with little fuss but maximum impact.
Basically what happened for us was that we were frantically going around from breakout session to breakout session to either record a snippet of the discussions, or find someone to interview (as I recall, we often did both). And then we had to grab hold of the lull time in between sessions to upload our content.
It was, for me, a new experience in the world of User Generated Content (UGC) since I had never really got my hands dirty doing vlogs (video logs) or podcasts.
Apart from that, this was also the first time that we were using Twitter to add some jazz and buzz to the events – at least as far as we could – through regular updates throughout the day. I remember trying to upload fresh photos on Flickr in between catching a quick breather at the hotel lobby (where WIFI access is free)…
But what about areas that we could’ve done better?
I would have to say that the Twitter experience wasn’t as effective because we launched it too late.
But to be honest, Tweeting was really an afterthought and more of a fun suggestion. Still, for the benefit of future student cohorts that’ll take over the baton for the subsequent IABD coverage, it’s important to market our platforms way in advance if we're to create awareness, retention and finally, participation.
This year it was really late that a Twitter account for the press team was established, but I won’t regret the move because what we are handling down to the next team is a better-integrated communication and publicity platform (not to mention systems) indeed.
I suppose that due to the size of the group, and the fact that we are also presenting papers during the conference, we were sort of stretched thin most of the time.
One of the issues I felt was that our written content on the blog wasn't as frequently updated as it ought to... though I thought we did exceptionally well in creating a whole library of photo and video testimonies!
Just perhaps... had we been able to include other elements like podcasts and even upload powerpoint presentations on our IABD Press blog or even the official website, it would've made the channel such a value-adding proposition for visitors.
In fact, I’m also looking forward to the day when participants will be actively contributing their own blogs, comments and experiences to our blog forum. This will be a step up as it adds a fresh and evolving layer of contextual and experiential details that will be such a priceless knowledge hub as time rolls on.
It is perhaps also the next level of dialogue that we need to aspire towards.
Still, it has been a great experience, and one that once again reinforces in me the conviction that integrated new media is the way to go in the future.
The next stage for the IABD Press is perhaps to consider developing a Facebook account as well as a LinkedIn profile. PR 2.0 and other new media practitioners understand that because today's market is very fragmented, communication needs to be taken to as many spheres as possible so that a presence may be developed - and conversations may begin.
So perhaps, it is ironic but true that as much as new media and Web 2.0 technologies makes it easier for us to connect with others, real communication is largely a very manual and laborious process of getting involved personally in the communities and groups out there.
This and several aspects of Web 2.0 developments will be covered in my next blog, so look out for it...
Till then!