New Comm Forum: Final Day & Reflections

Having a small baby means much love and lots of songs, especially "Old McDonald." Daycare in contrast often means lots of colds and flu.

Last Friday I picked up a cold from my son Bram, as a result my concentration this week has been dulled and it has meant that during my week spent in California at the New Comm Forum I've been slowly losing my voice. Basically I've been talking too much.

However, my voice did hold out for my two panel discussions today. One panel was on the New Influencer study and the other was on the Nuance case study. Paul Gillin did a terrific job with his presentation, lots of great case studies. While Wendy Harman from the American Red Cross and Jim Cahill from Emerson Process Management did super jobs in the New Influencer panels.

I had invited Wendy and Jim to the conference after they had been featured in the New Influencer study.

Jim Cahill was extremely kind to come up to the SNCR conference at very short notice and help out the panel discussion. If you have not heard of Jim's blog you should check it out. He gave a really interesting case study in his presentation on how to convince reluctant executives to allow blogging to happen in a company. The most effective tactic was by starting an internal blog. Everyone saw what corporate blogging was in action internally. Emerson has an internal Google search engine, and the blog achieved top rankings in internal searches. That data was used to provide evidence as to why the company should start a blog externally because of the effect of blogs on search rankings.

I've very much enjoyed the conference, there were a lot of great speakers, and I met some old friends and met some new ones. A highlight for me personally was the chance to meet Adrian Chan in person. Adrian is the web designer who coined the phrase, "social interaction design," a concept I've been thinking about for a while, but one that I did not have a phrase to describe, until recently. While I am not a designer, I do think a lot about the design of interaction between people within social media technologies. Adrian’s ideas are innovative; he also provides some great templates for using his concepts on websites on this site.