Archive for the 'Events' Category

You might like to come along to a discussion panel at the City Womens Network (CWN) on “Social Media: Online Communities” on 18 October ( 18.30 - 20.30pm). I’m one of the speakers along with a number of other web, digital marketing and business PR experts.

Here’s the blurb:

Using social media to build an online community around your business can be an effective way to retain clients, bring in new ones and raise the profile of your enterprise. In this panel discussion, we explore practical steps you can take to create and manage an online community relevant for your business.
We are proud to have selected a panel of speakers:

Yang-May Ooi, founder of social media consultancy ZenGuide and experienced blogger, will talk about strategies to keep your visitors coming back to your site and to develop your brand’s presence online.

Giles Colborne, President of the UK Usability Professionals’ Association and Managing Director of cxpartners, will guide you through the roles and responsibilities in managing online communities.

Kristen Berg, marketing strategist, looks at some examples of how brands have used communities, the strategic role they play and the potential value to the company.

Silvia Cambié, Director of Chanda Communications and Chair of CWN’s Membership Committee, will be moderating the session.

Organised by the Membership Committee. For more information, contact the organiser, Silvia Cambié, on silvia[at]chandacom.com.

Venue information:
Hosted by CO3 Limited
First Floor, Downstream Building No. 1, London Bridge,
SE1 9BG London, GB
nearest tube is London Bridge.

Time: 18.30pm
Date: 18 October 2007

Members: £20
Non-members: £25 (men welcome as guests)

It would be great to see you there. If you’re coming, email me and I’ll let the organisers know.

Last week, I gave a presentation at the Copyright Licensing Agency’s annual open meeting about The Impact of Web 2.0 on copyright issues. It was a packed hall with over 180 people, many of them standing. The delegates ranged from authors and content producers to publishers and librarians and knowledge management professionals in education and business organisations. Althought I couldn’t make it for the whole of the round table discussion on digital information and copyright chaired by Chris Bryant, MP, I managed to catch the tail end of it. I also had the chance after the event to speak to a few of the delegates, including representatives from the BBC, a photographic rights agency, a publisher and a corporate knowledge management professional.

I’m jotting down here some of my impressions of the issues from the conference - these are no more than impressions and vignettes of the discussions as they were aired and raise more questions for debate rather than giving firm answers.

• The government is making funding available for schools to help students become more internet- and social media- literate but there are apparently delays due to concerns about schools using materials off the internet in breach of copyright. However, there are apparently special sites offering copyright-free material for schools and educational establishment for just this purpose. But, overall, can the government with all its unwieldy bureaucratic machinery be the right instrument for change is the fast moving area of online technology and networked communication and enterprise?

• Is digital rights management here to stay? Or will content producers like the BBC have to accept the fact that they will have to let go off their rights to a product some time after it’s been produced?

• At the moment, the likes of the BBC can still find a market to sell its high quality products like its natural world series etc due to the fact that pirated versions on the internet are of low quality. It is probably not long before the technology will be freely available to upload high quality pirated versions online. What then for the original content producers?

• Is there a future for book writers when digital readers become more widely available? At the moment, book lovers are still attached to the physical book but as the young techno-loving iPod wearing millenials and their children start to outnumber us oldies, will they adapt more enthusiastically to electronic book readers? If so, will that be an opportunity for “bijou” writers who don’t produce blockbusters to gain a wider readership through digital distribution because they won’t be at the mercy of the bookshops for distribution? Or will it be a threat because their work can now be easily copied and freely distributed illegally?

• Chris Bryant mentioned the estate of German playwright Bertolt Brecht. The estate were apparently restrictive for a long time in granting rights for Brecht’s works to be used, quoted, performed or edited. For example, his plays in their original would run for over 3.5 hours which is difficult to market to today’s theatre-going audiences. However, they have recently been more open in rights granting and the result has been that more Brecht plays are being performed and the increased exposure generally from the dissemination of his works through freer rights has resulted in greater revenue returns for the estate.

• The panellists in the main discussion all called for flexibility in managing copyright - yes, it is important to protect and value the products of creativity and hard work but in this digital age, it’s important to be flexible to enable the sharing of information and knowledge.

• I was struck by the comment of a university representative about the difficulties of printing off 50 copies of an online article to include in a student pack for discussion on one of the university’s courses. It’s ironic in that the founding principle of the World Wide Web was that the technology was meant to make information freely available for all…

What do you think? Have you had experiences around copyright issues and social media or online digital technologies? I’d love to hear your views - please add a comment or email me.

Photo: of Sony Digital Reader thanks to askdavetaylor.com

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Today, I’m going along to the Copyright Licensing Agency to give a presentation at their open meeting on the impact of digital media and Web 2.0 for copyright stakeholders. It was somewhat last minute as their original speaker for the Web 2.0 segment, Giles Colbourne, a web usality expert at cxpartners, was unable to attend due to a conflicting engagement in the US. Giles asked me to step in last week so I spent most of this last weekend, putting together the presentation and slides.

While thinking about the issues to bring together for this talk, I found myself having a vested interest in both sides of the rights-holding debate.

As a a writer in print media, with two novels published, a third book (non-fiction) in the works and articles published in magazines to my name, I am fully in favour of my creative rights being protected by legislation. The reason is primarily to do with the monetary currency that I receive in return for my work from the bodies who publish my writing. As a professional writer, I expect to be remunerated for the work I create.

As a blogger and free-wheeling consumer of social media on the internet, I’ve got used to the idea that stuff from the web should be free - other than real-world-type things that you have to buy like CDS, books, groceries online or software of a certain level of high complexity that is worth paying money for. People create videos on Youtube and give you an embed code so you can embed (publish) it on your own site. Musicians create podsafe music for the joy of distributing their music to millions online even though they may not be able to get a record deal. I spend as much time - if not more - writing on my blog for free, compared to how much time I spent writing my novels, for which I was paid. Others offer their photos under the Creative Commons Licence so we can enjoy their creative work for free. The idea of having to pay for social media stuff in order to remunerate their creators feels like anathema.

This makes me feel strangely schizophrenic.

But I think the answer to breaking through the apparent conflict is in how we value the content we create in different media.

In my post last week on the world’s first website, I discussed the founding principle behind the world wide web and social media - the principle that information should be freely available to anyone. This is seemingly at odds with the traditional view that information and intellectual property has value and if you want it you need to pay for it.

In the traditional model, the value lies in scarcity and protection. In the new social media model, value lies in abundance and in sharing.

What I’ll be exploring in my talk to the CLA is what value the web’s open source principle has to offer to us offline content creators and publishers - and how we might look to take advantage of it, which I hope will be an interesting and useful approach for the writers, publishers and rights agents who will be attending.

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For delegates attending the CLA open meeting, you can download my presentation slides on The Impact of Web 2.0 - I will be making the password available at the meeting.

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The International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) is organising a regional conference for its European and Middle Eastern communicators with La Salle University in Barcelona on 4th and 5th February 2008. The theme is Innovation through Communication.

I recently joined IABC and I’m delighted to be part of the organising board for the EuroComm conference in Barcelona with the responsibility of implementing and running the conference blog. The website and blog are being developed by La Salle’s inhouse team and I spoke with their key conference organiser Alejandro Beya and web developer Carlos Ramil last week about infrastructure and design elements. They’ll be using Wordpress and I’m very excited to see what they are going to create.

The website and blog will be launching during October. I am pulling together our core blogging team and we are also inviting guest bloggers to contribute posts around the themes of innovation and communication. For example, we have invited the speakers to blog about the topics that they will be speaking on at the conference - from a more personal point of view than they might perhaps be able to offer in a conference room with scores of people, powerpoint slides and miked up to the sound system.

So far, the line-up of bloggers looks something like this:

Blogging Team/ Blog Management

Yang-May Ooi, communications & social media consultant, ZenGuide (UK)
Angie Macdonald, web writer & blog management specialist, ZenGuide (UK)
Marc Wright, internal communications expert, simply-communicate.com (UK)
Giles Colbourne, web usability expert, cxpartners (UK)
Kevin Keohane, brands expert, SAS (UK)

Guest Bloggers

Silvia Cambie, business communications expert, Chanda Communications and President, EuroComm Organising Board (UK)
Andrew Riley, assurance reporting and communications specialist, Harrison Riley and President, IABC UK (UK)
Ulrich Gartner, Vice-President of Communications Europe, AB Electrolux (Sweden)
Ian Anderson, Head of the Communication and Information Unit, European Commission (Belgium)
Martin Crocker, Marketing Communications Manager, Gemalto (France)
Rauf Hameed, Communication and Environment Manager, Tetra Pak Arabia (Saudi Arabia)
Ulrike Bleistein, Head of Pharma Informatics Communications, Hoffman La Roche (Switzerland)
Velin Velkov, President of IABC Europe and Middle East Region (Bulgaria)

We are still in the preparation stage so the list is likely to change and evolve. I’ll be blogging more about that and all the other news about the conference on the EuroComm Blog once that is up and running. For now, I just wanted to share this heads-up with you here while we’re waiting for the main site to go live.

Photo: thanks to danntara from flickr.com

This Saturday is the Live Earth event - 7/7/7. What is it?

“Live Earth is a 24-hour, 7-continent concert series taking place on 7/7/07 that will bring together more than 100 music artists and 2 billion people to trigger a global movement to solve the climate crisis.”

As part of this event, you can sign up to their Twitter feed and receive tips via your mobile phone on what you can do to help save the world. Here are some sample messages from their feed:

“Shading windows. It can lower your home’s temperature and reduce your cooling costs by 30%. Answer the Call at liveearth.org.

Cutting down. If 1 million people cut down their trash by 10%, we could reduce our CO2 emissions by 50,000 tons. Learn more at liveearth.org”

All you have to do is sign up to Twitter via www.twitter.com and go to http://twitter.com/LiveEarth070707 to add Live Earth as a friend.

The people behind this campaign are SOS an ” ongoing messaging campaign and larger movement behind Live Earth.” According to their “About” section:

“The SOS campaign is using a powerful multimedia platform - short films, television and radio PSAs, an interactive web experience, books, the Live Earth concerts themselves - to provide a global audience with the tools to tackle the climate crisis.

This multimedia campaign will ensure that the message of Live Earth echoes long after 7/7/07.”

This is an important campaign that will benefit all of us - and future generations - so it’s well worth signing up for.

As an aside, my feeling is that this is what many communications strategies need to look like in the future - whether you are a not-for-profit, big business, small enterprise or solo professional. As we all become multi-media smart, it will become increasingly important to spread the word about your event or product or services across a number of platforms in an integrated way. For small businesses and solo professionals, the interactive multi-media tools of Web 2.0 are cheap - often free - and easy to use. There are great opportunities these days for the enterprising small player to make big waves via the internet without a huge budget - all you need is a readiness to engage with the new technology.

Some ideas:

* start a blog and make your presence felt on the internet

* use podcasting to chat more informally. Writers could read extracts from their books. Record a speaking engagement so those who couldn’t be there can hear your speech.

* create presentations to show online. There are tools available to post slideshows eg Zoho

* record a video to show online. Facial expression and tone can convey warmth so much more than just words - what about a short presentation by your Chief Executive reporting on your company’s annual results?

* use Twitter to send out regular short messages. Executive coaches can twitter their clients daily encouragement or actions to boost confidence and productivity.

Photo: thanks to smh.com.au

This is a cross-post from my cross-culture blog, Fusion View

Fusion View is being featured on the BBC Radio 5 programme Pods & Blogs on Monday 25 June night (actually 02am on Tuesday 26 June) when it will go out over the airwaves to around half a million AM listeners and half a million FM listeners. The programme will also be available online for ONE WEEK on their website but unfortunately not as a podcast so if you’d like to catch it, you need to go to the site and listen during this coming week. (The Fusion View piece is at around 30 mins into the show, after the news and sport.)

I met Chris Vallance, the presenter, for lunch a few weeks ago at Hayes Galleria by London Bridge and we had a wide-ranging discussion about blogs, podcasts, the Chinese in the UK, cross-cultural issues, globalisation, Malaysian bloggers and much more. It was great to get his perspective as a blogs and pods watcher as well as sharing mine with him as a blogger and podcaster.

He only pulled out his recording equipment after lunch and we wandered around trying to find a quiet corner for him to record the interview. We ended up standing in an alleyway, not far from a white van where a couple of builders were having their sarnies and thermos of tea. Having had a good old chat over lunch, the moment Chris thrust his fancy microphone towards me, I went completely blank and started stammering and dithering - we had to start again several times before I hit my stride and could even say anything sensible about who I was and what Fusion View is all about! I’ve interviewed a number of people on my podcasts and I have to say, it’s utterly different being on the other end of the mike - I have even greater respect now for my Fusion View interviewees in that they never had to do any re-takes and just started chatting with confidence and panache.

The interview was only 10 minutes and we ended up focusing on my novels rather more than on Fusion View. After we finished, I realised I hadn’t had a chance to talk about the various themes of my blog such as:

# Fusion Stories - personal stories of people who live cross-cultural lives eg a Welsh-Iranian student, a South African living in Germany, a Caucasian-American who writes fiction in Mandarin.
# How switching between my “two voices“, speaking “proper” English and heavily accented Malaysian-English, affects my personality and identity
# Podcast interviews with Lucy Luck, a literary agent and Terry Bailey, a lecturer in screenwriting
# Curious Legacies - Recipes and other legacies from people who have influenced my life eg my first boyfriend’s recipe for Hairdryer Duck and my grandmother’s recipe for Soy Sauce Chicken.
# Legacy Blogging: stories from my family eg a recording from 1976 of my late grandfather telling the story of the “first ancestor” from China and my father’s Memories of Malaya during the Japanese occupation.

Chris also wanted me to explain to the world the equipment I use to do my podcasts. I had described it to him over lunch and he thought it was worthwhile for other potential podcasters to know that the equipment didn’t have to be too fancy or expensive - although I have to say, I was rather impressed by his equipment: the professional big flash drive; the robust noise-cancelling microphone and all those buttons. In the end, they didn’t use that bit of the interview in the piece they broadcast but anyway, here’s a picture of my home-made podcasting gear.

That’s a wooden kitchen roll holder and slotted into it is an old leather mobile phone case. The digital recorder sits snugly in the leather case. Ideally, I sit at a table with my interviewee with the equipment sort of in the middle on the table between us. I point the recorder at them when they speak. When it’s my turn to speak, I swivel it towards me by turning the base gently, ask my question and then swivel it back to them. The advantage is that my arm doesn’t get tired holding the recorder up and it also sits a sufficient distance away from our mouths to avoid explosive “PPPs” and “TTTs”. I’m tickled that Chris, the professional BBC journalist, has given it his seal of approval!

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The variety and fun of Fusion View would not have been possible without all the people who contributed to it through writing guest pieces, agreeing to be interviewed, adding comments or emailing me in response to posts - and also all those offline who sparked ideas for posts through our conversations over coffee and dinner. So thanks to everyone who has been part of the Fusion View community is some way or other!

I have uploaded my photos of my trip to Slovenia for the IABC Leadership Institute on a new ZenGuide Flickr account. The collection of photos shows the speakers at the conference as well as some of the delegates and some snaps of the gorgeous capital city Ljubljana.

Ljubljana is perfectly set along the banks of a small meandering river, with cobbled streets and baroque (?) architecture that reminded me of Austria. There were cafes and restaurants spilling out into the streets and people strolling and cycling at a leisurely pace. The Slovenian Tourist Board describes their country as the place where Germanic efficiency and order meets the Mediterranean good life and Ljubljana definitely seems to fit that description.

To see the photos, go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/zenguide/tags/iabcslovenia/ or click on the photo below.

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Note: ZenGuide is updated Mondays and Thursdays

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You will see the password-protected post that was uploaded a minute or so ago, IABC - Slovenia: Resources. This contains additional resources for IABC members who are currently attending the IABC Leadership Institute conference in Lubljiana and who are participating in the round table discussion on New Media that I am chairing there.

I hope for those who come along to the round table, we will be able to continue the discussion online after the conference via email and/ or comments and further posts here on ZenGuide following up on the issues we discuss. If anyone would like to contribute an article as a guestblogger on ZenGuide, please do contact me via the Contact link at the top of this page - in particular, if you do not yet have a blog or a forum you can easily access to share your views, being a guestblogger is a great way to start engaging in online conversations.

Next week, I’ll be highlighting some of the issues that came out of the round table discussions and inviting all my readers to comment and share your views.

Photo of Slovenia: thanks to mackintravel.com

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Since I was profiled in Communication World, the journal of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), I was persuaded to join the organisation by Silvia Cambie, the then President of the IABC, Europe and Middle East Region and invited onto the Board of IABC UK, with the portfolio for New Media.

On Wednesday, I will be off to Lubljiana in Slovenia to attend the IABC Leadership Institute where I will also be chairing the round table discussion on Social Media. I’m really looking forward to it - I’ve never been to Slovenia so it will be great to have this opportunity to see its capital city, albeit briefly. It will also be good to meet other IABC members and to be able to engage in-depth with the leadership aspects of this international organisation.

I’m looking forward to the Social Media round table. I’m curious to hear what the other delegates have to share from their experiences of using social media in their communications work. For those communicators who may be reading this post, here are some things I’d like to engage with in the discussion:

# how do you see blogging and social media working with traditional communications

# what do you think IABC communicators need to learn about blogging and social media

# what is the view of the businesses and enterprises you work with around the use of social media within their organisations

# what are some of the hot issues around social media right now

# how are communications practices changing in the light of the social media revolution

I have my own views and experiences about all this which I’m looking forward to sharing but I am also keen to hear what others have to say and to learn from my colleagues as well.

The hotel we’re staying at does not have WiFi or broadband, so I’m not taking my laptop and I won’t be able to check emails and comments after tomorrow night (I’ll be back online again when I get home at the weekend). But if you’re at the conference, do come along to the Social Media roundtable or come and find me at any time and let me know your thoughts.

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NOTE: There will be no posts on Thursday 07 June and the next posts on ZenGuide will be uploaded on Friday 08 June.

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