ABC Radio National: Beth Etling on the future of conferences – where is it going?

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Yesterday ABC Radio National’s Future Tense program did a special feature on the future of conferences.

Beth Etling, CEO of The Insight Exchange, was one of the three panelists interviewed, along with Matt Moore of Innotecture and Katie Chatfield of Jack Morton Worldwide.

You can listen to the future of conference program here as a podcast.

It provides a great overview of where the events industry is heading, with some excellent insights from Beth and the other panelists, particularly on the specific things that The Insight Exchange will be doing to push the boundaries on the industry, making events that are far more valuable to participants than traditional models.

In particular there was a great discussion on the role of blogging and Twittering at events. This is something that event organizers must understand and work with effectively to add value to conferences. Beth also spoke about the role of online community building before, during and after events. This is about combining the rich value of face-to-face interaction with the potential of online discussions.

If you want to experience real innovation and value-creation in events, attend The Insight Exchange’s inaugural event, The Power of Influence luncheon, in Sydney next Tuesday!

Keynote: Future of Global Business – Implications and Opportunities

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Tomorrow I am doing the closing keynote for the CPA Week Conference in Perth, on the topic of The Future of Global Business: Implications and Opportunities.

The slides from my presentation are here – as always these are intended for people who are attending my session as they are not designed to be meaningful on their own.

The Future of Global Business: Implications and Opportunities

View more presentations from rossdawson.

I’ll write a few additional thoughts on my speech topic soon – on the run right now.

An overview of my keynote is here .

Tapping the power of Social Media: 6 steps for marketers

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I wrote the article below for Tech Marketing magazine. It is intended as a quick guide for marketers who are looking to engage with social media.

It is now impossible to ignore the power and reach of social media. Yet the rules of engagement are very different to traditional marketing and PR. Here are a few guidelines to how to tap the power of social media without stumbling into the many pitfalls:

1. Participate and play

The only way to understand social media is to participate. Don’t just open Facebook and Twitter accounts. You need to play extensively with a wide variety of tools and discover how they are being used. If you think you don’t have time, think how much time you’ll have if you cannot work effectively in a world increasingly driven by social media.

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2009 is the year of influence – tap the power (on 19 May)!

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This is the year influence shifts to center stage. Wherever I go people are talking about influence. Meanwhile companies are rapidly shifting their marketing resources to tap the power of influence.

There are several primary drivers for the rise of influence:

* The democratization of media, which gives everyone a channel to propagate theirs or others’ opinions.

* Peer trust, which places far greater faith in individuals than corporate advertising and marketing.

* The ongoing fragmentation of mass media, which takes away the power of traditional marketing channels.

* The aggregation of social media, which gives a far stronger voice to the many individual conversations.

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(Finally!) Relaunching Advanced Human Technologies

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At last!!! It is literally over five years now that I have been wanting to revamp the website for my core company Advanced Human Technologies. In the meantime we have created many new websites, but the size of the task of reworking my original website, combined with the reality of an always-overfull list of pressing priorities, meant that it never quite made it to the top of the agenda. Click on the image to see the new website.

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Quick review of TEDxAdvance on Future of the Enterprise

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On Tuesday I spoke at the TEDxAdvance event in San Francisco on Future of the Enterprise.

Photo credit: Andrew Mager, magerleagues

In short, it was a great event, with close to 80 very interesting people in attendance, and excellent energy during the presentations and ensuing conversation over drinks.

I won’t replicate the fantastic write up of the event by Andrew Mager on ZDNet’s The Web Life blog – check it out for a great overview of the proceedings and some of the ideas that flowed through the evening.

A video of my presentation was taken – I hope to post it up here soon.

A busy May and even more exciting June…

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May is going to be a very busy month for me – lots of interesting things on. In a few hours I fly to San Francisco where among other things I will be presenting at the Future of the Enterprise TEDxAdvance event and generating momentum for our Future of Influence Summit to be held August 31.

Next week I will be in Perth to do the keynote at CPA Week on The Future of Global Business: Implications and Opportunities, a speaking topic which I am experiencing a lot of demand for at the moment.

The following week is a packed week in Sydney, including launching The Insight Exchange Lunch Series with The Power of Influence on 19 May, which promises to be a very exciting event, and the keynote at Information Technology in Aged Care conference.

At the end of that week I fly to Abu Dhabi to do the closing keynote at the MegaTrends conference, with Paul Krugman doing the honors for the opening keynote. My speech will take similar themes on opportunities in the global economy in the next months and years, tailored to a Gulf States audience.

A lot happening in between all this – announcements coming soon.

And my second child is due on 13 June (!), so there will be a slowdown from travel for a bit, though we’re planning to all go to Fiji or somewhere equally nice for a bit of a relax a few weeks after… It’s quite a year!

Announcing The Power of Influence on 19 May! Here’s your opportunity to show how influential you are…

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The first event of burgeoning new events company The Insight Exchange is announced! And to set the tone for some of the themes we will be exploring this year and beyond, the topic is… The Power of Influence.

This event will be the first of The Insight Exchange lunch series, which each month will explore a different topic, experimenting with formats along the way. The following events are:

19 May – The Power of Influence

23 June – The Impact of Twitter on Media and Journalism

21 July – Social Media Strategy

18 August – A very special topic and international guest – to be announced

For the May event, to uncover some of the dynamics of influence, we are running a competition for influencers – full details at Do You Have the Power of Influence?

In summary, contact us at @insightexchange on Twitter to set up your Twitter name (or whatever name you’d like), and anyone registering with that code (except yourself) will get a 40% discount in registering for the lunch. Whoever has the most registrations under their name will get some wonderful rewards, including a brief speaking slot at the event.

May the most influential win!

Which would you prefer to do your work without: email or ERP?

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I caught up with Laurie Lock Lee yesterday and we compared notes on our recent launched books – my Implementing Enterprise 2.0 and his IT Governance in a Networked World. I haven’t read his book yet but it looks great and I’ll report on it soon.

In our discussion of Enterprise 2.0 and the networked organization, Laurie observed that a minority of people inside organizations actually touch an ERP system. While it runs the basic business processes of a firm, it is essentially linear and doesn’t facilitate the networked connections and communication that support the everyday work of a knowledge-based organization.

Laurie proposed that it would be interesting to ask people in an organization which they would prefer to do without in doing their work: ERP or email. While finance types might immediately opt for the ERP system, the majority of people depend far more on email to do their jobs.

As I wrote back in 2007, we can consider that ERP is about automating processes while Enterprise 2.0 is about enabling knowledge work. While both are essential, as we shift into an increasingly networked world, facilitating connections matters more.

Which would you prefer to do without – email or ERP?

Q&A: Twitter’s retention rates: will Twitter be pervasive or a niche app?

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After my TV interview about Twitter the other day, I’ve just been interviewed by ABC Radio about the Nielsen research just out that shows that Twitter’s second-month retention rates for new users are 40%, compared to retention rates of 50-60% for Facebook and MySpace when they were at a similar stage in their growth.

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I was asked some interesting questions in the interview, so to paraphrase them and quickly respond:

Is this a concern for Twitter’s executives?

Absolutely. It’s one thing to get massive numbers of new users. It’s another thing to retain them. Unless Twitter can change this, it will never conquer the world as some suggest it might.

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