New Media For Communications Conference – Day One

It’s after lunch and Sumeet Khanna (Director, Windows Live Services – Online Services Group, Microsoft Canada) is giving his presentation, Internal Communications: Pros and Cons of Introducing Blogs To Your Employees. He’s riding through the various flavors of internal Blogs, ranging from team dynamics, leadership, products and even performance. It gets you thinking about the many different levels of content that a company has and how they disseminate it to their constituents. It also makes you realize how, if you open those floodgates to the general public, your ability to build the company (and its brand) through Blog marketing are endless. The point is, Khanna is enticing people to look at the slivers of content that provides loyalty and trust and, maybe, leaves the bigger issues to channels like Intranets and internal communications’ more tradition avenues.
This morning, David Jones (PR Works, co-host of the Podcast, Inside PR and executive at Fleishman Hillard) really drove home the “how” of social media (with a focus on Blogs) with his presentation, The Blog is in the M.A.I.L: How to Enter and Stay in the New Media Hemisphere. It was the perfect compliment to my ranting and ravings on the “why” (aka No Control or Know Control: What Communicators Need To Know About A World of User-Generated Content, Blogs, Social Networks and Mobility). Jones and I should take this show on the road.
Jones clearly gets the space. So much so that he set-up this del.icio.us page: http://del.icio.us/david_jones/canadianinstitute which is chock full of everything he talked about, links and much more. Love it. It is a great use of social media to prove social media. He also talked about two resources that I had never heard of:
1. Talk Digger – which the site describes as: “a web application developed by Frederick Giasson that helps users to find, follow and join conversations evolving on the Internet.
Talk Digger greatly evolved in 2006. I started being a comparative search engine using the link-back feature of many search engines. Then it evolved in a full-scale meta-search engine reporting web sites linking to another web site. Then it evolved in a search engine of its own: a ‘conversation search engine’ with feature helping the creation of communities around each conversation.”
2. Opinmind – which the site describes as: “not your everyday blog search engine. Type any subject into our search box and you’ll find people with opinions (good and bad) on your topic of interest.
We hope that you’ll use Opinmind to discover and connect with people with similar hobbies and interests. We also hope that you’ll use Opinmind to learn about people with opinions that differ from your own. Most of all, we hope that you’ll have fun using Opinmind to discover bloggers all over the world.”
Great stuff so far. More to follow.