CorporatePR

New Communications Forum: Call for Speakers

CALL FOR SPEAKERS

We are delighted and excited to announce that we have officially begun preparations for the New Communications Forum 2006. The conference will take place March 1-3, 2006, in Palo Alto, CA.

We’d like to invite you to propose sessions and/or panels for the program schedule. There will be four conference tracks: 

• New Advertising Strategies
• New Approaches to Corporate Communications – for Internal & External Communicators
• The New World of Marketing
• The New Media & The New Face of Journalism

Following are our ideas on each of the sessions that fall into these tracks:

Advertising

• Blogs Meet Ads: Can Advertising Be Authentic? 
• RSS as an Advertising Platform
• Ad Co-Development: Customers as Your Creative Resource
• The New Demographics: Online Influencers Might Surprise You
• Advertising Case Studies – Beyond Print & Broadcast - Using RSS, Search & other New Tools

Corporate Communications

• Network Building: The Corporate Communicator’s New Strategic Objective
• 1,000 Spokespeople: The Power (and Peril!) of Employee Bloggers
• Making Transparency Work: The New Ethics of Mass Communications
• Managing Information Overload Via New Communications Tools
• Organizational Power Dynamics Meets Participatory Communications
• Corporate Blogging Case Studies – Making It Work for You

The New Media & The New Face of Journalism

• Impact of Citizens Media
• Boundary Battles: What is a journalist and why does it matter?
• Blogging, The First Amendment and the Law: An Uneasy Cohabitation
• Beyond Print:  Podcasts and Video blogging
• A New Voice: Citizen Journalism and Disasters
• New Media Case Studies – Blending New Communications & MSM

Marketing

• Pay for Play: Blogging & WOMM
• Story Lines:  The Role of Fiction in Blogs and Marketing
• Search Engine Optimization and the New Communications Tools
• What Happens After Listening? Turning Conversations into New Products
• Weighting Influence: Who Counts and Why?
• Marketing Case Studies - Using RSS, SEM and other New Tools

In order to be considered as a speaker or panelist, please send us 250-500 words that describe your session/panel as it applies to one of these topics. You are welcome to suggest your own topics as well -- simply make sure you tell us to which of the four tracks it corresponds.

If you propose a session with one presenter, please send a biography of the presenter including information on previous speaking engagements. If you propose a panel, please include biographies and speaking histories for each participant. We suggest no more than four people on any one panel.

We invite vendors to propose panels or sessions, but we encourage them to feature customer case studies. No vendor pitches will be allowed. We will have a hands-on lab/expo area, and vendors who would like to exhibit their products/services should contact Jen McClure at: jenmcclure at gmail dot com for a sponsor prospectus.

Please send your speaking proposals to Elizabeth Albrycht (ealbrycht at gmail dot com) by October 30, 2005 at noon ET. Please direct any questions you might have on speaking opportunities to Elizabeth via email. For questions regarding exhibiting and sponsor opportunities, please contact Jen McClure at [email protected] or via telephone at +1 (650) 331-0083.

New Communications Forum Europe Postponed

Today we made the tough decision to postpone the New Communications Forum Europe.  We have discovered that it is just too early in the technology adoption process here in Europe for PR and marketing professionals to invest in a two-day conference dedicated to blogs and other new tools.

We firmly intend on holding the Forum once we have judged the market is more ready, hopefully towards the end of this year.  We are exploring a variety of partnerships as well, in order to broaden the audience and share the risk. If you are interested in talking to us, please drop us a line.

We want to thank our speakers, our sponsors and those who did register for the Forum for their support and hard work preparing for the event. We will do our best to make sure that work isn't in vain, through planning a variety of online and other activities throughout 2005. Please stay tuned by subscribing to our blogzine, which you can do at our website, www.newcommforum.com.

Change of Sessions for New Communications Forum

We've made some changes to our session schedule for the New Communications Forum Europe, which will take place April 5-6 in France.  I am also happy to announce that Loïc Le Meur, executive vice president and managing director of Europe for Six Apart, the company behind TypePad and Movable Type, would deliver a keynote address on day two of the Forum. 

New sessions at the NewComm Forum will include: Blog Content, taught by Paris-based writer and editor Stuart Mudie; Beyond Blogging: Wikis, Podcasts and More, taught by Richard Koman, US-based writer and blogger; and How to Migrate to a New Media Global Platform, led by Giovanni Rodriguez of PR agency Eastwick Communications.

The final workshop of the Forum will be presented by well-known publisher and conference producer Lawrence Ragan Communications, Inc.  Entitled, “Integrating Online and Print Communications to Engage Employees” this session will offer advanced training on how to unify print, email and intranet, blogs and wikis into powerful company messengers.

I hope you can join us!

NewComm Forum Blogzine is Out

The second edition of the New Communications Blogzine is ready for viewing.  If you want to receive it via email, you should sign up at the top of the New Communications Forum homepage.

In this issue we will continue to explore the issue of ethics in the blogosphere with an article by Jeremy Wright. In addition, we examine Internet libel with some thoughts from Elizabeth L. Fletcher, take a look at the new "Blogger's Bill of Rights," and present a primer from Dee Rambeau that guides us through how to increase Internet visibility using traditional and non-traditional methods, as well as other updates and insights from the New Communications Forum community.

NewComm Forum in the Financial Times

Tom Foremski's column today [subscription required] for the Financial Times covers blogging and other new communications tools.  He mentions the Forum as well!  Thanks, Tom.

The Forum

I've posted notes, began putting together links to coverage, resources etc. over at the Forum blog.  So run on over and take a look!

Live from the Forum

What a morning!  I am so pleased at how well the Forum is going.  The speakers, the attendees...great interaction, good questions.

I am not blogging the sessions (as I am giving most of them) but will definitely chime in later with recaps.

We started our discussion of ethics, which we'll continue tomorrow.  Most here seem to think it is a worthwhile topic to spend a couple of hours on. 

The other topic with lots of interest - legal issues!

Add Your NCF Post to New PR Wiki

Constantin just set up a page on the New PR Wiki for you to add links to your posts about the New Communications Forum. 

We are trying to aggregate all posts in a variety of places so there is plenty of access to the onsite action.

If you have any questions or concerns, please email me at ealbrycht at gmail dot com.

Heading up to Napa

Well, just one more day to go!  I flew in from Paris yesterday (what a long flight!) and am heading up to Napa today to check in for the conference. It is hard to believe that it starts tomorrow.

The program, the speakers and the attendees all look fantastic, and I think we are going to have some excellent discussions.  We subtitled the Forum "Blog University" because we wanted it to have the process and feel of interactive seminars where many questions are asked and assumptions are examined.  I think we all will learn things from each other.

Many of us will be blogging from the event and I will try to keep up a running link of commentary here.  If you see something please add it to the comments.  I have also asked the IAOC to provide some aggregation of links and commentary at their blog. 

I am most looking forward to meeting in person many of the people I have been talking to over the past months about the future of PR and marketing. 

[Cross-posted to New Communications Forum blog.]

Our Corante Interview

Alex Williams of Corante recently interviewed Guillaume and I about the Forum via FlashMeeting.  You can listen to the whole thing here or just bits and pieces based on the "minutes." 

FlashMeeting is quite a cool technology.  Alex explains it in terms of Hypermedia here.

This was the first time I have done such an online video meeting.  We had a few snafus--my laptop sound card is fried so we had to use my ancient backup laptop, and first, my headset/mike combo broke, then the old laptop speakers shorted out.  Murphy's Law! So, we did it from Guillaume's office on his laptop, which, thankfully, worked! (Note to self: Get the d*&m laptop fixed after the Forum!!)

Given my sound issues, I haven't listened to it...I know I talked too fast though!