The UK Business Book Festival on Sept 10th

I’m very honoured to of been asked to speak during the ignite session and get involved with the event in general… sadly, I’m out of the country on that day but that doesn’t stop me sharing it with you.

Regular readers of this blog will know I’m passionate about growing more of a tech/creative community in Bournemouth (from my involvement in Startup-meetup, meetdraw and Bar Camp Bournemouth) and events like this form an integral part in focussing attention on this part of the world.

If you’d like to present at the ignite session (5 min slots) please drop me a line and I’ll put you in touch with the organisers.

It’s been a busy and exciting time here at socialtech towers, we’re in the process (in case you hadn’t noticed) of re-branding all our sites and, more importantly, expanding!

It gives me great pleasure to introduce James to the team!

Name: James Williams (no relation to Luke)

Job title: Production manager = James makes tea, phonecalls and video.

Hobbies: Music and film making

I’m also really proud to say that James has reached the final (last 10) in the Vice Magazine / Kopparberg Klash artistic short film competition – see his entry over at the (unfinished) ebusiness media site

James will be representing us at Meetdraw, while I’m on holiday – please say hi!

The focus of the event was e-learning and learning technologies. I’ve had a couple of people ask for a copy of my notes, who were unable to attend, or who saw my tweets and wanted to know more and so I’ve (finally, sorry!) typed up my notes here.

All of the talks were excellent;  there were a few key topics I was listening out for and I’ve paraphrased the bits from those talks I especially took away and added some of my notes to them.

NB: Quotes are in “double quotes” my notes are in italics.

Matthew Poyiadgi, CompTIA @mattpoy

Social Media is just a fancy way to describe the zillions of conversations that are happening online.
I hate giving things a badge like “social media” it’s evolution to me, not some new mythical beast that no-one understands.

Successful models usually give content away for free, with only 5 or 10% paying users funding the service. How could this work for you?

Example: Monty Python gave away good quality, well edited short clips on youtube to replace all the fan clips that were often in bad quality… and increased their video sales by 23,000% that year.

“There is currently 6.6 billion people on the planet sending 6.7 billion texts a day.“
The short message format is king and it’s here to stay… I’ve always argued it’s a trend, not a fad.

“If we build the people, they’ll build the business.”
B. Wise, Tupperware in 1953

A frequently quoted barrier to training is:

“What if we train people and they leave?” → “What if you don’t and they stay?”

Quote of the day! I live-blogged a few bits and this quote had by far the most RT’s.

Mike Pilbeam – VP Sales and Technical Operations at Cisco.

Cisco have fully embraced social networking within their company. Their business is driven by web traffic, they extol the value of social networking to their clients so it is logical for them to fully embrace social networking within their business.

The approach is to try everything, always say yes. Then allow the people to act as filters through ranking.  Around 30% of ideas tried, didn’t work.

So how do you create a balance of new approaches and technology with skills and experience?

How closed loop mentoring benefits all:

Gen X – content is you
Gen Y – content is separate to the individual

Gen X – if you can’t hand off, you can’t take more on
Gen Y – Shares naturally

There is a lot that both sides can learn from each other about their approaches to learning.

Cisco loves bandwidth, so they largely replaced email with video within their organisation for internal learning – they found they saved time as people presented short videos, which were easier to understand. The scheme was so successful they now use it with some of their suppliers too*.

“Enablement is all about collaboration”

It is equal parts :

• people
• content
• community

“Enable people to be lazy, make it easy to find, consume and publish”

Developing new training:

Philosophy:

• Every possible answer exists somewhere in the company, in an email, someone’s head or in a piece of content – the challenge is there are multiple answers, some good, some bad.
• “If it works, polish it… if it doesn’t bin it”
• Good ideas/guides/content will be formalised into training, bad/poor content is deleted.

Findings:

• People liked gaining stars for their content so they wrote good content.
• Demand for self-branded and customised learning/learner interfaces grew as adoption grew.
• Key to success becomes content + lenses and not your imposed filter.
• Learning and development culture has to be informal.

Systematic re-use of content is encouraged – designs, technology, information and content. Where possible all content is recycled.

Flip video cameras are used for team updates, short, quick to produce video content replaces longer emails.

Problem:

• Resistance to using new technologies

Solutions:

• Find thought leaders, the people whom others turn to to find answers and use subject matter experts as moderators.
• Able to interact with the forum via email, subscribe to topics and reply. Through time, those who used it via email moved to using the forum directly.

*It’s also interesting to see some details of Quad start to appear, if you haven’t seen this yet it’s worth a look. From first glance it’s a real-time LinkedIn with Video.

And a Springer’s final thought” from the round table discussion:

Why does eLearning have a higher take up in the US?

Culturally in the US training is paid for by the individual and self directed, take up of e-learning is 4x higher… when the downturn hit, e-learning usage on Sundays rocketed… co-incidence?

Hope this is useful, if you’d like me to clarify anything please leave a comment.

Thanks to Kelly at Element K for organising a great forum, I look forward to the next one.

I then took this list into wordle to get another perspective, the larger the word the higher the frequency it showed up in my list.

Marketing is the clear winner.

I also thought it was interesting that 3 sites use “useable” which some people would argue isn’t a real word…

Interesting that the “All employees” option will only be available to paid up members, but is free for now.

Uses?

If you wanted to work for specific organisations, you can now subscribe to them to receive an email when they post a new job (assuming they used LinkedIn to do so of course).. probably has some uses for recruiters too.

One idea that I’d suggest to any organisation looking to recruit, is to monitor if anyone is following your company page – I think it’s interesting that you could see potential candidates before posting a job advert.

Do you think this is a useful feature? I can’t see much use in it yet (apart from recruitment), if it published the news items into people’s feed it would be more useful.

See also: LinkedIn Blog about following company pages

It’s just such… an OLD and dated format, its interruptive, its all about sales and not content.

He who pays, talks – if I go to see someone talk, I want them to be an expert in their field, not just a guy with a chequebook.

Money generating not knowledge generating – it’s about selling stuff, not adding value… ok I cringed writing that, a bit of a cliche but it’s so true! If I look back at all the events I liked and hated this is the key difference

Why do we need it? – a conference, about the “internet world”? Stop and think for a minute, erm… isn’t there a better way?

Ok, I do get that it’s handy if you’re a huge product or a big buyer. Personally, looking for ideas, innovation, inspiration… it’s all about the smaller niche ones like:

ContentStrategyLondon10 – superb, an intimate gathering on a specific topic. Lots of good networking, 3 excellent speakers (and beer).

TEDxCDF – outstanding, inspiring speakers by invitation. It expanded the mind and gave me something back for my time. (Great Guardian write up)

BarCampBournemouth2 – with the almost anarchistic approach that anyone can speak, you build your own conference program and interact with almost all the other delegates.

Plus by not going, I’ve probably saved about a tree in brochures I’ll never read…

I asked on twitter if it was just me who thought it wasn’t worth my time:

“I’m bothering, but I’m not optimistic based on last year!”

“Yeah it seemed a bit s#!% to me too.”

“Not Definitely no need.”

“I’m not doing IW, did it last year. Too corporate, so many cheaper ways of doing the same things, not as handy as the A4Uexpo.”

So go forth, find the small get-togethers and un-conferences… expand your mind. Don’t give up your time to be sold at.

What do you think? Did you go to IW10? Was it any good?

Numbers were up on last year (73 signed in attendees + more who mooched around)

More useful talks on the sunday (almost all slots were full both days)

We were able to provide Saturday lunch (thanks to RedWeb) and Sunday breakfast (thanks to the “breakfast club” The G3 show, Squizzle App and BCS YPG)

A HUGE thank you to our venue sponsors C4L and Fibreband and maybe see you all next year…

In the name of experimentation and generally liking to play with new tech, I proudly engaged with Google Wave for a few projects… after a 6 month trial period (wow, how time flies) I report my findings and feelings… please add your thoughts in comments:

After the initial “testing wave 1 2 3″ waves, I was involved in 3 projects, who all wanted to use wave as a form of communication/co-ordination – great, some real tests!

Project #1 – never got off the ground on wave, one of the participants rarely used anything other than his mobile and wave “doesn’t officially support any mobile platforms yet, but if you are feeling adventurous, you can try out Google Wave on Android phones, or on the iPhone.” – I tried, it failed (android 1.6)… he tried (Safari on iPhone) and failed. Dead in the water.

Project #2 – the aim for this one was a bit different, to use it more as an evolving document, outlining the project with waves covering sub topics – it required some interaction with other documents and this is where this one fell over. “Drag and drop” of documents? I’ve never got it to work, so we had to rely on linking to Google docs or other sources online which isn’t really the same. Again as time carried on, we moved to email and notes within a Google doc. Perhaps I’m missing something here, could something like Socialwok help?

Project #3 – Bar CampBournemouth planning – the one success, of sorts. Its worked pretty well for coordinating our efforts to organise #bcbomo2, once everyone had an account (luckily 2 of us had some spare invites) it grew and evolved as expected. The 2 things that weren’t great were:
1) It got a bit too large quite quickly, finding the right sub-waves/topics was difficult and it needed a trim to become more manageable – for corporate use I think I’d have a policy on what does and does not go within a wave (ie no off topic or “chat”).
2) Success was quite dependent on people checking the wave.

General findings and some tips:

Initially I think the biggest failure was to not have email notifications of new blips – there was an app you could add to a wave to do this, although now it’s a feature that is built in. This was the one that nearly sunk our BarCamp Bournemouth planning wave – you had to check if there were updates… rather than being nudged when there were.

I’ve also noticed times when having wave open has had a detrimental affect on performance of my PC, I’m using Firefox (not tried crome or IE) on an XP in my office, my laptop is Vista and my studio PC is a high powered audio PC running XP – all have had the same issue with it generally taking a lot of memory (I suspect), closing the wave tab has in all cases rectified the issue. Hopefully this is just a bug.

If you have more than 2 people in a wave typing/making updates in can really slow down to the point where you are waiting for it to catch up with the words you have typed, which is frustrating.

Some people have also claimed to hate the fact you can’t jump to the new “blips” within a wave… well, like Obama, yes you can. Click into the wave and press spacebar, it’ll jump to the next unread message.

All in all, it is still a beta and I do see potential benefits to a system like wave… would I use it again? Maybe.

Love to know your thoughts/top tips

Big thank you to C4L and Fibreband our main sponsors of BarCamp Bournemouth 2.

If you haven’t signed up to come along… why not?

** Sign up for BarCampBournemouth2 here **

1) Meetdraw 5 “So Meety” is being held at Bar So on Thursday 18th March from 6:30pm. Everyone is welcome whether you work for an agency, in-house team, freelance or currently studying. A great event to meet and network with fellow tech/web people locally.

and…

2) BarCamp Bournemouth 2 – April 10/11th at Bournemouth University, a 2 day self-organising un-conference – for anyone interested in tech/web stuff.

My quick effort at an FAQ:

What is a BarCamp? Its a 2 day event, starting at 930am and going right through till 4pm on the sunday – turn up, give a talk if you want to (or not if you don’t) and learn from/discuss with / laugh at people in the tech community. (see wikipedia or barcamp.org)

Is that something to do with drinking? – No… not really… but yes, the bar will be open and used as one of the discussion spaces.

What went on at BarCamp Bournemouth 1? Lots of stuff… my highlights are here.

More info and stuff coming on the website soon – if you’d be interested in part sponsoring Bar Camp, please drop me a line – you’ll get space on the website,a logo on the Uni TV (from now till event) etc etc