On Monday, I presented at my first conference, a Corporate Blogging Conference run by BFI. It was more by default then anything else, as the organisers were contacted me originally to try and get hold of someone from the Guinness team who worked on their blog. In the end I gave a talk about the sort of legal things you have to think about when blogging as a corporate, or having employees blogging when they are identifiably working for your company. Overall I enjoyed the experience, now I need to think if I want to do it again.
There were some great talks. JP Rangaswami gave an overview of corporate blogging (It was good to here he’s moving onto what looks like a great job with BT). Alison Watterson reviewed how they established blogging in HP and managed to skillfully deflect a question about the current scandal with their board (she said their bloggers focus on areas of their expertise and board activities don’t fall into their subjects). None of the presentations appear to be online, they were all handed out as part of the pack for the delgates which they then used to follow along and take notes. A different crowd to the conferneces I normally go to, being focused entirely on corporates with some vary big blue chip names in there. I had to double check, just in case I was going to mention one of them as a bad case of corporate blogging. There were no laptops open to take notes (except for a few of hte speakers by the look of it), there was no wireless made available (despite the hotel providing it) and there were no photos being taken. I’d bought my camera along, but ended up not taking any of the attendees, based on my rule of thumb that if there are a crowd of cameras you are OK but if you are the only one, probably not a good idea as no one there expects it.
