Publisher's Blog

Simply New York

Like most self-respecting communicators who have managed to talk their company/partner/themselves into stumping up the airfare I am in New York at the IABC International Conference in New York.
Kelly Kass is here too as the official simply-communicate reporter and we are planning to cover as many of the sessions as possible for our July edition. We come armed with video cameras so we can give you a flavour of the presentations and the buzz at the conference.
Organisers are claiming 1,700 registrations which is 500 up on the New Orleans event last year. Must be the lure of 5th Avenue on our doorstep.
Anyhow if you are attending the conference and you see Kelly or me waving a video camera around then stop and say hello!
Also I’m presenting tomorrow – Sunday – on using live events to drive engagement programmes, so drop by if you want to heckle.

June 21, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Live Blogging of our Conference

CLICK HERE for Live blogging of the event courtesy of Krishna De

CLICK HERE for photos courtesy of Kurt Kragh

June 06, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

The new standard for meetings and conferences

We're in the final stages of preparation for our annual conference which kicks off next week and I have the words of Seth Godin ringing in my ears. If you don't know him, he's the guy who wrote The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) which was a big hit last year. He's also a keynote at the IABC International Conference in New York.

Anyhow, Seth suggests that we conference organisers should all try harder now the cost of flying to these events is so high:

"Here's what a speaker owes an audience that travels to engage in person: more than they could get by just reading the transcript.

"And here's what a conference organizer owes the attendees: surprise, juxtaposition, drama, engagement, souvenirs and just possibly, excitement."

Must just pop out and get some souvenirs!

June 01, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

We've got new offfices

We opened our new offices this week. They are light, bright, airy and in achingly trendy Greek Street in Soho's London.
And they are empty.
We have a team working at the Celtic Manor delivering a conference for Vodafone, another team in Sweden doing a focus group, I'm at home working on my presentation for our upcoming employee communications summit (spot the displacement activity) and Bev hates going into town so is doing all the simply-communicate admin from a laptop in the garden.
Some mistake surely?

May 21, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Vista of hell

It's happened to us all. Your laptop goes mental - mine just started scrolling like digital St Vitus Dance; all on its own it would spin through files and menu options like a junkie looking for a fix. Sony were less than helpful (last time I buy a Vaio) and so I went through that process we laughably call upgrading.

A new laptop that took a day - yes a day - to load all the software that Microsoft deem necessary for you to write a document, do some sums or surf the net. A day for christsakes! It was as though my new laptop had turned up for its first day at work and then announced it needed to spend it with its therapist. Then of course it refused to talk to the other machines in the office (still having a sulk a week later).

But the worst shock of all was that Microsoft have 'improved' Office. I'd love to know what the benefits of these improvements are to outweigh the fact that I can't find anything. Want to change the font - you're in the wrong menu subset. It's as though some petty and rather spiteful minor deity has rearranged London, putting Waterloo with Euston because they are both stations.

Can you imagine Ford swapping the accelerator and the brake pedals because some focus group in Ohio thought they looked prettier that way?

And now that I have rewired my own brain for Microsoft's benefit no one can read what I sent them because they've added another letter to .doc or .xls so the sane members of the universe who haven't transferred to the dark side have to upgrade too.

There should be a law against it.

May 21, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

How to get rid of a Telemarketer

I've been plagued by people selling me stuff over the phone. But the calls have stopped ever since I took Steve Crescenzo's advice on how to deal with them. Having a father who was a homicide cop helped I guess...

April 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

TJ Larkin is a gent

This month's Simply-Updated (the magazine of www.simply-communicate.com) contains an interview with Dr TJ Larkin. Up until now I've had a jaundiced opinion of TJ - mostly cos he took the piss out of Steve Crescenzo in a very amusing way at a Ragan conference a couple of years ago. To make a point about understanding the workforce's point of view he strapped a huge metal wheel brace to Steve's crutch and made him walk around the stage in front of 400 gleeful communicators. You can see him doing the same trick on another IABCer here.
Laugh - I can't look at Steve with a straight face to this day.
Then there was his argument with Shel Holtz and Angela Sinickas about forgetting CEO communication and putting all your eggs into line manager communication, which caused all us social media neophytes condemned him as a dinosaur.
But reading Kelly's sensitive profile of TJ - and watching her video interview I have done a complete 180 on the guy. He really does know his stuff and is refreshingly humble in propounding it.

Besides, despite being American the man studied for his doctorate at Oxford.

Click to play

April 04, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3)

Howard Kerr

I had the privilege of working with Howard Kerr back in the '90s when he ran a huge government roadshow at Crown. Howard is one of the nicest guys in the industry and he is now on a mission to raise hundreds of thousands of pounds for research into pancreatic cancer, from which he suffers.
Along with his wife's family (The Grecians who run Gallowglass) Howard is undertaking a sponsored walk to raise cash for this neglected area of research.

The walk will be over the Ridgeway between Ivinghoe Beacon, nr Tring, Herts to Overton Hill nr Avebury, Wilts and will cover 87 miles in three days on the 18th,19th and 20th of April. So if you would care to join them for a stroll, donate money, sponsor the event or just tell people about it they would be very grateful.

The aim of the walk is to both raise the awareness of pancreatic cancer
and provide funds for further research.

For more details log onto Howard's Walk

March 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Man Flu

I am in Day 5 of Man Flu and just about feel strong enough to re-engage with the world (OK I did lunch with Darren Briggs and the lovely Sarah Curran of The Company Agency). But Monday to Thursday I have been as attractive as a used toilet brush.
Yet when I look back on the week I notice that for the first time in its history we published simply-communicate on the first Wednesday of the month rather than the usual Thursday, my emails are completely up-to-date and I've even been bothering people about stuff that is so far from my usual agenda that they are concerned I have been possessed by a particularly anal alien.
I blame it on a nifty bed tray I own that allows me to laptop dance round contacts and work without leaving the bed - let alone revealing that my eyes are gummed up with rheum and my reddened nose is visible to Google Earth.
On Monday I did forget to unplug my camera while Skypeing - not the kind of mistake to make twice. But once invisible I could impersonate a reasonably functioning human being (although with a typing speed that's not going to worry Stephen Hawking). Even on the mobile I could hide sniffs as poor reception.

But why did I bother; why not just succumb to the bacteria and die under the duvet? I know I've prolonged the agony and I'm sure nothing I've written this week has made sense let alone added to the sum of human knowledge. I guess it's that in the connected world, being unconnected is unthinkable.
Is this what's it's going to be like when I'm 80; immobile and suffering from online incontinence?

March 07, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3)

Gower Handbook of Internal Communication

It's done. The first draft of the Handbook is up there on the Wiki: 49 chapters by 31 authors - some of the best thinkers in internal comms in the world. I am enormously grateful for the contributions so many people have put into the book. But I'm even more grateful that the first draft is finished.
If you want a preview you can see it on the wiki. Just follow any of these links to see the relevant chapters.