commbasics

Got a short email from a buddy over at EE Times Group about ESC .  Practically giddy.  Their initial numbers are showing a 30 percent increase in PAID attendance and a preshow increase of total attendance by 25 percent.  We always have to wait for the final numbers but if they show even a 10 percent increase over last year, that's a very positive number. I only got to go down to one day.  Got to hear Dr. Michio Kaku (and yes I am a fanboy) talk on teleportation and molecular computing.  Probably the best keynote I ever heard and I got there half way through.  I dropped into the TI Day event over at the Marriott, which was packed and probably a reason for the big bump.  The Multicore event, which was stand alone last year, got folded in to ESC this year, which might also explain the increase.  But I wasn't sure starting a new event in this downturn was a great idea.  Having it part of ESC might do it more good than ESC.  But I go to confe...

As I said in the introduction, I attended the annual meeting of a major religious denomination last week to give a presentation on social media and one of the attendees came up and said he finally understood what the social in social media meant.  The day after that, I met with a colleague who told me I need to write a book on how I define social media because it "seems much clearer" when I talk about it.   Maybe not a book... but definitely fodder for this blog. In the terms of this denomination, these ministers gather every year to hear about the state of the denomination.  They meet for three days, renew old acquaintances, meet new ones and learn some stuff.  Most of the people they meet they won't hear from again for another year.  In the terms of most industries, company representatives attend a set number of annual events where, over the course of one or more days, they gather to hear the state of the industry, renew old acquaintances, etc.  Same basi...

What a week it was.  Spoke to 60 ministers in Sacramento and had a great time introducing people to social media.  i love it when I see light bulbs come on.  Then I came home and got sick as a dog.  My family started calling me "Grumpy" because I had nothing good to say by Friday.  On Saturday, I got an email from one of the pastors saying he finally got what "social" meant in social media. That kinda hit me weird.  Then some stuff started making sense.  There is a general hesitance to accept social media in many parts of the world.  My fee are firmly planted on both sides talking with those who are firmly engaged in social media, and with those who still don't want any part of it.  And it all seems to come down to an understanding of the social part.  So for the next week or so, I'm going to discuss the meaning of the term and maybe turn on a few more lightbulbs.  First session starts tomorrow.

In preparing for my workshop with the Assemblies of God this week, I put the final touches on my new website for Footwasher Media and redirected the URL for VitalCom Marketing and Public Relations.  This isn't a big deal for most people... but it is for me. I've owned the Footwasher Media URL for about 10 years and have been thinking about what I wanted to do with it for that long.  I could have hired a web designer to do something fancier with it, but I wanted to take a crack at doing it myself so it reflected the look and feel I had in my head, but more importantly, so it said exactly what I've been trying to put together in my head for 10 years.   It isn't fancy. It has a few nice features, including links and feeds from all my social media efforts.  But starting today, it's a whole new world for me and my tribe.

The hot news today is that the EE Times Group of United Business Media (UBM) has purchased the DesignCon conference for a bargain price of $1.4 million.  Yikes.   I've always enjoyed DesignCon because it's technical content is just outstanding and very diverse... and I know I'm not alone in that belief.  Most editors I talk to prefer going to DesignCon than DAC for that reason.  (That's not to say DAC doesn't have good content so put your pitchforks down.)  The big difference between the two conferences is that the former is targeted toward what is going on inside the industry and the latter to what is going on in academia.  Plus dealing with the constantly moving circus that is DAC compared to the consistent location of the Santa Clara Convention Center makes planning and costs a lot easier to control. But I've also felt that DesignCon's marketing has been about at par with what DAC has always done and as a result, the emphasis never changes: DesignCon is...

Just got word that Dan Holden , senior director of PR and the go-to social media guy at Cadence Design got wrapped up in the RIF ball rolling out of Cadence today .  There are not too many PR types that "get" social media and treat it like they do all general mass media.  Dan was one of those few.  Hope they have a plan at Cadence.

After getting the stuff about PowerPoint out of my system I failed to say what a positive experience the IMTC 2025 Virtual Conference was for me. IMTC (The International Multimedia Teleconferencing Consortium) is a non profit organization  of Internet application developers and service,hardware and software suppliers, telecom companies end users, educational institutions, government agencies and non-profit corporations.  Such luminary member companies as Cisco, Polycom and AT&T  participate to facilitate real-time, rich-media communications around the world. in other words, they do live video broadcast technology and promotion.  This is an area I think is going to be a wave of the future and could replace multiple trade shows and conferences. They used Scopia, a relatively new technology from Radvision in Israel that allowed speakers and even participants to have live conversations, similar to what is being provided by Ustream and Vpype , but significantly deeper. ...

I tweeted an innocuous statement this week about how I didn't believe in PowerPoint® and got some interesting comments and discussions about it.   Dan Holden said it would make a good blog post... An I think he was right. I've always hated this application and snort loudly when it's called a productivity tool because it is anything but.  I'm not alone in this belief.   The Department of Defense has had a very strict limit on presentations because it started eating up server and man-power bandwidth 10 years ago.  And things haven't gotten any better. Yesterday I was part of the 2025 Virtual Conference, speaking on the future of media.  The day before they asked for my presentation and I said I didn't have one and would not be using it.  Took them a few seconds to process that information.  "Really?  No presentation?"  Our panel closed the first day, went off without a hitch and was quite animated.  I checked in on a couple other session...

A couple of weeks ago I talked about marketing assumptions or, in the vernacular, "drinking the Kool-aid."  It's been rolling around in my head and I thougt I'd take it a little further, especially since this is this week's lesson for my tribe.  The lack of accurate data is the source of failure for most companies and social media programs.  The good news is adopting effective social media practices solves the bad data problem for both. Most companies begin with some good data that assumptions are based upon and direction is decided.  What causes failure is when ll future assumptions are based on the original data and subsequent anecdotal evidence that validates the original assumption.  That's a recipe for failure or, in the least, a continually contracting market. It used to be that companies would invest in some level for real market data, but falling revenues at all analysis firms shows that time has come to an end.  For ...

I'm going to be a panelist at the IMTC 2025 virtual conference  next week talking about the future of marketing.  This is a new organization launching new conferencing technology that is pretty interesting.  Not all the bugs are worked out (like getting stuff to work on Macs correctly but I think it has a future for many applications.  All the speakers and panelists will be broadcast, live, from multiple remote locations.  Those with the proper tools can jump in to ask questions, even on camera, or at minimum can comment and ask questions on the chat screen. My panel is at the end of the first day (Wednesday, April 7) at 12:40 EASTERN Time (9:40 PDT) For my part, I'm talking specifically about the future of media and will probably take some contrarian positions in conventional wisdom (now that's a surprise).  I look forward to "seeing" many of you there.  Let's make it lively.