About 100 people gathered in Google’s London campus last night to hear Robert Scoble and Shel Israel talk about concepts, ideas, experiences, trends and realities surrounding some of the themes and topics in their new book, Age of Context, published […]
Category Archive: Personal Development
If you’ve suffered through meetings where colleagues use PowerPoint decks as their autocues for droning ‘presentations,’ you’ll love this development at two leading companies that could be a model for others to emulate. Author and communicator Eric Bergman reports that […]
Today, June 5, is the first day of LeWeb London 2013, the two-day biz-tech fest that nearly 900 people have signed up to be part of, along with speakers, sponsors, journos and official bloggers. In that latter group, I’m one. […]
In ten days time, LeWeb London takes place. The overall theme is the sharing economy; the speaker line-up is fabulous, the agenda is compelling and, so, far, over 850 people have booked to be there on June 5 and 6. […]
Every now and again, I meet someone who knows a bit about me from reading my blog or following me on Twitter – but still asks “So what is it you do?” Even though I’ve been writing this particular blog […]
Ten years ago today, on December 13, 2002, I wrote and published my first blog post. Nothing especially inspiring, earth-moving or even awesome in what I said, just a brief note to announce my entry into the embryonic blogosphere: Dec […]
Today is Blog Action Day, an annual event that’s run since 2007 that aims to create a positive discussion online that enables social good about an important topic. The topic this year is The Power of We. This is my […]
The last time you went to a conference or other such event, what was the engagement like?
Were there lots of questions? Did people in the audience offer to share what they thought on a given topic or issue?
How engaging was it all?
There are many dynamics at play regarding what will make an event engaging – the speaker(s), the host and/or moderator as applicable, the event itself, the venue, whether the wifi works well and, last but certainly not least, overall content and specifically that of a given speaker.
I’d add another one – everyone’s commitment to participate.
If you’re an event host, why not try something a bit different at your event? Ask everyone – speakers included – to take the participation pledge, something I experienced for the first time as the #TAGtribe event at Waggener Edstrom London last week, when moderator Andy Bargery asked everyone present to take that pledge:
I do solemnly swear,
to get involved,
not to sit on my hands,
to ask questions,
and to participate.
Listen to Andy’s call in the FIR Speakers & Speeches podcast of the event – he starts at about 2 minutes 45 seconds into the recording.
If you do it right, including injecting a little humour into your request, it can be powerful. Along with all the other elements I mentioned earlier, I think it had an effect on our event last week, reflected not only in the actual participation that happened but also in what people said about it, as you can see in Andy’s Storify curation at the end of this post.
If your job embraces community building and engagement across the social web, does your ranking on an online influence-measurement service like Klout matter? For some companies and recruiters, it certainly does. A case in point – Salesforce.com has a job […]
Two of the overriding impressions I formed after taking part in yesterday’s TweetCamp in London is that Twitter is whatever people want it to be; and there’s no right or wrong way to use it, only effective and ineffective. This […]
In a few days time, an event takes place that marks another evolutionary milestone for the mainstream media – the launch of The Huffington Post UK edition on July 6. The Huffington Post is a US news website and content […]
On May 23, my podcasting partner Shel Holtz and I marked a milestone number for our weekly business podcast For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report, usually referred to simply as ‘FIR’ – episode number 600. Many of our […]