On Thursday, I travelled to Brussels, Belgium, to participate in the 50th anniversary conference of FEIEA, the federation of European business communicators’ associations.
My role was to make a presentation on new media communication channels (blogs, RSS, etc) and participatory communication as a constituent part of FEIEA‘s theme for this first day of their 2-day conference, which was focused on the future of communication. One point I was keen to make was that everything I spoke about was to do with the here and now even though to many of the conference participants, it looked like the future.
Over 50 communicators from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK were at the conference. I met some great people and heard some great presentations, especially by Dominique Wolton, director of the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique, France’s national research institute, on information, communication and scientific challenges.
There was also a very interesting case study by Stanislas Haquet of Angie Communications and Nathalie Guerin of PSA Peugeot Citroen on how the French car maker uses electronic print production systems for multiple sites and multiple publications.
I have a PDF version of my presentation “http://www.tle.us.com/pubfiles/051020_NewMedia_FEIEA.pdf”. Feel free to download it (5Mb) and let me know if you have any questions or comments. I hope you find it helpful.
(One of the troubles with PDFs of presentations is that you get the slides but none of the conversation. So I’m planning to make a Camtasia screencast of what I mean by ‘new media ecosystem’ and how organizations should embrace it as a natural evolution of participatory communication. As for when that will be, the best I can say at the moment is ‘soon.’)
Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.
Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.
