Employee Communciation Summit

I’m attending Simply Communicate’s Employee Communcation Summit today and tomorrow.

It’s an interesting conference, and I sort of wish I’d decided to live blog it (when I’ve done this before, at last year’s CIPD conference, I’ve found it very valuable to my learning as it forces me to internalise each presentation and articulate my perspective on the topic that’s been presented).

I’m not live blogging this conference however, possibly because I’ve got lazy, but also because I don’t find I’m yet as clear in my own thinking on communication and web 2.0 as I am on HR.

However, I am tweating on it, and here are a couple of other thoughts on some of my main reflections so far (I’ll do a couple of more substantive posts later on).

Firstly, there’s a big focus on web 2.0 in the presentations – so for example, I’m currently listening to one on Microsoft’s Academy Mobile (described as an internal you tube).

But there seems to be less familiarity of web 2.0 in the audience. I think only Krishna De and I are blogging (she is live blogging). And judging by the last question (upon hearing that Microsoft don’t moderate people’s podcasts: “But that means they can post anything!”) - Steve Crecenzo’s point that now we can only facilitate not control the conversation about our organisations doesn’t seem to have hit home.

I’d sort of expected a communication conference to be quiet different to an HR one (in the UK at least I know that most HR attendees are probably never going to have even visited a blog) – audience tweats up behind the presenter and that sort of thing.

We are using Crystal Response systems for asking questions, voting and providing inputs, but in the main, the style of delivery is still very much 1.0.