Category: Speaking
I was extremely pleased to be invited to speak at the Danish eCommerce Federation’s (FDIH) annual conference in Copenhagen on 30 September/1 October by my friend, Morten Kamper, FDIH’s Director.
I was still enthusing about my experiences of FDIH, Copenhagen and the knowledgeable Danish eCommerce community from my April visit, but the opportunity to speak alongside Trevor Johnson of Facebook and Neil Morgan of Omniture made participation a ‘must do’.
The venue was once again the IT University – great location and wonderful facilities.
As usual there was the amazing Danish welcome, the stupendously beautiful weather for a pre-conference afternoon’s wanderings with the Minolta CLE (which rather showed its 20+ years’ age and developed a shutter timing problem – and therefore a trip to RG Lewis upon return for ‘Clean, Lubricate, Adjust’).
Images from the conference, including me in full flow, are available here:
http://www.23hq.com/FDIH/photo/4987326?album_id=4987300
While I didn’t get invited to the Climate Conference later in the month, I can’t wait for an opportunity to go back to Copenhagen. I was however pleased to see Morten later in the month both at InternetRetailing’s 2009 conference and then in Monaco. October was a gruelling conference month!
I realised, just after I’d accepted Justin Cooke’s kind invitation, that I’d never “done” an after-dinner speech before. Despite have spoken at conferences for many years, the whole dinner speaking thing was new to me.
It was a pleasure to see Davina again (we spent a year or so as co-directors at Netimperative back in the dot com era) and the whole evening was great fun.
Danny Meadows-Klue took some notes from the evening and – now that we’ve removed the confidential, contentious and profane – you can read the write-up here:
http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/netimperative/directors_dinner_september_09/
Had great fun today chairing a panel at Google’s Retail Summit.I’ve written up the session on my blog:
http://www.innoparticularorder.com/2009/09/googles-retail-summit/
I’m expecting a video of proceedings to be made available and will update once I have a link for that.
It’s been a busy time on the speaking front – so busy that I’ve been remiss in posting details. Here’s a quick roundup of activities…
1) Econsultancy’s Future of Digital Marketing in June 2009 – Keynote
This is one of my favourite events. This year, 350 senior marketers and digital strategists congregated at the Congress Hall in London.
I was really pleased to give the closing Keynote and you can see my slides on Slideshare:
Following my presentation to the Innovation in Retail Forum I was pleased to accept an invitation to speak to the BBDO U meeting, held just outside Paris.
The event brought the leadership from the AMV, BBDO, Proximity family together to discuss digital trends, issues and opportunities. The team did a great job to pull together some excellent speakers (some of whom I was lucky to hear) as well as some ‘externals’ (me and Google).
I developed some of my themes on the demanding digital customer and approaches to exploiting the ‘attention economy’. In a very engaged Q&A session afterwards, and over lunch, it was good to get so many well-informed, enthusiastic and challenging questions.
No slide deck from this event due to its confidential nature, but there was some real-time commentary from the twitterati in the group – hashtag is #bbdou
I met Morten Kamper, CEO of the Danish eCommerce Federation (FDIH) at an ACSEL event in Paris earlier in the year, and he has also contributed a wonderful piece to Internet Retailing magazine (May 2009 issue). It was therefore a great pleasure to accept his kind invitation to give a keynote at their conference on the use of social media in retail.The event was held at the IT University, a wonderful and modern venue in the heart of Copenhagen, to a sizeable and enthusiastic delegate group.
As usual I was humbled by the fact that everyone spoke English, but moreso this time that some of the speakers even took the time to send me fully-translated versions of their slide decks: courtesy as well as capability. Very much appreciated.
I spoke on the retail progress made on Facebook and the lessons to be drawn, as well as considering other social media trends and opportunities (is it possible these days to present without mentioning Twitter??).
After the event Morten kindly gave me a CD of “The Roots Of Scandinavia: Soul Jazzfunk And Boogie” (we’d been discussing musical fusion over lunch) and this is currently a staple on my playlists. Amazing, and I’m looking forward to hearing more about how FDIH came to publish this album.
I had a great, springtime afternoon in Copenhagen afterwards and I’ll publishing the photos from my wanderings on my blog.
The line-up was very impressive and a little intimidating.
Chris Sanderson, Strategy and Insight Director of the Future Laboratory opened proceedings with a clear and stimulating articulation of “prosumers” – today’s demanding and knowledgeable consumers.
Mary Portas, “Queen of Shops” (pictured) gave a really engaging and characterful articulation of the need for innovation, engagement and collaboration in retail. I’d obviously seen Mary on ‘telly’ and so had certain expectations of her presentation. These in no way prepared me for such an open, amusing and highly engaging 40 minutes. I was totally won over.
Dr Jonathan Reynolds of the Oxford Institute of Retail Management (at Said Business School) gave a fast-paced and and well-supported presentation on ‘location’ in retail and queried its importance in future.
I followed with a presentation on opportunities for ecommerce in the ‘network age’ (a development of my presentations on epiphenomenology, magic and the network/attention economy).
The event was fast-paced, intense and fun. It ran very smoothly and this was largely due to the intensive work by Danny and Alice (you know who you are!) in detailed advanced preparation with the speakers. Not only did we have several phone conversations to flesh out the content, tone and approach of each session, but great care was taken over the interaction of the presentations. The result of this advance work was that there was a good flow, negligible overlap and good thematic reinforcement.
I’ve taken a lead from this and will be emulating this approach for the October InternetRetailing 2009 conference!