For the last couple of years I’ve spoken at the invitation of the London College of Fashion to their final year students on an aspect of eCommerce.

This year I spoke on “The Future of Internet Retailing – considerations for fashion (r)etailing”.

Great audience and some excellent questions, and of course the deck’s available on Slideshare:

http://www.slideshare.net/ikj/ps095-london-college-of-fashion

Last year I spoke at the Bazaarvoice Social Media Summit event at the Magic Circle, so I was pleased to return this year for an enlarged event, held at the wonderful Shakespeare’s Globe.

The day’s agenda is here: http://www.socialcommercesummit.co.uk/agenda.html and you can also see photos of the event on the Flickr set – http://www.flickr.com/photos/owiber/sets/72157622418861263/.

Ze Frank’s presentation was excellent: dynamic, engaging and inspiring – and delivered with energy and humour. His life is a blend of conceptual art, social experiments and situationalist improv. I rather fancy being him if and when I ever grow up. Surely, the biggest plus point of the interwebs is that they provide a milieu for minds like Ze’s to thrive?

I developed some themes from earlier in the year – epiphenomenology in particular – linking this to the idea of engagement and the challenges of relevance, culminating in the ‘profit per engagement-second’ metric suggestion.

Sam Decker’s given a great round-up of the day on the BV blog – http://www.bazaarvoice.com/blog/2009/10/13/summit-up-bazaarvoice-wraps-uk-social-commerce-summit/.

Congratulations to the BV team (and the ‘master of ceremonial preparation’, Jacob Salamon, for organising such a fun event.

UPDATE: some nice real-time responses to my presentation on Twitter:

Brett Hurt

Justin Goring

Björn Woltermann

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:

A while ago we launched the Post-Graduate Diploma in Internet Retailing. The programme was developed, in conjunction with Econsultancy.com, to support the skills and career development of multichannel retail professionals. The qualification spans the gamut of etail activity – from buying, sourcing and category management, to online marketing by route of operations, IT and logistics.

On Tuesday we were challenged by the accreditation board of Manchester Metropolitan University to assess whether the programme was at a sufficiently high level and with a suitable supporting academic framework to be worthy of being awarded Masters status.

After three and a half hours of grilling by the panel and external assessors we were incredibly gratified to be told that we had been approved as a Masters programme.

Congratulations are due to David Bird, Director at MMU’s Business School and Craig Hanna, Training Director at Econsultancy.com, both of whom worked incredibly hard to make the programme ready for assessment.

We’ve now got to update the webpage and revise marketing materials to reflect that this is now (we think) the UK’s first and only…

“MSc in Internet Retailing”.

Westfield (a client) organise a world retail study tour for Australian businesses to visit peers, examplars and trend-setters in the US and Europe.

On the London leg of the tour – following a period in the US – the delegates had visited key retail stores, niche retailers, characterful areas of London and for a day heard presentations from major retailing figures.

I was pleased to be able to open proceedings this morning with a presentation on ‘the UK online consumer’ and trends and issues in multichannel retail.

As it was a private presentation there are no slides available.

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

At InternetRetailing we’ve been working with the Royal Mail a good deal this year on a number of projects, research activity etc and so I was pleased to be able to speak at their Multichannel Retail Insight Day on 6 May 2009.

The event brought together the retail specialists within Royal Mail to discuss changes in the industry and I was able to cover some of the demands that the sophisticated UK internet shopper is placing upon retailers, along with some of the approaches that the UK’s leading multichannel specialists are taking to set themselves apart.

Thanks to the team at RM for their kind welcome. Sadly, no slides from this engagement since it was a confidential briefing, but we touched on many topics that I think we’ll be returning to in InternetRetailing after our October conference.