Talking digital in Melbourne - how far we've come

I just got back from attending and speaking at the New Media Conference in Melbourne, ran by the team at Frocomm. The whole conference was hosted by Ross Monaghan of Deakin University who had a lot of interesting points to make throughout the conference – especially at the end of day two when he pulled out a number of extremely old magazines (including one that featured one of the first desktop PCs which boasted a whole 4K or RAM) just to demonstrate how far we've come (hence my choice of picture). 

A couple of the highlights for me: Laurel Papworth and her presentation on the media revolution, going from web 1.0 through to web 3.0 and the implications of that. Mark Park of Deacons talked about the legal ramifications to be considered when working with new media –  ethics, defamation and copyright. And there were a whole host of other speakers including representatives from Fairfax, ABC, Howorth, Edelman and the BrandAide group. 

Walter Jennings also gave a very insightful presentation on new media from the CEO point of view. In all, it was a great conference with some very knowledgeable people sharing their insights. I talked about how you can integrate new media into a communications plan based on the principles of listening, planning and participation - with a strong emphasis on the listening part.

MyTake – It was great to see that there's so much passion for the online space and that there are so many people that want to get involved. It still seems that the biggest hurdle is getting the C-suite to recognise the importance of the online. But, with a growing number of people becoming so passionate about the space, it can’t be long before we’re making converts of them all. I’ll leave you with the quote I closed my presentation on, from the CEO of P&G 

“The power is with the consumer. Consumers are beginning, in a very real sense, to own our brands and participate in their creation. We need to begin to learn to let it go…”