Joining the Conversation

I love the title of Joseph Jaffe’s new book, and I’d like to read it, Dave (is the list of trackbacks in your comments the reservation list? I rather enjoyed Eric’s extremely minimalist approach to a mention )

“Join the Conversation”, for me, perfectly sums up marketing in the Web 2.0 universe. Whether you’re selling a political vision or designer jeans, people are talking about your brand online. And they’re paying much more attention to each other than they are to you.

The conversation is going to continue, with or without you. We’re joining it. Are you?

Update on “SEO – Living the link-love”

Last week, I wrote about using link-love as part of an exercise to improve our blogs’ search engine rankings. I thought I’d go back today and do the same searches to see if it had any impact. It has.

SEO – Living the Link-Love

We did a session on search engine optimisation (SEO) for our blogs in our seminar today. Besides using and highlighting keywords in titles, tags and content (sensibly and intelligibly of course), a key element – of course – is link-love.

To try and demonstrate this (although we’ll probably only see the results of this after a few days, when the googlebots have visited all our blogs), we’re linking to each other. Of course, most of our blogs are really new, so there’s not too much power behind the links at this stage. However, it’s all relative. We did searches before doing the optimisation.

New media in the Free State of Saxony

I’ve just returned to the academy in Gummersbach after three days in Dresden in the Free State of Saxony – the eastern most state in Germany. It included two days of sightseeing, followed by a day of meetings about the use of New Media, on Monday.

The Technical University of Dresden is doing some exciting work on developing e-learning platforms and programmes, and it would be great to use some of those tools for our young leadership programme, and for staff development in the DA.

Have you tried Google Docs?

A Report from the FNF’s International Academy for Leadership (IAF) in Gummersbach:

I was really blown away by some of my classmates in our New Media workshop this week. They put together some very funny ads for Google Docs as part of their group assignment to report back to the class on this topic.

A global view of Web 2.0

I am afraid it is turning out to be quite a challenge to make the time to update my blog regularly while in Germany. For a start, as part of the seminar I am attending at the International Academy for Leadership in Gummersbach, I am in the team responsible for documenting our proceedings on a class blog. To do this, we must either multi-task during the sessions (discouraged by our seminar facilitators), or post to the site in the evening and before breakfast in the morning.

It has been really interesting to get such a broad insight into what is happening around the world, and in developing countries in particular (there is a list of participating countries in one of the posts on the class blog, and we’ll be adding a Participants page in due course). There is quite a broad range of existing skills and knowledge levels. Some people are learning about blogging and social networking for the first time, while others are fairly familiar with much of the technology, but are looking to sharpen their skills, get some fresh ideas and pick up on specific areas of expertise, particularly with respect to generating traffic (a universal goal )