I have the pleasure of hosting a panel tonight for the New York chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) membership called "Beyond the Age of Discovery: What's on the Horizon for Participatory Media" at 6pm EST. We'll have some great panelists who will take the stage with me, including:
Christopher Barger, Blogger-in-Chief at IBM
Paul Rand, Global Chief Development and Innovation Officer at Ketchum
Sreenath Sreenivisan, Dean of Students and New Media at Columbia Journalism School
Quite a distinguished panel, wouldn't you say? NY-IABC put together a nice group here. For those that can't attend I'm hoping we can record it and throw it into the RSS for you. I'm hoping to touch on these topics, with no specific order in mind. It's a bit late in the game but I'd be happy to take anything Thicket fans are dying to know to these guys. Just let me know.
Topics and questions for the panel:
- As a corporate blogger, you have opinions and expertise. How do you balance that expertise with the trust necessary to really build audience?
- Do you read your competitors’ blogs?
- How are you creating ‘’traffic?” FeedBlitz? SEO? Optimized press releases?
- Blogging takes time and energy, but it can be done efficiently and certainly effectively. How much time are you devoting to the blog and responding to comments?
- Are you a blogger or supporter of bloggers? What are the nuances of both roles in the corporate environment? Blog Policy or none? Guidelines?
- What are the critical success factors you look for to determine if a blog is doing it's job?
- Your bloggers started out fine with frequent posts and great topics, but soon after posting falls off. As the in-house blog counsel, what can you do about that?
- One of your bloggers (good or bad) leaves the company. Do you take their blog down? Keep it up?
- Have you considered advertising your products or services in your blog’s sidebar? Is there an invisible line for you regarding commercialization of your company's business into the blog?
- When is the written word (via a blog) not enough? There are many other forms of expression in social media and which are the ones relevant at the corporate communications level? Should an organization be participating in social networks that share photos (Flickr), bookmarks (del.icio.us), or even defined terms (Wikipedia)?
- Setting up a mechanism for publising a blog is fairly understood, but what needs to be considered before an organization begins to create audio or video content to be distributed as podcasts or vidcasts? Are the business drivers different? How is this different from managing and maintaining a blog? Is the measures for success different in every form of participatory media?
- Many if not most people get their podcasts and vidcasts from iTunes. How important is it to be on the iTunes directory? Are there other distribution venues or networks organizations should consider?
- Ask 10 social media experts on the impact of social media on search results and you could get 10 different answers. How much impact do you think it has on search and should that be a primary driver of an ancillary benefit?
I'm very much looking forward to talking about this and more tonight. I'll report back how it went tomorrow. I personally want to thank JetBlue for helping to make this topic so ripe for corporate communications pros.
Last Friday I attended the 
