Communicators in Business

I was presenting and taking part in a panel session at the Communicators in Business conference at the Metropole in Brighton last week. It was quite an entertaining session and I was sharing the platform with Julie Howell from Fortune Cookie who presented a well argued case for renewing the focus on accessibility for social media tools, and David Burden of Daden Ltd who specialises in helping businesses with virtual worlds. I was particularly taken with David's arguments that virtual worlds may have a powerful role to play inside an organisation as they provide the 'experience' to complement the 'information' provided by the traditional and emerging web. I think I'll be following this up with him. The whole session was chaired by Louisa Preston, who did a great job.

What was most disappointing however was the level of engagement with social media amongst this group of people. It was a large room - over a hundred people I guess - all directly involved in the communications business. However, only about five in the room claimed to write a blog, and only two or three people had even heard of Twitter. I was very surprised! My conclusion is that traditional comms people are being marginalised - a very real danger for the discipline. Or maybe it's just that people in the social media world are still only talking to each other and haven't really broken into mainstream yet. Either way, I was surprised and disappointed!