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Since I arrived in Sydney just over two and a half years ago, I’ve busied myself with a variety of initiatives – a long term remote contract, a few freelance projects, numerous volunteer endeavors, one very exciting global collaborative project and a full time marketing and communications role in the not for profit sector.
Tomorrow I begin a brand new challenge.
 I am joining AMP Financial Services in their Customer Solutions division. Working from the Parramatta office, I’ll be leading the division’s Marketing and Communications activities. I’m thrilled to be joining such a well established and respected financial services organisation in a role that will allow me to help tell the exceptional service stories and publicise, promote and market the service advances delivered by the AMP Customer Solutions team to both internal and external stakeholders.
I am grateful for the opportunity to land such a transformative role that draws on so much of my previous experience. The truth is that I’ve been looking for a role like this since I arrived here. Over the next few months, I’m convinced this will prove to be both a fabulous fit and well worth the wait.
I huge THANK YOU goes out to all of you have helped me to get to this point. Your support is appreciated (perhaps more than you know).
While I may be moving desks, you’ll still find me in all my regular online places. And you can now also reach me at…
2 – 12 Macquarie Street Parramatta NSW 2150 Australia
Linda_Johannesson@amp.com.au
… and now for the compliments suggestions and criticisms
Applause, Applause – What #IABC10 Did Right
1. Great location
2. Warm and welcoming staff and volunteers to provide assistance throughout the conference
3. Fabulous opening ceremonies and Gold Quill Award ceremony
4. Engaging keynote speakers who challenged us to think beyond the business of communications
5. Well orgainized tourist support and dine around options
6. Great pre-conference tours
7. A worthwhile community project
8. Wide variety of global speakers to provide a diversity of perspectives
9. Good selection of topics within each stream
10. Addition of another interactive component (UNconference)
11. Attracted a fabulous group of delegates
Suggestions for #IABC11
1. Repeat unconference concept – expand it to include ANY communications topics and increase the time allotted to it – perhaps the whole first day
2. Provide free wifi everywhere – wifi is the contemporary communicators oxygen (frankly, I’m tired of excuses, if four people running an unconference can arrange for Rogers to step in and provide wifi support with a couple of phone calls and emails a week before the conference, then the conference committee should be able to come up with a viable solution over the course of the next year – and when you do, make sure it’s advertised heavily as it’s lack of availability can be a deal breaker for some delegates)
3. Have online or smart phone app of the conference schedule
4. Embrace a revised format for the conference brochure – it’s old tired and time it was retired
5. Redesign delegate name tags – include email, twitter names, etc….in the delegate name tags, speaker profiles, etc….
6. Continue to provide ways for delegates to connect beforehand (further in advance)
7. Include a greater concentration of hands-on/workshop type sessions
8. Don’t run out of things that are supposed to be included – like coffee and lunch – you know how many people are in attendance, plan for them. Include one for each and if there are leftovers, donate them to a food bank, but don’t run out!
9. Better utilize social media tools to promote the conference AND make it easier for us to promote it to our respective networks– (great start this year though)
10. Add a “Minga” to the agenda- have all delegates concentrate on one key communications issue or world problem and create a number of solutions for it
11. Have opportunities for people to provide feedback at the conference – a speaker’s corner type booth – feedback ambassadors who gather video or audio feedback as sessions finish and in the halls of the conference – give us more opportunities to share our thoughts about the experience or schedule a formal debrief/feedback session (we held one of our own)
12. Provide online feedback forms as well as hard copy forms for session evaluation
13. Record/podcast sessions and share them with conf delegates so that we can see sessions we missed and/or share these ideas with our colleagues back at the office.
14. Needs to encourage a greater sophistication of speaker presentation material – powerpoint with bullets is not engaging and frankly communicators should know better – this approach is powerpoint-less!
15. Create a short video to honour the Gold Quill Winners and play at the closing ceremonies, post it on the web, feature it on YouTube to further promote these folks to the greater IABC community
16. Better promote/communicate the community projects in advance – perhaps even to local media
17. Would love to see a visual at start of the conference showing how many people from what cities in what countries we have attracted to the conference – really show our global diversity
18. Like to see videos/photos/presentation put together that summarizes each conference and gets used from chapter to chapter to encourage attendance the following year – need to have some additional energy demonstrated in marketing this great conference
Question of the day
What would you add?
In addition to the fabulous people, professional sessions, terrific networking opportunities and heaps of fun,here are a few of my views about this year’s conference…
The future looks fabulous!
As communicators we’re a lucky bunch! Our future looks fabulous. It promises to be dynamic, challenging and rewarding. But, to take advantage of the opportunities that await us, we’ll need to actively embrace this dynamic future. In order to remain strategic and relevant we’ll need to better understand our own skills and strengths, we’ll need to embrace new skills, tools and technologies and add them deftly to our tactical toolkits. We’ll need to willingly embrace and respond to the expanding demands that require us to be consultants, change advocates, educators, coaches, publishers, conversation agents and story tellers. And, for those of us who do, we’ll have one key advantage. We’ll actually have a future.
There’s action required
A repeated theme of this conference for me was around Gandhi’s mantra of “Be the change you want to see”. The TorontoTalks was proud to have the opportunity to do just that with our Unconference session. We had an idea, we pitched it and we delivered it. We took action.
Many of this year’s sessions stressed a focus on action. Of course, feedback is fine, dialogue is necessary, but action is what makes the real difference. It creates change. Action is tangible.
Whether it’s everyone focused on achieving one action, as Craig Kielburger’s minga example, or the action is distributed through lots of people, each doing their share to create a small part of something larger, action by one or by many is a what gets things done. As communicators we need to realize that dialogue is great, but dialogue that creates action is better.
Great communications require great courage
We need to have the courage to break out of the traditional communications mold. We need the moxie to venture down new paths. We have to have confidence to challenge the status quo, to champion change, to create new tools, processes and solutions. We need to flex our strategic muscles and stand up for what we believe in, what we know to be good communication practices, to quote Guy Kawasaki, “don’t let the bozos grind you down” – have the courage to rise above them.
Trust has never been more important
As a profession, we’re still juggling the residual implications of the GFC, the challenges of Boomers, Gen X and Gen Ys working alongside each other trying to establish some common vocabulary and practices. Our ongoing reality includes an enduring lack of job security. We’ve faced dramatic change and had to do more with less.
There’s an expectancy for greater transparency in communications. There are more channels to choose from and faster ways of delivering your message. Everyone can have a voice and a broadcast platform,
We are at the highest level ever of distrust within organizations. There are rampant challenges to employee engagement.
To deal with these issues and move productively beyond them, we need to trust. We need to trust our employees, our managers, our leaders, our stakeholders and we need to earn, keep and treasure the trust once it has been established. Organizational engagement, productivity, innovation and evolution all depend on it.
The conference offered lots to applaud, lots to consider and lots to do…
Question of the day:
What were your conference thoughts, themes and takeaways?
TorontoTalks is grateful to Shel Holz for this recent blog post and podcast that explains a little more about how the UNconference came to be and what you can expect. Christopher Swan and I were interviewed by Shel just yesterday. Have a peek and a listen!
Questions of the day
Have you attended an unconference? Where? When?
Are you part of a smart mob?
Are you as cooperative or as collaborative as you could be?
How well have you embraced enabling technologies?
Rheingold discusses the technologies of COOPERATION & SHARING economies. He hypothesizes that if in the past, new forms of cooperation created new forms of wealth we may be moving into yet another economic form that is significantly different …
Are you prepared?
Take 20 minutes, have a listen, ponder the possibilities, then think about your answer.
Howard Rheingold on Collaboration
Question of the day
If your answer is “no, you’re not prepared”, what are you going to do about it?
 For all you IABC-ers out there…As outlined in the IABC 2010 World Conference program, there’s an “UNconference” session entitled Emerging Communication Channels scheduled for Sunday, June 6th from 2- 5pm. We want as many of you to join us as possible. Your facilitators, aka The TorontoTalks Crew (TTC) are Jeremy Schultz, Christopher Swan, Bryan Person and me, Linda Johannesson.
So, what is an “UNconference” anyway? An UNconference:
- Taps into wisdom of the crowds
- Provides an opportunity for passionate people to share
- Facilitates learning through conversations
It’s different from most conference sessions where you’d have one or two leaders speak and the audience listens, here, it’s the opposite. It’s the audience who has the floor – participants decide the topics – the content is determined by the wants, needs and desires of those in the room that day. You can participate as much or as little as you like in the discussions. The UNconference session will be a place for you to exchange your challenges, your victories, your concerns and your lessons learned with a diverse global audience of your IABC peers.
The session is free for conference attendees and will take place over a three hour time period, but feel free to come and participate for however long suits you.
A format skeleton for the session can be found here but, remember, the content will be up to you!
So, at 2pm Sunday afternoon grab your laptops, your mobile phones, ipads (if you’ve got’em), digital cameras, flip video cameras – come equipped with your case studies, your best resources, your stories, your burning questions, your best practices, your challenges and join us for the Unconference. It should be UNique learning opportunity and we hope that you’ll join us to enrich the experience .
In the meantime, if you have questions for the UNconference facilitators, ideas for discussion, want to share your stories, your experiences with other UNconferences, indicate your interest in attending, volunteer to lead a discussion, or just want to join in the conversation, you can find us online at grou.ps page , twitter, and on facebook.
I truly believe we can find wisdom in crowds, strength in communities and insight through conversation. So, join us in Toronto for our UNconference session and experience all three!
We are grateful to IABC for the opportunity to bring you this session. This kind of experience offers the entire membership another chance to “Be heard”.
We can’t wait to hear what you have to say!
There it was. In print. The brochure arrived.The annual event that I look forward to year after year.
Finally in 2010, after 20 years of membership in the association, I’m achieving a milestone. I’m on the agenda for the 2010 IABC Word Conference, taking place in my home city of Toronto. I won’t be playing the role of sage on stage. I won’t be at the microphone talking at an audience for an hour. Instead, I’ll be joining three others in facilitating a conversation. An approach that I think is far more fun!
I’m both honoured and excited to join an international crew Bryan Person from Texas, Jeremy Schulz from Arizona and Christopher Swan from California in facilitating a three hour Unconference Session, entitled Emerging Communication Channels
Beyond a love for warmer climates, we all share sense for what’s possible, a passion for marketing and communications, an interest in social media, and an obvious infatuation with technology and new ideas. It was these that brought us together at last year’s IABC World Conference. The four of us first met online through the conversations that took place through the outtathegate campaign. That was the start of a great collaborative experience. We continued our conversations long after the 2009 conference, brainstormed some ideas and then pitched a few to IABC for this year and… tada…this session was the result.
I think this is a prime example of how a conversation between strangers with something in common, backed by the power of social media can lead to an incredible exchange of ideas and the creation of something wonderful.
Just how wonderful? You’ll have to be part of our unconference session to find out!
We’d be honoured if you join our conversation…
Some messages should just be shared. And, then shared again. Pass it on…
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