Wednesday 23 March 2011

Final ECF2011 reflections and Presentations

ECF is coming to a close shortly with few more presentations.
It was a good forum as ever...
Loads of good energy and good discussions.

It is interesting to note how the change in the profile of participants has changed the discussion a bit...
Before the forum was full of digital comms people working with Campaigns teams sharing their experience and ongoing issues we had to deal with (mostly about feeling misunderstood :).

Now, the forum is a mix of campaigners who want to know more about digital, digital comms people who also do marketing comms people who started working recently in digital, agencies... Consequentially we moved on from very geeky very digital discussions and moans towards professional discussions sprinkled with a little bit of fear - fear of social media, fear of negative campaigning, fear for our privacy... I suppose it's good that we are feeling more confident and can focus on addressing the issues people are concerned about.
I do miss the geekiness and naivety of the early days of ecf though.. Don't get me wrong, change is good and we moved a long way. I am just allowing myself a bit of nostalgia... I think @hackofalltrades (Liam) the author of dismantling professionalism presentation will understand me here.

So two presentations I managed to write-up...

Change.org

Theory of a campaign - chop up a big issue into a number of small ones and win them one by one. Great idea - it does make sense..
Example: Issues around prejudice against gay and lesbian people in South Africa - too big. Needed chopping up into smaller specific issues, more tangible, achievable.

Websites

Brilliant presentation on how we use websites as a library rather than for funelling people to do what we want them to do. Too much focus on the home page while actually Google is our homepage..

It is kind of true but what people type into google is the brand name anyway which will land people on the home page. So it is still important.. But I agree, homepage needs to be more focussed. Some websites still have the structure which nicely shows the structure of the organisation rather than what we want people to do.

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