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Oct
29

Why we asked attendees to not blog our Customer Conference

Several bloggers have commented on the fact that we asked attendees of our customer conference last week, CGM Summit, to not blog the contents of the event. I would like to provide some perspective.

First, Nielsen BuzzMetrics has been involved in numerous conferences and summits which had active blogging efforts, and we fully understand the power of running "networked" events – we live it every day and participate (and, hopefully, lead) in many, many ways. We are co-founders of WOMMA, and many of that organization's events have had active blogging components. We recently founded the Engagement by Engagement blog, which initiated by chronicling a recent ARF/AAAA conference. Many of our employees maintain either official company blogs, or personal blogs on related topics.

In this particular case, for this particular event, the agenda was primarily focused on presentations by clients, of their companies' case studies. Nielsen BuzzMetrics did only a portion of the presentations - the bulk of the agenda was driven by our clients sharing their experiences. It was a closed, invite-only event (again, we participate in many open events, but that was not the purpose of this particular event), and we specifically brought it to our clients as an "off the record" forum at which they could share highly confidential experiences with some level of comfort that those case studies would not be discussed outside of that room. Those who have had to go to their corporate communications department to get clearance to share a case study knows that this type of "off the record" environment is sometimes essential to getting permission to present or discuss this type of material.

The result was extremely positive - the level of sharing and interaction, both in the formal customer panels and in the informal workshops was deep and sincere.

Was it the right approach? We got feedback from most of the 100+ participants and our exec team has a meeting tomorrow morning to discuss it. Certainly, the feedback from the blogosphere will be heavily considered as well. But at the end of the day, the goal for this particular event was to provide value to our customers.

I don't know that we got it right, so I am eager to get more feedback. One approach that we discussed was to have proactive blogging of certain sessions which BuzzMetrics was presenting, but then make the customer panels and worksessions "off the record". Would this have been better? Are there other models which organizations are using which are effective?

Posted by Jonathan Carson at October 29, 2006 09:31 AM

Category: Point of View

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