Another year, another OzCo Summit

I'm not in attendance this year at the Australia Council Marketing Summit, but participating from afar is almost as good. A few conference activities I have enjoyed include:

• Catching up on the You Tube stream from the conference at #msummit2010
• Reading the links referenced in various speaker's presentation. A particular post of interest has been the talk by Claire Eva - Head of Marketing and Audiences, at the Tate UK and links to the Tate Online Strategy 2010–12 and the idea of 'Your Tate Track'.
• Reading other's wrap up of the events....check out this great blog wrap up of several presentations.
• And of course, you can check out the OzCo site for all the presentations files, video and audio.

Happy reading! (from afar!)

Time to think...(and drink)

This week's mini Tessitura conference in Sydney went down like a treat. My presentation went well (everybody loved the Prezi software I used...more comments on that than the actual presentation content itself!), others gave inspiring presentations and it was great to be back catching up with all 'Tessy nerds' as well as friends and colleagues from around Australia and NZ. A great highlight from me was also having one presenter I deeply admire stop me and express sadness that my presentation was on the same time as hers...I was thinking the exact same thing!

When reflecting on the day I was struck with two things:

• time to think

A day away from the office, but not a wasted one. When else do you get a chance to stand back, to listen, to reflect, to get the grey matter mulling over different scenarios and really delve into the questions of are we making the best use of our technology? The deeper question of course is are well doing all we can? What are we doing well and what could we be doing better? Time to think is grand, now if we could only schedule in some time to play and let those ideas develop we would be onto winner I think.

• inspiring peeps

The conference and those mini catch ups you do with friends old and new is the type of communication and work process I like best. Inspiring and passionate people with vastly different skill sets to my own but all with a care for the end result. Yes we always don't agree about the one best way something might be completed, but there is a wish to assist each other, to work through a problem sorting it into logical parts and an attempt to innovate while ensuring the work we do now is flexible enough to adapt to the demands of the future. Got a problem, ask the brains trust!

Add in the fact these people are generally fun to work with and love a good debrief at the pub...and the whole experience was just about perfect. Surely these types of gatherings coupled with time after them to reflect and think is where both innovation and professional development spring?

On a presentation with a lose topic...but pretty pictures

So I've been asked to speak at an upcoming conference regarding the use of Tstats. For those playing at home Tstats is a reporting and analysis add in for our Tessitura CRM...really for us visual learners it's all in the drag and drop reporting.

This all started as I mentioned the topic months ago in a meeting and am now apparently an 'expert', meaning I have used the program more than a few others. As I said to a colleague from the SOH my presentation would not be about how to use Tstats rather, how to utilise Tstats in amongst other reporting options.

So what to speak about, well...

1) I still don't trust it

2) configure rules

3) cross check

4) play

5) don't reinvent the wheel...

Yep that's about it for now, but at least I have a new toy to play with. I'm thinking about using Prezi as my tool for presenting as I am more than a little over powerpoint presentations and in a nerdy moment, absolutely love the flexibility of prezi (ok, yes I also love how it zooms in and out too)...now to just decide what to speak about...back to the drawing board!

Ozco Marketing Summit 2009 videos

I was lucky enough to be substituted into this event on the closing day. Again I found this an inspiring summit to be part of, in particular my writing hand was very busy during the digital media presentations. In case you missed this, the videos are now available. I'm definitely going back to see those I missed such as 'Communicating with the 50+ audience' and the update from the 'ADVICE' program, and I might even relive Donna Williams' inspiring key notespeech from Day Two, there's an audience development hero for you!

Find all the videos here: http://vimeo.com/user1014372

Wikimedia: Conference seeks open cultural content

Stealing a headline here, but following on from yesterday's mention of cultural institutions using Wikis to gather and share planning and policy...here's another one, but only about 100 times bigger!

It will be interesting to see the outtakes from this conference and its many notable speakers. Here's hoping the content is captured and shared just as they are aiming to do with Australia's (and NZ's) cultural content....although one question...er, what about the other arts?

Wikimedia: Conference seeks open cultural content

'In a world-first conference, the Wikimedia Australia community will this week sit down with more than 170 senior executives from the nation’s largest cultural institutions – from the National Gallery to the Parliamentary Library – to devise strategies to better share Australia's cultural heritage.

Called ‘GLAM-WIKI: Finding Common Ground,’ the event at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra on August 6-7 brings together Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums (GLAM) with Wikimedia Australia, the all-volunteer force that brings Australian content to the Wikipedia site.

GLAM-WIKI convener and Wikimedia Australia vice-president Liam Wyatt says the conference aims to increase the availability of Australian and New Zealand cultural content through Wikipedia in a sustainable way through collaboration and the open source treatment of cultural items.'

To visit the official wiki of GLAM-Wiki see here