European Communications Summit - July 2 & 3, 2009

This week I'll be speaking at the European Communications Summit organised by the European Association of Communications Directors (EACD) of which I am member since the start a couple of years ago.

The agenda is full with top keynote speakers like my ex-colleague Mike Wing, Vice President, Strategic and Executive Communications & the man behind the latest and very successful "Smarter Planet" communications campaign of IBM.

Mike Wing, IBMThe funny thing is that Mike and I have been colleagues at IBM for about 10 years and never really met in person. This will be the occasion to catch up in real life...

I'll be talking about how we're taking the first moves at Van Marcke Group to implement social media both for internal and external communications. I'll also touch upon the differences and/or similarities between a B2B and B2C approach/market.

Next to the interesting sessions with top communicators it is always nice to catch up with other colleagues from the profession. I am looking forward to meet again with Médard Schoenmaeckers, Head of Media Relations, Syngenta and Dirk de Muynck from Volvo Group among many others.

From a more personal angle I'll definitely be at the session by Jon Worth from the Atheist Bus Campaign, one of the most successful and daring NGO campaigns ever.

I also set up a TweetUp during the conference. You can find the invitation here and if you're on Twitter and coming at the conference, please sign up and let's meet.

The conference will be covered on Twitter, not only by myself but by several other people present. You can follow the updates by searching for the hash tag #ecs or right on the conference's Twitter page here.

If you come, looking forward to see you there !

Corporate Communications Community of Belgium enters the blogosphere.

The 3C blog Home pageToday the Corporate Communications Community or 3C took a big jump and entered the blogosphere with a splash.

After several working meetings, tweaking templates and collecting content etc... the PR community in Belgium is finally online with a blog where it will share all the latest news around business communications.

On the blog you will find the latest jobs in the industry, news from the association, some blogposts from contributors (like myself) and an agenda of conferences and event.

The blog is written in French, English and Dutch; multilingual like a good Belgian industry blog should be...

Anyone can subscribe by email or RSS feed and we will soon offer content syndication as well. That way you can republish the blogposts from the 3C Blog automatically on your association website or blog.

Of course we have already foreseen a mobile version as well.

Check it out here:  

Daniel De Marto, Rodolphe Fourmaintraux & myself welcome any comments and remarks you might have. Please use the email form on the blog to give us your feedback. But please be gentle... this is "work in progress" ;-)

If you have events, workshops, vacancies etc.. to announce to the communications community in Belgium, again, don't hesitate to send an email with all the details via the form.

Features of a Crisis Site

Pic. by SymmetryxLast year I gave a workshop on "Crisis Communications & Social Media" to a very nice group of PR professionals in Madrid and we spoke at great length about the use of "crisis sites".

Crisis sites, also called "black sites" are pre-prepared mini websites that are set up before a crisis strikes... In general they are pre-populated with information that would be required if a specific type of incident would take place. They stay offline until they are needed and can be activated within minutes.

Example; a transport company specialised in dangerous goods could prepare a crisis site for when one of their trucks spills a dangerous chemical product they transport on a regular basis.

Of course a company would only prepare specific crisis sites for those incidents which have been identified during the yearly crisis preparedness and crisis management review process.

You can not prepare for everything but you should prepare for those incidents that have the most probability of happening and the most impact on the business.

Today, crisis sites can be created with easy to use blogging platforms. WordPress for example if a fully fledged content management system and could very well be used to create such sites.

Of course there are many useful & different features which can be incorporated in a crisis site and that's why I created this little poll below. Please give us your input.

Some benefits of a crisis site based on a blogging platform;

1. the communications team gains a lot of time by having an online communications platform ready in seconds... This is crucial - as you need to communicate within the hour if you want to stay on top of things during a crisis.
2. the communications team has complete control of the crisis site as simple to use blogging platforms do not require IT personnel or HTML wizards to be there.
3. the onboard RSS feed capability makes it possible for reporters and other to subscribe to immediate updates regarding the crisis.
4. the form and format of a blog lends itself perfectly for a "news driven" communications platform like a crisis site.

I'll be setting up a new & "crisis and social media" workshop soon and it will most probably take place in Brussels. So if you are interested, send me an email and I'll keep you up to date about the details.