Chicago Blog Business Summit Cancelled
August 29, 2007 by Des Walsh
Filed under Social Media
A few days ago I wrote here, enthusiastically, about the scheduled Blog Business Summit event scheduled for Chicago in September. And I was so enthusiastic, I wrote about it also on my Thinking Home Business blog.
I concluded the post on this site with a mention of the fact that I had not so far been to a Blog Business Summit (small matters of a large body of water and not insignificant airfares), and expressed the hope that I would be able in due course to remedy that. “One day” I wrote, “I will get to a Blog Business Summit!”.
Not so likely now, after the Blog Business Summit people posted on August 27th that the Chicago event had been cancelled. That post raised some interesting questions about blogging now in the business context, with the implication, as I read it, that the time for conferences on business blogging was possibly or probably over.
But then, as I’ve posted tonight on Thinking Home Business, a subsequent post on the Blog Business Summit site stated that they “anticipated” doing more events on blogging “if there is interest from the community”. Even though the post title proclaims “We’re Going to Host More Blog Business Summits!” the word “anticipated” in the body of the post and the qualifier about community interest do not convey for me the sense of a wholehearted commitment.
Nothing wrong with that. Like any business, the Blog Business Summit organisation has to play the game they are in. But I won’t be holding my breath for more blog business summit events to occur.
The organisation is not going to do nothing in place of the blogging-focused events. Through a new site, the Web Community Forum, the Blog Business Summit organisation is already promoting an event for December, to focus on using Facebook in business. At least, that’s how I read it.
The draw for a “Corporate blogging” event may have lost its sizzle at this point. But the excitement around enterprise (internal) wiki and blog clearly hasn’t. The Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last June was filled to the gills, and our own User Group meeting next month met my capacity goals.
I think corporate blogging my fold into web marketing conferences, as enterprise wiki/blog will fold into collaboration / KM conferences.
I understand why you would think that, Des. But we do intend to do more blogging focused events. It might be in the Blog Business Summit bucket, or it might be under the umbrella of the Web Community Forum series of events — it’s not all about Facebook, that’s just the first event — but we are not abandoning the blogging space.
We’re simply expanding our editorial focus to other social media. It’s an expansion that is in line with the movements of the “Web 2.0″ community and has been a long time coming.
But as long as there are blogs and bloggers, we’ll be involved in the space. Period.
Jordan
Hmmm. I wonder is there some language that appeals more to the corporate types, e.g. “Enterprise 2.0″?
Teresa
Thanks for the clarification. Good to know you will still be in the space. One thing I know is that there are still many business owners who could help their businesses by getting their heads and hearts attuned to what blogging offers.
Hi Des – If we assume this event didn’t take off because of positioning, then I think the language and the marketing target for the event is an important issue, and other terms could have wider appeal.
If I were to run this conference as it was designed, I would have made it a Corporate Blogging Summit and would have targeted marketing managers and IT folks.
The Enteprise 2.0 language certainly worked well for the Enterprise 2.0 conference in June. The E2.0 language also creates a big draw for more general conferences like KMWorld. Assuming the E2.0 term means the new web-like way to collaborate in the enterprise, then it has a wider and, likely, higher value focus than outward facing corporate blogging. Likewise, as a theme, it can be marketed more widely to Execs, Marketing, IT, Operations and so on.