After hearing so many interesting talks (seems I missed all the boring ones) I wonder which presentation you took the most out of? Just add a comment and tell us which you liked most and why!

INMA Conference Programm (PDF)

As currently - excuse my French - rather dull sales pitches in some more Powerpoint Karaoke style (sorry, I still can read faster than you talk!) are going on - I took the time to browse the growing collection of online slides from this conference on Slideshare. Check out the Slideshare channel.

Here's for example the slides from the previously mentioned talk from John Wilpers:

Ok, actually I only know about 5-10 people who actually use a mobile phone as an internet tool, but Austria is always a little late when it comes to technological progress. So when Jop Pollman (Momac) just presented the remarkable growth of the mobile news market in other countries, I decided to be there relatively early. So as he spoke I installed a mobile plugin on my Wordpress based blog. Ok, needs a bit of optimization, but that is how fast you get into new markets today. Now let the visitors come!

Juan Antonio Giner is right.
Todays news should be old.
And short is good.
Impressive.
This post is good.

INMA honored the best coverage of this years European Championship. And the winner is not Italy...



The winner is Aftonbladet

Horst Pirker (Styria) was just talking about possible reactions of newsmedia enterprises to the rise of the "WWW". As a speaker I experienced him more impressive, when he faced an audience of communication sciences students in Vienna about three years ago. But the contents were the same. I think it mainly was more impressive back then, BECAUSE the contents were the same.

He wants to "mirror the WWW" and make it a "MMM" (Multimedia-Multichannel-Multiplattform) - meaning that content should not be bound to channels or plattforms anymore. Back then, when I first heard that, this kind of convergence of media was a more theoretical approach.Today what Pirker spoke about is almost reality (or it should be). I hope I can catch him for a chat a little later to ask him, if his views have changed in detail over those three years.

Summing up, I guess Pirker's idea is about the same as what Ulrik Haagerup told us yesterday, when he inspiringly presented his idea of a new media house - where journalists work for all kinds of channels ('"They are Storytellers not TV/Radio/Internet-reporters"). I personally like the idea, since I enjoy experimenting with all kind of instruments. Also I am sure that this in fact is the future of journalism, even if established and older journalists will have a tough time adapting.

Imagine a room filled with dozens of peoples screaming "UUGH" imitating a Canadian song from the sixties. This is the INMA conference right now, thanks to a wake up call by Bernard Asselin from The Gazette Montreal.



(Guess Who - American Woman)

Ugh!

Artur Karda and Agnieszka Mazus, multimedia reporters at Media Regionalne interviewing the attendees at the outlook 2009 conference. Here is the interview with Rolf Schupfer Media Partner Relationship Mgr. at Publicitas AG (Switzerland).

youtube link

you can find much more interviews at the forum4editors youtube channel

We are currently listening to Séverine Lago from Publicitas Switzerland. She has a very charming accent and really manages to keep me tensely curious about WHAT kind of new innovative advertisment methods she is going to present.. for over 10 minutes now.

Please come to the point! Powerpoint karaoke (reading aloud what we've read ourselves already) of 10px font multiple slides about market segmentation, test settings and the like do not really make it easier to follow..

We want 30/20/10 instead of Death by Powerpoint! Nevermind, I'm still listening, what she has to say sounds interesting.

John Wilpers just talked about the opportunity newspaper makers can seize within the area of local and user generated content, be it photographs, blog posts or videos. Exciting.

The most convincing part was this video piece featuring video blogger Steve Garfield. Hear what Steve has to say:



It's all about ownership. Hand it over! As Douglas Adams put it already back in 1999: We want our interactivity back.

John Wilpers just holds an interesting pro-blog-implementation declaration. Now I am the one already knowing most of the presented ideas and data and dare to say that might not be the case for most of the people here. I am not sure if 25% of the people actually ever tried to start a blog.

For the first time today I really looked around. I wondered: This is a conference to talk about the future of newsmedia and there are only one or two participants acutally using a notebook. Nobody is twittering on his iPhone (and if it is only to giggle that the guy on the stage is an enthusiastic douchebag - which he isn't). If I went to such an event, I'd write about it on my company blog or at least discuss presentations at this blog.

2 questions:
1. Am I being naive here?
2. Am I wrong with my guess of how many people at the conference actually blog?

Yurek and Gregory (Grzegorz Piechota and Jerzy Wojcik) from Gazeta gave an inspiring talk about the challenges polish newspapers face. It's very refreshing to listen to people who have reached so much with so little, and still want to move forward. They had some ambitious goals back in 1989:

• free elections
• free economy
• rule of law
• euqivalent of opportunities
• security (NATO)
• development (EU)

And they reached all of them. So what's next?

Suddenly they where confronted with commercial challenges. Just since 2003 seven new newspapers where founded, and all of them try to promote their sales with DVDs, books and other promotional materials at the news stands. As a result the marketers came up to the editors and wanted numbers and facts about how their stories affected sales. But all they where thinking about was content and ideals. It's fascinating to see how they solved this challenge.

Treasure Hunting

They realized that they already had everything in their company. All the ideas and the content that would help them to be successful already was there. "All we have done was to discover it" (Gregory). People with experts skills that stand out, like their photographers became masters in their fields, and founded a "School of Masters" which teached their skills to other photographers in the company, but also to the readers. By making the photographers visible they created a unique brand around them. Everybody could have good photos, but nobody could copy these photographers.

They also realized, that they had journalists with strong opinions, which where able to write long and good articles. And they had fun with it. So the next thing was to create series of articles with a strong topic and a strong opinion. And it worked.

So here are my 2 cents:

I agree with Inge van Gaal: It's about change: to lift the barriers between marketing, editorial and the readers. Stop organizing your company in specialized departments, that work side by side and report hierarchical. Start involving all the experts at the different levels and enable them to communicate.

After the talks, I took the chance to talk to Gregory who told me a lot how they installed a culture of communication in their company, that enables them to be faster and more visible. They started to have a lot of discussions about how the world should be in 10 years. Even they disagree often on the solutions, they realized that they share the same ideals, and I have to say that I admire him for his confidence and trust in this fact. Especially as a person who participated in a revolution and ended up in a society that votes right and admires shopping.

He also told me, and i agree a hundred percent, that it's not about technology. First you have to make sure, that you as a company or newspaper are ready to communicate and accelerate. Than you are able to install the technical systems that support this communication. As a result of this strategy they have now more than 120.000 blogs, 2 million users in their forums, a journalist at the age of eighty-four who blogs every day, and a strong printed newspaper which challenges the daily fight at the news stands.

Thanks for the talk to Gregory and Yurek.

So the morning couldn't have started any better. „You really pissed us off“, said Grzegoryz Piechota and Jerzey Wojcik (Gazeta Wyborzca) at the beginning of their presentation, answering the statement of one unnamed conference-participant on the day before, who told them that all newspapers are going to die soon. Now we just saw an inspiring presentation on the future of newspapers by Grzegoryz and Jerzey. They talked about how seemingly old concepts of good journalism presented in long extraordinary stories might in fact also the future of the medium.

Their plausible message was how marketers and editors need to come together to reach benefits for both sides (going step by step and starting from the bottom, not the higher management). As someone with an idealistic journalistic approach, I somehow saw those two branches as counterparts. This seems to be the same expectation Jerzey and Grzegoryz found in their fellow co-workers. But sometimes expectations are not met, and that is a good thing.

I can now see my view can be wrong – at least with good marketers, who share your values of quality journalism. They showed how newspapers should not only promote their brand, but also their outstanding content and their staff, because they thought those are the things that make a newspaper unique.

Now I guess this is a very basic insight, nothing revolutionary. Judging by this first presentation I as an marketing newbie can learn a lot here. But like Helge I am wondering, if this is also the case for the hundreds of interesting people in the audience here. I guess the presentation Jerzey and Grzegoryz did would perfectly fit in a lecture at a universtity's communications department, but it may be less adaequate in a room of newspaper experts. Maybe that is why the conversation with the audience mostly circled around political issues like the transport problem of the Netherlands.

Just listening to Grzegorz Piechota and Jerzy Wojcik from Poland's Gazeta Wyborcza, who share with us their lessons learnt in the quest for symbiosis between editorial quality and the newspaper commercial interests, as well as their multi-platform publishing strategy from print to online and mobile. Great presentation, compelling stories.

What strikes me, probably due to having attended too many unconferences, BarCamp style, is that the conference format doesn't facilitate exchange of ideas and experiences between participants. The room is packed with Europe's best heads in newspaper making - yet they are more or less gagged in here. That's a pity. Would like to hear their war stories as well, have discussions go on.

I imagine an Open Space conference with today's participants - boy, that would be great.

Since I've been invited to cover this year's INMA conference from a blogger's perspective, I will start with an introduction to myself: I am Helge Fahrnberger, Social Media Consultant, co-founder of Toursprung and frequent blogger at Helge.at.

I have been following and blogging the exciting contrast between traditional print publishing and online conversations in "social" media for the last five years or so, drafting ideas such as approaches to communities for newspapers back then. (Most newer blog posts on the issue are in German though.) Going through my old blog posts I can't help noticing that what Rupert Murdoch said over three years ago still isn't commonplace in the industry.

Looking forward to getting to know the state of the transition of todays newspapers today. Especially John Wilpers' afternoon talk sounds thrilling when he promises:

This was a great start from my point of view! To be honest, I was a bit nervous today at 12:20 some 10 minutes before my presentation started at the Pre-Conference Branding Seminar. Some 30 people from Newspapers around the world were listening and we had a great vivid discussions and I got some tricky questions.

I covered basically some ideas about branding via Web 2.0.

But before I officially started Thorkild Rathje mentioned some really interesting stuff in the session before - He is Marketingdirektor at Nordjyske Medier. So he told the audience that at his newspaper they don't try to control the brand in a traditional meaning any more, but open up and engage their readers/users to show them what to create with their brand. I don't hear that very often and Thorkild promised to send me more infos on their ad campaigns based upon User generated content! Talk to him if you want to more about that.

I got introduced by Bernard Asselin, Vice President - Marketing and Reader Sales & Service from The Gazette. After lunch Bernard told us more about their fantastic branding campaign words matter



In my presentation I tried to cover 3 central thesis which I believe:

1. Web 2.0 is perpetual conversation

2. Brands and mainstream media are not in the driver seat any more - it is the active user

3. Users believe in other users opinions more than in company broadcasting

The question for Newspapers today is how to develop their online assets into platforms and infrastructures to make them attractive enough to have their readers their conversations on the site - and not on facebook or in their blog.

Otherwise big brands will take away budgets from traditional advertising and go on to stage their brands and develop their own corporate media around that brand. Just like as BMW which is launching the BMW Concept X1 with Twitter Channels, Photoalbums on Flickr, a Facebook Site, a Video on YouTube:



and great Feedback from leading automotive Bloggers around the World:

Just a few minutes ago, we learned that BMW has launched a Twitter page as well dedicated to X1, along with a Facebook account and of course, a Flickr page. I love the fact that BMW is getting more involved in the social networking world and they are trully commited to reaching out more bimmer fans through different media websites. But I will be back soon with an article on that since there is a great story that I have for you.

I hope there are some insights, usefull for your business! Thank you for having me at your conference. Enjoy the rest of it!

Very clever, you knallgrau-guys! Last week, when you invited me to cover INMA Europe's Conference in Vienna on this blog, you somehow managed to avoid telling me those kind of events start at inhumanly early morning hours. Well, now it's too late to pull myself out of it. And of course, since I am a blogger, media enthusiast, and freelance journalist, I am looking forward to those upcoming two days.

I rarely join big conferences (ok, I never was at one before), so I am not sure what to expect from it. There is one presentation I am especially looking forward to: "Can Local Bloggers Help Newspapers Grow Revenue?" by John Wilpers. But there are a lot of other interesting items on the agenda too, so I doubt that I am in danger of getting bored there.

So you're going to hear more from me tomorrow, starting at about 9 a.m. - if the sandmann doesn't carry his work to excess tonight, of course.

Dieter Rappold

Founding partner of Knallgrau and head of sales and marketing and also frequent blogger at sierralog.

Matthias Platzer

Founding partner of Knallgrau and also frequent on twitter as matix17.

Helge Fahrnberger

Vienna based Social Media Consultant, co-founder of Toursprung and frequent blogger at Helge.at.

Tom Schaffer

A 23-year-old student of Political Sciences and Communication Sciences at the University of Vienna. He works as a freelance journalist (e.g. derStandard.at, ORF.ON). On his main blog, ZurPolitik.com, he deals with issues like politics, society and media but he also regularly writes about football (ballverliebt.eu) and computer games (rebell.at).

Bernhard Pfaffeneder

Head of the Knallgrau concept team and part time photographer.

Thomas Niepraschk

Member of the Knallgrau concept team.