Early in September I was a speaker at the 2nd Digital Citizens Indaba. Last year this conference was immensily valuable to me because it presented an opportunity to meet many of my fellow bloggers from across the African content. This year for me I realised the greater need to teach people how to use blogging to generate income. In 2006 I spent many, many hours discussing this with Emeka Okafor, before he was selected by TED to host the first TEDAfrica conference, which may turn out to become an annual conference.
So this year I spoke with Mathew Buckland and Laurien Clemence on spoke on the Marketing & Moneytizing panel. The problem with DCI is that the bulk of discussion is about online activism and citizen jouranlism. This is not a conference about serious business blogging. So I’m making this public call for a conference that would focus on business blogging. This conference would propel blogging to a new stratosphere in South Africa and Africa as a whole. TEDGlobal’s Fellow’s who included many, many bloggers are a testament to the value we can add to business. Such a conference would appeal to large corporates to introduce them to social media, and web 2.0 business strategies, which will be an imperative by 2010.
My dream panel of speakers would include the following Technorati 100 heavy weights:
- Darren Rowse
- Steve Pavlina
- Guy Kawasaki
- Seth Godin
- Michael Arrington
- Robert Scoble
- Brian Clark
- Steve Rubel
- Jeniffer Jones
- Leonard Brody (I already know him personally)
I’m looking at doing this during September/October 2008. It would take 4/6 months to secure sponsorships for this event. And another 6 moths to do all the planning and organising with sufficient marketing and public relations building up to the event. These two activities can run in concurrently to some extent.
Who’s your international business blogger of choice for this conference? And how can you help me organise this conference? Post your feedback or contact me privately.
I think this is a great idea, but I would prefer to have a conference with a mixed panel of African and international bloggers.
If it would take about a year to organize the event you’d have to go back in time to have it in September/October 2007 🙂
I think you mean 2008.
If you can get those people into the same room at the same time. I’m there like white on rice!
Just got world from Steve Rubel that he won’t make it for that time slot. In the past Seth Godin has been against traveling to South Africa so I’m not even going to email him. I’m awaiting responses from the rest of the list. I look forward to your suggestions on other speakers from Africa, Asia, America or Europe.
p.s. Miguel I fixed the typo.