Overall I've had positive feedback on the Open Space that we held earlier.  People spotted some of the ways that it could have been improved, if we'd had more time.  Johnnie shared an insight with me which is that it's often good to resist the impulse to help people out based on our own perception of their problem.   We very quickly had a wide range of  conversations hosted and ready to go including: learning and education with wikis; moderation; using a combination of tools to support communities of practice; guerrilla marketing; engaging with large groups of consumers;  making money with blogs and many others that sprang up in the gaps between.  Most gratifying for me was seeing people in suits sitting cross legged on a conference room floor...

Welcome (again) to the blog for the upcoming Blogs & Social Media Forum. This is a space where delegates and speakers can talk about the topics which will be up for discussion at the event on May 17, and perhaps open up new areas of exploration for the event.

I'm Jackie Danicki, and I'll be taking part in the Making the right connections open space forum at the event (see the Blogs & Social Media Forum conference programme for more details). A bit of background about me: I started out in the humdrum world of e-commerce marketing, as the Editor-in-Chief of a Swiss financial institution's b2b website. I also dabbled in freelance writing for the web, and eventually started blogging. In early 2004, I joined the Big Blog Company, where I consulted companies on using blogs to perform better as a business (read: make more money, get more personal fulfilment, and spread those benefits to employees). In 2005, I became the head of marketing for Latitude, Europe's largest search engine marketing agency, where the social media intitiatives I introduced saw the company's press coverage increase sixfold, website traffic increase 7000 per cent, and sales enquiries via the web increase tens of thousands of percentage points. (Latitude was also named the UK's fastest growing media company during my time there.) I am now working on a contract basis with various companies to bring similar benefits to their businesses, as well as heading up the Engagement Alliance.

Now that the autobiographical bit is out of the way, I'm looking forward to bringing you frequent points to ponder in anticipation of the event, and your responses and feedback are definitely encouraged!

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