It’s been some time since I visited New Zealand so when the dates for this WordCamp came out I thought it would be good to get along to it and visit NZ for a few days.
Broaden your horizons
Meeting new people and listening to their stories is one of the best reasons to attend a WordCamp.
Particularly in another country, I’ve enjoyed to learning about people previously unknown to me.
The two best sessions…
Like any conference there are always sessions that are more interesting to you than others, a lot of the audience in Auckland were users rather than developers, the organisers had curated the sessions accordingly.
These were the pick of the sessions for me.
Jenene Crossan
In the morning session we had a keynote from Jenene Crossan @Jenene who had a great story to tell. She’s a specialist in the digital industry here in New Zealand.
My favourite take away from her session was this.
In talking about working with a new client she made the point to ask them, the business owner, how they use ‘digital’?
I’m shorting this but in her experience a lot of people she’s worked with, their idea of digital was a blackberry phone and a personal assistant that handles their email; point being they don’t live on their iPhone, use twitter and understand that Instagram is something more than sharing photos of your breakfast.
And this was the person, perhaps head of marketing that was in charge of a web site project.
What to do about the problem is a tough one. It did hit home with me to know who you’re dealing with on a project. Perhaps an idea is to develop some kind of orientation for this kind of client to bring their understanding up to date understanding of what others do online.
Bill Bennett
An experienced Kiwi journalist his session was around blogging like a journalist.
He had some great tips on writing styles:
- get your key message out in the first section of a blog post (users may not stick with you after 200-300 words)
- keep your language simple, your content is available internationally, don’t assume all readers are native English speakers
- this one applies to me, don’t overuse exclamation marks!
Check out Bill’s post on his site How to blog like and old school journalist.
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