IR leaders on YouTube and FriendFeed

LAST WEEK, I wrote about how the US National Investor Relations Institute (NIRI) annual conference was being given a little Web 2.0 treatment on the new, 100-day-old service called FriendFeed.

That unplanned experiment, which occurred to me on a whim and far exceeded what I or anyone else expected, was followed this week by a similar FriendFeed initiative for the smaller Canadian Investor Relations Institute (CIRI) annual conference in Mont-Tremblant, Quebec.

On the second pass, we had more experience and did things a little differently. Most of the credit for the success of both FriendFeed rooms must go to the new media firm zu.com, whose employees and executives provided 90% of the content via blog posts, photographs and video.

On the last full day of the conference, FriendFeed helped out by enabling us to bring a Twitter feed into the virtual conference room. That allowed us to showcase the Blackberry  livetwittering prowess of Q4 Web Systems CEO Darrell Heaps, who has a way of homing in on the best nuggets of insight in 140 characters or less.

But there was another big difference the second time. CIRI’s President Ian Bacque and NIRI’s President and CEO Jeff Morgan got involved by agreeing to be interviewed by zu.com’s CEO Ryan Lejbak in videos that were uploaded to YouTube. The videos are embedded below for convenience.

The main benefit I see of using FriendFeed for this type of event is that FriendFeed aggregates information from 41+ social media properties in one place. This is a great way to showcase the various Web 2.0 tools that are out there for people who typically are not familiar with them.

And in a recent development, thecorporatecounsel.net editor Broc Romanek plans to use FriendFeed for the upcoming Society of Corporate Secretaries and Governance Professionals’ 2008 Annual Conference after seeing what we did. Now that’s probably an even tougher audience to make warm and fuzzy to social media!

NIRI President and CEO Jeff Morgan

CIRI President Ian Bacque

The address for the CIRI FriendFeed room is http://friendfeed.com/rooms/ciri08 and for NIRI it’s http://friendfeed.com/rooms/niri08 Setting up and managing the rooms requires a bit of work behind the scenes. If you’d like to use a room for a similar type of event, let me know and I’ll provide you with some pointers.

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