California-Cologne-Connection
The entire C’n’B team was on conferences and events the last two weeks. At Berlin Music Week we followed up on the great meetings with all our friends and partner, as Berlin Music Commission, Reeperbahn Festival & Campus as well as MIDEM and the international music export bureaus; with the German magazine DeBug and Watergate we are planning a think tank techie event during Berlin Music Days (BerMuDa). From the hot spot Berlin we can warmly recommend to follow these activities: Free Culture Incubator and the Media Facades Festival. Meanwhile I connected with our partnering PR agency in Los Angeles, NVPR, and networked at different events in LA.
Friday, the 17 Sep. I have been hanging out in the sun at LA’s Park[ing] Day LA. Lowly asphalt parking space all across LA was is being turned into eco-friendly pocket parks. Park[ing] Day LA is “designed to stir a conversation or dialogue on public space, green space, and open space…” Here, I met a bunch of activists, bicyclists of the organization cicLAvia (whom I joined Saturday at their bicycle beauty pageant & party to benefit their purpose in making LA a better bicycling place) and deLaB, a collective of designers & writers who participated and turned a parking lot into one of their events.
There are great ideas, initiatives and projects all around LA that inform and bring forth green and sustainable living, being healthy and questioning those things that aren’t quite good —- yet (well, transportation is obviously a big problem). It is great to see all these actions taking place and seeing people just DOING things.
I also enjoyed Social Media Week in LA that took place in all kinds of venues around town, some even at the clubs on Sunset Strip - a little bit like c/o pop festival :)
Back in Europe this week my colleagues went to our great partnering conference PICNIC in Amsterdam and Reeperbahn Festival in Hamburg. I’m looking forward to Claudia’s feedback on that! The week before, C’n’B also went to DMEXCO - THE trade fair for digital marketing and were amazed about the fullness and dynamics; of course no doubt this will keep on booming. The phenomenon was also seen at stART conference, the original conference about social media for high culture. They all learned about some handy tools and took with them lots of input regarding our own C’n’B social media strategy. I was happy to find videos of the panels online within days and even though I could not be in Duisburg at the stART conference, I enjoyed learning via internet and directly took action:
Working remote from Los Angeles with the C’n’B team in Cologne, I had to set up my work environment in order to keep the workflow flowing and continue the conversation with my colleagues. We chose Hootuite now as the tool to facilitate our social networking activities (thanks, Frank Tentler for your recommendation!). That way, all of us at C’n’B can use one account to read RSS feeds and write tweets and posts on our Twitter and Facebook. Our LinkedIn and xing accounts are also directly connected. I have been searching for interesting blogs, RSS feeds and other sources to stay on top of developments regarding innovation (in terms of new technologies or
approaches to sustainability) within the Creative Industries. On this front, I am still looking… The app that I am now using to read the feeds is NetNewsWire.
The nine hour time difference has some advantages as well. While everyone in Europe sleeps, I will be reading the newest news and tweets. Therefore, our Twitter account CnBConvention is now twittering 24/7 (#cnb10) :) After all, a large part of our followers are from this side of the planet.
With our own documentation being online now I am starting to approach our existing partners in order to carve out new projects for C’n’B 2011. It is great that we start planning early this year and this time we are able to create even more intense and multifaceted collaborations. We have already had great partners on board for C’n’B 2010 but that was just the the beginning…
C’n’B on tour this month
September is the month where the year picks up again. While most Cologners have finally come back from vacation, I have flewn to Los Angeles last week and am continuing to manage partnerships and cooperations of C’n’B from here. We have collaborated with LA-based companies already for C’n’B in June 2010 to do PR and bring speakers from over there like Hal Bringman from the PR firm NVPR, Robert Tercek, who just helped to establish Oprah Winfrey Network or Shamal Ranashinge from Topspin Media. From here, I will grasp through the city to find more forward thinking cooperation partners in the USA and especially California to carve out projects and initiate exchange for C’n’B next year.
Everyone else at C’n’B is on the road as well, participating in festivals and conferences: we are hosting two panels as part of our collaboration with the a2n – alltogethernow conference in Berlin this week, we are co-hosting together with Reeperbahn Festival & Campus from Hamburg a BBQ at Berlin Music Week and will then be at Popkomm. Some of C’n’B are at EXPO in Shanghai next week and represent in South Korea. Claudia Jericho will participate at our partnering conventions PICNIC in Amsterdam the week after and then at the Reeperbahn Campus where we continue our Transpanel Session.
The world is full of great ideas, approaches and initiatives. We’d like to see the best of them come together at C’n’B.
PS: As someone of the C’n’B network you can get a 15% discount on all tickets to PICNIC and be there as well. Just join our C’n’B xing group to get the voucher.
