Hanging With The Flacks
It was a fun talk, and I got to advocate a holistic approach to building an Intranet to a crowd that sees the Intranet primarily as a vehicle for internal communications. There was a lot of interest in content management as well, particularly from the should-we-or-shouldn't-we side (you should). It's also worth noting that PR people are worrying about content management systems--which one to buy, what features to look for--when they should only have to worry about the content. There's a gap there that someone could fill.
After I was done, some people came up to me to chat about the presentation. One of them was an account executive with a local design/marketing firm. She thanked me profusely for all the support I'd given them since they're a small agency (I've never hired them, never recommended them, never worked with them directly), and she mentioned that Steve, the CEO, asked to her to say "a personal hello" to me. I don't know Steve--I met him once briefly about a year ago. And I doubt he even remembered my name.
I always try to judge design companies on the quality of their work, and someday when I'm looking at a proposal from this company I'll have to ward off the bad impression made by such blatantly false schmoozing. Shame. But otherwise, it was a great event.
