AMD shows future of the press conference
I just attended an AMD press conference virtually. It was really boring for a few minutes. Lots of PowerPoint slides. Stuff that bores me to tears.
But then they did two things.
1. They turned on a video camera in their offices so we could see the people on the other side of the call (and the very cool new laptop technology they were showing off).
2. They took us off mute and asked “any questions?”
Now THAT is how you get press and blogger types to pay attention to a press call! I said to myself “damn, what a difference between a professional PR team at a huge old-school company and the one that Facebook has.”
It’s amazing that a processor company gets how to use video (the camera was handheld by one of the participants, which accentuated its authenticity. No expensive camera crew. No makeup. No lights. No controlling PR team trying to make sure that only “nice” questions get asked. Just some geeks in an office showing off the new laptop technology they had developed).
Damn, CES is starting to look interesting (this was a call to show off stuff that’ll be demoed at CES and to give the press a little preview). Brandee Barker (she runs PR for Facebook), you should go over to AMD and study how they did it. Kudos AMD!
Powered By 
December 4th, 2007 at 10:41 am
Amen to that.
December 4th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
[...] just love this post from Scoble about a more open, authentic, and honest approach to [...]
December 4th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
AMD has had a few on-line virtual conferences and they even sent me a t-shirt afterword!
December 4th, 2007 at 3:02 pm
At the end of the day its not PR which makes a difference… Its the products. AMD can do all the PR they want but without the product line they will continue to be beaten by Intel. Same things with Facebook. I know you bloggers want to be made important by these things. But what matters at the end of the day is a innovative strong product line.
December 4th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Yes, the video was pretty cool. But there were still not many questions. These thing really need to foster attendee involvement if they want to make any major steps forward. Overall it was an improvement over standard WebEx but I can’t say it was revolutionary…
December 4th, 2007 at 10:57 pm
I think you would like this video ;-)… By the way you feature in it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi4fzvQ6I-o&eurl
December 4th, 2007 at 11:00 pm
Eshwar: yeah, I linked to that yesterday.
December 4th, 2007 at 11:10 pm
Oops missed that one. Sorry!
December 7th, 2007 at 8:56 am
[...] post from Robert Scoble reminded me to share a vision of our webcasting future: Multisourcing. While his post wasn’t [...]