Leeds Business Week Day One: Monday 23 September

3 October, 2013

I am still buzzing from Leeds Business Week! #LeedsBizWeek

What an absolutely amazing week it was. Running from 23 to 27 September 2013, Leeds Business Week comprised around 180 events at venues across Leeds city centre. The event is described as “a one-week business degree … bringing all of Leeds city’s stakeholders together”

It really is “an MBA in a week,” as Geoff Sheppard put it! Full credit to the organisers, they get so many organisations involved, it’s great!

So here is my round up, through my eyes…

MONDAY

Monday morning began first thing with me presenting as an associate of Northern Lights PR, with Chief Executive, Victoria Tomlinson. Northern Ballet very kindly sponsored the event.

Our event was on ‘How to use LinkedIn and other social media to win new business’. We had a great turnout and got some amazing feedback – thanks to everyone who came along.

One of the things that sparked huge debate was around whether you should be a “LinkedIn tart” and accept everyone who asks to connect. I am a bit of LinkedIn tart in that I tend to accept most people (you never know who that person may know and be able to put you in touch with), whereas Victoria goes for a highly curated, high quality network.

At a networking session on Monday lunchtime, I was delighted to bump into Catherine Karlyae and Phil from Caltech, one of my clients. It was great to see them and catch up on their current projects.

I then sped off to The Leeds Club for the series of ‘Tech That’ seminars.

The first session of the afternoon was on ‘Social media and the employment life-cycle,’ led by Andy Graham from commercial law firm, Nabarro. It was an interesting talking about pre- and post-employment and social media, covering things like introducing social media into absence management policies.

For me, it was a very cautious seminar, which considered all the risks of SM. The key message was about employers putting adequate policies in place to cover all eventualities.

I felt that in the same way as you have human resources (HR) people between employees and lawyers, you also need social media (SM) people in between employees and lawyers as well. Because in HR you have to make a commercial decision not a legal one, and for me, social media is the same.

I’m of the opinion that having social media policies that are too rigid shows a lack of trust of employees, and you could increase employee engagement and trust by training and encouraging positive use of SM.

I then went to see a similar presentation by Lupton Fawcett, Lee and Priestley, on ‘Employees and social media in the workplace’. Again, it used examples form case law to highlight some of the risks of social media.

While the themes were similar to Nabarro’s, I particularly liked the presentation style of employment law specialist, Diarmuid Deeney – very funny guy! Diarmuid talked about cyber slacking, and joked that Facebook should be sponsored by The Law Society as it gets them so much business.

I then headed over to The Rosebowl for the Institute of Directors (IoD) ‘Business Bites’ sessions. I’m on the IoD committee so wanted to support the event, but also the list of speakers and topics looked great.

George Hall from Jermyn Consulting presented on ‘Safeguarding your business against digital risk.’ The session highlighted potential risks, for example in using the cloud to store and access data, and gave some useful tips on managing security risks in your business.

We then heard from Sara Ludlam, Lupton Fawcett Lee & Priestley. Her speciality was intellectual property (IP) and she talked about talked specifically about digital: for example using images, trade marking domain names, and the risks of social media.

All in all, a fantastic start to the week! Read more by clicking on the links below:

Click here to read Tuesday round-up

Click here to read Wednesday round-up

Click here to read Thursday round-up

Click here to read Friday round-up