Over the last few days, I’ve been taking part in an interesting idea – a kind of travelling conference. I, and my commercial radio colleague Nick Piggott, have been doing a presentation called Radio for the Facebook Generation, in which we talk about interesting ways of keeping radio relevant for a young generation – and this week we’ve done it in Stockholm, Oslo, and (above) Copenhagen.

A travelling conference is a really neat idea. In each city, the programme was different – but while it would have been difficult to fly some of the speakers ‘just’ to Oslo, for example, the big international names appeared at all three; so you got the benefit of some really big names, and also the benefit of good local content too (a bit like, I suppose, what local commercial radio is trying to do).

So, also speaking was Mark Ramsey, who spoke engagingly about some of the things US radio is doing; and Nik Goodman. Nik’s talk was really good; essentially saying that sponsorship and promotions can lead to some really good radio, instead of boring crappy competitions. He played a lot of the work from Virgin Radio’s S&P department, who are deserved award-winners in this field. It reminded me that coming up with great radio ideas isn’t always the job of the programmes department; and rather nicely got a load of people listening to the radio and laughing.

Quite a few people asked for a copy of the presentation Nick and I gave. It’s 38 meg, and given that I was demonstrating Olinda (our rather nice prototype connected radio) and a rather neat webcam-based piece of software that got a spontaneous round of applause (when it worked!), it’s a bit hard to simply forward a PPT file to someone.

Instead, you’ll find a small PDF download here – Radio for the Facebook Generation – which is the text of the speech, suitably fiddled-with to make it less reliant on the visuals. If you want to see the whole thing, then do contact one of us; and note that the speech doesn’t make it clear who’s speaking at any one time, so don’t take anything in here as official BBC policy, because it isn’t.

I’m grateful for the hospitality shown to us by everyone we met; and it was good to make some good new friends.

My full disclosure is, as ever, relevant for this posting; in particular, it’s worth the licence-fee payer noting that all travel, accommodation, and internet access in Scandinavia was covered by the conference organisers.

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