Posts

Showing posts from April, 2011

The Netherlands: The Social Networking Country

Pretty proud to be Dutch: The Netherlands Ranks #1 Worldwide in Penetration for Twitter and LinkedIn . Impressive numbers.

Productivity, Multitasking, and the Death of the Phone - HBR IdeaCast

One of the podcasts I listen to is the HBR Ideacast. They have lots of interesting talks with people. Sometimes these talks are related to articles published in HBR. Recently they interviewed Sherry Turkle of the much-debated book 'Alone together'. You can find the podcast here: Productivity, Multitasking, and the Death of the Phone . It's an interesting podcast to listen to and think about. I understand the problem she is seeing and describing (although I still have to read the book). I understand she is worried about it too. But every time I read about her book and listen to what she's saying I think: Shouldn't this problem be addressed by helping young and old people understand the new web and using it in the 'right' way? For instance, help people filter the web, search the web, understand web privacy and build networks using the web. I see a huge need for this around me. And I don't see many schools (and parents) stepping up to this task. I liked Tur

The State of the Blogsphere 2010

Image
Wow, sometimes it takes forever to get a blogpost ready for publication... This is one of them. Sorry for the late post about 'the State of the Blogosphere 2010' , hope you enjoy it anyway. I've been blogging what I learned from the SotB for a couple of years now. Technorati's report on how the blogosphere is doing is   lengthy and rich. To my knowledge it's the largest piece of research on the blogging community. They started back in 2004. Besides collecting general data about blogging, this year's focus is on the female bloggers. Blogs are in transition, they say. The line between blogs, microblogs and social networks is blurring. Mobile blogging is the key trend this year. Based on the results of the survey and interviews they see great optimism about blogging. More and more blogs are generating revenue, more frequent blogging and more blogs are planned and more and more people say the go-to resource for news will be blogs. The trust in mainstream media

Mobile Intranet

Image
Mobile and the mobile web is huge . Lots of the discussion about mobile and the mobile web is about mobile and the Internet. Until recently not much attention was paid to the implications of mobile for the intranet. But this is changing rapidly . More and more interesting posts and reports are being written about mobile intranet. One of them was published not to long ago. It is written by Martin White and is titled 'Focus on Enterprise Information Mobility' . This is a first paper giving an overview of what's happening in this place. It summarizes and structures lots of information about mobile enterprise. So, if you want to get up to speed on this topic, I encourage you to read it. But let me give you some highlights from the report: The GMSA Mobile Congress has a Mobile Enterprise track for the first time this year (March). "Enterprise mobiliy" usually refered to some employees using their cell phone and/or connected devices remotely. This has changed. En

Using Social Media Inside Organizations - BNR Digitaal Interview

Image
Not too long ago I was interviewed for the BNR Digitaal program. We talked about how social media is used internally by companies. The trigger for the interview was the research we do on intranet trends. The Intranet Monitor 2011 will be published shortly. I shared the link on Twitter right after the interview and thought I'd share it here as well (at least it's in my archives now...). The interview was in Dutch. The interview circles around topics like: why do companies use social media internally?, do they use one platform or several different tools? and how does chat relate to microblogging? It was my first time in a radio interview. It wasn't completely live, but recorded in one go. I enjoyed the experience! Radio is even more about small bites of information, so I prepared myself to deliver short, informative answers. You decide if I succeeded in this! I'd love to hear your comments or feedback!

Social Media and Fashion - Presentation for ABN Fashion Lunch

Recently I was invited to give a short presentation about social media for a network event organized by the ABN-Amro bank . I inserted the presentation below. The participants were all related to the fashion industry in some way. I kicked off with a presentation about social media and business processes/networks. A second presentation was giving by Laurens Bushof about social commerce and their new service Shop with my friends . I really enjoyed the discussion with the audience. It's clear this industry is looking for ways to use social media for business. What struck me though is that hardly any were successfully generating business with the social tools. Some hadn't even tried yet and were skeptical. Others had dipped their toes into social media. Others wondered how to make their first steps into this space. These presentations always help me structure my thoughts and challenge me to bring the message in such a way that the broad audience understands the messages and can

Use Less of Your Product

Image
I love challenges like in this post . Andrew Winston has an interesting post about asking customers to use less of your product. So you're in the printing business: ask your customers to print less. Or you sell hamburgers or books, ask them to buy less. Thinking in this way can open you up to new opportunities and business. Sometimes you are forced to think this way. Let's make this concrete. If you were a printing company, would you advise your employees to add a footer to every email saying: Please don't print out this email! Of course many would say: Hey, but this would cannibalize my business! True, but as the above-mentioned article says: It's better to do it yourself, than that someone else is doing it to you. I think we can also flip this challenge to ourselves. Think about what you would do if your customer (member of family, friend or client) would use less of your product/service. What would you do?

Social software for business performance - Deloitte Report

Image
Deloitte recently published an interesting report about their research on Social Business . It's titled: "Social software for business. The missing link in social software: Measurable business performance improvements". Some colleagues and I were interviewed for this report (when I worked for Oce) - see table on page 8. One of the reasons I wanted to participate was because this research was focused on truly measuring the impact of social software in organizations. We'd been rolling out social tools and using them widely. Also, we measure or tried to measure the value of these tools for business. We focused on two types of value. Value based on hard (analytics, increased productivity) and soft metrics (stories showing the value of these tools). We combined both because we knew that one can easily shoot holes in the 'hard' numbers. For instance you can wonder if the productivity increase is really due to use of social tools or did other factors (like organizat

Workshop Open Innovation and Social Media - Join us!

Image
For some time now I've been helping a new initiative of Oce called Document Services Valley to build up their web presence. In short Document Services Valley is a venture to encourage and speed up innovation in document services in an open network (collaborative innovation). On April 28 a workshop will be organized about Open Innovation and Social Media. Stefan Lindegaard , expert in the open innovation field will lead the workshop. I also have a small role in the workshop. More information about the workshop can be found here . We hope you will join us! Till then.