infoarch

Looking Forward - 5 Years of Blogging

2012-01-19T12:00:00.000+01:00

My first post this year is to celebrate my blog's birthday! Wow, 5 years ago I started to blog. And although blogging (who said it would be...?!) hasn't always been easy I still enjoy it.

I started blogging to have a way to think out loud. To write my thoughts and ideas down and connect with other writing elsewhere in the blogosphere or on the Net. My main goal was to speed up my learning by not only reading interesting books, articles and posts, but also by publishing my thoughts, questions, doubts and learnings based on my reading. And I must say it really helped.

It definitely also helped to become more connected and visible in the communities that I'm interesting in. Social media in general, and social networking especially. But also: communities, social business, enterprise 2.0, knowledge management, intranet and content management.

One thing I'm wondering about is if a blog truly is a conversation platform. I know there are blogs that show it is. But my blog could use some more interaction and conversation (comments). (Although I get comments regularly, directly on the blog or in other social media.) I'm wondering how to move in that direction. Does it have to do with the things I write about or the way I write about them? Do people mostly comment on big blogs and not small ones? This is something I'm going to work on in the coming year.

If you have any thoughts on how my blog could be better or how I could get more interaction, please leave a comment. It would be greatly appreciated. As I truly appreciate the fact that so many people take the time to follow my blog and (just) read my posts. Thank you very much, you are a great inspiration to keep on blogging!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

2011-12-24T14:00:00.000+01:00

Just wanted to wish you and your loved ones a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Hope you have a great time.
And, thank you all for reading my blog and tweets and all the online and offline interactions. They are much appreciated.

I'm on vacation with my family, so I'll won't be blogging and will hardly tweet. Hope to meet you soon - in 2012!

My Predictions for 2012

2011-12-23T12:30:00.000+01:00

The future cannot be predicted. But, even if it could, we would not dare to act on the prediction.

- Arie de Geus in The Living Company

Join me at the Intranet Conference 2012 #intra12

2011-12-22T12:00:00.000+01:00

As you know I work for Entopic. Entopic has organized a conference about intranet for several years now. It has become the largest intranet conference in the World.

We’re working hard on the 2012 conference. It will be held on March 13, 2012 in Utrecht, The Netherlands. A large part of the program has been defined and we hope to finalize the program in the coming week.

This year we wanted to focus on the soft(er) side of intranet. What are the skills intranet-related people need to successfully implement and maintain a intranet and especially a social intranet. We found three keynote speakers that know all about this side of intranet:

Menno Lanting will talk about leadership and intranet
James Robertson will give an overview of the changing intranet landscape
Michael Sampson will present about facilitating collaboration with intranet

We also have a great list of interesting breakouts this year. Ranging from Shell about knowledge management and intranet to the Local Government of Amsterdam about their paperless dossier management via iPad.

Check out our new website and the program and tell me what you think. Of course I hope to meet you there.

State of the Blogosphere 2011

2011-12-21T12:00:00.000+01:00

How is the blogosphere doing? Several post have been written in 2011 about it being dead. At the beginning of the social media revolution everyone was told to start blogging. Now, most think microblogging is enough, it seems. Twitter has become a popular why to (micro)blog. And other types of blogging are showing up, like Posterous and Tumblr. As well as photo blogs, like Instagram.

Since 2004 Technorati publishes an overview of the State of the Blogosphere. Recently ‘The State of the Blogosphere 2011’ was published. I’d like to share a summary of this interesting report with you (as I’ve done in previous years).

Who are the bloggers?

4114 bloggers were surveyed for this report (about 3000 less than in 2010). According to the research 75% of the bloggers are 25-44 years old. The level of education of blogger is high, mostly college and university level.

Technorati distinguishes four types of bloggers: hobbyists (60% of the respondents), part-time and full-time professionals (18%), corporate (8%) and entrepreneurs (13%).

Blogging patterns

The majority of the bloggers has been blogging for at least 2 years. It is remarkable that all bloggers maintain more than one blog. 60% of the respondents blogs up to three hours per week, the rest (40%) blogs more. 13% say they spend more than ten hours per week.

The majority of the participants blogs 2-3 times a week. Professional full-time bloggers blog more often. 26% says they post at least three times per day.

The general trend among bloggers is to spend more time on blogging than in 2011 and to post more often. When bloggers decide to blog less this is due to, just as last year, spending more time on other social platform and especially microblogging.

Blogging and business

What is the influence of blogging on brands? This year blogs are listed as having the most influence on brands. Compared to 2010 this is a huge leap forward. As a second and third brand influencer friends and other social media are mentioned. All types of bloggers are asked regularly by brands to blog about their product or service. Even though most bloggers think that companies find them less professional, compared to traditional media.

A remarkable finding from the survey is that blogs are still considered to be most influential under consumers when they look for recommedations about products and services. Facebook is also influential, but less than blogs. Twitter’s influence has also decreased in this respect.

Blog inspiration and success

To find input for blogposts, most bloggers tap into social media sites (21 uur/week). Bloggers don’t watch a lot of TV.

Professionele bloggers measure the success of their blog by the number of unique visitors and financial gain. Hobbyist measure success by personal satisfaction. 70% of the bloggers blog to share experience and expertise with others. Another way to measure the success of a blog is if it has been quoted in traditional media. 36% of the bloggers say their blog has been quoted.

An interesting fact is most bloggers don’t want advertisement on their blog, although most bloggers admit they do not have enough readers for advertisers to be interested in advertising on their blog.

Blogging and other social media

82% of all bloggers uses Twitter. Under professional bloggers almost all use it. Hobbyists have about halve as many followers on Twitter as professionals. Professional bloggers have around 1000 followers. In most cases blogposts are automatically published to Twitter.

89% of the bloggers has a Facebook account. Setting up separate Facebook pages for your blog has increased by 15% in the previous year. In most cases the blogpost is not automatically posted to Facebook.

More than 6 out of 10 respondents uses Google+. The reasons to use Google+ are comparable to Twitter and Facebook: promoting your blog and finding interesting links. As with Facebook, automatic publishing of blogposts to Google+ is not done often.

The participants find Facebook and Twitter as most-effective to publicize a blog. LinkedIn comes in 3rd place.

Wordpress is the most popular blog hosting service. 51% of the participants uses it. Blogger en Blogspot are popular as well (21% en 14%).

Blogging and mobile

A nice question was about the impact of tablets and smartphones on blogging. 45% said they use more pictures and images and 43% said they write shorter posts because of mobile.

Questions

You can read the whole report online. Have you read it? If so, what were the most remarkable findings according to you? And what’s your vision on the future of blogging? Is it doomed, as some say? Or does it have a (certain) future?

Note: This post was also published in Dutch on FrankWatching and Teed.

Scoren met Twitter [Dutch post] #ilunch

2011-12-20T12:00:00.000+01:00

ThiemeMeulenhoff organiseert maandelijks een iLunch. Een iLunch is een inspirerende bijeenkomst voor TM medewerkers. Meestal wordt een externe spreker uitgenodigd om de iLunch in te vullen. In december was ik uitgenodigd om te spreken over het succesvol inzetten van Twitter, privé en zakelijk. Mijn slides heb ik gedeeld op Slideshare en bij deze ook hier. Feedback, vragen en commentaar zijn welkom.

Scoren met Twitter iLunch ThiemeMeulenhoff

View more presentations from Samuel Driessen

Another step towards internal maps

2011-12-19T12:30:00.000+01:00

Outdoor maps are great. Google is doing a wonderful job with Maps. But what about indoor maps? I've been tracking posts about this topic for some time. And just recently Google announced it's taking Google Maps indoors. Here's a short video about his initiative:

I think this will have huge implications for companies as well. Just think about adding maps to your internal intranet employee directory.

Social technologies are extending organizations

2011-12-16T16:44:00.000+01:00

McKinsey has been following the social business movement for some time now. And they're following to see if it can live up to the expectations. Recently they published the results of their 5th annual survey under 4200 global executives. The polled them how their organizations use social tools.

The finding of the report are interesting. There's clear progress: social tools are being used more and more and in more effective ways. When adopted across the networked enterprise and integrated in work processes of employees, clear benefits are seen. There's a boost in financial performance and market share, which relates to the results of previous surveys. However not many companies are fully networked, meaning they are internally and externally networked.

One of the most interesting things I read in the report was the fact that executives believe if organizational barriers to social tools diminish, they could transform the core business processes. This is a big statement as most business processes are formal and supported by heavy and expensive IT-systems. Exhibit 8 give you an idea of the processes that will/can be changed. This does not imply social tools are good for all business processes. Exhibit 7 should which business processes have the best fit with social tools. As you see, social tools are mostly used to scan the external environment.

The survey mentioned that 72% of the organizations have at least one social technology inhouse. And 40% have a social networking and blogging platform.

Of course we all want to know what the affordances of social business are. According to this report they are:

increasing speed to access knowledge
reducing communication costs
increasing speed to access internal experts

Another interesting finding is the fact that it is easier to loose benefits of social tools than to gain them. Implementing social tools is hard work and requires continuous effort.

Books I'm reading and why

2011-12-12T12:00:00.000+01:00

You may have never seen this. But my blog contains a list of books I'm reading at the moment. I just finished reading 'Making it all work' by David Allen. I re-read his book 'Getting things done' every year to review the way I'm working and apply new GTD elements to my productivity framework. But I thought I'd read Allen's newest book instead this year.
I'll review 'Making it all work' soon and share it with you as a blogpost. I enjoyed reading this book as it goes into the philosophy and mechanisms behind GTD.

Currently I'm reading 3 books:

As I told you I'm reading 'What Technology Wants' by Kevin Kelly. Not an easy book, but fascinating. I'm almost finished reading it and hope to review it in January.
And I just started reading 'The Information' by James Gleick and 'The Living Company' by Arie de Geus.

Have you read one of these books? If so, leave a comment and tell me what you think of it. If you're planning to read one of them, let me know so we can read together and share notes.

Great assignment

2011-12-09T17:04:00.000+01:00

Just wanted to share my enthusiasm with you about a great assignment I received from a client. Recently we were contacted because our client wanted to set up a new intranet. They were thinking about doing an internal survey to find out what employees expected from their (future) intranet. Soon they concluded this would only give them a list of things they already knew. "We don't really know what we need." So, they came to us/me with the request to organize trips to five interesting intranets. Show us five interesting intranets that we can learn from. Based on those visits we will learn a lot about organizational issues, budget, technology platform, adoption strategies, types of intranets, etc.

Wow, what a great assignment! I also think this is smart thing to do. Why do it all yourself if there's so much to learn from others? Isn't this also a faster way to get to results?

I'm honored to get such an assignment and it's great to organize this for them. It's just as inspiring to me as it is to them.

Enterprise 2.0 Summit Ambassador #e20s

2011-12-06T12:28:00.000+01:00

Just a short post to say I'm honored to be an ambassador of the 2012 Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris!

I was hoping to be an ambassador last year, but was asked to give a talk then. I really enjoyed the summit. The keynotes were very good, the breakout sessions were interesting, the conference was well-organized and the evening dinner and drinks were inspiring. It was fascinating to see what is being done in Europe in the enterprise 2.0-social business space.
This years program looks great as well. The summit will be held in Paris instead of Frankfurt, which will be interesting. You can register here.
All my posts about last year's summit can be found here.

Are you going to the Enterprise 2.0 Summit? I'm also curious which Dutch people plan to go! ;-)

Less Filter Bubbles with Twitter and RSS?

2011-12-05T15:38:00.000+01:00

Talking to an old-aged man who had just discovered the internet, he said: "The internet is just so great, what a huge amount of sources we have there!" And I agree with him. The internet is amazing. The huge amount of content shared there about all kinds of topics. The way we can interact with content and people via the internet. The amazing number of different internet services. And we have reached the end of what the internet will bring us.

But is the internet all good. There have been many that question if the internet is such a positive force. Shouldn't we question some (or all) of the changes the internet is doing to the world and to. Andrew Keen wrote about the negative aspects of the internet on culture. Nicolas Carr published about book about what the internet is doing to our brain. And more can be mentioned here.

Recently I bumped into a review of The Filter Bubble in my Dutch newspaper, went over to watch the related TED Talk with the same title and the post about information gatekeepers popped up in my feeds. Talk about the wonders of internet and serendipity...

In short the TED talk is about how services like Google and Facebook are automatically filtering out information for us, without us knowing, based on our profiles, search behavior, friends, etc. And the question is asked if this is good thing.

I'm happy these kind of questions are being asked. It helps me question myself if I'm too positive about the (role of) the internet in my life. One of the things I like about the internet is the fact that so much information is accessible at my finger tips. And the fact that I can follow close and far-away friends, thinkers and experts with such ease. I try to keep my filters fresh and open to new views. And as I agree and understand that Google and Facebook are trying to help me find what's relevant, I also see that I need other ways to get unfiltered content. Isn't this where Twitter and a good feedreader come in? Oh, yes, even there I don't follow the whole world on Twitter and I can read all the blogs in the world. But it's hard to block out all kinds of information I think I don't want to see. I can't stop someone I'm following to not send a tweet or write a blogpost about a certain topic. Of course I don't have to read the blogpost, but to do that I have to read the title of the post. And with that I'm at least confronted with his/her view on a topic.

Does this make sense? I'm really curious how you stay out of the filter bubble. Please share your thoughts!

Fire all the managers?

2011-11-30T12:00:00.000+01:00

I listen to the HBR Ideacast regularly. Recently Gary Hamel was interviewed about his HBR article 'First, Let's Fire all the Managers'.

As you may know Hamel has devoted a large part of his life to thinking about better ways to organize and manage companies. What kind of management (if any) does this time period need. Of course, Hamel goes into why he wrote an article about this topic. But to me the most interesting part was that Hamel provides examples of companies that don't have management. When I was listening I caught myself thinking: Yeah, less management would be great, but can we really live without them? Hamel shows it can be done. He points to one company called Morningstar for instance.

Very interesting and thought-provoking! What do you think? Can your company or could you live without management?

The invisible company

2011-11-29T16:04:00.000+01:00

Eryc Branham recently posted an interesting article about 'The invisible company' over on ReadWriteWeb.

I think his post also underlines that companies are inherently social. A company is a collection of humans. And (most) humans are social beings. I find most people don't look at companies this way. I hear lots of talk about social business as if business' are only social if they use social media internally and interact with the market via social media. Companies aren't social when they use social media. But, as Eryc says, social tools can be and should be used to make the social interactions between colleagues visible.

Social Media in Practice Event #socmedprak

2011-11-24T17:33:00.000+01:00

A conference about social media, organized using social media and presented by experienced social media enthusiast, can that be done? Yes, it can. I was part of such a conference a couple of weeks ago. It was called 'The Social Media in Practice Event' (Dutch: Social media in de praktijk).

Ronald van den Hoff of Society 3.0 kicked off the event. He gave an interesting talk about the influence of the internet and social media on society, and its implications for businesses. I liked how he stressed businesses should be built around passion and learning from mistakes. They should be ever more open to what's happening around them or else they will be eclipsed. Interestingly he also said large companies will get smaller and smaller and independent contractors/free agents will be the 'companies' of the future.

I also went to Roos van Vugt's breakout about leading into social media. She works for Deloitte and explained how see introduced and is cultivating social media inside the company. She stressed to make sure higher management is on board and agrees with internal social media deployment.

I also was asked to give two breakouts about social media and knowledge management. My slides (in Dutch...) can be found here:

Kennismanagement en social media, een perfecte matchijk 27 10-11

View more presentations from Samuel Driessen

During both breakouts the discussion was lively. Discussion topics were about the difference between business processes and networks, the security of hosted social media like Yammer, how people can be encouraged to share their knowledge and should companies introduce a central, all-encompassing social media platform or separate tools?

Location and News(papers), also for Intranet?

2011-11-18T15:00:00.000+01:00

The New York Times has an interesting 'experimental projects' group, beta620. ReadWriteWeb recently pointed to an interesting experiment, called Longitude.
Wouldn't it be neat if news items could be browsed through by a map? So you can see what news has been published about the city or country you live in or are interested in? Longitude does just this.

One thing I was wondering is: Is this concept also interesting for the intranet? Could it be valuable to international companies to link the news items and intranet pages to a location? Clearly there are good cases for the combination of location and intranet. Curious to hear your thoughts about this.

Go ahead and play with Longitude. Great stuff for in the weekend if you ask me!

Control and audit implications for social media

2011-11-18T14:00:00.000+01:00

What does social media have to do with finance and control? And even auditing? Those were questions I had to think about after I was invited to give two talks with prof. Eddy Vaassen about 'Control and audit implications of social media'. And I must say, it was challenging and fun.

Our slides can be found here:

Finance and Control Implications of Social Media

View more presentations from Samuel Driessen

Most of the questions from the audience were about control. What are the implications of using social media for the company's reputation? Should social media be organized centrally? Etc. Furthermore, some wondered if social media was only for marketing and communication, not for other parts of the organization, like R&D and Finance.

There were several other keynotes. One was particularly interesting. Prof. Dennis Campbell gave a talk about 'Control and customer experience'. His research clearly related to the points we made. It shows that: More (tight) control (does mitigate risk) but does not lead to learning. In loose control there is about 9% more learning.

And I also liked the simple version of the service profit chain:

Employee satisfaction > service value > customer satisfaction > customer loyalty > profitability

Reality is more complex though and this is a long process to get this right, Campbell said.

Social business and compliance are interesting areas to keep an eye on. Recently several good posts by Joe Shepley were written on CMSWire about this topic. I commented on the first one.

Is control and compliance an issue in your internal and external social media roll outs? If so, let me know. I'd love to hear how you address this topic.

Social Business Doesn't Mean What You Think It Does, Neither Does Enterprise 2.0

2011-11-17T15:09:00.000+01:00

Some time ago Deb Lavoy wrote an interesting post titled 'Social Business doesn't mean what you think it does, neither does Enterprise 2.0'. I just wanted to point you to it. The discussion around the post is interesting. I also commented on the post. I'll mix it into this post and hopefully you'll read Deb's post and join the conversation.

I like the way Deb links social business to deeper societal and even philosophical movements. I think this is one of the reasons Tapscott c.s. wrote the book 'Macrowikinomics'. W.r.t. philosophy she relates social business to Enlightenment 2.0. I was wondering if we can just say it relates to the current philosophy, postmodernism (- there is no absolute truth, everything is fragmented, deconstructionilism, subjectivism instead of objectivism, etc)?
Extending that thought, we know philosophies come and go (objectivism is followed by an era of subjectivism, then objectivism, etc). I think we are now learning that subjectivism alone won't get us there. Society is showing this. But in social business there's also more and more talk about social business and core business processes, and integrating formal processes and informal networks in organizations. I hope this is showing that we are learning. Because we know from history if we only focus on one side of the truth, the world will sway back the other way to address the other side of the truth for some time.
In short, networks and informal collaboration aren't the whole story, there's always some formal structure. But definitely less structure than we were used to. Because structure isn't the whole story either; networks have always been there as well.

4 Big Intranet Questions

2011-11-16T15:20:00.000+01:00

Jane McConnell recently shared 4 questions about intranet (aka the web workplace) that she is going to ask several panelist at an upcoming conference. Big and good questions, in my opinion. Her questions are:

Are we reaching the end of the intranet as we know it? How do you imagine intranets to be in the future?
Enterprise search seems to be essential in today’s world of masses of content in the managed intranet, in collaborative spaces and in enterprise social networks. Some people see “search’ as the logical point of convergence and the ideal user interface for the “digital workplace”. What is your vision of search and its role in the digital enterprise?
How do you see the evolution of “governance’ in a world where managed content and user-generated, spontaneous content are blended?
If you were to give one piece of advice to organizations just starting the social (or 2.0) journey, what would it be?

Jane wondered what her blog readers would answer. Here are my answers (also posted as a comment to the blogpost):

The traditional intranet will become much smaller, more focus will be on social tools and mobile access. I think stuff like location and gamification will also have influence on the intranet (or digital workplace…).
Search is important, but social search can compensate bad intranet search. I see tools like Yammer being used to help colleagues find internal info and apps more quickly. Just ask the question and others will point you to the location on the intranet/digital workplace.
Governance will be more important than ever. You don’t need to much governance around an intranet with 100s of static pages. You do need facilitation, community management around 100s of colleagues sharing and connecting within the organisation. Governance will focus on creating the playing field, facilitation and encouragement, less on control and enforcing.
Try, experiment, go for it. Try internal social media on the edges of the company if you’re not allowed to roll it out centrally. And try to connect internal social tools to the core business processes and goals. Show value there and managers and decision makers will love you!

Do my answers make sense? Do you agree/disagree with them?

Internet Trends 2011 and on

2011-11-14T12:00:00.000+01:00

There is one presentation I love watching every year. It's loaded with data and just sets the agenda for the coming year. It's Mary Meeker's talk at the Web 2.0 Summit. You can watch it here:

And find the slides here.

As I said, it loaded with data and insights. I'll highlight just a few. Striking is the international growth of the internet. It's definitely not the US-only in the internet. And Africa and South-America are continents to pay attention to.
Another thing is the speed of adoption of new communication technology is increasing, even in recession.
The speed of adoption of the iPhone was fast compared to the iPod, but just look at how quickly the iPad took over the market.
The next big thing according to Meeker? Everything that has to do with our ears; Sound/audio. And, of course, the continuing growth of mobile.

Dutch Web Editor’s conference #webred11

2011-10-29T12:12:00.002+02:00

The company that I work for, Entopic, recently organized the Web editor’s conference (Dutch: Congres Webredactie). It was the first conference in Holland (and the world?) for web editors. Dutch posts about the conference can be found here. The tweet stream can be found here (#webred11) and all the presentations here. I’ll share some highlights from the conference with you here.

The Future of Content
The conference started out with a talk by futurist Gerd Leonhard about the future of content. He gave an interesting talk about the past, present and future of content. He started in the broadcasting era and move to what he calls the broadband era; the time we are experiencing now. He stressed this is happening now and if we or institutions don’t get on board we/they will be disrupted.

I liked they way he pointed to the increasing influence of technology on our lives, but also stressed the extreme importance of human ingenuity.

Of course, Leonard also addressed the post pc statements and its implications for content (publishing and curation). The value of content will be in adding meaning and context (location, real-time, platform) to content, not in the publishing of it. This will also ask for a complete different business model.

Customer Journey
There were also several breakouts. I went to two of them. One was about Customer Journeys. How can you lead people through their tour along websites, email newsletters and social media in an optimal way? Interestingly the speaker said the audience should not use persona’s to define these journeys, while persona’s were promoted in another breakout.

Writing a book using social media

The other breakout was done by Erwin Blom. Hij wrote the Community Handbook (in Dutch). He told a fascinating story about how he used social media to write, promote and improve his book. He sees the process of writing the book as the product. And advises all to publish raw material. Make sure the product or service you want to deliver is alive before it’s there.

Another interesting thing he said is by sharing early you also claim the idea. I agree. This is a weird paradox of social media. Some wonder if we should be so open about our lives and ideas. An important question. But if you have an idea sharing it on social media gives you the exact time and date (permalink) on which you shared it. Comparing dates could help solve the problem who had the idea first.

Web editor’s and social media
Erwin Blom also closed the day with a keynote. He stressed the blessing that social media is for web editor’s.

Erwin studied journalism and became journalist. The internet fascinated him. He wondered how he could tell more stories over the web. How do you share more with your audience? Your audience often knows more than you can know by yourself.

Social media is great for telling (more) stories. Social media brings people together around their passion, a problem or goal they have. Blom showed the audience all kinds of ways to use social media to find interesting people and information, to interact with the world, etc. He challenged the audience to start with one of the example or just start blogging.

Some endnotes

- Social media is about passion. So if you use social media, you have to do it with passion.
- Facilitate the communication of the community. Even when it’s negative feedback. Respond to the feedback and learn from it.
- Blom was asked what new web app he liked? He pointed to Instagram. Not many in the audience had heard of it or were using it.

- And two video's from the conference. The first is the intro to the conference and the second is a summary of the day.

Question
I'm curious if you know of a comparable conference in other parts of the world?

Linking Strategies in LinkedIn

2011-10-20T15:30:00.000+02:00

How do you use LinkedIn? Who do you connect to? Do you use LinkedIn Groups? This post on the NextWeb triggered me to answer these questions publicly.

Resume
LinkedIn is an interesting platform. I've been using it for several years now. At first I basically uploaded my resume to LinkedIn. I hardly visited LinkedIn after that, except for excepting link requests.
Some time after that LinkedIn introduced Answers. I followed several topics there, but stopped after about a year. The quality of the questions was horrible and it seemed I didn't get anything back from the answers I gave.

Groups
I also joined several LinkedIn Groups. Groups is interesting and it keeps me coming back to the LinkedIn site. Right now I'm following 27 groups, mostly in my area of expertise (intranet, social media, knowledge management, enterprise 2.0, social business). Most of the groups have interesting discussions. The update in my email every day helps me keep up with what's going on in there. If I see an interesting question that I can answer, I'll jump in. And, regularly, I also tap into the knowledge of the group members. The quality of the interaction and the people's knowledge in the groups is usually great.

Linking
Of course, I get invites to connect in LinkedIn. Regularly people that I don't know personally, contact me via LinkedIn with a request to connect. (This is also encouraged by a LinkedIn Group setting allowing group members to link directly to each other. I usually uncheck this setting.) I accept invitations to connect when I know the person quite well. I've talked with him/her, preferably face-to-face. I want to be able to say something about that person, if somebody asks me about him/her. For instance, when a recruiter is looking for someone in my network and asks me about him/her, I want to be able to give a recommendation. If I can't do this, I won't connect with that person. Of course I hope I'll be able to do so in the near future. Sometimes this interaction via LinkedIn even leads to a live meeting with that person.

What's your linking strategy?
I know there are different linking strategies. What's yours? Do you link to everybody who sends you requests? If so, why? Do you also join groups? How do you follow what's happening in those groups?

Hope this will get you blogging

2011-10-19T14:38:00.000+02:00

I enjoy following Seth Godin's blog. He has as inspiring way of pushing out short(er) blogposts and getting me to think.

One blogpost about 'Talker's block' struck me recently. It struck me for two reasons. It related to the situation I'm in every now-and-then: writer's block. I'll have several draft posts, almost ready to be published, but they stay in the draft folder for too long.
The other reason is: It's part of my work to get others to blog. And to my regret I see people starting to tweet and use Facebook, quite easily. Blogging, however, is a step too far for most of them. No, blogging is not for everybody. But some people don't start to blog because they fear writer's block. Or they're insecure about their writing skills. Or they fear for the comments others will have on their musings.

Godin challenges you and me to get over it. He says:

Writer's block isn't hard to cure.
Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better.

There. Does this help? Hope so! See you soon in the blogosphere!

[Request for Input] Control and audit implications for social media

2011-10-19T13:30:00.000+02:00

In a couple of weeks I'll be giving a masterclass with prof. Eddy Vaassen about 'Control and audit implications for social media'. Wow, what a title, eh?! This masterclass is part of a large conference in Holland organized by NBA-VRC for accountants and controllers. The topic of this year's conference is Customer 3.0.

I'm working on the slides for the masterclass. And I'm curious what your expectations are when you read the title of the masterclass. What topics should be addressed? What are control and audit implications, according to you? Do control, audit and social media relate? If so, please explain.

Of course we'll share our slides as soon as they're ready. Feedback on those slides is welcome, as always.

Which Social Media do Millenials use?

2011-10-18T13:42:00.000+02:00

Giving a guest lecture is great fun, I find. I recently had the chance to interact with about 60 college students. They were in their second or third year. The topic of the lecture was social media use within company. So, Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business. My slides can be found here (in Dutch...).

I kicked off my lecture with some open questions. I'd like to share the answers to one question with you. I was curious what social tools they use themselves to get things done in their lives. With all the talk about millennials being digital natives (or aren't they), easily moving in the social space, organizing their life and work with these tools, etc I thought I'd see if this if the case in practice.
I shared what I got from the students on Google+. In sum, this is what they told me.

Of the 60 students:

40 use Twitter
Almost all use Facebook
Just over half use Hyves (Dutch social network)
1 uses a bookmarking tool
2 blog
0 have a wiki (although all have experience using wiki's)
6 use Google+
2 use Foursquare
16 are on LinkedIn

Let me reflect on this a bit.
Of course these results are not statistically valid. It's just 60 students from one college in a city in Holland telling me what they use. But I'll will poll them two more times this year. (Great idea from Chee Chin Liew!) Let's see what we learn from the trends in this class.
I didn't have time for a real discussion about the data. Of course you wonder why only 2 blog, for instance. LinkedIn is not much used either. Does this point to the fact that LinkedIn is a business network for people looking for a job or that have a job? This poll also shows Foursquare, Google+ and bookmarking are hardly used. The students using Google+ said they signed up to see what Google+ is and find out if it has added-value compared to their current toolset. Facebook is very popular and the Dutch network Hyves is clearly becoming an echo chamber for them. Several said they stopped using Hyves or just use it to be reminded of their friend's birthday.

Interesting data, don't you think? If you have any question I should ask them, please let me know!