Joseph Pine, Joseph Jaffe, Tim O’Reilly, David Meerman Scott, Jim Sterne, Nalden, Boris Veldhuizen van Zanten, Jim Stolze … and me (and a bunch of others). I was really honored to be featured in the SparkCast, Energize‘s Klaas Weima‘s semi-monthly celebration of bright ideas.

Klaas is probably the best podcast host you could wish for. Well-prepared, inquisitive and above all: beyond excited. He interviewed me on social media, engagement, KPIs and trends for 2012.

Or, as SparkCast puts it:

Polle de Maagt, independent digital strategist, is on a mission. He believes companies should focus more on acts and less about ads. The last decade we have seen radical changes in advertising and branding. Companies have been too busy in focusing on their product and services. As a result, most of them lost connection with their customers. Polle shares his lessons learned at the award-winning agencies Boondoggle and Insites Consulting. In this podcast we talk about the core drivers for marketing change, how companies can earn instead of buy attention and the main trends for 2012.

More than enough reasons to listen to it. Another one: my ridiculous thick Dutch accent. Well, have fun.

Download the Sparkcast as an .mp3 (9MB)

One of the big fronteers for the coming years: the future of health and the quantified self. Over the last couple of months I spent a lot of time working on nudge mechanisms, small interventions that change consumer behavior for the better.

So, when the Utrecht Medical Centre (UMC Utrecht) asked me to do a short presentation on quantified self and nudge mechanisms in health. I couldn’t resist. Would love to hear your feedback.

Yeah, best wishes … but what about acts? How can you really turn Christmas into a merry one? Most people wish they hadn’t postponed their Christmas shopping till the last saturday afternoon. Most people wish they they had a radar to avoid the huge shopping crowds. And now there’s a (web)app for that.

Amsterdam advertising agency THEY turned to some technology to easy the pain. Enter the Avoid the Shopping Crowds (mobile) site which detects crowds based on geo-tweets and Foursquare checkins … and helps you to avoid them. A true merry Christmas.

I really like the concept. And there are rumors THEY will launch several other apps next year based on the same idea (get social media geo info to help people dodge crowds). Question remains to what extent the social media data is a valid way to detect crowds. Especially with a low volume of tweets/checkins, it’s hard to tell whether a location is busy. Furthermore, checkin/tweet behavior is biased (sharing bias) and tends to favor more techy people.

So, please be cautious before depending to much on the app …

Page not available. But Justin is. There’s an incredible power in turning dissatisfiers (out-of-office replies, customer service, 404 pages) into satisfiers. Interactions that are actually worth sharing instead of worth complaining about. Mint’s 404 page is a great example.

Involver is a company that provides off-the-shelf apps for facebook and other social platforms. They believe strongly in tapping into social streams and implementing social sharing. And the proof is in their in their 404 page. Even that has a social node.

Don’t tell people what to do, use small interventions to help them make the right decisions. It sounds a bit like Kim-Jong-Il-style manipulation, but it’s the basic concept behind nudge (and it’s token gamification). And I believe it’s the way to go for (semi-)government. More than communication campaigns. More than using social media for the sake of social media. How can government really change people’s behavior for the better.

I’ve been spending a lot of time working on nudge projects lately (and that’s why I love Hivos’ recent experiments). It’s about managing expectations, acts not ads and failing and creating momentum.

So, when I was asked to do a presentation for Brussels Regional Informatics Center Conférence Annuelle/Jaarlijkse Conferentie 2011, it was a pretty easy choice to do a plea beyond social media alone. A plea for feeks, fails … and nudge.

I wrote about the Hivos piece-of-tape-to-save-energy-experiment earlier. The experiment is part of a broader effort by Hivos to enrich society with small ideas that help to save energy, the Seduction project.

The basic idea is simple: ask someone to do something and he/she won’t do it. Leverage the power of nudges, small ideas that seduce people to change their climate behavior for the better and you might actually succeed. Some call it choice architecture, behavioral economics or even Kim-Jong-Il-style manipulation, I just think it’s smart. And awesome.

The campaign consists of several initiatives; the experiment with the piece of tape, the light gun and most recently, the Small Climate Summit.

The Small Climate Summit in Amsterdam was a mini-equivalent of the official Climate Summit (COP17) in Durban and housed only forty attendees. Purpose? To reach a crowdsourced climate agreement. The treaty consisting 10 tweets with small solutions to the energy challenge was instantly shared with the world via twitter. Followers watched a livestream on Facebook and tweeted suggestions of which the best were added to the treaty.

The campaign takes Hivos beyond being a simple non profit organisation. Like Foursquare is all about making the real world easier to use, and Dogma is all for dogs, Hivos is now all about small interventions that make us save energy. And that, takes the ‘campaign’ beyond a ‘campaign’. It is a reason to communicate with consumers on a daily basis. A reason for people to join in on the cause and help Hivos to make the world a tiny bit more energy-consuming. And it is ‘campaignable’, which means that throughout the year, there are plenty of opportunities to turn these experiment into communication campaigns with high impact and reach.

Smart.

I really can’t wait to see the next experiment.

Note: nope, I don’t have shares in Boondoggle nor Hivos. And Tom de Bruyne or Gaston Serpenti didn’t pay me either. I just think this is the way to go for brands and agencies.

Capture anything. Access anywhere. Find things fast. That is Evernote, a tool to remember everything. But on top of that, Evernote is rapidly building extra services on top of it’s basic foundation, making it more than a tool to just “remember everything”. Evernote as a platform.

Yesterday, Evernote launched three new services, Evernote Food (Preserve your food memories), Evernote Clearly (Distraction-free reading) and Evernote Hello (Remember people). And several months ago, Evernote already launched Evernote Peek (Study smarter). All building upon the Evernote platform, but adding extra (and sometimes at first sight a-typical) functionalities. Smart, intuitive and beyond-awesome search. A very solid base.

So, what’s happening here?

Evolution of Evernote as a platform

Evernote started out as a simple tool: collect snippets of information in a web tool and a desktop app. And it’s still stellar there. Great interface, brillant search, seamless sync.

Next step was adding different devices and the so-called Evernote trunk, a collection of all third-party apps and add-ons that work with Evernote.

And now, adding new features that build upon this eco-system. Features that are beyond simple add-ons and actually change the face and function of Evernote, while building upon the solid Evernote infrastructure.

Evernote Food

Turns Evernote in a food archive and discovery tool.

• Remember the meal Snap photos of dishes, people you’re with and the venue, then add captions and thoughts as you go.
• Recall them all Browse and find all your past experiences in Evernote Food and inside Evernote.
• Track your food adventures Whether cooking at home or traveling to faraway lands, all your food memories are in one place.

Evernote Hello

Turns Evernote in a smart CRM system, creating a rich, browsable history of individuals, encounters and shared experiences. Which – instantly and for some uses – makes them a competitor of services like Cardcloud and Gist.

• Remember people Whenever you meet someone new, hand them your phone and they can quickly make a profile.
• Build a rich history A smart interface to create a history of every encounter that you’ve had with individuals and everyone you’ve met together.
• Get relevant information Hello brings in related information from your calendar, Evernote account and more.

So, what if we could take this idea beyond startups?
What would a bank as a platform do?
An airline as a platform?
Car as a platform?

Recently, I stumbled upon a recent feature of document sharing platform Scribd: pay in content. As an alternative to pay for access on a daily, monthly or yearly basis, visitors are asked to pay in content, by uploading a document. An interesting alternative for both Scribd (increasing their content volume) and consumers (no financial compensation).

New? No. Bulletin boards have long had similar models where people were asked to upload content in exchange for the access to download content. But it’s an interesting development that more and more companies start to look for alternative payment methods, whether it is in content exchange, reputation, micro-payments or conversations.

Another smart feature is leveraging the default option: the monthly subscription plan is highlighted and is the default option for consumers, leading to more conversion and thus making in the most popular option.

Other great examples of companies that let you pay in content? Please let me know.

Other alternative: rewarding conversations

Consumers connect their twitter and/or Facebook account to the Incubate festival website and instantly start earning credits for sharing content (which they can redeem for items in the Incubate store).

Hello