DigiRedo at the National Marketing Day

One is in Boston, the other one stays in Utrecht, being one of the speakers at the 2nd edition of the National Marketing Day in the Netherlands. Last year this event proved to be very successful, and this year it seems that the expectations even dazzled the organizers. Thousands of marketers flock to Nieuwegein to learn about the latest and greatest on marketing and to get a glimps of the many top-notch speakers, of which DigiRedo is one.

DigiRedo is sponsoring this event, being present with a stand and a film crew. We will be making an impression and interviewing several key speakers of the event. Besides that we will be speaking ourselves. René will be talking about ‘Social Media for Internal Collaboration – On the Way to Enterprise 2.0′ on Thursday, June 26 11:45am Amsterdam time. If possible we will be streaming the presentation live via Qik (check out our channel here)

Rest assured that we will be blogging about this major event extensively. In the meantime you can follow the activities about the National Marketing Day via Twitter (#NMD09) and learn more about the program here.

Stay connected, stay informed!

Enterprise 2.0, or: How Your Boss Should Change

The working environment is changing. The Web 2.0, in all its philosophical aspects, is gaining ground in the corporate world. Transparency, authenticity and new (online) collaboration tools are finding their way into our cubicles, providing more power and knowledge to eveybody who is open for these developments. Well, if your boss agrees with it.

More and more we see young people entering the workspace, requiring the same tools as they are used to at college and university. Blogging, wikis, podcasts. Where can we find it in our secure and well-known cubicle environment?

Time to find out at the Enterprise 2.0 congress in Boston. The single largest congress in this field, dealing with all aspects related to the ‘new way of working’. So I traveled to rainy Boston (bummer!) to check out the possibilities in this very interesting field. I will post a detailed summary of the things I learned here later, once all the E2.0-dust has settled down (and I tell you, there’s a lot of dust!). For those of you wanted to stay informed about the congress, check out the following links:

Official program
Conference blog
Back Channel (Twitterfeed)

Meet Milo

In case you haven’t seen it yet, check out the next big thing in computer entertainment:

So Ray Kurzweil will be right after all?

Thx Tritonizer for the tip!

Who is using Twitter?

Last week during one of our New Media Masterclasses somebody asked me what kind of people are actually using Twitter. Although I do have a hunch, I have not seen any demographics, so I owed the person an answer.

It’s funny how the little things in life sometimes can be pretty amazing. This weekend I was reading the ‘Intermediair’, a Dutch magazine for working professionals in which I found a small article entitled: Twitterers are mainly ICT people and marketers’. Well, well…

According to the article the group using people still is a very small niche which can be identified as ‘Online Network Pioneers’. More than half of the Twitter-users is active in Information and Communication Technologies, marketing, sales, advertising or consultancy. Other job functions can hardly be found. About 75% is male, between 30 and 40 years old. Seventy-five percent has a higher education (bachelor or higher).

Still I have the feeling that Twitter is becoming more and more mainstream in the Netherlands. You see it on TV and hear it on the radio. Many celebrities have a Twitter account which they use to stay in touch with their fan base. We even have a few politicians fanatically tweeting about their thoughts. Don’t know if Twitter is here to stay, but it is certainly moving something. What about Twitter in your country?

Source: Intermediair, June 12 2009

No stealing the Cloud

Thursday morning, 6:30 am. My wife runs into our bedroom asking why all our laptops are gone. And why there are so many papers spread out in the garden. In a split second you realize that the one thing always happening to other people just happened to us: they broke into our house…

Using the ‘Eastern European method’ (according to the police) they entered the house through a small window at the front of our house. As like in a candy store these socially retarded people which one might call thieves or burglars, took away stuff which belongs to a company owned by two hard-working, tax-paying people (that’s us). You have no idea (they sure don’t) what a feeling it is when people enter your house uninvited and take away stuff for which you worked your *ss off to get it, or spend days or months creating it. I won’t go into detail about the things they took, but rest assure that it was devastating for me and my family.

After having inventarised what they took you start wondering what data you have lost, which is usually the moment perspiration kicks in. “When did I make my last back up?”. Fortunately I had a reasonable back up strategy, but not perfect. I did lose stuff which I will never be able to get back. My daughter’s first birthday on video for example.

Our digital life is exploding. Petabytes of digital memories in the form of video, photos, blogposts are created every single day. Day in and day out. Who still has a physical photo album? And all these memories are so precious to us that it should be obvious to guard it with your life. And yet it is known that only about 25% of the people make a regular back up of their digital stuff. Seventy-five out of 100 people lose their entire digital life when their hard drive crashes! And of those 25 smart people, almost all of them make only a back-up on an external drive, sitting next to their computer. Clever when your hard drive crashes, not so clever when they break into your house, of even worse, if your house burns down. So the solution? Let’s go into the Cloud.

The cloud can’t be stolen. The cloud can’t burn down, or be damaged by water. That is, if you deal with a sound cloud company. Due to the fact that a lot of my stuff was in the cloud somewhere, I could continue working reasonably soon after my disaster. So which services do I use for what?

First the most important asset on your computer: your pictures. I back-up my pictures on an external hard drive, but for the more serious data loss I have backed up all my photos using a service called Mozy. For about $60 per year you get unlimited storage on their servers. I have now uploaded a total of 110 GB (which by the way takes forever) and it is a comfortable feeling that whatever happens, my digital life is save. In case of a disaster you can download your stuff again, or they can put it on a DVD and send it to you. For privacy matters you can encrypt your data which you upload so nobody can sneak around.

For e-mail I use MobileMe (private mail) and webmail (business mail). Both accounts are forwarded to a GMail account which I use on a daily basis for mail management (apart from the client on my MacBook). With one push of a button I could retrieve most of my mails.

My bookmarks and addresses, also pretty important, are synced with several Macs using MobileMe. Some people ask me what the benefit of MobileMe is. Well, only the fact that within 5 minutes I could retrieve all my addresses, phone numbers and bookmarks is definitely worth the $99 per year.

White papers, interesting presentations I find online and all other stuff which makes me a true ‘knowledge worker’ was put into Evernote. With this truly awesome program you can manage all your digital knowledge assets. They also have an iPhone application meaning that you can gather ideas on the road and that access to your digital knowledge is just one touch away. Fortunately for me Evernote puts my data also in the cloud (hence the iPhone app wouldn’t work). I just had to install the client on my new MacBook and 10 minutes later it had downloaded all my stuff and put it in Evernote.

All my documents which I have created throughout the years are stored on my iDisk (through MobileMe). Each day a backup program backs up these important files. I just had to download the last version and I was good to go.

For our project management and financial stuff (invoicing, estimates) we use CashBoard. This service is only available online, handy if you want to work with several people on a project. There was no glitch whatsoever in our billing. Pretty important I would say.

Wasn’t there anything I lost? Sure there was. For example, I lost all my passwords which I kept in my computer using a program called 1Password. Also all my to do items and my ‘Getting Things Done’ lists are gone. The application I use for this, Things, doesn’t have an online version. And because these nifty programs put their database somewhere hidden in your hard drive folder structure I forgot to back them up.

So what’s the total annual price to maintain your sanity after theft:

Mozy: $60
MobileMe: $99
GMail: Free
Evernote: Free
CashBoard: $75

Total: $234

Still anything to learn here? Sure there is. Firstly I will scrutenize my entire backup management once again. There is some stuff which you just can not put in the cloud. The original video files of our projects for example. Using HD a project can easily be around 50 to 80 GB. Uploading this to Mozy will take weeks, if not longer. We will purchase a Drobo which we will use to back up these files. Rest assure that the Drobo will be anchored and secured with a bog strong cable in the wall.

Secondly I will get me a Time Capsule. Next time this happens I just want to plug the Time Capsule in my new MacBook and continue working where I left off one hour ago.

And I will get new locks, an alarm system and a Terminator-like Security Guard…

How to create a secure podcast channel for internal podcasting

One of the things which are pretty crucial when you do internal podcasting and deal with sensitive information is the security level you implement in order to protect the sensitive information from unwanted eyes. In the early days when we implemented one of our first podcast series for a pharma company we were shocked to realize that all podcasts showed up in regular podcatch sites such as Odeo. Especially embarassing when Corporate Communications found out about it. Not good.

We learned a lot since. However, most knowledge we learned from trial and error. Surprisingly not a lot can be found on the internet about the process involved. Sure, there are many podcast hosting sites where you can upload your podcast, create a feed and submit it to iTunes. But when you do internal podcasting that is exactly what you do not want to do. Remember, when you use internal podcasting for business purposes two things are important:

1) You do not want your podcast to be found by the Googles in this world
2) You want to password protect your content

In addition, podcasters should in general consider the following as well:

3) You want to be flexible in your decision which hosting service you use
4) You do not want your feed to change since that will result in losing listeners

Regular podcast hosting services are aimed at obtaining an audience as large as possible, and create buzz wherever possible. Internal podcasting wants to stay below the radar, only accessable to selected members.

A few hosting companies have specialized themselves in this area. But not a lot. We have been using Podkive from Genetic Hosting for a while which provides easy creation of the feed through a simple web interface. However, lately they have been having some problems with their uptime, so I decided it was time to investigate other possibilities.

After half a day I think I have figured it out. It does require some logic thinking and I have to admit, it’s not for the technofobes. But it works. Until somebody comes up with an easy point and click system this is what we’ll be using. Let’s have a look.

The ten steps of creating a secure podcast channel:

1. Take an account with a reliable hosting service which offers password protected directories. I’m not providing any ‘reliable hosting service-lists’ since you can find these plenty on the internet. Make sure that you have sufficient storage and bandwidth.
2. In your home directory, create two folders: one for the files (video/audio) and one for the XML file.
3. Password protect the folder with the files. Do not password protect the folder with the XML file.
4. Upload your content via FTP to your files directory.
5. Fire up your feed creation software. I use Feeder for that (Mac only, I’m sure Windows has similar programs too). Create your feed. This may require some setting and filling in the right paths where to find the content.
6. Upload your XML feed via the software to the unprotected folder in your host directory.
7. Check if your feed works. Copy and paste the feed address in your browser. If all went OK you should get a pop-up window asking for your username/password when you want to access the content.
8. Now it’s time to make sure you will have the same feed till the end of days. Go to Feedburner.com and burn your just created feed into a Feedburner feed.
9. Take this feedburner feed (starting with feeds2.feedburner.com/[feedname] and check if it works in your browser. Again you should see a pop-up window asking for your username/password. Fill in your credentials. You should be able to see your content
10. Copy and paste the Feedburner feed into iTunes (Menu Advanced/Subscribe to podcast…). Hit OK. Fill in your username/password and off you go (remember to check ‘Remember Password’)

Because the folder with your content is password protected, Google spiders can not enter and hence can not find your data. If somebody finds the original path (which is difficult since it goes through Feedburner) they still can’t access your files without udername/password. If you want to change hosting services you just link a new feed to your Feedburner feed. End users won’t see the difference.

We think this is a nifty way of creating a secured channel. Is it 100% secure? Most probably not. Die-hard hackers will be able to hack into everything. And remember: the chain is as strong as the weakest link. Change username/password regularly, especially when people leave the company. And of course the morst important tip of the day: Don’t use sensitive information in your podcasts. We use no absolute figures when we talk about sales developments, only percentages. Treat this digital communication channel as any other. Cautiously.

Our article in Pharma Marketing News

 

 

 

 

 

John Mack is (aka pharmaguy on Twitter) is a ‘Pharma Pundit & Publisher of Pharma Marketing News’, according to his Twitter Bio. He runs a successful blog named ‘Pharma Marketing Blog‘ and a podcast with the same name on BlogTalk Radio. In addition to that he’s publisher and executive editor of the monthly newsletter ‘Pharma Marketing News’, distributed to the pharma world.

Pharma Marketing News is an independent, free monthly electronic newsletter focused on issues of importance to pharmaceutical marketing executives. It is a service of the Pharma Marketing Network, which brings together pharmaceutical marketing professionals from manufacturers, communications companies, and marketing service providers for wide ranging discussions and education on a multitude of current topics.

After reading our blogpost on the EXL Digital Pharma congress John contacted me to ask whether he could publish this post in his monthy newsletter.

Of course you can John, of course…

Click here to download the article from the April issue of Pharma Marketing News.

Final video of Digital Pharma: The Impression

We don’t seem to get enough of that video thingie during the Digital Pharma Congress in Barcelona. This time it’s the impression of the congress itself. Check it out…

 

Third part of my presentation

Finally got some time to edit the final part of my presentation at the Digital Pharma congress in Barcelona: “Best Practices Using Internal Social Media”. Check it out here:

 

First two videos of my presentation at Digital Pharma

Found myself some time to make my ‘SteveNote’ way of my presentation given at Digital Pharma in Barcelona last month. For a detailed report on the event, see here.

I have split my presentation (Best Practices for the Use of Web 2.0 and Social Media Tools for Internal Collaboration) in three parts:

Part 1: The Need for Innovation in Pharma
Part 2: Social Media and Internal Collaboration
Part 3: Best Practices Using Web 2.0 and Internal Collaboration

In this blogpost the first two episodes (it was late, so the third one coming up asap).