Blogworld 2009: Human Business and a Guinness World Record

Social Media has definitely grown out of its infancy. Although, according to all the geeks that attended the first integrated edition of Blogworld and New Media Expo in Las Vegas. More than 2500 bloggers, podcasters, consultants and other new media mavericks visited Sin City for 3 days to talk about and share experiences on Social Media. Close to 300 speakers gave dozens presentations and panel discussions on a large variety of subjects. Without going into detail of all of them, I will give you the highlights of the conference.

Twitter rawks

If there was one subject that was mentioned in almost every discussion then it was Twitter. With great passion Twitt-lebrities like Laura Fitton (@Pistachio), Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) and Aaron Strout (@aaronstrout) shared the power of Twitter. “The power of unisolating people”, according to Laura. “And it’s not about the writer, it’s not about the number of followers you have but it is about the message you share. People are made to socialize, also in business. For that it is important to surround yourself with inspiring people. Twitter is a great tool for that.”

Guiness World Record

Thanks to Twitter a Guinness World Record was set during Blogworld. The highest number of social network mentions within 24 hours. And last Monday the record was confirmed by Guinness World Record: a total of 209,771 social network mentions of #beatcancer in one day via Twitter, Facebook and blog posts. As a result eBay/Paypal and MillerCoors offered a donation of $70.000 to four non-profit cancer organizations (Spirit Jump, Bright Pink, Alex’s Lemonade, and Stand UP to Cancer). As the campaign continues, you can still donate and help promote this initiative via Beatcancereverywhere.com.

Shoe4Africa
More good causes-support from eBay/Paypal. Their booth was completely dedicated to this theme. One of the good causes was Shoe4Africa, a non-profit organization aiming at ‘empowerment through sports and education, creating unique health initiatives, and promoting AIDS awareness.’ Cornerstone project is the development of a children’s hospital in Kenya, which will be the first public hospital in Kenya and the largest children’s hospital in Africa. The project is supported by Anthony Edwards, who sat in the keynote Celebrity panel. Although not yet very active in Social Media, Edwards understands the difference he can make as a celebrity using Social Media to spread the word around this project. So at Blogworld, he lost his Twitterginity and made his first tweet. Follow him on @anthonyedwards4. We also had a short interview with him which will be published shortly.

Dutch presence
And of course we ran into Vincent Everts, a webexpert and trend-watcher. Vincent presence at Blogworld was to promote yubby.com, a video aggregator the collect videos from over 30 popular video sources. Previously known as Dik.nl, but you can imagine, not a name that would work well in the US (although, flickr didn’t change its name for Holland…) And of course, Vincent not only did his upmost for yubby, he also worked on his own brand. Being very present at various sessions and as member in one of the panels, the success of his quest was confirmed to be successful during the closing keynote. When one-time talk-show host Guy Kawasaki asked the audience who has not heard of Jenny the Blogess, Vincent raised his hand as one of the few. Guy looked at him and said ‘oh, that’s that guy in the white suit’. An interview with Vincent will be launched shortly.

Chris Brogan

If there is one Social Media guru that is reaching superstar status without losing it, it’s Chris Brogan. I think he is the most mentioned, quoted, RTweeted and appreciated speaker of Blogworld 2009. And true, Chris is a very sympathetic and respectable person, but moreover, he is a visionary and true knowledge expert in the field. His keynote on day one was for me the most inspiring of all sessions. ‘Stop tapping each other on the back, but get out there and start working. There is so much to do out there’. And he is right. Social Media has grown out of its infancy. As much as we liked the pioneering atmosphere at New media Expo 2007, those days seem to be over. Social Media is becoming true business. Moreover, we shouldn’t call it Social Media anymore. It’s Human Business.

For more details go to Chris’ blogpost on his keynote. Here you can find the entire keynote (and all other keynotes).

Trend for 2010
On the exhibition floor, there were several companies that demonstrated applications based on aggregation of content. We already mentioned yubby.com as a video aggregation site, but aggregation goes beyond video. Zemanta is an application that helps you look for content related to the blogpost you are writing. While you’re writing, it ‘looks over your shoulder [..] and gives you tips and advice’. It analyzes your content, suggests keywords and related articles. With Zemanta, your blog becomes more visible and generates more traffic.
Regator goes even further in aggregation. There is an enormous amount of content available within the blogosphere. Regator ‘gathers the world’s best blog posts and organizes them in a way that’ makes it easy to find the things you need’. This selection is not purely done through some fancy algorithm, but through a team of editors. Yes, real people that search the web for valuable content. In fact, they decide for you what’s valuable or not. Regator uses criteria like regular updates, topical, well written, originality and whether or not your blog is ‘awesome’ based on which you can be added to the selection. The last criterium is rather vague and subjective, but that’s admitted by Regator.

Content is still king in new media. But finding the right content becomes like a monk’s job. For that we need aggregation, and we predict aggregation becomes the trend for 2010.

Audio Bummer
Was it all highs in Vegas? No, there was definitely a bummer. As there were more than 5-6 simultaneous tracks, you had to make up your mind what session to attend. Obviously, that was challenging as interesting presentations were scheduled at the same time. At New Media Expo in the past all participants were given the opportunity to download the audiotracks of all presentations. For free (or better, at no additional fee). Blogworld changed that policy: audiotracks are now available for $15 per session. Not funny. I can’t split myself up in 6, but feel that I have paid close to 1200 bucks to make all these sessions possible. Therefore I plead that all participants should have access to all recorded sessions (at least audio). And I was not the only one complaining about that. Organizer Rick Calvert should make up his mind or consult Tim and Emile Bourquin, former organizers of New Media Expo.

Another disappointment was that there was not much on the use of New Media for internal communication, in our view the way to learn what New Media is, to gain experience and in addition, to improve your internal communication, which in many organizations is underdeveloped. Truly win-win. A separate track should have been developed for this topic. Hopefully the organization considers this for the next edition.
Further, there was a strong focus on blogging, too strong to my liking. New Media is more than just blogging and Twitter. The focus overall was too much on the technology. There was hardly any attention for the development of a New and Social Media strategy. If we really want to go out there and help companies adapt New and Social Media, we need to understand that this is key to success. From that perspective I didn’t really hear anything new in these three days.

Conclusion
Conclusion for Blogworld and New Media Expo 2009: a lot on technology (and then mostly blogging) and too little on strategy. A lot of panels, some good and some which had a tendency towards too much ‘incrowd’. Some very inspiring speakers, a good atmosphere and at night awesome parties. Overall, a more than average event. Rick Calvert only has to solve this audio issue and I will certainly consider attending Blogworld and New Media Expo 2010.

Hello, it’s US again!

Yep, it’s that time of the year again. The time you realize you already worked your butt off during the first half of the year but that you have to work even harder the second half of the year. And that you won’t survive without a mental break if you don’t refill on time. Don’t get us wrong, we love our jobs and we regret everyday we didn’t start DigiRedo earlier. But everybody needs a break, so now and then.

So what do we like when we take a break? Relax, enjoy different cultures, amaze ourselves, learn new things but most of all, have fun. We at DigiRedo think we have found our perfect break. Like last year, and the year before, the New Media Expo (NME) is around the corner. And we are ready to go! This year however, the NME is bigger than ever. In 2008 Tim Bourquin, founder of the NME, decided to merge ‘his’ conference with the BlogWorld Expo, resulting in the -rather creatively entitled- BlogWorld and New Media Expo, the singlelargest congress about all things new media on this planet, and no doubt on any galaxy far, far away. In three days, 6 simultaneous tracks and more than 150 speakers this congress will for sure blow our minds. And the fact that it is in Las Vegas is of course the icing on the cake.

So in October we’re off to the US. But going to a congress alone can not be considered ‘relaxed’. Even not for NewMedia Nerds as ourselves. That’s why we decided to extend our trip to California a few days and head over to San Francisco as well. We always wanted to go to this supposedly laid-back city, and while we’re there visit the cradle of modern computer-technology: Silicon Valley. Visit the Mothership of Apple in Cupertino is every AppleFreak’s wet dream and obliterates any other attempt to impress other AppleFreaks. Like going to the Apple Store in Japan for example.

And while we are in the US, why not attend the next congress? Or even present on that congress? Indeed, coincidentally the US version of EXL’s Digital Pharma is just two days after the BlogWorld & NME. We have been invited to give a new preso on Enterprise 2.0 in pharma, and we will be sponsoring the event with video coverage. So after the 39 degrees Celcius (102 F) environment of the Nevada dessert we’ll fly back to the East coast to participate in the 3rd Annual Digital Pharma Congress in New Jersey. My talk will be an extension of my Barcelona preso, of course with new information.

But the good thing is that EXL has decided to put the ‘S’ of Social in this congress and wants a more ‘unconference’ approach. Spearheaded by our friend Shwen Gwee who will be chairing the conference, EXL hope to achieve more participation, engagement and dialogue. It’s up to the presenters and moderators to achieve that.

It’s ging to be an exciting trip. Leaving on October 8 to New York, stay one day in the Big Apple. Fly to SanFran on October 10 for our Silicon Valley trip, and arrive in Las Vegas on October 14 for the BlogWorld and NME Expo. Four days later (October 18) up in the air again to New Jersey and participate in the Digital Pharma congress. Finally returning to base on October 22.

Obviously we will be providing plenty of blogposts and video coverage of our trip, like you’re used to from us.

My two cents on Google Wave

We all face the same challenge: too much communication. E-mail overflow, status updates on Facebook, Tweets, blogs, RSS. All scattered around on the internet. We might have embraced these new communication technologies a bit too much. That it what Google might be thinking when they started the development of Wave almost two years ago.

Wave is supposed to solve the ever increasing tsunami of data. Being active in the introduction of an internal social network I whole-hearted agree with these imputations. One of the main topics of discussion there is the fact that people do not want to have more tools to communicate, they want less. So obviously I was eager to find out what Google Wave has to offer. And let’s face it, e-mail is soooo 1995…

First let’s have a look at what Google Wave actually is. I couldn’t find ‘Google Wave in Plain English’, so I’ll give it a try myself (alternatively you can watch the entire keynote -1 hours, 27 minutes, see below- looking at two dreadfully bad presenters in which they explain the entire thing. Recommended for New Media Specialists or if you want to play guru at parties).

In the basis Google Wave is a centralization of all forms of communication. Because of this centralization you can do cool stuff, as we will see later. When compared to ‘traditional’ e-mail (see picture 1) which is basically a copy of the snail mail concept, Google Wave connects everybody on one server (see picture 2).

Picture 1 - The traditional way e-mail works (courtesy of Google)

Picture 2 - The Google Wave way (courtesy of Google)

What is Google Wave?

The information Google is providing is not too much, mainly because Google Wave is still in development. The keynote presentation (yes, I did watch it) reveals the following features:

A Wave can be compared to a sort of e-mail message on steroids. Looking at the interfce of Wave, you see a navigation on the upper left side (with inbox, archive, etc), Contact list on the lower left side, A pane in the middle with your ‘Waves’ and on the right side the selected Wave.

Plain vanilla e-mail is done by creating a new Wave, dragging your contact in the wave and start typing. When the recipient receives the Wave it can reply. Nothing new here. But the cool thing is that one can reply on paragraphs within the mail and start a conversation based on this specific paragraph. So you get a conversation within a conversation. All visually stunning and easy to see. But now the cool part comes: whenever the sender is typing her message, the recipient, if online and looking at the same Wave, can actually see the sender typing. Sort if instant messaging, but without the message ‘xxx is typing….‘. Of course, if you want to give your love message a bit more thought you can switch this off and use the traditional ’send’ button.

Dragging pics into your Wave is as easy as drag and drop. Also here the recipient sees the pictures arriving the moment the sender drags them into the Wave. Impressive stuff, also if you realize that all is done within the browser. No additional software is required.

If you want to name the pictures, you can of course do so. And again, whenever you add text to a picture, the other person can watch it ‘live’. But Google has built in an even neater trick. The recipient can start adding text too, and then the sender sees it automatically. In this way you can really work collaboratively on a document (as opposed to the dreadful way Microsoft has implemented this in Word).

Sometimes e-mail threads can become pretty long. Ever received an e-mail of twenty pages, where you have to scroll all the way down to start reading? With Wave, where people can start a conversation within a Wave, things don’t get any clearer. Fortunately Google has thought of that too. There’s a playback button on each Wave, and a timeline. Just press the ‘Play’ button or drag the timeline and see the Wave being build up from scratch. See who replied on who, and when. Handy stuff.

A Wave can be embedded in a blog, wiki or any other website. So when you embed your Wave, it’s there to see for the world. Basically you can take your conversation public, viral. Whenever people react to your Wave on the embedded website it is shown on the website itself, but also in your original Wave. Same goes for Twitter. A nice integration with our all time favorite microblogging platform makes it convenient to have your tweets together with your e-mails…eeehh… Waves. Just imagine what this could do for enterprises, building up a massive knowledge database automatically.

Another nifty feature is autocorrection based on Google’s language database (should be pretty big by now) and, guaranteed WOW effect, autotranslation. Somebody is typing in French and it is automatically -on the fly- translated in English. Google Wave, where were you when I was on High School? Using these features involves including a ‘Robot’ in your Wave. Just like including people in your Wave you can add these Robots (little pieces of software) which enhances your Wave. A bit scary may be for novel users but -depending of the Robot’s feautures- proving very helpful eventually.

Wave is open source, so all can start making applications. Next to that companies can install Wave software independently from Google so that communication never has to go through Google servers and stays within the group you decide to share. Clever, Google, clever.

There is much, much more to tell about Wave, but I suggest you grab some popcorn and a bottle of beer and start watching the presentation:

So, will Google Wave have a future?

From a collaboration point of view I certainly saw some very nice features. Collaboration within a Wave, dragging just another person to the Wave if you want to get involvement, conversations within a Wave, adding features with Robots, taking the conversation outside the Wave. All features which will bring a rich user experience and endless possibilities. But the main challenge will -in my opinion- be twofold:

1. User adoption
2. Lock-in by Google

1. User adoption
Google Wave has a strong competitor. A competitor which is so adopted within society, from a cultural as well as a technological point of view: e-mail. And why is e-mail so strong? Simply because we all have it, we all know how to use it (which is obvious when I look at the number of e-mails in my inbox) and because the technology is not owned by anybody. So the success of Wave -any new technology for that matter- depends on the adoption and thus on the number of people using it. If nobody has Wave, with whom will I dance the Wave? Google of course realizes this, hence the decision to make it open source. They want as many people as possible to try, build and embrace it. Hoping for a tipping point.

But will my mother use it? Will she see the benefits of online collaboration? Will she take effort to go through the rather steep learning curve? I just don’t know. For the average Digital Native this won’t be any issue. But mind you, there are still a lot of Digital Immigrants out there, and they feel perfectly okay using e-mail. Even so, it is not too long ago that they mastered e-mail and I’m not sure whether they want to go through that again.

And what about corporations? More efficient communication, building up knowledge collectively, online collaboration. Which CEO doesn’t want that? But what a minute… this is technology from Google, isn’t it?

2. Lock-in by Google
In a recent Wired article (August 2009) it is explained why Google is set on a collision course with the US antitrust division. Being seen as the ‘new Microsoft’, the recently appointed head of Justice Department’s antitrust division Christine Varney is sure to investigate the accusations Google has received from various parties. According to Varney “[Microsoft] is not the problem. I think we are going to continually see a problem, potentially with Google”.

Whether these accusations are all true or not, nobody can deny that Google has gotten some power over the years. And in general society doesn’t like such powerhouses. I can imagine that also companies are reluctant to use technology which on paper might be open source, but you just never know.

In conclusion I think Google Wave could potentially be very big. It certainly has all the ingredients to become the next iteration of online conversations. I’m not so sure about adoption, which is the main critical success factor. I will certainly give it a try when it becomes available later this year, and I advise you do the same. If it was only for playing the early-adopter guru amongst your friends.

Additional reading:

First Impressions of Google Wavers, by Dion Hinchcliffe

What works: The Wave Way vs. the Web Way by Anil Dash

Introduction of the Community

Tell me,

and I will forget

Show me,
and I might remember

Involve me,
and I will understand

If you think this is a tagline of a new social media initiative, you’re right. If you think this is a quote of Confusius who lived 479 BC you’re right too. The man certainly had a clear vision about the way companies would work in the 21st century. And with this vision the launch of our Social Innovation Platform started.

You got to do it right from the start. Or at least do your very best. So launching an internal community -especially after weeks, even months of hard work- is a milestone you want people to remember. Reason for us to put some serious effort in this event.

If you think about communities and forget the 2009 meaning of the word, the first things that pops in your mind is the sixties: hippies, make love not war, flower-power, ban the bomb, all happy together-kind of stuff. So there was our theme. For the more serious stuff we invited two top speakers (Wassili Bertoen, Director Deloitte Innovation and Marco Derksen Founder of Marketingfacts.nl) to talk about communities in general, community management and innovation through communities. For many people an eye-opener.

Then we presented the platform, only seen before by a few happy PowerUsers, in all its glory. Our Idea Platform, Podcast, Blog, Wiki, RSS reader and Polling feature. Enterprise 2.0 in reality. To put things into practice we arranged several laptops for people to test and start filling the platform.

People were impressed and dove into it enthusiastically. To be frank, I didn’t expect anything else. And that has nothing to do with the way the platform was built (well, a bit) but mainly because this is an enthusiastic group of people. The official BarbeQumunity might have helped as well.

The proof is in the pudding, so reality will kick-in soon. Will people actually start using it when back in the office? What kind of issues will we face with the (cloud) software? Will and can these be solved?

Questions, questions… But let’s first enjoy the moment. For a moment.

Explaining the Platform

Live Tweeting!

Where would we be without our camera?

Does your company have a Facebook, blog or wiki?

The National Marketing Day in the Netherlands proved once again that marketing without the term ’social’ is to no use. Well, talking about it actually. As hungry hyenas the Dutch marketers swallowed all with the name extension ‘2.0′. And the dutch marketers are not the only ones. We see this happening all over the world. Whether that is a good of bad thing is part of another, much broader discussion. Fact remains that companies now suddenly see that having conversations with their customers, preferably authentic and transparent, could prove extremely important. And that’s always a good thing.

But what about those employees of these ‘2.0-savvy’ companies? Or even those ‘1.0′ companies, still figuring out these new trends? To which extend has 2.0 communication penetrated within organizations? Let’s be honest. If 2.0 means that people create stuff in an open, constructive and transparent way it shouldn’t be difficult to imagine that companies jump into this like they did into Web 2.0. Which manager doesn’t want to have employees who perform much more in less time and come up with real customer-focussed products and services? And have fun along the way, too? At last, Cubicle Utopia!

Unfortunately, things won’t change overnight. But changes are imminent, that’s for sure. The rise of Generation Y/Millenials/Generation Facebook/Digital Natives (basically all the same) within the walls of corporations determines for a great deal the way we are communicating (or are going to communicate) between colleagues and higher management.This is the generation that doesn’t know that you could ‘dial’ on a phone and that music was distributed on a kind of plastic called ‘vinyl’. MP3, computer, internet, 24/7 availability and Facebook have found a place in their vocabulary. This will be the generation pulling the strings soon. And may be soon is sooner than you think. In the Netherlands 800,000 babyboomers will have to be replaced by only 450,000 GenY-ers. And in the US half of the workforce is marked GenY at the end of 2010.

What does this all mean for communication and collaboration? Time to find out on the fourth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, USA.

Enterprise 2.0

The number of participants going to the Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) Conference is growing steadily. No surprise, because in six tracks the organization promises all kind of inspiring sessions. How about ‘Implementing Enterprise 2.0: Exploring the Tools and Techniques of Emergent Change’, or ‘How to Build Collaborative Software That People Will Actually Use’? And let’s not forget ‘The Evening in the Cloud’. With these kind of titles I at leas was intruiged. Started three years ago with only 750 participants, now the world’s biggest event on Enterprise 2.0 with this year more than 1,500 participant of various nationalities (though no Duchies, to our knowledge).

Dion Hinchcliffe started the program on Monday morning with a three hour session about the current status of E2.0. Dion should know, since he is blogger on the popular ZDNet, has his own Enterprise 2.0 show, is President and CTO of his own consultancy Hinchcliffe & Company and in his spare time set up Web 2.0 University. A busy bee, to say the least. Passionately Dion explains that social media tools such as blogs and wikis are more or less accepted by the mass and that in some way many organizations are already experimenting. Mainly because for many people the border between work and private life is diminishing. Employees work from home and ‘Facebook’ at work. “But”, as he explains, “we are at the beginning of the curve. Plenty of opportunity to improve.” And to what should we pay attention, according to Dion? “Community Management, social media guidelines for employees, change management, increasing acceptance and measuring results are focal areas which every company starting with E2.0 should take very seriously.”

Results don’t lie. A sound E2.0 program may gain a better distribution and usage of knowledge, increased productivity (in some cases even more than 20%), transparent business processes and improved innovation. The advantages of E.0 are plenty, and Forrester Research estimates that this market will have a value of $4.3 billion in 2012. “Most probably this will be even more”, said an optimistic Hichcliffe.

But aside these halleluja-stories of course also challenges lie ahead. Plenty of challenges. Many of these challenges were discussed in most presentations and can be, in my opinion, broken down into the following subjects:

Safety
Company data not on the company servers, but outside the firwall. Very scary for most companies. Put many servers together and call it ‘The Cloud’. Cloud Computing is hot, sufficiently hot to dedicate an entire evening to this subject. In a panel discussion between users of cloud solutions and vendors (such as Google, IBM and EMC) it became obviously clear that there are many advantages (among other things scalibility, flexibility and lower costs) but that a healthy distrust remains. “I want to know exactly where your servers are located. Not somewhere in a country with a doubtful regime”, said a user to Rajen Seth, the inventor and developer of Google Apps.

Acceptation by policy makers
Making policy can be interpreted in many ways. For E2.0 roughly four groups play a significant role: Human Resources, Corporate Communications, Higher Management and IT. And not all are equally convinced about the advantages of E2.0.

A nice example from the audience: “My company loves video. We even have our own Youtube channel to inform our customers. However, when I type ‘www.youtube.com’ in my browser the site is blocked by IT. And thus I have to watch these company videos on my own computer at home. Still many companies do not understand that the majority of the employees can be trusted and can use tools like Youtube and Facebook in an honest way, perfectly in line with corporate guidelines. A nice lecture about this from Metthew Fraser, co-author of the book ‘Throwing Sheep In The Boardroom: How Social Networking Will Transform Your Life, Work and World’.

“Human Resources prefers to talk to customers instead of with customers”. said a frustrated Fraser. And this is exactly what I see around me all the time. Don’t expect any help from Corporate Communications either. Fixated in old thinking patterns most organizations still send out press releases in the name of… yeah, in whoms name anyway? “Just send this out in the name of a true person, with a face, and so”, Fraser preaches.

The co-operation with IT is a different story altogether. I wrote in a previous blogpost that in general IT is not first in line to implement these new tools. That I wasn’t alone with my hypothesis became clear on this congress. At most, if not all lectures IT was mentioned as the major hurdle to take. Reason for this is beyond my understanding. Of course I understand the fear of placing data outside the firewall. But one should think that IT, of all disciplines, should jump on board of these new and exciting IT-related developments? Don’t get me wrong, there were a few examples where IT was not the problem, and even a catalyst to get things done. But these were exceptions to the rule.

Measuring
The good ol’ ROI dilemma. Also here people were wary about how to measure Social Media. Do we have to measure it anyway? As a ‘best practice example’ the introduction of the phone after the Second World War was given. The US government had the ambition to put a phone on every desk in the country (that vision was later borrowed by Bill Gates and the ‘phone’ was replaced by ‘computer’). “Ridiculous”, people said. “Before you know it everybody is going to call everybody all day long.” Well, the phone came and the world didn’t collapse, nor did we morphed into a brainless communication creature (come to think of it, some of us did). Can you imagine doing your work without a phone? And did you ever see the ROI calculation of the phone? It reminds me about the same discussion I had on e-mail, internet and mobile phones. All difficult at the start but were eventually adopted without ROI calculation and changed the way we work. IBM had a nice suggestion to measure effectiveness of E2.0: Return on Contribution: how much views did a specific type of contet had. Anyway, we didn’t quite finish the discussion on ROI, and I have a feeling that this subject will emerge frequently on various congresses.

Acceptation by end users
E2.0 is all about sharing knowledge. As much as possible. But wait a second… What about the well-known and often abused ‘knowledge is power’ mantra? “Social Media causes the first real generation gap since Rock ‘n Roll”, I read in a tweet. “back then the older generation didn’t understand the fun of dancing with your hips. And now the older generation doesn’t understand the importance of sharing knowledge”. Whether it is this strong or not, fact is that a separation on the working floor seems inevitable. Time to focus on implementation.

Robbie and Madonna

A whole shopping list of challenges. Pessimistic readers might conclude after reading this blogpost so far that a marriage between Robbie Williams and Madonna is more likely than letting E2.0 succeed. Don’t worry, fortunately a lot has been said about acceptation and implementation as well.

A well-known condition of a successful implementation is linking the tool to a real business problem (as opposed to first develop the tool and find a business problem to use the tool later). A bit obvious but still very true. Next to that, find your evangelists and experts. People who get excited about these tools and developments. Give them a specific task when implementing. Another major motivator to consider is recognition. We human beings seems to be a but basic as far as status is concerned. Social Media can utilize this by implementing Reputation Management, for example.

Lee Bryant of Headshift provided in his presentation entitled ‘Transition Strategies for E2.0 Adoption’ an obvious though unique tip: “Don’t mention the S-word”. In other words, don’t throw difficult Social Media words like blogs and wikis to your people, but link them to existing tools. RSS technology? Just call it ‘e-mail which you don’t need to throw away’. Or how about Crowdsourcing: ‘your customers want to talk to you. And a wiki is ‘the intranet with big fat edit buttons all over the place’. Awesome!

The best tips however came from Gentry Underwood. Head of Knowledge at IDEO. Just his title alone must indicate that they take E2.0 pretty serious at IDEO. IDEO is a design agency. Design in the most broadest sense given the fact how his presentation was layed-out. In an all-inspiring session Gentry told the audience how IDEO has created their social platform themselves, based on existing technologies and tailor-made programming. Their platform ‘The Tube‘ was without doubt the most lickable, clickable and workable system that I’ve seen till now. All internal, so unfortunately not accessible to third parties. Also not for sale, regretfully for some interested people like myself. What Gentry did want to share was his vison on the acceptation by users. Outlined in 5 principles, learned by doing:

1. Build pointers to people
Put the employee centrally. Sound familiar but in reality difficult to put in practice. Everybody at IDEO gets their own blog, and on their profile page one can put personal info. The platform shows who’s available and how they perform.

2. Reward individual participation
Provide employees the personal recognition if they participate on the platform. Link this to career development and 360 degrees feedback.

3. Demand an intuitive User Interface
Employees not only ‘consume’ the information of the platform, they are also contributors. And if you can’t find your way around or need 200 page manuals it’s likely users are not going to share anything. Make sure the platform is easy to understand and minimum training is necessary.

4. Take the road more travelled
Integrate new procudures into the daily routine of people. For example, summarize the platform activities in a weekly e-mail, or place a flatscreen at the watercooler to showcase platform activities.

5. Iterate early and often
Life wasn’t perfect from the start, so don’t expect your platform to be. Start with what you have and implement small changes fast. Rather 15 small updates in one year than 1 major update each two years.

Especially this final point is considered Microsoft’s SharePoint Achilles heel. Looking at the Twitter feed I did notice some severe critical claims towards the patform. Guess it doesn’t really matter whether you are a diamond sponsor or not in the authentic and transparent E2.0 world. Especially the slow update pace (every three years one major update) and the ‘they don’t get it’ feeling was overall present. Nonetheless it remains the biggest platform on which intranets run and thus the biggest potential for breaking into corporations with E2.0. If they do it right.

Besides Microsoft there were plenty other vendors of E2.0 software. It’s still a very young field so vendors come and go. It still is unclear which vendor provides a solution for which business problem. But that’s charming in it’s own way too. Like in the old days of computer technology: so now they have this device, but for what are we gonna use it for?
I myself am involved in the implementation of an internal community based on innovation. From the collection and selection of ideas till the process of starting a project once ideas have been selected. But this platform needs to host our weekly podcast too, our blog and, while we’re at it, why not our wiki and RSS reader? We haven’t been able to find a solution which suited our needs for 100%, so we had to (re)design certain elements ourselves. But the solution we’re using now (www.spigit.com) is flexible enough to facilitate our requirements.

Awareness

The E2.0 congress lasted for almost 4 days. Next to several very interesting sessions during the day also the evenings were accounted for. We could choose between various sponsored cocktail parties and tweetups. We came home with the belief that the E2.0 trend might be even bigger than Web 2.0 trend. Think of it: internal communication remains important, and sharing knowledge may become even more important. Companies knowing how to facilitate in these processes might find themself some interesting competitive advantages. But be cautious about the pitfalls, too. Many employees are critical towards new ways of working. Whether true or not, be careful with implementing too much, too fast and too technical. It all starts with the awareness that things need to change, and that things can change. Eventually people will accept that things will change.

We see around us that Enterprise 2.0 is still in it’s infancy. To create awareness we have the idea to organize a Enterprise 2.0 Bootcamp, somewhere in the Netherlands. Kind of ‘Enterprise 2.0 for dummies’. We don’t know yet the details but we want to keep it simple, straightforward and practical. Should you be intested, just drop me a line at erik at digiredo dot nl.

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)

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.

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).