Happy Holidays!

Wow, 2010 flew by! 2010 has been an interesting year for me. The biggest thing has been my new job, a new challenge. After 10 good years at Océ, I started working for Entopic and am enjoying it. I'm curious what 2011 will be about.

I want to thank all of you for reading this blog, interacting with me offline and online. I hope we can continue our conversation in good health next year!

I wish you and your loved ones Happy Holidays! I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas time and a Happy New Year.

A history of Social Networks - Open always wins

Techcrunch ran a very interesting series of posts about the history of social networking. They were written by Mark Suster (@msuster). I think you should go ahead and read all the posts, but I'll pass on some highlights here to get you started.

Marks posts are about the “6 C’s of Social Networking” – Communications, connectedness, common experiences, content, commerce & cool experiences (fun!). He stresses that social networks exists before they were hyped in our time they just work better now "and there are more people doin’ it." And a bit further on: "Yes, social networks of 2010 have much better usability, have better developed 3rd-party platforms and many more people are connected.  But let’s be honest – they’re mostly the same old shit, reinvented, with more people online and trained.
But less considered is the fact that the success of the Web 2.0 companies versus the Web 1.0 ones were enhanced because they coincided with hardware that allowed us to capture more content instantly – namely images and video – otherwide Web 2.0 might have been a lot less differentiated."
He relates back to the beginning of internet and AOL. "The funny thing about AOL is that while you dialed up to the Internet, the goal of AOL was to keep you locked into their proprietary content and thus earned the classification of “walled garden” because they kept you inside AOL." From AOL he goes on to show how closed and open social networks has been successful or not. "The lesson was learned over 30 years in Silicon Valley: you create ecosystems where third-parties can innovate and thrive and you become the legitimate center of it all and can tax the system later.
He closes off with social networking trends he sees (- I only list a few of them):

  • Social Networking is becoming mobile "and that adds new dimensions to how we use social networks.  The most obvious change is that now social networks become "location aware.""
  • Facebook is our social graph and will be so for the next decade, Mark says. He goes on to say Facebook with make our social graph portable or we'll move to new networks. Because "nobody exists in one social network." He thinks public and private network will be more separate in the future.
  • There will be lots of focus on privacy in the future.
  • Social networking will mix with everything we do. "As our social graph becomes more portable I believe that social networking will become a feature in everything we do."

What really struck me in these posts is that it shouts out: Openness always wins on the long run. Do you agree? This is the case in mobile, but also in social networking (tools).

Two other nice quotes to think about:

  • "Twitter is much more.  ... in a nutshell it is: an RSS reader, a chat room, instant messaging, a marketing channel, a customer service department and increasingly a data mine."
  • "When you’re on Facebook you’re not on the Internet—you’re on the InterNOT."

Social Media and the Workplace by Commoncraft

Commoncraft does it again! They released another video explaining something no too easy in an easy way. This video is about social media and the workplace. It mostly focuses on explaining how companies can join in the conversation. And how not only comms but all employees can be empowered by being trained and giving them clear social media guidelines. I enjoyed it and hope you will too. It's great stuff when you need to explain to company decision makers what social media is about and how to use it.

Culture <> Social Media

Jane McConnell raised an interesting question about the relationship between social media and culture. She asked:
Will cultural differences impact adoption of social media? Will culture “eat” social media for breakfast? or will social media “eat” culture?
I find social media interesting because I see the relationship between social media and culture as bi-directional. The (company) culture has to fit social media (culture) for successful adoption. But I also see culture change due to social media use. I think this has to do with the underlying concepts of social media, like relational networks, information is social and humans as social beings. These concepts fit us people very well, because they are deeply human. Tapping into these concepts when rolling out social media is a key to success (and positive cultural change). Rolling it out as technology (non-human focus) is a key to failure (and negative cultural change).


Also refer to this interesting post about cultural differences. (HT, Ana Silva for pointer!)

An implicit expertise network / IBM´s Expert Network on Slideshare

Luis Suarez recently pointed me to this. IBM set up an Expert Network on Slideshare, giving us a way to see all the slides produced by IBM-ers. Adam Christensen has a post explaining why this was done.
This got me thinking. I think this is a smart move.  Isn’t this a great way to implicitly show the expertise of IBM-ers? Of course LinkedIn tries to do the same, the other way around. You set up your profile. And you can connect Slideshare to your profile. Problem is, nobody says that profile is correct. And clicking through to the proof (e.g. your presentations) is not that easy. Furthermore you can´t see if that person is the only expert in that organization or the organization as a whole has expertise in a certain area.
I think if you’re looking for someone from IBM to help you out, the Expert Network on Slideshare will get you to the right man/woman much more quickly. What do you think of this move? And do you think such a network in Slideshare is a better expertise locator than LinkedIn? I´d love to hear your thoughts!

Global Intranet Trends 2011 by @netjmc Published

Just wanted to write a short post to create some buzz for Jane McConnell’s latest Global Intranet Trends 2011 report. I hope you all go and read it. Jane posted a couple of highlight posts about the report. I’m reading it now and will write one or more posts about it. I love reading the report. You get a great overview of the state of affairs in the (social) intranet landscape. It’s also a great way to benchmark your intranet or an intranet you’re working on.

This year Jane also published a free executive snapshot. It gives you a good idea of the quality and richness of the report. I hope you go ahead and download/buy the report. And also participate in the survey next year!