Workshop on Social Media with Students

We had an exciting afternoon yesterday at Océ. A workshop was organized with students of the 'Christelijke Hogeschool Ede' (Christian College in Ede, NL). Jan van Veen and I defined 5 assignments about social media for the Communication students to work on. These were our assignments:

Group 1
If we see a very negative rumor about one of our products in blogs, forums and websites, how and in which media should we react?

Group 2
How do we organize consistency in our online (also social media) presence: who should be responsible?

Group 3
If we want to reach YOU students for jobs and internships, which media should we use and how should our tone of voice be?

Group 4
If we want to start a viral campaign to create buzz for a product, what would be the creative concept? (tone of voice, media, ways to distribute)

Group 5
How should we use Twitter to sell our products?

The students jumped into them and came up with some very good ideas. What really struck me (again) was the difference in adoption of social media in this group. Some had heard of it, but didn't use it. Others were deeply involved or just dipping in.
Another striking thing was the different social media tools they use. For instance the Hungarians mostly hadn't heard of Twitter (yet). And they mostly used their national social networking site iWiW. Of course this can have major impact on the way a company uses social media of their marketing campaigns, for instance.

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Tags van Technorati: web 2.0,social media,microblogging

Where's Information Headed?

Thomas Baekdal has a very interesting post titled "Where is everybody?" His post comes along with a really nice visualization to prove his point (refer to his blog post and the picture I added into this post).
It would be interesting to extend this post and visualization with other kinds of information. For instance, office documents, flyers, etc. Baekdal also leaves out books. Books would come in between 'local marketplace' and 'newspapers', I think. And office documents (like Word docs) came around 1990-1995? I remember typing my first report in WordPerfect around 1993. At that time you were still allowed to write your report in handwriting. Wow, time flies!

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Tags van Technorati: information,information management,information architecture

Loving FriendFeed

Some time ago I started using FriendFeed. I'd heard about it on the internet. I thought I'd try it when I had time. So I went over to get an account and see what it was like for real. The idea of Friendfeed is compelling: integrate all your internet streams into one stream. Friendfeed helps you read all your and your friends social media updates in one spot. That's exactly what I need. Before Friendfeed, I would check different sites I use, such as Twitter (or actually Tweetdeck), Slideshare, Diigo and Youtube.
After setting up my account I had a hard time starting to use FF. One of the big issues for me was: who is on FF and who is on Twitter? And how do I import all my Twitter friends to FF, without duplicating? This basically is too difficult for most users, I think. I used the 'Twitter2FF' tool, which helps. I ended up writing down lists on paper to make sure I didn't duplicate and really have all my Twitter friend in FF.
Furthermore some Twitter friends have protected their account. These can't be imported to FF. This is one of the reasons I still use Tweetdeck. The other reason I check Tweetdeck is for retweeting. And I also use Tweetdeck when I 'live tweet' an event. I don't find Friendfeed good enough for real-time, although the new FF has solved this issue I think. I hope to try live-tweeting using FF soon.
I've heard that some also import all their RSS feeds in FF. I don't. I still read my feeds with Google Reader. For all other stuff I use Friendfeed.
I really enjoy having one stream of updates to watch. With the new Friendfeed the stream is even in real-time by default.

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Tags van Technorati: stream,filtering,microblogging,friendfeed