Dutch Web Editor’s conference #webred11

The company that I work for, Entopic, recently organized the Web editor’s conference (Dutch: Congres Webredactie). It was the first conference in Holland (and the world?) for web editors. Dutch posts about the conference can be found here. The tweet stream can be found here (#webred11) and all the presentations here. I’ll share some highlights from the conference with you here.

The Future of Content
The conference started out with a talk by futurist Gerd Leonhard about the future of content. He gave an interesting talk about the past, present and future of content. He started in the broadcasting era and move to what he calls the broadband era; the time we are experiencing now. He stressed this is happening now and if we or institutions don’t get on board we/they will be disrupted.

I liked they way he pointed to the increasing influence of technology on our lives, but also stressed the extreme importance of human ingenuity.

Of course, Leonard also addressed the post pc statements and its implications for content (publishing and curation). The value of content will be in adding meaning and context (location, real-time, platform) to content, not in the publishing of it. This will also ask for a complete different business model.

Customer Journey
There were also several breakouts. I went to two of them. One was about Customer Journeys. How can you lead people through their tour along websites, email newsletters and social media in an optimal way? Interestingly the speaker said the audience should not use persona’s to define these journeys, while persona’s were promoted in another breakout.

Writing a book using social media

The other breakout was done by Erwin Blom. Hij wrote the Community Handbook (in Dutch). He told a fascinating story about how he used social media to write, promote and improve his book. He sees the process of writing the book as the product. And advises all to publish raw material. Make sure the product or service you want to deliver is alive before it’s there.

Another interesting thing he said is by sharing early you also claim the idea. I agree. This is a weird paradox of social media. Some wonder if we should be so open about our lives and ideas. An important question. But if you have an idea sharing it on social media gives you the exact time and date (permalink) on which you shared it. Comparing dates could help solve the problem who had the idea first.

Web editor’s and social media
Erwin Blom also closed the day with a keynote. He stressed the blessing that social media is for web editor’s.

Erwin studied journalism and became journalist. The internet fascinated him. He wondered how he could tell more stories over the web. How do you share more with your audience? Your audience often knows more than you can know by yourself.

Social media is great for telling (more) stories. Social media brings people together around their passion, a problem or goal they have. Blom showed the audience all kinds of ways to use social media to find interesting people and information, to interact with the world, etc. He challenged the audience to start with one of the example or just start blogging.

Some endnotes

- Social media is about passion. So if you use social media, you have to do it with passion.
- Facilitate the communication of the community. Even when it’s negative feedback. Respond to the feedback and learn from it.
- Blom was asked what new web app he liked? He pointed to Instagram. Not many in the audience had heard of it or were using it.

- And two video's from the conference. The first is the intro to the conference and the second is a summary of the day.

Question
I'm curious if you know of a comparable conference in other parts of the world?

Linking Strategies in LinkedIn

How do you use LinkedIn? Who do you connect to? Do you use LinkedIn Groups? This post on the NextWeb triggered me to answer these questions publicly.

Resume
LinkedIn is an interesting platform. I've been using it for several years now. At first I basically uploaded my resume to LinkedIn. I hardly visited LinkedIn after that, except for excepting link requests.
Some time after that LinkedIn introduced Answers. I followed several topics there, but stopped after about a year. The quality of the questions was horrible and it seemed I didn't get anything back from the answers I gave.

Groups
I also joined several LinkedIn Groups. Groups is interesting and it keeps me coming back to the LinkedIn site. Right now I'm following 27 groups, mostly in my area of expertise (intranet, social media, knowledge management, enterprise 2.0, social business). Most of the groups have interesting discussions. The update in my email every day helps me keep up with what's going on in there. If I see an interesting question that I can answer, I'll jump in. And, regularly, I also tap into the knowledge of the group members. The quality of the interaction and the people's knowledge in the groups is usually great.

Linking
Of course, I get invites to connect in LinkedIn. Regularly people that I don't know personally, contact me via LinkedIn with a request to connect. (This is also encouraged by a LinkedIn Group setting allowing group members to link directly to each other. I usually uncheck this setting.) I accept invitations to connect when I know the person quite well. I've talked with him/her, preferably face-to-face. I want to be able to say something about that person, if somebody asks me about him/her. For instance, when a recruiter is looking for someone in my network and asks me about him/her, I want to be able to give a recommendation. If I can't do this, I won't connect with that person. Of course I hope I'll be able to do so in the near future. Sometimes this interaction via LinkedIn even leads to a live meeting with that person.

What's your linking strategy?
I know there are different linking strategies. What's yours? Do you link to everybody who sends you requests? If so, why? Do you also join groups? How do you follow what's happening in those groups?

Hope this will get you blogging

I enjoy following Seth Godin's blog. He has as inspiring way of pushing out short(er) blogposts and getting me to think.

One blogpost about 'Talker's block' struck me recently. It struck me for two reasons. It related to the situation I'm in every now-and-then: writer's block. I'll have several draft posts, almost ready to be published, but they stay in the draft folder for too long.
The other reason is: It's part of my work to get others to blog. And to my regret I see people starting to tweet and use Facebook, quite easily. Blogging, however, is a step too far for most of them. No, blogging is not for everybody. But some people don't start to blog because they fear writer's block. Or they're insecure about their writing skills. Or they fear for the comments others will have on their musings.

Godin challenges you and me to get over it. He says:

Writer's block isn't hard to cure.
Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better.

There. Does this help? Hope so! See you soon in the blogosphere!

[Request for Input] Control and audit implications for social media

In a couple of weeks I'll be giving a masterclass with prof. Eddy Vaassen about 'Control and audit implications for social media'. Wow, what a title, eh?! This masterclass is part of a large conference in Holland organized by NBA-VRC for accountants and controllers. The topic of this year's conference is Customer 3.0.

I'm working on the slides for the masterclass. And I'm curious what your expectations are when you read the title of the masterclass. What topics should be addressed? What are control and audit implications, according to you? Do control, audit and social media relate? If so, please explain.

Of course we'll share our slides as soon as they're ready. Feedback on those slides is welcome, as always.

Which Social Media do Millenials use?

Giving a guest lecture is great fun, I find. I recently had the chance to interact with about 60 college students. They were in their second or third year. The topic of the lecture was social media use within company. So, Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business. My slides can be found here (in Dutch...).

I kicked off my lecture with some open questions. I'd like to share the answers to one question with you. I was curious what social tools they use themselves to get things done in their lives. With all the talk about millennials being digital natives (or aren't they), easily moving in the social space, organizing their life and work with these tools, etc I thought I'd see if this if the case in practice.
I shared what I got from the students on Google+. In sum, this is what they told me.

Of the 60 students:

• 40 use Twitter
• Almost all use Facebook
• Just over half use Hyves (Dutch social network)
• 1 uses a bookmarking tool
• 2 blog
• 0 have a wiki (although all have experience using wiki's)
• 6 use Google+
• 2 use Foursquare
• 16 are on LinkedIn

Let me reflect on this a bit.
Of course these results are not statistically valid. It's just 60 students from one college in a city in Holland telling me what they use. But I'll will poll them two more times this year. (Great idea from Chee Chin Liew!) Let's see what we learn from the trends in this class.
I didn't have time for a real discussion about the data. Of course you wonder why only 2 blog, for instance. LinkedIn is not much used either. Does this point to the fact that LinkedIn is a business network for people looking for a job or that have a job? This poll also shows Foursquare, Google+ and bookmarking are hardly used. The students using Google+ said they signed up to see what Google+ is and find out if it has added-value compared to their current toolset. Facebook is very popular and the Dutch network Hyves is clearly becoming an echo chamber for them. Several said they stopped using Hyves or just use it to be reminded of their friend's birthday.

Interesting data, don't you think? If you have any question I should ask them, please let me know!

Mijn workshop voor Social Media in de Praktijk #socmedprak

Binnenkort, 27 oktober a.s., wordt het event Social Media in de Praktijk gehouden. Het belooft een bijzonder congres te worden. In de eerste plaats, is het congres op een bijzondere manier bedacht en opzet. In de tweede plaats, de lijst met sprekers hebben allemaal diepgaande ervaring met social media.

Mijn workshop gaat over het raakvlak tussen social media en kennismanagement. Volgens mij is kennismanagement en social media een perfecte match. Kennismanagement was een hype en is als top-down strategie mislukt. De opkomst van social media biedt geweldige mogelijkheden voor kennismanagement 2.0. Tijdens de workshop ga je uitleggen waarom ik dat vindt. En we gaan er ook mee aan de slag. Aan het einde van de workshop kun je persoonlijk aan de slag en/of in (een deel van) de organisatie/instelling waar je voor werkt.

Wat verwacht je van mijn workshop? Ik hoor het graag van je. Ik neem jouw input dan mee in mijn verhaal.

Kom je ook naar Social Media in de Praktijk? Geef je hier op. Ik hoop je er te zien!

Food #BAD11

Food is not something I blog about. But I'd like to make an exception for Blog Action Day. BAD11 is today! This year's topic is 'food'. I've joined BAD for a couple of years now. It's a neat way to focus some of our time and attention on a bigger cause.

Food, there's lots to say about food. As a person who has always had (more than enough) food, I feel privileged and thankful. There are lots and lots of people in a totally different situation. Just think of what is happening now in Africa. And we know there are many more places in the world where people have little to nothing to eat.

What can we do about that? For one, blog. The whole idea of Blog Action Day is to have many bloggers write about the same topic. Hopefully this will shift the world a bit in the right direction. The right direction being: a more fair spread of food over the world.

On the hand I often feel helpless. Helpless about the fact that we know there are people dying of hunger in Africa, but the news easily shift to our economic troubles. We're not hearing a lot about Africa lately... And I also feel helpless because the people that we see on TV are usually not the reason for their problem. The problems is often politically related. Some even say: We should stop sending those people money and food, because we only feed the underlying problems.
I don't agree. I do think we should help the people we see on TV. But I would also love to see a structural solution to this problem. If that is possible in our live time.

In any way, I hope this post, together with all the other posts will make a difference.