It is often said that the key to ‘how social media works’, or at least how you can gain inlfuence as an actor in social media is staying honest and true to what you believe as a person. (ie: don’t try to operate as a typical company) Although one can certainly make arguments against that, I do support the notion that an open and honest approach is appreciated by many. This is true in real life, but even more so online, where hiding ones true intentions can be a lot easier.

Thus, when it became apparent that the Dutch ‘twitterer of the year’ election was set up by a advertisement agency people began to criticise they way this was set up. Of course it didn’t take long before freelance journalist Bert Brussen announced on twitter that he would take care of organising something more fun. What followed is an example of a typical social media effort. Read the rest of this entry »

Following the recent acquisitions in the research industry, think about Toluna buying Greenfield Online/Ciao Surveys, one would expect a response from other players in the market. And to be a bit more specific; what would smaller players in the market do with their panels? There are several obvious solutions to the troubles of maintaining smaller panel(s), one could thing about an advanced sharing system or outsourcing panels.

As all of these seem to be happening there is the other obvious solution to which I’ve been pointing several times in the past; several companies ‘chipping in’ together and combine their panel efforts. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, of course the end of Search Engine Optimization is not near in a broad sense, but we could be well up for some “SEO, but not as we know it”, quite soon. Despite it being fairly successful, especially in recent times, I’ve always been skeptical about “pure SEO”. That is, SEO for just the purpose of doing SEO, optimizing your website just to look good in search engines. I’m not denying the value of good SEO, after all you want your nice articles and information to be found, but that is the point; nice information! All too often optimization tactics are used as a way of promoting content that is of little value as much as possible. In general I would say this applies to advertisements and advertorials, the value of this could be disputed, but way too often I’ve seen excellent SEO trying to drag me to a site with content that was just promotional and of no (other) value to me.
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For my and your convenience I have been working on my Social Media Success model. People have been asking if it wasn’t true that you could also use this to analyze branding on the internet, personal branding in particular. I’ve made two short presentations, also showing how the model appreciates the characteristics of online (personal) branding. The presentation of the model comes in two flavors;  a “presentation” flavor for use with a bigger audience and I’ve made a simpler version with more text as well as a handout flavor.

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Na de twee artikelen over online interactie, nog meer van mijn hand op bijgespijkerd. Allereerst een kort overzicht over een nieuwe service van tweakers.net: een telecom vergelijkingssite. Daarnaast schreef ik een artikel over wat men “roaming restaurants” noemt; een restaurant waar je je voor moet inschrijven en waarbij de locatie van het daadwerkelijke diner steeds anders is. Het is steeds maar afwachten of en wanneer je wordt uitgenodigd om een keer langs te komen om meet te kunnen. Een apart, maar leuk idee dat “uit eten gaan” combineert met “online marketingtechnieken” om het een uniek karakter mee te kunnen geven.

Een tijd geleden kwam ik terecht bij een, voor mij, zeer interessante post over de onwaarschijnlijkheid van communicatie bij Social Media. Aan de hand van de theorie van Niklas Luhmann probeert de schrijver uit te leggen dat het bij systemen gaat om het waarschijnlijk maken van communicatie. Kijken we naar een erg “vluchtig” medium als twitter dan geldt hier dus dat followers/vrienden niet zo belangrijk hoeven te zijn als men soms voordoet. Het gaat er om, om tot, wat ik dan nu maar even “effectieve” communicaties noem, te komen. Interessant genoeg voor een post van mij hierover op bijgespijkerd, leek mij.

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I already wrote about the KOPTE model, that defines 5 basic factors that are of influence the success of your social network. I’ve tried to explain what each of the five points means and how this can work in practice. But how does it work in practice? What does it mean if you apply each of those five points to your (Social Network) organisation?

It is nice to see that someone has actually done just that. (Based on a Dutch article I wrote about this model earlier this year.) In the professional case “Working open source”, the five point model I described is used to analyze the open source business model of ZXZW. (An annual festival in “celebration of independent culture”) Read the rest of this entry »

So, let’s say you have started with “web 2.0” and the decision has been made to start with setting up an online community. You end up with a nice website, reliable software, but little to no visitors! What has happened?! And other, maybe even more modest, projects of competitors seem to work a lot better. How do they do that? First of all you decide that the number of visitors doesn’t have to say anything about “Return on investment” in this case. On the other hand this of course doesn’t mean that you want to do without a good number of visitors.

At this stage it might be good thing to decide upon some things that you might have neglected a bit, or may have missed altogether. But what kind of things are those? Read the rest of this entry »