On companies killing each other

I hope Google+ succeeds. Given the blog posts saying this will kill Tumblr, Twitter, Foursquare, etc, you might wonder why I feel that way. Well first, I don’t think competitors kill companies and services. I think the vast majority of “deaths” are self inflicted. Facebook didn’t kill MySpace and Friendster, they killed themsleves by failing to address the shortcomings of their services and their inability to respond to changing market dynamics, in some cases brought on by competitors. Of course, that fate could be in store for any company, including our portfolio companies, but it won’t be because of Google+.

Unless Company Y actually went on a shooting spree at Company X, let’s stop talking about companies killing each other, ok?

/via Fred Wilson.

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[dk] En lille note om social media monitorering, værktøjer og strategi

Kasper Bergholt skrev på sin blog om et arrangement afholdt af MeltwaterBuzz og jeg kunne ikke dy mig for at smide en kommentar om min erfaring med produktet.

Den er mildt sagt ikke god, og det er der flere grunde til:

1) Jeg får en mail fra en af deres sælgere om at jeg “da godt nok er svær at få fat på”. Det er første gang jeg hører fra hende overhovedet, men hun har angiveligt prøvet at ringe dagligt til min arbejdsplads, 1508, for at stable et møde på benene en hel del gange. Men det er første mail.
2) Jeg må ikke få et testlogin, men skal arrangere et møde med hende. Hvad med nej?
3) Jeg får endeligt – efter en længere telefonsamtale – et login, og det er tydeligt hun allerede dér ved hun har tabt slaget (et stort suk hjælper ikke på mit indtryk af produktet).
4) I en mail der sendes sammen med login-informationerne ridser hun kort fordele og ulemper op ved MeltwaterBuzz sammelignet med andre, lignende produkter. Bl.a. skriver hun at designet ikke er så godt som andres. Det skriver hun til en UX Designer…
5) Da jeg prøver produktet laver jeg nogle testsøgninger for at se hvad det kan finde, og det finder nærmest intet jeg kan bruge. Med andre ord, det er simpelthen bare et dårligt produkt.

Hvorfor skal det være så svært at finde et produkt der kan monitorere danske brugere af sociale medier? Det er der også en hel del grunde til; tekniske, sproglige og strategiske:

For det første er dansk et meget, meget snævert sprogområde i det store billede. De fleste der går ind i markedet for social medie monitorering med et produkt har ikke skænket dansk, hollandsk, walisisk, svensk, norsk eller finsk én eneste tanke. Vi er bare ikke vigtige nok i det store billede for en startup der er baseret i et engelsk-talende land (eller spansk, for den sags skyld).

Ved at teste MeltwaterBuzz, Radian6 (hvor jeg heller ikke måtte få et login før jeg sad i et timelangt webinar) og det gratis værktøj SocialMention kan man se forskellige grader af filtrering af ikke-engelske resultater. Dog er SocialMention det tætteste jeg kom på et brugbart produkt af de ovennævnte. Og det er gratis…

Men uanset om det produkt man bruger finder alt der er det mindste relevant for sin lille danske virksomhed, kommer du ingen vegne ved at stole blindt på værktøjet. Det kan bruges til at finde nogle ting du ikke anede var derude, men uden at gå aktivt ind og søge efter relevante grupper/sider på Facebook, følge blogs igennem Overskrift.dk og generelt være tilstede vil du aldrig få et sandfærdigt og mere fuldkomment billede af hvad der sker i din branche eller med dit brand på sociale medier.

Det værktøj jeg har fundet virker bedst til danske resultater er svenske Notified. Selvom jeg heller ikke måtte få et testlogin uden et telefonmøde (hvad er der med de fandens møder?) har jeg fundet det til at være det der finder de fleste brugbare resultater. Næ, de var de eneste der fandt noget der i det hele taget kunne bruges!

Jeg synes de er lidt dyre, men hvis man er seriøs omkring sin medieovervågning (de inkluderer også alle andre former for medier foruden blogs, Twitter, Facebook og YouTube som det kendes fra Infomedia) kan det bestemt anbefales.

Dog skulle jeg mene der ligger et uudnyttet potentiale for en dansk startup til at få stablet et succesfuldt produkt på benene. Hvis jeg kan være behjælpelig i den sammenhæng kan I altid sende en mail – den står i bunden af siden.

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On the verge of another ’68?

The Saturday Evening Post September 23 1967

How would we know if we were on the verge of another ’68? Who could be the one who foresaw that series of events that would spark another creative wildfire? Are we there now with social media? Was Obama’s election in 2008 the closest I will come in my lifetime to something similar? Or is the current wave of demonstrations in the Middle East something we will look back at in years to come and compare in scale of democracy to the impact Woodstock and Vietnam war protests had on the US in terms of creativity bursts and social change?

Or do we just like it, retweet the copy and move on to the next gadget?

via TOMBOLARE.

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Dropping out of Facebook

Super interesting point in a lengthy article on dropping Facebook for 30 days:

Dropping Facebook wasn’t at all like disconnecting from hundreds of individual friends. I didn’t miss anyone in particular because my Facebook experience was like connecting with a collective. I noticed the absence of the collective when I left, but I didn’t miss it per se.

via Steve Pavlina.

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Victory!

Obama on Election Night, listening to John McCain's speech

As of Tuesday, November 4, the American people have spoken. Barack Hussein Obama is the President-elect, and will be inaugurated on January 20, 2009. It’s such a hard thought to cope with, because it seems so unreal. Obama is not a Messiah, but he is the person who I hope and think will bring America back on track as the country every other in the world wants to identify themselves with. Not because they are forced (“Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.“), but because it’s a country that inspires us and shows us that even though we are different, we can be one.

This election has more than ever been driven by the social media and technology that is such an integrated part of many people’s lives. Obama raised more than $600.000.000 by using the potential of having a social network as a great part of the way his supporters are organized. It’s phenomenal, and reminds a lot of people of how John F. Kennedy used television as a great part of his campaign back in the days.

What I’m more interested in (being mostly a technology-blogger), is how Obama will use the social media to his advantage from now on. We have seen his own social network (MyBO) during the campaign alongside Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, text messages and the newsletters that encouraged us to donate. Now that he has been elected, his administration has put up www.change.gov which serves as a means to follow Barack Obama in the transition period until inauguration (70 days away, the site tell me). They have a blog (today it’s regarding Veterans’ Day – with a slideshow from Flickr, albeit in very low quality) which can be followed in my RSS-reader of choice, and I can apply for a job, if I have the desire to do so.

“Will he blog?“, David Weinberger asks – and says so himself that it’s a bit ambitious to hope so, but isn’t hope what this election was all about? It works for the Danish Prime Minister, so why not for the American President? All I hope for is that the Obama-Biden administration will be open and welcoming input from the American people in a way it has never been seen before. Change.gov already asks people to write their stories and send them in, so a facilitation of the possibilities the internet gives you is already underway, but I want to see them drive it all the way to the front. The technology is there – they just need to have the courage to open up and start the conversation.

Here are some links for you to enjoy while I go back to more or less regular blogging about tech and what else is on my mind:

50 Obama facts you might not know

How He Did It – Newsweek were allowed to follow Obama around during the campaign and has written 7 very long articles about it. It’s really worth a read, as it also follows some of the issues from inside the McCain-campaign and their problems with Palin, and because of an embargo, they got a lot of information out of the employees, as long as they promised to not print it until after the election.

White House Photo Blog from TIME and CNN, which picks one picture a day from all of their White House photographers and shows it here. The navigation is bad, but the pictures are magnificent.

Buy a copy of New York Times from the day after the election.

John McCain’s concession speech. One of the best political speeches I have ever heard. Period. (If this was the McCain we had seen during the election campaign, I don’t think it would be President-elect in favor of the Democrats.)

I’ve been watching a lot of Entourage lately, and I guess this is what Obama must have felt like when he was declared the President-elect around 11 o’clock in the evening.

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Microblogging as a Facilitator for Tacit Knowledge

Yesterday, I attended my last exam in the second year of my Bachelor’s study where I defended the paper I have written with Kristoffer and Kristian on microblogging in organisations.

Everything went well; we got a good grade, but more importantly, our supervisor and examiner said the paper was very well written and had lots of good points, even though the coherence between the various parts of the paper is a bit vague at times. But what the heck? It’s over with, and we finished well.

The research question of the paper is as follows:

“How can an organisation facilitate tacit knowledge through a social media platform?”.

This is my executive summary of the paper:

“For this paper, we have interviewed prominent, Danish social media consultants, and applied relevant theory to try and find a solution to what is one of the crucial issues in organisations today; the tacit knowledge that is embodied in the members of the organisation, and might not be made explicit, without the aid of various tools.

The paper is divided into three sections, where the first one seeks to answer which kind of knowledge that can be embodied in a collaboration tool. We find that there a two kinds of tacit knowledge, where tacit knowing can not be articulated, and implicit knowledge is the knowledge which can be articulated, but has not yet. Moreover, when articulated, the knowledge loses the context in which it was situated, and becomes highly shareable information that can be shared through the organisation’s platform of choice.

Various social media platforms are investigated, in order for us to find which one is the most applicable for the retrieval of the Implicit Knowledge. We conclude that Instant Messaging is best for one-on-one interaction, but is lacking in features that makes the members of the organisation able to re-find their information. A wiki platform gives the user the ability to re-find the Implicit Knowledge that has been articulated, but the lack of social interaction makes it less useful for capturing the knowledge that is created throughout the day. As a result, we find that a microblogging platform acts as the best medium for the retrieval of Implicit Knowledge, as a tagging feature can be incorporated, in order for you to describe what your post is about, and then re-find it at a later point. Furthermore, because of the social nature of the microblogging platform, you are able to socialise with the other members of the organisation.

Lastly, we seek to give an answer to how an online community work, in order for us to better understand the social interactions that happen between the work-related issues in the microblog. This led us to a conclusion stating that because of the users’ interaction over social objects, they feel a form of being present together, even though they may be geographically dispersed.”

The whole paper can be found at Scribd: Link.

At a later point, I will put out the links to the blogposts and articles which can be found online that we have used in the paper, but for now, you will have to look at the bibliography at the end of the paper.

Many thanks goes out to especially Jacob Bøtter from Wemind, who helped us out by letting us interview him on his company’s use of WordPress’ Prologue-theme as an internal microblog. Also, thanks to Jon Froda and Anders Pollas from OurHoist, Henriette Weber Andersen Kristiansen from Toothless Tiger, Trine-Maria Kristensen from Social Square and Lennart Bjørneborn from The Royal Danish Library School for providing us with a yet-to-be published article on Serendipity.

So, if you managed to read through the paper (or parts of it anyway), what do you think; is it possible for teams/small organisations to actually extract some of that valuable information that forms inside their employees’ heads with the aid of a microblog?

Update: Just found out that you can embed the paper into the blog post, so here it is:

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