Mijn belangrijkste conclusies: stap niet in sociale media omdat u het gevoel heeft dat het “moet”; kijk of het past bij uw doelen en doelgroep en bepaal dan uw strategie. Leer te luisteren en weet dat de oude manier van bedrijfscommunicatie (zenden, corporate nieuwsbrieven, 1-richtingsverkeer) niet meer werkt. Meng u in de conversatie. En als u besluit sociale media in te zetten, zorg dan dat het gebruik een onderdeel is van de normale werkprocessen, niet iets dat mensen erbij moeten doen. In de trajecten die wij bij klanten doen zie je vaak dat dat laatste de sleutel tot succes is.

Meer weten? Vragen of commentaar naar aanleiding van deze presentatie? Neem contact met me op!
De slides kunt u vinden op slideshare:

(cross-posted op thisexperiencerules.com)

Over het algemeen is het nieuwe web te beschrijven op basis van drie kenmerkende trends, namelijk:

• Web als collaboratief en participatief platform ook bekend als het sociale web
• Bredere gebruikersondersteuning en toegankelijkheid
• Integratie standaardisatie

Deze drie kenmerkende trends vormen de basis van de internetontwikkelingen van vandaag en de nabije toekomst en worden in nader detail verder hier beschreven. Ook brengen deze trends duidelijkheid in de toekomst van het web en de verdere ontwikkelingen die we kunnen verwachten. Het onderstaande boek, gepubliceerd door Via Nova Architectura, biedt IT architecten en managers die geconfronteerd worden met deze nieuwe ontwikkelingen daarbij een overzicht en helpt bij het maken van slimme keuzes.

[PDF]

Central in the model is individual readiness: the individuals in the team have to be willing and able to work together. Between the different individuals there have to be positive relationships. Other key aspects are having clear goals, clear roles & responsibilities, a common way of working, organisational embedding and strong leadership. Click on the image above to see a more detailed description of these aspects.

We are currently validating checklists for each of these individual aspects – such checklists can be used to gain a deeper understanding of the situation or to compare the situation before and after an intervention.

I am curious to hear which models you use around team effectiveness!

A webcare team monitors online conversations on Twitter, blogs and other social media and has a strategy on how to deal with various types of negative responses via social media. When necesary, they can join the conversation, offer support, provide facts or anything else to steer things in the right direction. But it is not just about customer care, the webcare team can also do PR (discovering and preventing issues) and marketing (educating customers or providing feedback to product development).

Why do companies actually care about what is being said in social media? More and more companies realize that, in line with the Cluetrain Manifesto, “markets are conversations”: customers trust opinions of friends a lot more than they trust company websites, and they use information about products and services found on social media to make informed choices.

Who should be in your webcare team?
From the type of work a webcare team has to do, it should be clear that this is not a job for the IT department. Instead, people from marketing and corporate communication should be involved, and maybe even experts on your products and services. Pick your team from people who understand the norms of social media and are able to respond from a personal perspective. As such, your manager PR and corporate communication is probably not a good candidate for the job.

The tools of the trade
Webcare teams get more and more tools to discover what is currently being said about their brand, products and services. Important tools of the trade are Google Alerts, Twitter search, Technorati and Google blog search. These tools are all aimed at discovering relevant online conversations, without having to spend the whole day looking.

What is a smart social media strategy?
Unfortunately, there is no universal recipe for a smart social media strategy yet. Nevertheless, an important starting point is to accept each opinion as such, and not call opinions into question. As with any employee that takes part in an online conversation, the norm is to identify yourself as an employee of the company and behave accordingly. Also it seems important not to be drawn into online discussions: seek direct communication with the person behind the complaint. For more inspiration on social media strategies, I suggest you take a look at the IBM Social Computing guidelines.

I would like to hear your experiences with webcare teams!
(Cross-posted on the Future Workspaces teamblog)

The slides of our talk (in Dutch) are available via slideshare:

How it works
This method should be used during the initial session of people who have to collaborate. Immediately after the initial round of who is who and why are we here together today, form pairs of people from different backgrounds, cultures, organizations or whatever barrier you wish to level. Ask these pairs to write down on sticky notes what prejudices their colleagues might have against people from the other “side”. It is important not to ask what prejudices they have; as that might result in only the politically correct responses. While they are writing these down, walk around and stimulate them with questions such as: “What did your colleages say when they heard you had this session?”.

After a few minutes, when you notice that “the popcorn stops popping” ask the people from one “side” to read out what they have written down. Write key terms on a big piece of paper. Try to defer any defence (“I would like to react on that…”, “Let me put that straight…”) to the next phase. Then ask the people from the other side to read out what they have written down and collect their key terms on a different piece of paper. Then start the next phase by just asking “Who would like to react?”

Our experience is that this method is a powerful starter for cross-organizational collaboration projects.

(c) photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/agharti
Cross-posted on the Future Workspaces teamblog.

Still, telling the news at work was difficult: in 11 years these colleagues have become like family (one very literally) and I really enjoy working in the Future Workspaces team. Therefore, I would like to thank all colleagues for the many inspiring conversations we had over the years and the institute, for offering me a chance to combine my PhD with project work. Fortunately, I will still be able to wave to you from the TriMM/GriDD building.

I will be around until the end of December to properly finish my Future Workspaces activities and tie up the loose ends.

A few remarks:

• Sure, I used a tool of the devil, but Wave seems to have a problem with .docx files.
• Can I define groups of contacts? It would be nice to be able to start a Wave with my team, without having to select all individual members.
• No standard support for action points: this is something I use a lot in online collaboration.
• Wave has folders again… You can actually assign tags to waves (check the tiny button on the bottom), but these tags are not shown in the navigation pane.
• Sure, the auto translation is cool! Goodbye babelfish…

I have to give it to Google that the way they organized the Wave invites helps to build a hype: are you one of the lucky few? Did you get no invite yet? Could you please invite me too? And then after you activated Google Wave, you notice that your Google profile is outdated, so you also visit your profile page to update your picture and personal information.

What are your first impressions of Wave?

–UPDATE–
I gave a presentation at work on my first experiences with Wave:

	Quickr	Google Docs	Ning	Zoho wiki	Office Live	Box .net	Huddle	Con fluence	Base camp
Logging in
Https	?
New workspace
According to template					(1)
Access rights
My workspaces
Documents			(2)
Action points
Traceability	(3)
Notification change
Notification action points
Schedule
Online status
Chat	(4)
Knowledge base
Free	(5)					(6)	(7)	(8)	(9)
User friendly
Web application
Dutch
Ads free			(10)
Standard	DFNAS	DF	NS	DN	DFNAS	DF	DFAS	D	DA

About the demands: based on the way the customer would like to work together with people from other organizations, we have formulated the following demands on the virtual workspace. The words must, should and could in the description indicate the importance of the requirement:

• Logging in. The workspace must be secure and people need to log in before being able to access information.
• Https. Communication over the internet should be secure.
• New workspace: It must be possible to create new sub-workspaces that contain information on a specific topic/case, with specific access rights.
• According to template: It should be possible to create new workspaces according to a template to create a standard structure or to fill them with standard documents.
• Access rights. It must be possible to indicate per sub-workspace which people or groups have access (edit, view, no access)
• My workspaces. It should be possible to have an overview of the workspaces (topics/cases) you are working on.
• Documents. It should be possible to upload documents (Word or PDF) as part of a workspace. In the next phase of our experiment this must be possible.
• Action points. It must be possible to keep track of action points as part of a workspace.
• Traceability. It must be possible to see who made what changes to the workspace.
• Notification change. Users must be able to receive notifications of changes to the workspace.
• Notification action points. Users must be able to receive notifications of changes to the action points.
• Schedule. It should be possible to keep track of scheduled meetings in the workspace.
• Online status. It could be nice to see the online status of other workspace members in the workspace.
• Chat. It should be possible to exchange chat messages with other users in the workspace.
• Knowledge base. It should be possible to create a knowledge base at the highest level of the workspace, with questions and answers that all registered users can access.
• Free. The workspace should be free to use.
• User friendly. The interface of the workspace must be intuitive, clear and appealing (subjective scale).
• Web application. Users must be able to access the workspace via the internet using their web browser.
• Dutch. The workspace should have a Dutch interface.
• Ads. The workspace should not show ads.
• Standard: While it is often possible to store information in a workspace (for instance, notes about a document can be placed on a wiki), this shows which types of information (relevant in the pilot) the workspace recognizes.
  • Documents
  • Folders
  • Notes
  • Action points / tasks
  • Scheduled meetings / events

Notes:

1. Only via pre-defined templates
2. Only via external applications: Ning Apps
3. Only in the Quickr wiki
4. Requires integration with Lotus Sametime
5. The costs are €71 per person per year
6. The costs are $15 per person per month
7. Costs start at $200 per month, see http://www.huddle.net/huddle-price-plans/
8. See the pricing options at http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/pricing.jsp
9. See the pricing options at http://basecamphq.com/signup
10. Paid option

(Cross-posted on the Future Workspaces blog)

Since Wordpess is not very cooperative on a temporary hosting account, it is pretty difficult to run the old version and the new version in parallel. So, the new version needs to be set up while the old version is no longer reachable. That does not leave much space for error…

My lessons learned:
Before the transfer of the domain to the new provider takes place:

• Export your wordpress MySQL databases to your local machine (just in case). Tricky process.
• Use the “Tools -> Export” function in WordPress to get an XML file with all your posts and sore this file locally.
• FTP your website and copy your theme, plugins and uploads directory to your local machine

After the transfer:

• Set up a clean version of WordPress
• Create the appropriate user accounts
• FTP your theme, plug-ins and uploads back to the new WordPress install
• Activate your plug-ins
• Import your posts from the local export file
• Check and double-check everything