Going through my backlinks I found a great posting from blogger newbie Christina Rogge titled “Just do it! The Nike-approach“, describing her first steps. The quote which got my attention was the end of that first posting (emphasis mine)

The major realization which struck me was that it is important to just do it. Start the website although one does not know everything about it yet. Because the Internet is developing so fast, you can try to plan, but will never know if it is outdated by the time you are ready to implement.

And that sentence just nails some thoughts floating around in my head for some time.  You need to experiment, you need to play around just to be able to get to know the things fast enough to start to make an informed decicsion. Not on a personal level, and especially not on a corporate level facing the customer.

There is no time any more to first have R&D to figure some stuff out, or have somebody do some dossiers about if one should dare the experiment,  then get it approved, then move it on etc – everybody has to constantly work on those skills to be ready when you want to do something. And it is not limited any more to “let the other department do it” or “that is not my job”.

Even I – as somebody who lives this stuff – am amazed on the speed of how this is currently developping. I have started to implement in my presentations a list of ‘bad news’, which focus on Twitter but are usable in general. I am using their interest in Twitter to show them the other bases they should have covered a long time ago – works like a charm. ;)

The bad news for you and your company

#1: Now is too late
If you are starting to think about Twitter just now, you are already too late. That should have been on your map at least a year ago.

#2: Buhu, my names are gone!
If your names are gone, stop complaining. You are a professionell entity and as such “securing accounts” should have been on your list at least 18 months ago and reference the one you use for domains with brands, names and products.

#3: There are no bullet proof ways to do it
There is no blueprint how to do it. We are all experimenting and making it up as we go.

#4: Twitter can only be part of you social media strategy.
You do have a social media strategy, right? Because this is what you already should be covering (covering not in the sense of doing it, but making sure you know if and how to use it or not.)

The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas

Bonus fun feature for me to ask during the presentations:
“But you do at least have an online strategy, don’t you?

#5:  Your employees HAVE to be trained by you and have to be guided.

They are not stupid or anything but it is your job to make sure they can keep up to date. And that means much more than just one conference a year for upper management.

#6: That business modell “Internet” or “Twitter” – not.
There is no money to be earned in Twitter. Nor on the Internet.
There is only money to be made with business modells and implimentations of these strategies using tools like Twitter.

So basically nothing new. I leave them with the “good news” that per se this is not really something new, it is just some new technologies behind it. But their core job and skills stays the same.

10 years old and still relevant

Something else I throw in is the Cluetrain Manifesto (web site / book). It has been 10 years now that the cluetrain manifesto is out and still most companies are not even at the part of “we do have an online strategy”.

I myself will get a new copy because I actually never had the english one in print – when it came out I still had my ‘English is devil stuff” time. ;)

Why you should work with people who know this stuff

So, how does one do it? You talk to people who know a bit or two about this, work with their experience and use their judgement to see where something fits for your company, where you may have to look into because customers expect it and which are the areas you can ignore for now.

External advice and mentoring can only be part of the equation or it will cost you a lot of money. And by talking I do not mean just one session or so, but you need to have your resident expert on this, similar to the person doing your taxes or your layer. Parts of this belongs into your own hand, part of it you can outsource although it should be done on your side, but other parts you need to rely on the skill and training of the expert.

Where do you find such a person? Well, for starters you could talk to me, especially when you are in the European timezone of course (have a look at what I do). There are a lot of people around who can help you with this – and if you would be in the space you would already know who they are. ;)

One way to find them is because they show up all the time with these new technologies. Which for one is the reason I have been in a lot of interviews for print, radio and tv over the years, first for podcasting, then second life, now twitter. It is not because I am good at faking to be a so called expert, it is just that I have played around with this stuff a lot longer than others and when somebody like me has put this into my regular toolkit, others start using it. Meaning I do have a head start plus by experience I do know how to use and implement those tools.

Look for these people and make a mental note if a name does show up regulary so you can test them if they are a fit for you and your organisation. Usually people like myself have preferences of people and kinds of organisations / corporations we like to deal with.

This needs to be happening from top down

Top management needs to give the okay for people to play around while making sure that people don’t create chaos. It is their responsibility to put up the strategies, free the budgets and use their brain to realize what this is about. Though in many companies it is still some employees who make their innocent first steps and need to be careful not to be caught. Similar to computer training (which happened in some parts) training in Social Media and co is now relevant for most of the customer facing side of the companies.

Different to just browsing the internet the evolution speed is now so fast that companies cannot rely on the individual to learn how to twitter, use facebook, blog etc etc.

Twitter is a good starting point

For one Twitter seems to be a great tool for people to get their feet wet for the first time in what we call Web 2.0 or Social Media or whatever. It is simple enough yet covers all the bases (sharing, communicating, collaboration etc), but is easy enough to handle (140 characters top and you even can do it from your mobile).

It also seems to be a great way to instead of starting to think about a big Social Media Strategy to start with a “what would we need to do / talk about / set into motion if we just wanted to start on twitter?” Going on from there, some other things fall into place and become clear.

Start simple, learn, adjust, expand, rinse and repeat. Because the next big thing – Facebook – is already there. You do know how to do those, right? :)

Robert Scoble: Will new Blog Council help big companies get small conversations?:

I’m pretty skeptical. Why? Cause I’ve done enough speaking to enough corporations now that if they don’t get why they should be talking with their customers already I don’t get how hanging out at yet another boring industry conference is going to help them to get it.

Because it is not just about blogging to the outside. they will be able to work with others who have similar needs rather than with somebody foreign to their needs and structure. They will discuss not whether WordPress is a good blogging tool or not, but how to fit social media tools into the intranet, into their IT strategy and deal with the outside. They will talk about how to deal with laws around information providing rather than about how to get more traffic.

Dealing with the Cluetrain is only part of the problem. An important one, probably the most relevant – but by far not the only one. To put it in everybody’s favorite terms of the longtail: Cluetrain as a metaphor for having to deal with the consumers / customers on the outside is the bestseller. Absolutely relevant, not to be neglected. But the longtail of problems are neither to be ignored, and they need to be dealt with too.

Dave Taylor: Big Business “Blog Council” created, business world yawns:

My translation: “we’re all clueless, but don’t want anyone to realize just how unplugged our organizations have become from the world of “marketing 2.0″, so we created a club so our ignorance can be shielded from public eyes.”

Alright, that’s probably a bit harsh, I admit, but having helped organize the terrific Blogworld Expo last month in Las Vegas, why weren’t these companies there? We had over a thousand of the smartest trend-setting bloggers and new media people in the world all neatly in one place. That’s how you learn, guys, from talking with the best in the business — and everyone else — not by hiring an expensive consultant to have discussions behind closed doors.

Because the people attending those conference in general cater to the small and the middle business market. Not to the ones of large corporations. It may hurt to read this, but Blogworld Expo is a consumer expo. Yes, also with corporate / enterprise touches, but only sprinkles.

The other entries on Techmeme looks similar at the project. To sum it up “they don’t get it, why don’t they ask us, they are clueless, they want their control back this is why they are doing it in private” yada yada.

Basically a similar response from the sphere as I encountered last year when I visited the Office 2.0 conference and saw the same kind of people crash with corporate. I can’t describe how baffled I was by their cluelessness. “I don’t get why corporate IT hates me – all we want from them is to put their data on our servers, but as soon as we say that, we get the door slammed in our face. But we are so cool!” Really? Who would have guessed. And my favorite quote? “Sap is irrelevant in the Office space.”. Right.

It is the same kind of response you get from employees complaining about the fact that they read in the morning paper about some changes in their company, rather than being told so first.

Now, let’s have a look at what the website of that blog council says (emphasis mine):

The Blog Council exists as a forum for executives to meet one another in a private, vendor-free environment and share tactics, offer advice based on past experience, and develop standards-based best practices as a model for other corporate blogs.

[...]

“Major corporations use blogs differently while abiding by the same rules and etiquette,” said Blog Council CEO Andy Sernovitz. “Individual and small-business bloggers don’t face the same issues. For example, we still need to deliver a responsible and effective corporate message, but we need to do it in the complicated environment of the blogosphere. We have to speak for a corporation, but never sound ‘corporate.’ And we have to learn to do it live, and in real-time.”

[...]

We will also serve as a voice for corporate blogging. Companies will be blogging, but we will do it differently than personal or small business blogs. There is no one “right way” to blog.

[...]

Members are 1) large corporations that 2) have significant blogs.

[...]
We don’t represent vendors, agencies or individual/small business blogs. We also don’t represent big businesses that aren’t blogging yet.

[...]
Our purpose is to help our members develop effective policies and learn from each other. Teaching ethical best practices will be a core part of our program. The Blog Council is a community, not a trade association, so we don’t set or enforce polices.

The point, repeated over and over again: “We have different needs. We need a different surrounding to talk to each other, we have different interests. We have to deal with this internally and externally, and yet make it work.”

Claiming that those corporations as well should go to the places individuals and small / middle businesses go is like to request of a video maker to ‘just’ learn how to do efficient blogging. Yes, he can make use of some of the lessons learned, but basically video has different needs. Which need to be taken care of.

I read in this announcement simply: If you have already committed to the step of doing blogging in some way, you can join. And we will help you work on issues like policies, provide best practices and at the same time make sure that your privacy is dealt with, in order for you to be able to share information. Why does everybody seem to assume that just because the council in general is a private club, that they will not listen to the outside?

And that they are only clueless people at these organisations. Hello? Have you looked at the list of the members and just make a quick guess how many employers world wide those companies have? For example Cisco, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Microsoft, Nokia and SAP? Plus I do not read anywhere that they will not invite ‘outsiders’ to contribute.

So this sounds good and relevant to me. Except the no vendors part.

Because looking at the list of members, these here catch my eye at once: Microsoft and SAP. (Notice the absence of IBM?)

Major corporations run on the combination of Microsoft and SAP software. To a point that if SAP promises to have a certain functionality, it will get marked as “this product provides the functionality” in evaluations of products.

Now, let’s say you are a major company, and you do want to get into this blogging thing. Joe Doe is provided with the job to figure this thing out. Running around the blogosphere and alike he encounters a lot of good ideas – but many of them just not applicable onto this major corporation. Just as he can’t run the company on a spreadsheet, he runs it on something called SAP. And he can’t work on some Gmail Apps online, but uses a decent mail server.

He learns, that Microsoft and SAP are involved in something called the Blog Council. Which they are part of. And it is only for major corporations. Great! Place found! Oh and btw they also provide tools (not know, but SAP already announced they want to get into that game, even become the leader).

Sweet. A place where he can share and learn, where they face the same challenges and they work with the tools he also has to deal with. That’s what I call a match made in heaven.

So congratulation on that, and the only question I do have at the moment to Andy Sernovitz basically is: You claim free of vendors, yet you have SAP and Microsoft in there.

Given, they are tremendous assets for their enterprise expertise – but they are (future) vendors in this space too.

The part which i totally disagree on? “No criticize”. Of course I disagree, it is my job to criticize. ;) But yet in the way criticizing is meant: As feedback, as a way to grow. Because if all is shiny, you will not be able to evolve. You can call it analyse, or anything else you want, but you need feedback, criticism, what ever you call it, to evolve. And looking at the current state of things – you need a lot of it.

And here I agree with the cited above – major corporations need to adapt, and do it fast. Just not the exact same way everybody else does.

Added: Direct2Dell nails it in “Why I Think the Blog Council is a Good Idea“

That means letting real people have real conversations just like individual blogs do. But it’s a bit different from a corporate perspective.

Transparency is still key, but the reality for large corporations is that there are some things we can’t discuss.

• India (feed)
• Italy (feed)
• Belgium (feed)
• Ireland (feed)
• USA (feed)
• United Kingdom (feed)
• Germany (feed)
• Canada (feed)

Now, if someone could help me convice those German companies to start adding themselves into our Company index, that would really help. I can’t believe how hard it is for people to actually enter just a little bit of information about their company – after all, it is a backlink! :)

Meaning: if you are any kind of web 2.0ish company from anywhere, head over here, check if your company is already in there and if not, enter yourself. Take this as an example.

This place is cool and already see a lot of people I *have* to talk to! Podcast Hotel is not as huge as the Portable Media Expo but sorry, the content is much much better. :)

But guess what – it does not work with my German power plugs – and I idiot never tested it of course. At home there are now 3 working adapters and I am here with one universal – just not for me.

Thank god the hotel had this baby for me – but I am afraid they want it back which is why I do some charging of batteries now – not sure when I will find the next available one :(((

Anyone wanna buy that baby from me for $25, just grab me at the Web 2,0 Expo as it should work perfectly for UK / US use :(

Tags: useless power adapter, poweradapter

Crushed by twitter bill… Ugh. Be careful people!

He pays nearly 240 dollars – may I note again that sms receiving does not cost anything over here? ;)

I would be interested to see a comparison of text message usage in the States and in other parts of the world. If I would not know better, I would assume the providers got together and said “Let’s make an app which makes people text like crazy!!”

btw, I am still skipping nearly everything at the moment on my twitter as I have def. no time for that. And I am probably going to add a second user in German and separate by language.

Tags: Twitter

I did this for several years in Germany. I always had a problem with the residency registration. In Germany you have to have a Meldeadresse (official address) registered with the government. It was always extremely difficult to convince them that my residency was in a hotel.

Beyond that one of the funniest experiences in my life was the day I moved out. The other guests looked at me very strangely as I carried out a tv, mini-fridge, about 150 DVD’s, two lamps, a rolled-up carpet, etc.

Perhaps even funnier was when someone from the hotel wanted to check that I was taking out only things that didn’t belong to the hotel. The manager came over and said, loosely translated, “mr. cbellero has spent enough at this hotel that he can take anything from the room that he wants”.

:)

Technorati Tags: fun, hotel, travel

On Google Video there is an over 40 min long Discovery channel documentary about it and although I am only half way through you should take a look too.

[And i have said this before: Where is my "pay 20-50 cents to the make of this documentary" button on those videosites (of which the person please also gets the money?

I would pay a small amount for a good documentary, recognizing how much effort has went into that for the benefit of being able to watch it. Yes, there is a channel over here which does run Discovery channel - satellite which I will not install or buy in hardware, nor watch on a TV screen and even if , it would be a dubbed version anyhow. I do have DSL and I have a computer, that is more than is needed. ]

(via Mail.)

Technorati Tags: apple, ipod, documentary, history of ipod

Interestingly now the Payperpost people “regretfully” decided that the deal was not right for them and the feedback from their community was not positive etc etc. Yeah right. As TC writes it in Amateur Hour At PayPerPost:

In a post on the PayPerPost blog today, the company said “We…dug into the Metrics platform and regretfully found that it wasn’t what we were looking for right now.” That came just a week after the official announcement of the acquisition.

Generally speaking, responsible companies “dig into” the acquisition target before they announce a deal.

As sorry as I feel for the Metric guys I have to ask the question if I am the only one who thinks that the reason for the buying was not the pure metric solution but the userbase who so willingly would put out their data and their metrics? That it is about data mining?

As nice as the Performancing solution ever would have been, I never would have signed up for it for a very basic reason: Giving away your own data for what terms are good running on blogs and how their click rates are. In case you do not know it: Most blogs do NOT earn money from their current readers but from their back catalogue, once the article is indexed and has come up in the search engine rankings.

It is then about the niches of the world where you can see a kind of unimportant niche with high clicks and good prices. Analyse it and you have a gold mine. This is what you basically give away every time you install something foreign on your page. And with Performancing you also did track your adsense clicks. Great.

Now Payperpost: They want to know and prove what is working. What better thing to deliver to possible customers than “look. These are the blogs and this is how they have topics and this is how good click through rates are” (a very simplistic view). But for this you would have needed one thing: blogs who provide the metrics.

And this is the part where the users said “no more”. The storm which rose over the acquisition of the Metric Solution to Payperpost should have shown an impact on the userbase of people saying “I quit” – and I think this is what happened. Why else should you announce a deal and then cut it off again if the basic product itself stayed the same? Because the real part of the “acquisition” fell through.

And it is a good time to look at the parts you use and integrate into your website – what will happen if that data and you as a user is sold one day, hm?

In case you are looking for a nice integrated solution again – go Feedburner. They just added site statistics and you should use it for your feed anyway. ;)

Technorati Tags: payperpost, performancing, feedburner, metrics

“We are proud that our sponsor XYZ will provide us with this gigantic connection to the Internet to make you all happy! Go forth and blog about it and be happy.” says the conference host and everybody starts the game.

Throughout the conference you then spend your time trying to connect, get happy for some minutes, try to get back on. Where again is the powerplug? Lost connection again. Shoot! I just want to do IRC which is like the lowest usage you can think of!

You start exchanging views with your friends where to find the most reliable router which crashes the least. One or the other has to leave the conference in order to “find a signal” because they have to submit an article, really do some work or other. The happy ones have gotten the costly but more reliable option of a mobile connection as this never works out.

At the end of such a conference everybody is pissed because the wifi was flaky, no Ethernet cable in sight and you know you will have to do the reading at home / at the hotel (mostly a costly option) and do all the blogging / tagging / flickering you wanted to do later.

Evening organisation is not done by online tools but by mobile phone through crappy SMS.

Additionally the conference chair expects some warm welcoming applause for the provider. (Btw: Why do you clap in such situation? They will not change if you applaud them).

So we have the pathetic situation that conference attendees hope for some connection every time and still get disappointed.

Tell me if that sounds familar.

Now, I am not a hyper technical person and I do know that there are some limitations involved as well as the technology itself but sorry. This is nearly 2007 and getting a working system up and running to satisfy the need of for example a thousand or just 500 people in the room is not rocket science if you apply some basic measures like thinking about it from the perspective of the root of all evil as well as know how to prevent some of the issues.

So Joe Reader (you are most likely male), this will your assignment if you take it! Let’s see if we can break the task down and tackle some of the problems. You just need to read any reportage about the conferences in the last months and you will find some common issues and problems appearing every fraking time!

• At any technology / geek crowed oriented conference chances are that 100 % of the participants have a laptop with wifi possibilities nowadays and guess what – they actually expect to use it. Especially in the morning when they want to check their emails and see who else is there.
  
• If for some reason the net is not working, they will try it over and over and over again in hope to once get a signal. Many may never have heard of the concept of strongest sending signal and the necessity of several routers. They will just go on and use what looks good. And this in some cases can mean that they like the other name better.
  
• If then finally something is running part of the time, some people do have their computers up as “access points” and do run p2p software. You or the host go up and ask them to switch that off and to turn off the p2p.
  
  Everybody nods and nobody thinks it is them – which is why they crash the network and have open access points. The ones knowing what they do will be able to use this sensitively. For the rest you do talk in the wrong language to them.
  
• The conference host wants them to buzz and gloat about it online during the conference so you need to have the connection up and running the whole time. No connection, no postings, no buzz.
  
• It is not good buzz when the only people posting are the ones who had to leave the conference due to problems with your connection and they had to get back to the hotel or worse.
  
• You also need to provide some ways that the presenters have access to a connection. Experience tells you that it is a stupid idea for the presenter to use the same connection (especially wifi) as the room – if will again embarrass you.
  
  As you will learn from looking at videos from presentations you will notice that despite better knowledge most presenters are also clueless in learning from experience and do not prepare a self sustainable presentation which can run without net connection.
  
  If you have another room for presentation or just other sponsors and they need a connection, you will make sure that they as well have a separate connection to be able to showcase whatever they want.

So we have a lot of experience / same old problems – and still there are no solutions to it. Why oh why is this? When we look closer at the problem we do have the following

• technical incompetence on side of the attendees
• technical limitations
• technical incompetence on side of the organizers / connectivity providers
• organizers / connectivity providers not being able to think smart

technical incompetence on side of the attendees

Let’s face it: Many people just click on connect and expect a wonder to happen. They will not know if their computer is cluttering up your system with broadcast messages, they will not understand or care if they are “access points” and they just want to run skype, not knowing what they do there. Before you try to get a hold of them, start on your side first, because that is much easier to deal with.

Even with a knowledgeable audience – last year in Paris iirc we crashed not only the leblog network but the chamber of commerce’s one and the university which was in the same building.

technical limitations

So you wanna set up connectivity on a conference with X  participants. Just looking at the pure number you will be able to smell trouble. X participants means X+x users on your network – laptops and mobile phones.

I would be happy to link to somebody giving a small oversight of what the main problems are which are happening here, as I am not an network technician. But interestingly most of those problems are homemade which is why I will come back to technical limitations at the end.

technical incompetence on side of the organizers / connectivity providers

You should never assume that your attendees will be able to know what they are doing. You need to cope with worst case scenarios (and it is not the first time this is happening, so you do not have an excuse).

If you will not be able to bring up a reliable working system with wifi then leave it. And provide ethernet cables or get a sponsor for one of those nice small mobile options where you can track and expand a cable – makes a GREAT schwag gift. (I got mine from Lufthansa when they where promoting their wireless service in the planes …)

But lets stay with the idea of wireless for a second. You know you will have your so called “inexperienced” people who not even try to have their laptop set up to be an access point – they do not know. Find a way to find those laptops and notify the owner. (Am I the only one thinking trace the access point not in my list of allowed access points by mac address and net send here?!)

Get an intern and give him or her the task of finding those people. Set out a bounty or whatever.

People using peer to peer software

Trace the usual suspects of application, hunt the ip / mac down, message the owner as in “your laptop will blow up in 10 seconds if you do not stop this. We have your mac address”. AND: Take your time to LIST the p2p software you want to ban during the conference. Because most people do not realize what actually runs on p2p, like for example skype.

organizers / connectivity providers not being able to think smart

They will crash your routers and connection. You know it. Why not deal with it?

• Name the access points in a way normal user understand what to do. Like at the last Leweb: Organize seat rows and put up signs like ‘please connect to this name of access point. It is your best, trust us.’ And they did not use geeky names but colours. Even if you did not understand french you will be able to identify rouge, noir, prune etc.
  
• Provide places outside with wired access so people who have to send something will have a way of doing so. People will use this fast connection to shortly send up those flickr fotos and then go back happy that they did not need to use the wifi.
  
• Provide places with wired ethernet. As there are technical limitations which cannot be overcome at the moment – we understand. We just want our fix. We even will bring our own cables if you tell us to and promise us connectivity. We need cables anyhow for our laptop power.
  
• If part of the problem is getting people to connect due to the amount of tries to get an IP address – then distribute preset IP addresses! I’d rather go through the hassle of using such than not having a connection. Put it in the Schwag bag or something.
  
• If your wifi uses security settings or needs special attention: Those information belong on the screen, in big letters, and need to be accessible everywhere. It is a bad sign when attendees memorize 10 digit access code.
  
• Bandwidth always seems to small and nobody really has a grasp of how much data is transferred. It may be technical but get somebody to EXPLAIN what is happening as well as provide statistics at half time to show the participants that there actually is something happening. Have a screen on the side / in the hall to show current traffic.
  
• Dress up your team to make them recognizable. I would suggest dart target pictures btw. Make Network angels – that will be a great lesson for people you want to train to deal with angry customers. There is only a limited amount of laptops floating around and network problems so not much of a problem.
  
• Make a net check point or something. Let people bring their laptop to get it checked for malicious stuff happening from there.
  
• If you are also a mobile provider: You know you will have problems. You know you will have a depending customer base which is angry to annoyed. So why not make a special deal at the conference setup and show them through the days of the conference how your mobile service is working?
  
  Take a deposit for the card, get a free connection for those days and offer it to special people or all of them. You not only will get a mass test, a good feedback if you do it clever. You might even get a new contract or more out of it.

technical limitations II

even if every option is exhausted (and my listing above is by far not complete in any way) there will be technical limitations. What do you do with such? Just cave? No. You go out and invent something new which can deal with these new requirements.

And in case you think: 2Why care about such an event, this is only happening some times a year” then try to think some years in the future and realize that the times where so many connections are coming to your service will come soon and you will have to deal with it anyhow.

What else did I miss?

Suggestions happily welcome.

Technorati Tags: wifi, conferences, connectivity