[The Insider] 6 Wunderkinder

A new star appeared on the startups sky above Berlin. And it came with a bang. 6 Wunderkinder published their first to do list application wunderlist in November 2010 not even two months after they have been founded. It runs straight the top in major tech blogs, magazines and goes wild on Twitter.

Luckily the place we work is literally across the street of their offices. So we poked them on Twitter and arranged a meeting with “the marketing guy” Robert Kock to talk about this boost start and the role social media plays in this company.

Undoing Years of Efforts

Some days ago I read a tweet by Jeremiah Owyang (jowyang) - in my opinion one of the most interesting people to follow on Twitter when it comes to social media. It said:

Oh my gosh, he is so damn right!

[The Insider] 15 Talents

When you want to be the leading market place bringing together talented students with interesting company projects of innovative companies, you need to be where the students are. When the 15 Talents SIBE GmbH was founded in early 2008 it was the leading rule for structuring the company. This simple but powerful rule was the reason why 15 Talents was created with Social Media at its core, making it a true social media company.

Two years later the responsible for Sales and the company site within Xing, Andreas Griesbach, is giving us insights of the company structure and how it works today through an interview.

[Should I care about] Fans and Followers?

Social Media is mass media. More than 500 Million users in Facebook, more than 160 Million on Twitter. I am sure you know the numbers. But what about your Fanpage or your Twitter account? Are there are lot of people around? Is it even neccessary to have the ultimate goal to boost those numbers? Really: should I care about my Fans and Followers?

[The Insider] Schwarze Dose 28

Since the start in 2008 Schwarze Dose 28 (also called "28black" in the US) has been more than just an energy drink based on the açai berry. Right from the beginning the brand stood for quality, natural ingredients and aesthetics. Resulting in a huge success; offline and online. When they hopped on the Facebook-Hype going through Germany last year, they took over a community Fan Page with about a thousand fans. By now they crossed the 20 thousand marker and head for even larger numbers.

Julia Akra, Head of PR at Calidris 28 Germany, met with us and gave some insights about the beginning, the current state and the future of the Social Media involvement of Schwarze Dose 28.

[Should I care about] Location-based Services (LBS)

Even before the latest peak in downloads of scvngr  Location-based Services had a huge buzz in the internet community; Foursquare's and Gowalla's (both launched last year) growing user base put Facebook under heavy pressure. So heavy that about a month ago they launched their competitive service called Facebook Places.

Location-based services promise to "socially engage" users for your local business like cafés, bars, museums and similar public places. But how do these systems work? Why is there a hype about them? How do they try to keep this promise and what would I - as a business owner - have to do to participate? All boiling down to one major question: Should I care about Location-based Services?

The End of Top-Down Control

I'll keep it short today, I promise.
I just want to show a really good TED-Talk about how Social Media is changing the way people communicate and participate in things politicians and also companies do. This TED-Talk was held by Clay Shirky in June 2009.

stay disconnected

This Monday I talked about the Social Media Landscape. In there I mentioned in half sentence that "Most of the Media Sharing Platforms allow similar techniques [as Social Networks] by now but it isn't their main purpose." without explaining myself. What I meant with this are all the ways to follow the updates other do on their accounts. For example you can "subscribe" to a users on flickr and youtube. When ever said user is now uploading new content you'll be informed about this. This allows you to stay connected.

Well, kinda. If you are a member of as many platforms as I am (I counted almost 20 I was able to remember by hard a few month ago, since then it grew) you are not logged into each one permanently, checking or updates all the time. This is why so many of the Media Sharing Platforms allow the users to connect with Facebook or Twitter nowadays. And on first sight that sounds like the long wanted feature we were all missing: connect everything with everything and everyone and all the time.

Social Media Landscape

One term I hear a lot lately is "social media". From what I understand marketing people use this term to describe "everything but classic advertising in the internet". One big problem I have with the term and the discussion around it is that people use it in various contexts describing various aspects of it and making it look like "the big picture". In my opinion "social media" can't be understand as one big thing (like "mass media") working in one certain way with one set of rules.

I rather see a "Social Media Landscape" of various tools, ways to share or publish, connect and interact. And from what I see the rules differ between the areas in this landscape. But you can't adapt to the rules for this area when you don't know where you are. So lets start by looking at what this landscape looks like as of today.

Why Google Wave will never replace email while social networks already did

Almost a year ago Google published their "next big thing": Google Wave. And as an technique enthusiast I was psyched from the first day I saw the presentation video. I pictured all the ways this tool is going to change the world and how awesome everything would be. For those who don't know it, Google Wave is an online chat-collaboration-sharing tool. It was developed by the smart guys who came up with Google Maps. They were basically freaked out the way people use mails today and thought about "what would it look like if we would design mail today?". And that is what they did.

Besides some performance issues and missing feature Google Wave is quiet there, you can use it (drop me a line if you need an invite..!), heck I even use it at work. It is a great collaboration tool. But it won't replace mail. Sure it is still young and the developers said themselves that it will takes ages until it would do so. But standing here today, seeing what it is, I am totally sure: it will never replace email! Google Wave won't replace it for one simple reason: Email already got replaced!