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.

Flip and think!

Recently I found an interview hosted by Mark Suster (@msuster) with the rapper and entrepreneur Chamillionaire. Firstly I was a little bit cautious about it because I knew Mark Suster from the side of an entrepreneur and active social media user. Chamillionaire was known to me as a musician and tech addicted. I thought it was a strange mixture but this interview really got me thinking about a lot of things regarding business and especially Social Media.

Should Business-to-Business-Companies care about Social Media?

When we talk about successful usage of Social Media one often talks about nice brands targeting end customers. Not only because there are many of good examples but also because they are more visible than others. But being a company doing business to business products or services one wonders what to do with social media. You barely establish your brand with it, only few try to do business to business over the social networks like Twitter and Facebook yet. Asking themselves: Should I care about Social Media?

Schuster bleib bei deinen Leisten!?

Ein CEO hat oft genaue Ziele, welche dann so schnell wie möglich mit so wenig Arbeitsaufwand wie nötig erreicht werden sollen. Ich bin mir nicht ganz sicher, ob es überhaupt eine Situation insbesondere in der Welt der Arbeitenden gibt, die diesen Wunsch ermöglicht. Social Media ist wohl auch eher ein Fall für Zeitaufwendigkeiten und deswegen nichts für die Geschäftsführung. Oder sehen wir das falsch?

[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.

Outsourcing Social Media? Bad idea!

With all buzz around Social Media you've properly discussed it in your company or with your media agency now or then. And they offered you to create a Social Media strategy and execute it for you. While it is a great idea to let them develop a plan for you - as you have bigger problems to worry about - you should not let them execute it for you:  it won't work! No matter what you agency is promising you, it won't work. They can support you, come up with ideas and train your writing skill and how to behave in certain areas of Social Media, but they should never be in charge of execution.

Who's afraid of Social Media?

Recently we gave a presentation discussing the potential marketing of an upcoming product. Alex and me suggested using Social Media to make the step from the phase of early adopters to the mass market. Thought the listeners were quite young people and were aware of social media and its immense power they were quite sceptical, to not say scared. That got me thinking: are people scared of Social Media? And if so: Why? How can we prevent that? What can and should we do about it?

[The Insider] Hotel Berlin, Berlin

With its 52 years "Hotel Berlin, Berlin" clearly is not a new comer in hotel business. But when the hotel was bought out of a big chain in 2006 the heads decided to reinvent the hotel and its meaning once more. Beside a new facade for the building this included a new brand and new ways of marketing; taking the hotel into Social Media.

And once again Berlins third greatest hotel is leading hotel business to new innovative ways. Last week we got the great opportunity to talk to Anne Bubner, Brand and Media Manager and her Assistant Maria Langhammer both managing the Social Media appearance for the hotel. Like no one before they showed us how Social Media is more than just another communication channel and deeply effects the hotel and its processes.

Marketing by Sharing

Oh no, thats not just another TED Talk. It is not, really! If you want to see some interesting TED Talks about marketing and social media I would suggest you to have a look right here and here. They won't dissappoint you. I promise!

But lets get back to the main topic. I guess a lot of you know 37signals. They are the creators of "Basecamp" (and more) and writers of "ReWork" and "Getting Real", some awesome books on building web based services.

Jason Fried (Co-Founder and President of 37Signals, the guy in the video) talks about a possible way to promote and marketing your products and services: marketing by sharing.

Good Night my Blog, Good Morning Twitter!?

Das Wachstum rund um die Nutzung von Microblogging in Unternehmen erinnert mich in vielen Facetten an die Veränderung der Firmenkommunikation mit dem "Einbruch" der Blogs. Das Gefühl man müsste den alten Zug verlassen und mit einem anderen weiterfahren um ans Ziel zu kommen ist nun wieder erkennbar.

Vor kurzem bekam ich einen Artikel zu lesen, in dem die Meinung vertreten worden ist, Microblogging würde den Blog in Kürze ablösen, denn die Tendenz zu kurzen Mitteilungen sei nicht zu übersehen.

Dabei bin ich der Meinung, dass sowohl Blogs im ursprünglichen Sinne als Microblogging für eine gelungene Social Media Kommunikation unabdingbar sind. In einigen Gesprächen mit Unternehmen kam immer wieder die Frage auf, ob es sich denn tatsächlich lohnen würde, einen Unternehmensblog weiter zu führen, wenn doch Twitter und ähnliche Dienste vorhanden seien.

Ich sage ja!, es ist sinnvoll, aus den folgenden Gründen.

[The Insider] Freunde des Mauerpark e.V.

The Mauerpark in Berlin (between Pankow and Wedding) isn't a park as all the others. When you look at it during weekdays it looks like an old, dry fallow land you would never call "park". While on weekends it is overcrowded - feeling more overcrowded than alexander platz - and filled with all kinds of artists; there are bands playing, people dancing, there is open air karaoke and a fleemarket every sunday. It is a really special place.

And like every special place the Mauerpark needs people who take care of it. One society of 25 volunteers taking care of the Mauerpark is the "Freunde des Mauerpark e.V." ("Society of friends of the Mauerpark") who are trying to establish the park as a constant in Berlin, its culture scene and tourism. So when they thought about relaunching their webpage last year it was decided to get off the path of a "normal society webpage". The people behind "Freunde des Mauerpark e.V." wanted a website transferring all facets of the Mauerpark - they decided to go "social media". We had the great opportunity to talk to Alexander Puell from dfacts.de, the designer of the concept, the creator of the page (software wise) and the one behind most of the social media involvement of the foundation. And, boy, did we learn a lot!

Remarkable

As you may have noticed we provide you with TED Talks regularly (e.g. here and here). It is not a secret, that we love them, as far as some "Social Media and Company"-Points are in as a topic. So, here you go with another great one.

This talk is held by Seth Godin (Blog), a great marketing mind. He speaks about marketing actions and in some points about product creation. Seth Godin points out that both have to be remarkable and aim for the right target audience. That doesn't sound new to us, n'est pas? But at the same time we see a lot of companies struggling to realize especially when it comes to remarkable product and marketing strategies as well as brand management.

These are also, and as I think especially, main points which you should consider if you are about to start some kind of social media activities. And yes, I am sure that social media is a great opportunity to build your community which will have a big impact on your brand management and product creation.

Social media activities need to be remarkable and aim for the right target audience if you want to be heard in your community and get reaction/respond. Try something risky, invent some new kinds of social media experience. Don't go the old way like this proverb says:

“One who walks in another's tracks leaves no footprints.”

Now let Seth Godin do the talking!

"

Remember that!

Demand and Supply

One of the big hyped surprises last week was, without a question, Twifficiency. We told you who was behind this viral tool. The whole Twittersphere was busy linking this tool to their Twitter accounts in order to let it calculate their "Twifficiency".

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.

The New Era of Advertising

If we take a look at the global advertising market, we see companies investments heading more and more for online marketing and advertising. It is not about the general growth of the advertising market anymore but it is about the allocation between offline- and online advertising in the future and the way companies promote their products and services. That is going to be an interesting thing to talk about.

Mastering the social media geek on a party

As your company does Social Media now you have to face the fact that a lot of geeks and social media evangelists don't like you. Normally you don't have to care about that but as this group growth quickly chances are high you meet them on parties sooner or later. So you better learn how to cope with them in such a situation.

We've all experienced that: You are at party, it ain't that much fun (as in "fun party with friends") but it is okay-ish. At some point one of these geeks pulls out his new iphone/android/whatever, complains ten minutes about the bad reception but eventually is able to show the group surrounding him the thing he was looking for...To understand what happens and how to deal with it let's skip back 12 minutes. That is when it all began.

Break your mind!

Last night I was sitting in my living room while I thought about questions for a questionary about Social Media Usage in companies, how they want to use it in the future and what, in their opinion, is missing in the wide range of communication tools.


The problem was: I had no clue how to start and how to order the questions. It felt like my brain was empty, and I knew that I would need to much to get good results. That was really disappointing, because I wanted to finish at least a small overview, so I could follow up later on the next day.

So I stopped, switched off my Mac, put in some old Teddy Pendergrass songs and started to relax, think about daily issues. And suddenly I had this first question which would open the questionary. From that moment I needed 30 minutes to finish the questionary without even having a break.

Rammstein vs. van Buuren

I have been to two big gigs lately: "A State of Trance 450" (ASOT) by Armin van Buuren and Rammstein's "Liebe ist für alle da". Going through the process of finding out, buying tickets, getting there, attending and having fun I realised something: There are quiet some differences in promoting, organizing and executing these events. Looking closer it looked like a mirror of the two major ways companies act and communicate today: the classic way (Rammstein) and the new way (van Buuren).

Let me explain you what I mean by comparing these two events...

If companies were real people

most of them would be in therapy by now. I mean seriously, they only care about themselves and act only to get their drugs (theirs is called "profit"): they are ignorant, betray, use people and lie straight in their faces. Unless they need you for their goals they won't even acknowledge your existence. But if they do they only care as much as they need to for their goal: as soon as they reached it they let you fall like a hot potato.