A Long-Distance Miracle

A word to the wise – this post contains content of a very personal nature, about the pregnancy of a very dear friend. Those wishing to know nothing about stuff like that (both the beauty and the horror) had better stop reading right now.

I received word from my good friend L, who currently lives in Sweden. Her water just broke. Those intense hours, or at most, days, before finally meeting that person you have carried around for – in her case exactly – 9 months, have finally arrived.

I am hesitant to write about this, because it feels like provoking the gods – even though I ‘m not a religious person. And perhaps also because I could’t write during my own pregnancy. But it itches, so I guess I’ll take my chances…

Having experienced the same thing almost to the exact day, 7 months ago, I feel excited, emotional, anxious and happy for her. It’s a cliché, I know, but the mixture of ecstatic joy, anxiety and surprise you feel when you are looking into the eyes of precisely the person you find thrown on your belly, is indescribable. My baby boy, by the way, was looking back at me in a state of total and absolute bewilderment, nausea and shock – but I guess that’s normal too…

My friend has crossed the boundary where it finally becomes apparent that there is no way back. It takes 9 months and an intense physical revolution in order to get to that point. The immensity of the act you are about to surrender yourself to, is as overwhelming as it is basic and purely natural. It is something that countless other women have done before you, rich poor, sick, healthy, with or without help, inside or out. And still it remains the most unique, personal, desperate and wonderful experience I have ever had. I don’t think anyone is exactly the same after it.

So I think it’s amazing that through mobile communication technology I am able to be so close to my friend in this amazing, but also frightening time. Although we’re physically multiple nations apart, I am thinking about her, sending her strength and endurance and my most intense wishes that all will be fine with her and her child, and of course her husband.

Although the joy and happiness about finally meeting my child remains much stronger, I found giving birth an agonizing and horrifying experience – contrary to what people like you to believe, hormones haven’t made me forget about the messy and painful part. So I know she can use all the positive energy and thoughts the people that love her can send her.

Which is also why, secretly, I am online already, checking out dates and airline tickets to go and visit the soon-to-be new family in their home town. I have already sent a card on my iphone with the TNT kaart sturen app, and just cannot stop feeling how lucky I am to be able to share some of the experience with her. Just a few decades ago, I would have received word of the baby’s birth at best after a couple of days, probably even weeks, whereas now I am sure it will be within hours. I don’t care if that makes me a naive technology optimist. I just love it that technology allows me to keep the bonds of friendship warm, and the joy of a shared experience possible, despite the distance.

L & W thinking about you, wishing you all the best, with all my heart!

July 26th update: L gave birth to a healthy baby girl on Saturday, July 24th, 2010. Being the amazingly precise planner she is, she managed to deliver exactly on her due date. Both mother and daughter are doing well.

Web Withdrawal

On my way back from Paris, France it suddenly hits me. I’ve been a bit cranky these last two days because I didn’t have Internet access. It wouldn’t, shouldn’t matter, except…

In his infinite wisdom Steve decided the iPad would become available ‘somewhere in July’ in the Netherlands.

Since my husband’s birthday was this weekend I decided to combine pleasure with over the top indulgement and drive to Paris to get him the iPad and a romantic weekend getaway. I know this sounds crazy, but that’s the way it is.

So yesterday we arrived in the mac store at the carrousel du Louvre, only to find out the iPad was in back order. Several Fnacs and other hardware stores later, it became apparent that we had a huge problem. I had googled the prime location before the trip. But running into supply chain problems required further web crawling.

I called a friend back home who graciously texted some more addresses. But I couldn’t use google maps to find out where to go, leaving me with only 4 more possible iPad venues which I was able to locate on the tourist map – yes a paper one, I didn’t download off-maps. Stupid me, taking Internet access for granted.

Five venues later, still no iPad. Are there any big hardware outlets outside of Paris where we might find the coveted gadget? I don’t now. Let’s use Twitter and #daretoask, perhaps somebody out there can help us. But wait no. Data roaming is just too expensive. Then it hit me. I’m suffering from web withdrawal. Functioning without mobile Internet is surprisingly hard.

I forced myself to accept iPad failure, start looking away from my iPhone and up towards the georgeous facades Paris has to offer. The craving subsided, a bit. At least until now.

Once we cross the border back into the Netherlands I’ll upload this post using my wordpress app.

Finally Someone Making Sense on Social Media ROI – and Why I Love the Web

I love Olivier Blanchard’s (@thebrandbuilder) insightful dealings with social media. I also love the artwork in his presentations. I love the way he speaks English, and I love his turtle neck. But most of all I love how he has simplified social media ROI to the essence without missing the core.

For a blogpost on building a social media business case for TOTE-M, I spend hours trawling the web to find good examples last year. My thoughts on experimenting and just finding out as you go along what works and what doesn’t were just too fuzzy. So I hoped someone else had come up with some amazing insights that I could build upon. But alas, quite a lot of buzz, no substance.

So I went back to think about what makes social media interesting from a business perspective. It not only allows customers to talk back to organizations – heck, we were always able to this, via phone, in store, email chat, etc – it also allows us to talk to each other. In public. That’s the beauty of it. Both for us and for smart organizations. Word of mouth. It’s also the horror of it. One stupid blogpost can haunt you for the rest of your life, and a zealous legal council trying to stop the online morphing of a company logo can cause so many #fails that it’s just not funny anymore. So it had to do something with generating buzz, or positive sentiment. And doesn’t an immaculate (online) reputation drive revenues? Hmm, well, yes, perhaps, but…

So how to solve the issue? The judges were still out when I took a leave of absence from work (…) . The social media serial blog, almost completed, stayed in some dusty digital drawer. Until recently. And I decided to crawl the web once more. Surely, there must be some benchmarks somewhere by now. But still no luck. Until I accidentally found Olivier Blanchard’s presentation on slideshare. He was able to express my fuzzy thoughts so eloquently. He has clearly been thinking, and definitely doing much more than me.  So great to be able to reference content like this.

And lo and behold, a few days later, I found a video of Olivier Blanchard actually walking people through his presentation, on Andy’s Answers, at smartblogs.com. Thank you Andy! And thank you Olivier Blanchard  for finally making some sense about figuring out social media ROI! This is why I love the web.

Sorry about that long intro, just go and see what the buzz is all about for yourself! Had to share this elaborately with you

Trusting Agents

While our balcony is filled with soccer supporters watching the world cup game between Argentina and Nigeria, drinking Jupilers, I read Rijn Vogelaar’s blog on Trust Agents and Superpromotors (in Dutch). I started writing a comment, but found out that what I had to say was too much to add as a comment, so decided to turn it into a post instead.

Rijn writes about the natural tendency of people to help others and the advantages this offers organizations who find out how to harness this power. He argues trust will be restored between consumers and corporations when organizations learn how ‘to create – or rather let emerge’ the situation in which people who happen to work at an organization, help others via social media channels. He is talking about Trust Agents, (from the book with the same name by Brogan and Smith – I haven’t read it by the way), people who happen to work at a company, but help others because they care, not because they are part of a webcare team for instance. Sort of like your nephew or next door neighbor working at XS4ALL and helping you fix your internet connection.

I think Rijn is right in pointing to the potential goodwill this could generate for organizations, including, but not limited to, the fact that people acting of their own accord can ultimately help develop organizations into ‘persons’. Persons, with likeable (and unlikeable) traits, with whom you can interact and develop meaningful, enduring relations. So far so good. But Rijn also points to a potential problem. Organizations need to hang back and let these situations emerge organically. You cannot go around and tell people to start using twitter or facebook and help others in their spare time, while casually acknowledging that they work for your company. This has to happen spontaneously. On the other hand, if you want people to spontaneously help others who are customers of your organization, you accept by default that they use knowledge, and sometimes even privileges acquired while working in your organization, in order to do so.

And that’s the trouble companies find themselves in if they want to rely more heavily on superpromoters and trust agents. Many companies view social media as a marketing, sales, or customer care channel. People using these channels are either deemed to be public relations officers, as for instance the WWF views them, or webcare specialists, or some other breed of people limited by guidelines and codes of conduct.

I don’t think it’s a problem perse that organizations try to manage the conversation by creating guidelines, rather, the trouble is that limiting people by laying down rules of engagement points to a more fundamental problem. The problem of trust. Rules and regulations are put in place to prevent mistakes. To make sure that no sensitive information is shared that might give the competition the advantage. Everyone who has ever done work within contact centers will know that this argumentation is often used by marketing departments to defend the fact that contact center agents don’t learn of new marketing campaigns until 5 minutes before they go live – or worse, from customers after they’ve gone live. In other words, companies have a tendency to distrust the critical faculties of their employees. It is besides the point whether this is true or not, the fact is that limiting behavior like this leads to a loss of authenticity. And authenticity and transparency of motivation is exactly why you do trust your next door neighbor to advise you on which internet provider provides the best service, but not a flashy media campaign.

If organizations refuse to let their employees be themselves – authentic – online, their endeavors will gravitate more and more towards social advertising, or even social spam. We all know how easy it has become to filter annoying TV commercials. Filtering unwanted messages on social platforms is a lot easier, and creative and smart users are already figuring out ways to filter unwantend content – and that’s if they take the trouble to filter specific comments by you and not just defriend you altogether.

In short, organizations need to find a way to deal with the fact that using social media, trust agents and superpromoters to their advantage ultimately comes down to one single thing: TRUSTING agents. This automatically means your organization will become more transparent.  It also means organizations need to reconsider which information is confidential because of competitive advantages and which isn’t (hint; much isn’t that exiting or usable to your competitors). Organizations also need to accept that mistakes will be made, and this is perhaps the hardest part.

Rijn ends his argument by pointing to the way in which nurturing your Trust Agents ultimately leads to personifying your company or brand and this is a competitive advantage. This is a good thing, and may provide an antidote to the psychopathic personality traits that large companies are prone to (watch the 2004 documentary “The Corporation” for more info). In order for this to succeed, organizations need to start trusting their employees. The ones that do will be the ones with the greatest competitive advantage.  But that’s just my opinion

On Copy Machines, Dutch Elections and the Herd Collective

Rijn Vogelaar points out in “De Superpromotor” , (thanks to @JosVink for sending it to me after MARCOM10), that people are xerox machines. We copy behavior (and appearance, mimic body and facial language, expressions, tone of voice, basically, everything) from people we for some reason trust, respect, or aspire to be like. Especially when those people enthusiastically advocate something or other.

Following tonights Dutch election on Twitter (#tk2010) proves this point. Although there are lots of original posts, most of the tweet-surge seems to consist of a small number of posts that get retweeted. Popular retweets are either funny remarks, meant to entertain the reader or show off cleverness of the sender,  or tweets by Dutch celebrities.

In Western cultures, originality is usually valued above the herd mentality. On the other hand, social networking sites, like Twitter, Facebook, etc thrive on our innate desire to copy. They stimulate sharing of content, whether it’s gossip, news, some specialist subject, or personal views about trending topics.

Re-blogging is also bon-ton, provided you acknowledge and trackback the original post. Of course everyone aspires to be the person ReTweeted, Shared or ReBlogged, to be the leader of the herd. But if you’re not, well, then selecting those posts that your inner-circle will find interesting (or you wish you’d created) is the next best thing. Sharing other people’s work, opinions and one-liners – attributed copying – is seen as a good thing. Although this is in essence normal human behavior, I’m under the impression (illusion?) that trying to make up your own mind is still considered desirable as well.

So I wonder, seen from our innate desire to copy successful behavior, and the explicit advocacy of copy-cat behavior on online social networks,  is the chilling victory of the far right in today’s elections proof that the collective herd mentality has prevailed over our desire to be unique (just like everyone else)?

Perhaps the Borg have finally arrived and our next PM will lend (copy) that famous phrase during formation talks: “Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated…” Or perhaps I’ve just read too many ReTweeted micro blogs today and I’m suffering from repetitive-brain-injury.

Why is Words With Friends Addictive?

I can’t help but wonder. Since @glossy_me got me into this iPhone scrabble app, I’ve been carrying out multiple games with friends, acquaintances and complete strangers. Whenever there’s a spare moment (of which there are not too many, leading to, amongst other things, flat-lined blogs) I can’t wait to find out what my opponents have been up to. I’m all anticipation whether I’ll be able to play my 10 point Q on a triple letter spot, or finally lay down a word which will use all 8 characters. But why?

Maybe it’s because of the thrill of seeing those letters on screen form words in my mind. I stare at them for a while, and the first thing I see is almost always a 4 letter word, which usually means there are a bunch of 3 letter options. If I wait and stare a while longer, the magic happens and sometimes the letters regroup themselves into 5, 6 or, if I’m blessed with a good set of scrabble letters, even 7 and 8 letter words. Alright, not 8 letter words, there are only 7 letters to play with. This is probably a very mundane thing happening to everyone playing letter games (boggle for any Dutchies reading this, leads to similar experiences), but still, I love that feeling of simply ‘seeing it’, so I don’t have to systematically try out all kinds of combinations to find  a playable word.

Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to play a 7 letter combination. Of course the words you can form in your head aren’t necessarily possible on the board. And seeing words appear doesn’t mean I win that many games. All that kind of sucks.

But hey, I think I’ll stay addicted to Words With Friends a while longer. If you’re interested in a game, just invite me. Username gerdiend (what else)…

Second chance for a flat-lined blog?

My blog has temporarily flat-lined. Well… That’s putting it mildly, my last post was in May.

Why is that? Well, for one thing, something happened in my life that changed a lot of things, caused a huge loss of energy, and downgraded my powers of reasoning to the level of a slightly above average endowed sheep. And I didn’t feel inclined to write about it.

This is what strikes me as weird. I’ve always been partial to the notion that using your own experiences, observations and musings as the basis for writing leads to the most interesting stuff – even if my life is rather modest and mundane, or as some might say; boring.

Then something happens to me which has all kinds of emotional and physical effects and I feel totally uninclined to write about it. In fact, I don’t feel like writing about anything at all for months…

But who knows – slowly I’m getting back some of the sensation in my frontal lobes and I’m experiencing a slight tingling in my fingers. This blog might just be recussitated from the bright white light of forgetfullness. Doesn’t every blog deserve a second chance?

What’s the difference between crowds online and in real life?

Something struck me this last Queensday in Amsterdam, as I struggled to get out of a mass of people. We were stacked so close together the accumulated smell of stale beer and sweat made me feel like Patrick Süskind‘s Jean-Baptiste Grenouille during his times in the Parisian sewers. Although wandering aimlessly around town and meeting up with friends while having a beer, checking out live bands and people trying to sell the contents of their tiny Amsterdam attics is a great past-time, whenever the crowds get too big, I scramble to get out.

Not being able to move where you want to, having so many people breathing in your neck, invading your personal space and interfering with everything you do and on top of that the knowledge that one crazy person in a little black car can be enough to cause death, destruction and mass hysteria (still), is enough for me to hurry back to my balcony and watch the crowds from my 13th  floor safe distance.

So why is it, that I try to avoid crowds in real life, when on social networks I try to connect with as many interesting people as I can? Easily amassing followers on twitter, perpetually extending your friends on facebook, myspace or hyves, and growing your business network frugally on linkedin, plaxo or naymz seems to be all important in order to succeed in this co-creating, social and interconnected web we all inhabit. So what is it that makes online crowds more bearable, or even desirable than off-line crowds? Or am I totally off-track here and are real life crowds like the ones on Queensday actually why people enjoy such holidays and are online social networks more interesting and gratifying when they are limited in numbers? Questions, questions. Suggestions, anyone?

Twitter – decluttering your friendship?

Clutter

At a CEM master class I attended recently I had an interesting discussion with a non tweeter. I had asked some of the participants how they felt about using twitter as a back channel and way to interact with people not attending the event. This person obviously had no opinion about this particular question, but did have an opinion on the uses of twitter itself.

All my usual comments on the value of a social push technology, effective way to find information fast, get updated on fast moving trends etc fell on deaf ears, and the only argument he could relate to had to do with me exclaiming that I just enjoy using it and have fun with my friends also on twitter.

“Now, that, I can relate to. Except that I don’t want to know what my friends are up to all the time, because then there’s nothing left to talk about over a beer in the bar when we finally meet up”. I had had a similar conversation with my good friend R. He stated that all these status updates merely cluttered your friendship with unnecessary white noise (R is himself an avid tweeter).

Intrigued by their comments I started wondering; do you indeed clutter your friendship with extra noise, leaving the easy going ‘what have you been up to’ obsolete and in so doing, undermine the foundations of friendship? Or does getting al the superficial status talk out of the way on twitter actually pave the way for more meaningful topics for conversation and can you deepen or broaden your relations precisely because you know what’s up. In other words: is twitter for friends actually a de-cluttering mechanism? Tweeps, what do you think?

On @mashable’s influence on the twittersphere…

Ever noticed how many of the relevant blog/news articles that discuss twitter originate from @mashable? It’s not that there aren’t millions of other bloggers and online sources taking shots at providing relevant insights, comments or just fun stuff arount twitter, but @mashable somehow stands out.

At first I had some misgivings about the way Pete Cashmore posts links to articles only – at least – I haven’t been able to catch him saying anything personal yet -  but he posts the stuff I enjoy reading. And he’s not only posting links to mashable either. He reads wired, newmediaage and introduced me, and almost 400000 of his followers to online resources such as comscore,  great visualization programs such as twitterstreamgraphs and twittersheep – it’s  a wonderful thing to be reminded of what you are once in a while .

The list could go on and on, but it’s easier to just follow @mashable.

The point is, @mashable,  is having a rather profound impact on how we perceive, experience and use twitter. Or on the way I use, perceive and experience twitter at least-I learned about #followfriday through one of their articles, used mashable’s advice on how to manage my different social networks and through a link to mediacaffeine.com found out my twitter personality.

In other words, twitter wouldn’t have been the same for me without @mashable. The way he uses twitter to generate attention for articles related to twitter use, relevance or news seems like a nice karmic circle in a way. So, am I missing something and are there more relavant tweeple out there infusing the twittersphere with useful advice and info on the socialmedia side of things? Or is @mashable having a similar effect on your user experience as well? Let me know, I’d like to find out if I’m the only @mashable addict out there!