Management Consultants for Web Strategy and E-Business Development, CRM, SEO, SEM, Paid Inclusion, Social Media, Marketing - Lars Hilse » mass collaboration

German media continues to demonize social media

Lars Hilse — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 19:00:44 +0000

A few years ago it was the German media proclaimed that blogs had no future simply because they would give away too much information about the users and that they could not be kept private.

I have found my blog to be a most valuable platform – and so do my over 5000 subscribers.

Yesterday I was shocked to see that they haven’t learned and that the witch-hunt seems to continue: only with a different “witch”.

Now German media outlets, especially the Westdeutscher-Rundfunk (Government-related tv station), has repeatedly aired programs which totally falsify information in context to social networks.

Therein they stated that the information which people upload and enter on to social networks are indexed by search engines instead of the truth that they are only searchable if I the user decide that they should be.

A long line of arguments followed, totally torn out of context, but the primary indicators that this piece of “information” was not really true was that Facebook had 2 million members.

While this may be true for Germans registered on Facebook it was not mentioned by the network that they have a few million more.

If this trend of negative propaganda should continue I think a lot of German companies will endanger their competitiveness on the global markets as they have done with not embracing blogs. Most German companies could be doing better in terms of search engine score and public relations work if they were to utilize these and other great instruments out there.

Let’s see what the next trend in 2010 will be and what stories German media outlets will come up with to demonize those.

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Should CEOs blog?

Lars Hilse — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:38:42 +0000

you don’t have to pay too much attention to opinions and discussion. What you have to figure out for your organisation is whether you want to participate in the mass collaboration aspect of web 2.0.

It’s not about collecting anymore. It’s about sharing. It’s about sharing what your CEO, and thus your organisation has learned from certain experiences. Yes, even if your CEO has made a mistake, this can be posted and can prevent other decision makers on the globe from making the same mistake. Remember: making errors and wrong decisions is human. Not talking about them is pure vanity.

These are the facts that will make a community out of the internet. And as long as the information you publish does not compromise confidential parts of your business, your business will benefit from what your CEO has to say because it will always lead back to the image of your company.

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Enterprise 2.0 – Show me the money!

Lars Hilse — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:29:24 +0000

The value of Enterprise 2.0 is nothing that you can grab. At least not for the moment. Things like knowledge management and internal communication (mass collaboration throughout the different departments etc.) will raise the value of your business tremendously to external investors though.

Furthermore, there are issues like the fluctuation in personnel. Employing someone today may very well result in a headhunter standing in your door and draging this valuable resource out of your company within months, leaving the company with a painful loss. If this organization had a proper knowledge management system installed and encouraged their employees to document what they do etc., the loss would not have been as tremendous.

These are just some of the examples that go along with Enterprise 2.0, not to mention issues like CRM, corporate, internal and external blogging, etc.

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If you have a blog (hosted on typepad for example) and have the blog feeding into your web-site w/i a frame, does google & other web-sites count the blog as your web-site content?

Lars Hilse — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:23:02 +0000

a clear yes and no
If you have hosted blog solution google and co will not count the content as something that belongs to your website. YET! the content you submit there will be ranked higher because the blogs you write on will usually have a kick a** pagerank which – if you place links back to your website – you/your website will benefit from.
That being said: using a blog inside your website is interesting also. Reason being, that you provide your thoughts and insights on your corporate ID, etc. NOTE:! If you pull your feed into your website do not do it with frames because SEs will not index the content properly. Instead, use script to import the RSS feed, reformat it to fit your websites layout and then have it displayed there.

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What do you foresee as Blogging 2.0?

Lars Hilse — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:20:01 +0000

actually, blogging is 2.0 – so there is no real more growth to the whole issue.
Yet, if you’re referring to the direction blogging is going to take, then I would say that we’re going to move more and more towards blogging becoming something exceptionally social with a lot of content contributors on few niche platforms, which will then become pretty famous.
But unfortunatly, my glass ball is broken, so these were just my 2 cents

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Enterprise 2.0 – Community V/S Control?

Lars Hilse — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:16:20 +0000

no, I don’t. A lot of enterprises don’t see the value of mass collaboration and which benefits it brings along. And if they do, they deploy a platform but do not encourage their employees to use it adequatly.
Now, I know that the hardest task in implementing an E 2.0 solution inside an organization is to get the people to contribute but there are simple measures I have worked out to do so. And the whole organization profits from these because of the high amount of information flow taking place.

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