Henriette Weber

Today it’s blog action day, and this year, more important than ever, it’s about climate change.

It’s something I feel very passionate about, and someting that we know that we need to act upon now if the status quo of gaia needs to be maintained.

Also from my writings on Green Girls Global, I also figured out that you have to have a positive and creative outlook on this HUGE challenge otherwise it could really get you depressed.  With this attitude towards climate changes I was ready to go explore – and there’s so many awesome things out there happening in this area to make the world a better place for the future generations. On the other hand, I get increasingly upset when I see that some people don’t really care – and why should they – I mean we probably won’t live to see the worst of it, But our kids will, and their kids, and their kids.

So I can get really sad when I walk into a house where all the lightbulbs aren’t energy efficient, when people don’t believe in ecology, when they can’t see what all these hyped things are good for, and they put me and my kids in some sort of generational dictatorship, where we decide the outcome of the world for the kids, but we’re to caught up in social media, business, life or whatever to care.

Why should you chose to put solarpanels on your house ? because it’s important that we redesign our energy consumption. why should you eat ecological foods? because it’s healthier, it’s better for the animals, and the ecological farmers are doing so much to try and bind the CO2 in the ground. Why should you eat more vegetables ? because it makes you look like a rockstar and if you eat more vegetables you won’t eat as much meat – and our global meat production is the no 1. cause to the climate changes.

We all know by now that the best thing you can do to affect the climate changes in a positive direction is to become vegetarian. I think that in 3 -5 years you will be looked down upon if you don’t do your share to battle this. You won’t see computers or phones that are using more energy than they are giving – everything will be based on the natural unlimited resources we have – and it could be that I come across as such a hippie – but this is bloody important.

Why should you blog about climate changes, because others might support you and write their thoughts, They might comment and participate in the discussion somewhere, or cut back energy consumption in their house because they start monitoring their overall electricity level. You should do it because you have a voice, and that voice matters..

There’s so many reasons to be a part of this movement. There’s so many ways we can change this for the better. We have all the tools to make it happen. I believe in you. I believe in us. I really think we can pull this off.

Last week I came across an article on NY times called “The Day Facebook Changed: Messages to Become Public by Default” which basically means that the whole structure of facebook is changing as well. For me, as a social marketing rebel extraordinaire it means that you can actually start measuring statusmessages inside facebook as a part of your online reputation or as a part of measuring return on involvement. It basically makes my day easier in the end. The original release from facebook is here.

But what does it mean to the people on facebook – the ones that doesn’t have their statusmessages rss’ed in from twitter ? well with a development of the facebook API it could mean that your data will be displayed other places than on facebook, as you have with twitter and then some companies who shows a defined by hashtags twitter search on their own site. So in some ways facebook starts to resemble twitter a lot when it comes to the statusmessage part.

I am a facebook fangirl – and I think that this approach will open up the community more and have it become more transitional – meaning that facebook’ing doesn’t have to happen on facebook anymore, it could also happen on other people’s blog, facebook connect etc, facebook searches and hashtags (as with twitter). So is this the dawn of seeing facebook becoming more of an internet social infrastructure, than a community ? I can actually see it happen – it scares me a bit. Majorly because for a lot of people, their facebook is their online identity behind closed walls – now it’s going to be more like online identity in front of open windows.

Interesting move for sure.

I have been thinking increasingly about local and hyperlocal initiatives and communites recently – which is something I think we as a society needs to hold on to, in these days of connectedness.  So this post is about offline communities – kind of like my own offline initiative for online people called IRL.

I’ll be the first to admit that don’t know the people who lives around me, yet I know so much more about people I meet online and IRL with common interest. This frightens me a bit. I have some idea about who these people are, but the communication in our local area is pretty much non-existent (I don’t really do a lot to participate in it, either). However I think everyone around my hood has a good connection with the small supermarket that more often than good is, is actually supplying us with a pretty big ammount of groceries that would be less expensive everywhere else. But my supermarket is a party, meaning that he celebrates birthday and he has a small ammount of some really cool products – products that are quite unusual for a danish small supermarket. I think he really saw real soon that around here there is no community between people. He started to make speciel events, postings of what is happening in the local gym hall and school and basically become a centerpoint for the community.

You are kind of scared of them because they seem to know everything. At the same point, they are becoming an invaluable piece in everybody’s life around here because instead of just building local – the are actually making the local community grow as well. It makes me happy =)

I can’t sit still these days – so I have decided to do another event within the field of social media : Socialmediacamp Copenhagen.

Socialmediacamp Copenhagen is an un-conference that seeks to research and teach people about social media: blogs, podcasts, video, social networks, online communities and transitional web apps. An un-conference is a conference/workshop-y format where all the participants is prepared to participate in the camp in different ways. Putted another way, you have to prepare something that you’re passionate about that could occupy the other participants for a minimum of 30 minute

Who is it for ?

Basically everyone can participate in Socialmediacamp Copenhagen, no matter if you are a super social media user, an expert or a newbie. If you have any interest in Social Media Socialmediacamp Copenhagen is the place to be. So take a look at it, and sign up.

ps. Crossposted on Toothless Tiger.com

So I have been wanting to write this for about 2 weeks. Mostly because my email is flooded with questions about the “new” twitter thing. Yep twitter has gone mainstream in Denmark as well by now. So to all you wonderful people out there I have decided to explain a couple of things about twitter, how it differs from facebook, and how you can use it for marketing and branding.

If you look at facebook and the actions there (be it companies, profiles, groups or events) facebook is excellent at creating a social tail. A tail defined by your actions in facebook (and also a fragment of your online presence – supplied by RSS). This is what facebook does and is excelling in at this point. Interacting and exploring other people on behalf of data they themselves put out there.

Now Twitter is different – and it doesn’t have the same kind of social tail. Twitter is like small social raindrops of information more frequently and more impulsive than facebook is. Twitter seems agile, where facebook seems huge.

You can explore people on facebook. You can explore people on twitter. But where facebook is great to find out a lot of stuff about people based on a context, Twitter is great at exploring people based on conversation and interactions.

So you can actually follow people on twitter that doesn’t have to follow you back. You are being continously updated on people and brands you think are interesting – both on mobile but also on the web.

Furthermore you can actually import your twitterfeed to facebook and have twitter run as statusmessages on facebook – which also makes twitter a transitional community (the way to go in my Point of View),

Why should you be on both twitter and facebook ?

Because it’s two different kinds of interactions going on in facebook and on twitter. If you want to you could see twitter as “yet-another-social-media-distribution-channel”, otherwise you could see it as a valuable talk/feedback mechanism. Facebook is so social all the way, but I am afraid that its not where the cool kids hang for that much longer. Not when you have tools like twitter to supplement a part of it. from a marketing point of view you really need both these days.

oh and a couple of companies I think are doing one hell of a job on twitter.com

- http://twitter.com/zappos – Tony the CEO of Zappos.com has a great twitter voice

- the same does wired magazine http://twitter.com/wired

Basically if you want to toy around with twitter as a part of your marketing, remember no salespitches and don’t be rude or stupid. if you are posting stuff on twitter remember it has to be relevant information for the people following you. I suggest you head over there and try it out – Im here if you need me =)

So these days in the sphere of social marketing there’s a lot of social media bloggers who are talking about skittles new social media move – turning their own homepage over to real time results from twitter, and outsourcing photos and videos to flickr and youtube amongst other things. Some of these bloggers think that the skittles case is the worst thing ever to happen to social media branding, 0thers are more neutral.

I think this case has the bravery that we all, as experts and consultants, are urging the companies to have. I would say that letting go of the control of a major part of your website is not really what you want to do – brandwise.

Another thing that we constantly see is that companies would rather display the communities that they participate in, instead of embracing them. The “old” social media marketing saying of “meeting people where they are” – which I like a lot and preach a lot, is replaced by “displaying people where they are – if they talk about skittles”. There isn’t really any interaction. Some people are already  spamming  the campaign and writing skittles after their normal twitter’s – which I think is not where skittles wants to see this heading at all. So the skittles site is going to be filled with skittles twitter spam. Pretty useless. Maybe skittlesspam will be a word used to describe initiatives in the future ? who knows.

My judgement is that, even though it’s hyped a lot these days – this campaign is not going to work for skittles, mainly because it doesn’t really give anything to the skittles brand apart from showing what people are saying about the word “skittles”. I think skittlesspam is all that is going to come from this.

And onto something else – ABBA – one of my alltime favorite bands is launching an online music store for their fans. The great part about this is that they are making the musicstore transitional – which means that their fans will be able to have an ABBA music store on their facebook profile or on their blogs (they have around 176.000 fans in their community already. Now this is something (on the contrary to skittles)  that is actually involving people who would love to be involved in ABBA – Great stuff.

Mama Mia =) -via Kullin.net

I want to touch upon a tendency in communities that is outstandingly fantastic, if you want to create some sort of automatic online presence (in addition to your “real” online presence, not as a substitute to it – you hear?). You can actually import your blog into communities via an RSS feed  (if you don’t know what RSS really is check it out here). Normally you call this process “feeding”.

So what communities are supporting this?

I would define the communities supporting this as “communities with other people as social objects”. Meaning communities celebrating social, connections, business etc. Not to get to specific I will like to highlight 3 communities where you can import your blog: Facebook, linkedin and twitter.

Facebook user:

As a facebook user you can import your blog:

1.  On the “notes page” select the “Import a blog” link on the right side of the notes page

2. Enter the URL of your blog

3. Click “save settings”

Now everytime you blog something on your personal blog, it is also published on your facebook profile.

Facebook page:

on your facebook page, find the box where it says “notes”. On my facebook page for Toothless Tiger the box with notes is on the righthand side, under the “events” box. Now on your page an orange icon will appear when the page is importing a blog RSS from elsewhere.

Twitter: there is a service called Twitterfeed where you simply provide the URL for the blog (or the RSS feed) and attach it to your user.

Linkedin.com:

On linkedin you can import your wordpress blog under “applications” – as far as I have experienced, it’s only a wordpress application that is actually supplying linkedin.com with blog feeds these days – so the rest of you will have to wait (on the other hand – why use anything else than wordpress ?)

Anyway:

1. log in

2: click profile in the lefthand menu

3: you are now on your profile, scroll down to under your “summary” – you will find an “application” tab. Here you can add your wordpress application and drag your blog rss feed onto your profile.

ps. I have installed a slideshare.net application and a wordpress application on my linkedin profile. I think it works great because it’s not too noisy with only two applications in linkedin.com

pps. something you should also work around is your summary on linkedin - I have worked on mine a lot and I think it represents me really well by now.

crossposted on eeze.dk

Today I want to take upon two subjects that I think is highly underestimated in communities; commenting and control.

Commenting in my point of view is the most useful thing that has come out of web 2.0, basically because it is  the main reason that online conversations and communities can carry on and on an on..  Also it’s the most simple and the best way to actually engage in a community and give your say either as a normal user of the community or as a company.

How so ?

Before web 2.0 commenting and also socializing on the internet happened in closed forums and discussionboards.

Along came blogs and it really  made the web more social – because of the commenting functions. Still I would argue that blogs really are broadcasting tools made public, because it is still completely in the eye of the “publisher” or “blogger” what content will be posted. I love blogs because the have made me have a voice to the people that wants to hear what I have to say.

But – blogs are still within the complete control of the company. You publish. You Strategize. You decide. Communities however – these days are not build on blogs – but they are build on the community feeling, that you get from links, and by links I mean – comments, comments on everything.

It seems like the level of control is one step further away from the companies in communities. One control step further away from the company than blogging. Why is that ? well because the communities, comments and control cannot be managed or integrated in a structure.

the structure of comments is like outbursts and you never know what you’re gonna get.

So this is the very first post in the henrietteweber.com “I heart communities” blogcolumn. The subject is a question I am being asked continously by a lot of my clients. Lets start out with the question “why you should have a facebook page”.

1. Facebook pages are public. This means that search engines index them and you appear in searches on google on a given subject. this also means search engine optimization.

2. Facebook pages have links – meaning you could get a little link love in your statistics from the facebook community.

3.  Facebook pages have RSS integration - meaning that you could actually have your blog appear on your facebook page. (blog+facebook page+ Search on the big ol’ internet= more visitors on your site.

4. You can update ALL your fans at once. This means that no matter if you have 5 fans or 50.000 you can reach them with a wink of an eye.

5. When someone be-fans you, it appears in their newsfeed (and gives you exposure to THEIR network as well)

6. If you know of some pages that you think are awfully hot and cool - in relation to the mission of your facebook page – add them to “favorite pages” on your facebook page.

7. It takes you about 5 minutes to make a page in the standard design. A real good idea is to integrate some of your other web 2.0 tools you use daily on the facebook page – mo’ involvement and action creates mo’ fans.

So now you have a facebook page. Good for you! - but how do we get people to become fans ?

1. A good way to start will be to define something that the fans get from you, that no one else gets (and it shouldn’t be salespitches about your products) – it should be something of VALUE (to the fans – and not to you)  and something REMARKABLE to make them CURIOUS. What could that be ? People will get tired of your stardom if you don’t appreciate your fans and give them value.

2. Find the people amongst your facebook friends that is actually interested in you and your company. Send them a facebook message telling them that their support means the world to you and you have created a facebook page that you would love for them to become a fan. You tell them what your valueable, remarkable secret thing that you only involve your fans in. Make it good. this is your shot at having your friend be-fan you.

3. Write about your facebook page elsewhere than facebook. if you have a blog or a webpage, why not give your visitors the option to go and see you on facebook as well.

4. Create events from your facebook page. involve your fans. These people are the people that is the most passionate about your company. invite them to a champagne brunch, a cupcake party or a mushroom hunting trip.

5. Upload pictures and videos that supports your page (please promise me not to do salespitches – it’s communities we are talking about here.. salespitches are a BIG no no – and creates more badwill than goodwill)

6. Ask people to put up fan photos and fan videos from the events – involve the fans in the page – this is really hard but you can help it along.

7. Find facebook groups and facebook pages where you can involve yourself (remember again – involvement is not salespitches – involvement  on the internet, amongst other things is listening and commenting and being proactive in the context of the gr0up page (not outside of context – then it becomes ackward and marketing-y).

8. So now you have your fans - what do you want them to do ?. Oh you want them to tell their friends that they should befan you. You want them to become groupies instead of fans ? great. Listen up closely though. You wont get it with posting news about your business to your fans. You get that with posting genuinely valuable content from your world to your fans. News about your business they can get from your newsletter.

In conclusion: facebook pages and fans is not about spreading messages or marketing, it about long-term involvement in a community and branding effects.

Now go out on the big internet and be happy!

ps. I will love for you to actually use this and republish it. But I really hope that you will give me link + credit for it. This is hard work=)

pps. crossposted on eeze.dk