Henriette Weber

So a couple of nights ago I decided to do it – give the pressrelease and the date of the launch of the book to the public. danish press release here and google translation of press release here. It feels great to launch and give the date of when you can get the book in the bookstores (august 31st 2009) still there is a lot of stuff PR and marketing wise that needs to be done (oh and the logistics=).

I think it’s been a great ride, but it’s been a tough baby to bear, I guess I knew I had to do it on my own when my ex-editor told me that she didn’t think it was time for me to publish a book, i should be doing other stuff. Now one of the first triggers to get me going is when people tell me what I can and what I can’t do, I just knew that I had to get this book out of my system – and right away.

The book to me is something that’s missing out there. Not focusing on the social tools (to me they are 10% of social marketing and branding), not to focus on why you need to do it, but simply to give people an overview on what it takes (and it takes a bit) and how they create business unusual – the type of business I find is most suited for what I call the “anarchistic ways of the internet”. So it’s been a fun progress – it has a bit of everything I have been working on for the last couple of years – rockbandism, tools, identity, revolutions, movement, marketing, branding – stuff like that.

The best that I have taken with me from writing this book is the process of it. It was hard work (not just hard- but darn hard), and yet I still know what my next book will be about, I have even started to structure it in my mind, which is scary because I have promised myself that I need to take care of myself after this first insane project.

I have a saying that I can only take care of one baby at the time – now up is my health (I need to loose weight and these days I am loosing weight as we speak =), next up I am gonna ruin my weightloss by having another real baby. (Princess P is 5 now and tired of not having any siblings), heck I might even do 2 babies in a row (aka. weightloss probably pretty much ruined).

Also if you want to know more about the bookwriting process – I did a summary a couple of weeks ago

There’s gonna be a booklaunchparty on the 28th of August where all of the internet is invited.. So I hope to see you there.. be-fan the book at facebook if you want to know more.

ps. crossposted on toothlesstiger.com

Today I write history – well a little bit of my own history that calls for champagne, dancing and a bunch of laughter- I uploaded the free introduction to my book called “return on involvement – how to use the social web to create business unusual” (in danish only so far – sorry non-danishspeaking people). The book in itself is going to be available for purchase medio june. But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the process of writing this sucker =). It started out in January 2008 where I decided that I needed to put all my thoughts on the social web and business down in a structured format – which became known in my head as “the book”.

When the first draft of the book was finished – A danish publising house contacted me because they where curious about the book. We arranged for a meeting, and after a couple of meetings – they decided they wanted to publish it – i was exstatic for a while but my smile soon faded. The book they wanted my book to be, where not the book that I had written.
they wanted a how-to book on social tools
I wanted to write a book about why social tools are necessary and what effect they can have on business – which meant no deal, they called it off first, but I am glad they did today.

A couple of days after I decided to do my own publishing house – Toothless Tiger Press , mainly because I could not see what my former publisher could provide me with at high cost, that I could buy myself and with a greater gain in the end. I don’t really think we are going to be having that many big publishing houses anymore – to me, what I have encountered that a publishing house does – doesn’t really have a place in todays world of connectedness on the internet. You have to transform and you have to transform big time. =) Toothless Tiger Press has been used as a platform for my own (only) free ebook on rockbandism so far.

In January I decided to add two more chapters to the book, in february the first round of editing started, march 2nd round of editing and in April my hands where off the manuscript and I could leave it in the hands of my excellent editor for the 3rd round of editing. These days it’s having it’s final layout, a last round of editing and then it hits the bookstores in Denmark. Meanwhile I have hired someone to translate it all to english – so you english speaking people won’t wait long ( we are talking mid-september or someting here)..

The absolutely hardest part for me, has been to let go of the book. In this area of work you can continue to work on it forever and ever. It was my wonderful husband who told me that if I didn’t stop adding stuff to this book he would go insane – and I really couldn’t have that on my shoulders. I am one of those people who are so terribly afraid of being un-original and not-that-genuine at all. So I really wanted to do my best. I think it has it – a bit of everything that I believe to be important, combined with a couple of why? how-to’s and best practice.

I hope you will all enjoy it when it launches both in danish and english !

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

I had an out-of-the-body-AHA-experience this morning. As a marketer, you have always been taught that you need to target your marketing to a targetgroup. In social marketing you focus much more on the single user instead of a “group”, and you don’t target a group anymore, because the chance that you actually are going to shoot and hit this target group is relatively small. If you have to target your marketing, target a lifestyle.

Seriously find out what lifestyle you want to be a part of, and become a part of it. Your product isn’t made for people between 14 and 25, it’s made for people between 14 and 25 that listens to depeche mode and has the ambition of becoming the no. 1 chef in the world. We’re so much more fragmented than a target group. If we think you’re cool and we identify ourselves with you – you got a date, awareness or other of those old school mumbo jumbo marketing words that is becoming more and exstinct as we speak.

Marketing has always stroke me as odd. It still does. It’s getting much much better though =)

So I am doing a LOT of talking these days about social media marketing. Which in it’s essence isn’t really marketing, but it’s something on the combination of creativity and people. Actually it’s using a brand creatively to involving people in the brand. It’s good fun, I like it. Now I don’t want to come across as an old hag (well maybe Im beginning to be =). But to me, the medias in itself aren’t interesting. It’s what they can facilitate when they are used creatively that’s the really interesting part – not the media, the network, the effect of bringing people together around objects and brands they want to be involved in. Now that’s how I define social media marketing. And that’s what defines “social” in social objects, in social marketing, and in social media.

That’s what turns me on babies =)

You don’t do anything for people by if you open a twitter account, a facebook page, a blog, or what-have-you. You provide value for people if you can find the magic key to the social network and the involvement of the users. the magic key is coolness (do I dare to say rockbandism) and substance in your brand. Little pointers people can relate too and find fantastic =)

that’s all.

I should have seen it coming long before I started using my “last-five-years-handle”: Redsoda – that one day I would not be known online as Redsoda anymore, but I would be known as my real name. There’s an increasing ammount of communities that really wants to know who you are – IRL and thereby diminishing the border between online and offline even further. If you google yourself, a lot of the stuff coming up is from social media that you are actively using.
I work everyday with online identity and social branding, and a lot of clients asks me to use my social network as a part of the branding and marketing strategy, which I refuse – unless it’s a steady employment or something that I am associated with, not only being freelance. The reason I refuse is because, that if I do that, I would become apart of the brand and marketing strategy and probably annoy my network to hell =)

Sometimes I want to be anonymous redsoda – whoever she is. I am missing a private space – where people can’t find out who I am.
I could just choose a new handle and a new identity, still at some point, people would find out that I was indeed Henriette Weber.
I might just feel nostalgic, but I am starting to miss the online anonymity where I don’t have to be anybody except for a handle.

SXSW has been great. Yesterday Bruce Sterling took the stage and did a keynote – and it was an absolutely amazing keynote. He also mentioned the “global microbrand” a term that Hugh Macleod has been discussing for a couple of years now.

Global Microbrands are or companies without space and time, that everybody know of, in small fragments of a much bigger industry. So people behind these microbrands are extremely valuable speakers at conferences, advisors etc.

I have actually been thinking about it for a while – I love my work. I love running Toothless Tiger, but sometimes it seems like I don’t “do” anything. I talk. I tell people what to do to make things work on the web. My clients think I rock.

Yesterday I even caught myself considering a really great joboffer for a fulltime job. Something I don’t do normally.

I think that even though I like the might and glory of being somewhat of a global microbrand (I don’t see myself as a global microbrand – im probably a mutation of it =) I really want to do something. Because in my head it feels like Im not doing anything. I don’t work. I talk. I write. I help people do kickass projects. But I don’t have a project of my own that I can take to webheaven, a project that is useful for other people and that I have time to work on.

My project is so far going to involve geekculture, sustainability, action instead of talking and is going to be based on community and the now-open-sourced-former-fantastic-rockstar-client jaiku.com. I think I might toy around with it since even though with all this twittering, my heart still belongs to jaiku. Maybe I’ll even do two projects. A geekculture one and a actionpacked sustainable community based on Jaiku.

I dunno yet. In my honest opinion Jaiku is the best functional microblogging service out there. It’s just not being developed anymore and I want to change that.

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

Picture by peregrino will reign on flickr

just a quick excellent pointer to a mindprovoking blogpost on the Brains On Fire Blog. It basically states that
social networks are not what we think they are. – Instead of really creating new networks it enhances already existing relations.

This is really good news for my mill, because I have always argued that you really need to supply social media and social networks with IRL relations.

YEY!

nb: the title is from the lyrics of the elastica song “nothing stays the same“.

for some strange reason ( that I can’t reveal.. sorry guys) I have been doing a lot of thinking about photosharing.
plain simple down to earth revolution.
I have been “forced” to do thinking about getting the photosharing out to the masses – or the “general public” so to speak.
how would you do this most beneficially ?
you have to make Photosharing “common”
you would want to make it local.
Im not talking Denmark here.
Im talking nitty gritty cities in the outskirts of Denmark .
BBQ parties, concerts, conferences, babies.

hell following upcoming rockbands on tour.

how do you make it common and local?

I think I have an excellent idea… but I’ll let it grow in my head for now…