So in these times with the “new facebook” I think it’s important to touch upon the influencers in this glammed up world known as the social web. In this social web where identities are polished to be liked and adored and well.. social- and where they are fragments of the truth (and nowhere near the truth at all) and we tend to forget that.
Where the real conversations and phonecalls and connections are sometimes forgotten because of our obsession with a facebook feed, or a timeline or something like that. In this social web world – we all have influence over our network, and even though some services out there are saying that they are measuring the influence of people – they are measuring the identity of people on the social web (you know the identity that’s polished to be liked, adored and popular.)

I often see the online Henriette Weber as Norma Jean would see Marilyn Monroe. this fictional character she steps into to make her wages. This fictional character that doesn’t lie, but who just, to their own advantage leaves out stuff that is not “sharable” and doesn’t add to what we want to achieve: influence. likability. We all want to be treated as little kings and queens right ?

But the influencers (or online identities if you will) are something we all are, and they can be used to get closer to your targetgroup. To have your targetgroup stumble over your product and services and not the other way around as you see in business as usual. So make sure your ecosystem is set up to support them, because they live of your love (and you of theirs).

This morning I got access to facebook’s timeline. My first thoughts was that it was kinda memolane.com meets about.me.

(ps. you can get to play with it too – see how here)

but here’s what I think about it :

I like that facebook is finally turning less linear and they are breaking up the browsing format. so there’s not so much scroll or load to do (however I would love to see the newsfeed before Im too exstatic about it).

Another thing I think is spot on is that it looks more like 2011 than the previous version – meaning more sharing, more pictures and I bet it will make people go in discovery mode on their friends more.

One thing I think is kinda tiresome is that the investigation and discovery mode is still mainly kept on people – instead of integrate some of people’s passions as well… or the things that people thinks are cooler than a like – but something they would re-share with their peers.

I was hoping that facebook would have integrated a bit more of a pinterest feel and make it a tad more visual (especially with the likes and shares) – and giving people incentive to like and share and subscribe more – but I think it’s coming soon. I mean for a lot of people facebook is the infrastructure of the social web. Then us firstmovers can stand in the corner and say “to a lot of people the internet is bigger than facebook”… but to some parts of the mainstream crowd  facebook is the no 1. place on the internet. Why not let facebook become the full experience to them then ?

If I was facebook I would do something more with the visual side for sure… keep people inspired by something more than text and “xx liked toothless tiger“. But where the actions that people took where more and more supported by images. It looks like they’re also turning “like” into other gestures – which I am looking forward to as well – and will be an interesting turn.. so exciting days ahead…

I think that’s what I have to say right now.Weekend is coming up and Im feeling good =)

There’s this man.. let’s call him mr. X – everytime I see him out and about on the social web, I start to studder, my face turns red and I get infurious. Especially when he’s communicating in some linkedin groups. Sometimes I even think so high about myself that I think “he’s not supposed to be using it like that” or “what is he trying to cover up”.

He is, in my eyes, the most annoying person on linkedin. I would even name him “mr. most annoying person on linkedin” and give him a tiara and stuff. Because he annoys me so incredibly much. I’ve just stopped interacting with him – really. Just cut him out of my ecosystem.

The thing is that I like people way better when they approach me and tell me what it is that they want to sell, instead of trying to wrap it into something more hypotetical subject-y thing – if they do it badly. I love the art of selling through creativity and selling through network and mind. But if you do it badly and if people (or I) can see through it all the time. Things like writing into every group “so what’s best facebook pages or linkedin company pages” and then in the comment area just keep highlighting himself over and over again. And he just clearly shows that he might be reading all these cool blogs and books, but he doesn’t have an opinion about any of these things. He just keep stating the obvious – very boring and not personal at all. Sometimes he want’s to discuss autenticity and building a brand because of who you are – and he’s not even likeable or present and he’s mean to people. What a joke.

So he:

- don’t have anything important to say

- don’t really speak his mind about anything, but just re-saying what has been said by real  cool people and stating the facts

- highlight himself everywhere

Do you know him?

He’s the guy I don’t want to be like. He’s the guy that if you’d ever put me in the same room, then I would leave. Because I can see right through him and I don’t see anything interesting. He just seems like a shell. I guess that’s my point. I don’t like shells without anything in. I love substance.

As you can see this blogpost is not about him – it’s really about me, it’s about seeing what’s triggering my feelings and my bad temper out on the social web. To some people I might be the most annoying person out there? Scary. but I think it’s important to turn things around like that and say “what is it that triggers me to feel this way”.

have a great weekend rockers=)

So there’s a lot of “why you don’t need a social media agency/strategy/something”  going on in the blogosphere right now. As always these things amuses me, mainly because I see them as fingerpointing in a world of content, where what is called bullshit upon isn’t necessarily people in general but “types in general” aka. kind of like when “social media experts” calls bullshit on other “social media experts”.
So if you don’t need a social media agency or a social media strategy I really must beg to differ.  Well, it would crazy of me not to, since  the agency/strategy/community/viral effect thing has been my bread and butter for the last 6 years.
Let me be frank: in my opinion, you need a social media agency and a strategy (and I want you to choose Toothless Tiger as said agency… cough… personal sales pitch… cough).
But besides that – I believe that social media agencies really can help you by structuring your activities on social media, tie them to a strategy, help you figure out what content is best for you, and then implement it side by side with you.

The real important part in the social media agency/strategy thing is the “back again” (in the title). I focus 20 % of my time with a client on the strategy and 20 % on the research and the analysis  then the remaining 60 % is to implement the strategy, and not only that, but to make sure that they are dressed up for a longer period of time.

I like to say that what social media agencies do is, they are help you to build a map. Or a driving plan for a given project (in the business world you would call this the strategy and action plan for something) and then they help you implement it.

We, as social <insert something here> agencies, are an outsider minority in the world of business – and we bring value, because to most companies these thoughts on the digital side of their business is priceless when they are being implemented, because it gives so much back to them. I’m not talking about generalizing or buzzwords, I’m talking hardcore implementation in co-creation and cooperation with the clients.

As always I will leave the buzzword talking to the “social media experts” the ones who care about whether or not facebook has done a new group dynamic thing or if twitter has a new design –  I honestly don’t – but I use the tools and the functionalities in my maps and implementation for my clients.

This is a question that I get a lot when I speak at events and with my clients. To what extend should companies focus their activities on facebook instead of their own site ?

I think facebook is really cool in some cases and not so cool in others… I love the fact that the interaction in there is a gamechanger for the whole internet…  But Im not fond of their ever changing terms basically saying what you can and cannot do, with your content on facebook. I think in general that terms are good and they are needed with facebook. but fx. facebooks promotion terms is not just a law to me, it’s more a creative restraint and a dictation.

So for the sake of the creative restraint and the dictation, I don’t think you should focus more on facebook than your own site. I hate when people tell me what to do, and I want the total freedom of the web and I don’t want my identity to be owned by some megacorporation in the US. To me, only to have your website on facebook would be to sell the chaos, anarchy and freedom of the internet to somebody else.

This is what I think you should do instead:

Make your site the one-stop platform for everything you:

Everything goes on there so you create more of a universe of you, than a website. This is important because we tend to hide behind the screens a bit – but a wise woman told me that I needed to burst out.. So I have around a 50 page addition on my to-do to henrietteweber.com that is going to be added along the way. Yes I am going to be full of myself here and this is where you will experience me. This is also where all the writings and videos will be. This is where you need to go to find me =)

Make social media, proactivity and other blogs your embassies:

I see my two facebook pages as embassies for henrietteweber.com, my twitter profile as well. Linkedin ? yep. Conferences ? embassies.

I see my danish blogs on erhvervsbladet.dk and amino.dk as embassies. I see my newsletter as an embassy. Comments on other blogs are embassies. Books and e-books are embassies.
By that I mean that I draw people into the henrietteweber.com “country”, and give them every reason to stick around. Because I want them right here, so I can continously inspire and convert you to buy some of my stuff so I can do more cool stuff for you guys

You can also see it as you’re own personal spiderweb.

Be specific on your embassies – state what people can expect from them and what you expect from people

My personal facebook page is for all my writings – both english and danish blogposts (on henrietteweber.com you only get the english writings)

Twitter is where I interact with my underground community aka. people within my field. I know twitter is huge in the US but not so much so in Denmark or Scandinavia even. It’s more a closed club – but a very fun one.

And so on and so forth.

But it’s a spiderweb for the magical kingdom of Henriette Weber, so I can get you here and measure your traffic and give you more good stuff…  a’right ? Henrietteweber.com is a way for you to be inspired, and for me to become better at giving you what you want from me.

So – how many of you business owners out there have thought about getting some agency to set up your facebook page? Maybe a ‘welcome’ tab under your facebook page, saying that people should sign up for a newsletter?

I don’t do stuff like that. I don’t tell people to have a welcome-tab. I sell a lot of “turning the social web (hereby also facebook) into a strategic creative tool for you, as well as giving you a detailed plan for how to use it and add to your company identity“.

Don’t get me wrong I love facebook pages, but I don’t like the “welcome – ad” because, in my humble opinion I think it’s destroying the flow of the facebook page experience. That is a really bad thing on facebook, basically because it introduces something that is ad-like in a space that is ad-free and filled with interaction (yes I know that people are posting links and that there’s ads in the sides) but not in the middle where the news feed is.

Now if you could turn that ad-welcome tab into something awesome and cool – I would roll with it all the way.

But – I haven’t seen any great welcome-tabs on a facebook page (and I’ve checked out a fair ammount of them, which is why I decided not to have one on my own facebook page.

I decided to get a facebook page for me and my writings because it gave me an opportunity to exist in the “like’rs” newsfeed, and therefore get more traffic to my blog. I think a facebook page welcome tab should call for interaction on facebook instead of sending people off, to be lost on some webpage in the middle of nowhere. And that’s what I see them doing. “go to our website” – “sign up for our newsletter”. Stuff like that.

But – I think the whole design part of a facebook page, is so limited and so “ad” like, that I would rather set a designer loose on a real webpage and then direct the traffic there via links to valuable content in the newsfeed. Continiously. Hard work, and damn creative!

I also believe that if you can’t communicate what it is that people are seeing in less than 30 words in the info box on a facebook page – you have a communication problem.

Anyway that’s just my humble opinion. I don’t like facebook ad-tabs. Get it? I like the creativity and the strategic approach to facebook. I have a whole rant coming up about the mainstreamness of facebook for businesses in a blogpost tomorrow.

But if you should have a facebook page – I think you should make it madly creative and toy around with it. If you make it flow probably and end up by enhancing my facebook experience of you instead of interupting it, I would love to see it =) (drop a link in the comment section – please?)

Here’s two tools I toyed around with, that could help you create a facebook page for yourself:

Shortstack – custom facebook tabs in minutes.

Pagemodo – design your own facebook fan page for free

And a couple of facebook page links :

How to add a video to your facebook page

How to get a custom facebook webadress

The difference between a facebook page and a group (coming to you from the almighty facebook themselves)

Im looking forward to see what you come up with.

Be creative!

Today I decided that I would move all my bookmarks from delicious.com to pinterest and evernote.

It’s a good way of going through all of them and see which ones are keepers which ones has to go, which ones are broken links and which ones are hopelessly outdated compared to who I am today – au contraire to who I was 5 years ago. it’s good fun really. Pinterest is somebody that I have researched a lot, especially since my work with fashiolista. I really digg the flow of pinterest and I think they’re spot onto something right and something that makes websites and the internet seem less linear. I digg that. it’s doesn’t look as much as a catalog or a magazine as it’s more like instant inspiration. I so want to be a part of that community and I am now…

The things that I don’t want to share with the world goes to my bookmark folder on evernote. Ciao Delicious –  I might pop by for occasional research for clients though.

In October I wrote a piece for my blog on amino.dk – that was wildly popular. So I decided to translate it into english and post it here as well – enjoy =)

I have made an ally with an advisor in my business Toothless Tiger
(she’s cool, she rocks and she’s called Mercedes), and I have found out that it might have been her that was the business backbone of Toothless Tiger instead of me. That’s just not an option, because I had to be a large part of the business backbone myself.
She has however, been a lot of value. Kicked my sweet behind and inspired thoughts about my business, and that’s just super cool.

She had me define my sales funnel, something I haven’t been using a lot since I left business school. I know it’s really important, but it’s just not something I have prioritized a lot. 
Now a sales funnel is an interesting tool – especially for me if you do a funnel based on social web – which is my god given metier. When I look at a sales funnel as a model, I see it as a model that’s both really good at defining where you are in your sales process, but ALSO a tool that’s really important if you want to get people closer to your company (warning: social media rant alert =))

(This sales funnel I have borrowed from http://www.getentrepreneurial.com)

Well, what should we use the sales funnel for on social media then? We should use it to get “top of mind” when people need a person in your EXACT field.

Let’s walk through it and start “above the red field” on the model. That’s where you’ll find twitter. Twitter is a promised land to make new contacts (and eventually get new leads). You just need to make it strategically targeted (a good way to start out is to find 5, 10 or 20 people that you really need in your future network, and after that you put aside 1 minute a day to talk to each one of them), no sales-pitchy bullshit; just genuine human conversation.

Between the red and the yellow field is facebook. Facebook is for people who are interested in you, and you want to hear from as a continous part of your network. I see facebook as a bit closer to you than twitter, because people also get access to other information about you (pics, more info), to me, facebook is more about a universe for your current social network, where twitter links to a more “formal” part of you – your webpage or someplace else where there’s a part of you that you want to sell =)

Where it get’s really interesting business wise, is at the beginning of the yellow area: where the newsletter and the blog lies. The newsletter and email are generally fantastic ways to convert social media into something closer to a sale.

So how do you get people from twitter and facebook over on your newsletter or your blog?

1. You ask them 1 after 1 in a context where the initiative is on them. If there’s someone on twitter asking a question about something and you know something about it, then it’s really ok for you to write the answer to them, and then afterwards write “I write a lot about that in my newsletter, would you like to receive it?”. It’s a pretty resource-demanding thing to start out on.

2. Create flagship content (as Chris Garrett would put it). An eBook, a guide, a how to. Something that isn’t available for everyone unless they “pay” for it, either with cash or with an email signup or something. If you want to receive Chris’ eBook about flagship content, you have to sign up to his rss feed on his blog, and in the bottom of the blogposts in the feed you’ll receive a secret link so you can download it. In Denmark I would change the RSS feed subscription with a newsletter subscription, because even though RSS is on it’s way up here, then there’s a lot of people that don’t know what it is – yet.

You get people to download the eBook by writing out about it a couple of times a day in different settings, where you will either generate more content about it (blogpost, video or something else) or take the quotes or comments about it. It shouldn’t look like a sales pitch, because basically people hate to be told what to do (also in a social media context). What you can do is to become active with other things than your own stuff and messages on facebook and twitter. I would say that you need to be 5 times as active in other places/in other conversations as you post things yourself.

Ok, we need to get to the green part of the sales funnel, and we do that through the newsletter (by writing great valuable newsletters, together with good offers – we do that on a weekly basis). When people have recieved the newsletter over time, it would be ok to add them on facebook or twitter or throw them an email and get people into a CRM system where the contact is closer.

Keep constant contact (in most CRM systems they can tell you who you haven’t talked to in a while). You can also add some keywords to contacts in a CRM system. Then, once in a while you go through it all and add tags to those who are potential clients and those who are close to becoming clients (now we are in the beginning of the blue area of the salesfunnel).

At that point the relation is nurtured to the point of knowing what color people like to wear, and they invite you for family birthdays (just kidding).

No honestly, it doesn’t need to be that close, but you could easily write them and ask if they would consider buying your stuff, and they can always answer no. And ta-da! – people from the internet converted into potential clients.

Today I am heading down to Roskilde Festival – a place I have visited at every opportunity I’ve had since 1997. Anyway this year there’s a lot of connectedness tools going on down there (foursquare camp, tweetups etc.) and I will attend as much as it as I can.  It’s awesome sitting here looking on twitter at the #rf10 tag and see what people are doing down there – I can’t wait to participate myself.

At Roskilde Festival 2007 I worked with a client of mine Jaiku.com – one of my favorite webapps of all time (and I may still add, in my opinion used to be superior to twitter as a microblogging tool), and one of my favorite clients of all time. We tried to set up to use Jaiku.com as a part of the “roskilde community” site (before it was integrated in the overall site=). I think we where around 30 people using jaiku at Roskilde 2007. It was good fun.  I remember @shevy and @aj42 and @wendelboe and I tried to plan a meetup – it was really hard though because the jaiku client drained our phones of batteries.

This year – three years down the line, things have changed and the apps are everywhere – the online/offline relations are booming and it’s a joy for me to see -  My only problem is that if I bring my iphone I will run out of batteries in a day or two. I am thinking about bringing a really old nokia instead – but then I will miss out on all the geolocated fun.

It seems like the collective education of the crowd when it comes to social apps has come so far, where as in my camp 3 years ago people where sitting and asking if I was a reporter or why I was fiddling with the phone all the time. When I said that I was updating the internet they looked puzzled to say the least. Today I don’t think anyone will ask that question. It’s a part of people’s behaviour nowadays. Even though some of it are slightly geeky, the 3 people who asked me questions about “updating the internet” will probably poke a person or two on facebook or send a tweet.

It’s amazing how fast the collective education of the crowd has gone. I wonder where we will be in 3 years =)

by the way – this blog is probably going to be quiet while I am down there – I will however upload pictures to my flickr, so you can have your daily share of me (if you miss me too much=)

I was at a Marina and the Diamonds concert yesterday. It was a mixed experience but overall it was really good inspiration – anyway she did a cover version of starstrukk at the concert that I previously listened to online.

it goes a littl’ something like this:

Now – until today, I haven’t heard the “real” version and I was awestruck at how different it where. It’s not my type of song at all.

I think the cover version by Marina is so much better. Sometimes songs and content in general can be interpreted differently by who’s saying it and how they have added their own point of view. What are you waiting for ?