Henriette Weber

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=)

So this morning while I was pulling my daughter on a sleigh to the kindergarden – I thought about it being time for me to change the name of the title of the blog. The old title has been there for a while now (I think ruffly  3 years ?) and looked like this. I totally recall that I was so inspired by my film studies and film history that I wanted it to be something with Avant-garde and the belle epoque. It’s something that I firmly believe we still are living – other people call it a paradigm shift – which it also is, but I think “la belle epoque” is so much more glamourous, creative and me =).

Before I had that title, this blog (which has almost always been placed at henrietteweber.com – apart from 2 months to begin with) was called “only the real is unreal” which was me totally rambling about anything. While i still do that from time to time I think it’s important to evolve the blog as much as you evolve over time…

Hence, new blog title – oh and a lot of other cool new things coming up as well.

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 !

Let’s play a bit: thinking about the financial crisis – this what I will personally hope to see coming out of it from a business point of view. I am really convinced that the solution to this financial crisis is people and creativity (as always =).

1. Creativity instead of consumption – from a society point of view. This is gonna be fun

2. Measuring value to society instead of measuring everything in money

3. Doing well by doing good (this one is unescapable)

4. Involvement and more cool business that dares to fail hard and fail again, and win the heart of the users in the long run.

5. More niches – I don’ think we have seen nothing yet.

6. Please give me more vintage instead of mass produced goods. Remodified vintage. Oh joy.

7. Internet will be a catalysator for local and small business

8. Rockbandism (sorry I had to put it in there) will be the strategy of the businesses – it’s not about how you look, it’s about how you act, and guys, the world wants you to act nicely, transparent and crazy cool.

9. The climate change problem is going to be solved. We have Obama now. Everything is possible.

10. Push marketing strategies will slowly diminish (yey =)

11. Media will be aggregators instead of content providers

I really want to keep this list going – do you have any future predictions you really want on there ? tell me in the comment field, last time I did one of these I made a creativity 100 list so please join in =), I’ll add your suggestions with links to wherever you want them.

12. More publishing and less patenting – earning the credit for your ideas early without heavy economical investment is the name of the game. (Niels Christensen)

at Next09, Hamburg 5th and 6th of may, I am tranforming my “why every company should be a rock band” ebook into a new speech – the overall theme of the conference is shared economy, but I will be talking about shared branding and where it is that rockbandism is actually helping you a whole lot with your branding. I would maybe even go as far as saying that rockbandism is the precondition for good branding these days. I have been thinking a lot about how you share your brand, mainly I think it’s interesting who you want to share it with ?

- It could be your customers, potentiel customers and the market out there, but it could also be your suppliers and your stakeholders. I work with social branding everyday where you actually talk about what return you get from involving your customers in your company (and there’s a whole lot of strategic work involved in this question, because why on earth would people involve themselves in your company ? – ta da – rockbandism is why.

And a part of rockbandism is actually to share your brand inwards – aka. making sure your company is authentic and a rockband. If you are a company like innocent drinks it’s would take a huge blow to your authenticity if somebody found out that you actually shipped your goods around the world with planes. (They don’t – it’s not an option for the logistic managers at innocent drinks, planes are out of the question).

So if you really want people to involve themselves in your rockband – you need to share your brand inwards before you share it outwards. Other approaches than that would be a shame.

Another thing that you could share is the management of your brand, where you lead the brand and put the management and decisionmaking out to the users, but again, how do make sure that people actually wants to manage your brand ?

hm. more to come.

ps. crossposted at Toothless Tiger

So there’s one reason I tell people I do social marketing instead of social media marketing is that I have been living my life as an IT-person ignoring the online/offline divide. Why is the ignoration of the online/offline divide important ?

Because I have also lived with the feeling that the divide would become less and less significant as the internet became more and more mainstream. I hardly feel that there is a divide anymore. Is there ? and if there is – where is it ? The divide might actually be the computer as the portal to the internet, but that is going away too with continously upcoming peripheral devices and transitional web apps. =)

I have had this blogpost coming in a while. Both because of the above picture, but also because of a SXSW panel called sustainability and social media, but the buttomline is, that I see a lot of people and media actually making  talking down on great initiatives for the environment – because they don’t make a difference in the bigger picture. It’s probably the same guys talking down on greenwashing – (I will state that even though greenwashing is not optimal it comes from good) I would rather see that there was really green initiatives but the effect of companies being active about the environmental problem is a great thing.

They are actually moving themselves in a problem, where they used to be passive to being active.

There’s nothing really we can do as a single person, on a larger scale, that can help enviromental problems. But as I, in my work, work around viral effects, the effect is a bit bigger for every person that actually starts doing green stuff. This is how every movement in society has worked. In Denmark these days a lot of companies and municipalities and people has signed up for “turn of the light – denmark” which is a campaign where all people signing up commit to turn their lights off between 20.30 and 21.30 tonight.

This is a great thing.

However the danish newspaper Politiken (the same with the wonderful add above) wrote an article yesterday about “how initiatives like this doesn’t make a difference because the energy is sold to other countries”. Yep that’s true and I can’t believe that they actually call that a newsstory. Anyway as on the sustainability and social media panel at sxsw, this attitude on change is wrong. At the panel there was one guy who made me really angry because he was really annoyed that the companies didn’t do things right, and they did greenwashing.

We shouldn’t be angry at companies doing greenwashing. We should support companies doing greenwashing because if they get a lot of support for their greenwashing initiative, they will continue do it. on a larger scale, we as customers, can change the demand and supply, and that is why companies do greenwashing. They will optimize their products etc to be more green because then they will sell more.

Where we need to be, as a society, media and as a person is where we are active. where we do green things. Where we are not passively listening to what media are telling us. but we involve ourselves. Even though we might now inside that it doesn’t do much of a difference if one single person does it, it makes a difference if all the people surrounding that person are actually doing the same.

no more passivity, do something. greenwash. I don’t care. And if people say that it doesn’t make a difference anyway – see it as your own little revolution and think to yourself with a wink in the eye “I know something they don’t, im changing the world with my actions”.

You can’t change the world if you’re not active. And people (and surprisingly even media) will tell you that we’re doomed and it doesn’t make a difference.

Well I know better than that. Please know better than that too.

I just read Matt Balara’s very short blogpost on his impressions from SXSW (which I also attended and you guys probably know that by now – okay I’ll stop writing about SXSW soon).

Anyway what we should all take away from SXSW (even those of you out there just terribly annoyed that I keep mentioning SXSW) is that we need to do epic shit. Epic-whatever-field-your-in. And do things while you keep your integrity, don’t sell out -life’s too short.

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.

august is my first “no consumption month” for me – I have taken up a challenge from a book I bought so I can’t get any more stuff in august at least (I bet thomas is real happy for that).. I will however get the normal stuff to keep the household going =)

and I have a couple of IRL events to attend – but no more ebay or vintage dresses or shoes or books – Im tired of consumption and it doesn’t make me happy and what the world needs now is less consumption so people in less developed countries can afford to eat proper food again… – I will keep you posted if I can keep this up

nb: just a thought: this provokes the same feeling that i got when I became a vegetarian – it’s a little thing to do to make the world a better place…

Im not a vegetarian anymore – but maybe im the first declared anti-consumerist ? at least that I know of…

crossposted on greengirlsglobal.com