here’s a video from a night filled with sparklies (champagne) pizza, boats, beach and fantastic people:

we still have a bunch of shares to sell off around 100 at 500 DKR a piece – we need to sell around 10 more this summer to get the engine working – so please contact me at henriette @ toothlesstiger . com and become a shareholder in the coolest – most action packed IRL startup around.

So this is to get the engine working – in the fall we will actually try and fund for a winterhood and for a paintremoving/ painting job.. so still lots to be done – internally as well as externally =)

btw that we are aiming for is a miniature version of Alastair Callender’s Soliloquy – the super green super yacht. We just want to make a super retro super green coworkingboat. the yacht comes later =)

Great article on the superyacht on coolhunting.com

ps. pictures from the coworkingboatpan party+ progress here

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.

Reboot was fantastic as every year however the focus is being taken more and more away from the speakers and to the people instead – which is why i choose to go to reboot every year – because of the openess and the creativity from the other people there. NOT that the speakers don’t do a great job- but reboot is more than that.

On saturday I had a coworkingboat pan launch party (more on that later) – where it became obvious how many of the people I am calling “friends” these days where some that I have met at reboot – and in particular reboot7. Reboot7 changed my life. Reboot11 confirmed me in what I believe in most – and it gave me so many thoughts. It basically made me reboot my vision of action – which was the organizers goal.

You succeeded but you also did more than that – you made me jump and smile and laugh:

thanks =)

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 !

this breaks my heart. And it’s one of the reasons I got into marketing for the first place – im unacceptable of things like these – so nice going major brands. Im inparticular so disappointed to see IKEA on that list – a company I have used as casestudies in my talking and speaking because they actually look like they are doing good stuff. They where even on a panel at the nordic climate convention in copenhagen last year stating how much good they did for the environment. I guess not ?.

The sad sad part is that these companies will probably all use the same excuse for doing this and causing us all harm by global warming “it’s hard to manage your suppliers”. well for me – that’s not a good enough excuse. I have talked with companies where the ethics of the company was higher than anything else. Flying their goods around wasn’t an option to solve the logistic problem of getting parts of a product form a – z. These companies are so much smaller than ikea or nike – so they could probably make an effort and do it too.

Anyway the tigers has build something that are going to measure companies by their faults and their actions – basically how much of a difference they do to save the world.

it’s coming up shortly in closed beta and it’s gonna be called superhumanity – doing well by doing good. We have a lot of great people working on this concept which is still very much in the making. I’ll let you know when something happens on those parts – we are almost ready to rock n’ roll =)

I have been giving my looks upon social marketing on a danish blog ( sorry in danish only guys) lately, I have been elaborating on it over and over again in my head and I have a couple of points I would like to discuss here on my own blog. Now if you decide to let go of the control of your brand and start using the involvement and the engagement as a marketing tool (a couple of campaigns lately has done that – without the “best” outcome for the brand – skittles, starbucks, motrin, slideshare etc.) The problem is that people on the business side of life see this as a failed marketing campaign. Heck “fail” is probably the box they normally put these things of “oh people did not act around the brand the way I expected”.

From a consultants side of the table, on of the first things I would encourage companies to is to let go of the control and start putting their content where people already where. Places like facebook, youtube, digg and one the 10.000 other social media and web 2.0 tools out there.

But seriously is it still a discussion about control ? – well not really – not in my eyes for sure. Is it about failing ? Nah. it’s about companies getting their act together and start doing cool stuff. It’s about not seeing a campaign as a failure because you achieve getting people to engage in a brand, but then they don’t engage in the brand doing only good stuff. Some of the stuff they do with your brand might be pretty scary shit for the management of the company, it might be scary for business as usual. But seriously if you can get in the attention stream of people and having them spending 10 minutes taking anti-pictures of your brand – you don’t have to see this campaign as a failure, you should see it as something that you seriously need to adress.

In my view there is no magic middle for companies to lie in the sun and make money with no opinion and nothing to stand for anymore. Motrin got their ass kicked pretty bad with their motrin mommy ad (I as a mother cannot see how the commercial could air, because in short it is offensive and disrespectful to mothers) – but if that’s what they stand for, fine by me, I just wouldn’t buy their products. Other people would probably.

My point is, that there’s no magic place in the sun – where people don’t have opinions about you anymore, either people will think you rock or they will think you suck. Sucking is to be taken seriously because it shows that some people think that your existence as a company – well basically shouldn’t be  (rockin’ is for partying hard and being cool – and do more rockin stuff and being cooler)…

Engaging people makes you wiser, for good or bad, it shows you what you really need to work on as a company – especially over time.

1. you mainly do producttalk – so you got the conversation thing going on – apart from no one is answering.  you blog about your products, you blog about how great you are – and I don’t really care to ask why you do that. It just annoys me to pieces and I am out the door. Why don’t you tell us what makes you so great, why don’t you tell us what you are so passionate about that it wakes you up in the middle of the night ?

2. You don’t do cool stuff. Maybe you talk a lot. But you don’t really do anything cool as a brand. You don’t have a knitting community. Haven’t you heard ? everybody should have their own knitting community these days. If you can’t fit knitting into your branding – find something else that does good and resembles the knitting community – I have my coworking boat. Yep and it’s what people they talk to me about when we meet. Who cares about Henriette Weber or Toothless Tiger ? Let’s talk about the coolest boat around (shares still available btw).

3. you broadcast continously on  social media. Broadcasting can be ok – if it’s relevant for me and it gives me more of what you know. It gives me the unicorns, fluffy clouds and my little pony’s of you – it’s brilliant. If it’s out of context it’s pretty lame and more badwill than goodwill. Oh remember there is a reason that it’s called “conversational tools” right ? maybe it’s not meant for broadcasting then.

4. you think your better than your competitors and you continously highlight yourself.  again who cares ? tell me why you exist, tell me what you oppone against as a company and as a person. and act out why you are the smartest kid on the block, instead of just talking about it.

Here’s the one from next09 called: “rockbandism” or “why every company should be a rockband” based on my ebook with the same title – filmed by the amazing Andrea Vascellari

Here’s my talk on “return on involvement – how you can use social to create business unusual” from disruptive media a couple of days later i Stockholm.

Here’s where you find the video

This week I am working on putting last hands on a new ebook that is probably going to be entitled “from hopeless to hot – a crashguide in social marketing” – I don’t know yet – I change my mind all the time =) anyway the suggestion came from Eva Jonassen who send me a mail with the coolest suggestions…

Also I have made up my mind to move socialmediacamp copenhagen from the 5-6 of june to the 12th of september – this is mainly do to heavy workloads on the PR and publishing side of my big book (entitled return on involvement – how you can use the social web to create business unusual” which is due to come out shortly.

that’s about it these days – what’s happening on your side on the internet ?

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 =)