The Crossmedialab social media album Top 50 2012

I love charts and yearlists. This passion started in my childhood. As a child I made lists of almost everything: how long it took to brush my teeth and put on my pajamas (with a all time record of 10 seconds), lists of the time the planes flew over our house to Maastricht Airport, and also of all the licenseplates of the cars in our neighbourhood. When I think about it, I’m surprised that my parents never thought I was autistic.

Tagged with: chart, social media, music, interaction,

How to measure online success?

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to download and read the research report from Culture24 focussing on museums and the Internet. Online strategy and how to measure online success were central in this four year during study. Developing effective ways to define, measure and evaluate the success of online activities is an issue faced by all parts of the cultural sector. Organizations regularly invest in cultural websites, social media activities and online services without a clear idea of what the services are trying to achieve, or their intended audience.

Tagged with: metrics, museums, social media,

Symposium "15 years SWOCC"

On September 13 2011, the Foundation for Scientific Research on Commercial Communication (Stichting Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek Commercieele Communicatie SWOCC) celebrated its 15th anniversary in style, by organizing a symposium.  Its stated goal was to flood the participants coming from academia, advertising agencies and marketing departments with scientific insights from communication science. Unusual for a scientific meeting, it was held in Dutch, except for one apologetic (German) speaker who spoke in English. In practice this meant that the line-up of speakers was exclusively recruited from the ranks of Dutch universities, several of them still working on their PhD. It was organized in the debate centre “de Rode Hoed”, beautifully situated on the imperial canal (Keizersgracht) in Amsterdam. 

Tagged with: swocc, conference, branding, Marketing, social media,

The role of social media in the entrepreneurial process

There is an broad array of initiatives and experimentation with social media by entrepreneurs and businesses. ‘We have to do something with social media’ seems to be the credo and emphasize lies on ‘a race to the market’. There is a great deal of trail-and-error and knowledge on how social media works is often highly tacit. One can also think of this as a ‘probe and learn process’ of entrepreneurs and businesses trying to use social media to their advantage (Groen et al, 2008). The degree of success however differs.

Tagged with: phd, entrepreneurship, social media,

Like! part deux

As I promised, I’d think about liking. And so it came to pass that I did. For weeks I pondered about liking. I have come to realize that the “like” has a lot of aspects to it. I’ve been thinking about liking. How liking things helps us make sense of the world surrounding us. In a way, what we like defines us. If you are surrounded by things that you like, does it make you happy? I can imagine it will, so we tend to collect likable things and people around us. So we can create a personal utopia, built out of the things we like. We teach our kids to like certain things, so that we can share the pleasure of our liking. We meet new people and friends in places we like. Or we go to places people we like, like. Liking is emotion. 

Tagged with: emotions, social media, like, facebook,

Like!

I like a lot of things. I like snowboarding, I like to have a drink with friends, I like to have a good conversation, I like lobster, I like good wine, and so on and so on. People that know me well, know what I like. The basis of friendship is liking each other and doing things together you both like or love doing. Friendship starts when you’re doing something you like doing and meet someone with the same “likes”, we call the “interests” mostly. The same counts for doing things you loathe doing as well. This of course fits in the day and night equation(if there’s nothing to loathe, there’s nothing to like). This is the basis for fraternity or sorority initiation, make a bunch of people do stuff they loathe and the start liking eachother. This is also known as teambuilding. My point? Liking or loathing is a very big part of our social life, maybe even the very base of having one.

Tagged with: like, social network sites, facebook, social media,

Social use of social media : the small benefits can be the biggest

There’s a lot of talk about the big opportunities and benefits of using social media. Examples of these benefits are customer engagement, direct customer communications, the speed of feedback/results, learning customer preferences, low cost, brand building, credibility of the ‘crowd’ or reach. You can hear or read al lot about the benefits of social media for marketing purposes, customer service, personal use, for relaxation and public services. The discipline you hear less about the benefits of social media is social welfare. Therefore, E-society organized Next: a congress about the benefits of ICT for professionals in social welfare. This congress contained a combination of presentations and workshops of research and good practices during the last ten years. I would like to present some good examples how social media can make a difference in a community.

Tagged with: social media, communities, participation,

How to analyze political tweets

The politics are totally into social media. Nothing new about that. That politicians are trying to close the gap between politics and the people by using social media, is also nothing new. But is this really the reason why they are using social media, or are they only saying this. What kind of messages is sent by politicians? How do people react to these messages? To what extent do politicians respond to the reactions of citizens? In the past two years Chris Aalberts and Maurits Kreijveld have done research to find answers to these questions. These answers are described in their book ‘veel gekwetter, weinig wol’. To my humble opinion, the most interesting contribution from this research is the number of new questions that come out of their results. I would like to describe some answers from Aalberts and Kreijveld given to the three questions above. With these answers I’d like to ask some new questions and introduce you to the new database that gives opportunities to answer these new questions. 

Tagged with: database, politics, social media,

Nuclear crisis in 140 characters

Tagged with: history of the future, energy, fukushima, twitter, social media,

Who gets my vote?

Coming up: the provincial elections. On March 2, I again have to decide who gets my vote and especially why. Right now I am a true undecided voter. For that reason I am looking for the politician and the party that is able to convince me. So for the last few weeks I’ve been looking on Twitter and television to find the most reliable politician and party.

Tagged with: elections, politicians, twitter, social media,