Coca Cola's social media policy

A couple of weeks ago I talked about the social media trends for 2010 (see here). One of the trends mentioned was that more and more companies would get social media policy's. Only just a couple of days ago I stumbled over a blog post talking about the social media policy that Coca Cola employs. This post predated the article I read before, but it gives a good insight into how a company handles social media. Next to listing 10 principes for online spokespeople it also links to a pdf containing Coca Cola's social media policy, which is a very interesting read.

Go here for the blogpost and here for the pdf.

An interview with Coca Cola's head of social media (yes they have one)

One of the more useful ways to use Twitter as a company

Not all of you might be familiar with Blizzard Entertainment, the creators of several legendary PC games, but I would still like to use them as an example. Many companies are looking for ways to use Twitter and other social phenomenons like facebook, but I think that not all companies have found a good use for Twitter yet. However, Blizzard did. They use it to keep people updated about upcoming patches for the Starcraft 2, which is currently in beta phase, as well as answering questions and promoting their game by posting examples of what is possible with the supplied game editor. They also have a big discussion board, but I do feel Twitter greatly supplements that by the more small and informal messages that are posted there. It gives costumers are more direct link with the company. I also think that more companies should use Twitter like this. Twitter is a very useful tool for short messages about servers that are down or small announcements. It also gives companies a place where they can directly refer to others using their products, something that could look quite out of place on their normal websites.

The official Starcraft Twitter can be found here

Augmented reality in your living room

I think most of use are familiar with the concept of augmented reality (if you're not, read up here) on mobile devices, but augmented reality in your living room is something new. A researcher at MIT came up with the idea of "Surround Vision". This allows a user to use his (or hers) mobile device to look at the content shown on a television from a different perspective. You should really check out the video to see what I'm talking about, because it explains things so much better than I can. I wonder what kind of roll augmented reality will play in the future, I'm pretty sure there must be some value in it for companies (I see a bright future for virtual banners shown in an augmented reality).

Dutch Police also using Twitter.

Last week I read an interesting article in one of the free newspapers you get at the train stations: it was about Dutch policemen using Twitter to talk about their job. Several police departments are using Twitter as a tool to help solve cases quicker. For example, the police in Veendam used Twitter to spread news and gain information when a pyromaniac went on a spree (read more here).

I find it interesting the Police has found Twitter to be a useful tool, but I am a bit worried about the lack of policy with regards to Twitter. There are no set rules about what a policemen can publish on Twitter and what not. How do you determine if they are acting as a policemen or if a tweet is a simple private tweet?

Let me know what you think!

David Letterman's first tweet

Couple of months old, but still pretty funny

A nice video about social media

And a more boring video of social media as a marketing tool.

The six social media trends for 2010

At the beginning of every year people like to predict the trends for the coming year. Even though it's already March I still would like to talk about it. I found an interesting blogpost from David Armano (Senior Vice President at Edelman Digital). He names the following trends:

The six social media trends for 2010
1. Social media begins to look less social
2. Corporations look to scale
3. Social business becomes serious play
4. Your company will have a social media policy (and it might actually be enforced)
5. Mobile becomes a social media lifeline
6. Sharing no longer means e-mail

Especially trend number 4 is an interesting one. It shows that corporations are becoming aware of the power of social media. It recognizes the need for some kind of policy about how employees have to behave on social media platforms without being harmfull for the company they work for.

I do have doubts about trend number 6. I do believe e-mail will phase out in the future, but I doubt it will happen very soon.


Read more: David Armano's blogpost

Twitter lends a helping hand in the fight against scammers

For every organization it is important to protect it's customers from all the nasty people in the world. Twitter recognizes this need. It has now introduced its own shortened url's to protect it's users from scammers. Before today scammers could just send direct messages with url's to malicious websites in it. A user would receive an e-mail notifications about the direct message and could click the link. There was no way for Twitter to prevent this.

Since today Twitter replaces the direct url in the notification e-mails by shortened versions that link back to Twitter. When you click these url's Twitter checks the website it refers to before a user is send there. This stops all the baddies on the internet dead in their track.

But remember kids: common sense is still the best protection against scammers. Many scamming attempts can be prevented by simply thinking for a second and paying attention to the URL's you are clicking on.

More info at Tweakers.net and Twitter

Microsofts "secret" phones coming Verizon

Gizmondo got their hands on some 3rd-party promotional material for some upcoming Microsoft phones. Normally I am not that interested in phones, but it is clear that Microsoft has made this phone especially for social-networking. I'm really curious if it's really a step forward or just a bunch of marketing mumbojumbo.


Read the entire article at Gizmondo

Ballmer talks about Bing & Twitter

At the Santa Clara Convention Center Ballmer talked about Twitter and Bing. He hopes that Bing.com (the new Microsoft search engine) gains some market share, but he primarily wants to make the search experience better.

Ballmer also mentioned he has a secret Twitter account to provide commentary on high-school basketball matches. It's fun to see that even big-shot CEO's use twitter. He also commented on acquiring twitter; read more at Cnet.

Slate devices not the next sliced bread?

In case you have been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks: Apple has just announced it's slate device, the iPad. Apple fanboys have hailed this new device as the next big thing in mobile computer. But not everyboby seems to agree. Lenovo just updated it's line of tablet capable business laptops. They decided to not release a slate device because businesses don't want them. The biggest problem is that users want to have a physical keyboard. Even the youngest users prefer a physical keyboard over a virtual one.

Read more at cnet

Publishers vs. Apple

When the iPad was announced, Apple also announced that five major book publishers would bring content to the iPad. But there was no word about magazines or newspapers. Turns out the publishers are not quite happy with the way Apple handles the sales of these products. The publishers want more control over the pricing and subscriber information.
Apple uses a fixed 70/30 (70% for the publishers, 30% for Apple) split on all the items in the Apple store. Publishers find it hard to accept they "lose" almost a third on every sale they make. Especially with recurring payments, like subscriptions, this is hard to swallow.
And as always Apple refuses to share consumer information with the people they do business with. This is a big issue for the publishers since they use this information for marketing purposes or deciding what the content of their publications will be.
This two issues could be potential dealbreakers, but I doubt it will come that far. With physical newspaper sales declining even more every year I don't think the publishers will pass on the opportunity to increase sales.

More information:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6530db6e-1a70-11df-a2e3-00144feab49a.html?nclick_check=1

Google's 1Gbps experimental fiber network

Google has announced that it is planning to build and test a high-speed (1Gbps) fiber network that will be open to 3rd-party users. This is a very interesting move by Google. I was expecting them to enter the ISP market, but not this soon. By offering these very high-speed connections to the public Google will probably force other ISP's to speed up their own networks.

More information on Google's blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/think-big-with-gig-our-experimental.html

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog about the usage of ICT in organizations. In the upcoming weeks I'll post various blog message about the usage of ICT in organizations.