1. Find a Person’s Preferred Communication Channel

If you want to contact someone you have never communicated with before, do some research. Find the person’s preferred communication channel. If they have a website, check out their contact page and see if they encourage people to contact them in a particular way, and follow their suggestion. It also helps to discover what level of participation they have on various social networks (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) to see which places may be best to engage them. When is the last time they posted on Twitter or Facebook? Do they respond to the @replies they receive on Twitter or comments on a Facebook page? Get a sense of their preferred means of communication, and make contact where they are.
Lesson: Go where they are.

2. Say Just Enough
This cannot be emphasized enough, and it is probably my toughest challenge. In the age of social media, we may be able to get the attention of more people, but we get it for a much shorter amount of time. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make, is that they send long e-mails or social media messages explaining all the reasons they want to connect. You are likely have not earned not earned the five minutes of the recipient’s time that it will take to read that message. Brevity is built right into Twitter, making it a great platform for making a first connection. However, if you use other channels, keep it simple. If there are 700 words you eventually want to get across, include only 50 in the first contact. Let the person choose if he or she would like more. You can fill in the rest later. I prefer a less complete 50 words than 700 words that tell me more than I need to know.
Lesson: Less is more.

3. Don’t Expect a Response
I often see e-mails with phrases like “Please respond,” or “please get back to me.” Unless it is an old friend or a colleague, if you are contacting someone new, you are not entitled to a response. If the person wants to get back to you, he or she will. It is much better to say “If this is not of interest, feel no need to get back to me.” At times I hear people complain because they reached out to someone and never heard back. The fact is most people do not have the time to get back to everyone who contacts them to say, “not interested.” Open a door without adding pressure. There may be times to follow-up, of course, but don’t do so with resentment or frustration.
Lesson: Say what you need to and then let it go

4. Clarify Early
This may seem like common sense, but don’t wait for the last line of your message to say that you want to meet for lunch, or ask your contact if he’d like to speak at an event. Put it right up front. If he cannot provide what you’re looking for, he’ll know sooner rather than later, and will appreciate you for it.
Lesson: Say it up front.

5. What You Want is Not the Point
You may think that what you want is a phone call or lunch meeting to discuss your big idea. But communication is more than any one project or meeting. What you really want is an authentic connection. In a very real way, it doesn’t necessarily matter if the person is interested in discussing your project idea. What matters is whether you are making a connection. If you focus on the relationship more than the specific request, and the person has a pleasant experience reading your opening communication, it is likely the door will remain open for possible collaboration in the future, and the next e-mail you send will more likely be fruitful.
Lesson: No one knows what the future may hold, so make the moment count. Ensure the door stays open, even if no one is walking through it right now.

6. Be Open Without Needing
Needy never goes over well. Statements like “I really need to talk to you,” or “it is essential that we speak,” show your general insecurity. There is a huge difference between being open to collaboration and “needing” it. Do not make contact until you find that place in yourself that is totally comfortable with any outcome, including a strong “no” or no response at all. Only then can you make authentic contact. When you do, openness rather than need will come through in your words.
Lesson: Speak from openness rather than need.

7. Give Space
The key questions people have when someone new reaches out to them, particularly those who are quite busy, are “Do I have time to bring this person into my network? How much time will they take?” Therefore, it is generally not helpful to send too many e-mails. Doing this may send the signal that you are going to take a lot of the recipient’s time and send numerous e-mails every day, and communicating with you will take great effort. Instead, give communication some space. Unless something is very timely, let a bit of time pass before sending a response. Let communication have some breathing room. Once there is some level of trust, you can experiment with more immediate information exchange.
Lesson: Focus on thoughtful instead of continual contact.

Basically everyone these days is interacting through online groups on Facebook, real-time feeds on Twitter, real-time searching with One-Riot and getting their website-of-the-day from automatically generated lists such as Newsified. A web article that was hot one day probably isn’t going to be hot the day after because there will be another one in its place. Social Media changes shape every day, in fact it’s changing the web every second! Your website needs to utilize Social Media effectively in order to get a leg-up and be recognized in this constantly-shifting web cosmos. As a follow up to my previous article, I wanted to share a few tips that might help your website or web application grow. Since launching Project Bubble I have seen massive growth which I attribute mostly to the use of social media and I’m sure your website too can benefit from this. A good place to start is to learn to understand Social Media by subscribing to blogs like Mashable and staying on top of the latest trends by following key people on Twitter. Once you get inside the world of Social Media and begin to understand it the following tips will make a lot more sense to you and you will be able to apply them to your website.

Build Community
A lot of websites are static, with a few simple pages and a contact form. The owner of the website only knows if someone has visited based on the tracking statistics (such as Analytics) and they can only communicate with their visitors if the person visiting fills in a contact form. Also anyone else visiting the website won’t be able to interact with other visitors, let alone find out if anyone else is interested in the products or services offered by this website.

Building social community features in to a website will spark life in to your online presence and make it change a lot more often. A site that you might have only updated every six months will suddenly get updated by your community every day, providing you can get the traffic. Your site will look a lot more active, but also by capturing your visitors’ information (such as email, name, country, likes, dislikes etc) you can collect a lot of data on your audience which will be really useful to you (make sure you have permission to capture your visitors’ information with a clear privacy policy).

Community features such as allowing comments on a blog will let your visitors say what they think about your products and services. A forum feature will allow users to network with each other, as well as being able to discuss a recent event in your business. Building a sign up feature to your site will let users be able to return to your website and have their preferences saved, and you will be able to store the contact information and data of those who regularly visit your site. Most of these features are fairly easy to implement and can make a world of difference.

Get Feedback
It’s important to get feedback from your users, especially if your web business is new. Don’t be ashamed of any bugs or small issues that might happen on your new website because if you can prove that you are listening to your users, and that you can fix these issues quickly – that will outweigh any problems or bugs people find.

A feedback system will let you know about issues that you might not have otherwise found through your usual testing methods, for example a recent one that came up in Project Bubble is Japanese and Russian characters. Someone reported the issue (and I would never have known about this) then straight away provided a fix. I learnt a lot about UTF-8 that day! Finally, providing a channel for feedback shows that you care about your customers and you are willing to change things based on what people report. This builds loyalty to your brand and will help with user retention. Tools for getting Feedback could be: UserVoice and GetSatisfaction.

Offer Interaction
Not only do you want to capture the users who visit your site and build a community, you want to offer them the facility to interact with you and vice-versa. Interacting with your website users will build brand loyalty and people will see that you’re not just a big corporate identity but are actually real people behind all the PR gloss. Get your users to talk to you, and when they do make sure you talk back to them straight away.

Tools such as simple web forms are absolutely essential in providing your users with quick, clear and targeted contact methods. Studies have shown that the more work you have to make your user do on your website, the less likely they will do what you want them to do. So, for example in the case of web forms – if you don’t use them and you rely on “mailto:” email links it means that people have to do much more work, whereas with a contact form all they need to do is quickly fill in their name, email, select a subject from a drop down and then type out a simple message there and then. Also web forms allow you to find out data such as where they came from (based on the I.P. address), what page they were looking at when they visited the web form and so on.

Other tools you should look at to enhance user interaction are blog comments as mentioned before but most importantly Twitter. There are other articles on Woork that you can read which describe the power of Twitter so I won’t go in to detail here, but I’ll just say that it is absolutely essential for any web based business. You can not only find out who is following the developments of your business, but you can talk directly to them and involve everyone as you do so.

For example, you have just launched a new home page design and you announce it on Twitter, then somebody replies saying they can’t view it properly on their browser. You can fix the issue, reply back to them and then not only will they be informed of this fixed but so will all of your followers. The person who reported the issue will likely be very pleased that you fixed their problem so quickly they will praise you on Twitter, then you can re-tweet this feedback to all of your followers. So you have an issue reporting tool, but also a testimonial tool – all for free! A Facebook page is a great way of providing real-time interaction with your user base. Set up a Facebook page and publicize it just as you would a Twitter link. People use Facebook every day (in some cases all day!), so the minute you post a status update you will likely get comments back straight away. Also because of the real-time feed system people will see your new update pop up just as they look at their other feeds. You can also allow users to upload photos, join in a discussion through forums and install loads of different modules such as a Poll system with just a few clicks.

Offer the Best Customer Service
As mentioned earlier, customer service is crucial to the success of your business. Your customers will want to see that you are active and in-touch with them. They will want solutions to their problems as soon as possible. The quicker you can turn-around with these solutions, the better people will rate your customer service. This will in turn create buzz about your company throughout the social sphere (Twitter, Facebook etc).

Let Your Users Create the Buzz
Make it easy for your users to create this buzz. As mentioned before you need to make it really easy for your users to do the things that you want them to do. With regards to creating buzz, you can add buttons and ‘widgets’ to your web pages that allow them to do this easily. Such as TweetMeme or Topsy (offer a retweet service so your page will get easily posted on Twitter), Add to Delicious (allows users to add your page to their Delicious favorites), Digg This (allows users to add to their Digg bookmarks), Add This (allows users to add the page to every social website out there). The more times people add your web page to a social media site such as Digg, Mixx and so on the more likely your site will get featured on their home page. So it’s important to have these facilities in place if you are expecting a surge in traffic at any time, for example after doing a television, radio or magazine advert.

Good luck!
I hope these tips help. I personally think that social media is a lot of fun, and because there’s always something new to read every day it makes the web so exciting. Maybe your website will be in my RSS aggregator tomorrow as I read the Delicious most-popular list?

Organiseer je leven

Nu de Wikipagina’s van Mindtouch niet meer gratis zijn, moest ik op zoek naar een alternatief voor mijn losse projecten. En ik denk het gevonden te hebben in PBWorks. Het organiseren van met een werkgroep hoeft niet lastig en ingewikkeld te zijn. In plaats van het bij elkaar harken van informatie in e-mail bijlagen en voicemails, kan je ook een wiki opzetten. PBWorks biedt een veilige, gratis online werkplek. Waar je tekst, documenten, foto’s en zelfs video’s kan plaatsen. In 60 seconden is alles op te zetten, zonder het installeren van software.

Altijd al presentaties willen maken met meer interactie, Web 2.0 actie? De Powerpoint Twitter Tools prototypes zijn nu beschikbaar. Gemaakt dankzij SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius (er dient wel PowerPoint en Adobe Flash gebruikt te worden), de twitter tools maken het mogelijk dat de presentator de tweets in real-time kan bekijken en kan reageren, direct kan embedend in de presentatie. http://www.sapweb20.com/blog/powerpoint-twitter-tools/

De Eindhovense hoogleraar Matthieu Weggeman, specialist in met kennismanagement en innovatiemanagement zegt hierover: “Professionals hebben geen sturing nodig, maar concrete afspraken over projecten en resultaten. Ze willen voortdurend feedback. Bovendien willen ze afgerekend worden op output in plaats van controle op aanwezigheid, planning etc.!” Volgens Weggeman wil de Nieuwe Professional werken volgens de vijf F’en: Focus, Fast, Flexible, Friends en Fun! over de thema’s vastgeroeste organisatiestructuren, verantwoordelijkheid, vertrouwen ten opzichte van wantrouwen,
 
Maar wat zijn dan de belangrijkste kenmerken van de Werknemer 2.0?

• De nieuwe generatie zoekt naar zingeving. Geen baan voor het leven, maar een baan of project waar hij/zij zich mee verbonden voelt.
• De Werknemer 2.0 wil ruime voor ‘ondernemerschap’ binnen de organisatie. Daarbij zet hij of zij  kennis, netwerk en technologische mogelijkheden maximaal in.
• Persoonlijke groei en ontwikkeling staat centraal. De nieuwe werknemers profileren zich met onderwerpen waar ze betrokken bij zijn en met de resultaten die ze hebben behaald. Zolang de organisatie weet te prikkelen en weet bij te dragen aan die groei, is de organisatie interessant voor de werknemer.
• Hiërarchie wordt steeds minder belangrijk. Het is veel belangrijker om in het project, team of dossier waaraan je werkt de juiste bijdrage te leveren. Functie is dus veel minder interessant dan je bijdrage of expertise (kennisdeling) aan het proces. Dáárin ligt de autoriteit.
• De nieuwe werknemer is open en wil laten zien waar hij/zij mee bezig is. Niet in het vasthouden van kennis zit zijn kracht, maar in het leveren van toegevoegde waarde door die kennis te delen. Kennis delen is vermenigvuldigen.
• Collega’s die kennis of informatie ‘voor zich houden’, zullen de volgende keer niet snel weer bij een project worden betrokken.
• De Medewerker 2.0 richt zich op zijn onderwerp of project. Hiërarchische structuren, bureaucratie en interne politieke spelletjes belemmeren de oplossing alleen maar en zijn zonde van de tijd.
• De Werknemer 2.0 houdt zijn netwerk op de hoogte van waaraan hij of zij aan werkt. De prioriteit ligt bij samenwerking.
• De Manager werkt als facilitator en zorgt voor de juiste voorzieningen, functionaliteiten, ruimte en sturing. De kernvraag: ‘hoe kun je je afdeling of organisatie zodanig inrichten dat ze zichzelf organiseert.
• Medewerkers worden niet ‘afgerekend’ op fouten die zij maken, maar juist op het eindresultaat, de bijdrage die zij leveren en mate van ondernemerschap die zij tonen. Van fouten maken leer je immers het meest.

Werken volgens de principes van Web 2.0 zal de nodige dilemma’s opleveren. Wat kun je als werknemer wel en niet zeggen in de online discussies en op online netwerken? Welke gevolgen heeft e.e.a. voor de hiërarchische structuren binnen bedrijven?

• Er is een sterke toename van consumentengebaseerde social network-tools in het bedrijfsleven. 75 procent van de ondervraagden ziet social networks als de social mediatools die het meest worden gebruikt, terwijl ongeveer 50 procent ook de populariteit opmerkt van microbloggen.
• Een tweede bevinding is dat slechts één op de zeven ondervraagde bedrijven een formeel proces heeft ingevoerd om consumentgebaseerde social network-tools bedrijfsmatig in te zetten. Door het ongestructureerde karakter van sociale netwerken, worstelen bedrijven nog steeds met het opstellen en invoeren van beleidsregels. Het kopiëren van governance-processen van andere, meer gestructureerde bedrijfsonderdelen – zoals de IT-afdeling – is dan ook niet mogelijk. 
• Een ander punt waar bedrijven moeite mee hebben, is het vinden van de balans tussen het sociale en persoonlijke karakter van deze tools, en tegelijkertijd het handhaven van een bepaalde mate van bedrijfsmatig overzicht.