Monday 28 September 2009

A Vision of Students Today

This makes you think too...

Information R/evolution

We have done a long journey from the library times... Thanks for Teemu for sharing these videos.

We Think

Impressive video and good thoughts about the communities and enterprise2.0.

Did you know (the original)

I guess I had not shown this before. Almost 7 million hits, impressive!

Friday 25 September 2009

My TwitterSheep

This sheep has eaten Twitter bios from the people I follow. Quite interesting.



See what your sheep has eaten.

Social media & marketing: evolution or revolution

Another nice presentation found through Minlii, thank you. :)

I noticed a new definiton for a generation: generation C, C as Community, Co-creation, Connected, Consumer 2.0.

Growyn - eco-friendly search engine from Sweden

I just heard about Growyn and made some searches. Google generated links while Youtube and SlideShare did not find anything. In Twitter they have now 8 followers (including me) while in Facebook they have 2848 fans.

But what is it then? Let them tell themselves:
Growyn is an eco-friendly search engine, promoting environmental awareness and funding community level sustainability projects.

Growyn is a search engine just like Google, MSN and Yahoo! but with one big difference - we donate all our profit to support the environment. We believe that everyone wants to contribute to a sustainable future but for most of us, daily routines come in the way of a proactive commitment.

Growyn enables you to help save the environment by simply using our search engine!
Every time you search the web through Growyn, money is generated to our projects.

Interesting project, good luck to you Kurdi&David. How about adding a Youtube video to spread the word also there? :)

Advertisement 2.0

Mainostajien liitto (association of advertisers in Finland) published their Mainosbarometri (ad barometer) study yesterday, they are doing the same study twice a year to their members.

Next year the advertisers are going to use their money especially to net advertisement, radio, and direct advertisement. 65% of the participants are planning to use social media (like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter) and 74% of them more than this year. The challenge in net advertisement is that the results are difficult to measure.

Monday 21 September 2009

Protomo met Hub

And now that I have introduced Protomo I can share a workshop notes from last week. Monkey business (they have the coolest web address: banana.fi ;) is the team behind the idea of bringing the Hub to Jyväskylä and they came to see us in Protomo with other like-minded people. For three hours we were brainstorming and this is what came out:



Hub could be e.g. a place where individual people or companies could go and work but it could be something else also. Hub is challenging the way of working - compare with Office nomad Janne Saarikko (in Finnish).

Protomo and Somenta

Busy day in my blog, already third entry. I have also been busy lately - I started in Protomo in the beginning of this month. What is that then?
Protomo™ on on uusi suomalainen innovaatioapparaatti, joka luo osaamisen uusia yhdistelmiä ja synnyttää työpaikkoja yritteliäille osaajille.

I.e. Protomo is a new Finnish innovation apparatus which is generating new know-how combinations and is proviking positions for entrepreneurial experts.

At the moment Protomo´s working mode is piloted only in Jyväskylä but it will spread to other cities next year. In practice Protomo is offering us e.g. office space, tools, and trainings until the end of this year. It is a great place to start a company or just test one´s business idea.

I belong to a team called Somenta ("Some" comes from SOcial MEdia of course). Besides the obvious social media trainings and consultancy we are also offering marketing services (it is still early to tell about our plans in details) but if you will learn more later...

Did you know 4.0

I like these videos, they contain ideas and figures in a nice format. Thanks for sharing MinLii. :)

Managing Online Forums

Few weeks ago I read Patrick O´Keefe´s Managing Online Forums and as I promised him in Twitter to write about the book, here I go.

In his book Patrick gave a lot of new ideas about community management: practical guides for the daily work. Some tips were familiar to me from my own experience but as he has done the community management professionally (full time) and his audiences are bigger than mine he has thought about the issues much more.

I joined my first discussion forum in 1998; two years later I found a Finnish doll forum. It was a common forum for the lovers of dolls, teddy bears and dollhouses. I was among the first miniaturists who joined and soon we started to manipulate the discussion by the volume. Dolls and teddies have only heads, bodies, hands and legs, sometimes also clothes and shoes. But dollhouses, they are world of their own: furniture, dolls, collections, styles, massive amount of techniques that can be used. The topics with dollhouses were never ending and soon the doll and teddy lovers started to blame us for talking too much: nobody is talking about teddies anymore. Well, why don’t you start talking about them then?

As I was an excited newbie and as the technology was easy for me I started to contribute in the forum. I created structures for links and files and innovated new ways to use the forum. I started to talk with new members and answered to their newbie questions. I used much time for this but felt I was not appreciated, not by the forum owner, not by the newbies - and because the doll&teddy people I started to feel guilty when sending dollhouse messages.

So I started sending private messages with two other active dollhouse members. We were dreaming of a new forum, a different forum, a friendly forum where we could talk about dollhouses as much as we wanted. We knew what we wanted, a forum with rules. We spent many weeks for writing the rules before we told the others about the forum.

After the announcement the doll forum went crazy, everyone had an opinion about our new forum even though we told the forum is open for everyone who accepted our rules (e.g. no lurkers, real name required). It was exciting to wait if we are getting any members after the battle.

But since we had a good reputation we did of course and now after 7 years our forum is still active and as we have closed doors we can share also personal news - we have become real life friends. During the years we have done a lot together (e.g. the first Finnish book about dollhouse hobby). We have had difficult situations too but all in all we have done very well.

Patrick starts his book from the basics: choosing the platform and features, making the rules and hiring the staff. Hiring sounds little odd for me - who would work for a forum for free? But I did it and I still do. I do it because I am excited about the issue and want to promote it. At the moment the dollhouse hobby is almost too popular in Finland: the media has noticed us, we are seen in magazines, radio and television and the amount of blogs is hundreds. Somehow it is a pity although it is also cool: we made the difference and I made the difference. But it is only natural that after you have reached your goal you feel a little empty. So I have moved to a bigger playground than Finland.

In spring I set a wiki for English speaking miniaturists: Mini treasures wiki. Or actually, thanks to Google´s translators, it is for the whole world. I am only in the beginning in building this community but my experience with the Finnish wiki I set up 3 years ago is helping me. I have now an intuition that is leading me. It was nice to read from Patrick´s book that he and I have many common opinions about how to act in the forum: be real, be reachable, be open, and be honest.

So far my projects have been non-profit (ok, I did get some money from the book) so monetizing the forums is not my specialty. Affiliate programs are not very familiar to me, I have only some Google & Amazon ads. So the first thing I did after finishing the book was setting up a shop in CafePress. I do not want to send t-shirts to all over the world or ask money from my mini colleagues so having someone to do it for me is fantastic! And if nobody wants the fan products I am offering it does no harm to them - or to me. :)

Patrick talked a lot about difficult people&situations in forums and that was very valuable. So far I have got my fair share of them but if the wiki grows as I expect I will get plenty of more in the future and knowing the tricks he has used is a valuable asset. His tips for hiring the staff confirmed my tactic: not to hire someone because you need someone but because the person is what you need. Hiring wrong people will lead you to troubles. Patrick also gave hints of how to keep the forum interesting and how to invite people. All in all, it was really interesting to talk with Patrick (although I was only nodding in front of his book)!

PS. Patrick showed that he lives like you teaches (being open and reachable) - tweeting with him while reading his book raised the reading experience to new dimension. :)

Tuesday 15 September 2009

Facebook featuring @Twitter

Facebook has taken @replies into use, see the video to learn more:



The feature worked well when I just tested it and as it is used a lot in Twitter, maybe it becomes a hit in Facebook too. Let´s see.

Sunday 6 September 2009

Saturday 5 September 2009

Bequething your net accounts

By now you have tens of accounts all over the Internet. And you have passwords. What do you want to do with them after you are gone? Do you want to give access to them to your husband, wife, kids or frieds? You don´t want to do it right away and you have heard the warnings not to write them down on yellow post-it notes.... What then?

Surprise, surprise, there are services for this case.
There is Deathswitch in Germany and
Legacy Locker in US. See the video to learn more.

Is your mum stalking you?

Social media can change the way families communicate...

I was very proud when I taught my mum to blog (with 360 which is now dead), it was very nice way of sharing news between her and my sisters. She is not yet in Facebook but do I really want her there after seeing this ;).