One of the most persistent and hardest to dispel myths in social media is that of the “quick win”. Since Facebook, Twitter etc. are easy to use from a technical point of view and since there are always stories of people getting an insane amount of attention through these channels, many people assume that there is no work involved. Scott Stratten has recently posted an excellent, short video (1:52 min) explaining why you can’t expect to open a social media account[...]
Archive for the ‘Strategy’ Category
Every time I’ve witnessed the restructuring of an organization or company, the same thing happened: within minutes of the announcement, the foot soldiers gathered in the cafeteria, voiced their surprise over some of the changes and discussed why certain things simply won’t work. I’m normally one of those people. Organizational structures are information architecture The other day I realized that the challenges that management face when deciding an organizational structure are not very different from the problems that web managers have when[...]
October 15 is Blog Action Day – an annual event where a bunch of activists are trying to focus the attention of the entire world on one topic. Their method: Get as many bloggers as possible to write about this topic. No matter what the normal topic of the blog is, no matter whether it is a long or a very short post. Basically they are trying to flood the web with their chosen issue for a day, which would then[...]
The United Nations Joint Inspection Body recently spoke to web professional in 40 UN agencies to identify what the most common problems are and how to fixed them. The result is an impressive document that can be used by many non-profit organizations, NGOs, International Organizations and even government ministries and agencies to address similar problems in their own organization. The ”Review of Management of Internet Websites in the United Nations System Organizations“ (31 pages) focuses on website governance and strategy – and I still[...]
Update (4 November 2009): the Social media guidelines have been approved. Two month ago I wrote that I had started to create social media staff guidelines for my organization. Here is a short update: Since my last post, I spoke to all relevant stakeholders in the organization. In my case these were the Communications Department, Human Resources, the Staff Association, the Security Unit, IT, the Legal Unit. I also met with both the Undersecretary General and the Director who oversee these[...]
My organization is currently working on a major web relaunch: we are moving our public facing website and our two extranets to a CMS and will give them a new, similar look and feel. In a series of articles I will describe what I have learned during the process. This is the first part. Lesson learned: Don’t split the contracts for the design-part and the technical implementation! If I could go back in time and do one thing differently, this would[...]
Seth Godin recently wrote a post titled “The problem with non” in which he claims that non-profit organizations fail at social media adoption and that the reason for that is fear of change. Here are six reasons why I disagree: 1. There is a difference Oprah and an NGO „Take a look at the top 100 twitter users in terms of followers. (…)None of them are non-profits. (…) Is the work you’re doing not important enough to follow, or is it[...]
A few days ago I came across a remarkable TED talk that gives some interesting insights into why non-profit organizations might be the best employers you can find. It also got me thinking about whether we are asking the wrong people for advice, if we are inviting the McKinsey’s and KMPG’s of this world to assist us with our problems. I highly recommend you watch the video before you read on: What I find most interesting about this presentation is[...]
