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Showing posts from June, 2011

Two Types of People

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This post has been in draft for a long time... I was on the verge of posting it several times, but held back. I wondered if I should post it. Is it too negative, too open? Well, now I'm posting it anyway. As always your honest comments are welcomed. In my work and private life I basically run into two kinds of people: People that get things done and people that don't. People that do what they promised and people that don't. People that answer emails and people that don't. People that finish their tasks on time and people that don't. People that are on time and people that aren't. People that forget appointments and people that don't. People that .... I think you get the point. I honestly believe I belong to the first group. I'm not saying that I don't mess up, forget, procrastinate, etc. every now and then. But when I do I say sorry. It's not a normal thing, things should be different. Furthermore I'm not saying I don't like

Insights from Social Media Workshops

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I enjoy  leading workshops. Sharing my knowledge and experiences with others and learning from participant's knowledge and experience is truly inspiring. I wanted to share some of my insights from the social media workshops I've been giving. The workshop focuses on social media as a hype or trend, social media strategy, social media concepts and tools, etc. We're just getting started One of the things that really strikes me is that we are only just starting to understand social media and experiment with it in practice insides companies and on the internet. I know there are examples of companies being successful in this space. But more than 90% of the people I get in my workshop haven't experimented with social media personally and in a corporate context, are often afraid to dip their toe into social media, find it hard to define next steps, etc. Concepts and Tools I usually start my workshop by talking about underlying concepts of social media. Understanding the

Is an Organization a Hierarchy and/or a Network?

Back to work after a wonderful vacation in the US! Really enjoyed being there. My sister lives there. We went to the Gulf of Mexico with them and stayed there for a week. And we also travelled to Washington D.C. Went to the Museums in D.C. (we had already 'done' the monuments in a previous trip), went hiking in Shenadoah National Park, etc. Now back to work. Worked through my email, feeds and tweets. One post I saved to read was  this interesting post by prof. John Kotter, Hierarchy and Network: Two Structures, One Organization . A must-read for all social media and social business people! Lots of discussion there. I also commented on the post. I wrote: Wow, lots of discussion here. I liked the post as well. I blogged about this topic a couple of times. I agree with some of the comments made stating the hierarchy and business is older than the 19th century. I do think you can say the 19th century made hierarchy the way to go. I think this is one of the reasons social media is