Please meet Swan Insights !

I recently joined Swan Insights as board member following their capital increase.

Swan Insights implements the Data-driven business by helping organizations take the most out of external data, fostering strategic decisions and laser-cut operations.

Social media adoption

We did a viral campaign in Denmark. It actually got nice press coverage and gave us signal about which social network was really used. Check the result by your self....
Facebook is not a surprise but the fact that tweeter is lagging behind LinkedIn voice of share was for me unexpected.

Impact of online reputation on job seeking process

Research commissioned by Microsoft in December 2009 found that 79 percent of United States hiring managers and job recruiters surveyed reviewed online information about job applicants.

Most of those surveyed consider what they find online to impact their selection criteria. In fact, 70 percent of United States hiring managers in the study say they have rejected candidates based on what they found.

Review the results of the survey to see how online reputations impact people’s lives. The research comes from interviews with over 1,200 hiring and recruitment managers and 1,200 consumers in the United States, the U.K., Germany and France.

Survey available in English here

2009 Trends in Marketing Budget

Interesting survey by Marketing Sherpa shows that yes, marketing budget are lower than last year- as expected- but it forces marketeer to move away from the traditional AIDA model, to a more user centric model, where the user is promoting the brand to his personal network

A total of 48% of the firms interviewed predicted that their spending on social media would increase in 2009, with just 20% predicting a decrease. This compares with print advertising, where just 4% predicted an increase and 60% a decrease, and Radio / TV ads which saw a dramatic 83% of companies predicting a decrease in expenditure in 2009.

Return on Investment on Social media ?

I'm working on a framework presentation for the business development community of WK... Purpose is to create awareness that social media is part of the marketing mix and can be used to "produce" content, of course simplified to the extend and condensed in one hour ppt, easy no ?

We have asked Caroline from RollingTalks to help us and I wanted to share with you an interview of Katie Pain, the godmother of analytics done by Jason Falls of Social media explorer

The competition starts...

Many of you are getting impatient to know where I go... Fair enough :-) Let's do a competition through various channels where I left some elements of answers, consider this as a game to enter what Marc Prensky call the digital native generation. I hope to understand the social network typology of my peers and you'll get a chance to follow my web updates.

Let's first recap what I told everybody :

1. It's not an internal move, I'm really leaving Wolters Kluwer :-(
2. It's also a European position, same list of airports and cities :-)
   
3. I'm joining an online group as head of product development
4. I'll be located in Brussels, Belgium
   

Some people knows more than others, there is one person in LTRE that knows the name of the company (hey you ! if you read this post, pls don't participate :-), there is one person that know the segment I'll join, there are some more persons that know what kind of revenue stream that group generates.

Where do I leave tracks :
LinkedIn : http://www.linkedin.com/in/christophederassenfosse
Facebook: http://fr-fr.facebook.com/people/Christophe-De-Rassenfosse/743260815
Delicious : http://delicious.com/cderass
Twitter : http://twitter.com/deras
Flickr : http://www.flickr.com/photos/business-trip/

Just listing them all should ring a bell, web2.0 is not mature! Social networking will be more integrated in the future because it's impossible to maintain so many channels :-)

No competition without a price:-) I'll see what I can do, but price will be from a kiss to a bottle of something.

Enjoy... and you'll know in the near future !

Legal aspects of user generated content

Nobody cares !!!! Well, I need to look after legal aspect of user generated content. as publisher we earn our living from the content and intellectual property is one of our assets... I've attend a Juriconnexion.fr event where that kind of topic was addressed and the conclusions of professor Manara from the Edhec Business School can highlight some issues : If your site contain offending content about yourself, you are safe :-) but otherwise you can be responsible to civil law and more... Why ?
The "blogger" or the one that allows user generated content is responsible of the content of his site, the one that provides the content has also his part of responsibility but it's theoretical since you can post anonymous comment/content. Finally, in France, the one that host the site is safe.... That why you'll find a lot of explicit content on their blogging platform ! So, as Publisher, we just need to control that the content is meeting our editorial policy but can we make a commercial product out of it ? Yes if the licence and the Terms and Conditions to post content is explicit. Having said that, who is going to generate content knowing that the site is making money out of it ? Would you ?

BBC about the future of Search

A intersting conference by a project manager at the BBC. The proposed content is increasing day after day, they digitalize more and more archive but the user generated content is also booming via e-mails and mobile phones. The content in their case, is more pictures and short films than text or document but they face similar issues than publishers. They want to make their content available on new delivery channel and therefore need to tag the content (for searching or labelling) independently of the delivery channel. Eg. how to tag the content for search engine and for vodcasting ? Of course, like traditional publisher, the volume of content impact the editorial workload and this process taking ages if they want to make it internally. Therefore they allow user generated tags to reduce the production process. Smart usage of the social web. This could be applicable for legal content but probally on market segement that accepts the community to provide input on their subject.

A side effect of this social tagging, the navigation becomes more and more driven by metadata and less and less by taxonomies managed by an editorial team. Intersting...

The social web for dummies

Another term for whom is tired with web2.0 vocabulary is "Social Web"...Yeahhhh.
I personnaly think it's more explicit and show the evolution form static content to dynamic content and now to user generated content. Social Web is growing because we have finally reach a certain volume of users that volunteer to enrich the web content. It's a matter of fact that social web is working on light content or non litteral content like photo (flick.com) or video (youtube.com). To make "volunteer" work you need to attract them on something that interest them, that's why we will see an increasing number of vertical site or niche site where the "volunteer" has the feeling to serve a community (and be recognized within that community).

Now, the reverse side of the medal is that amongst the volume of volunteers we face a lot of spammer that use this opportunity to market their business. Social tagging is lacking controlled vocabulary and can lead to real misfunction in the long term, human are lazy by definition and it's the kindom of Idiots. I personnaly trust the community but it's true that allowing everybody to "enrich" content is dangerous.