May, you mother of all networking possibilities.

To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t fully convinced about the whole idea of having a Berlin Web Week with two conferences tied so closely to each other. It seemed as if it would create somewhat of a stress test for the people trying to be at both conferences, too many work flows, etc. And it did, but I have to say that being part of this web week, I definitely see the benefits.

For a long time now, Berlin enjoy has been enjoying the glory of being Germany’s main address for everything digital. The Berlin Web Week with re:publica and NEXT Conference only highlighted that and gave people here and visitors alike the opportunity to see the full potential.

It’s been a tremendously exhausting week, but one full of many old and new friends, plenty good connections, too many beers and a healthy outlook into the future.

Expanding

We hired someone. While she is still in a contract with somebody else, we will refrain from naming names, but it won’t be a big surprise too you when we will reveal it.

While we started thinking about who and how to hire, we actually didn’t have plans to do so before October of this year. But when opportunities emerge, we like to take them as they come. Sometimes it is more important to see the potential of a situation than sticking to a plan.

And yet, I don’t have any issues admitting that this in fact is a big step for us. It will change the dynamic, we will have to start actually thinking about more then the founding members of this company. If you have any advice to share, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line in the comments. I would love to see a discussion about this emerge.

Additionally to this first hire, we will also have one intern and two new trainees over the course of the next six month. Which brings our head count to a total of 7, although not full-time. Still, seven individuals will perform work under the umbrella of Third Wave and we couldn’t be more exited about things to come.

The internet is human fanfiction.

-James Bridle, at NEXT12

Geography is now only about how far your body is away from your phone.

-Alexander Bard, at NEXT12

Articles of the week

• Huffington Post: An Interview With James Bridle of the New Aesthetic
  James Bridle coined the term “New Aesthetic,” and so is the appropriate person to approach about what it means. For exactly a year, he used a tumblelog by the same name to collect examples of where the virtual overlapped with the tangible to form a new aesthetic. He tells Robert Urquhart of the Huffington Post about his observations in digital culture.
• Deutsche Welle: The Internet of Things and sustainability
  Our friend Martin Spindler, a freelance IoT consultant, tells the Deutsche Welle about what IoT can do for us, and why it’s important to explore the benefits of possible implementations before dismissing them as being too risky in terms of privacy and data security.
• design mind: The Networked Urban Environment
  Jan Chipchase, chief researcher at frog, gives a great primer on networked cities in this article. He shows the opportunities but also explains the questions we have to ask about all the data creation and the involvement of private companies in our shared city lives.
• Selectism: UNIQLO Wake Up App
  Japanese apparel producer UNIQLO shows how brands can add both value for, and touchpoints with, their customers. In this case, they built a gorgeous multi-platform wake up app that pulls in live ambient data to create customized wake up ring tones.
• The Verge: Real-time Facebook ‘likes’ displayed on Brazilian fashion retailer’s clothes racks
  C&A is experimenting with live data in Brazil. They’ve equipped their clothes hangers with a display that tells shoppers how many Facebook likes an item of clothing has received, in real time. It will be interesting to see how this feature affects consumer behavior and whether it catches on. A good example of how IoT might be integrated into everyday life.

Photo: Cognitive Cities by Tam

Why we organize events

Running events is, on many levels, exhausting. There’s an inherent chaos, time pressure, financial restraints, strong communication needs and demands.

Running events is also, on just as many levels, rewarding. The dynamics, the joy of putting something together that matters to people, that helps build connections and fosters collaboration and inspiration, is tremendous. Maybe even a bit addictive.

As you might know, we tend to go with the latter of these two ways to look at things. But why do we put the effort in? Usually, our events are not for profit. We might break even or even turn a small profit, but usually and across events we usually just about even out, and that’s not counting our own time. So these events are a bit of an investment of sorts, and one we’re happy to make.

First, you get to know a whole lot of smart, interesting people. Speakers, participants and fellow organizers, there are many good folks to meet, and organizing events is a pretty smooth way to do it. Giving someone a chance to speak at a big stage can also really be a bit of a leg up for those who are relatively new to the game, and if they’re good at what they’re doing then everyone will be happy for them to get some stage time.

Second, it’s a fantastic way to get inside a topic you knew little about. Doing the research, finding the right speakers and having plenty of conversations along the way, putting together the program for a conference is like a fast track to become a (meta-level) expert for something. Being in the business of helping people understand emerging technologies and behavior changes, running events has turned out to be a perfect vehicle for us. At these events, we explore new topics and help spread ideas from innovators in one field to the early adopter crowd. Then, one step later, we help larger organizations to understand the changes these emerging topics trigger, and identify new business opportunities for them and ourselves.

Also, if somewhat more fluffy, it has the side effect of being invited to other great conferences and parties, and who are we to complain?

How we organize events

Over the last few years, all of us individually and collectively have been involved in all kinds of events, from Barcamps, TEDx and Ignite to larger stuff like our own Cognitive Cities Conference or Next. We did this either as lead organizers, as part of larger collectives, as curators or advisors. We also speak a lot at conferences, and attend even more. In other words, we breathe these kind of events. And so over the years, we’ve learned a few lessons.

These notes go particularly for small to mid-sized events and those with a low or very low budget. If you actually have a fundraiser and a full-time team to throw at organizing something, this might not be the right list for you. That said, what are the tricks, the nitty gritty of how to put together something memorable while working full-time on something else?

• Keep it simple.
  Experimenting with formats is ok, but the easier the better. Simple food and drinks are the best solution as full-on catering tends to use up a fair bit of both budget and time to organize (after all, you’d want to pick the best caterer, sample the food, sort out logistics etc). Make sure to have plenty of vegetarian food, too, as chicken sandwiches aren’t the most exciting lunch. Use simple, self-service buffets if possible, or even just book lots of tables in nearby restaurants. Don’t try to be too artsy about the sign-up process. Simple rules, simple tools.
• Curation is key.
  Selecting the very best speakers, as opposed to the biggest names, makes all the difference. Numbers don’t matter much: Five top notch talks beat ten big names any day. And always consider younger, less experienced but eager speakers too. While it can be a bit of a gamble, the chances of them delivering some unexpected, kick ass talk are good. We always try to go for a healthy mix of more experienced and less well-known, emerging speakers, and our experience so far has been great.
• Treat your speakers like the rockstars they are.
  Particularly if someone agrees to speak for free at your not-for-profit event, they deserve the best, most personal and warm treatment you can possibly give them. Just alright isn’t good enough.
• Not-for-profit is OK!
  If faced with the decision if you should go fully non-profit or try to make a few bucks along the way, opt for the free way. As the saying goes, either charge fully or work for free, never work for cheap. The same goes for conferences.
• Form follows function.
  Things don’t have to be fancy to be great. Get your priorities straight: Do you want people to connect? Provide areas with comfortable chairs or sofas and snacks. Want the speaker presentations to get the full attention? Put up a bigger stage and a big screen. Want to reach as many people as you can? Make sure you have the best documentation you can afford.
• Involve the sponsors.
  If you take on sponsors, make sure not to pick the one that would just throw some money into the pot. While that might sounds tempting, it’s a bad idea. You need partners who want to contribute, and who commit. If you pay attention, you’ll notice early on if a sponsor really wants to help build something great or if they just want their logo up on the screen. If need be, help coach their speakers.
• Communicate clearly.
  I can’t stress this enough: Let everyone know at any time whatever relevant information they need. For speakers, this means clear travel arrangements early on. Participants need to know the logistics and confirmation they’re in, and what to expect. Your team members and volunteers need to know things, too: When to be where, who to call, how much time to set aside at which stage.

What we attended this week

Look back at the week, it’s conference week craze. Under the umbrella of Berlin Web Week, Republica (rp12) and Next joined forces and now basically serve as anchors to a whole slew of smaller web-related events all over town in the past and current week.

We all spent some time at Republica, one of Germany’s first “blogger conferences”, as it used to be called. It’s grown up to be one of the biggest web conferences in the country with some 3-4K participants. If there is one place and time to meet up with half the internet scene in Germany, this is probably it. Timed around Republica there were a bunch of parties, meetups and soirées one or two of us joined for a bit, which leaves us in dire need of a break. (Kidding, keep it coming.)

At Betapitch, as a member of the jury I got to enjoy a fantastic set of startup pitches at Betahaus. The overall level of pitches, the energy, vision and ambition of the presenting teams was great and contagious. It was a particular pleasure to see two teams I know and respect tie at the top, and share the price. Congratulations, Knowable and Somewhere.

So which events are we currently involved with?

Tuesday & Wednesday (8/9 May), Next12 is on. Having put together three tracks as curators, we’re all looking forward to meeting face to face with the speakers and to learn how the audience enjoys our pick.

Friday & Saturday (11/12 May), the Quantified Self-inspired (free and in German) event Digitale Selbstvermessung (sign up here) should be good. With a maximum of 100 participants it’s much more intimate than Republica and Next, so that should be a nice change of pace.

A week later (23 May) Ignite Berlin will bring us an evening of quickfire talks, and I’m really looking forward to this one. We’ll have a speaker list up on the site soon.

Meet you soon, at an event near you.

We don’t exist in a vacuum. People all around us are doing amazing things and provide progressive thinking. We couldn’t do any of our work without a growing network of collaborators. That’s why we’re getting pretty excited about the upcoming two weeks when a big crowd of geeks and tinkerers will descend upon Berlin for a large number of conferences and events. The city buzzing with passionate people is how we like it best.

As we mentioned here before, we’ve been heavily involved in the curation of this years’ edition of the NEXT conference. Peter and Igor have been putting the finishing touches on the programs for their stages. It’s looking mighty good with a lot of people we’re really looking forward to hear speak.
Also, check out the video profiles, our friends at Freunde von Freunden did for NEXT speakers Caroline Drucker and Jeremy Tai Abbott

We’ve also got our own event in collaboration with Hybrid Plattform, coming up right after NEXT called Digitale Selbstvermessung. As we did with CoCities, we love to introduce a fresh topic (like Quantified Self with this one), that we think is going to get really big, to a wider audience. Sign up now for one of the last free seats available (conference language is German).

You can also meet us at republica12 this week and many other events. Please, feel always welcome to say hi.

If you’re visiting Berlin and looking for a good bite, check out Peter’s list of restaurants.

Peter about startups

Peter spoke about the startup culture in Berlin on dradio Wissen last Saturday. Listen in (the show is in German).

Change is the only certainty, today is the slowest rate of change we will ever experience, and those who are most responsive to change stand the greatest chance of survival.

-Jonathan MacDonald

Smart cities will be places that foster creativity, where citizens are generators of ideas, services and solutions, rather than subservient and passive recipients of them.

-Usman Haque

Articles of the week

• The Atlantic: Social Media’s Small, Positive Role in Human Relationships
  There is an interesting, heated discussion taking place on how technology influences the way we interact with other people. Sherry Turkle, on the one hand, believes that we’re increasingly sacrificing true, deep social interaction for superficiality as a result of new technologies. David Banks counters this stance, demonstrating point by point the flaws he sees in Turkle’s argumentation. This article, by Zeynep Tufekci, makes an excellent case for the benefits of social media.
• Wired: How to Spot the Future
  The future is fickle, and hard to predict. Yet there are some patterns that can help us figure out trends early on. All it takes is the effort to look, and these seven guidelines by Wired magazine’s executive editor Thomas Goetz. Hint: If you want to spot the next big thing, look for those ideas/companies/people who fit not just one, but several of these characteristics.
• Co.Design: The Apple Way: How The Second-Gen Nest Thermostat Evolves To Help Users
  The Nest thermostat’s “small, thoughtful improvements that help users” make it an exemplary piece of product design. The designers went out of their way to make the Nest friendlier to use, even inventing a new type of screw (and matching screwdriver) that would allow it to be fixed easily to drywall. Here we see what it means for a company to have its users’ best interests at heart, and how this attitude is the best kind of marketing there is.
• ExtremeTech: Think GPS is cool? IPS will blow your mind.
  You have probably never heard of IPS before. Think of it as the much more precise brother of GPS. And it will have as many – if not more – implications. IPS, or Indoor Positioning System, would let you know not just where a shopping center is, for instance, but where the shops inside it are. This article sketches out some thoughts on how IPS might be applied in interesting ways.
• Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino: The Internet Fridge Factor
  In this blogpost, Alexandra discusses product ideas – such as jetpacks and internet fridges – that catch on to an extent in people’s minds, but don’t quite make it to properly useful implementation. See the slideshow at the bottom of the article to find out more about the Internet Fridge Factor’s relevance in terms of the Internet of Things.

Wie bereits angekündigt laden Third Wave und Hybrid Plattform ein zum Event Digitale Selbstvermessung:

Details

11.05.2012, 14:00–18:00 12.05.2012, 10:30–14:30

Beschreibung

Third Wave, Agentur für digitale Strategien, und die Hybrid Plattform, Ort für transdisziplinäre Projekte der UdK Berlin und TU Berlin, veranstalten am 11. und 12. Mai 2012 ein Symposium mit anschließenden Workshops zum Thema Mensch und Datensammlung in den EIT ICT Labs in Berlin.

Mit jedem verkauften Smartphone gewinnt die Thematik der Selbstvermessung und Selbsterfassung an Relevanz und an Brisanz. Es handelt sich dabei um die eigenständige Erhebung und den Vergleich von Zahlen um Körper-, Gesundheits- und Lebensdaten mit Hilfe von digitalen Geräten. Die Anhänger der Quantified Self-Bewegung sind davon überzeugt, dass die Analyse von humanen Daten wie Schlafzeiten, Blutdruck usw. jedem Einzelnen hilft, sein Leben zu verbessern. Die weit verbreitete Bewegung hat weitreichende Auswirkungen, und zwar nicht nur auf den Einzelnen.

Das Symposium am ersten sowie Workshops am zweiten Veranstaltungstag beleuchten die Thematik Mensch und Datensammlung aus den unterschiedlichsten Blickwinkeln: Welche Daten kann man sammeln und was ist daran ablesbar? Was passiert mit den Daten? Welche gesellschaftlichen und wirtschaftlichen Auswirkungen hat das Sammeln der Daten? Welche Entwicklungen dieser Technologie zeichnen sich ab? Welche Wissenschaften werden in welcher Tiefe eingebunden?

Diese Fragen möchte die Veranstaltung gewohnt transdisziplinär und hybrid angehen, um durch die produktive Kollisionen neue Erkenntnisse für unsere Zukunft abzuleiten.

Programm

Das Programm wird aus heutiger Sicht wie folgt aussehen, Änderungen und Ergänzungen sind noch möglich:

Freitag, 11.05.2012, 14.00-18.00

• 14:00-14.05 Begrüßung durch Christoph Gengnagel, UdK Berlin
• 14.05-14.10 Begrüßung durch EIT ICT Labs
• 14.15-14.35 Johannes Kleske, Third Wave, Einführung in QS und Feedback Loops
• 14.50-15.10 Kora Kimpel, Professor UdK Berlin
• 15.25-15.45 Florian Schuhmacher, Münchner QS-Gründer
• 16.00-16.20 Yasmina Haryono, Fjord, Datenvisualisierung, Personal Analytics
• 16.35-16.55 Prof. Sebastian Möller, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories und TU Berlin, Quantified Self in HCI: Models and Implications
• 17.10-17.30 Daniela Kuka, WiMi UdK Berlin

Samstag, 12.5.2012, 10.30-14.30

• 10.30-10.45 Begrüßung/Vorstellung der Workshops
• 10.45-11.15 Awareness Talk von Ahmet Acar
• 11.15-12.45 Workshops Runde 1
• 12.45-13.00 Pause
• 13.00-14.30 Workshops Runde 2
• 14.30-15.00 kurze Präsentation der Ergebnisse/Abschlussrunde/Feedbackrunde

Workshops geben voraussichtlich: Daniela Kuka, Moritz Greiner-Petter, Wolfgang Spahn, detaillierte Beschreibungen der Workshops finden Sie im Anmeldeformular.

Teilnahme & Anmeldung

Die Teilnahme ist kostenlos, die Anzahl der Teilnehmer ist auf 100 begrenzt (Link zum Anmeldeformular).

Für einige der Workshops benötigen die Teilnehmer Laptops und/oder Verbrauchsmaterialien. Diese können mit vorbestellt werden; die Bestellung ist verbindlich und muss vor Ort bar bezahlt werden.

Presse & Medienvertreter

Für Journalisten haben wir begrenzt zusätzliche Plätze zu Verfügung. Auch hier erfolgt die Anmeldung über das Anmeldeformular – am Ende des Formulars finden sich die relevanten Formfelder. Für Interviewanfragen richten Sie sich gerne jederzeit an Peter Bihr, Geschäftsführer von Third Wave, oder Marguerite Joly, UdK-Projektkoordinatorin der Hybrid Plattform.

English summary: Together with Hybrid Plattform, we organize a two day event around the idea of the quantified self, self-tracking and personal analytics. It’s a two day event, held predominently in German, in Berlin on May 11/12 with one half day of talks and one half day of hands-on workshops.

I will admit that before we started Third Wave, I was heavily biased toward believing that the bureaucracy will be a pain in the ass when it comes down to formally start a GmbH, the German version of the Limited. It is not. The process – yes, I will dare say it – feels almost slick and requires a healthy amount of involvement. After all, it is not completely unreasonable to require a certain commitment of somebody to actually start a business.

Where it gets more tricky is the actual maintenance of a company. Besides getting all the cool projects that you are be looking for, and then executing the task in a way that exceeds expectations, you also need to understand how to create a financial plan that will help you do all this.

For a long time we didn’t manage to create a system to provide us with a quick overview of our short, mid and long term financial planning without much maintenance. By now, we’ve figured it out, step by step. So based on that information, we are able to plan our upcoming weeks and month more easily. When the books are full, we can shift slightly away from focusing on acquiring new business and invest some of the time in our own projects or publications (as you have seen over the last few months).

While we feel quite comfortable with how our systems works right now, there is still room for improvement. That’s why we gladly took up Peter’s father offer – who is a financial auditor with more then 30 years of experience – to take us through some of the basic and more advanced methods of running a company on a financial level. While we usually are the ones who give workshops and tell people how things work, it was a rather good experience to be sitting on the other side of the table and get some input that instantly felt actionable.

There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself.

-Adrian Tan

More information does not make a more informed population.

-danah boyd

Articles of the week

• Cory Doctorow: A Whip to Beat Us With
  Author and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow sheds light on the twisted logic connecting publishers, e-books, DRM and certain platforms’ nasty habit of locking users in. For related material, see Charlie Stross’ related article on Amazon’s e-book strategy and its consequences.
• Wired UK: Ikea’s “Uppleva” integrates TVs and sound systems into furniture
  Ikea is a great example of a company that knows how to extend their range of products. Their latest endeavor: making their own HD TVs. And it seems that they’ve done well on the product, too. This will be interesting to watch. On a grander scale, the company is also planning the construction of an entire neighborhood in East London.
• The Boston Globe: How democracies clamped down on the Internet
  The openness of the Internet is threatened – unfortunately not only by nations and regimes that we expect to go against freedom, but also by democracies. This article is a good reminder that we can’t take the net for granted.
• Mashable: Meme Management: Meet the man who reps internet stars
  In times when user-generated content can become more successful on the internet then professional productions, it probably shouldn’t be surprising that at some point they also get professionalized. Still, “meme manager” is a job title not many would have anticipated, and yet it is very much an expression of the zeitgeist.
• danah boyd: Getting the News
  danah boyd, internet researcher, tells News.me how and where she gets her news fix every day. She discusses the importance of finding points of view as different as possible from one’s own, and what it means to be well informed.

Additionally, should you like to catch up on our series of articles on our social media strategy framework, the collection is now complete.

There are numerous reasons why a social media strategy might fail. It could have started without any clear goals. It could have chosen the wrong platforms. It may have missed the right tonality. And many more.
But when I look at most of the social media efforts out there that have stumbled in one way or another, the source of the problem almost always comes down to an internal failure in the organization.
I’ve seen companies with the best intentions, which had solid social media strategies fail because of internal politics and unclear processes and structures.

This is the main reason why our social media strategy work with our clients has been shifting constantly into business consulting territory, away from just communications in marketing and PR. All we have learned over the recent years suggests that for social media to be successful for a company in the long term, it has to be deeply integrated in the company’s structures. This takes time and effort, and helping to build these structures takes both a different skill set and a different mandate than the average agency out there might have.

Here are some of the most common hurdles that stand in the way of a social media strategy’s success, and how to overcome them.

Working with internal politics

In my experience, there is no greater threat to the long-term success of social media strategies than the internal politics of a company.

Everything we talked about in this social media strategy framework can be worked out perfectly well. But when it comes to the questions of budgets and positions, the questions of “who owns this?” and finally “who will get more power?”, everything might go up in smoke. Because in the end, all the business objectives and metrics usually take a back seat to the individual interests of the different stakeholders involved. This is deeply engrained in the incentive structures of many large organizations.

As an consultancy, we try to plan for that by first getting to know as much as possible about the internal politics right from the start and then to work them into our strategy, making sure that each stakeholder gets their fair share as long as that doesn’t get in the way of the overall goals. But we also let the client know that this will only work to a certain extent and that they have to put their personal interests behind a common interest if they want their social media strategy to work.

Internal politics are difficult for every business strategy. But social media is still in its infancy and often misunderstood, so getting the buy-in from everyone is tough. It takes a certain amount of vision to grasp the role of social media in the future and that it’s worth putting the whole company’s interests first for this.

Our recommendation for companies working on their social media strategy is to put the politics on the table from the start. The longer they are ignored in the process, the more likely it is that the strategy will backfire in the end.

Fighting silo thinking

Social media has this strange capability to display the internal structure and politics to the outside world. If a company is thinking as one, everybody working together, it will show. But it will also show when a company is riven and torn apart by individual politics of each department: just as social media can amplify your brand message, it also amplifies the visibility of your internal problems¹.

Your structure is showing.

Each product manager creating their own Facebook page with content that oftentimes overlaps. Marketing and PR departments fighting for the lead on the social web. Customer service talking to people complaining on the social web, not realizing how that might reflect on the brand. Crowdsourcing contests that obviously haven’t been worked out with the product development team and where the results will never get where they need to go.

The problem with all of this is that it confuses the customer and reflects badly on the brand. Typical examples of this?

• A customer wants to know more about a brand, and instead she finds four different Facebook pages that all have kind of the same content.
• Different Twitter accounts give different information about a product detail.
• A service question on a campaign page doesn’t get answered.

Organizing for social media

The key task in this part of implementing the social media strategy is to create an internal structure that can bring all the involved departments and stakeholders – and that can mean most of the company’s teams – together to speak with one voice on the social web². It means to find a way to coordinate all the different social media engagements of a company to work with each other.

What this structure could look like is highly individual for every company. But there are a few best practices that can be a starting point.

The Social Media Committee

Social media must not be owned by one department!

To really push the point: social media has to be a joined effort. It must not be owned by one department! This will clash with the usual hierarchical structure of most traditional companies. So we have to find a way to get interdepartmental cooperation, usually with a project group or committee that each department sends a participant to. This committee will steer the social media effort of the whole company. It will help coordinate and synchronize all individual engagements and make sure that the company speaks with one voice.

This committee is responsible for creating, implementing and iterating the social media strategy of the company. The more each participant buys into a shared vision of the company’s social media engagement, the better it will work.

The Social Media Manager

The social media committee appoints a social media manager. Her role is to be the internal expert and manager for everything social media. She knows about all the individual social media efforts and works with each department to help with knowledge and insight. She’s not the one creating content for Facebook pages, etc. But if a department needs some help with that, she will find someone.

This person should be someone who is well connected inside the company and can handle the internal politics properly. Each department might appoint its own social media manager. The company’s social media manager will lead those and coordinate between them.

The Community Manager

While the social media manager is focused inwards, the community manager is the connection to the outside, the communities on the social web³. She deals daily with the communities, the fans, the followers, the customers. She knows who they are, how they think, what makes them happy, what makes them angry etc. She gains tremendous insight about the communities over time and plays a vital role in any social media effort by the company.

She is the direct line between the company and the communities. The communities, in turn, see her as the human face of the company. If they have a problem, a wish, a request, they talk to her. They trust her to have their best interests in mind and to represent them inside the company.
For the company, she’s the spokesperson of the communities. She should be part of every meeting where inside-knowledge about them is needed. She will say things like “No, the community will hate that.” She’s also the direct channel of the company into the communities if there are questions to ask them, or if the company wants to collaborate with the communities.

Depending on the size of the company and other factors, a company can have one or more community managers that can be organized as an individual team or can be connected to different departments or projects.

Collaborating with vendors

Outsource as little as possible!

We strongly believe that a company should keep its social media efforts internal to the extent possible, and only outsource when absolutely necessary.

First off, customers want to talk to the company directly on the social web. That’s the big advantage of the social web: a direct channel into the company. If the company puts an intermediary between itself and the customers, they feel like the company is not really interested in the conversation with them. If this is really the case, it will show.

But the bigger issue is that the ongoing conversation with the customers on the social web creates communities that are based on the company’s relationship with its customers. This relationship is of tremendous value for the company. It delivers insights and feedback from the customers and provides a continuous line of communication directly to the most engaged fans of the brand. Does a brand really want to outsource this relationship to an agency or a vendor? And what happens when the contract expires or the company wants to change the agency? The relationship to the communities and all the knowledge gained about them will be gone with the agency, or the company will be bound to the agency for a long time.
No, this knowledge and this relationship have to be deep-seated inside the company, as they will gain more and more influence on the decision-making process, and will become a long-term investment that has to be cultivated and protected.

The role of agencies and vendors is to give advice and help execute the tactical measures of the social media strategy like campaigns and design. They can provide the technology and the tools to help the company with analytics and managing the conversation. But they shouldn’t be the keyholders to the community.

Company culture

As this series about our social media strategy framework has shown, we see social media strategy as the gateway to the future of a company. Social media has this amazing power to put on display how ready a company is to move into a future marketplace that is very different from the one we can already see changing now.

All of the factors described in this article that influence the implementation of a company’s social media strategy are part of that company’s culture. The structure, the politics, the collaboration between departments, the interest in the customer, and many more. In relation to social media, these can give a company a pretty good idea of where it stands. Is it embracing the opportunities of the social web to get much closer to its customers, or does it feel driven by the changing world of markets and communications? Where between these two poles does it stand?

This is why we see the development of a social media strategy as a long-term process, something that changes the company over time. First come internal changes, before moving on to engaging in external conversations. Depending on the company culture, results can show more quickly, or take a bit longer.

And you know what, it’s okay to take a bit longer. We really don’t expect companies to change overnight, particularly because of something that still seems to be very fuzzy and prone to change in the future. We’re still at the beginning of how social media will really change communications, and from there on out, the whole company. Right now, the only way to catch a clearer glimpse of that future is to take a leap of faith.

Taking journeys with companies towards a more social future is at the heart of what we enjoy working on at Third Wave. It has its risks and it takes time, but we truly believe that social media can be a catalyst for more humane companies. And if you’re interested in that journey, we would like to help. Let’s have coffee.

This time, we are looking for two people who want to learn about social media & community management while contributing to the young, agile and dedicated teams at VCCP and here at Third Wave.

Check out the job description and requirements and if you feel like this could be something that you are interested in and you speak German and English fluently , let us know! We would love to hear from you.