I must say that this weekend’s Social Media stream on natural disasters triggered very mixed feelings. I followed both the devastating earthquake in Chile, and the brutal storm over France live on social media. Twitter and YouTube proved to be way faster than CNN and even the local French news desk. The social media warrior in me had a glorious “told you so” moment, the journalist in me felt fundamentally and completely by-passed. Simply no way in covering news any faster than this live-stream… you can follow the ripples of the news as they unfold.

What is astonishing is the near real time experience. The constant stream fully local tweets gives a hallucinating vivid image of what is happening. Multiple channels (more people tweeting on the same event) and location tracking filter out hoaxes and disinformation. Direct links to online pictures, videos and text-content give this crowd-journalism a cross-media and very visual impact.

As Social Media can be done on most mobile phones these days, the technical barrier to use it is extremely low. Anyone armed with an 89 dollar phone can cover, edit, shoot, post and share news-as-it-is-happening and will probably have hours of head start before a traditional journalist can work on the premises.

But as the stream of abhorrent news kept on flooding my trackers and feeds, the big difference between this unfolding disaster covered by people who are involved (even committed) and the more distant approach of the traditional channels became very clear.

It is not all about speed, and volume of data. TV gives you a filtered, selected story based on information that is carefully put in a context. It is calibrated for a normal audience. Too shocking or disturbing facts and images will be polished, or left out.

The news will be packed in an item that is tailor made for understanding and assimilating.

Social Media feeds are unfiltered, un-blurred, and raw. It puts you right at the receiving end of a fire hose of pure emotion and drama that is happening right now. You are simultaneously voyeur, analyst, journalist, editor and news anchor.

My question is: can you handle it?

I know, it’s personal, but I’m getting a bit annoyed with how mainstream press is handling Social Media, and how they are covering it. @samfeys (great online chap by the way) drafted a nifty, nice, lighthearted piece and highlighted the vision on Twitter of a politician, a DJ, a radio presenter duo, a cinema group and an entrepreneur.

Apart from the entrepreneur (@netlash), none of these have a detectable Twitter street credibility. I follow all of them. They are nice. So is Sam. Really.

But sketching the whereabouts of social media, and the impact of Twitter on the Belgian landscape on just these people is a bit thin and shallow. Luckily @netlash, a fellow Social Media consultant was able to inject some SoMe wisdom into the article.

We’re living in a world where big brands are massively shifting their marketing/communication spending towards more online dialogue; where Twitter stays one of the most influential communication channels through knee deep trouble (Iran, Haiti,…); where celebrities can cash in their influence and translate it into tangible massive help efforts (@aplusk)…

Belgian companies and organizations are using Twitter (amongst a plethora of other digital tools) for mind casting and data mining. Belgian companies are moving towards using the crowdsourcing power of micro blogging and Predictive Web. Increasingly big brands go out of their way to forge an Intelligent Dialogue with their customers. Because that is what customers want: to interact with a brand that cares.

Not a lot of our politicians got it right at our last elections here in Belgium. Still toying with the medium, without really understanding it. Obama got it right though… it propelled him into the highest charts. It funded big parts of his campaign.

Even the presenter duo @wimenanke are still discovering the medium. In a nice and good way. But with no more followers than you can reach on an average sunny day terrace  they are still warming up, flexing muscles.

To determine if Twitter is hype or not, you need to interact with @princess_misia, @netlash, @mindblob, @horationelson, @bnox and the like. You need to interact with the marcom people of the big brands. You need to crowd source the Belgian Twitter scene.

I’ll just finish my coffee, and read a Dilbert.

While speaking at an event in San Diego last year, I had the privilege to meet Jeremiah Owyang, the energetic analyst from The Altimeter Group (coming from Forrester) as he was giving his views on Social Media. One of the trends he spotted was that the Real Time Web simply is not fast enough for the growing information and data hungry web users. As the need for accurate, focused and profiled data grows, of the shelf (nearly) real time data does not get you in the charts any more. Jeremiah calls the need for a faster, intuitive web use: what he labeled as the “Intention Web.”

It is amazing to see how the web evolved in just a couple of years from an asynchronous web, (archiving thoughts, information and events) over the Real Time Web (instant two-way interaction) to Owyang’s Intention web (metrics used to predict trends and events).

Using both online conversations metrics and online archived knowledge we slowly -but surely- evolve the web towards a worldwide connected grey matter that produces Real Actionable Intelligence. It is safe to say that most of humankind’s sec knowledge is archived and search-able on the net. This vast knowledge library fueled with the flavor of instant, measurable and chart-able online sentiment and online conversation gives an extremely powerful forward-looking knowledge tool.

Adequate metrics, linked to location, time, profile and projected calculated intention give intelligence that can be acted upon instantaneously: Actionable Intelligence is what (personal) brands and corporations will be fishing for in the future. Data tools, metric systems and analytical wisdom to turn this gargantic knowledge pool into tangible and tailored bits will become the moneymakers for the years to come…

For those hardliners that still doubt if Santa really really exists: NORAD, the bi-national U.S.-Canadian military organization responsible for the aerospace and maritime defense of the United States and Canada uses top notch bleeding edge technology to track the whereabouts of the good man on  Santa’s Christmas Eve flight.

The tradition began in 1955 after a Colorado Springs-based Sears advertisement for children to call Santa misprinted the telephone number. Instead of reaching Santa, the phone number put kids through to the NORAD Commander-in-Chief’s operations “hotline.” The Director of Operations and his staff checked the world’s most powerful radar for indications of Santa making his way south from the North Pole. Children who called were given updates on his location, and a tradition was born. Now you can track Santa’s flight on Google Earth…

I’m amazed how many people still think that there is a clear, solid, protecting wall between their real world, and the digital world that they use on a daily base. For an alarming high number of internet users, the virtual internet world is not yet perceived as “real” or touching their “real life” in any way.

The fact that employers, future employers, co-workers, clients, friends and family have a fluid access to their online lives is something that is too easily forgotten. The barriers between 3D life and onscreen life are quickly eroding away, and will increasingly continue to do so.

Google and other search tools give an online profile of just anyone in a nanosecond. Accessible to everyone that has internet access. More often than not, reputations are made or broken based on this first digital check-out. And some people just see way too late that too much of their live is for grabs out there…

You are what you are, the sum of your real self and that of your digital Avatar…

It may sound fairly surprising to you, but I am a gadget freak. Collecting and using small battery operated devices is a fairly innocent but truly expensive disease.  So slowly -but surely- my shelves get buried with PDA’s (yes, I started with a Psion), PC’s, laptops, netbooks and smarty phones. And you know how it is, just as you get used to operating it, a newer, better, smarter, quicker and fancier version pops up. I guess someone has to sustain this faltering economy. 

Having passed way too much time in airports, media markets and online stores lately, I noticed that my taste evolved. Before, I was irresistibly drawn to the most performant object. Now I select my toys on real use expectations. Why would I want a water-cooled quad processor in a lightweight laptop that I will mostly use for internet access and PowerPoint? What’s the use of 16 USB ports, when I can connect all that matters through WiFi, Bluetooth and a high def screen cable? Why carry an extended battery when free power is available everywhere, including trains and planes?

I notice that lately I am mostly hunting for practicality, lightweight and coolness. I pay for fashionable usability over overkilled specs. I silently laugh when I see wonnabees use enough processing power to recalibrate Wall Street just to update their Facebook.

Maybe I’m getting old. Maybe I lost it. I might even get more sensible. But when trop is too much, I’ll go for good enough…

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated with travel, moving,  going places. Now that I’m finally in a position and an age to travel a lot, I got a ferocious dislike of public transport, airplanes, and security checks. Let’s say timetables and security officers don’t like me very much .

Man, seeing captain Kirk and pointy eared  Spock being teleported into the most incredible places  by a simple “beam me up, Scotty” command still makes me raving jealous.

And look now here, scientists at the University of Maryland’s Joint Quantum Institute successfully teleported data from one atom to another in a container a full meter away.  They beamed stuff!  A full meter away! From one container to another!  Time magazine claims that “… a landmark in the brain-bending field known as quantum information processing, the experiment doesn’t quite have the cool factor of body transportation; one atom merely transforms the other so it acts just like the original. Still, atom-to-atom teleportation has major implications for creating super-secure, ultra-fast computers.”

Not cool? They beamed stuff! You’ll see, one of our next meetings, I’m going to get beamed directly into a meeting room, far far away…. You can have all my travel points and air miles…

I’m in that stage in my professional life where I am at conferences, meetings, seminars and exhibitions often, very often. Luckily, most of the time I am asked to give the keynote or presentation but I cannot avoid having to sit in and listen to a plethora of other speakers, executives and guru’s.

To be honest, there is nothing I enjoy more than listening in to a good speaker. But I am astounded that there are so many bad speakers around. Most of the time, when I look around me I see people with glazed looks and brain-dead features open-eyed falling asleep. And that is a shame, because all the people called on stage obliviously are knowledgeable, smart, and credible (well, at least they should be ).

So where does it go wrong? Well, it’s not because somebody has three letters on his business card labeling him or her “boss” that that person is the most talented speaker. Use your upscale C-level people to determine content. Let the most gifted speaker deliver the keynote.

Speaking is an art. It requires understanding of the audience, a flexible knowledge of the topic and an adaptive attitude towards the social behavior in the room. Golden rules are simple. If you want the audience to read, send them a book or an email. Slides with text on, force your audience to read: they’ll never listen to you and will fade away within seconds. Moreover, text filled slides prevent you from being flexible.

I NEVER saw a good presentation with a lot of text on the slides. So, do your homework and build a deck with good, humorous, intriguing and capturing pictures or graphs and build your story around it.

The best presenters are people telling a story, taking you for a fascinating journey. If you tell the story right, your audience will walk with you. Use the presentation to illustrate and highlight.

Good presenters interact, smile, are dynamic, vocally creative and masters in playing the room. There is not a lot of them around. Threat them well…

There we were outside, overlooking a wonderful sunset over a well-known San Diego golf course. Three of us, simultaneously holding conversation, emptying starters and drinks, banging email over connected laptops while keeping an eye on the ever flashing blackberries.

How do you keep two screens, a beer and a discussion going? The gargoyle scene from Neil Stephenson’s amazing book Snow Crash comes into mind: people who make their living connected to the web are better off if they integrate their gear in their clothing… and body. Kurzweiler’s been announcing this for years.

Maybe on my next trip: overhead data projection on my designer shades, middle-ear-implanted voice link, trousers with a terabyte of data storage, keyboard-projecting shirt button.

And a water-cooled in-brain Twitter add-on decrypting fact from the vapor of nuance. Hell yeah!

By the people, for the people. It sounds like a Revolution credo, but it is really what social media is all about. News that is aimed at consumers can now easily circumvent journalists and media and hit millions of online users faster than Richard Hammond can crash a car. Everyone is scrambling around to find creative ways to harness the power of these social media, because it can be an extremely effective way reach out to a targeted audience. While websites are static, social media opens up the dialogue wide open with your audience, allowing interaction and discussion. Just be careful not to bite off more than you can chew

Here in the Porter Novelli Brussels Towers, we’re installing a Social Media Lab on our fifth floor. We conveniently branded it PNBR5 (area 51 was already taken….). It’s an area dedicated to studying Social Media phenomena’s and to integrate online strategies and tactics into communication models. Here online buzz get’s measured, analyzed and rendered into accountable intelligence.  We have training facilities, a meeting room and a fridge.

That will do for now …

When leaves fall,

It starts to rain a little.

Outside.

(and deep in me…)

Bluetooth SIG, the organization driving development of Bluetooth® wireless technology, launched a global ’Sharing4Caring’ initiative to help third world entrepreneurs gain access to low-cost financing. Bluetooth SIG teamed-up with Kiva, a person-to-person micro-lending website, and is asking people to take 2 minutes of their time to click on a ‘I want to care’ button on their website. For every click, the organization lends 1 dollar to Kiva entrepreneurs.

Why this project? Mike Foley, executive director of the Bluetooth SIG, on ‘Sharing4Caring’ initiative:

“The Bluetooth SIG represents more than 12,000 members, so sharing is at the very center of everything we do. We share intellectual property, best practices, creative ideas, everything that enables us to take the next step in further enhancing Bluetooth technology. We decided to take this one step further and show how sharing can improve lives of people all over the world if we put our will and energy to it. That’s also why, after careful selection, we decided that Kiva, with its strong focus on sharing, was the best fit for us in this endeavor.”

Wanna help? Visit the Bluetooth SIG website now and take 2 minutes of your time to help them do good!

Really, I don’t care what people are doing for a living. As long as they get at it in an honest, professional and preferably passionate way I am game. And my vision is that it takes as much effort and skill to be a good mechanic than a trusted brain surgeon.

But I’m getting a bit tired –must be my advancing age- that any weirdo with half a broadband connection, 9 friends on Facebook and a couple of dozen followers on Twitter suddenly labels himself a Social Media Guru. SMG’s spread quicker than a field of rabbits on Viagra and sell themselves hard and expensive. Way too many have no clue on life, the universe, everything.

It takes more than an occasional Internet visit to guide people around the digital spider webs out there, and I am a bit weary with people who try to do it on a guessed estimate. Having a healthy sense of communication strategy, social interaction laws, agogics, and the ability to calculate a healthy ROI for clients should be mandatory. Most often, it’s not even an option.

Clients wanting to buy Social Media Services often are way too inexperienced with the new game in town to be able to safely choose the right partner. I just hope that –as always- the wannabees will fall through the ice soonest.

This video shows what I mean. You might not want to click on it if you’re sensitive to a stronger language…

Ever since I was sweet-talked into attempting golf, my life is a long misery. It’s clearly a sport that was invented to test the ultimate strengths within. While it looks easy, peaceful and grandfatherly, it awakens the worst in me. Every ball lost in some pittoresque little lake wants me to whack my driver around the nearest oak tree.

Nothing kills your testosterone levels quicker than banging a tee-off towards the wrong fairway, or missing a 15 centimeter “put”. Seeing good friends effortlessly overshooting the green with a meager meter on the first shot on a par 4 just invites me to strangle them surely and slowly between the 13th and 14th hole. And then you have the pro’s that navigate their shots around the course with chirurgical precision. Urgh. On a Golf Video Game, players pointed at an impossible shot of the Tiger Woods Avatar walking on water, and miraculous saving his game with what was labeled “the Jezus Shot”.

Laughter all over. Then came the video response:

 I rest my case. I’ll do something more easy in my life. Turning water into wine or something .

I spend more time on the road than I care to compute. A formidastic part of my life seems to consist in trying to get from point A to point B while on point C yellow clad pointy haired entrepreneurs put obstacles on the road because they want to make it better. Or something.

Too often, before that snail of traffic moves, I surely have enough time to get acquainted with most of the people around me. That nose plucking sweaty teenager in the pimped up pink Clio behind, the yelling kids in the back of the Beamer in front, the aspiring Elite top model on my right. They are not moving either. They are intriguing.

But there is simply no way to shout out on a highway: “Hey! You look interesting! Want a tissue? Great car! Where do you work?” Nope. Everybody looks around, listening to some bonobo-on-steroids on the radio that is way too awake and loud for the beginning of a day. No way to connect. No way to reach out.

That’s why I decided to put my Twitter handle on my car. Hoping it will become a new trend. So people can Tweet me goodmorning on the highway. It’s safe, because we’re not moving anyway. It’s social behavior. It’s fun. I got a tweet from a Landrover Discovery today, and it made me smile. just for that I’ll keep TweetTweet, the tweet car on the road.

To paraphrase Snow Crash (great book):  The TweetTweet car has enough potential energy packed into its motor to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a Johnny box or a BoomBoom beater, the TweetTweet car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished exhausts. When you put the hammer down, shit happens. TweetTweet is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta… And it’s bloody stuck in traffic somewhere near you. Send me a tweet

I’ve been to most big cities. Name them: New York, Vegas, London, Kuala Lumpur, Delhi, Calcutta, Shangai, Beijing, Paris, Moscow, Marrakesh, Singapore, Dubai, Tokyo,… I’ve been in the world’s most plushy hotels, and spent on multiple occasions more on breakfast than on my very first car.

I’ve flown over the Hecla in a helicopter, saw the sun go up from a hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon, saw the Aurora Borealis in Spitsbergen, and I’ve been on top of the Atlas Mountains at sun set. I saw cheetahs dining, elephants fighting, dolphins playing, snakes digesting.

And each time my wheels grind the stony curvy roads of Trouville-la-Haule, a minuscule little village in the darkest part of Normandy, my heart feels at peace.

One day, this old buccaneer will drop his anchor somewhere in the midst of this stately apple trees. I’ll own a cat, drink homemade cider and play petanque.

One day….

As an old journalist, it’s fascinating to see how news is evolving in a lightning fast way. Before, the only way to get something in the press was for corporations and their PR people to draft a press release, send it to a journalist, and then follow it up using all kind of tactics ranging from a nice diner, a stalking phone call or an exotic field trip to assure the editors attention. Journalists were dignified. I was God. Without our royal consent, no news would pass. We were the ultimate, personified and slightly bribable filter between news providers and the general public.  PR consultants and company communications people would throw their best at us to add our scalp (a nice bylined article, a favorable product review) to their clipping book.

With 80 million bloggers around, and citizens that Twitter, FriendFeed or Facebook quicker than the badly implemented software on their iPhones can handle, information becomes for the first time truly decentralized. Conscious web users have a plethora of tools to share their views, real-life-product tests, opinions and grieves with the inhabitants of the World Wide Web.

There is no faster, better or more balanced way to spread information. By the people, for the people, socially controlled by a busy cluster of very critical web users.  News that is aimed to consumers can now easily circumvent journalists and media and hit millions of online users in an eye blink.  Forums, bloggers, social networks and very active Twitter jungle birds are passing along what they identify as news faster and more thoroughly than the classic news channels. Corporations scramble around to find creative ways to harness the power of these social media.

As a former God, it amuses me tremendously. J

People who know me well have figured out by now that I suffer from occasional insomnia. Last night I decided to crawl out of bed, and go for a stroll. Contently nibbling on an illegal piece of chocolate, I saw my very first Perseid meteor this year. Yay!

Each year, our good old blue Earth is thundering through a stream of rusty dusty snowy debris from Swift-Tuttle, a comet that was re-discovered in 1992, after being lost for a small 130  years. The golf ball-sized pieces are responsible for a spectacular firework show called Perseid meteor shower every year around August 11th and 12th, but as I could testify, the early flashes are already lighting up the sky!

So wait for another 10 days, spread your blanket in a dark corner (avoid parking lots J), bring a bottle of Chianti and your loved one and stare dreamy towards the shower’s radiant in Perseus. It’s a most romantic experience. Trust me, I’m a consultant J

Deep in myself I just always knew I was special, and that I had a tiny bit of that little je-ne-sais-quoi in me that superheroes have in disgustingly industrial quantities.  Let me get things straight: I cannot fly (well, not that far), I have a little difficulty claiming X-ray vision, and nothing melts down spontaneously when I take off my sharp Ray Ban shades.

But I glow in the dark. Really. My carefully shaped and nursed body J literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day. Trust me, it´s true. A bunch of highly smart and smartly paid scientists are there to back my statement up!

In an article scientists reveal that the body emits visible light, a phenomenon thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals. Faces glow more than the rest of the body.

See? I glow in the dark. Next I´m going to work on my telekinetic powers…

It´s giving me a burning headache. If you look at the coverage on social media, there seems to be a frenzy around numbers. Big numbers. When people talk about Twitter-VIP´s, they add the magic number of followers almost reverently. Oprah has more than 1,8 million followers now, BritBrit 2,4, Barack´s ghostwriters1,7 million. Connecting to these Big Whales is what Tweeps want to do, forgetting that this usually is valuable for one person: mister Big himself.

Climbing higher on the social media ladder, deciding who to connect and interact with is extremely important. Where do you put your time and energy? What will get a maximum spread of your messages? What will effectively enhance your reach, impact, and social velocity?

Let´s get real, chances that the Oprah´s, Kawasaki´s and tutti quanti of this world will even notice your tweet, let alone retweet it to their followers is extremely remote. They are industrial machines, programmed to push forward their personal or business purposes, and clearly too swamped being big to notice you at all. 6 digit follower people look nice in your followship, but they will not get you in the charts spreading your precious messages.

Aim for the little fish. People roaming in their first hundreds of followers. Reach out to them, help them grow their turf. Give them tips. They will notice you, as they do not have to skim (yet) through a gazillion tweets. They have time clicking on your links, and most often happily retweet good content, (which you provide J)… and by connecting to them at their early intro you will make it to their favorites easily with a good chance of staying there while they go up the charts. 

My personal rule? 80\20.  I spend 20 percent of my effort learning from big whales, 80 percent goes into interacting with the shiny silver fish.

Yay! (yep, I picked up that disturbingly vocal thingy as well) We earned a Certificate of Finalist Recognition in the category Communications Campaign of the Year in Europe in The 2009 International Business Awards (aka the Stevie Awards).  Basically, our communication approach and execution of celebrating 10 years of Bluetooth™ wireless technology was selected from more than 1,700 entries received from organizations and individuals in more than 30 countries.  

It feels extremely good to feel the work recognized, and see that the integrated communication mix ranging from viral tactics, social networks, event support and more traditional die hard PR execution did not go unnoticed.

No communication strategy can be pulled off without a client believing in us. Kudo´s to Mike Foley, PhD., Executive Director of the Bluetooth SIG and Anders Edlund, Marketing Director and their team for having faith and keeping us sharp.

Thanks also to Marta Majewska and Dirk Bosmans, for great work, creative thinking and going the extra mile (and knowing Bluetooth better than a camel sand…)

I´ve been watching my Twitter account and my Facebook updates with a suspicious eye lately. First Yasmine, a lovely Belgian singer died. Though all my sympathy goes to her relatives and friends, the internet frenzy that followed was crazy and horrifying. Not only were all the sinister details of her suicide smeared all over the net, hundreds of people started to comment on the why, the how, and the-who-should-be-blamed. Nobody considered apparently the grief and horror her loved ones must experience while reading…  Sympathy pages popped up like mushrooms on a dying tree in a rainforest, generating more sympathy and generosity than most of the charitable causes on the web…

And the day after, the self proclaimed King of Pop died… The social media craziness following the first announcement was mind boggling: Twitter reporting well over 30 percent of all conversation dedicated to Michael Jackson, and having to shut down some of its functionality to keep from fail-whaling. Facebook updates showed signs of mass hysteria as a gazillion people expressed whatever they felt like sharing in their status lines. I dotted down updates like “disaster”, “horror”, a “black day”, “my world ends” (!)… I need to go back to the web just post 9/11 to see so much emotion expressed. It largely beat the social online concern right after the tsunami…

Michael beat the charts big time, not only are his songs propelled right back at the top of the iTunes charts, but his death generated more compassion than the passing away of thousands of dying kids in dark Africa.

I´m not sure I like that… maybe we should recalibrate our priorities…