Nice view from the tweeps at alltwitter .com. Maslow 2.0. It makes sense. Well done…

I love all of you. Well, no, that is a lie: I love most of you. But still, there is so much about you that I really, really do not want to know. Ever.

The world went crazy last year when a woman live-tweeted her drug induced abortion, live. Tons of blog posts, articles and editorial pieces were written on keeping certain things from the internet, and to safeguard some information in one’s private life, rather than on the web.

Still, looking at your twitter feeds, your blog posts, your Facebook pages: there is so much I’d better not know. I see updates flipping from in a relationship to single back to in a relationship over a weekend. So you had a big fight with your loved one, that happens. You made it up on the pillow, that is nice for you. Your life goes happily on. Only, I know.  Before, you could break up a blue Saturday night, and discover new frontiers of the Kama Sutra the next sunny morning without me noticing it. But you had to Facebook it: now I’ll never look at you the same way again.

People tell me online -through updates- that they’re out of money, hate their boss, will kill their neighbor’s cat, have a hangover, broke up, divorced, have that time of the month again, are late, were out of dental floss, shopped a G-string at Victoria’s Secret, illegally downloaded the new Susan Boyle, are looking for a new job, and secretly used their moms credit card. THAT is just what I found through the updates I saw over the last 10 days, from you.

Those are just the updates. Your picture streams are really wild, complete, and do not leave a lot to the imagination either. Keep them coming.

I have a wicked mind, I’m not a prude, I can take a joke. But I’m worried. One day, you will wake up, and realize you overshared. Big time. In a way that hurts. The update that went over, the picture that kills, the drunk tweet with consequences. That day, it will be too late. It will be all over the place, indexed, search ready, shared, stored, mirrored and backed up. Your painful slip, for always ready to be found on Google. Disaster forever just one click away.

Don’t. Don’t share it all. Think twice. Like fine lingerie, social media is as exciting for what stays hidden, than for what is revealed.

I know that I will be kicking in more political correct doors than I can possibly legally afford. But I need to ventilate: I want a new phone. One that is designed for men.

I now pack an iPhone. It’s overrated, ridiculously expensive, nice, smart, slick, fast, intelligent, and above all: good looking. It even makes the color of my eyes stand out. But it comes with a twist: it is delicate, sensitive and fragile. It hates dust, moisture, temperature peaks, sand, mud, shocks and scratches. Basically: it hates me.

Steve Jobs had a nice black turtle neck and washed-out jeans. But his phone is simply not made for me. I dive in half-frozen pools. I drive my Landrover through rivers and a meter of mud. I let it climb impossible mountains. I use the winch. I get dirty. I drive cars through corners faster than is good for me and the environment in general. I generate more  g-forces than a fighter pilot. I am a boy.

See, my Breitling watch effortlessly resists my kind of lifestyle. So does my Audi, my Landrover, my Swiss Army knife. Even my wife is Danny-proof. All, except my iPhone. I broke two in 20 months.  Before all you loyal Apple fans go all oh and ah, no other brand designs phones for me it seems. HTC, Nokia, Samsung… all those fragile designs seem to bend and break by just looking at them.

The only one that fits my profile is the phone from Landrover. But, it is real real stupid, middle aged technology. You can drive a bulldozer over it though.

Sigh. How difficult can it be: a sturdy impact resistant smart phone for a caveman like me?

There is a day for everything these days. I cannot open my computer, or people will be shooting at me with all kind of reflective pieces of wisdom, smartly connected to whatever the flavor-of-this-particular national day is.  It makes me a bit tired. Mothers day… fathers day… why do I need a day to honor my parents? Should I give my mom special flowers because some committee decided moms deserved a day all to themselves?  And what about international Nutella day (Feb 5^th)? Or the International Nurses Day? (May 12^th)? Do I hug all nurses?

January 8^th is Elvis Presley day (no kidding). September 19^th is Talk-like-a-pirate day. In June there is Shoe day. What about Global Handwashing Day (Oct 15^th). God, I hope it is hand washing day EVERY day. There is International Pasta day (oct 25^th). As said, it makes me grumpy, tired. Must be my status of middle(r)aged man. I hate international days of whatever…

Tomorrow is Valentine’s day. The day of love. People all over the planet are heating up their credit cards, hunting for sweets, flowers, silky lingerie (tx @thebrandbuilder !),  diamonds, cars, Chihuahua dogs, fur gloves and selected bottles of scotch. I see couples who have not spoken a kind word to each other in ages, book a table at the local Michelin restaurant. Because February 14^th is Valentine’s day. The day of showing your love to your loved one. Va Savoir. You have all year for that. I hope.

Valentine’s day turned into a very unloving multi-billion industry that thrives on red, pink, soft, bubbles and candle light. It has nothing to do with love. I spent 9 of the last 14 Valentine’s days at a technology exhibition, where I saw multiple business people give instructions to their personal assistants to arrange flowers for their significant others. For a lot of them, sending flowers or sweets did not hinder them a bit in flirting their way into new beds…

Valentine’s day. One of these days. It gives me the creeps. Call me a cynic, but with all of the expensive, glittering, sparkling, and bubbly gifts that will be bought and offered tomorrow –(often just to buy a clear conscience for the lack of genuine love the rest of the year)- my vote goes to International Mistress/Lovers day. No mistress/lover celebrates Valentine’s day. Ever.  That is for the legal, official spouses and significant others. International Mistress and Lovers day is February 13^th , today, the day before the crazy global extravaganza of love. That, my sweet friends, says it all.

I will now curl into a furry ball, and wait till the glitter parade is over. February 15^th is Galileo day.

There is, deep in me, a small McGuyver. I love non conventional solutions. I love forget-about-the-box-thinking. I love Dyson engineering, a lot. My Dyson vacuum cleaner totally rocks. And it is high tech from space

I was amused to see how Dyson reinvented the fan, by taking the blades away. Now, they use it to fly hot air balloons. Me like (just do not try this at home, really!).

Bristol’s Cameron Balloons advised on and supplied the ultra light weight balloon material, but honestly, they were just interested to see if Dyson’s engineers could make it work. It took several prototypes to find the final scale required. And it involved some physics; Dyson engineers needed to overcome the machine’s thermostat control to ensure a continual heated output, whilst working in a chilly and cold space to get the required lift.  Heck, science asks for sacrifices!

It took some time to fill the balloon with the large volume of air required, whilst combating heat loss from the balloon’s large surface area. They used a second Dyson Hot™ fan heater to help overcome heat loss until the balloon took off. All in all it was quite fun. *sigh*. I guess I’m just a boy

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yes, I know. MP3 players. MP4 players. Shiny ones, megabytes, bitrates, fashionable colors. I have an iPod that has more musical power than the disco I used to hang out in, and that looks cooler than a frozen Ferrari Testarossa. But then again, so do you, and a gazillion other ones. *sigh* Being different but staying cool did not get any easier in these hip times…

Luckily, old records are so in, greying black discs turning around under real diamond headed needles… Listening to the Sex Pistols with the occasional scratches… that’s the way. If you really want to blow your audience away, try getting a steampunk record player.

Yep, this record player is powered by a small steam engine, and uses a small processor and some servos to turn the record at the exact speed. Admit, there is simply no better way to listen to God Save the Queen than powering up a small steam engine. It looks hot as hell, and is the perfect accessory for the ice cubes in your bourbon on long summer nights. In the right company, of course… 

Click here to view the embedded video.

Neatly stacked piles of paper, empty desks, desert desktops, I hate them with a vengeance. It simply never works out for me. I will try, organizing my desk, filing documents, doing creative things with Post-It’s, lining up my pencils. It will make me sneeze. It will give me a headache. It will not work. I will be setting there in that oasis of clean, ordered efficiency, helplessly fishing for inspiration. Organization, it gives me the creepiest nausea just thinking about it.

But, until now, they always made me do it, these goddesses of efficiency, these marvels of organized workspaces. Frowning from under perfectly groomed corporate hair, they will point out, slightly patronizing, how inefficient my cozy, dusty desk is, and that I would be better, faster and smarter if I just could keep it neatly organized.

Until now that is. No more. I have a new hero: Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business . In a recent HBR report he said: “How much time do you spend each day getting better organized? Cut it in half. When it comes to investing time, thought and effort into productively organizing oneself, less is more. In fact, not only is less more, research suggests it may be faster, better and cheaper.”

Sounds like music to my ears! But it gets better:  “IBM researchers observed that email users who “searched” rather than set up files and folders for their correspondence typically found what they were looking for faster and with fewer errors. Time and overhead associated with creating and managing email folders were, effectively, a waste.”

I’m faster, better, cheaper. Schrage said it. So, get out of my office, stop frowning over my desk, and yes… I DO love my bookcase exactly as it is. I DIGG the icons on my desktop. Go get your stuff in disorder, try to keep up.

*happy sigh*

Curation. The word was hotter than a steaming Bhut Jolokia chili pepper in 2011, and many social media rainmakers  swept the concept around in presentations  and books with more enthusiasm than a hungry Chinese drummer  his chopsticks.
In a digital world where more content is being created per day than in the last two millennia, it becomes increasingly difficult to find relevant, trustworthy, and adequate content. Technically, the finding of good content and putting/pulling it together in a list is still aggregation. Curation requires more than that: it requires for the curator to give a value to it in the form of an appreciation, contextual scoping, summarizing or even re-editing.  But the term curation is so hot now; it will not be bound by semantics. 
A decade ago, people shared content in an easy understandable way: the notorious 1 percent created content by writing blog posts on Blogger and WordPress. Other people read it, and spread it through email. Spreading now happens through a plethora of networks, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. The syndication of authentic content through the Social Media platforms happens now mostly with one click,: the content appears out of context and out of frame in a different social ecosystem. A well thought-off piece of content on your blog might trigger a conversation within seconds on a Facebook page in Timbuktu, without the author even knowing or realizing it. Twitter’s Retweet , Google’s +1 and Facebook’s Like buttons propel astronomic amounts of data and content all over the social web, snowballing it into the darkest corners of the internet.

As a new blog platform, Tumblr added to this with a 1 button reblog function, enabling seamless content meshing.  Without even having to write a single character, people can thus populate complete news and content sites… The concepts creation and curation  watered down to redistribution…. often even without mentioning the original source.
Newer platforms like Pinterest, Snip.it, Storify, Scoop.it, Fab.com, Pearltrees, mySyndicaat, and Budlr make it easier for a whole generation of content re-distributors to personalize their favorite content from a timeline/stream approach into more personalized and structured board approach, where content can be fashionably “pinned” on the right “board”. In sharp contrast to Twitter, Facebook and Google+ where content is merciless bound to a fleeting timeline, the board like approach brings back memories of magazine style content consumption that a lot of people have missed online.  Even, fast aggregator tools for mobile content consumption as Zite and Flipboard swear by this magazine board style approach, turning screens into comfortable e-zines.
Yelp, twitter, Facebook  and Foursquare bring quick social comments on top of shared content and places, effectively adding a more credible flavor (as in adding opinion and value) to the pure aggregated content.
Social Local Mobile curation, where content and places are shared with a simple click, and value perception is added (often condensed in a line that is most probably shorter than a 140 characters ), will drive a lot of the social web in 2012. Social Local curation,  is as laser sharp, on the spot, on the go –thus mobile-, black and white , in your face and lightning fast as it gets…. Worse than a jury, social curation  judges quick and hard, the verdict relentlessly published on more online places than you can imagine.
Are you ready for it?

Remember Watson? The IBM computer that successfully beat the living beejezus out of an army of Jeopardy champions? Turns out most people think it’s kind of cute. Same thing happened when Deep Blue (still called Deep Thought in 1997) won over six chess games against world champion Garry Kasparov.

It’s cute that a machine beats a human. Just… don’t call it thought: that would be immensely disturbing. Deep Blue is fine Deep Thought is creepy. Watson is fine, as long as he looks like a set of silicon on steroids. It needs to stay a thing. Our psychological and ethical sensors seem to take all AI (artificial intelligence) nudging machines as ultimately creepy when they take a human form.

Admit… you would not mind losing to a chess computer. Chess computers are built to outperform and outsmart us. But, imagine a chess computer looking like this?

What people find most disturbing in Watson is not that it (he?) has tremendous linguo-analytic capabilities, parallel thinking power and advanced AI logarithms… but that it speaks. People would prefer it to just dot words on a screen.

Humanity my age and older does not want to see computers and interfaces become human, in any way. Younger generations however are completely fine with human/machine interaction that is stooled on humanoid processes. Computers with a human voice, looking like us – be it on screen or in real life- do not disturb the gen-Y’ers in any way. Can you imagine a Google interface that looks and talks like Hale Berry? We are not that far off! Watch how Kate interacts with virtual Milo in this Microsoft Kinect demo:

Click here to view the embedded video.

David Levy, PhD, goes further by showing that psychology has identified roughly a dozen basic reasons why people fall in love, “and almost all of them could apply to human-robot relationships. For instance, one thing that prompts people to fall in love are similarities in personality and knowledge, and all of this is programmable. Another reason people are more likely to fall in love is if they know the other person likes them, and that’s programmable too.” Levy predicts that robots will become so human-like in appearance, function and personality that many people will fall in love with them …

Maybe that is why grumpy old men like me do not want our gear to look too human. A robot looking like George Clooney, with my sparkling personality, and IBM Watson smart would simply be too hard to compete with!

Lately, I teach a lot of teams on how to integrate digital media better into their marketing and communication mix. And, lately I get a lot of people asking if it is a wise thing, making people better at skills that I could sell to them…
I remember a discussion just like that with my grandfather. He wanted me to understand it was way better to teach people to fish, than to give them a fish each day. This discussion came right after a long chat on why it was good to be entrepreneurial. Young, cocky and confused, I pointed my finger at the obvious flaw in his reasoning: surely, by teaching them to fish, you give away your knowledge, your unique selling proposition, your vision, your art, your wisdom? Once you teach them how to fish…. you’re done?
My grandfather just smiled, and bounced a pebble over the waves: “wrong”, he said: “Teach them how to fish…, only then will they understand the need to buy a boat.”

You know, I can predict the future. Every morning, I predict the day will end with dusk and dark. And, using my best Nostradamus skills, I predict a lot of New Age craziness on my favorite social networks this year. It will dwarf all talking of Michael Jackson’s death, Obama’s election, and Paris Hilton‘s underwear: the 21-12-12 frenzy.  The Mayan calendar,  you know, it maxes out end of this new year, when a huge astronomic line-up is due, and the Black Hole planet Nibiru will doom us all into the next solar maximum.  We’re doomed. We’re going to die.
Before you start maxing out your credit cards to go with a bang, hold your horses. First of all: Yes, the Long Count Calendar reaches the end of its round…. Only, it is not Mayan…  it’s Olmec.  Nowhere in Olmec or Mayan history is the end of the world mentioned. … but the end of an era.  After our calendar year 2011 was “up” and “over”, luckily we could start a new count in 2012. When the figures on the mileage counter of your car reach 99999 miles, it starts over again. So does the Olmec Long Count.  The ancient Mayas even thought it was the reason for a huge celebration…
There are even multiple references in as well Olmec as Mayan inscriptions referring to dates way beyond the turning of the long wheel (well, ellipse is more correct ). B’ak’tun 13  is not the end of time.  In fact, there are inscriptions leaping forward to October 21st 4772 AD.  We should be fine. For the moment. I think.
The cosmic line-up is another doomsday reference….  It’s been said that on 21.12.12 the Sun will lign up precisely with the Galactic Equator on the 2012 winter solstice, the precision and slight wobbling of the earth all thrown in a mix that predicts overheating of the earth’s electromagnetic capacities, prompt polar reverses and mayor catastrophes.  Too bad that neither the Olmec nor the Mayas refer anywhere to the Milky Way. No inscriptions, no tailored calendar.  Most unfortunately, even today, no one knows even remotely where the exact equator of the Galaxy is… the Galaxy still mostly being very much uncharted and unknown… what we do know is that the accepted equator did indeed  align most precisely  with the exact center of the Sun, only….. this occurred  already  on October 27, 1998.
So… I’m going out widely on one limp here: we will be fine! The world will not end, just yet. Trust me, I’m a consultant. If you DO fear 21.12.12… Porter Novelli, the company I work for, offers great crisis communications advice. Now is the time to get your end-of-life-as-we-know-it-messaging right. Contact me for end-of-time prices.  It might be your last chance to spend your budget wisely .

A marvelous 2012. It is a New Year, 366 days of blank canvas for you to fill in. Make it into a nice piece of art. May your most crazy wishes come true, may you encounter fun, friendship, starry nights, real coffee, pleasant moments, dreamy music, warm fires, plenty of luck, blue oceans, true love and crazy quarks… have a fab one!

In the old days, if I remember correctly, Christmas was truly a great moment. The radio would air Christmas songs for weeks in a row. As a kid I was marveled by the twinkling of the lights in my grandmothers Christmas tree, the colors of magnificent glass balls, the funny faces of a plethora of Father Christmases, and the sweet angel laughing from the very top of the tree.

And then, there where the carols. All the kids would sing “Silent Night”, or “Petit Papa Noel”. The more musically gifted ones (mostly everyone except me) would bring their flutes, their piano, hoboes, trumpets or clarinets. There would be music. And singing. And someone would tell a story. Very often it involved a shining star, a baby, some shepherds, and voices singing from heaven. All this, together with a nicely prepared duck would set the scene for a great night. A holy night. A night that would warm me from the inside, that made me feel warm, loved and comfy.  Most of that seems to have gone. Radio 1 shouts “Katie” from the Barenaked Ladies,  and “Thunder” from ACDC, with a week to go. It  forgets “the Little Drummer Boy” completely.

Thousands of Belgian people are spending over half a billion euro on mostly useless presents that will be sold on Ebay within hours. Still on the radio, people seem to be more worried about the number of glasses of alcohol they could drink without losing their driver licence than about world peace. Well, we have a government now. Kids will bring their Playmobiles, PSP’s, TV’s and DVD-players on Christmas Eve. I could not tell you if they can sing. Or play music, or tell stories.

Well, call me sentimental. Or old. Or an over-romantic sot. But I miss the old-style magic. A lot. I still am moved by the stardust, the angel hair, the secret smiling spirits in the decoration, the old stories. Can I wish you an Old-fashioned Christmas? And peace and harmony for you and your loved ones…

Click here to view the embedded video.

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… Watch the video.

13 times. 13 times in 3 days, someone on stage @ #LeWeb11 referred to Steve Jobs. Not in the logical sense like “Steve did…” but in the more esoteric inquisitive way: “What Would Steve Do” or WWSD.

I think it is tragic. Jobs was a brilliant thinker, an entrepreneur, someone who would move mountains and seas to get his will done, his vision productized. If necessary, he would knock over some people who were in his way. Nothing and nobody would stand between him, and his vision… The very last thing Steve Jobs would ever have done is wasting precious energy and very costly time pondering on stage on what Jobs would do.

Wondering What Would Steve Do is about entrepreneurial a as buying a book “entrepreneurship for dummies”. Steve Jobs was Steven Jobs. He took his decisions in the context of his time, and stood by them as a man. He took some very unwise decisions, and even more decisions that proved to be excellent choices. His decisions however, will not drive your business very far, regardless of the countless WWSD presentations and countless official and officious memoires that are for sale right now.

I admired Jobs a lot. I’m reading his memoires. I will tell the future generations what a remarkable stubborn wise man he was at times. But I will not spend a minute more trying to figure out what Steve Would Have Done, and neither should you.

I know what Steve would have done hearing you asking what Steve would do. He would have hissed SUMO! And that, my friends, is Jobs’ shorthand for Shut Up And Move On.

Steve did his thing. Now it’s your turn…

I have something for brainy girls, so what can I say… deep down in me, I have a particular soft spot for this woman. Ariel Garten is about as close to the verge of helping machine-body integration as you can. Garten is a psychotherapist trained in Neuro-linguistic programming, and is on the frontlines of thought controlled computing.

If there ever was a gap between science, art, business and technology, Ariel has closed it. An avid hydrophone performer, her scientific work converts the workings of the mind into tangible solutions. Interaxon, Garten’s company explores how man and machine can interact better and faster.

Thought controlled computing was deemed a thing that emerged in bad Sci-Fi novels, but Ariel and her team drilled deep into neuro linguistic to make successful machine/mind interfaces. Granted, still far from thinking up your next email, but it is way closer than you think.

“Professional thought controlled computing is less than a decade away” states Garten: “then we will have reached the level of speech control we have now”.

Thought controlled computing will first have an impact in the medical field. Think about the endless possibilities for locked in , and paralyzed patients, or people with reduced mobility. But think beyond that. Think about a world, not that far away, where those annoying interfaces with machines just went away. No more crappy small keyboards, smudgy touchscreens, or drilling through menus… we will control our computers, home automation, phones, and all the smart devices around us through thought.

Not convinced? Watch Ariels demo… As she states eloquently: “Even the future has a expiring date”

Click here to view the embedded video.

The augmented reality of techno-magic

I admit, it must be this process of becoming a middle-(r)aged man. But I am blasé.  Going to many conferences, listening to the very core of ultimate thinkers, seeing the authors of my favorite books on stage… I love it. But I see that it becomes increasingly difficult to “wow” me, and that I become more and more critical on how people perform and behave.

What I miss most these days is freshness, passion, and a childish fire to share the excitement. If I look at my corporate world: what is the point in trying to get the message across if people, client and/or agency side, get not childishly on fire around a concept or an idea. I learned one thing:  If people in that mythic meeting room without windows are not nodding after a project is unveiled, if you do not see the smiles and twinkling eyes… the project will not fly. Projects need passion. Projects deserve passion. Passion and this innocent fire-within to share are the magic ingredients to make a good project sing, and rock. Passion is magic.

But like unicorns, real magic is hard to find these days. Most of us spend way too much time looking at PowerPoint slides that look like they are made by the Spanish Inquisition, and that are brought by the corporate equivalent of zombies: death inside, but still walking.

Some speakers at #LeWeb brought their keynotes and product demos with about as much passion as I can muster to set out the garbage in a hailstorm. In walks Marco Tempest. Tempest is not a corporate guy. He is a magician, bitten by modern technology. A guy re-inventing his world. A world that is ruled by silly card tricks, a million years old, and black-clad guys sawing curvy underdressed girls in two on stage.

Tempest has burning passion to spare. You see the people shifting from hanging in their chairs to full attention just as he walks in and smiles. A smile that awakes an audience, dear Marco, is worth a fortune.  And then he talks… captivating his audience every single second. Explaining on how he uses bleeding edge technology like augmented reality, crowdsourcing, camera tracking, interactive lighting and cross border social media to give his projects body and existence.

Marco awoke the boy in me. I’m including a video of Tempest, so you can judge for yourself. One sentence of his keynote will be my 2012 motto… “Believe in your magic. If you do not believe in your own magic, how do you expect other people to believe in you?”

That is why we do not see unicorns anymore… we stopped believing in them…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Dear Richard. We need to talk, really. It’s about that space thing of yours, Virgin Galactic. You know, when I was even younger than I am now, that is what I wanted to do. Become an astronaut, build a spaceship or two, and defend the earth against the baddies that could sneak past captain Kirk. But you know how it is, Richard, I had to change plans. Some doctor said you cannot save the planet if you are colorblind, so I did not build the spaceship either. There was not really a point, you see? So I am glad you did.

Richard, I was all excited when I saw Virgin Galactic would speak at LeWeb. I thought you would be there. But… you had better things to do, helicopter skiing with some supermodel, or having diner near Saturn with Kirk and Spock,  I do understand that. Priorities and so.

So, you did send a nice video, on how you wanted to socialize space, and boldly send tourists where they never went before. Trust me Richard, I almost bought a ticket. You were good, on message, touching, wise, smart, a bit funny, and with that little twinkle in your eyes that made the ladies in the audience melt. You totally captured 3300 people by showing of some pricy spaceships, and some manly talk about opening up space to people like me. And then… you stopped. No more video. But you had a back-up  Richard, you shipped George Whiteside, the CEO of Virgin Galactic to finish the presentation. He did, Richard, he did… he killed it.

Don’t ever do it again Richard, letting Whiteside do your presentation? Please? I’m sure he is smart, and nice, and good with numbers. And, he sees colors better than I do. But he is not an astronaut, he is not an adventurer, he is not a storyteller. He lost us Richard, all of us. Here is a man who calls your precious rockets and spaceships “vehicles”, and who murmured stuff that was utterly unexciting.  The melted girls froze up again Richard! Men, who wanted to become firefighters and astronauts before coming to #LeWeb, left the auditorium to get some lukewarm coffee Richard. It was just pathetically boring.  Vehicles… faut le faire as they say in France.

I feel guilty Richard, that I did not make those spaceships myself. I left you with the dirty work. Let me help you… I’m prepared to show George Whiteside how to present better, and how to say rocket in a sexy way. For free, of course Richard, just take me on one of those Intergalactic flights… so we can talk it over.

Yours sincerely,

Danny

In the dark ages, I studied educational sciences and agogics, the science of social interaction. How people learn, how group dynamics influence behavior and how individuals interact with their environment has intrigued me ever since.

I was baffled to hear Deb Roy speak @ #LeWeb11. When his little baby boy was born, Roy and his wife took a courageous decision: they would move into a house that would record every second of their lives, sound and video. The house has sound recording equipment, and cameras all over, and is packed with the most spectacular processing and storage power MIT can provide.

Deb Roy first mission was a misleading simple one, he wanted to understand how language is assimilated by humans. Lan­guage is without a shadow of a doubt one of the defin­ing fea­tures of the human species. By collecting busloads of data on how his child learns in the nat­u­ral habitat of its home, Roy wants to track the process.  Cameras record where the family moves, microphones record sounds…all this is captured, labeled and data mined. The system is able to produce the whole sequence from the baby sound “gaga” to say­ing “water.” The system can also find correlations between assimilating words and vocabulary, and visual impressions. Roy was able to prove that words that are more often associated with an image are quicker absorbed by the child.

By recording every single bit of data, scrubbing the data from unwanted ballast, correctly labeling it, and building intuitive learn­ing algo­rithms to process, analyze and under­stand the patterns Roy is now able to visualize these patterns, interpret them, and close on understanding.

On top of the obvious hearing/learning connection, Roy can prove a definite social con­text to learn­ing, up to a point where his analytic tools can predict how fast a word will be learned, based on the movements in the house, and the number of times the child is exposed to the word.

Armed with this amazing technology, Roy started up Bluefin Lab, convinced that the same prin­ci­ples of lin­guis­tic analy­sis, visualization and predictive interpretation can be applied to new areas, such as TV and the social web. Bluefin Lab  is now not only index­ing over 200  US net­works, 200,000 shows and 2 mil­lion ads per month; it is also connecting all the online conversations gen­er­ated by 20 mil­lion peo­ple around these indexed items,  .

The associations, learnings and predictive formulas that Roy is able to distill out of his system  of cognitive machines are mindboggling, and I am convinced that we’re only at the beginning of social datamining. This will in earnest change the way we deal with “influence” and “metrics”

Tell me what you did when you said it… and I’ll predict what you will do next…

Click here to view the embedded video.

You just know he is different. Put Karl Lagerfeld on the central stage of a global web event as #LeWeb11, and he fits in as nicely as a yellow rubber duck in a bowl of strawberries. Lagerfeld is different. Even a seasoned host as Loic Lemeur, organizer of LeWeb does not really know how to handle him.

Lagerfeld does not come with a manual. He is who he is, and even that is not for sure. Evidence shows he is 78, but he claims no-one knows who he is, and where or when he was born. Lagerfeld… is a big cultivated mystery dressed in spotless black.  He is the flamboyant head designer and creative director for the prestigious fashion house Chanel. Karl Lagerfeld has his own label fashion house, and owns a publishing house. He creates the collections for the Italian house Fendi, is a cult star photographer and filmmaker. At 78, he seems more energetic than a bunch of teenagers on mushrooms, a third his age.

At 78, Lagerfeld thinks email is for old people, it is just annoying him. “I do not do email, it’s useless” he said: “ if I need to read, to deal with all those questions, I cannot create, not concentrate, not shine. I do work, you know?”.  Lagerfeld is also harsh on modern technology: “no machine or program produces creativity. Humans do. Machines are just machines, a help, nothing to bash about. The genius is within us.”

And then… Lagerfeld opens his magic box. He produces 4 iPhones out of his suitcase. Each has a selected circle of people who know that number. Lagerfeld shows his iPods, with his playlists full of favorite music “I paid for this music. I do not download illegally, artists need to live.” And from behind his smoky sunglasses, he throws in a small bombshell: “I also have 20 to 30 iPads. I use them to sketch. Before I worked on sketchbooks, more and more I create on iPad” And he shows the audience a sketch he made of Steve Jobs, and playfully makes a cartoon of himself. Live. Onstage. On an iPad. Not bad for a 78 year old old-timer.

His favorite tool is the trash-bin. “Throw away the 95 percent of your work that s mediocre or bad, concentrate on the good stuff. The winning stuff.”  And on social connections: “it is not because you are heavily connected that you are well connected”.  There is clearly more about Lagerfeld than meets the eye. “Be yourself, be your own brand, you are your own ambassador. Do not look shabby or poorly, style is priceless. But always, always be true to yourself. Pretending is plain ridiculous.”

Lagerfeld was captivating. An old creative genius, out of his bottle, out of his fashion world, stealing the complete attention of 3300 nerdy techy social media kids. “Fashion is not what you see on the catwalk. It is what people wear”.

Lagerfeld will launch a new label in January called ‘Karl’. Net-a-Porter will launch this line exclusively online from January 25th 2012. Lagerfeld is convinced he brings his collection closer to the public this way. “Shopping is social, online shopping is a social activity, you share your experience through the social web.” He is right, especially with prices hovering around 150 euro. But how do you keep up when you have 8 decades on the counter?

“I have my eyes hidden behind sunglasses” he says: “But they are always open. Always. I observe. I see. I link the dots. That is how I learn. See, even at my age I need to adapt to the world. I’m sorry, but the world does not adapt to me. I have no respect for status quo: change things, push forward, be  crazy enough to change the world… Do it!”

“I am a strange child” says Lagerfeld: “I am down to earth, but just not grounded to this world…”

Karl Lagerfeld is more hybrid  than most people half his age… I learned a lot more from Lagerfeld, than from some so-called guru’s today…

Respect…

Corporate life, you have to love it. Working in a consultancy environment, with clients that are dictated by the whims of Wall street is, well, interesting. Nearing the end of the year you spend your time waiting for Godot. Budgets erode away quicker than Artic ice in a microwave, projects get postponed, to that magic point where they emerge into the next year, maybe. Political games are played harder, sensitivities emerge more sensitive, accentuated by hourly rates, geographic location, gender, diversity, language, level, connections, hope and early Christmas carols. Decisions are phrased, rephrased, polished, re-polished, vanish into the waiting room of stuff about to happen, before they join next year’s budgets, maybe… where they will be postponed, eventually. Plans are penciled out in meeting rooms to do better, faster, quicker, with more ROI, and will be discussed in conference calls, next week, before Christmas, before Easter, but soon, really.

Q4 is the time where corporate world waits for Godot. Vladimir meets Estragon, Didi meets Dodo. The modus is waiting, rephrasing, and ironing it out in splendid PowerPoints. Meeting rooms are hard to get in December. Windows get steamy on the inside, wet on the outside.

It reminds me of J.P., best personal coach I ever met. Ex Airborne trooper, hard as nails with a hernia. Cold as frozen carbon. Liquid Freon in the veins. Eyes that burn through armor. I still can hear the gasps when we first saw his foot, or better what was left of it. J.P. amputated three toes while climbing a silly mountain in Alaska. They were frozen, going gangrene. The toes that is, not the mountain. J.P.’s wisdom is simple. You roll the dice, cut through the bone, and let it bleed. You kill it before it kills you. Don’t wait for a new year. Sometimes, you have to hammer nice.

I really miss J.P. Especially in Q4’s waiting room called Godot…

Charming spot

On Twitter, 140 characters make up a message. That’s not much and some businesses, especially small to medium-sized ones, still think Twitter is a no-go. They say it’s too short, too uncontrollable and too time-consuming.

At first glance, Twitter might indeed not seem an ideal communication tool, but in just a couple of years it has proved the world that sometimes “short” is powerful. From its genesis as a basic online SMS service, it has evolved into a world-encompassing communication tool; Twitter users generate more than 200 million tweets per day, and the microsite often beats the most sturdy news platsforms in the world with speed and accuracy. And don’t forget that close to 750 million searches are performed on Twitter every single day, making it a toup-four search engine.

Communicating in 140 characters can be extremely tricky, and when done in an unconsidered or trigger-happy way, a lot of damage to brand and reputation can be done in a heartbeat. Here are 10 ways that brands risk ruining their reputation on Twitter and, ultimately, across their marketplace:

1. You have the wrong handle. A good Twitter name should be short, catchy, simple and recognizable, and refer to your brand.

2. You’re nobody except an egg on a blue background. If you do not tell people who you are and what you stand for, you’ll never reap ROI. Use your profile to show what it is you do and what you stand for. Include your location and website, and remember to use the C3 rule: be catchy, concise and complete. Also know that the default Twitter background with the impersonal “egghead” avatar is not the road to success. Dress up the bride. Stand out. Be sparkling, inventive, inviting.

3. You’re a robot or a zombie. Communicating from a corporate pedestal and hiding behind a shiny logo gets you nowhere. People want to interact with people, not with a brand. This is the engagement part of social media; So mention in the profile who is tweeting on behalf of your brand. You’ll be amazed how much more interaction is triggered by having real people represent your brand.

4. You’re selling. If you only communicate about your beloved product all the time, people will unfollow you faster than you can press “send.” People are not interested in your sales talk or marketing language. They are interested in finding useful content, hearing smart viewpoints and getting helpful tips.

5. You’re boring. People follow you because they think you might share good information with them, or because they want to build a relationship with you or your brand. So give ‘em what you want. As a rule of thumb, divide your tweets in three buckets, one-third for conversing with people, one-third for spreading great content that others brought to you and one-third for bringing great original content to the platform. This optimal mix will allow you to boost followers, connect and engage.

6. You’re shy. Staying in your corner will not win any business or Twitter goodwill. Growing a Twitter account is hard work, and it requires commitment and a willingness to connect. The easiest way to get followers is to follow people. So search for and follow relevant accounts. So search for and follow relevant accounts. If you find someone interesting, check out who he or she is following and add some of these folks to your lists too.

7. You follow spambots and prostitutes. Tell me who you follow and I will tell you who you are, so be careful. When people start following you, it’s common courtesy to follow them back. That’s how a relationship gets started. Be smart about it though. Make sure you filter out the spammers, spambots, prostitutes and random bizarre people.

8. You don’t keep your house clean. Once in a month, do some housekeeping. Look to see if you’re following the right people back and if you answered all messages. Decide whether or not to keep people on your follow list if they are not following you. Ask yourself if the accounts you do follow are relevant in your Twitter stream. If not, unfollow them. Also, accounts that haven’t tweeted in 90 days are usually stone dead, so unfollow.

9. You’re rude. Yes, you have the right to disagree with other people and have your own opinion. What you don’t have is a reason to be rude or impolite. Deal with the message, not with the messenger, and disagree in a pleasant style.

10. You’re lazy. Remember that point earlier about unfollowing accounts that are dead? You’ll be unfollowed if you aren’t a regular tweeter. And remember that once you starte engaging, you’re in it for the long run and should never stop. Your social capital builds with every single tweet.

BONUS TIP: never tweet when angry, drunk, in love, upset, confused or high on emotion. What you put out there cannot be taken back.

(Originally published in PRNews’ Digital PR Guidebook, by Danny Devriendt , buy it here http://www.prnewsonline.com/store/57.html?hq_e=el&hq_m=2327704&hq_l=1&hq_v=b80c18002f ; republished on http://pnintelligentdialogue.be/?p=1675)

Kurzweil’s singularity. Intriguing stuff. It made Peter Hinssen almost nauseous at the last #TEDxBrussels conference. Too much Singularity is bad for you, everybody knows that. It’s a bit scary, talking about this almost magic moment in the not-so-distant future where man and machine will finally merge, kind of…

While most speakers could comfortably maintain an intelligent helicopter approach, Rob Spence was different. He is, well, an eyeborg. Six years ago, a stupid shooting incident destroyed one of his eyes. Rather than feeling sorry, or permanently mimicking one-eyed Jack Sparrow, he opted for filling that empty spot. Literally. With a camera. Equipped with a wireless video camera prosthetic in his right eye socket, Spence moves now in the world as a human camera. An Eyeborg. It gives Rob Spencer extensive international press attention. Time Magazine recognized his eye as one of the 50 best inventions of the year. Spence speaks all over the world.

Spencer looked a happy man. As happy as some people I know with ear prosthesis that help them hear. Or some people with pacemakers that make them live. There seems to be more and more machinery in humans around us. Do some microchips, sensors, titanium plates or bolts make us less human?

The moral question will be what to do with it. I, for one, look forward to that debate… it will be a hefty one. Do we define “human” as the body, the mind, or both. What do you think? Think carefully .

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I love presenting, I love speaking. Seeing others doing it well is a joy. Peter Hinssen blew away the audience @ #TEDxBrussels. You’ll like it…

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This one… just moved me. For all of you who love the power of words…

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Two heroes of my childhood in one music video. Star Wars meets ACDC. May the Thunder be with you!

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You trust those bungee ropes blindly, don’t you? Think again… they might very likely hang you. An Indian summer drink this weekend resulted in heated discussions on e-identity, e-brand, and the very precious social capital. To my huge astonishment, a lot of people keep on posting shady, risky or downright provocative pictures and updates on their social networks “because they have set their privacy options right”. They post compromising pictures, half-drunk thoughts, angry ramblings, etc…. “because they have set their privacy options right”.

Bull. Here is some advice from a grumpy old timer: turn it off.  Set the privacy filters of all your social networks to the lowest protection. Throw those pictures and tutti quanti wide in the open. Let the entire Facebook community gaze at your holiday pictures; invite everyone into your Google+ circles, and get those tweets out in the open. Have a blast! Privacy was a myth of the 20th century…

Turning the privacy settings off will free you of that false sense of protection. It will make you think four times before posting. It will make you think if you really want your boss to see you without your tiny black bikini on an alcohol generous just-amongst-friends night. It will make you stop trusting your friends.

Because, trust me, friends cannot be trusted. The virtual ones I mean. These thousands of Twitter followers, these hundreds of Facebook people…. They are connections, not friends. And even at least one of your friends likely copy posts that privacy protected picture of you to someone else. If some people cannot keep a secret safe, than certainly not your pictures, most intimate thoughts… or wild frivolous fantasies.

So… turn those privacy settings off online, throw the curtains wide open! But, tighten your security settings offline. I have iron social media guidelines with my friends: on when the picture taking stops during that hot barbeque. And what happens with inappropriate taggers. If people do not want to be cast out of my social circle, they need to adhere to those rules. No pictures after dessert, no wild tagging… no exceptions. My way, or the highway. And yes, I check daily to see if everyone complies!

Trying to fix that crazy picture or sharp ranting is like trying to knit a sweater for a dead squirrel: it’s plain useless.

Have fun, offline and online… but let no-one check your rope for you. Only you can…

Nice one from @guykawasaki .  I have to agree with Douglas Adams:  “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by” .

Ah… the old continent. You know, where I, and 731 million other tweeps are living. Basically, people dwelled over the European tundra’s as early as 1,9 million BC. Our first cities appeared thousands of years ago. We have been bashing each other’s skulls in for eons, before settling comfortably within our borders.

France for instance, is a pretty big country. It’s a major power with cultural, economic, military and political influence in Europe and around the world. It owns the third strongest army in the world, with nuclear power.  During the 17th and 18th centuries, France colonized great parts of North America and Southeast Asia; during the 19th and early 20th centuries, France built the second largest colonial empire of the time, including large portions of North, West and Central Africa, Southeast Asia, and many Caribbean and Pacific Islands. It’s the most visited country in the world. It has Paris, the Eifel tower, the Loire Castles; it has the Tour de France.

It also has Cannes, a nice town on the French Riviera established in the 2^nd century BC by the Ligurians (I bet you did not know that). Since 1939, Cannes hosts the Cannes Film Festival (le Festival international du film de Cannes). Every year, film stars from all around the world have been strolling down the Promenade de la Croisette. It is on this beach that the young Brigitte Bardot showed off her voluptuous curves for the first time. It hosts the G20 now.

See, a lot to learn in three paragraphs of text. All of it freely available on the net.  Dear @CNN: CANNES is in FRANCE. Not in SPAIN. Sarkozy is the President of FRANCE, married with an ITALIAN woman, having a meeting in a FRENCH southern city. We’re already happy you correctly located the G2O in southern Europe. But you’re 1200 kilometers off…  I sincerely hope you’ll send your camera crews to the right city…. eventually.

I admit, two videos in one day: it’s pushing it. But William Shatner aka Captain Kirk from Star Trek singing “Bohemian Rhapsody”? I could NOT resist!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hilarious video on how Social Media platforms can all of the sudden become a little bit awkward in a business conversation. Superbly acted, it makes you think… yes, that could be YOU in that chair… are you prepared for it? *evil grin*

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The peeps from http://gopopcorn.ca made a great infographic on what the army of smartphone equipped people around you are up to. Every. Sixty. Seconds. One minute of media sharing generates more content than you can handle. Yes, you!

Without words .

It’s sad to see how everyone, from markets, over journalists and influencers to White-Van-Man is overreacting when something terrible happens to one of the leaders of star corporations.

Steve Jobs passed away, and people all over the planet make his testament, and -in one breath- the one of his beloved Apple Inc. I’m sad that Jobs lost his yearlong battle against cancer. I feel for his family and friends. I feel for his colleagues at Apple, and I feel for the broad Apple community. The world lost a charismatic futurist. His loved ones lost a loved one…

But Steve Jobs is not Apple. Apple was never diagnosed with cancer. Apple never was one man. Hearing Bob O’Donnell from research firm IDC say that the timing of Jobs death is “unfortunate” gives me the creeps. What is a good timing then? Is it really better for anyone to read the obituary after the launch of the iPhone 5?

Analyst Chowdry from Global Equities Research said on abcnews.go.com: “Apple is Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs is Apple, and Steve Jobs is innovation, only God creates innovation.” God? Really?

Apple’s stock dropped 2.3 percent after the sad announcement. Earlier this year, when Steve Jobs asked for some privacy and time off to deal with his health issues, the Apple stock dropped 5%, instantly.

When Eric Schmidt announced that Google did not need his babysitting anymore, black hatting tweeps preached the end of the world, and Google-as-we-used to know it. Remember the day Bill Gates told the planet he would find wise ways to spend his capital, and would leave Microsoft in the hands of Steve Ballmer?

Let’s get real. Apple will survive Steve Jobs.  That is why Jobs worked so hard. There will be Google after Schmidt. One might argue that Microsoft is experiencing a second youth under Ballmer.  William Procter and James Gamble; William Hewlett and David Packard, have found their place in history books (and on Wikipedia), but P&G and HP are still very real.

France had Napoleon, De Gaulle, Pompidou… the US had Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy… The UK still is a great nation, even with Churchill long gone… Good corporations, and most nations, survive the change of leadership.

The King is Dead, Long Live The King. Life, even corporate life moves on. Historically, change in leadership opens room for new blood, new ideas, new challenges. Darwin would argue that change, of all things, generates evolution.

Strong charismatic leaders are important. But not more than that… It takes lots of people to make a thriving company.  Antoine de Saint-Exupery voiced it perfectly – “How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.”

Rest in peace Steve, we’ll miss you…

Eat this, John Wayne… get lost, you silly Lassie dog. From now on, round up your cows with a remote vehicle. Easier than ordering Starbucks!  Can’t wait to see the Parrot boys try this with the AR drone…

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For reasons too long to explain, I attended a presentation of a social worker this week. I hate stereotypes. I hate stigmatizing people: I know countless fab, great, nice, funny, enjoyable, intelligent, sensible social workers. I love and adore social workers. But this one got me all Jeremy Clarkson in seconds.

That image of the dope smoking dude, slightly ahead of himself, with a mind that rather would be doing yoga on top of an Indian mist wrapped mountain? The one who thinks internet is a disease, flying a crime, and electricity something we need to give back to the Gods soonest? The one without a car, with  woolen socks, a wardrobe that closed permanently its doors in 1973, and is slightly smelling of patchouli? That was him. Of all people.

And, on slide 22. The horror: Middle Aged People (40 – 65). Excuse me? Here I am, at 42: washed, brushed and vaccinated. In the Prime of my Life. Juggling neurons with Nobel Prize winning ease, driving cars that are so fast the law doesn’t even have licenses for them, cumulating jetlag, airports and time differences, swapping away short nights like Bruce Lee did with annoying street fighters. But slide 22 of Mr. Social says I’m middle aged.

I hear you Jeremy Clarkson. I’ll join your club: the angry old man club. If Social Workers label me middle aged, the world is doomed. 40 is the new 20! Darn! People like me make the world go round. And round. And then… some!

Feel the blood boiling, the rage fuming in this aging temple of a body. Beware, you young yoga freaks, socially engaged meditators. I’ll room the streets. I fight dirty. I can. I have a 20 year old head start. I’ll ridicule your slide 22.  I’ll quote Mr.T, icon of my generation: “I pity the fool….”

Imagine; in 2008 a young kid CEO piggybacked on Moore’s law, stating boldly that people will share twice the information online. Every. Single. Year. And ‘his’ Facebook would be the center point of that phenomenon. The bold statement was received with some indulging smiles. The boldness of young people is easily tolerated, if they are successful. Some journalists were already wetting their knives, surely, so much arrogance had to fall, soon.

But with close to 800 million people connected on Facebook, tirelessly sharing their location, moods, actions, notes and intentions, it looks that Zuckerberg’s Law is well on track. And Mark Zuckerberg did more this week than just give the old Facebook a Facelift. He radically redesigned it, inviting the small continent of followers to the next stage.  Zuckerberg is turning your old profile page into a timeline. Your life is from now on a well-defined line through time, captured online.

With a click on a button, a conference and some nicely prepared presentations Facebook positioned itself as the focal point of your online life, the spider in your fragile online ecosystem. It connects to your social web, your pictures, your news, your mail, your music, your games… With the announced even smoother integration of reading, listening, curating and sharing tools, most of what you think, read, want, view, or comment will be linked to, stappled on and associated with your timeline, traced, linked and indexed.

I know, put like that, it sounds scary. But Mark Zuckerberg thinks the world is ready. And I am afraid he is right…

It sounded a bit like a seriously broken record. For more than a year, most of the marketing, communications and external relations efforts for way too many companies and agencies have been terrorized by one magic word: “LIKE”.

Facebook’s LIKE button was rapidly becoming the dictator of influence. Forget about engagement, forget about sentiment, and forget about relevant content, social ecospheres, authenticity: How many “LIKES” can we have by end November? In an online world where everything can be measured, the magic key of demonstrating success was a ridiculous simple graph showing your brand had more LIKES than the competitor.  Add the evil grin on the face of the presenter: we had more LIKES!

Everyone in his right mind knows that “LIKE” does not mean a thing, that LIKE can be bought, 27 dollar per thousand… still, in many pointy haired boss presentations, LIKE became the barometer of online success.

LIKE does not give any hint on the impact content has on an audience, how the content is received, discussed, analyzed, shared, rejected. LIKE is a tool to artificially shift stuff into a timeline. Lots of great content was created, shared, approved and enjoyed, but never liked… and thus never made it into the charts.

Zuckerberg and his team are now taking wind out of the sails of LIKE. LIKE will be less dominant. People can share without liking, or simple  indicate what they read. Facebook moves clearly towards a deeper connection with the content. Basically, it turns everyone’s profile into a dynamic content page.  Mark Zuckerberg said at Facebook’s keynote: “The next five years are going to be defined by the depth of engagement”.

Creating depths of engagement will finally force brands and companies to turn away from the cheap “LIKE” hunting, to rethink their engagement strategy. Creating content that makes the Facebook crowd tick will force communicators and marketers to work harder for their money.

Finally.

Found a great infographic on jurgensundberg.net on how to get smarter about personal branding while setting up your social media ecosystem. Smartly done!

Bertrand Piccard got my full attention last year @LeWeb. Bertrand Piccard’s grandfather was the first human being in the stratosphere, his dad plunged down a whopping  14.000 meter into the Challenger Deep, and Bertrand himself adventured around the world. Nonstop. In a balloon.

“It would be childish to think humanity will compromise on comfort levels, mobility and way of living” he says: “we need innovation to adapt the technology to fit the people and the planet’s needs. Not the other way around. We need to dare to innovate, and invent sources of energy and commodities that will support human life as we know it. Simply put, the next generation will have to save us, and the planet. Or not. Either way, nature won’t care”.

A bold statement from a passionate nature loving adventurer. An open invitation to start innovating using the power of Social Media, and the wisdom of the crowds. Piccard used crowdsourcing to make his solar powered non-stop flight around the planet happen (more on www.solarimpulse.com ) .

It seems that Piccard’s public plea for crowdsourcing is a smart one.  Biochemists at the University of Washington used a worldwide set of 235.000 young gamers (!) to play a game called Pundit to help solving a decade old puzzle on the molecular structure of an AIDS like virus found in monkeys. Figuring out the structure opens the way to designing the cure. It’s that simple, but in an environment where there are billions of combinations, no professor can find the little Stone of Rosetta on his own.

The researches turned the Quest into a crowdsourcing game, looking for the most efficient, lowest energy state of the molecule. It took the combined players less than 10 days to crack the code… using auto building, smart tagging and group projections.

Using the unique human knack for seeing structures and sift through recombinations fast, is one of the key drivers of crowd sourcing success. For a lot of global players, – governments, research and development centers, universities or brands alike-, crowd sourcing will play a vital part in the next years to come.

The fundaments of successful crowd sourcing are deeply imbedded in creative connectivity, social engagement, dynamic communication lines, intuitive sharing platforms, and gamification.  It will require people with unique social connectivity skills to drive it: Connected Communicators.  Personally, I think that the word crowdsourcing does not give the planet saving potential any justice. I prefer group intelligence by far: a definition so rooted in my agogics and social sciences background it’s scary .  What communication departments, strategic consultancies and decision makers will first see what it takes to spark success through the cleverly connected wisdom of many?

Harnessing the power of millions of highly inventive brains into one sizzling solution center, connected by the power of a connected web and social sharing tools. The little Kurzweil in me is having a field day…

I still could not care less about your Klout score. Really. It’s just a number, that needs to be put in more context than I can handle right now.

Fashion brand Bal Harbour rattled my belief in social humanity as it re-defined VIP status. Someone thought it was a very good idea to go for a social-score based on Klout to determine who could attend… or not. For its Fashion’s Night Out party in Florida, you needed a Klout score of 40 or higher to get in. Now wait a minute: traditional journalists, people who did not rate their Klout score were refrained from attending? Surely that propels Bal Harbour high in the social likability charts!

What happened to the old-fashioned press-room, where a local beginning journalist could sip coffee brotherly next to a Pulitzer winning heavy weight? Or to a blogger lounge where a starting tech blogger can shake hands with @guykawasaki?

How did Klout become the official VIP rating anyway? Because their website says it can? Let me get this straight: I have nothing against Klout. I do have a Klout score, and apparently it is high enough to get me Champagne and Caviar at the Bal Harbour Shops Fashion Night Out, thank you very much! I would have been welcome there… except, I’m not influential in fashion. Not credible. No role model. No fashion kudos what-so-ever.  The whole Klout craziness is a bit tiring, and extremely worrying. If agencies and brands are using this score to determine who is important, influential and thought leading, we are far far away from home.

It’s already starting: every single day I get multiple requests on Twitter, Facebook and mail from bloggers, twitterati, Google+-ers and tutti quanti to ask me to give them a +K score on Klout. “can you please give me a +K on Klout for my blog”?  A system that can be heavily influenced by simply begging people to vote-you-up, seems a shabby standard anyway. So no, I will not +K you because you ask. Maybe I will if you deserve it.

So please, leave me now… I’ll bash in the luxurious glow of having a Klout score way higher than 40. That gives me VIP status in Florida. I made it. My star is shining…

(you can +K me on writing, blogging, social media, etc…. some of my light might shine upon you, so it’s totally worth it)

It must be the new 42 in my bio. I’m getting old. I’ve lost it, somewhere between the hipness and troubling youngness of 41, and the midlife grim of 42. I’m getting old. It comes with grey hair, faster cars and a certain reluctance to adapt to new things.

You want proof? I have not updated my Facebook profile picture for 6 months. And I still feel happy. And… I’ve given up on Social Networks. Seriously, I do not want to change. I have 6 email addresses. I only deal with two in earnest… the rest, I just automatically pick up.

I’m on all kind of Google stuff, on LinkedIn, Facebook, Bebo, Plaxo, Twitter, Friendfeed, MSN, Yammer, WordPress, Blogger, Delicious, Digg, Sphere, Tumblr, Foursquare, Gowalla, Heat!, 2^nd Life!, YouTube, Spurl, ScoopIt, Netlog, Technorati, Flickr, Instagram, WordPress, Beknown, Evernote, Quora and a dozen other pieces of Social Sorcery. Honestly, I have more than I can handle, more than I can share, more than I can read.

What more do I need? Let’s be honest, the market of social networks is saturated. Yes, I daily subscribe to new ones. Yes, I do have a Google+ account. Yes, as so many others I fake to be everywhere at once. Bilocation is my middle name.  Reality is, if you look closely, that most of these networks are empty shells, populated by frozen avatars. Reality is, that you can only spend so much time on line. When I look closely, on most networks there is nobody home, but an automatic aggregator that faithfully mirrors a status update from another network.

Thank God for automatic status updates! Thanks for update mails, because, how many social networks can you really, truly handle? If I roam through Google+, I see mostly automatic updates. Do people need it on top of their Facebook and other Networks? And what is expected of me? That I link the people that I’m already linked to on a dozen networks yet again? Another invite? To do what exactly?

I’m getting old and tired. Yes, I’ll sign in on your new network. Send me an invite, it’s ok. But I’ll download an aggregator and CRM tool to centralize my online presence faster than you can say nerd.

I can. I’m 42. So many things to do, so little time…

“I can do all things through him who strengthens me” - Philippians 4:13. This nice piece of wisdom gets particularly highlighted in this movie, where a father keeps a promise to his son: they will finish an Iron Man together, no matter what. Or… how “yes we CAN” gets a different meaning when it’s propelled by faith and unconditional love. Rick and Dick Hoyt in a moving tale…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Scientists just discovered that by enhancing the human skin with spider DNA, it becomes bulletproof. It literally can stop a bullet. Spider webs are that strong. The Ethiopians have since the dawn of time a saying: “when spiderwebs unite, they can tie up a lion”. Ancient wisdom and modern technology agree, once more.

The Social spider web is all over the news lately. From playing a highly romanticized role in the Arab Spring revolution, to triggering the Vancouver riots, the riots in London, the cleanup  in London… social media have been put at the very roots of social community engagement… happening in real life. Tweets, Blackberry messages, Facebook pages and instant messages were identified as the initiators of communities taking action: from overpowering governments and attacking police forces, to peaceful cleaning up of London suburbs that looked a bit like Beirut in its worse days…

Strangely, the same politicians that voiced their support to the Arab crowds using social media as a backbone for their revolution, were the first ones to threaten to pull the plug out of the very same social networks when crowds started to voice disagreement in Tottenham, London, Vancouver and tutti quanti. One social uproar is clearly not the other one, is it? UK’s Prime Minister David Cameron even threatened to shut down Social Networks altogether, and has summoned executives of Blackberry, Twitter and Facebook to his office to discuss their part in the social unrests.

The powers that be tighten the thumb screws of the social networks in a desperate move for more control (and ultimately even the right of excluding individuals, or temporary closing down a network) – An attitude that certainly would be loathed by the same people if some Eastern, Middle Eastern or African government would try the same thing.

But as soon as things go terribly wrong, like the Belgian Pukkelpop drama, the earthquake on the US East Coast, or the regions plagued by Hurricane Irene, social networks seem to have become the one communication web that allows a steady stream of information. @DHSjournal, the twitter account of the Department of Homeland Security tried to free a tortured and melting mobile phone system by encouraging people via twitter to favor social media to contact friends and loved ones, and to stay away from the phone.  In Belgium, social media were used as well to set up help actions for bewildered teens, as to organize lists of who was ok, or not.

Should the alert police officer have a fully loaded iPhone next to his gun? Would that be a good addition to the survival kit?  – Social media is rapidly becoming one of the fastest and most reliable ways to communicate “to many”, one of the quickest ways to send out messages to an audience. It is a bullhorn on steroids. Instead of finding ways to control, should event organizers, governments, fire departments, police forces, and worried parents alike not better rapidly embrace their use, and learn how to benefit from this social spider web that connects a growing amount of people?

In the old days, the old Gods would send Mercury to bring news. The messenger of the Gods, with his winged feet, was unstoppable and would bring the messages wherever they had to go. We, modern people, are so used to fast, reliable communication. Phones. Messaging services. They became the cornerstone of our society. We’re so used to having our loved ones on fast dial : reassuringly convenient.

And then, there was Pukkelpop. Within minutes the nice music festival (over 60.000 people attending) turned into a nightmare when a thunderstorm unleashed its wrath, rain, hail and winds over Kievit. Trees snapped, areas were flooded, tents collapsed, stages crumbled down, poles and debris were flying around everywhere, killing five people, leaving 11 people seriously wounded, and sending close to 70 people to medical attention centers. Read Andrew Vassallo ‘s eye witness testimonial here.

Within minutes 60.000 families heard their son or daughter was in a disaster area. Followed a communication nightmare: youngsters trying to call or text home, parents desperately trying to get news from their kids, while organizers and medical teams tried to help where help was needed (everywhere). Mobile phone networks could not cope with the peak in demand, lines went dead. Mobile phones could not cope with the rain. Phones went dead.

But where voice calls had trouble reaching through, the mobile internet stayed on. A steady stream of tweets started to hit the internet. First chaotic messages coming from the festival, about wounded people, and dying people. Very quickly, the tweets got organized: youngsters telling they were ok (using #PPOK), parents asking for news of loved ones, tweeps helping to look for the missing.

People in the neighborhood started offering their help on Twitter: from dry clothes, food, warm drinks, a place to stay the night, a shoulder to cry on, or a ride home… the whole Hasselt region mobilized via Twitter to help the tens of thousands distressed youngsters .

More than 19000 tweets were sent, with a top around 20:00 with over 5100 tweets. For a lot of anxious families and friends, the quickest way of getting news was over the Twitter network. Even the factual information on what happened, how severe the damage was, the casualties, etc came way faster through Twitter than through the organization , the police or fire departments.

“The medium is the message” is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. I disagree. The medium is the medium. It should be set apart from the message. Only a week ago, UK Prime Minister David Cameron had the firm intention of shutting down Twitter altogether during the London riots: “Free flow of information can be used for good, but it can also be used for ill,” he said. “When people are using social media for violence, we need to stop them.” Stopping the bad guys? By all means. Grounding the medium? Never.

Pukkelpop11 showed that social networks have become our modern Mercury, the unstoppable messenger. Mercury brings the message, but is not responsible for the content. The messenger should never be shot, Mister Cameron.

But that does not help the pained families of Pukkelpop, my thoughts go to them. Hope the countless messages of sympathy bring them some peace.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ever since she was Rachel in Friends, Jennifer Aniston made it into the secret dreams of a whole army of men, women and occasional visiting friendly little green ones. Women fantasize about her haircut, diet, wardrobe, and curvy lines. Men fantasize about,… hm, guess that would bring me to a total different chapter.
Anyway, La Aniston made it into the top Google search strings (pun a bit intended:-p) since ages. If you do a little bit more research on Google behavior, you see that about 137,4 percent of the intergalactic male population at least once asked Google for a undressed picture of the Californian actress.
Actor Ben Stiller teaches everyone a nice lesson in Search Engine Optimization by announcing the http://seejenniferanistonnakedfoundation.com/ where he piggybacks on the global urge to see more of Jennifer than is strictly good for the heart. Stiller does it for a good cause: His Stiller Foundation’s primary mission is to support children around the world by providing educational opportunities to help them realize their full potential. Machiavelli would agree that promising some naked Aniston to help kids all over the world to better education is a good thing… not?

Click here to view the embedded video.

I guess I’m a real boy. I always wanted to be a pilot, a secret agent and some super astronaut hero. Nice ambition, until some doctor discovered that I was so colorblind that I saw ripe tomatoes in exotic shades of green…  which banned me from flying anything any higher than I can jump…

That is, until Henri Seydoux from the Paris based company Parrot introduced the Parrot Augmented Reality Drone last year. An iPhone controlled quadricopter so cool, it makes seasoned polar bears shiver. Equipped with four high speed rotors, ground following radar, high definition video cameras front and under, and with an effective flying range well over the advertised 50 meters, it looks like it was designed by Q-on-mushrooms himself for some deep cover mission.

You control the Drone by simply tilting your iPhone (or iPad) front, back, left or right. Altitude and rotation are simple touch controls on the screen. Flying by moving your phone. Neat. Even more spectacular is that the drone sends streaming video back to your phone, real time and high definition.

Your control screen on your iPhone looks like something that could control a Stealth fighter, complete with augmented reality, tilt warning, altitude and direction finder.

It’s good to be a boy, these days…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Great infographic from NJI on simple ways to improve your Twitter behaviour.  When it’s good… it’s good

I played Volleyball for a very long time. I always loved watching the female volley teams, because… they played better: more strategy, less muscle attacks. I also love tech, for a very very long time. I’m intrigued by QR codes, they’re so techy-isch.

Now Shauna Mullin and Zara Dampney,  26^th on the female beach Volley list, and the UK’s prime Volley choice for the Olympics in 2012 are bringing Volley and QR codes together… big time. The girls are renting out there official bikini bottoms to display a QR code that guides people brave enough to aim their lenses at the girls behinds to a betting website.

To boldly bring technology…  what did you say? Augmented Reality? Go wash your mouth with soap!

Communicating with online audiences. More and more brands are convinced of its growing importance, and huge potential.  It’s a fast changing environment, where new networks are adopted; sky rock, are disregarded, forgotten and sold to pop stars in the blink of an eye.

In all kind of windowless meeting rooms, marketers and communicators look at expensive slides. Buzzwords like engagement, Klout, digital, blogs, and Google+ are ping – ponged around the table.  Everyone agrees change is needed: Stepping up, killing your darlings, bleeding edge, innovation by design, burn the status-quo.  There is lots of nodding. And then, somebody  brings to the table that outside the box thinking is needed.

And that is when my light goes out. Albert Einstein framed it elegantly: “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at, when we created them”.  I could not agree more. Just adding a Twitter account, some Facebook hocus pocus and being one of the first brands thinking about the new Google does not make a company ready for this digital age. The biggest problem of thinking outside of the box, is that the box is kept.

Can we find the guts and glory to forget all about the old box? Trying to find a new business model that fits consumer needs that are rapidly changing? Can we get away of our history, ourselves, and shape up for the future?  A car is way more than a horseless carriage; an iPhone is a complete rethinking of what good old Alexander Graham Bell had in mind when he invented the telephone.

Successful chance in this content driven, engaging digital age requires more than the occasional out of the box thinker. It requires purposeful dreamers, with an iron will to make it happen. Reshaping is a creative strategy, not a recurrent one.

To get out of the mud, rethink your wheels

Click here to view the embedded video.

Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google was formal @ Lake Tahoe a couple of months ago: “every two days, we create more content than in all history of mankind… until 1993”. That is a staggering amount of content. New, fresh content. Every two days.

For everyone using the web; that content is a blessing and a curse. There are simply no topics not covered online, with an avalanche of info available in just a couple of clicks.  But what is good information? How do you find it? How do your consumers find it? How to sift through it? Who and what is to be trusted?

How do you survive, as a worker, in dealing with high speed, high tech, always on, fully traceable information? How do you cope, analyze, stay on top of it, process and turn it into something that returns value for yourself, and your company? Because, that is what makes the gold roll: creating added value.

I’m alarmed when I see way too many people sheepishly navigating their careers, propelled by their university degrees, PhD’s and MBA’s, plotting their path for the next two decades. What decade? A society that is more and more driven by information does not really follow a continuous, predictable line. Will these people make it?  I hesitate: More than people programmed to remember and chart, we need people with a knack to spot trends, find patterns, identify audiences, discover opportunities, gather information, and process it into actionable intelligence. In real time.

We’re looking for people with not only the capability to network, but with a born capacity to work the net. People that are street clever, fast-moving, eternally evolving, fast learning, and content hungry. People that scavenge info into tangible bits. People that deep dive, make their hands dirty, and excel in delivering spot-on bullet points. Learning by doing, leading by example, and generating added value. People connecting the story between two bits of information, 7000 miles but only 2 clicks away from each other. It’s work. But not as we used to know it.

The web driven content economy gives no points for knowing, but medals for finding. It has no morality, no set patterns, no agenda, and no guarantees. The content economy runs on servers, smartphones and esoteric bits called cloud.  The content economy speaks over a 100 languages, in a fistful of continents in over 10 alphabets.

The content economy gives you all you need to know, at warp speed, in a crazy information dump at the other end of a search window. Enough to make or break your company over the next five years.  Maybe even over the next five days. Did you add the right people to your workforce to digest?

I’m with Bruce Sterling on this one: as your machines are clearly not educated enough, your people will just have to be smarter and faster, eternal students that constantly evolve, and are willing to make mistakes.

Above all: have fun.

I was contacted yesterday by a young girl who wanted to know my Klout score. She was making a list of important people to follow on twitter. It made me smile. When I answered that my Klout score is on klout.com (like everyone else’s) and that it hovers between roughly 55 and seventy-something depending on my mood, and the temperature of the seawater in Belgium, she got upset. Klout was important, and I was not taking her seriously.

I explained that the temperature of the seawater does have a determining effect on my Klout score. If it gets too cold, I migrate South, and stop tweeting for a while. My Klout thingy sinks accordingly like a stone with respiratory difficulties. If the temperature is ok, my mood gets better, I twitter chat with friends, spread some blog posts around, and my Klout score sours up.  That did not make her happy either.

Now, how can you determine if someone is important based on a yo-yo Klout score? Try walking up to somebody, and ask how important he is. Can you picture that? How do you define ‘important’? Is that a figure in two digits? Will he be more important tomorrow? Is he important because he has money? To whom is he important?

What does my Klout score tell you? Does it show you what people think about what I write? What impact my tweets/posts/musings have? Does it give a value on quality? Even on quantity? If so, in relation to what exactly? To my goals? Did the girl mean with ‘important’ influential? Influential on what topic? To what audience?

I have nothing against Klout.com.  It is a rating system amongst many. I do have something against conclusions hastily drawn from a two digit number that gets influenced by the temperature of seawater.

If you want to determine if someone is important, relevant, influential, you’ll have to rely on more than just an automated tool. You’ll have to analyze all kinds of data, you’ll have to sift through criteria, and you’ll have to put stuff in context. Content might be King, but contextual information is Queen.

There is no number that can tell you whether I am important or not. Only you can determine that.

Thank you for sharing this, it will benefit my Klout score…. .

Amy Winehouse passed away. The internet is bubbling with tears, grief, anger and a multitude of conspirator theories about what happened in her bedroom  on that last evening: why, and with whom. Amy Winehouse was a fascinating phenomenon. Apart of her fantastic voice and great songs, it’s the drama that captures the sociologist in me.  “Crónica de una muerte anunciada” (Chronicle of a Death Foretold) ,  the title of Gabriel García Márquez’ novel captures perfectly a scary new social phenomenon, the new panem et circenses…(bread and games).

Millions of people followed every step of Amy Winehouse’s life, the success, the sorry moments, the young girl unable to cope with success and celebrity status. Bloggers and twitterati had field days covering her drinking problems and severe drug addiction.  Pictures and videos of Winehouse slowly degrading were shot around the planet. A youngster lost control, publicly, and millions of people were watching. Society as a whole failed to save Amy.

Panem et Circenses: we want our heroes to suffer, and die miserably. We watched Amy –and others- battling till death. In old Rome, people watched their gladiator heroes go down. 2000 years of civilization only got the audience up from a couple of thousand, to a couple of million.

We can be proud of ourselves…

Holidays: It is all about switching off, getting away, unplugging, and forgetting. It’s as simple as that. Put your electronic gizmos in the safe, pack your credit card and just.. go. Except… it does not work that way. For me it isn’t.

My books are on my iPad…, my navigation system, radar detector (sorry), addresses, hotel confirmation, cocktail guide and restaurant finder are on my phone. So are my camera, my pictures, my music and my stellar configuration ranger. I want to blog about the great stuff I see and experience, I want to share pictures, upload reviews, download tips. I want to book and order, with one right thumb controlled click.

Trying to switch off work for me does not mean switching off stuff. Stuff is what I do. Stuff is what I use. Without is just more… complicated. You can frown all you want, but I am happy relaxing, with my phone in the holster. I recharge nicely reading Bruce Sterling on my ebook reader. Yes, I am on holiday. Yes, off work, yes, relaxing. But I will no more apologize for staying digital than half of this beach should for reading glossy magazines made from stone-dead trees. There, I’ve said it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my mojito is waiting…

How far would you go to win? How far do you need to go? How far is good enough? Every consultancy firm has a sacred fear of coming close second, to get the call that says “It was fabulous, we loved the team… but..”. The “but” that kills.  The “but” that tells you your competitors were quicker, smarter, better, and used better tactics. They got to the client at an angle you did not see, using language you did not consider, using a plot you omitted to explore. They were more daring, more creative. They swirled around faster, with all their weight on the front foot, delivering a killing hook. They were Machiavellian in their approach, using what it took to win.

How far would you go to nail that important contract triumphantly at the barn door of your office? It takes more than a nicely dressed war room, and some shiny white boards to win these days. Just great corporate hair, and a fashionably cut suit does not get you in the charts anymore, neither does the BMW3 series.

My grandfather was a self-made man, a successful entrepreneur. He educated me with John Wayne. “See that sheriff?” my grandfather said: “every time he walks out that door into that street at sunset to confront the villain he knows he needs to win, if he wants to live, if he wants to come back. As long as you do the same, you’ll be fine. Go, but go to win. Do burn bridges, you’ll fight harder.”

I was given a book recently  Market Forces, by Richard Morgan, painting a pitch dark view on the corporate world in the very uncomfortable close future. Consultancy firms respond to pitches from global corporations. Over time these tenders are fought more and more grimly. From showing up with the best team and the best proposal, to showing up first… to -well- showing up alive basically.

In  Market Forces, tenders and pitches are fought out on the road, on the way to the client. Pitch teams kill off weaker opponents on the deserted highway to the pitch. No rules. No witnesses. Quickest reflexes and biggest cojones wins. Competing consultants only stop to collect the bloody plastic corporate nametags from their dying opponents. Clients get the consultant that has proven to be the last man standing, natural selection. The consultant that went the extra mile, and lived, wins. Darwin would be proud..

“Show up early, with blood on your wheels… or do not show up at all”.  Market Forces might be caricaturizing it, but it’s more reality than you think: are you John Wayne enough to kick your opponents out of the meeting room?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll sweet talk my boss into getting me bigger wheels…

Without words, from the www.thenextweb.com . tx @teakosta!

I do not have a crystal ball, and that is mighty unfortunate. Aside from the occasional lotto numbers, there is some stuff that would be extremely handy to know upfront. @fjaempeters tossed me great video though, digital life tomorrow. What do you think, on the spot?

Click here to view the embedded video.

It was intriguing to see how the various agencies fought for attention at #canneslions this year. And… it was not about the number of golden or silver lions they could conquer… the real battle was elsewhere… and way deeper.  The real battle was on who could convince clients and prospects to be the ideal partner to win over the… online consumer.

While everyone on stage recognized the growing importance of the online citizen/consumer, no one shared the golden recipe of how to win those consumers over exactly, nor what the philosopher’s stone was to keep them happy and brand loyal… There was a lot of talk about bravery, transparency, change, being different, moving border stones. But, let’s be honest, most professionals look at this new battlefield, and scratch their hair. No one has cracked it yet: the ultimate code to tackle communities. Anyone telling they’ve done it a dozen times successfully, on a global level is lying.

Digital agencies know websites, widgets, applications, microsites…  Marketing agencies have the creative skills, the punch lines, the dazzling visuals, media buying does magic with banners, SEO, profiling… Communication and PR agencies are familiar with content, dialogue and interaction. And all are eying the same stack of dollars on the table.

So which discipline owns it? Has the right pedigree? Deserves eternal glory and money in the bank? Can you win with apps alone? Will content by itself get you in the charts? Will a fabulous online movie turn your customer into a brand ambassador?

The uncomfortable truth behind the bleached smiles in Cannes is that no traditional agency unchanged or on its own can deal with the new challenges. Clusters of agencies, sharing top resources across disciplines apparently do the trick. Agencies that dare to adapt their traditional way of working, proceeding, offering  and hiring, and are rethinking their ways do get results. The future will go to those who take risks, adapt, evolve, and learn fast.

Cannes 2012 and onwards will prove some wise words of Darwin right: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change.”

Found a great info graphic on mindflash.com. All the Jedi wisdom, tailored to employee management. Have fun, go motivate your troops… Yoda says: do, or do not, there is no try. May the force be with you!

I admit it, I’m a Foursquare junkie. I like to put places on the map, I upload pictures and tips like crazy… you can follow my every move on Foursquare’s map, and I collect mayorships and… badges.  Dear Dennis, I’ve never been this high on badges since my young boy scout days.

And, now that we finally met in person at the #canneslions , there is no Cannes lions 2011 badge. Nowhere. No. Badge. To. Be. Had. I collected a few mayorships (noblesse m’oblige)… but that was it.

In an interview you said you were a bit surprised about check-ins in Cannes being below par. But seriously, why would people continue to check in, if you do not provide the badge. You whispered something about “Foursquare throttling down on event badges”. Why. O Why?

The excellent Brandbuilder Olivier Blanchard gave you some great tips a while ago, but diminishing badges was not on that list! While Foursquare is an excellent location based reference tool,  there needs to be some kind of reward or recommendation for the user, Dennis.  Businesses get better with good peer reviews. You and your loved ones will get (way) better with the new VC funding , and… one day your IPO or M&A. But for us, dear Dennis, we need badges.

I got some nice stuff from Gowalla. But let’s agree dear Dennis, that is not the same! It’s good for once. We’ll be at the next event. Checking in. For your badges, don’t let us down.

I sat through all the sessions in the Palais in #canneslions. Some sessions were boring, uninspired,  over the top, could be predicted. Others were great, entertaining, educative, challenging. But true inspiration sparked when people from outside the industry were given time. Robert Redford: fabulous. And… Patti Smith.

She’s 64, and looks like she rock’n’rolled every single one of those years. She was at the very heart of punk and Rock. An iron lady in wrapped in leather and iron chains.  A scene monster.

But the lady calmly talking to the creative industry is soft spoken, cites poetry, cites big books of religion, and speaks with reverence of her fellow artists, the people she knew, now long gone… She keeps her memories lively, with a touch of melancholy. Smith is mesmerizing, captivating. She recreates her fellows: Robert Mapplethorpe, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix.  She paints the shaman in Jim, who brought poetry as a highly emotive language, the humbleness of Jimi, who would be mortified by the modern culture of instant online, paparazzi and cellphone cameras.   When Smith talks, the audience is silent.

And she teaches, naturally playing with little gems, paraphrasing her recent book Just Kids. She encourages the audience to look for the magic, to stop faking being unique because you already are, to live up to the duty of transforming society for the good. To not take no for an answer, but struggle for what is right…  to make the ad industry tremble with fear for the unknown, cause you never fear enough. And to be true. To your values, yourself, your friends, your network, your history.

And forget the life is simple. Every weathered line in her face shows the sorrow, struggle, pain and melancholy that turned her into the woman she is.

When she cited poetry she meant to send to Robert Mapplethorne before he died, there was not a dry eye in the audience. You could sense Patti’s old friend reappearing on stage: Beautiful magic.

Here is a lesson no golden lion can buy: “To live in the hearts of those you love, is not to die”…

Click here to view the embedded video.

The power of social media, it amazes me every day. It brings back power to the people, literally. It brings down barriers, it makes people more brave, it gives people a voice. Meet Napoleon, Greek, and a big fan of Arianna Huffington. Hearing that his goddess was in Athens, he decided to give it a shot, and banged out the sweetest tweet I’ve seen sofar here @ #canneslions:

“@ariannahuff I’m Napoleon the hairdresser and since you are in Athens it would give a great pleasure to do your hair once…”

I rest my case… and I hope she does give it a shot. For Napoleon.

Cannes. This is a plush city on the French Riviera. A city under siege. At thebrink of civil war. See, historically the city belonged in June to the big ad- and marketing agencies, coming together to celebrate their amazing work with their clients at a big festival: #canneslions. This is their city. They own it. They have symbolically put their mark on the four corners of the city. Private property.  Marketers only.  Trespassers will be shot, survivors shot again, for good measure.

Expensive watches, 500.000 dollar beach parties, celebrities, free champagne, cocktail dresses and heels… and yachts and helicopters. It’s all here. But that is the cliché façade… see the creativity, the art, the amazing métiers of getting products sold. The visionary thinkers, the daredivels, the lucky ones.  The brainy challenges, the magic of good marketing. It’s… everywhere.

Except… the city is under siege. Enemies are trying to forge a beach head, somewhere between the Majestic and the Carlton, enemies are sipping in. People that normally do not belong here… like communications and public relations people, digital people, strange and weird hybrid people… and –god forbid- people from the tech industry. Sipping the same bubbles, listening to the same deejay. Slippers deeply embedded in the same sand.

Because the sacred Holy Grail of influencing audiences, sending messages, selling products is not owned by marketing anymore. Public Relations wants it share. And while these two giant industries eye each other suspiciously, circling around each other with balled fists (and a knife in the waistband)… there are others that are joining the fight for the marketing dollars: the tech companies: Microsoft, Foursquare, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Adobe… and they are talking about marketing, outreach, points of influence and sales. And they bring guns, big guns to a knife fight…

The total bounty will not increase. More contenders want to rip each other’s ear off. And the rules for wow-ing the clients with measurable results are: no limits, ultimate fighting.

This is a civilized warzone, and the city of the Lions will look way different next year…

It happens way too often, and it gives me the flying Trombones: in a meeting room without daylight somebody with great corporate hair will put on a strategic face and will utter something along the lines of “for this bleeding edge campaign, we need a viral component to generate word of mouth that will bla bla bla”.  Here in #canneslions there are even Lions for best viral campaigns. *sigh*

Let’s agree something.  Please, here from the beaches of Cannes: You cannot buy viral. You cannot make viral. You should not sell viral. Full. Stop. Viral is something that will eventually happen, if the online public decides to. There is no magic formula, no guaranteed ways of making it happen. It is –by definition- purely an organic thing. Whether marketers and spin doctors like it or not: going viral is a community driven phenomenon. Seed all you want!

Buying a gazillion online views and paying for countless banners does not guarantee a campaign to be/become viral. It guarantees views, eyeballs, and opportunities to see. Nothing wrong with that: that is what the job is about. Getting the message to the audience. Simple.

The online world has no need for more viral. The online world has a need for more quality, more skill, and more community understanding. As Redford says: more compelling stories. Instead of burning all this useless energy and money in trying to fake something viral, I’d rather see the effort invested in state of the art insights and metrics, strategic choices that drive change, awesome engagement strategies and a flawless execution and delivery plan with respect for the organic nature of the social web.

We’re professionals, not artists.  I prefer awesome to viral any day. One day you might get lucky and experience one of your brainchildren go viral. Good for you. I hope your other online work is awesome enough to move the needle without a viral throw of the dice…..

It was pock ugly brown, with a ridiculous curved glass screen, and 4 buttons. That is how old I am. The realization came sudden, and brutal. Three buttons would get me: first Belgian Channel, second Belgian Channel, First Dutch Channel… and the fourth one would power the wooden piece of furniture on and off. My dad called it a television. We were mighty happy with it…

Bizarrely, I associate this first TV with happy family moments. Eating together at the family table was mandatory at Casa Devriendt, and the hours we spent watching the news, the weather or cheered on James Bond in saving the planet, we watched together.

But that did not last… For some decades, every basement, teenage dungeon, and master bedroom was equipped with TV’s. People would watch on their own, contently dabbing some chips in cheesy dip sauce.  For decades the motto was me and my TV… and now,… people with nice corporate hair on stage in #canneslions are talking about social TV.

There are three things that prevent people to meet at the dinner table at the same moment: TV, internet, and mobile phones. And still, various people on stage think that the new golden age of TV is combining those three things, and that it is going to be social.

Before you invest in a bigger comfy chair and a giant fleece blanket to cuddle under… hold your horses. Social TV does not mean sharing the family handkerchief while watching the little house on the prairie. Apparently, social TV means you now can tweet your mom how great your American Idol is. And you can use your phone to vote for stuff. O yes, you can Facebook your dad some hilarious fragments of your show,so that he can like it.

Social TV does not mean more people come together…. Social TV means people have now more devices to be away from each other.

I miss that pock ugly brown curved glass thing…

I love to meet Arianna Huffington. For a lady who made it in a couple of years to one of the absolute queens of online content, she stayed very much the Greek girl she initially started from.  Giving a wide population the platform to share highly localized content, she took her Huffington Post to one of the most talked about content sites on the planet, and recently sold it to AOL.

Hearing Arianna speak is a nice. With a hilarious collection of quotes, and a delicious exotic accent, she takes the audience for a wild ride on the river of her thoughts.

A remarkable constant lately in her talks is the emphasis she puts on a couple of point you would not expect a figurehead to address on stage: the importance of having quality time, the refreshing benefit of using the “off” button on connecting devices, the no-charging rule in the bedroom, the importance of a family taking the time to dine together, and the ridiculousness of hypothecating sleep for stressy work.

Arianne Huffington can talk about sleep, like a sommelier can talk about a delicious bottle of Bordeaux.

At the #canneslions, Arianne gave a view on what she labeled the four essential pillars for a better, humanized internet. She did not talk about more IP addresses, or faster routers, better storage, more fiber and transcontinental backbones. She talked about very human values: Trust, authenticity, engagement and a relentless pursuit of happiness.

Something anchored on pillars from that caliber, cannot be wrong…

Thousands of top notch creative people in Cannes. The crème de la crème of the advertising, public relations and communications industry. Sessions on nice podia, given by the world’s most confident client facing people. A delight to attend this #canneslions thing, and watch.

But still, this year it seems to be about content. The power of the community. Crowdsourcing. Co-creation. Creative storytelling. Message delivery platforms. The power of change and integration. Concepts and words skillfully used, like Jedi knights wield their lightsabers.

But still, in walks an old man, with a weathered face. Born in 1936, a high school drop out. A backpack adventurer who’s seen hunger, cold, and endless routes under his sore feet… in walks Robert Redford.

He still has the sparkling eyes of his Sundance Kid days, and more charisma than is good for the rest of the presenters. Robert Redford has a presence. He does not present, he is. Dressed in a faded jeans, and naked feet in casual moccasins he talks, and smiles, and reflects.  Robert Redford enchants the audience.

And teaches many in the audience (me included ) some lessons, shot right at the heart, from the hip. About authenticity, being real, true and transparent. About how you earn respect and trust by being true to your word. How the way to success is long and thorny. How you only get to the top by taking risks. How taking risks will make you fail. How failing will make you learn. How vision comes from the heart, not the head, and how stubbornness gets more done than eternal reflection. How life is more than work, nature better than art, and how experience mellows even the most rebel soul. How even thinking that winning or losing does not matter is so wrong… as life only deals with winners.

Robert Redford was as credible as it gets. As big as the theatre. As sharp as a knife.

Robert Redford still knows how to tell a story…. Have we forgotten?

#canneslions : this is the Mecca of creativity, here the world’s top talented people in advertising and PR meet, compete and interact. A mist of almost holy creativity hangs over the French Riviera city for a full week.

The winners of the first Lions, the prestigious Cannes awards, have been unveiled, and even the very critic peer jury was in awe of the level of brilliance that radiated from the awarded entries. Daring, edgy, entertaining, moving, captivating… it was all there.

The old journalist in me looked as much at the audience, as at the stage. It was fascinating to see how agencies and their clients were sharing these awkward seconds between introduction of a category, and announcement of the winners. Sometimes, client and agency literally await the verdict hand in hand… and every time, winning, close second… or losing was shared by a joined team.

Great brands need great agencies. Great brands and great agencies need great people. Great people in the right environment spark pure brilliance.  None of the winning or shortlisted agencies was working for a client. To even compete at this level, it takes more than working for someone. It means partnering. It implicates blind trust and tremendous respect. To win, you need to think outside the box, deliver above standards, re-invent the path to success, and break down any barriers that might prevent flawless delivery of stellar ideas. Not even a team can chew that off. You need a tribe.

There is no arrogance in successful teams, no politics, no poker faces… to win, every single tribe member needs to break through all that, and become the selfless soldier of a platoon under heavy enemy fire: the confidence that comes when you know you’re covered.

The old French elite Musketeers already knew the key to success: all for one, and one for all… More social than that, it does not get

Buzz words, and buzzing phrases… it’s intriguing to see how concepts that made perfect sense when they were first used,  gradually erode to the dust of absolute hollow meaninglessness…

The phrase I heard most so far at #canneslions is “harnessing the power of communities”. Seriously, every keynote or seminar I went to, used it: harnessing the power of communities. People on stage trying to make us understand that, regardless if you’re in communications, marketing or media buying, you need to aim at that community. And… harness it’s power. Whatever that means.

What rubs me the wrong way is the directional connotation that the new buzz phrase has. Go harness the power of the community. The community is your target. Go, mighty marketing soldiers… go, and harness its power.

I do not see it work. If a community is your target you will fail, miserably. The secret potion of success lies in understanding the community, finding common grounds and interest points, and creating a partnership that is built upon mutual respect. To make it work, you’ll need engagement… and regardless how well you target the community, and how desperate you want to harness its power… well, you simply cannot. Because engagement and interaction comes from them, the people within the community. They will choose whether or not you’re interesting, funny, nice, intriguing and adorable enough for them to invest some of their energy in you.

See, the power of a community exists. It’s pure magic… but you cannot harness it. The power of a community is a precious gift, and rather than go and conquer it, you’ll have to earn it.

Earning trust and respect, that will lead towards engagement, is a social skill. The social in Social Media was not put there by mistake…

So, stop talking dust…

Stop the press. Seriously. The red button, press it. While everyone at #canneslions is going all mellow on online stuff, and the slow death of classic press is being proclaimed on some over-enthusiast blogs, Internet Archive starts backing up its efforts…. on paper.

Imagine this: “Internet Archive is building a physical archive for the long term preservation of one copy of every book, record, and movie we are able to attract or acquire… The goal is to preserve one copy of every published work,” says Brewster Kahle, from Internet Archive on his blog. So Internet Archive is scanning in all those massive records… but is backing them up on dead trees.

“All our disks, servers and storage means are still objects” says Kahne: “stuff can go wrong with it”.

So for every scanned item in their archive, Internet Archive is now keeping the hard copy as well. Millions of books and publications, on normal paper.  They developed a modular storage system in Oakland California, constructed around one of the most popular storage units in the world: the shipping container –  40.000 books in a container (the equivalent of a standard library), stackable to accommodate the millions of books.

Preserving all the books on the internet, backing up this digital Alexandria on paper. The Cloud never felt more heavy…

Wandering through the old streets of Cannes, the various advertisings and teasers are about online. Digital, you know, and social media.  #canneslions 11 is going to be Social. For sure.

Sipping cooled drinks, awaiting the official start of the event, conversation goes on about the future. The future of advertising, communication, news, influencing. The future of some very influencing industries. And, apparently, between industrial quantities of Pastis and Pernod, it has been decided that that future is going to be digital. And social. For sure.

I, for one, think that this is missing the point entirely. I agree with The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University: the real future of advertising, communication, media buying and news lies exactly where it was in the past: in the ability to deliver a compelling message to a selected audience.

Having insights (metrics, data, intelligence,…)on the communities that harbor your target audience enables you to plot a suitable connection plan, fueled by conversation topics and appealing content.

It does not matter if that community is on or offline. A good strategy is built around the connecting points, encompassing on- and offline, making sure to reach the community in the least intrusive way. Stop bringing the people to the mountain… move the mountain…

If you reach out to communities… do not forget you reach out to people, not to numbers, or dots on a chart… reaching out to people is pretty social in my book, it always was…

The key to success is still the ability to benefit from insights, to have the right empathy to feel the community, and to cleverly select the right mix of influencing channels.

Some old games never change, they just dress differently…

So I arrived in Cannes, city of plush French Riviera, overpriced terraces, great sunsets, and –especially with the #canneslions – a lot of overzealous marketing people. The old journalist in me still has a knack for spotting interesting conversations around me. When I heard two junior people going all ballistic over Facebook, I could not help smiling.

‘Facebook will never go away”, the young girl said: “ever. It’s too game changing. Too many people are touched by it. It’s here to stay.”

How I love youth. How I love the naïve black-and-white painting of a complex society. The lack of long time perspective… how I adore people not yet tainted by the knowledge that what moves up, comes inevitably down… and hard.

I look back on almost half a decade of life-altering inventions that changed humankind forever. VHS. Betamax. The telex. The fax. LED watches. The modem. IRC.  BBS hot tub. MySpace. Yoghurt machines. The number of applications, inventions and conditioned behavior that simply eroded, ebbed away, and got forgotten is mind boggling. In the best of cases, some of it is now museum shelve material, gathering dust.

In the steam engine era, steam engines were a big deal. Really. It changed life as they knew it. They thought those whistling machines were there forever.  Well, it has been a while since I saw the cloud-spitting Flying Scotsman thundering by….

Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr… they are great. They change life as we used to know it. But something tells me, we’re not there yet. There will be the next next thing.

One day, we’ll have to explain to a whole new young generation what all the fuss was about.

Great Infographic from www.theatlantic.com.

Oscar turned seven. That is a big step in a man’s life. You learn things when you’re seven. You decrypt letters like there is no tomorrow. You count. You add stuff to other stuff. And then, there is girls. Like Sarah. Seven rocks. Seven means you’re growing up… Fast.

So Oscar had a Grow Up Party at school. Like a Convention for smart people growing up. They could invite old people, like me. So he invited me. To the Party. Now… being invited to a Grow Up Party is a big deal. Especially when you’re invited by Oscar. It means a lot.

So he picked my most shiny car for the wonderful ride, just the two of us, to his Grow Up Party at school. And while humming through the Flemish countryside, quietly enjoying the sun in a roofless sixty year old two-seater, he slid his little hand in mine. And squeezed a bit. For Comfort. I do not know if he wanted comfort, or wanted to comfort me. Anyway, my nervousness ebbed away.

As I saw him beaming, on his way to his Sarah and his Grow Up Party, I understood: he will save our world. No matter what. That’s what seven year olds do…

When @GaryStockman, CEO Porter Novelli, tweeted yesterday: “Final lesson from weekend’s perfection driving school: In a spin, both feet in. It doesn’t really apply to biz, but it sure saved me yesterday”, some people asked me what he meant.

As a fellow lover of fine fast machines, I knew exactly what he meant: When you lose control of a speeding car, press both clutch and brake to the floor. This will keep you from stalling the engine (and, while spinning backwards, prevent from ruining it). Moreover: locking up all four wheels gives the car a straight, predictable path (nice for other racers who go out of their minds to avoid you). Thirdly; four fat strips of enhanced expensive rubber screeching on the asphalt slows your car down… and every mile/hour slower is a good thing, especially when you’re heading for that unforgiving concrete safety wall…

There, I explained it, clear good advice that can save your car and some precious body parts. But before you take off, in a local imitation of Alonzo on speed… wait a second. You need to know that Gary is driving a mighty rear wheel powered car, with modern ABS system. On older cars, without ABS, locking your brakes will flatspot your tires, with a risk of them exploding. Hm…  and, when you’re losing control racing a front-drive car, slamming the gas to the floor and some skilled counter steer allows you often to recover from certain disaster.

Just to say: advice should never be taken out of context. As every driver knows: every car is different. Same goes for tips and tricks on communication. There is no one size fits all, no boxed approach, no always-win tricks. Every situation has a history, a context, very own specificities… it requires a strategy and tailored solutions…

Trust me, I’m a consultant

With Flipboard, Storify, Zite, Scoop.it and some other nice applications in the spotlight these days, the terms aggregation, filtering, re-publishing, and curation are being used like there is no tomorrow. Apparently, people are curating via Twitter, filtering signal from noice, turning buzz into intelligence… curation is the new aggregation… etc.

Curation seems to be the old yellow, which was the new black. But in my humble opinion, true curation goes (or has to go) further than some (most) of the stuff I see today. With literally petabytes of info, news, and user-generated content being uploaded every single week, the term info overload is an understatement. My personal Tweetdeck presents me with three tweets a second, in average. To avoid me getting a whopping headache, I filter it on people, and keywords… filters do come in handy…

If I browse the news on keywords, and put the results in a space, I’m aggregating. Aggregation gives me topic relevant news @ a glance. To narrow down for relevancy, I can filter it further, using artificial or human filters. Machine or human filtering..I do not care, it stays aggregation in my eyes. Very often, it is smart re-publishing.

My personal requirement for curation goes a step further, it needs to bring me content on a higher level. It requires a necessary step beyond aggregation and filtering: it needs to add a relevant; active and editorial component. Curation needs to bring me relevant news, filtered, positioned in context, and condensed… following a what I call smart content strategy.

I want the news to be gathered, processed and brought to me on a way that brings me intelligent added value. The news needs to be tailored to my content needs. And answers to crucial questions are primordial: why is this news relevant, out of what context was it taken, what is its authority, reach… how will it impact me, or my client.

The editorial interpretation by a trusted source is primordial in the validation of the gathered content. It’s a process that starts with adequate sources, filtering on relevant key-words, followed by content evaluation according to tailored criteria. Follows interpretation of the content mirrored against a broader context, weighing in sentiment, relevance, and authority. That piece of work published is a piece of curation. I’ll settle for nothing less.

Content is King. Dealing with is a métier, an art.

Re-calibrating content is what gives curation value. Carl Sagan phrased it eloquently: if you want to create an apple pie from scratch, you’ll first have to invent the universe. Good luck with that one…

When Gary Vaynerchuk @LeWeb countered the ubiquitous question “what is the return on investment of Social Media” with an instantaneous “what is the ROI of your mom?”, I enjoyed myself tremendously. Both questions are extremely difficult to answer…  but for those of you who are wondering, here you go!

I still have it. My journalist card. To get it, I had to learn, cherish and foster a holy grail of deontological codes. Codes that for a decade drove my life. Hunting the best news, putting it in an adequate referential frame, and always… always keep three things in mind: integrity, news value, and a loving respect for the audience.  Romantic soul as I was, I went , a Knight of the Round Table of newsgathering. Abiding the rules. They are still firmly embedded in me.

What happened to those rules? What happened to earnest journalistic skills? Investigation? Pulling off pieces that you were so proud of you would frame them in your office?  It must have to do with age. Like Jeremy Clarkson, I am turning into a bitter grumpy old man. And, there are a lot of good journalists out there, surely. Some are good friends. Some are still knights.

But I do not like what I see. Every single day I see journalists complaining about bloggers and tweeps. Pointing out that those online amateurs do not have to abide by rules…

But when I see Yves Desmet, editor in chief of a notorious Belgian newspaper publicly burry twitter after trying it for a full 58 tweets… I have questions. Why did he not try it seriously? Is he aware of the impact of his words? What would he do with a trainee that would produce a similar ill-documented piece? I know that my old chief would have boxed my ears…

And when De Standaard documents that Bart De Wever changed his favorite French fries supplier from ‘t Draakske to ‘t Kriekske… why should I care? What is the value of that news for us, common mortals? Is that what the editorial power is supposed to do?

And yesterday, journalist Geenen gave Roger Vangheluwe,  former Belgian bishop at the epicenter of one of the biggest pedophile scandals a free hour long live TV forum. Vangheluwe abused two nephews, but has no plans to abandon the priesthood. As AP frames it this morning: “He called 13 years of sexual abuse of one nephew which started at age 5 as no more than “a little piece of intimacy.” He said the abuse of a second nephew was very short.”

Indeed. He did. Live on TV. Where was the context for the audience? The moral obligation towards the audience, which includes the victims of this man? Who authorized a livecast? Was the goal sensation and audimat? Or was it news?

What I saw had nothing to do with news. What I saw was cheap sensation. What I’m seeing more and more is that deontology became a weapon to attack others more than a way to live by…

I saw more respect, compassion and context on Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere yesterday, than I’ve seen some journalists handle for a long long time.

I’m proud to be a blogger. Maybe, for some journalists it is time to put Excalibur back in the rock. You can always claim it back when you think you’re worth it again…

Click here to view the embedded video.

I should be proud. This little country of mine made it into the Guinness Book of Records for being the one country that could not manage to get a government in 300 days. You read correctly: forming a government in Belgium takes longer than in postwar Iraq…

I admit, ruling a country of some 250 miles on 100 miles (roughly), with 11 million people must be hard. Belgium is about as big and crowded as greater LA, but the politicians are having a hard time… doing… well, no one knows exactly what they are doing . Splitting some stuff, to keep the other stuff together sums it up quite nicely.  For 300 days, we got more people working on forming a government than I care to feed. Unfortunately, I do… feed them, through the about 60 percent of taxes that I contribute faithfully…

Even journalists are getting bored with it. For the last days, we got a “dissident” prince on the front page, the fact that a politician changed his (I swear!) French fries supplier was national headlines, and the picture of the tired boxer shorts of yet another politician stare at me from the cover of a quality newspaper.

Belgium. Maybe, we should sell it. Or franchise it. Or call the cavalry. Or call 82^nd Airborne division. Or go back to what we’re good at: tap some beer and find a Belgian compromise…

In the spirit of pristine crystal clear transparency: I will Google you. If you’re anywhere remotely near me, I already did. And I will again. The articles you wrote six years ago, that embarrassing picture with the dolphin and the frozen margarita, your funky status updates on a dozen social networks, your job-hopping on LinkedIn, and what your ex is eloquently writing about you on the blog my.six.years.in.hell.com… I’ve seen it all.

I’m just very good at keeping a straight face. Seriously. I’m Googling you. And so is everyone else you’ll meet. Your HR director. The headhunter you’re talking to. Your colleagues. Your future employers. Is that a little drip of sweat on your brow now? You thought you hid the ghosts from your past that well?

Reppler (www.reppler.com) thinks it can help you. The (for the moment still free) service continuously tracks and monitors your online social-networking reputation… well, on Facebook that is. Reppler is designed to keep a frowning eye on you, and manages the content you post. It monitors your privacy settings, and watches everything that that uncontrolled tribe you call friends post with your name on it. Reppler cries wolf every time it detects something that might jeopardize that precious reputation of yours.  In short, Reppler wants to be your online conscience, bodyguard and guardian angle.

But here is my advice. Forget Reppler. Forget any digital service to manage your reputation. Your best chance in keeping  you in check… is you. Be smart. Think twice before posting, educate your friends on how to behave, and educate them on their tagging behavior. Remove tags from pictures you’re not happy with. Ask friends to post pictures privately. Take your own online reputation seriously.

And learn to live with some mistakes. We all had off-weeks, bad hair days, and embarrassing moments.  It’s not the end of the world, even if there are online traces…

You know that. You Googled me…

Click here to view the embedded video.

David Christian narrates a complete history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the Internet in a breathtaking 18 minutes. Challenging  illustrations accompany his personal “a short history about everything”, eying the world through a fish eye lens… .Life, the universe, everything…

Enjoy also a great example of the art of presenting…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Every time people come up to my office, call me or send me an email asking for a Twitter strategy, a Facebook strategy, or a YouTube strategy, I get an uncontrollable urge to rebuild their outer hull with the help of a pneumatic hammer and an icepick.

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and tutti quanti are no strategies, they are not even tactics. They are simple tools, channels to convey a message. It’s simple. Think about an overall objective, build an overall strategy, and look what tactics and tools you need to achieve your goal. Success is often not  in the little details, but in big holistic, structural approaches like the planning of your community engagement .

When rightly integrated in an overall marketing and communications approach, digital and social media will help move the needle in a nice and measurable way, but are not a miracle recipe. No social campaign can make a crappy product look shiny, and no YouTube video can correct a manifest lack of vision. Success comes first with companies who value their audiences, and invest in the courtesy to listen to their market, and respond and act upon it.

Building a social capital requires listening first, and adequate responding after. It asks for building mutual understanding and trust. In short, it plays on the middle to long run. It’s not a quick-win/harvest soon methodology. Like most investments, you’re in for the long haul…  you will get longstanding dividends.  Just a quick dip in social media waters to test the temperature will not do, and is not done…  As social engagement plays out on the longer run, you cannot pull out early of the game. You commit, or not. Like there is no way to be a “bit pregnant”, there is no way of being “a bit social”.

Yoda said it wisely: “Do, or do not… there is no try!”.

I’m Belgian: open, understanding, vaccinated, and tolerant. As long as it is between consenting adults, I am mostly fine. But kids need to be protected, always… it’s a sick world out there sometimes. So, here is a nice campaign US celebrities set up: Real men do not buy kids. See Mr. Old Spice, Isaiah Mustafa, and Mashable‘s CEO, Pete Cashmore star in a string of videos that are meant to help to warn against child sex slavery. Real men get their kick elsewhere, no?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, you use the internet? Congratulations, you have a couple of thousand terabytes of charted web @ your disposal: company websites, twitter streams, the magic Kingdom of Facebook, and the wondrous tentacles of Google land. But all of this mindboggling information is only a tiny percentage of what the internet really is: a gargantuan monster…

Picture this: The World Wide Web is rather huge, really… Google found more than a 1 trillion (that’s 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web, and is still trying to index all of those ( in 2006, 25 billion sites were fully indexed). However, most experts refer to this “visible” part of the web as the “surface web”.

Surface web is an adequate term, if you currently draw your nets  in the ocean of online info; you’re barely scratching the surface. The Dark Web, or Hidden Web is approximately 540 times bigger than the web you experience daily. Apart from secret military streams, long lost and forgotten early-day-experiments, over machine-to-machine botnets and criminal set-ups, there are whole sections of the web (like freenet for instance) that are concealed from the normal user.

While big players as Google, Bing and Facebook desperately try to chart, map, reach and index this Deep Web or Dark Web, none of them are making remarkable progress: the Dark Web is still uncomfortably dark, and “hidden”.  However, in this Dark Web, people are storing data, having conversations, expressions, opinions… that are now mostly lost for the indexing, tracking and measuring giants.

Michael Bergman is an American academic, specializing in this Deep Web. He found the deep web to be approximately 550 times larger than surface world wide web. His study says that: “The deep web is the fastest growing category of new information on the internet … The value of deep web content is immeasurable … internet searches are searching only 0.03% … of the [total web] pages available.”

Tim Berners-Lee, CERN scientist who stood at the very cradle of the world wide web has a compelling vision: “I have a dream for the web in which computers become capable of analyzing all the data on the web – the content, links, and transactions between people …” His dream of a Semantic, indexed and holistic web is still a distant dreamy thought however… But the key to a better understanding of knowledge, sentiment and vision might be found in the dark web.

Content is Gold. Measuring is knowing. 99% of the web remains unexplored. Leave the charted waters, Go West. Again .

I’ve been watching this video for over a week now, and it still moves me. Meet 13-year old Alye Pollack as she silently protests against her bullying classmates. You go, Alye… and respect.

When words can kill, YouTube is a mighty weapon…

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s done. All nephology for me from now on. My stuff is up there. All of it. In the cloud. On top of the tiny water droplets and frozen ice crystals and slightly radioactive stuff that are quietly hanging out there in the cozy glowing atmosphere above the surface of our planet, you’ll find my digital bits.

My money was already virtually located in some hyper protected secret bank vault, but now, my music, files, memories and more life than I care to ponder on  is parked in the dusty trusty binary environment of a mysterious cloud. A digital mist of smartness that I can access from any intelligent device around me, and these days, that scales from a freezer to the traffic lights on High Street Corner.

Kurzweil would be proud of me. Virtual me. Digitalized, uploaded, mirrored, backed-up and on unlimited broadband capacity.

I’m a Cloud. John is a Cloud. There are lots of Clouds… . All of the sudden the song “It’s raining men” gets a whole new meaning…. : I’m all Mist, Ice and Creepy Particles

Click here to view the embedded video.

Lol. You gotta love The Onion

SxSW is seen by many as the ideal launch platform for social media start-ups. Twitter, over countless others to Foursquare own a great deal of “launch momentum” to the Texas based exhibition. Only, what was the golden start-up this year?

A lot of start-ups come and try to pitch their cause at the blogger lounge, and I heard more than once that the overwhelming presence of bigger brands prevented smaller start-ups from getting a fair share of voice. Gigabrands like Google, Foursquare, Twitter etc. eating up so much attention that they literally smother to death the little beginners?

Excuse me, but I have difficulties buying that. A ton of journalists, bloggers, podcasters, venture capitalists and business angels are sifting through the five days of SxSW to find the little gem that will grow to the next Gowalla. Investors were roaming the floor with dollars in their pockets.  Claiming that you do not get noticed because O’Reilly stole your five minutes of glory is a little bit too Calimero to my taste.

Oil and water. They do not mix, and oil floats on top. Always. So does quality. If no journalist, blogger or investor made you an instant billionaire, you probably only have to blame yourself. Is your product really outstanding? Does it create a unique user experience? Is it unique? Is it compelling? Did you pitch it correctly? To the right people? Were you professional in advance briefing your targets, and in shortlisting face to face meetings? How good was your leave-behind? How professional your deck? Did you present it well: with passion and conviction? Did you identify the right messaging?

Confucius said that 98 percent of luck sits in clever preparation. Who am I to disagree… if you were worth it, you’ll get in the charts. If not: back to the drawing board…

Bruce Sterling did not disappoint me at the closing of SxSW. A cynic futurist and gifted speaker, he has a tradition of naming the things exactly as he sees them, without dressing them up. While he usually writes with vinegar, he switches to vitriol in his talks.

The closing speech was a 45 minute ranting, where Sterling gave Exxon Mobile, the Catholic Church, politicians, Berlusconi and Google C-levels a full broadside of his legendary fuming.

“Women, cast away all the cowards from your embraces, “ gives a good idea of the tone of voice, but it got even better when Sterling invited the young generation to take over an overheating planet from the generation that let it happen:  “Go away, Boomers! You need to take power, millennials. I’ll vote for ya! Move to Austin, take over the town, and create a global youth movement. Boomers, shut up, your days are gone.  What you should study now is collaborative consumption. Days of rage, baby. Be realistic, demand the impossible! “

Sterling was steaming about the fact that, while nuclear power plants are burning, and the planet is heating… the people who can move the needle sit on their coach, playing with their PlayStations and Wii’s. He’s convinced that without a revolution, the necessary efforts to save the planet and invest in clean technologies that will allow us a future will never be made.

Sterling points out that it is the millennials who should grab their future now. And they have the ultimate weapon to enforce things: the power of a social net.

All they need now is rage.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It must be the old journalist in me. But way too often I hear in keynotes, panels and conversations the gratuitous “We”, or even more angering the totalitarian “they”. “We all think…..”; “They need….”, “We all want….. they need to give….”.

I have big difficulties with these generalizing pointers. Maybe it is because I’m special, but every time I hear a keynote speaker go “and that is what we all want”, I have this uncontrollable urge to stand up and shout “not true, I’m not.” I hate it when the audience is unidirectionaly demystified, stripped from all individuality, and crammed into two buckets: “we” and “they”.

Very often I cannot identify myself with either the we or the they… and voicing the angry inner dialogue in the vast personal kingdom of my head after being pulled into a “we-crowd” against my will would be illegal on most planets.

So do not link me to whatever you have to say. Show respect for the fragile thing that makes me me. Talk about people, as Guy Kawasaki does so charmingly (or should I say “enchantingly”), talk about friends, talk about persons. Say there are, or I noticed.

You know what, if your keynote is compelling, interesting, challenging, smart, revolutionary, different or entertaining, I will join your “We” club willingly, unconditionally and completely. Until then, you’ll have to earn it.

As former French president Mitterand once said: “Tu peux me dire vous”. .

Let’s face it, we roam the endless spaces of the biggest conventions of these planets, spreading business cards around like there is no tomorrow. I literally level singlehandedly a shaming surface of lovely tropical rainforest each year by spreading a couple of thousands of cards.

“Hey, how’re you here is mine can I have yours bye”. We both know we did not get any value out of the conversation. We both know we will never call each other. I know he was extremely boring, and will never make it to make it to my secret Christmas card list. Still, cards changed hands. Identity was confirmed. An innocent tree was leveled.

Here comes in a young guy in the blogger lounge. Firm handshake. Nice, but affordable suit (Pablo Nero?) Corporate hair. Good teeth. The works. And a refreshing “Can I steal four minutes to earn your business card?”.

He got me at “hello”: what a refreshing practice. Approach, connect, pitch… and if relevant do the business card thing. Nothing personal, just a fair evaluation of an occasional encounter that more often than not will get us nowhere.

And you know what? Once we determined we’re worth swapping identities, and propel each other into our respective social lives (because we DO will do the Twitter, Facebook and YouTube stuff thing, right?), let’s just “BUMP” our cards electronically. I’m so tired of lumberjacking trees all the time

Here we are, at a world influencing show on digital and social media. More social brain power around than one can fathom and more than 3OO.OOO event related check-ins so far. Every single one of these thousands of people carries a fancy, shiny, expensive smartphone.

It can do everything: from finding you the next location for a real espresso, giving you the time, translating weird looking augmented reality tags into spectacular 3D experiences, updating your status on a plethora of social networks, making embarrassing pictures of friends and clients and showing you the exact amount of aspirin to wash your yesterday’s social networking away.

Except…. It cannot. Because the smart people making these smartphones never actually had us, people who use them in mind. Going full force with any smartphone will give me a couple of hours. Then they die; lack of power. With my Blackberry Storm 2, I burn through 3 (three) battery packs a day. My iPhone4 lasts exactly 4 hours and 32 minutes. With the extended battery pack, I can go a revolutionary 7 hours without having to whack somebody on the head in an effort to steal his power socket.

People are bitching about the fact that most electrical cars do not get further than a miserable 350 miles before needing a new powershot. But nobody seems to find it abnormal that a 700 dollar phone barely makes through half a business day. All over Austin you see people crawling on hands and knees, desperately looking for a free socket where they can plug-in and get a few extra minutes of social life. Pathetic.

The social web is great, and I spent more money than I care to remember on geeky devices to connect-on-the-go. Can somebody now please fix the basics and solve the energy issue. No power, no connection, no more online social life.

It cannot be that difficult: wireless electricity has been around for a gazillion years. It’s called lightning.

Everybody needs to make a living, so I respect that everybody sells something. And listening to all the people selling their thing-of-gold @ #SxSW I cooked up a very simple rule-of-thumb to separate the chaff from the wheat.

It’s no rocket science: ignore the people that are talking about applications, software, browsers, plug-ins and tutti-quanti. They will not make it. Selling stuff will get you nowhere in the charts in the social media world. And a quick poll amongst the influent bloggers in the blogger lounge shows a similar view. Selling stuff is an indication that you do not get the game., it proves that you are playing in the wrong league. It proves that you are on a rollercoaster to lonely oblivion…

Because the game is social. And social just does not care a bit about stuff, social is about people, social is about experiencing and social, more than everything, is about us.

And the people selling experiences stand out like traffic lights in the Mobiwashi desert. Because the online consumers do not want to buy, they want to experience. And if good experience goes through a quick tap through their credit card, they do not care.

So, spotting great user experiences, gives you a great roadmap to real successful companies. How do you benefit from location based services? What curation service will get you the most relevant content? What platform will give you the most interaction with your audience, what tool will let you travel without having to worry about keeping track of your important shared documents?

It’s no longer about bits, and bytes, and CPU’s and whether or not it runs on Honeycomb, OS, Win7 or magic stardust. It’s about how and where and why. The web morphed from tech to social, from geeky to ubiquitous, from stuff to us…

Click here to view the embedded video.

When you specialize in cross-border, multi lingual integrated communications –like I do- you get old very, very fast . Dealing with more than 70 languages and five alphabets (and that is Europe alone) is not easy, and dealing with dynamic content is hell. How do you find it in that amount of different tongues? How do you distribute it? How can you make sure contextual information is preserved?

How do you ensure quality of translations, and a fair geographic split of content intake? How do you distribute content back in all of those languages, and how can you track comments to be able to maintain a decent finger on the pulse?

No one better to help with out with that than Steve Rosenbaum the friendly eyed author of “Curation Nation”, a fabulous, crystal clear, hands-on book on curating content. Rosenbaum gets content as no other, and is able to synthesize his thoughts in a soft spoken concise way, that I like. Enjoy his response… and his pointer at using the crowd to its fullest extent…

Click here to view the embedded video.

One of the killer questions in the different panels and talks at #SxSW in Austin is: “… and what about brands”. Because, let’s face it: the boring internet of unidirectional websites has evolved into an online social forum, where people meet, talk and share.

The net is social, and the people have taken over the net in a peaceful revolution. That’s fine… but what about brands? Brands have invested heavily to build out their net-presence over the last decades, and are worried their dollars might evaporate overnight, with the masses gone rogue and confined to Facebook and Twitter. While people like Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter) think it is a bad thing for brands to move away from the trusted fortresses of their corporate websites, this does not mean there is no future for brands in the social space.

I’m agreeing with Owyang that abandoning the build-up brand capital that now is resting in the corporate websites is a bad idea. However, rethinking the website as the vibrating energetic center of a social online ecosystem is smart. Social sites add a ton of interacting and engaging possibilities into the brands online ecosphere, and are capital to bring vital social interaction into the equation.

The first steps in this process are a bit awkward. Beyond the heavily protected walls of the corporate websites, the social online ecosphere looks like a terrifying jungle to the brand owners. There is no perceived sensation of control, which triggers asthma attacks and anxiety in more than one corporate boardroom.

The answer is however simple: go with the flow and partner up (or hire) with online Tarzans who will give you the survival code book of the jungle, effectively turning it into a social ecosystem.  Because this is a fact: Just being a brand online will get you nowhere. Just having a brand presence will not propel you into the winning charts. You will have to allow your brand to behave like a social citizen.

Humanizing corporate brands and making them alive online, allowing a human face to interact with the online community are the first getaways to new opportunities to shine. But for that, brands will have to take the hurdle from controlled “being” to social “behaving”…. And that…. is a difficult one. 

Tweeting gold, Check-in Silver, Liking Diamonds

It’s fast, it’s in, it’s social, it’s easy, it’s entertaining, it’s cool, it’s the thing to do, it’s fun, and it’s educative: social media took our world by storm. Updating Facebook, finding the right places through location based services, keeping your Twitterville happy, and Googling the steam out of your environment added a whole new meaning to how we interact with our physical and social world.

Just following SxSW in Austin, you see people glued to their smartphones as if there was no tomorrow, and the number of tweets, check-ins, updates and posts bangs through the roof with gracious ease.

And all of that for free. Free Facebook, Twitter, Twitter clients, check-in services etc… occasionally you can spend a couple of bucks on some application, but nothing so expensive that it will make American Express call you to ask if you finally lost in.

Leaves the devices. Let’s say it’s reasonable. A couple of hundred dollars will get you a state-of-the-art social weapon to conquer your digital online world, even buying a high end top notch shiny one will cost less than a year of smoking.

But here is the trick: social media for mobile warriors does not come cheap. In fact, it is freaking expensive. Uploading and downloading your life through the cloud to your friends eats up bites, megabytes… gigabytes… and those come at a price. Dataplans of most carriers give out a decent flat-fee deal on mobile data, but as soon you breach through ‘normal use’ the prices skyrock.

And then, there is international roaming, which for Europeans and Asians coming to SxSW can get up as high as 20 dollars… per megabyte. Every day some innocent global traveller gets the yellow hinky-pinkies when the mobile phone bill hits the fan. Uploading a YouTube movie while in the States? Used a little half an hour of Facetime or Skype over 3G while in Austin? You might get an over 1000 dollar bill. That is the price of an iPad 2 with ABS, power steering, and 17 inch rims.

So every time the free Wi-Fi in Austin falters, and your Instagram gets uploaded through 3G, a mobile operator somewhere grins happily, while sipping some expensive bubbly drink. Your social life just made his day.

There are a lot of men in the Blogger Lounge. But when Luria Petrucci walks in, most of the male audience is a bit disturbed.  Better known under her internet alias Cali Lewis, the 30 year old brunette is one of the most popular American internet celebrities in Europe where her dynamic podcast  GeekBeat.TV is top of tongue.

Her dynamic personality and easy going nature made her the role model for a whole generation of European Geek Girls. A celebrity with absolutely no capsones, as I could find out during a short interview.

Smiling young people with tremendous influencing power: are you ready for them?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Excuse me, I’m still a bit shaky.  I just encountered Michael Bruce Sterling. The Bruce Sterling. Sterling is now globally seen as one of the inventors of the concept “augmented reality”, but above all he is the author of some of the best Science Fiction Books I got in my hands. His Mirrorshades anthology placed him with William Gibson, on the upper left shelf of my bookcase, where my cyberpunk collection is standing.

I’ve always seen Sterling as a semi-god, someone who dreams up a future. Jules Verne, Frank Herbert, Ray Kurzweil… they show us a future based on technology that is just around the corner… just out of grasp, but one that they –for some obscure reason- seem to see.

Seeing Sterling interacting with youngsters on augmented reality made me smile. These kids have no idea about the writer Sterling, about the phenomenon Sterling, about the designer Sterling, nor the futurist Sterling. All they see is an old guy, talking about how he sees augmented reality taking up a glowing big part of our near future.  A guy that urged them “you kids have to dream up the next decades of our future”… They thought he was amusing…. and a bit coo coo

If only they knew .

Click here to view the embedded video.

Browsing #SxSw in Austin for content, the old journalist in me has a field day. Some of the smartest brains on the planet that are dealing with social interactions and digital media are literally  within a square mile from this laptop. An amazing amount of brainpower, egos and strong viewpoints are competing for attention.

What makes me happy and hopeful is that in about every conversation I witness, the little phrase “But how do you do that…” pops up.  @GuyKawasaki was talking about Enchanting, but he very quickly went down to “But how do you do…” to everyone he interacted with. Steve Rosenbaum (@magnify) asked me “But how do you deal with info in multiple languages”…. Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) and @briansolis were talking in a panel yesterday on data curation and “How do you do…” came back multiple times.

How do you do social across borders? How do you curate? How do you measure? How do you interact? Engage? Spread? How do you get noticed? What are the rules?

My grandfather always told me that the quickest way to become smarter was asking lots of questions. The fact that the smartest brains I’m following on Twitter are still asking these questions every single minute they mingle proves me that our future is in good hands .

I admit: I am a geek. Even worse, I’m pretty proud of it. The latest technologies, the latest products and techy gadgets: I want them, I want to play with them, I want to try them.

I talk to my car, listen to the voice synthesizer of my smartphone, and let semi intelligent machines determine and direct a big part of my life. But… to my astonishment, there are limits…

In the #SxSW blogger lounge they have the creepiest thing, the end of civilization as we know it. It features Samsungs tweeting fridge.

Now, in a world where more than a terrabite of new content is being uploaded to the cloud every couple of minutes, and where sifting through data to find relevant data becomes more and more difficult, I am wondering if we’re waiting for household machines to clutter our contentspace.

Mind you, my fridge can send me an sms, our a mail… but I honestly think that the fact that I am out of my favorite flavor of ice-cream is not really of your business. Machine-to-human updates are ok, but they are not social…. So they do not belong in the social ecosphere.

Austin Texas: I draw the line on line-dancing, and tweeting fridges. There.

While covering #SxSW in Austin is fun, educative, entertaining and generally nice… it is also hard work. The ten venues that encompass the event this year are not exactly in spitting distance from each other, and endless long hall ways, tricky stairs and Austin’s historic pavements are a pure torture for the feet.

Add to that the murdering difference between the soft autumn temperature outside, and the freezing chill inside the meeting halls, the long hours, the time differences and relentless jetlag, the greasy-food-on-the-go, the pressure to choose wisely between more than 6400 keynotes, talks, panels, demos and chats… and you are up for nerve-wracking body-breaking experience.

Luckily, we do not have to do this on our own. The local Porter Novelli team in Austin, captained by energybulb Aaron De Lucia, goes lengths to make this an as smooth as possible experience for the weary PN’ers coming from far away. From reservation, to registration, to help and encouragement “on the floor”, this team does an amazing job.

In between their busy client work, they are great company, they leave their loved ones alone at night to show us the places-to-be and assist in solving a myriad of small but urgent problems.

The PN content team is amazing as well, from the first cry of the Austin rooster, to the last round of the VIP swamped party, these people are everywhere… hammering their dusty keyboards till way too late in the night to produce content to share.

“With a little help from my friends” or “You never walk alone” cheesy songs, but they spring into mind when the team converges a couple of times today for updates and energy sharing. Tao Tze said you cannot walk to your destiny alone… but I’m not scared…

Porter Novelli? It’s a well-oiled Social Army….

Content is king. Everybody knows that and unsurprisingly: at #SxSW it is the talk of town. Roughly you can divide the online world in three big continents: the creators of content, the curators of content, and the consumers of content. Think of it as a pyramid: lots of people are consuming content, a selected number of people is curating content, and the smallest group is actually creating content.

And there used to be a picking order: it was clear that creators were more valuable than curators. They were the thinkers, the thought leaders, the wizards and gurus. But as the quantity of content grew in a mindboggling way, the consumer went to look for people who curate content.

With all of the content out there, it became next to impossible for most people to filter the garbage from the gems, or to get timely access to premium content. Content may still be king, but curating is queen.

Precious (and monetizable ) value is added by the curator: he aggregates the avalanche of available content, filters it, screens it, reworks and packages it, and gets it to the consumer in a handy, unified and timely matter. Curators are the glasses through which a big part of the online consumers see the world. In fact, curators have de facto more power and influence than the creators. Without the curator, most creators have no significant reach… they need the curator to amplify their content. The curators of today are the superstars of tomorrow, and the recent godlike statuses of the curators of the Hufflington Post and TechCrunch show it is happening now.

Curators can amplify, or close the gates to your content. You’d better start courting them soonest….

Being a European here @ #SxSW is fun. I am like a little exotic curiosity… and you can hear it in most voices when they shake hands (or Bump iPhones): “Europe… right”. Wandering through the long walkways of the Austin Convention Center, I notice how very US and English centric most of the A-players here are. In the blogger lounge, I had a long discussion with people that want to export an social application to Europe. First question: “They speak English in Spain, right?”. Urgh. No? “But they have nothing against English, right?”

Let’s be clear: if you want to be social, and play an active role in social media in Europe, you’ll have to know the facts. Long story short: While it is completely cool to do stuff in English in England, it is not done elsewhere. Period. Courtesy towards the consumer market means you’ll have to engage in his home tongue. And that needs to be done by a native, and not by a San Diego based community manager using Google Translate.

Successful engagement requires mastering the local culture, language and specificities, and cannot be outsourced or offshored. There are no shortcuts in engagement: it is about authentic connecting…

Measurement tools and sentiment analyzers will have to be able to drill down to the core of communications being held in more than 400 languages worldwide, before they can declare themselves “global”. Just English with some notions of German and a flavor of French will not cut the cake .

It’s a long way to Tipperary

For brands, creating engagement in any way is key… that’s why they are in social media in the first place. In recent months, a telltale signal to determine that engagement at a glance is the number of “likes” a brand collects all through the brands online ecosphere. Fueled by mostly Facebook, the hunt for likes is powering an important part of the Social Media roll out, and, between us: that is a bad thing.

A number of “likes” does not show you in any way the quality or quantity of engagement with your target audience in any way… for that more intelligent sets of data should be explored that give more relevant information on quality, sentiment, loyalty and behavior.

And a “like” is just a wrong metric. Clicking on it is often a gratuit gesture… for most consumers it means nothing more than a thoughtless “click”.  There is no bar, no effort, no real thinking, and thus way too often no real intention or engagement.

Personally, I have more respect for the location based check in. A check in, is like a “like”, but only better. Checking in means that people are linking their real life location and behavior (shopping, eating, going to a concert,…) with their offline social media ecosphere. They went through an experience that reverberates in the social spider web. Location based social check-ins are more and more combined with the ability to rate the experience, adding a tremendous potential added value for the brand. Having people checking in from stores, airports, planes, restaurants and events and giving a positive social rating turns every active “checker” into an active brand advocate.

People will trust the review of someone who actively ate at a restaurant way more than one from someone who just punched the “like” button on a website.

Check-ins new style will beat up likes big time

There, did that get your attention? I thought it might…  Tim O’Reilly caused quite a stir @ #SxSW when he proclaimed that Ronald Reagan was the mental father of Foursquare.

But he has a point. Let’s go back into history: while the Beatles were working on their White Album, the U.S. Navy and Air Force slotted together a system that would enable navigation on a plethora of applications. A set of incompatible systems was developed, until the US Department of Defense decided in 1973 to unify the existing systems. With atomic clocks carried on geostationary satellites (predicted by Arthur C. Clark) , the Navstar Global Positioning System became a huge success. In the beginning, military use had priority, and accurate positioning was not possible for civilian systems.

The disaster with Korean Flight 007 in 1983, a mortal tragedy that could have been prevented with more accurate location awareness, made President Ronald Reagan decide that accurate GPS signals would be available worldwide and at no charge. Reagan’s directive angered quite a lot of military decision makers, but stood at the cradle of the location driven social media that is so popular today.

The military not only got us the backboned, dynamic rerouting internet (and an internet of things by that), but also stood at the very beginning of Google places, Gowalla and Foursqaure. Not to mention Augmented Reality, that made it directly from the cockpit of the Apache fighting helicopter into the smartphones. Presidents and generals at the roots of social media, a slightly disturbing thought….;-)

For governments, brands and companies, the ability to interact with target audiences on- and offline has become crucial. Increasingly sophisticated consumer engagement is leading to greater understanding, respect, loyalty and comprehension. And as more and more conversations and social interactions move online, we see more companies and brands doing a magnificent job of engaging loyal followers with digital and mobile technologies. However, many of the same organizations that enjoy tremendous success in America often struggle in Europe. Here’s why.

On a continent like North America, online engagement is relatively efficient and cost effective. A substantial amount of consumers can be reached, from coast to coast, in a single country (the U.S.), and in a single language (English). Adding just one country (Canada) and two languages (Spanish and French), provides access to most of the entire continent.

For metrics tools, conversation starters and community managers, three languages to engage and measure allows for profitable opportunities to scale online influence programs. In Europe, though, it becomes much more complicated—with 750 million people scattered over 44 different autonomic countries, each with its own set of laws, socio-cultural habits and ethno-historic sensitivities. From the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains, and from the North Pole to Gibraltar, roughly 70 different languages are spoken. To read and write in all of them, you need to be fluent in five distinct alphabets (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian and Georgian).

This makes online influencing and community engagement fairly complicated. Economies of scale and reusing existing material becomes virtually impossible. Messages and message delivery vehicles need to be adapted to the local language and cultural needs.  Messages not only need to be translated, they need to be rewritten.

Even in smaller countries like Belgium and Switzerland, communication needs to be done in three different languages, which has severe implications on timelines and budgets. Compounding the challenges, big international metrics tools are often unable to filter out all of the semantic sensitivities of these 70 European languages, or simply do not have enough volume to give accurate analysis—enhancing the importance of local tools, and demanding a higher human involvement throughout the process.

Effective community engagement in Europe requires small, dedicated and integrated teams that can take an organization’s concept and strategy and tailor it for the local country. These teams must work hands-on with the tools that are most relevant for each European region, which are often quite different from the big global players. For instance, it’s impossible to reach the Dutch through Facebook, because they’re on Hives. And Poland has at least four different equivalents of Twitter.

To build global communication strategies, it is important to involve people who have in-depth knowledge of their region from the very beginning. All too often, compelling strategies and tactics conceived far from the actual countries where they will be implemented prove to be impossible to execute.

To successfully bridge Europe’s multicultural, multilingual diversity, it is far more effective to build communications strategies up from local insights and understanding. As many organizations continue to discover, in Europe, an overarching, top-down approach to consumer engagement often gets lost in translation.

(this post is part of Porter Novelli’ s “intelligence” series. Find the complete series here)

QR, AR, and good old fashioned barcodes are smeared all over #SxSW in Austin. The possibilities to scan in things are endless. With free apps to scan, connect and store the info, the scan-able coding is one of the fast “aim, click, connect, forget” user friendly tools. And you find them on the most probable and improbable places as the friendly Jack from the Pepsico Playground demonstrates….

#SxSW in Austin still needs to officially kick off, but one thing is for sure: it is still about location, location, location. In the night and early hours before the event, you see location based tags and check-ins popping up like warm popcorn all over the city.

Foursquare, Gowalla and Google Places are arm wrestling for love and attention, and mayorships, points and badges are being distributed to the convention goers like ice cubes on a warm day.

But I spot a mayor difference. It goes way beyond the boyish gimmicks now. Location starts to add value. The big three added a ton of Social Functionality to their offering: the fact that people now can rate places, add tips, and hint at things to do, hyper jumped location based sharing into a realm that makes social marketing interesting. We found a great Austin Barbeque Place to eat, based solely on tips of Foursquare and Gowalla. We were tricked to the coolest bars in town with the same applications.

Startup “Heat Tracker” (find it for free in the app store) shows where the most action takes place in a reasonable circle around you. “Heating up” proves to be a great indicator for finding cool places to hang out with likeminded people.

Social location linked with the endless possibilities of “rating” places opens a great added value: peer screening. Nothing better to guide your culinary escapades in an unknown town than tips of people who tried it before.

Checking in is not just for geeks anymore, it helps determining the places to be, the hot spots and the trendy locations. The time a selected group of journalists and critics, and specialized publications as Michelin Guides and tutti quanti could determine where in town you wanted to be seen is over.

The reputation is made by the countless people around you. And THAT is a good thing .

So you’re tired. You ask for coffee. A friendly waitress brings you a steaming mug with something black in. So far, so good. And then, you see the giant frog on the sticker claiming it is for 30 percent certified…. certified what. Frog? And the other 70? Heeeeelp!

Nice, here I am some 20.000 feet above some obscure part of the United States of America, blogging like there is no tomorrow. Wifi in an airplane. kinda neat .
I crossed a number of airports on my long journey towards SxSW in Austin, non of them provided free wifi… nor power sockets.
I do not get it. charging up to 15 euros for an hour of connectivity is a scam, pure robbery and should be exposed. Shame on you, Brussels Airport, and shame on you Chicago o hara!
One would expect that airports should have understood by now that free access for the traveler is more than a simple courtesy, it’s answering to a growing demand of mobile people.
o well….

As I predicted, IBM’s Watson super computer configuration won a game of Jeopardy from some very smart humans on US national television. A bit humiliating for us, the human race, but on the other hand, we did design the thinking machine… so our pride should not take too big a hit.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Fascinating on Watson winning this brainy contest about hands down, is the machines striking ability to deal with complicated linguistic clues: Watson can process natural language with surprising ease, and is even able to filter and crawl through complicated things as irony and sarcasm, and cynic one-liners (that’s more than some humans I know ).

Apart from winning primetime TV quizzes, Watson and a comparable research logarithm Wolfram|Alpha open new horizons that are way more down to earth than thinking machines taking over the planet. “Search” for instance. The best search engines available to the public (Google, Bing, etc) are based on keyword driven search. You type in a series of keywords, and the search logarithm gives you a series of links where those keywords are found. Mind you: neither Google or Bing answer your question, give you an answer to what you want to know. It gives you a suggestion of pages where your keywords can be found. Often, just finding a page where the keywords are featured enables us, humans, to browse ourselves through the content of the page, and find the answer of our question right there. We all got good at this keyword based content suggestion. We even think it gives us answers. But it is not .

Using revolutionary natural language driven concepts like Watson and  Wolfram|Alpha, the game will soon change. With their ability to cope with the eccentrics of our language, we will be able to ask these search engines a question and they will provide us with an aswer. As human-to-intelligence interface this is a giant leap forward, because we’re not taking shortcuts anymore but will be able to elevate “search” to its fullest extent: the ability to ask the web a question. Watch the video: Can you feel I’m excited?

I confess, I admit: I could never ever coach an American Football team. I have never played it, never watched a full game, I do not understand any of the rules, and I am completely ignorant to all the habits and sensitivities. I would probably do about as good as a drunken rhinoceros in artistic skating.

In my book, to be good at something requires enthusiasm, sheer will, track record and hands-on experience. And that is exactly what I see as lacking in how most influencing agencies cope with social and digital media. They line up their usual experienced heavy weights to provide their clients with strategy and guidance on how to integrate digital and social media into the overall marketing and communication mix. Little side note: an alarming high percentage of these heavy weights have no experience in the digital and social media world.  Even more alarming is that the teams they roll out, into the field have none either.

A fascinating amount of power is given to people who have no clue what’s what in Social Media land. It’s not because you’ve read Groundswell or The New Normal that you are fully equipped to deep dive successfully into this fast moving area. It’s not because you know how a journalist thinks that you should take it for granted that a blogger thinks or behaves in the same way. It’s not because you’re a hotshot in direct marketing that you understand –at all­- how twitter works. It’s not because you were fab in influencing through 25 square meter advertorials that you can safely assume that a banner on a site will actually benefit your client or cause in any way. It’s not because your toddler is reasonably good with Lego that it is statistically safe to let him/her play with a fully loaded Kalashnikov.

I’m confronted on a daily basis with blogger relations experts that have never blogged, community managers that are online rookies, and twitter experts that have less reach and followers than my 83 year old gardening neighbor on a rainy day.  Robin Wauters of TechCrunch gave a PR professional a full broadside earlier this week for not playing online engagement by the online netiquette rules. And Wauters is so right. Too many arrogant old style off-line influencers think they can take the online new interactive digital scene by storm… and birthright. They look down on this booming online realm with an explosive mixture of denial, ignorance, arrogance, even disdain: an ideal cocktail for guaranteed distaster.

Not so long ago, agencies tried to offer top-notch journalists, analysts, Pulitzer Prize nominees and politicians a job to get extremely valuable hands-on knowledge, credibility and experience in house. To think that these same people will make the difference in online engagement is a huge mistake that cannot be remediated by an over lunch training session. Big time for agencies and their clients to go hunt for social media wizards, top-notch bloggers, proven star-profiled tweeps and highly connected  social networkers.

Only by upgrading their workforce with Digital Wizards will companies, organizations and agencies stay afoot in this morphing landscape. How did Cary Grant say it again: it takes a thief to catch a thief….

I’m getting a bit tired of it. Too many journalists I know go all dismissive over digital media. Too many bloggers I know think that having 16 readers (and a horsehead) visiting their blog occasionally makes them directly eligible for the Pulitzer Prize. *sigh*

As the old adagio says: “Ignoti nulla cupido” – you cannot love what you do not know. I think the current journalist generation needs to understand digital media better. A growing number of people, including a whole upcoming generation, are consuming a big part of the news through digital channels. Insufficient knowledge on these channels, inadequate presence on these channels, and a defensive reaction to a new medium from the news-professionals would be catastrophic for the quality of the current and future news. Though I see a growing number of journalists toe-dipping in social media, most embrace it in a worrying way: mostly as an extra listening channel, or broadcasting opportunity. Most journalists are not trained into public dialogue and engagement possibilities. A lot of them also do not possess the necessary data processing- and analytical skills to process crowdsourcing in a safe way.

On the other hand, it worries me that a whole wide range of bloggers reached “God-Credibility” status amongst a broad audience. But most of these online writers do not use (or know) the journalistic deontological codes and practices.  Source controlling, second opinions, and balanced viewpoints are most often ripped out of the equation, leaving a very biased and unverified opinion piece.

The non-critical online consumer is –unfortunately- unable to distinguish quality content from doubtful or false information. It’s time to cross-train as well journalists and bloggers on each other’s skills and possibilities. I would love to see bloggers adhere more to a journalistic code of conduct and I think journalists should understand (and respect) the online environment more.

The future is going to be a net based information society. I was intrigued and positively surprised to see that search giant Google is spending a 2.7 million dollar grant to the International Press Institute to explore the future of digital news. This money comes on top of an earlier donation of 5 million dollar for investigating the new way of journalism.

“Journalism is changing fast. And as news businesses experiment with new ways of creating and delivering journalism in the digital age, Google is keen to play its part. (-) We seek to find and fund breakthrough ideas that will have a lasting impact on the future of digital news in communities across Europe, the Middle East and Africa,” says Peter Barron, director of external relations for Google EMEA.

I just hope that the institutions, media corporations and schools that work with, or educate/form journalists will do a similar effort. Though I applaud Google’s initiative, I’d rather have a critical blogger/journalist generation investigating and taking up the role of the fourth power that is NOT Google funded….

Click here to view the embedded video.

I am flabbergasted. Muʿammar Al-Qaḏâfî is still Kalashnikov-wrestling with half of the Libyan nation. The F1 circus skips Bahrain because it is way too unstable. New Zealand is still looking for survivors after a devastating earthquake; the planet is heating up and our friendly neighbor-star Betelgeuse can blow up any minute now…

But… to my astonishment the online newswires seem to be more a-buzz on Justin Bieber’s and Jennifer Aniston’ s new haircuts. Apparently la Aniston hated her Rachel trim, and went for a sexier, more mature business cut. And though I admit there are worse things to look at in the morning than a smiling Aniston… I’m trying to figger out (over my third cup of coffee): why should I care?

One newspaper screams (kidding you not!!) “Justin Bieber’s Hair cut down: A teen nation mourns”. Now THAT is what I call newsworthy . Bieber cut off his strands, an half a billion screaming 13 year olds need to go in therapy. Next up: parents will sue Bieber for mental terror on their beloved teenagers… There is more: Bieber tweeted this very last night that “he will give his cut hair to charity.” And a star-watch-blog immediately headlined: “Never in the field of human civilization was so much owed by so many to so few strands of hair”. Really.

I don’t know what Momo Qadafi is up to this weekend, I’m not sure if Betelgeuse goes supernova and back on Sunday… but Twitter be warned: Saturday I’ll be doing an Aniston. Still negotiating the live-cast rights…

It’s frustrating. I spend considerable time looking at a white screen, torturing my delete button, chewing my finger nails and trying to find the right wording. It’s not easy, you know, this whole blogging/author thing. I need to get very complicated stuff out of my head, and puzzle it into a compelling, easy-reading, slightly humoristic piece of content that’s mentally a bit challenging, but not too over the top. All that in a couple of lines, spiced with some freeloaded stock photo.

And while I am carefully polishing my creative output, some young flashy nitwit will put the same content in two pie-graphs, a nifty bubble chart and some random colors. An “Infograph”. ‘Cause it kinda visualizes stuff better. Because the younger generation does not like to read. Because it helps the content “up there” down to the “readers level” in a painless and smooth way.

Right.  *sigh*

Opinions are divided, as they should . Lots of experts see Nokia’s handshake with Microsoft as a complete surrender and guaranteed death sentence, the others see it as a stroke of genius. Let me help you get all the little yellow ducks on a row.

It’s Microsoft. Their operating system populates about every single PC on the planet, and then some. People are using their applications (Outlook, Word, Powerpoint) like there is no tomorrow…. and they happen to have a phone operating system that is neat, fast, and fully integrated in the Microsoft ecosystem. One bummer: Microsoft has no clue how to sell phones abroad. They do not have the retail infrastructure, knowledge or distributor history to pull it off short notice. They do software very well, but apart from X-boxes, a lonely mouse and keyboard, their global box selling capabilities outside the US are fairly limited…

It’s Nokia. The older ones still can remember that Nokia made some of the very best phones ever. Only, lately their operating system got a bit old fashioned, and lost the burning competition with windows mobile, Android, RIM and Apple. But Nokia does know how to make and sell phones.  This is a company that started 160 years ago… as a paper mill! It moved into  rubber, built some darn good Zodiacs, sold floating devices, went into cables and electricity, employed Olympic wrestler Verner Weckman as CEO before getting some historic mobile phones on the shelves. Rambo would grunt that these people are survivors. Liquid adaptable.

With that handshake, Nokia finds direct access to one of the leading and most promising mobile OS systems, and a new go at conquering the US market. Microsoft sizes an opportunity to plant its OS slambam into the coming generation phones from a giant phone manufacturer. Through the deal, Microsoft can also tap directly into the well of Nokia-owned Navteq maps, adding state of the art location based capabilities directly into the ecosystem, and adding a great map and navigation partner to Bing.

You know what? I’ll think they’ll do fine

Walking through the endless halls of the Mobile World Congress, you see mobile applications everywhere, ranging from e-health, over facial recognition, location based services and dating to picture apps, and apps juggling with a growing n