Today my HootSuite client was offline for a while, which was a big surprise. In general Hootsuite is a very reliable service. Fortunately, I was informed this was due to a remarkable update. Some time late I noticed significant changes to the social media dashboard beginning with a completely refreshed HTML5 user interface, plus geo-located search, native Twitter ReTweets, and integrated Google Analytics.

For me Hootsuite was already the best Social Media dashboard for both personal and team based social media management. Today’s improvements prove Hootsuite continuously keeps improving its service.

HTML5 powered

With the recent announcement of Google’s HTML5 site and many other brands like Apple on-board, HootSuite has made a substantial investment in this new technology standard. HTML5 allows them to release unique features like geo-search and drag & drop. This combined with the improved performance with more responsive tabs and streams makes using Hootsuite a real pleasure.

Page redesign for better access to the streams

The most noticeable change is a fully redesigned dashboard, with more space for accounts, updates and an intuitive arrangement for HootSuite’s many features. Additionally, you can now choose a design theme which suits your tastes.

And many more

This is just a first quick impression of the new release. See the Hootsuite blog for more detailed information about Hootsuite 5.

A debate titled: The freedom perspective of digital media with William Echikson, Communications Director of Google EMEA seemed promising. It doesn’t happen everyday you can hear the future Google plans directly from one of the leaders. It turned out differently. After the debate you could leave the room rather disoriented. Is Google really just looking for more content to earn more and do we need the government to protect our copyrights?

William Echikson visited Gdansk 22 years ago as a reporter. Sending news was completely different from today. The Internet provides everybody the freedom to share their news with the world. It decreases the obstacles for free expression. On the other hand the Internet is an area where breaching copyrights happens on a regular basis.

The Google mission

Google has been started by two guys working from a garage not knowing how to make money. They basically concentrated on gaining as many visitors as possible. We can conlude this appeared to be a good concept. Today Google earns thanks to the high amount of visitors. This enables them to sell advertisements. According to William “Google is just an advertising company”.

Google aims to disclose more and more information through the Internet, they offer a platform where others can publish content. Basically this should generate even more visitors of course. The more frequent Internet users will visit Google sites the more advertisement space they can sell. William discussed two examples: Google Books and Google News.

Google Books aims to publish books you cannot buy anymore. Think about copyright free older books. They already agreed with several libraries to publish selected books. They plan to scan a tremendous amount of books from American libraries in about 8 years time. Comparable projects would take most governments at least 20 years.

There are also many books which are no longer available anymore, out of print. The publisher still owns the copyright. Google enables them to publish these books online to make them available to an increased audience. It’s up to the copyright owner to decide whether or not the reader has to pay. Of course Google will share in the future sales, but is this wrong?

Something similar is applicable to Google News. By publishing news on Google News, which is ads free, newspapers are receiving more traffic on their websites. By selling advertisement space on the news papers website both Google and the news papers earn because of all the generated traffic.

Is governmental control needed to protect our copyrights?

In the beginning of Google Books they published pieces of still copyrighted books. The intention was to show the publishers the potential of Google Books and to achieve a win-win situation. Under pressure of the EU the European copyrighted books have been removed from Google Books.

One of the main questions is whether or not the government should act like that. Do we have to be protected against Google? You could say that Google is digitizing all this information for their own gain only. Google is a normal company, that has to earn money. Enabling them to digitize everything and to store it in their databases can lead to abuse by Google. They can use all the content to improve their language algorithms. This could lead to improved search and translation services which Google could start asking money for.

The governmental control concerns Google. It blocks the openness of the Internet. Turkey in example has just announced a two year ban on YouTube. Google had a lot of freedom in China around the Olympic games. But recently it became impossible for Google to offer the openness they want.

In Europe there is a fundamental issue. Take the Google directors in Italy who have been convicted of a crime because of one indeed horrible movie which was online. According to William the movie makers have to be punished, not the providers of a content sharing platform.

More and more artists/copyright owners decide to go online. Monte Python has been fighting for years to protect their copyrights. Many people were illegaly publishing Monte Python material. Recently they decided to stop fighting and to join them. They allowed Google to publish their movies online. And they profit from this decision.

What’s wrong with content sharing?

Enabling people to publish content online is one of Google’s aims and in my opinion it’s logical they want to earn money for that. Google is investing fortunes in the development of their platform and sooner or later this has to pay off. But this doesn’t mean governmental control is not needed. We should prevent a company like Google will abuse its position. Copyrights have to be respected.

Google claims they do the best they can to prevent copyright breach. If somebody reports copyright breach Google will take appropriate measures. They also try to prevent copyright breach by scanning material which have been published online.

On the other hand more and more people decide to share their “copyright” with others through creative commons licenses. They believe the end result will improve by sharing. Platforms like Google support this in a perfect way. They increase the potential audience and make you can reach people you wouldn’t reach in the traditional way.

Poland, Gdansk, it’s time to open up!

The legal structure in Poland hardly enables a more open approach to sharing artistic rights. Gdanks is a candidate to become the European Capital of Culture in 2016 and uses the pay off: “Freedom of Culture, Culture of Freedom”. That’s why Gdansk should stimulate that artists start sharing their copyrights through more open creative commons licenses. By doing so Gdansk can stay the city of freedom, a status Gdansk gained because of the Solidarity “revolution” in the 80′s.

What’s is your opinion about the increase of online available information? Do you have experience with creative commons licenses? Do we have to watch out for these Google activities?

Social media are there to stay, whether you like it or not. At its best you can make advantage of them by including social media into your marketing and communication strategy. But at least you will have to follow what people are online telling about your brand, product or you in person. But how do you do that? How can you prevent this becomes a time consuming task? I will explain two tools which I use frequently.

Every day huge amounts of information are being added to the Internet. Think of blog posts, reviews and comments, news items and updates from various social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook andTwitter. It is impossible to keep track on everything. Yet this is important.

It’s fun to see how others write positively about you. A thank you message by you should follow. And it’s even more important to act quickly when someone’s sharing their dissatisfaction. An accurate response to a negative expression is a very good impression among online users. Everyone realizes you can make mistakes. This is not a shame if you at least react with an appropriate response.

Fortunately, there are several tools that continuously scan the Internet for new expressions. Besides several expensive solutions, there are two very good free solutions: Google Alerts and Social Mention.

Google Alerts, e-mail with the most recent Google search results

With Google Alerts you receive daily or weekly by email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on the query you have defined yourself.

You can use Google to search for any random keyword, think of:

• Your company name
• Product name
• Names of employees
• Names of competitors and industry relevant keywords

On the page of Google Alerts the requested Alert can be created. In the above picture you will see I created an alert for the following “search string”:

“peter horsten” OR phorsten OR petersopinion

Determining the right search string is relatively simple by using the Google advanced search page. Enter the keywords Google should continuously search for. Click on “Google Search” and the Google search box shows the search string to copy.

You will receive an e-mail to confirm you would like to receive the alerts, instantly, daily or weekly. Once you start receiving the alert a quick analysis of the e-mail message will show whether or not immediate action is needed.

Social Mention, real-time social media search and analysis

Social Mention, the Google Alert for social media. Gradually, this distinction is disappearing. Google Alerts, like Google, now fully focuses on social media as well. The basic concept of Social Mention is similar. Again, a search term can be made (also to be determined using the Google advanced search method described above) and the result will be send by e-mail as well. The big difference is that you can instantly watch the result online, including additional statistics.

What I recommend?

Normally I don’t mind to share my opinion …. In this case, I think both solutions are useful. Social Mention certainly has the advantage of the immediately visible online result. Tuning the search terms is therefore more convenient. Social Mention also gives more additional statistics. On the other hand, Social Mention mainly shows results from Social Networks and Google Alertsseems better in showing results like blog posts.

Advice: Just try them both and see for yourself what is best and / or works most enjoyable. I invite you cordially to share your opinion below. Let’s learn from each other!

Today at the 4Developers conference in Poznan, Poland, I presented the audience my concern about the existing gap in between client’s need and the reality of the software developers. For some reason we seem not to manage to understand each other well enough. Too many projects do not deliver the result the client was hoping for. Honestly, it’s no longer a question whether or not this gap has to be closed. We just have to do it to make software more successful and clients more happy. But who’s responsible to bridge the gap? In my opinion the software developers. I will try to explain why. [Picture source: Allaboutjazz.com]

Software projects fail too often

Based on many data sources and publications we can only conclude software projects “fail” too often, meaning:

• The project is not delivered on time
• The project is not delivered within budget
• The project is not offering the requested/promised functionality

A combination of the above is happening as well of course.

It’s not easy to improve but we just have to

Neither I’m going to claim I know best how to solve the issue. Honestly I’m learning every day of the mistakes we are making ourselves. As every other software company we have both successful and improvable projects.

Nor will I tell you it’s easy to bridge the gap in between clients/users and software developers. These are people with a different background, different interests and a different focus. Both communicate, think and express themselves totally differently. You could say clients are from Mars and software developers from Venus.

But one thing is for sure. We need to bridge this gap. Business will have to talk together with IT, it should neither be a continuous fight nor competition.

Are we willing to work together as partners?

To realize excellent software solutions a developer will need very well specified requests. Based on a quick poll among the audience and my own experience I conclude too often clients are just not able to really specify their needs. At least not in terms a developer will understand.

I don’t blame them because I believe it’s almost impossible to fully define your needs in such a way that everybody will understand it.

We will have to find another way of communicating the client’s needs. At it’s best developers are defining the needs together with the client. Several “best practice” or “Agile” methods are available to support this process.

It’s important that we define what the software application has to do in terms the business understands. When using Business Driven Development it would look like this:

Discussing the needs in this way will also lead to all kind of usefull user stories which will make the developers understand the needs better. Besides discussion will lead to more creative ideas! Together you can prioritize them. While prioritizing it will also become clear that currently too many useless features are being developed. By setting the right priorities together you can also safe a lot of money.

The next step would be to start prototyping. You can do this by means of wireframes, mockups, draft GUI’s etc. The aim is to show the client/user as soon as possible what it’s all going to look like. The instant user feedback will show the developers whether or not they are still on the right track. Communication is king in this phase. Developers should be willing to except changes in business priorities during the development. A user will better understand what he really needs once he sees the first prototypes and working releases.

Honestly, the method doesn’t matter, because it’s just a method. If the willingness to improve is there from both sides and when they invest time and effort in defining the project you can choose any method that suits you best. The cooperation as partners will be the biggest gain, period!

Developers will have to start this change

Developers their life will become a lot easier if they understand the client’s needs better. Therefore, they should make the first step.

And why wouldn’t you? Just imagine that you won’t have to fix “bugs” anymore and that the amount of unexpected change requests drops? How would that feel? I know it’s scary, but please just give it a try. What can you loose? Add some funk and have more fun making better solutions, may be even the best solutions.

But this doesn’t mean it will be easy. Especially when clients think in the traditional model of sending a request and agreeing about a fixed priced, fixed date project. Both sides will have to trust each other. The business has to dare to share their ideas and needs. If it’s hard for your development team to achieve this interaction with your client just start working like this yourself. One of the team members could “act” like the client. A sales person, consultant or business analyst are in general best for this job.

We try to achieve this level of trust by having many (in)formal meetings at the start of the project. Having a drink and dinner together makes you start acting different. Several workshops together show the added value of such an investment.

If we don’t change the competition will overrule us

Having a nice and relaxed 9 to 5 (or more common in Poland an 8 to 4) job you might not be willing to bother about the above. But software doesn’t stop at 4 pm. Clients are depending on software solutions 24 hours a day. And business dynamics are hard to plan.

If you are willing to support the business better this will demand an additional investment. You will have to spend time together, probably you should learn more about the business. That will take time, after hours.

But if you don’t do this, the competition is waiting. In China and India there are many young, eager and clever software developers willing to take our jobs. Today the main issue for the client will be that it’s even harder to outsource the work to these countries. But sooner or later they will find out how to use these resources if we as Polish and European developers don’t manage to seduce our clients.

It’s not about methods, but about “funky” cooperation

Hopefully I managed to show we can not solve the current situation just by implementing a new “funky” method. There are more steps needed. I will summarize them:

1. Get to know each other: Business en IT will have to invite each other to share thoughts, to understand each other
2. Trust each other: The relationship in between Business en IT will have to be based on trust
3. Stimulate creativity: Business needs should be defined together
4. Make things understandable: Business needs have to be defined in an understandable way, as “user stories”
5. Set priorities, exclude waste: The business sets the priorities for the implementation of the features
6. Interact: Development should be more iterative and interactive based on prototyping
7. Communicate: During the development we have to communicate, communicate, communicate
8. Change is the norm: Developers have to be open to changes. Business needs will change over time

The above is a rough summary of today’s presentation at 4Developers in Poznan, Poland. Feel free to check the slides. I’m looking forward to your feedback, comments and opinions below. Thanks for your attention!

After my presentation @mesirii send me the following link where Martin Fowler and Dan North discuss bridging the gap as well.

I just came along a nice blog post by Drew McLellan, Social Media Cheat Sheet, where he presents the Social Landscape created by CMO.com. The sheet shows what social media can be used best depending on your personal aim. The bottom line conclusion for me is that you have to make you will be on YouTube to gain most from social media.

Just like Drew states I’m frequently asked what social media site somebody should use. In general I tried to figure out what social media site would fit best. Based on the Social Media Cheat Sheet from now on it’s possible to provide a better answer.

Depending on your aim you can now choose the best performing sites. To achieve this you will have to be aware what you want to use social media sites for:

• Customer communication
• Brand exposure
• Driving traffic to your site or
• SEO?

Analysing CMO.com’s social media landscape I conclude I will have to do a lot more on YouTube. I’m curious about your opinion!

In my previous post I already indicated it is no longer a questions whether or not you want to use social media, because others are using it already. You will just have to follow your brand. The following YouTube movie shows clearly what’s going on. Some figures are already outdated, but for me that doesn’t matter. Besides it has a great addicting beat …. Have fun!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8

A recent study carried out by Manpower Poland shows that 60% of Polish businesses don’t feel the need to use social media (in Polish only). This result isn´t applicable to Poland alone. Recent research shows that in the US about 50% of the marketeers is using social media. In Europe this is about 34% In general a huge amount of companies is still reluctant to use social media. But in my opinion this is no longer a real choice. Just because others are using social media every business and institution has to be aware of their impact. A strong brand can be heavily damaged if you don’t act in time.
I won´t claim that everybody has to jump on social media. I can imagine for some companies and institutes it would be hardly useful. Nevertheless, you will have to be aware of the fact that consumers today are sharing their opinion online. Potentially their opinion about your company and products as well. If you are not aware of this it can potentially lead to dramatic brand damage.

Dominos Pizza was not aware of the social media impact. Last year some employees posted videos themselves showing in what a disgusting way they prepared the food. Initially Domino hardly reacted. In no time a miljon people watched the movie on YouTube. Nevillehobson.com provided a good analyses how fast bad news travels. On Twitter many people were Tweeting about it.

But especially the lack of “social” reply and “engagement” caused most of the brand damage.

What would you do in such a case? Would you  notice an online complaint about your company or product?

In fact it is rather easy to follow the online mentions of your brand or products. Just let tools continuously browse the Internet.

For example Google Alerts can, once Google finds a certain “search term”, directly send an alert to you. This “search term” could be your company or product name. But you can use it to trace news on your clients or competition as well!

In our daily live we tend to chose the easy way. Like sheep we follow the others. We chose the known paths.

People who know me probably agree that from time to time I try the off the road track.

Today my 4 year old son made me realize why.

Together we went sled riding on fresh snow. Just next door we have a small hill. People were queing for the same downhill tracks all the time.

You should know something more about me. I hate waiting and queues drive me crazy.

We decided to take the other side of the hill, without any track, just 30 cm of nice snow waiting for us.

Of course the first times we got stuck half way. But after some time we created a new track. A much nicer one than the others. And for sure we had more fun, without queues!

Isn’t the same applicable to all kind of adventure activities? They are very popular among others for team building.

So let’s start adding some adventure to our daily (business) live.

Try to do something in a different way today!

Katowice station on cold morning

Originally uploaded by Peter Horsten

Currently I am travelling by nighttrain to the GOYELLO office in the South of Poland, Gliwice. The good thing of travelling by train is that I can relax. It’s pure time for myself. Time I use for blogging, thinking, inspiration and to stay in touch through social networks. I force myself to be outside focussed by taking pictures of what I meet during such trips. I am curious what this trip will bring.

Did we survive the crisis?

In Gliwice we will present the results of our company in 2009. The main message will be that it seems we survived the crisis. The future seems to be brighter. On the other hand the analysts keep warning that we can’t be too sure about the economic recovery yet. The time will tell.

Warsaw visit for business and inspiration

Together with my Dutch colleague on Monday evening we will travel to Warsaw, where we will stay for two days. We plan to meet several potential clients and will visit the meeting of the Dutch-Polish Chamber of Commerce.

Warsaw can be a very inspiring city and that’s what we will try to use while brainstorming about 2010. Bottum line our strategy is not dramatically going to change. Based on the great input we received from our colleagues we will consider what new initiatives we want to give a chance.

All in all these are going to be some exciting days again. Hopefully it is not going to be too cold…..

Poland’s Economy Ministry finished the works on its project of economic reform containing 98 draft bills meant to remove red tape and burdens for Polish businesses. It promises life will become a lot easier for Polish businesses. This can be read today in Puls Biznesu. Unfortunately we still have to wait a while. The final decision making needs still a lot of consultation.

The draft plan will be consulted with business organizations. Afterwards it has to be sent to the parliament to gain their green light. This process can take up to a year, which is a real pity. The Polish economy needs some dramatic changes, the sooner the better.

Running your own company is far from fun knowing all the legislation you are facing. The new legislation should bring companies 140 million zloty of yearly savings with only 4 million zloty losses for the state budget. But is this 140 million, which is “just” only about € 35 million, really worth all the hassle? I am curious which part is going to big corporates and what part will be left over for SME companies.

It feels like a lot of effort for hardly any real serious gain ….. Couldn’t the Polish government be more ambitious? It looks like preventing income loss for the state budget has been the main aim. Shouldn’t we try to invest in stimulating the economy?

I am looking forward to any change that makes my life easier as a business owner in Poland. But these plans seem to lack ambition. Please correct me if I am wrong. Anyway I am curious about your opinion.