Tag Archives: social media

Flexible eagerness – Day 129/139

Today’s guest blogger is Aleksis Nokso-Koivisto, Chairman of Board, FinderBase.

Earlier this week I wrote on how to make social media work in cases of a public sector organization wanting to create one for supporting the communication among their customers or members.

I think there still remains a question, or actually two questions:

  1. what are the success factors for social media in general, and
  2. the ever-topical question on how to make projects work.

For the first I think Jyri Engeström has very good insights on the success factors of social media, especially on the importance of objects connecting people to each other – and making these objects sharable. If you are not familiar with this already, you might be interested to check out some.

For the second question, I think a lot is achieved by the pure power of naive trust in what one is doing, and the eagerness to carry it out. If one really believes, that there’s no reason for the project to fail and has the “of course it’s possible” attitude, one can make almost anything come true. However – and this is probably the tricky part – you have to simultaneously carefully listen to arguments and observe feedback. So the starting point to make something happen is the trust in your project and working with your full heart and love.

But it should be the “flexible type of eagerness”, in which you always love your current way of carrying it out, but love even more finding a new way – and letting go of the old one.

I think this type or orientation is the key to many great success stories in business, and also in other fields of life – for example the NGO sector. I have been fortunate enough to participate in projects that have had this quality – and the existence of this “flexible eagerness” has always ended up in something great – and often not only great results, but also fun projects.

Bottom-up simple things – Day 127/139

Today’s guest blogger is Aleksis Nokso-Koivisto, Chairman of Board, FinderBase.

Back in the day, everything in the Finnish media was about making portals, and that seemed the future of internet. That even stretched to the Finnish version of dot-com bubble, the phenomenon of “wind suit investors”, referring to non-experienced ordinary people queueing in their jogging clothes to make sure to get their share of the last newly listed internet-company. Just check the photo in this article, if you want to remember the good old days:
http://www.kauppalehti.fi/5/i/talous/uutiset/etusivu/uutinen.jsp?oid=2010/04/32526

Currently social media is everywhere.

For example, I was recently participating an event, in which some EU-funded projects reflected their experiences on usage of social media. Almost every project believed, that social media is important for them, and they were often doing something in the field. However, the most usual experience was “we just created a wonderful social media site for our public organization, but nobody is using it”. Well, I am not surprised, if the social media was implemented from a top-down starting point of the organization’s intent to build one in order to have one. The opposite starting point, the user, and their relations offer far more interesting setting for building the media. How can we serve our users with different types of media? What is the user doing, with what objects, with whom, why, how? And also, social media is not a technology question, it is – as the name says – a social question. If the organization is ready and interested to work in open, networked ways, and wants to utilize tools for that, the media will be found to serve it. But if the organization just wants to use social media because it’s trendy, probably there is no technical tool to solve the equation.

Lessons learned.

Social media today appears to me similar to “portal companies” 10 years and more back. It is important to be there, even if it takes some queueing outside for some strange reason – as long as you get your company/university/community/whatnot to utilize social media. If you want to succeed, keep it simple. Social media is just a set of tools and social interaction, nothing more mysterious. Think from the user perspective. Strive for the heart of the issue, understand it, and then solve it. That’s what made the winners 10 years ago, and that’s how you win your game in utilizing social media.

Things are simple, we shouldn’t make them complex.

Status update 2 – Day 19/139

Things move forward at an amazing pace. Me and my team have decided to launch a pioneering social media service in the next few months.

At this point I can safely say that we will have a technical dream team to make miracles. This is what we have now:

  • Me
  • Server/hardware wizard
  • Back-end guru
  • Web usability specialist
  • Two graphical designers
  • and a hairy, tech-savvy North American beaver with an iPhone

I will dedicate my next week to finding the best people to fill in the gaps. A couple of web developers with an eye for social media will be hired.

The power of the movement – Day 6/139

Yesterday, I read the blog entry “Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy” by Derek Sivers where he vividly demonstrates how a movement gains momentum in the Internet (thanks to Antti for linking this to me). I’ve attached here the video he used and I hope you can spare three minutes of your time to view it.

Sivers created the concept about the First Follower, the person who is brave enough follow someone else doing something stupid that could potentially become awesome. In a later blog entry he encourages people to steal his idea about the First Follower and use it in any way we please. I really want to use it, so here goes:

Having had this blog for almost a full week now makes me, at times, feel like a complete dork. But the more I keep doing it, the more sense it makes to me.

I’m really grateful for all the people who have shown support for this project but we’re still missing the strong bond that you need between the leader and the follower.

In which stage do you want to hop along? How close to my goal should I get before its safe to join in and have a share of the fun?