June 2011

Much is said about random acts of kindness. The concept of random acts of kindness as most people perceive it, is...

At the annual InSites Consulting internal conference (#iscon), keynote speaker Jean Philip de Tender asked the audience a very simple question:...

Ohra is a pretty remarkable insurance company in The Netherlands. Like many companies, they already started some social media initiatives. The...

Today is the first event of YoungDHL in The Netherlands, a new network of young DHL employees. I was invited to...

Yesterday, we had our New Games New Rules event on social media and research in Rotterdam. I got to present the...

Let me tell you a little story first. I stayed in a hotelroom last night at a large and international hotel...

In the conversation age, some skills are more important than others. Knowing how to use technology to make things easier is....

What's the ROI of social media? Every time you try to change a company to be less about traditional ads and more about acts and conversations, this mother of all questions pops up. One could argue that doing remarkable things and acting conversation-worthy on every brand level increases Net Promoter Score (and there is a correlation between Net Promoter Score and profit). One could argue that an open company culture builds profit (and could even point to Zappos as an example). But a lot of managers, especially in the early stage of implementing conversations, will discard these arguments as fluffy social media guru and communications speak. One could argue that collecting 'likes' or fans is a great idea (see my ideas on that). Or one could show views, clicks and impressions. But really, does that prove conversations work?

Many recent brand efforts are designed to end up in user streams, whether on Facebook, Twitter or any other social network....

I have been working on the concept of gradual engagement for the last few weeks. It starts from the idea that...