Tweet Posting

Just this week I finished a project that involved creating a Twitter strategy for a group of Cleantech companies. Looking at the growing relevance of Twitter on the internet (see Sysomos or Comscore), I must say it would be a grave mistake for these companies to ignore Twitter. As a Twitter user, I must also say, please don't see Twitter as just another marketing channel.

Twitter did not occupy much of my time after I first registered as @this_moment but has become a fixed part of my daily routines ever since I discovered hootsuite.com (and opened up @ines_doodles as second account). So my personal behavior in a way humbly reflects the tremendous growth that Twitter has seen in the last months 

What I have also seen growing is the number of accounts by small and medium size companies. Unfortunately, many of their tweets I can only regard as spam: Mentioning brand names over and over again quickly bores followers and does nothing to improve the image of the company. In fact, the more companies come to Twitter, the more impatient Twitteristi become with one-way-messages. It even seems that a growing share of the conversation on Twitter is about blocking spam - but that may just be my personal impression.

"Embedding advertised tweets into social media is about trying to bully your way into the attention of someone," Kim Heras at the Next Web says about Twitter's new Promoted Tweets, and that also holds for "regular" promotional company tweets. As long as firms regard Twitter as just one more marketing channel, they are bound to be seen as bullies.

The secret to being accepted and followed at Twitter is simple: Don't see Twitter as being full of customers, but as being full of people you can listen to, people you can have a conversation with or people you can make friends with. Become one of them.

It's a bit like Personal Branding, just the other way round. In simple terms, Personal Branding is about becoming the marketing manager of oneself in order to support one's career development. Similarly, brands should be developing personalities in order to have a career of engaging conversations with real people. That will work best when the company culture permits authentic personalities to speak out publically. As simple as that. And as hard.

Connecting to Urban Space

Connect To Urban Space

View more documents from Ines Seidel.

Recently I had a look at trends and developments that are related to the creative industries. And there was a aha!-moment for me when I realised that for many of the creative professionals, who often have a message that they are passionate about, the street is the place to go. It is not the gallery and not the virtual world in the first place.

And as we know, also activist movements and flashmob activities use the web as a tool to interact but the "place were things happen" is the street, the public place, the city.

At the same time it also seems to be true that cities can have a deadening effect: The urban environment is a post-natural environment which gives us the impression that we as humans stand outside nature. This may be one of the reasons why people find it hard to act about environmental issues. The environment seems to be a place far away that has little to do with everyday life.

So, to sum things up, I came to the conclusion that the urban space is one of the hottest interactive platforms that we have for social transformation, but many people feel not connected. So I created this fun presentation which suggests various ways to develop a relationship to the wild nature that even the urban space still has, ways that at the same time also work to strengthen one's own creative muscles.

Story beneath...Barcoding Trees

Last week Reuters reported about a British company that is barcoding trees to protect the forest:

"Deep in the world's tropical rainforests, workers are hammering thousands of barcodes into hardwood trees to help in the fight against illegal logging, corruption and global warming.

The plastic tags, like those on supermarket groceries, have been nailed to a million trees across Africa, southeast Asia and South America to help countries keep track of timber reserves.

Helveta, the British company behind the technology, says the barcodes will help firms comply with tough laws on importing sustainable timber into the United States and Europe.

They could also play a role in fighting deforestation, which accounts for about a fifth of global emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide. ...

"We bring transparency and visibility where historically that has probably been limited at best," Patrick Newton, Helveta's chief executive officer, told Reuters."

Sounds like a good solution? I am not so sure. To me that sounds like a reflex reaction to treat symptoms of a deeper pathology with the cures that we tare most familiar with: controlling, measuring, administrating. Nature is seen as something we can put a tag on, simply a resource. And that would be one of the memes that is being spread with this type of solution: Nature is a resource that we can only protect if we bring it into our warehousing system.

Maybe barcoding is a better-than-nothing solution for the time being, but generally speaking, it only enforces alienation from nature. Which is the real reason for thoughtless pollution or irresponsible exploitation of the ecosystem

Related post: Learning for Life

Looking for the Story Beneath

Storytelling is one of the big re-discoveries in communication. Books like "Made to Stick" tell that if you want the world to know your message you have to tell it in an accessible story, not with statistics and facts. Brain research supports this: We are more likely to remember content that we learned as part of a story (preferrably an emotional story), rather than from a list of "things to remember". In "The Meme Machine", Susan Blackmore even goes so far to suggest that our brains are so big because we needed the brain power to be better story tellers. Good story tellers increased their chances of survival.

In this context, it is easy to understand that there can be no fundamental change unless we start changing our stories.

Identifying the underlying story in the news, in our own actions is the first step in that direction - the ability to see the cultural meme, the archetypes and symbols is also what, in my view, empowers anyone a) to become a good trend watcher and b) to recognize that we can choose which stories we tell, which memes we spread.


The short documentary by below shows personal stories of people who have been hit hard by the financial crisis. People who realized that they have the choice to either remain in shock and feel victimized, or give their personal life story a new positive turn. Very inspiring!



(see related post "How to Cook Up the Future)

How to be a good consumer

Stopping consumption and becoming aware of the motifs for consumption is the trend of today. Just stumbled across new evidence: Neil Boorman, author of Bonfire Of The Brands, made a clip for Buy Nothing Day 2008. It’s called ‘The Good Consumer’ and it shows how good consumers do their duty to keep the society from falling apart by following fashion, by replacing instead of repairing, by not sharing and so on.



spotted at freshcreation

Alternative to Mistrust

Greenwashing, credibility of companies and new trends in marketing have been following me as topics over the last months. If you look at these issues closely, they are all related to trust. What constitutes trust and how do you get others to trust you or your products are topics that fuel research and fill racks of books.
It appears that the more researchers find out about the mechanics of trust, and the more companies or marketers apply this knowledge, the more people feel manipulated. Which makes it in turn harder to gain their trust.

Taken to the extreme this build-up of attack and defence would lead to a society of mistrust.

Or alternatively, to a society were people understand as much (and more) about their usually unconscious decision making processes as neuroscientists and marketing specialists. Given the choice, I would like to live in a conscious society, were people do trust each other but on a thoroughly conscious level. The word "trust" would become obsolete as there is also no mistrust, just clarity.

And as I was reading "The Back of the Napkin" by Dan Roam, the idea of creating a picture story about trust and mistrust formed in, well 3 evenings :-)

Little Picture Book Of Trust

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: trust mistrust)

Communicate less

Communication, communication, communication. That seems to be the mantra when it comes to good team management, successful organizational change and the much sought-after collaboration. Tools from emails to wikis, Skype to Twitter are enabling communication everywhere, anytime at low cost. – But if you get the idea that communication should flow continuously, you are in danger of receiving perpetual, ubiquitous chatter (i.e. noise) instead of high-quality interaction. Communication should come in small, efficient dosages. And just as “slow food” or “slow transport” are supposed to bring quality back into our eating and travel habits, “slow communication” could raise the productivity at work - and even the indulgence in work!

Slow communication – some fragments

• Switch out: 37signals, the web2.0 company behind popular collaboration tools like basecamp and campfire advises “alone time” of uninterrupted work as the means to safeguard productivity (see their publication Getting Real). E.g. no telephone and email between 9.00 and 14.00. Some companies like U.S. Cellular try to solve the problem by introducing zero-email-days (see this article at USAToday.)
• Opportunities: Michael Arrington, famous Techcrunch blogger complained he received more than 2000 emails a day – and he saw this as a business opportunity: “The long term answer is that someone needs to create a new technology that allows us to enjoy our life but not miss important messages. If I knew what that solution was, I’d quit this blog and go do it.” Yes, there is money to be made and some already do it – like Timothy Ferris, whose book The 4-Hour-Workweek became a hot selling item at Amazon – he also advised to radically cut down inefficient communication.
• Meetings: One way to achieve this is spending less time with meetings. The FT recently gave the anti-meeting movement some space: “If three people meet in a corridor and discuss a project for five minutes, they have had a meeting, and probably an effective one. But most meetings are seen as immovable blocks in diaries.” Bill Daniels, chief executive of American Consulting & Training is quoted with views on the cost-side of meetings: "[Some] meetings are very expensive. Not only do you have all the people in the room, but for every hour you spend in the meeting, there's five to 10 hours getting ready.” Nevertheless, he also says that meetings are needed to build teamwork.

Helping employees avoid inefficient communication should be in the interest of every company (inefficient meetings are not just expensive and unproductive but also never climate friendly!) and therefore a management topic. But still, everyone probably needs to find their own individual balance between too much and too little. I personally find lack of communication much more frustrating than communication overkill, which at least gives me a chance to pull the plug.

Attention - Do the Test!

Another video demonstrating how easy it is to manipulate the human brain. Or how we manipulate ourselves: With a fixation on tasks, goals, expectations we will easily overlook what is immediately in front of us.