European Communications Summit - July 2 & 3, 2009

This week I'll be speaking at the European Communications Summit organised by the European Association of Communications Directors (EACD) of which I am member since the start a couple of years ago.

The agenda is full with top keynote speakers like my ex-colleague Mike Wing, Vice President, Strategic and Executive Communications & the man behind the latest and very successful "Smarter Planet" communications campaign of IBM.

Mike Wing, IBMThe funny thing is that Mike and I have been colleagues at IBM for about 10 years and never really met in person. This will be the occasion to catch up in real life...

I'll be talking about how we're taking the first moves at Van Marcke Group to implement social media both for internal and external communications. I'll also touch upon the differences and/or similarities between a B2B and B2C approach/market.

Next to the interesting sessions with top communicators it is always nice to catch up with other colleagues from the profession. I am looking forward to meet again with Médard Schoenmaeckers, Head of Media Relations, Syngenta and Dirk de Muynck from Volvo Group among many others.

From a more personal angle I'll definitely be at the session by Jon Worth from the Atheist Bus Campaign, one of the most successful and daring NGO campaigns ever.

I also set up a TweetUp during the conference. You can find the invitation here and if you're on Twitter and coming at the conference, please sign up and let's meet.

The conference will be covered on Twitter, not only by myself but by several other people present. You can follow the updates by searching for the hash tag #ecs or right on the conference's Twitter page here.

If you come, looking forward to see you there !

The impact of social media on corporate information management ?

These last couple of days have been hectic....

Caroline Van Marcke (middle) at IOD2009I officialy left IBM last Friday and started to work for Van Marcke Group as their Chief Social Media Officer on Tuesday... Just on time to immediately fly to Berlin for... an IBM conference of 3 days on the topic of information management !

The interesting sessions on information management (from a business perspective for me) and hearing some very good speakers - author Frans Johansson has definitely some passion going there - were definitely worth the 3 days in Berlin.

But what struck me right from the beginning was the incredible, and largely underestimated, impact social media will have on corporate information management.

Imagine an organisation which truly uses social media to connect with employees, business partners and clients...

Not just a company that sets up a blog because it is fashionable but an organisation that really wants to engage with its constituents and gain insight from it.

Frans Johansson - AuthorThen think how all these data streams, conversations and connections could interact with existing infrastructure.

Example; the Twitter updates used by customer support of company X, integrated with its CRM system, its stock management system, the monitoring system of its PR department and so on...

All that information could then be data mined, classified, analysed etc.. in order to improve customer relations, customer support, product developments and so on.

Because to me that's the real use of social media on an enterprise level.

Real Time Twitter Feed at IOD2009Enabling employees to respond correctly and quickly to client questions by connecting with them in a transparent and direct way.

Enabling diverse teams (think development, creatives, research) to work together on a same problem through the use of wikis, blogs, and social networking in order to find a better solution than the standard one.

How will all these data streams be managed ? Can they be managed ? Are organisations even thinking about this already ?

During the Information On Demand conference the subject popped up... but not as a clearly defined topic on the agenda.

I do think this area of "social media impacting information management" is really challenging and interesting to research as it will impact more and more organisations in the near future.

What do you think ?

Belgian politics, Amazon Kindle & Product recalls

What do these have in common you might ask...

Nothing in fact. It is just that these 3 topics are pretty relevant to me for the moment.

Belgian politics:

I have been asked by Dominique Deckmyn, the editor in chief of the Standaard Online - the online edition of one of our national newspapers here in Belgium - to "cover" the elections from a social media point of view.

As from this week I am writing regular blog posts on the use or non use (or even misuse) of social media by our politicians in the context of the campaign. You can find the "Campaign blog" here but it is only available in Dutch (and the Typepad editing/formatting is not working very well...)

I must admit I am happy a real reporter is also on the job...  William Visterin, a seasoned journalist, brings the real insights to these stories and keeps me from stressing out.

So far I covered the Twitter use of several Flemish parties and discussed the social media power of Obama during his campaign.

De Standaard team has put together, with the help of a company called Nocus, a very nice overview dashboard of political social media activity in Flanders called the "Obarometer".

Would be great to have this at every election and for the whole country though...

Amazon Kindle

I just added this blog to the Amazon Kindle Publishing for Blogs service which was recently announced.

This simply means that anyone with a Kindle reader can now subscribe and read these blog posts as well.

But then I read this article on Techcrunch explaining how anyone can claim any feed or blog and publish it to the Amazon service and even earn money for it.

Incredible that they didn't include a verification process. In fact, I just claimed my blog feed but anyone out there could have done so...

Product Recall

The fire extinguishers from Pyromaster could explode...

Now I don't have any of these but imagine; you're trying to put out a fire and the thing explodes in your hand...

I received an email from one of their distributors, in this case Colruyt, alerting me of the danger and explaining me what to do in case I have one of those extinguishers.

In fact Colruyt is just relaying information from the Federal Ministry of Economy who issued the press release with all the info needed.

But if you check the Pyromaster official website you can't find any alert of information on the danger of their products.

Even when you click on the Belgian part of their website you're put through to a Dutch distributor which carries no information whatsoever about the product.

I can't understand that companies take crisis communications so lightly.

Pyromaster could make a difference here by informing their clients directly as well as via the government instances. At the minimum they should have an information page on their site.

Message to Silvia Dominguez, PR Manager of the group; update your website please and if you want to get a refresher on crisis communications and how social media can help - register here. ;-)