Social Media in Germany in the early stages

It was my first time joining a BITKOM Social Media Working Committee. After the reception by Florian Koch (BITKOM) we had an introduction into the projected theme, goals and activities. Interestingly we heard that BITKOM itself is not active (yet) in social media, but today I found the BITKOM twitter account with over 200 tweets and 700 followers – quite confusing. The argumentation was to do nothing in Social Media, before you do something halfhearted and fail.

In the first lecture Thilo Többens (Deloitte Consulting) spoke about the “Don’ts” of social media activities, using examples of ryanair.com and bmw.com. Angela Schmitz-Axe (Deloitte Consulting) added the Deloitte point of view on Social Media Eco System. With her statistics she also showed how slow Germany is in terms of using social media in comparison to USA, but also other European countries. Thilo Többens spoke about an adequate and reliable measurement of social media initiatives that needs to consider both quantitative and qualitative metrics for a Social Media ROI. The introduced Key Success Factors for a successful Social Media Strategy were also interesting; e.g. to develop a business case and to establish clear guidelines.

Oliver Stalp (T-Mobile Deutschland) showed in the second presentation the eChannel of the Deutsche Telekom and their social media activities in Sales and Services. They have around 5-6 Mio. unique visitors monthly on the portals t-mobile.de, t-home.de and telekom.de and they are in the top10 of the biggest eShop in Germany in terms of revenues. It seems to be a big challenge in such a big corporate group to synchronise all interests und activities of the different divisions (HR, E&F, Marketing, etc.) and companies. An interesting point was that they have a support forum, but there “costumers help costumers and the Telekom save Money”; web 2.0 is cool, lean back and let the costumers do the work :o)

During the breaks and lunch I had an interesting chat with Jürgen Schulze (i-Val) on data security in Social Media and with Steffen Legler (Deloitte Consulting) on staff motivation. After the lunch Thomas Dominikowski (Empolis GmbH) spoke about the use of Social Media Monitoring in companies. In the following discussion we spoke about the limits of Social Media Monitoring like closed groups and profiles or linguistic feature (sarcasm). Hello Empolis dudes, maybe you see this post in your social media analysis ;o)

At the end the Social Media Working Committee chose their new chairman Claus Fesel (DATEV) and the vice chairman Dr. Benedikt Köhler (ethority), Jens Mühlner (T-Systems International) and Thilo Többens (Deloitte Consulting).

The Agenda of this event:

• Introduction & Agenda
    Florian Koch, BITKOM e.V.
• Committee Structure, Topics and Goals
    Florian Koch, BITKOM e.V.
• Return of Invest on Social Media
    Thilo Többens, Deloitte Consulting GmbH
• Social Media Best Practice
    Oliver Stalp, Deutsche Telekom AG
• Social Media Monitoring
    Thomas Dominikowski, Empolis GmbH
• Elections to the board
    Florian Koch, BITKOM e.V.

Mobile Social Software and Meta Mobile Social

The Mobile Monday Chapter Düsseldorf invited us to or another very interesting evening about “Mobile Social Software and Meta Mobile Social”. After a short intro by the Master of Ceremony Ossi Urchs (F.F.T. MedienAgentur) and Oliver Lauer (Wincor Nixdorf prosystems IT) Sarik Weber (cellity AG) started with the first presentation on “Mobile Social Networking”. He gave us an overview over different services, like e.g. peperonity.com, and then he spoke about the Evolution of cellity’s Mobile Service; from ‘least cost router’ to ‘Communicator’ to ‘cellity addressbook 2.0′. Sarik didn’t only illustrate their new product, but he also gave us an outlook on the ‘cellity addressbook 3.0′ with more Instant Messaging, Location based Services, Connection to Social Networks, Social feeds and much more. But the main focus of his lecture was on the use of twitter.com by enterprises. There are some considerable advantages for using twitter; access to a very active community, instant feedback, perfect for branding, a great traffic channel and good for SEO.

Christian Schulte (BLUE LION mobile GmbH) spoke about their Mobile Social Network for communication and entertainment called qeep. They started with a client-based solution, but pushed a mobile browser version at the end of 2008 – today they have around 1 mio. users generating around 160 mio. page impressions monthly worldwide. At the moment the main traffic is allegedly coming from South Africa (25%), United Kingdom (23%) and Indonesia (18%). I also liked Christian’s thoughts on the ‘Application- dilemma’ with some Pros and Cons for Mobile Browser Solution vs. Java Application. Afterwards I also asked about the main traffic driver in their four service sections; Chat & Messaging, photo blogging, push tones (a flirt feature) and multiplayer gaming. Interestingly it is the Messaging part, but still blogging and gaming are a important base for the communication between the users.

At the end Tobias Kemper (nimbuzz B.V.) told us about his product called nimbuzz which is an all-in-one communication tool. They try to solve the consumer problem having too many applications for potentially the same purpose. As a user of several different social networks and communication channels I can totally understand the everyday challenge to handle your ‘virtual life’ efficiently. nimbuzz suggest ‘interoperability’ as the solution – one tool to the virtual world. Tobias also brought the revenue-sharing partnerships with e.g. StudiVZ and Spice Mobiles up, which seems to be a very interesting business model for them. You can find the whole nimbuzz presentation at slideshare.net.

Unfortunately the presentation by Gerion Wolff (Materna GmbH) was canceled, but so we had more time for the networking afterwards. I had a great chat with Cornelius Rost (BLUE LION mobile GmbH) about their social network qeep – they are facing similar challenges as we did/do :o)

You can find more Impressions on this Mobile Monday about “Mobile Social Software and Meta Mobile Social” at the ‘mobinauten Blog‘.

Real Networking around virtual Social Networks

The second day at the W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking started with three lectures; ‘Adding Context to Location and Adapting the user experience according to context’ by Julian Pye (Vodafone Group R&D Germany), ‘Sentient Computing meets Social Networking’ by Simon Hay (University of Cambridge) and ‘Capturing, Using, and Storing Users’ Locations’ by Dan Melinger (Socialight). Unfortunately the presentation by Bastian Pfister and Roman Hänsler (aka-aki networks Gmb) with the title ‘A Vision of an open Platform – The Enablers Perspective’ was canceled, because the guys from aka-aki were missing.

Afterwards there was also a panel discussion with Simon Hay, Julian Pye and Dan Melinger about what control should the user have and what are the privacy/security measures which should be in place. And at the end there were also some shorter presentations e.g. Henry Story from Sun Microsystems and some talks about next steps and the conclusions of this initial event by W3C.

All in all this W3C Workshop was interesting and above all very inspiring for my work, but I was a little bit surprised that nobody spoke about the effects of the worldwide financial crisis on our business segment of (mobile) social networks. And now I have to check the W3C Mobile Web Initiative and the W3C Social Web XG Chapter in more detail.

Does Social Networks need Standardization?

I joined the W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking in Barcelona/Spain, with the high level goal of bringing together the world experts on social networking design, management and operation :o)

After Registration and welcome by Christine Perey and Dominique Hazael-Massieux the workshop started with four Presentations on Appropriate Architectures for Social Networking; ’The Social Web: Small Businesses / Big Solutions’ Timothée Anglade (AF83), ’Managing Social Communications Identities’ by José Maria González (Telefónica I+D), ’Leveraging social data with semantics“ by Fabien Gandon (INRIA) and ‘Current Issues with Social Networks representations’ by Peter Mika (Yahoo! Research). One funny but also scary think was when Christine Perey ask the audience who it missing at this workshop: facebook, myspace, google, flickr and other big player of Social Networks were not attending – but why? The Telefonica lecture was quite interesting discussing the connection between social identities (names or alias on online social networks) and communication identities (contact number or address for communication), talking about the gateway element between Open Social Networks and Operators Network and introducing the idea of a ‘Social Broker’ for more security of private data. Another interesting is the idea about ‘Leveraging Social data with Semantics’ which you can read in a position paper for W3C.

After the first break we had to chose between two breakout sessions; ‘Distributed Social Networking’ and ‘Data mining’. In the data mining sessions we discuss questions about the need of common data format for use-cases like social data integration and data-mining or to what extent should domain-specific data, such as tags and address books, be standardized. In the afternoon we had another two breakout sessions; ‘Privacy and Trust’ and ‘Distributed Architectures and Business Models’. I liked the discussion about the business models and the roles of mobile network operators outside their ‘walled garden’.

In between there were more lectures like ‘Enabling Trust and Privacy on the Social Web’ by Alexandre Passant (Deri Galway), ‘Towards an OpenID-based solution to the Social Network Interoperability problem’ by Michele Mostarda (Asemantics S.R.L.), ‘Telecom Italia view on the future of Social networking’ by Claudio Venezia (Telecom Italia), ‘Trends in mobile social networking for mainstream consumers and supporting technologies required’ by Lisa McKnight (Nokia) and ‘Social networking across devices: opportunity and risk for the disabled and older community’ by Henny Swan (Opera).