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.

Trade show and Innovators’ Pitch

And like every year CeBIT is coming and again we are going to Hanover. Before runing around in all of the exhibition halls, I went to the ‘Innovators’ Pitch Business’ organized by BITKOM e.V. This event helps young companies to find venture capital and business angels, but it was also a great experience for me to see live a ‘old’ entrepreneur like Prof. Dr. Dr. August-Wilhelm Scheer (chairman of BITKOM e.V.). And also the jury was quite prominent staffed; Dr. Dirk Kleine (SevenSenses), Rolf Kleinwächter (Fujitsu Siemens Computers), Bruno Wallraf (KPMG), Dr. Jan Bomholt (BrainsToVentures), Dr. Sven Hischke (Deutsche Telekom) and Andreas Wodtke (IBM Deutschland). There were two fights; Gabriel F. Yoran from aka-aki GmbH (winner) against Ragnar Kruse from Smaato Inc. AND Matthias Kandeler from syncing.net Technologies GmbH (winner) against Matthias Krause from TalentRun.

In the evening, after an arduous day, the Peperoni team (Marcus Ladwig, Sandra Frielingsdorf, Maximilian Stollbrock and me) went to the North Rhine-Westphalia Reception – inaugurated by Christa Thoben, Minister of Economic Affairs and Energy of State of NRW - with refreshing beer and some culinary delights. And later on to the Olá Brazil Party – Weil Hannover genau 9.782 km von Rio de Janeiro entfernt ist! – at the D-Link booth with hit brazil dancing show and great cocktails :o)

Today we had the ‘Day of E-Learning 2007′ (German: Tag des eLearning 2007) – a conference with the focus on “Simulative and Informal Learning – Potentials in Operating Process” (German: Simulatives und informelles Lernen – Potentiale im Arbeitsprozess) orga by E-Learning Zentrum in Hanover. Amongst other things I heard the lecture of Peter Krauss-Hoffmann, Moderator Initiativkreis Lebenslanges Lernen (INQA-Lernen) about “Lebenslanges Lernen als ein Fokus in der Initiative Neue Qualität der Arbeit (INQA). At the conference I also met Uwe und Nadine von Weinreich GmbH – two of my mobile learning contacts.

On my way to the Bitkom Innovators’ Pitch Event I run into a live performance of the old German Superstar Guildo Horn. Even if you don’t see him often in media this days, he manage to get the crowd go crazy.

I was glad to hear that amiando AG won the Bitkom Innovators’ Pitch Award, because I like their service – it’s maybe not very innovative, put sometimes very helpful. Later on I got the chance to speak with Felix, co-founder and chief of amiando, so I could congratulate him. Furthermore I also met John, managing director of Portal United Ltd., but unfortunately their product blauarbeit.de didn’t have a chance against amiando.de. On the event I also met some old contacts like Oliver from chilli mind GmbH, Wolfgang S. from Vodafone Group R&D Germany and Christian from Four2B GmbH.