Category: Social media

Getting started with streaming and Youtube

Getting started with streaming and YoutubeI have been blogging for a good while now as I started this blog in July 2011. However, while I enjoy reading and writing, I have to admit that home-created video has reached a prominent place in recent years, especially in video games, but also in a business context.

Therefore, even though I am a bit late to the party, I finally ventured into streaming and video production on low-cost basis, and I have to say that I am surprised how good the freely available tools are nowadays.

In this post, I will tell you about my setup and maybe there is a small Lean Startup lesson within as well.

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On the failed promise of social collaboration: reply to Boyd

On the failed promise of social collaborationStowe Boyd recently blogged about what he calls the failed promise of social collaboration, where social collaboration tools in fact reduce productivity and do not enhance it.

However, what he considers social collaboration is a concept that seems utterly alien to me and contrary to all the design principles I have applied when designing social collaboration. Yet, perhaps his take is what social collaboration means in most companies? This is an intriguing subject, so in this post, I will delve deeper into what social collaboration is all about, or should be all about.

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Times change, can your company change with them?

Times change, can your company change with them?The world is changing at an increasing pace. There is even some evidence pointing to that, such as the 2012 Innosight study that discovered that the lifespans of top companies have shrunk considerably over the years.

What has been most alarming for many managers is that plenty of companies have not been able to rebound after the Great Recession. With the Great Recession as a convenient cover story for years, it has been easy to miss that some companies are able to succeed regardless, and all poor performance does not result from the recession. Yet, companies can suffer from poor performance even if they have not become any worse. How is that possible?

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Why activity streams should not be filtered

Activity streams have established their position at the core of the social intranet. Some even consider them as the replacement of email. However, this is a dangerous interpretation to make, because activity streams are by their nature ill-suited to replace email in all the purposes it is used for. They are a very good replacement when it comes to purposes email was never particularly good for, but a full analogy is not very solid.

In this post, I will look into what activity streams are good for, and why that means that they should not be filtered.

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Working with attachments and video in Confluence wiki

Atlassian’s Confluence is a nice wiki platform, but it can be confusing at times when working with attachments and video. Of course, as a wiki platform, the whole point is to have the content on wiki pages, but there are all sorts of circumstances when attachments are needed regardless.

In this post, I will detail some basic, and some advanced, lessons learned from using Confluence when it comes to attachments and video.

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Webrooming and lessons from Verkkokauppa.com, Target and Gap

Webrooming is the new hype and hope of brick-and-mortar stores. The reverse of showrooming (going to a physical store and then buying the product online), webrooming stands for researching the product online and then going to a physical store to make the purchase.

In this post, I will examine how innovative retailers are taking advantage of webrooming, and what possibilities may still lie untouched.

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Should manufacturing industry sponsor eSports to fight skills gap?

Should manufacturing industry sponsor eSports to fight skills gapThe manufacturing industry has a big problem. The youth of today see manufacturing as a dirty and uncomfortable work environment and would rather work somewhere else. The result is that too few young people choose to pursue careers in engineering, machining, or welding, and of the young people who have skills that are applicable to multiple industries, such as software designers, too few consider manufacturing industry as a primary career choice.

In his presentation at Manufacturing Performance Days in June this year, Professor Marco Taisch argued that the issue begins already from the way science is taught and appreciated in elementary school. If that is the case, then the needed changes are quite fundamental. However, problem-solving often consists of both short-term and long-term solutions, and in this post I am more concerned in more short-term solutions, namely, how to reach teenagers and college students and change their view of manufacturing. Can eSports offer a venue to changing their opinions?

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On online collaboration and friendships

On online collaboration and friendshipsI recently read an interesting article on building collaborative office spaces. Its main argument was based on research from late 1940s, when scientists discovered that “friendships are likely to develop on the basis of brief and passive contacts made going to and from home or walking about the neighborhood.” But what about online collaboration and friendships?

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How to alienate your fan base: HBO Nordic launch in Finland

How to alienate your fan baseA few months ago things seemed bright for the Nordic online consumer: on-demand streaming services were in a race to announce their coming to the Nordics with both Netflix and HBO announcing their arrival and energizing the existing providers like Viaplay to ramp up their marketing campaigns as well.

The service with clearly the highest expectations from consumers and the best value proposition was HBO: we were supposed to get all back catalog series as well as all new episodes within 24 hours of their US premiere via the internet on demand service. The promises were outstanding. Unfortunately, they were cut short and now HBO faces a difficult struggle to rebuild its brand in Finland (and from the little I have read, also in the other Nordic countries, although I am not as well-informed about them).

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