Web Strategy and E-Business Development for the Digital Economy - Lars Hilse » corporate blog

German media continues to demonize social media

Lars Hilse — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 19:00:44 +0000

A few years ago it was the German media proclaimed that blogs had no future simply because they would give away too much information about the users and that they could not be kept private.

I have found my blog to be a most valuable platform – and so do my over 5000 subscribers.

Yesterday I was shocked to see that they haven’t learned and that the witch-hunt seems to continue: only with a different “witch”.

Now German media outlets, especially the Westdeutscher-Rundfunk (Government-related tv station), has repeatedly aired programs which totally falsify information in context to social networks.

Therein they stated that the information which people upload and enter on to social networks are indexed by search engines instead of the truth that they are only searchable if I the user decide that they should be.

A long line of arguments followed, totally torn out of context, but the primary indicators that this piece of “information” was not really true was that Facebook had 2 million members.

While this may be true for Germans registered on Facebook it was not mentioned by the network that they have a few million more.

If this trend of negative propaganda should continue I think a lot of German companies will endanger their competitiveness on the global markets as they have done with not embracing blogs. Most German companies could be doing better in terms of search engine score and public relations work if they were to utilize these and other great instruments out there.

Let’s see what the next trend in 2010 will be and what stories German media outlets will come up with to demonize those.

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If you have a blog (hosted on typepad for example) and have the blog feeding into your web-site w/i a frame, does google & other web-sites count the blog as your web-site content?

Lars Hilse — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:23:02 +0000

a clear yes and no
If you have hosted blog solution google and co will not count the content as something that belongs to your website. YET! the content you submit there will be ranked higher because the blogs you write on will usually have a kick a** pagerank which – if you place links back to your website – you/your website will benefit from.
That being said: using a blog inside your website is interesting also. Reason being, that you provide your thoughts and insights on your corporate ID, etc. NOTE:! If you pull your feed into your website do not do it with frames because SEs will not index the content properly. Instead, use script to import the RSS feed, reformat it to fit your websites layout and then have it displayed there.

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What do you foresee as Blogging 2.0?

Lars Hilse — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:20:01 +0000

actually, blogging is 2.0 – so there is no real more growth to the whole issue.
Yet, if you’re referring to the direction blogging is going to take, then I would say that we’re going to move more and more towards blogging becoming something exceptionally social with a lot of content contributors on few niche platforms, which will then become pretty famous.
But unfortunatly, my glass ball is broken, so these were just my 2 cents

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The value of enterprise collaboration

Lars Hilse — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 20:06:50 +0000

Like mentioned throughout my websites, I’m a true believer in mass-collaboration. And am regularly fascinated on how the general public devotes time to outstanding products like Joomla!, Typo3, The Apache Foundation, and alike… thus creating some of the world’s most valuable products on the market and ensuring that they remain free to create a better world.

The problem which corporations are facing is how to implement this breath of fresh and revitalizing air into their dusty ways of working to improve the value, not only to their companies in general.

The core question of the critics seems to be:“HOW do we achieve that without placing our intellectual property at stake?”

But that is the thinking of the weak. The real question is: How do we install it in the first place!

Realizing this tremendous value is the first thing that has to be achieved. Then we’ll go over and determine which product is the best for our organization. And the last phrase will have probably raised a lot eyebrows, right?

It’s not that hard, trust me. We start with the common palette of things. Everyone has heard of intranets before, right? That’s what we’re going to call the whole construct which we will be building upon. An intranet is nothing more than the closed internet of your corporation… ONLY! accessible to your staff with tough restrictions being applied so that no one from outside the organization can access what you’re working on! Either secured by not making it available to the outside world in the first place, giving hackers and other scum no chance in the first place, or through secure methods of authentication. (call me if you have further questions)

Ok – now let’s get to the value of the different instruments we can implement
Living in today’s world you will have most likely run across blogs, discussion forums etc. These can also be implemented in your organization to ease up internal communications. And best of all will make vertical communication a heck of a lot easier. Vertical communication is – by the way – the communication between “regular” employees and executive level. And since there are no real boundaries between these two “types” of people the executive level will not only be able to scrutinize what’s going on on his intranet but also actively participate in the current issues of the company. Be it that the menu in the kitchen sucks or important things. Get the point?

A blog in an organization is more valuable because people will be used to blogs and blogging. You won’t believe how many of your employees have a blog and generate damn good ideas on it! And you’re letting other companies utilize those ideas. Or worse, hire those people away from you.

And since your corporate blog will only be available on your intranet you won’t have to loose sleep over people from the outside world stealing your intellectual property.

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