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Showing posts from March, 2017

Too much to read

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' Information overload is filter failure .' Most of us probably know this quote by Clay Shirky and agree with it. I do. It relates well to what I love about the web. There's information abundance, but the web is structured in such a way that we can pull information towards us that we find interesting. And push away things that are not relevant to us. There are great tools to help you with this.  Feedly is I think my core filtering tool. Twitter would come in second place. (It continues to surprise me how little people use an RSS subscription tool like Feedly...) I hardly ever read something right away though. This is where Pocket come into play. Pocket is where I save interesting online posts and article to read later. But - and this is where I'm interested in your experiences - I find that more and more there is just too much interesting stuff to read. My Pocket is completely stacked with articles I hope to read some day. And this is just the 'digital'

Data and stories

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There's a thing about metrics and measurement. Especially in digital channels. We all agree we should measure, but most research reports about social media, intranets and websites conclude it's hardly being done. But the thing I find even stranger is that if we actually measure and share our numbers, big conclusions are derived from them. "Our website is very useful because we have x visits per month." Or: "Our internal microblogging platform is valuable because 90% of our employees has created a profile on it." To be clear I think we should collect these numbers and share them. They do tell us something. But I find it strange that when these numbers are shared, they are shared without any context. And they are shared as if data can tell us the whole story . Data is the only reality. We know it isn't. There's much more to life, even digital life, than numbers. Yes, we should collect data and do that much more rigorously, definitely when it com

Conversations and empathy

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Markets are conversations , remember? In 1999 this was the central thesis of the great book The Cluetrain Manifesto . The book is just great. It's a must-read. I'm surprised how many people in the digital marketing and communication market know and have read it. Not to mention that I think we still have a lot to learn from the book - so don't just read it once! Markets are  conversations. We know and feel that deep down. But are we as humans and are companies actually doing accordingly? There is so much in marketing, communications, advertising, selling, etc. that has nothing to do with a conversation... Maybe there's something more fundamental that we are not getting here. I'm about 90% through Sherry Turkle's book Reclaiming Conversation . And what a great book it is. I love books that really make you think. And this is one of those books. When your a 'digital' fan and junkie like me, you almost want to put it away. The book is a mirror and what

Changes to work and blogging

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If you follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn you've probably seen I changed jobs as of Jan. 1 of this year. After 6 great years at Entopic and Bildung I decided to join Teva Pharmaceuticals as senior director external digital channels. I've been at Teva now for about 10 weeks and must say I enjoy it. There's lots going on in the pharmaceutical industry and the intersection of digital and pharma is very interesting, I find. In short, there's lots and lots to do. So, why change? As mentioned I enjoyed working at Entopic and Bildung. Great working environment, great team, dito customers. But I also found I was looking for new challenges. In leadership development and in digital. If possible I wanted to get more experience with leadership in a large, international organization. And I was looking for new areas in digital to learn about. Teva contacted me and gave me this opportunity. After quite some talks and lots of thinking, I decided to go for it. And I'm happy to s