As you might know I have a column in the Dutch radio program “Echte Jannen”. With the start of a new year, I had to do some trend-watching of course, especially after covering the topics of last week in the New Year special (Dutch) the previous day. So here are a couple of things that I think will be important for the coming year, in the Dutch speaking part of the internet and beyond.

1 More apps, less browser

Of course a development like this is relative to other things, we won’t see less browser based content in absolute figures, but the relative number of apps and their influence will grow. Due to the rise of mobile the rise of apps will go on in the next year, not even counting games and the quite recent growth of the number of newspaper applications. Apps are an ideal way to be able to charge for content as well as to avoid browser compatibility issues.

2 Professionalization of advertising

Especially Android users will be familiar with advertisements for mobile, but developments will go further than that. Due to professionalization social media will become a normal part of the marketing mix, you can expect a big rise in new marketeers, who we will suddenly call ‘online marketeers’ as well. That’s not a bad thing per se, as long as you keep risks like too narrow a focus on specific online knowledge in mind.

Besides this, the professionalization will have an impact in the opposite direction for bigger companies. These will put even more budget aside for more daring online marketing actions. Guerilla or viral is not dead for online niches, but it’s the big multinationals that will fuel a continued growth here. This means there are chances for larger new media advertisement companies if you aim at small and medium businesses or, if you want to aim at the multinationals, for niche, daring, advertisement agencies.

3 Twittercode

Your complaints may not be any different from those you express at the water-cooler, we will see more Twittercodes at companies. A Twittercode in this sense is a social media code of conduct for employees, to restrict them in what they can say about, for example, their employer online. In the US we can see that restrictive codes are put to the test, and we might see companies abandoning (some) for common sense. In the Netherlands though, or Europe as a whole, we will see the first examples of Twittercodes for employees soon enough.

4 Data visualization

The data that is available online continues to grow, that’s no secret. Data will be more complex as well, especially if the linking of data becomes the semantic web. this could mean a golden age for journalists, visual artists or any other job position you can come up with in this area: if you know how it ‘works’ online, there are huge opportunities. We need people that can process the huge complex amount of data for us. Newspapers are struggling to keep their subscriptions up, but they might be fighting the wrong game if what they want to do is interpret information.

5 Social Games

There will be real social mobile gaming, think World of Warcraft meets Farmville, on your mobile. The only remaining challenge is making this in usable concept, and we will soon see solutions that try to solve this question.

6 Prosecution of a blogger

See also ‘Twittercode’ above. This might not be a real trend, but we will see the prosecution of yet another blogger, commenter or tweep due to something he or she has said online.

At a Dutch blog I write for, de Jaap, we were asked if we could give a guest lecture on ‘Online journalism’ at the ‘School of Journalism’ in the town of Zwolle here in the Netherlands. Together with Bert Brussen, Huub Bellemakers and Bart Nijman I travelled to Zwolle and we arranged a nice set (three) of guest lectures. I thought it would be nice to quickly translate the slides I made for my lecture and share them with you.

Of course some parts of this presentation may be unclear or may even appear as ‘untrue’, I hope in both these cases it is because you can’t hear which things I’m talking about while showing these slides. (Of course I would be happy to answer any questions, or indeed to give a similar lecture on request.) In any case, the main point is that with new and ongoing developments journalism as a field, like any field, has to ask itself ‘what is it that we’re doing?’ and ‘what is it that I’m offering’. This way you can get to where the roots of your field lie and how you can use the new opportunities one has to accomplish the main goals.

Quite often I find that online sources are dismissed, with the mean reason being that they’re online sources. I think that, as with any source, the question should be of reliability, not of origin instead. This does require some new skills for journalists, but fortunately it also offers them with far more information than ever before. My slides can be found on slideshare here, and this particular set is included below:

I’m excited to tell you that already twice this month I’ve been on Dutch Radio 1 with a column about news, tips and tricks on the internet. New Dutch broadcasting organization PowNed has invited me to make a column for the weekly late-night radio-show ‘Echte Jannen‘.

For those of you who understand Dutch:you can tune in every Sunday night between 24:00 and 02:00 hours or listen to the past show here at radio 1. (Pick 0:00h on Mondays at the ‘terugluisteren op tijd’ option.) PowNed is a broadcasting organization that wants to make programs aimed at the ‘network generation’, a generation that by the way does not let itself describe by a single age-group or other demographic. It’s television and radio programs as well as it’s website hope to fulfill the need for quick, fast and raw information. I’m very happy that they’ve offered me the chance to get on the radio and tell my story about what I believe has been important online in the past week or so.

More information, again in Dutch, can be found at Wikipedia about PowNed in general and the show ‘Echte Jannen‘ in particular. (I figure you understand that my column is named ‘Ctrl Alt Delete’.) Or follow the twitter account here.

Plain and simple:

#1:  It’s something online

#2: It’s new

I tweeted these two often seen misconceptions about social media and Dave Witmond replied: ‘3d largest misconception about social media: it’s social‘ . Even though I think this is a misconception indeed, I think it’s included in my two earlier statements. Stating this is pointing to the fact that people seem to believe that this new way is something that indeed new, while it isn’t. Media has always been social! As Dave responds, it’s not the ‘social’ part that’s new: it’s the way of presenting it, the interface if you like.

If you’d like to point to the fact that what people seem to call social media is much faster, more interactive than everything before, you may have a point.  New technology allows for much faster, almost instant feedback, sharing and interaction, but it is not something new! The scope and the way we do it, that is what is new!

It does seem a bit odd; meeting each other in real life after an initial online contact. It does happen quite often anyway, already since the first chat groups there seems to be a need to meet ‘the other’ in real life. This is how the first ‘internet meetings’ started. While internetting was for the ‘geeks’ at school, some 10-15 years ago you were even more frowned upon if you were meeting those internet people offline as well. Even today online communication is sometimes met with disbelief, but as more and more people have been using the internet it has started to become normal to have online friends. Using this momentum, the internet meeting is starting to break through , maybe as early as this year. This development is not only fun and entertaining; it is also a good way to make contact with consumers, customers and business partners.

Even though internet meetings, even large gatherings, have been there since way before Twitter, it seems to be Twitter that is driving the ‘meeting’ to a new level. Just this year it seems to get to a point where it’s really popular. In Holland there was a Twitterdisco, and a crowd-sourced Twitterparty already. And of course there was the ‘Twittershizzle’ party that I helped organizing as well. Of course to me personally it is this last one that is closest to me, but it’s also the event that got me loads of reactions like ‘we should do this more often’ and ‘will there be spinoff Twittershizzle parties’?

Drink turning into event

Drinks, ‘open coffee’ and other events organized via twitter, facebook and ning are, in my opinion, just the start of things to come. There is a demand and more Twittershizzles or whatever you’d like to come up with will be there soon. But there will also a larger demand for more specialized gatherings, dedicated to making new useful contacts. These won’t be like one of those ‘networking drinks’, just some sort of generic presentation about something or a large sponsored event. These will be different; a mashup of all these, informative but ‘fun’. Currently there is a development in the direction that I named earlier; the offline consolidation of knowledge and contacts by a central ‘actor’ that knows how to find the right people from the online social networks: commercial dating. (On which I wrote an article that for now is only available in Dutch on Bijgespijkerd.nl here)
Yes, of course these are offline events, but it’s setup will make it have similarities with the online social networks. Selected on a specific target group (maybe just ‘self-selection’), but open, honest and with a focus on sharing information and knowledge.

The role of the mediator will play an important role in this second form; the organizing of specific network events, whether you call it commercial dating, or not. I assume a lot of readers will be able to give me several examples of this already. There have been countless examples all over the world of interesting events, in Holland there are “tweetups” and things like “Mobile Monday”. However, I think we will see in the rest of this year that organizations will plan these type of events more on their own to attract a specific audience of consumers, reviewers or promoters and get these all together in a fun but (commercially) useful way.

Maturity

Press conferences, première nights and other presentations which we’ve been familiar with for quite some time, will be changed or altered to a real ‘twitterparty’ or similar event, for like minded people or converted to an event where knowledge sharing will be the key. Essential in this, perhaps not so apparent, renewal of events is the connection to ‘online’ communication-wise during and after an event and the collection of knowledge online to make sure you get the right people there to begin with. These little changes in meeting could mean the ‘meetup’ will start to reach maturity in 2010.

This article is based on a longer article (in Dutch) that I’ve written for marketing blog Bijgepijkerd.

It is often said that the key to ‘how social media works’, or at least how you can gain inlfuence as an actor in social media is staying honest and true to what you believe as a person. (ie: don’t try to operate as a typical company) Although one can certainly make arguments against that, I do support the notion that an open and honest approach is appreciated by many. This is true in real life, but even more so online, where hiding ones true intentions can be a lot easier.

Thus, when it became apparent that the Dutch ‘twitterer of the year’ election was set up by a advertisement agency people began to criticise they way this was set up. Of course it didn’t take long before freelance journalist Bert Brussen announced on twitter that he would take care of organising something more fun. What followed is an example of a typical social media effort.

This is how Twittershizzle got born; an effort to do something fun for twitterers (or ‘tweeps’) that was more than just meeting up for some drinks. You could call it crowdsourcing, but maybe that doesn’t do justice to how these kind of things usually work. With Bert’s following on twitter he quickly gained attention and a buzz of enthusiasm was spreading through the Dutch twittersphere. With friends and colleagues from the Dutch weblog deJaap Bas Paternotte and Levi Boitelle agreeing to help the event was taking shape.

As part of the deJaap editorial board I was happy to do my share in making this event a success. It wasn’t a complete smooth ride, but we all know our fair share of how things work online, so in the end we got it together. Staying true to what we thought would be fun to do, not thinking too much about marketing practices we managed to get it done; #Twittershizzle the Twitter event was born and would take place on the 9th of February.

Word about this event spread quickly, and set up as a free event with artists and musicians participating for next to nothing it became quite something. There was a stream from ‘Ted’, there were paintcartoons, there were writers, there was beer and there was more beer and sigarettes.

(CC Photo by Anne Helmond)

I’ve been setting up meetings for more than 10 years now, from get-togethers in the local pub to lectures, but this was something unique indeed. A nice 300 active twitterers from all kinds of sub groups in the Dutch sphere showed up, along with newscrews from papers, radio and television, trying to see what this could possible be.

Let me be clear, there is nothing wrong with organizing something and making a profit out of it. But especially online people want to participate, not just be bothered with offers or things that they should really buy in to. Or as Bert Brussen puts it:

beware of stains on your purple pants

Personally this all is what I love the most about the internet. You get together with long-time online friends, strangers and everyone in between, while others are still trying to grasp what this is really about. Yes, “the internet really is my thing” and I love every second of it. What’s next? I can say a new Twittershizzle, and plans for international versions of this type of event are uttered, so we’ll see where we stand, tomorrow, next month, next year. And never forget that it’s you, it’s me, it’s us all together making fabulous things happen again and again, sometimes failing miserably, but always creating something beautiful. I hope this will come across on television as bright as I feel it now.

Of course most of the postings about Twittershizzle are in Dutch, but you can search by Hashtag if you’d like and pictures can be found here or here. A nice linkdump with even more and some (Dutch spoken) videos is here on Mark Hulstein’s blog.

The question “do you deserve your following” might sound a bit odd. After all, if it is a followerbase like on twitter that you have, people have the option to unfollow you once they feel mistreated. Nevertheless it is a good thing to stop and think about how you treat the people that follow you online. Yes, of course there might be real life friends and other contacts represented in your following, but quite often posts on how to deal with your following tend to lean towards “what do you get from it”  side.

Thus I thought it was nice to come across this blogpost, asking how you really treat your followers. It’s a sad thing really, that posts like these have to be made, but I do think they are necessary, even though the answer to what a “good way” to treat them is migth be easy.

The answer I think really is quite simple. Even though I’m not religious I’d like to quote from the Bible for some guidance to basic etiquette:

Do to others as you would have them do to you
Luke 6:31

Yes, this old piece of wisdom still holds value, especially on the web. As Garret points out in his post; you’re not dealing with contacts (or just followers, for that matter) you are dealing with real people. As said;  I think it is a bit sad we have to think about how we should treat other people, but fortunately there are blogposts like these to remind us just a little.

Not just sometimes, but quite often, new media really is that simple. Hold on for just a moment and think about older, every examples of how to deal with people, products or anything else and you will see that even new things might rely on old principles.

Have you ever taken a survey recently, or maybe several surveys? If so you might have wondered about several things. And maybe those things are exactly those things that bother me about surveys. One could have, of course, something against surveys altogether, but they remain a powerful research tool, that is one thing that’s for sure. Even though I’m personally calling for a broader way of doing research, I don’t think we should abandon it.

I do think we should look more into some of the things that come to mind when you look at a survey. These things are often related to a certain tradition that lies in doing survey based research and indeed in a sort of tradition that is created per tracker survey as well. Not changing things for tradition’s sake, is one of the worst things a researcher could do and still this seems to happen all too often. Survey methodology in general is one thing, but a lot of me wondering about survey research is the lack of changes, of innovation.

Tradition

If any objections about wording, questions, long surveys and tradition sound familiar to you, you may have read Jan Hofmeyr’s (Synovate) Research Magazine interview where he comes up with similar notions. He describes in an honest and clear way how tradition seems to hold the Research Industry hostage some times. An excellent example is about brand tracking; surveys in these studies seem to be way too long, which makes response and dropout rates suffer and will of course cost the researcher way too much money. Still companies seem reluctant to step forward and possibly lose half of their income and clients seem to be reluctant because the ever present danger of losing the budget for your department if you seem to be able to spend less this year! Quite a classic way of holding on to traditions for little more than some sort of business continuity reasons.

To these observations I would add that an other reason is often because one likes to compare studies. This, of course, mainly concerns tracker-like studies. Questions can sometimes be added, but clients could be very reluctant to remove any, or even improve the wording because of reasons like “this has been running like this already” or “we want to compare this with 2001”. In these cases, the question of course is whether comparing “bad” data (defective, in the sense that Jan is using it.) with new bad data makes sense at all!

Can we add to survey research?

On other point is the research itself; I mean: come on, survey research? Can’t we come up with some nice additions to that? Well, of course we can, and I believe that we can even strengthen survey based research with additions like these. Still, very little seems under way to do this, even with the “2.0” hype going on like crazy. Now of course I do see the point in no jumping on any bandwagon, but the way clients and others seem to hold to just surveys some times seem to be a bit odd, to say the least. When one looks at comments made by Hofmeyr like

“it’s very hard to get people to change. We’re supposed to be researchers; we’re supposed to care about truth and new knowledge”

and

“Our industry is one of the most conservative you will come across. Look at IT – look how keen they are to throw out the old and adopt the new.”

it’s maybe not that hard to see why a “knowledge” industry seems very reluctant to use any improvements, let alone new ways of doing things.

Being this knowledge based industry I think the ideas, the knowledge, is there, what we have to do now is to use it! This will not happen tomorrow, but if we can come up with a good way of doing “new research” tomorrow, present it next week, clients may follow and demand these things next month, if you catch my drift. I think this is a train we cannot afford to miss or else we might never arrive in the future while others who did “get it” are catching up and do get there in the end. So, of course, proceed with caution, but be sure to catch that mediatrain that will departure very soon or has perhaps left the station already.