
Influence tools: the devil is in the details
For those of you who haven’t heard of Klout, let me give you a brief history: they started back in 2009 with a lot of marketing, a so-so product and non-existent service. They had two ways of handling criticism: either shower the critic in increased Klout score, or ignore him (or her). With criticism multiplying […]

54% of blog posts contain pure facts
A post by Dion Hinchcliffe on “social business maturity” made me laugh and cry at the same time. It’s one of those misleading semi-analytical semi-research posts that will be joyfully accepted by most people as solid truth. However, it ain’t. If it’s anything solid, it’s solid suggestimation. Why? The post smacks the reader in the face […]

On the insignificance of (Re)tweets to a post
In a discussion about blindly ReTweeting yesterday, I remembered that I once did a short analysis on auto-tweets. An auto-tweet is a schedule you set up against an RSS-feed or any other trigger, which tweets the URL with a title, some of the post itself, a fixed word or hashtag, etc. Some “thought-leaders” use it […]

Why TwentyFeet is Total Twash
Yet another Twitter analytic tool has made it into the spotlights: Twentyfeet
Like most if not all other tools that try to measure Twitter stats (Klout, Tweetlevel), it horribly fails. Apparently it’s too much work or money to actually measure all…

Read before you share – otherwise it’s gossip
A rubbish post by Business Insider titled “This Survey Is Devastating For Microsoft: 42% Of Windows Users Plan To Switch To Apple” and a very dubious post by the New York Times titled “The Tablet Market Grows Cluttered” drew my attention today – the latter claimed that About 98 percent of Web traffic from tablets comes […]

Big Brother? Sits right on your mobile
[The image above has nothing to do with this post, but it seemed to be fitting, given the latest developments. This post is all about trust] In this age of free(mium), it’s common knowledge that you pay with your privacy. Facebook is the best (or should I say worst) example of the dance around your […]

Innovation and inclusion – a matter of space and time
I am not sure anymore on relationship between innovation and inclusion . Need to think through it during the long flight to India tomorrow — Vijay Vijayasankar (@vijayasankarv) October 26, 2012 Vijay Vijasankar and Ethan Jewett dragged me into a conversation on innovation and inclusion. Well of course they didn’t, I butted in as usual […]

I’m sorry, you’re just not incompetent enough to get it
Olivier Blanchard made me do it. @martijnlinssen 😀 As far as I can tell, incompetence isn’t a driver of failure. It’s a driver of advancement. — Olivier Blanchard (@thebrandbuilder) October 16, 2012 And it is. Definition of advancement? Coming up soon. But this is the driver for most, if not all, of your life: […]

What drives IT failure? Ignorance and Greed
It was an interesting question Charles Storm posed the other day: was I saying that solutions are primarily driven by ignorance and greed? I wasn’t, but he made me think: Every solution is driven by need, or want, and some lack of knowledge. Every failure is caused by ignorance and greed Let’s see whether I […]

GoDaddy… Go… Gone
Today the Godaddy servers have been hit by a simple DDOS – a distributed denial of service involving a few dozen clients or servers that fire off hundreds or even thousands of requests a second at their servers. It’s a simple attack, and very effective. It’s like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop, standing in the […]

Twitter is NOT where the party is at
You couldn’t possible have missed the messy story around NBC and Twitter, resulting in suspension of Guy Adams’ Twitter account. Guy’s latest reaction on that is here, and contains the concise version. I do have to say that “which is widely listed online” is an exaggeration for sure, as it’s only to be found on […]

Google you are so sad, you drive me mad
Google has tried a new trick to lure in people to their destined-to-die Social Network, aka Google+ Why the harsh words? Because I’m appalled by the method they choose. If you’re not getting enough attention for your product or service, you should try to make it more attractive (financially, operationally, which ever way) – not […]

Need a mindset for adaptation? Team up
My latest post told my story of a week of hiking. In essence, it was a classical story of engaging a new venture, preparing for it as best as you can, being confronted with (utter) failure and adapt to the changed circumstances by listening to yourself, your peers, experts in the field – and then […]

Will adopting social tools leverage adaptation?
After a week of hiking in Ireland (hence the picture), it’s hard to pick up blogging again. Thankfully, Michael Brito got me going and an interesting conversation, with an old theme, unfolded: RT @martijnlinssen: @Britopian I think the need to adapt rather than adopt is what stalls #socbiz. Takes a few times longer than usual […]