Tuesday, June 29, 2010

New Ideas


Our new YNNO website offers the opportunity for a fresh start, so we will be blogging at ideas.ynno.com from now on. See you there!

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Farmville as the way forward


The gaming industry is in the midst of a fairly heated debate about Facebook games such as Farmville. If you're interested, there's a good summary of the debate in this Terra Nova post. One of the most insightful contributions to the discussion comes from Raph Koster. In an extensive post about virtual worlds, social games and where Farmville fits in the spectrum, he makes a couple of observations that I think are very insightful in a broader perspective.

The first is that we are moving away from pseudonyms on the internet. Social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn require real identities and Twitter is moving in that direction as well. Not only are we moving away from pseudonyms towards real identities, as a consequence we are also moving towards singular identities. I am personally starting to see more and more of an overlap between my LinkedIn connections and my Facebook friends, although I still show two distinct aspects of my identity on the two networks. I use Twitter solely as a professional microblog, but who knows, perhaps I'm being old-fashioned. I see others around me struggling with the same issues or sometimes just accepting that everything is converging and it's no use anymore to separate private and professional online identities.

The second trend that Raph points to is the move from real-time interaction to asynchronicity. Much of the interaction that takes place on Facebook, Twitter and through text messages is asynchronous (not to mention very brief). Asynchonicity is the norm, real-time interaction an occasional bonus. We have moved away from the ideal of real-time interactions with high media richness and 3D environments, which seemed to be what the industry was chasing the past two decades.

I welcome these developments. This embrace of the limitations of these types of technologies makes them more powerful and gives them a better place in relation to talking on the phone or meeting in person. Because of course, trying to imitate face-to-face interactions by means of technology has always been, and always will be, a dead-end road.

Monday, January 4, 2010

Business Processes Supported with Twitter

Earlier we posted some stuff about twitter. Today twitter has really hit mainstream in The Netherlands. So I guess it is time to look into how companies are using twitter to deliver value!

News
In terms of the groundwell strategies this a little bit of one way talking. Two examples are DWDD a popular TV news show and NRC a newspaper. DWDD only posts the people how are on the show in tweets so their followers know how is on the show that day. NRC tweets about new posts in their website containing a link to the site. For news the main goals is getting more visitors to the site and alerting people for new content.

Customer services
UPC is a Dutch example with close to 1500 followers, maybee inspired by Jetblue. The twitter stream is a way for customers to get in touch with customer support about problems with their cable TV. UPC is not as big as Jetblue, Jetblue has 1,5 million followers! Rijkswaterstaat is the dutch traffic agency that uses twitter to talk with the general public and explain projects and roadblocks. The twitter customer service is about another channel in the services mix.

Politics
D66 is using twitter for news events and discussion about policies.More political parties have discovered twitter, like PvdA and VVD. More or less politics use twitter as a mix between news and customer services.

Jobofferings
Randstad is posting joboffers on twitter through multiple accounts, you can find a buch of them using search. They segment in country and types of jobs. Some accounts are more popular than others. Other agencies offering this service are YER en Adformatie.

Discounts
Some companies give discounts to followers of specific people. Blogger Nalden is very popular in The Netherlands and companies give discounts to his followers!

Are there more business processes supported by twitter? There must be, so let us know!