I attended this week a presentation hosted at Deloitte in Zurich. While Deloitte presented some high-level social communications and collaboration PPT slides from a former internal workshop only, the communication expert and project manager at SwissRe (a large global reinsurer company) had much more concrete to say about his project. SwissRe will launch end of September now to all their 10k employees after a successful trial with 1300 employees since April this year an internal collaboration software based on an off-the-shelf Web 2.0 community tool. What makes this news interesting is not the rollout of this tool which is IT-wise a piece of cake, but the fact that such a conservative company now suddenly opens up to full collaboration between all its employees allowing them to use any kind of web based tools such as forums, wikis, IM, blogs etc. being able to form groups and share knowledge across any departments globally.

They justified the investment with a range of organizational and cultural benefits that they expect but one thing worked out by chance very nicely, they could show that they can replace two very expensive (only used by small groups) existing collaboration tools that they inherited from some former acquisitions. The project was run by the communications department and was not an IT project which makes total sense since it is not about the tool or technology but about the business benefits in communications that are at the center here.

During the following apero I raised the idea that any progressive bank that would allow its analysts to work with such tools would have a significant advantage over the currently closed-minded and self-centric approach that all the banks have right now. People agreed with me. Will it happen? We will see, there is certainly a chance for a paradigm shift which is not only the case in the banking and insurance markets. And if there are some expensive not much used software tools in your organization as well, how about taking a look at replacing them with something that could actually work and provide big benefits to your organization? Now is the right time to do this.

This is Paul’s second book on this topic after his bestseller The New Influencers. Secrets of Social Media Marketing you can read very quickly in case you are already familiar with most social media marketing trends. In fact you probably won’t need to read the book then as it is mostly written for people who are new to this subject. Not surprisingly the social media networks he talks about are 99% based in the US also simply because that’s where most of the action happens on this topic. I read the book because I thought I could find some ideas on how to promote a soon to come out Extendance-sponsored  e-book on European high-tech marketing tips and tricks. And I found a few things that we will try out now and see if it helps the goal of making the e-book known to a special target group. Paul’s book is full of “secrets” which are displayed as side notes. See from the sample list below if you can learn anything and if so then the book is certainly worth your time or maybe you get it for your employees whom you think should catch up on this. I will buy it as a gift for some clients and prospects. Here now some samples of Paul’s “secrets”:

• “When marketing on MySpace, get a kid to help.”
• “The most popular social networks in overseas markets are almost unknown in the U.S.”
• “Social networks resist marketing messages and they are currently some of the least effective social media marketing platforms.”
• “A safe approach to blogging is to answer frequently asked questions.”
• “Blogs are your best bet for controlling the conversation.”
• “Use “site” and “link” to drill down on search.”
• “Podcasts work well in b-to-b communications.”
• “Photo-sharing sites are one of the great underused resources for finding influencers and groups.”
• “Use Twitter to broadcast limited-time specials like temporary discounts.”
• “Regularly scheduled online events keep community members coming back.”
• “A tiny percentage of your members will contribute most of the content.”
• “Engage, don’t sell.”
• “Google is the great equalizer. You are potentially as important as source as The New York Times.”
• “No one has figured out a formula for “going viral”. Don’t even try.”
• “Give video a homegrown feel to make it look more genuine.”
• “Syndicate everywhere.”

Today I used the blog trend tool IceRocket to compare the number of blog posts on “LTE” in the last three months of the leading wireless infrastructure vendors with each other. Not surprisingly Ericsson (39%) showed up on top, followed by Alcatel Lucent (24%) quite far behind, then Nokia Siemens Networks (16%) and the two Chinese manufacturers Huawei (12%) and ZTE (9%).

The tool gives a first hint of who might be leading the discussions in certain areas although to be able to understand more one would have to actually study the blog posts daily over a certain period of time. GoogleAlerts is the well known tool to do that and there are quite a few others as well. We will show some of these social media “listening tools” in a wiki soon. So check back here and you will learn about that too. What does WolframAlpha got to say about this I asked myself then too, and the answer was:

Prime factorization:

This is our response to Techcrunch’s upcoming event Plugg and request for comments (click on the PPT cover below and enjoy):

We’re giving away two free tickets to the conference, which will go to the commentators that can best give us a humorous take on why they think European entrepreneurs can compete with Silicon Valley’s finest … or why not. Don’t forget to add your e-mail address and to make us smile.

The WSJ has a few stories, videos, Q&As on the 10 year anniversary of blogging. Particularly interesting I find the video interviews they did with the people from BoingBoing, Techdirt, Publishing 2.0 and DoNews.com. Of course all these blogs are alternative online magazines, so a bit different to corporate blogging - i.e. blogging done by key people of companies for their industry peers. If you want to read about corporate blogging then you can check out our “How to story” on it - subscription is FREE from the Nice Ventures website.