s.mueller

Social Media Einsatz im deutschen Mittelstand

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Laut der aktuellen Ausgabe der „wirtschaft konkret“, herausgegeben von der IHK Regensburg, ist Social Media „ein relevanter Kommunikationskanal für mittelständische Unternehmen. Basierend auf einer Umfrage unter 2800 deutschen Unternehmen nutzt bereits jedes zweite Unternehmen diesen neuen Kanal um auf sich selbst als Arbeitgeber hinzuweisen und um Konsumenten anzusprechen und idealerweise gar den Dialog aufzunehmen.

Dass 80% der Unternehmen Facebook nutzen verwundert nicht, ist es doch der Kanal über den man über mittlerweile gelernte und etablierte Techniken eine sehr große potentielle Zielgruppe ansprechen kann.
An zweiter Stelle folgt dann Xing, das ein exzellentes Werkzeug sein kann, um sich mit Geschäftspartnern zu vernetzen und um neue Mitarbeiter zu rekrutieren.

An dritter und vierter Stelle folgen dann mit fast identischer Relevanz YouTube und Twitter. Der zentrale Grund, warum Twitter hier ebenbürtig mit YouTube auftritt, dürfte an der Einfachheit der Bedienung und der Begrenzung auf 140 Zeichen liegen. Und: Tweets können auch im stark wachsenden Mobile Segment superschnell abgerufen werden, was Experten zu der Einschätzung führt, dass gerade im mobilen Bereich Twitter mehr Einfluss haben könnte als Facebook (Link). Simplicity ist hier der klare Vorteil gegenüber YouTube. Warum? Auf YouTube lassen sich zwar wunderbar Videobotschaften oder PR-Filme integrieren – diese wollen aber auch erstmal produziert sein. Eine finanzielle Hürde vorallem für kleinere Unternehmen. Daneben ist YouTube auch eher ein statischer one way Kanal über den Inhalte für die Allgemeinheit bereitgestellt und aber auch geshared werden können. Der Rückkanal beschränkt sich meist auf Kommentare.
Mit einer der größten Vorteile, einen YouTube Kanal zu haben und auch zu pflegen liegt darin, dass sich diese Inhalte kinderleicht auf anderen Websites oder Social Media Plattformen in beliebigen Größen einbetten lassen, also nicht lokal auf dem jeweiligen Firmenserver liegen müssen.
Auch wenn Twitter deutlich leichter zu bedienen ist, stellt sich hier natürlich noch immer die Frage der Reichweite. Gerade aber in letzter Zeit scheinen immer mehr Menschen an der Einfachheit von Twitter gefallen zu finden. Während facebook mit immer neuen Funktion versucht zu verjüngen, reagieren immer mehr User mit Verärgerung darauf, dass gelernte Verhaltensweisen immer wieder an neue Funktionen angepasst werden müssen.

Aus dem oben genannten ergibt sich dann auch wofür Unternehmen Social Media vornehmlich nutzen: Kommunikation (nach außen) um neue Zielgruppen zu erreichen und die eigene Bekanntheit zu steigern. Social Commerce, also die Nutzung von Social Media als Verkaufskanal über den tatsächlich Sales abgewickelt werden können, erweist sich für die meisten Unternehmen noch als Hürde – keine Frage, hier wirds technisch und komplex und nicht jede Zielgruppe ist dafür offen.

Die Hinderungsgründe für den Einstieg in Social Media sind nach wie vor die selben: der korrekt eingeschätze oft hohe Zeitaufwand (insbesondere wenn man einen Dialog zu den Konsumenten sucht), das Verhältnis von Kosten und Nutzen sowie die große Unsicherheit bei der Auswertung der Investments, also die schon fast klassische Frage nach Social Media ROI.

Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass der deutsche Mittelstand dem Thema Social Media durchaus offen gegenübersteht, aber hier auch eine gesunde Skepsis mitbringt und sich dem Thema oft Schritt für Schritt annähert, um erste Erfahrungen zu sammeln und darauf aufzubauen. Je nach Situation sollte auch ein Berater im ersten Schritt zu kleinen Testprojekten raten anstatt gleich Budgets aus anderen Bereichen abzuziehen und in eine große Social Media Aktion zu stecken.

Hinweis: Dieser Artikel lehnt sich an die aktuelle Ausgabe der wirtschaft konkret, 66. Jahrgang, November 2011 herausgegeben von der IHK Regensburg für Oberpfalz/Kelheim an.

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s.mueller

Thanks, Steve

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Last Sunday I came across an article in the September edition of Fortune magazine which my girlfriend brought along from Chicago. In the very end after all the business talk Stanley Bling, Fortune columnist, was given his space to say thank you to the man who in many way changed the lives of so many of us.

In the context of Steve Job’s sudden death, this article becomes even more touching.

But read for yourself. Don’t rush through it, but take your time:

We’ve all been lucky to live in a world where there was a person with such an imagination.

I want to take this opportunuity, before time and our common mortality rob me of the chance to do so, to thank you, Steve Jobs, for all that you have done for me. No, I never had the privilege of meeting you, or had a chance to get yelled at by you in a business meeting, or even watch your charisma transform an audience into acolytes. But I feel as if I know you well enough to express, as you ascend to your new role as chairman, the sadness I feel and my gratitude for so many of the good things that you have brought to my life. It’s not business. It’s personal.

I want to thank you for my graphical interface. There were computers, of course, before you made that first Mac. They could run only one program at a time. They had no graphics. You knew that was lame. You imagined the alternative — multiple programs, launched by clicks, running concurrently in a windowed field. Last night I watched a movie, printed photos, harvested e-mail, and bought a bunch of business socks, all at the same time. So thanks for my GUI.

I want to thank you for my mouse. Can you imagine a world without mouses? I can’t. Before you bred them for commercial use, a person needed a host of keyboard commands to get anything done, and a lot of programming code to produce words and numbers on paper. I read somewhere that you got the vision after you visited Xerox’s PARC. They showed you what they were up to, but they sort of didn’t know what they had. You ran with it. Because that’s the way you did everything. All in. Feet first.

I want to thank you for all Macs, great and small. I went to your Apple Store (AAPL) the other day and saw a tidy row of new machines, from the slender new Airs to the massive towers of power. I wanted every one. They’re pretty and shiny, unlike my big old black rubberized clunker the corporation gave me, and the last time I got a virus was just before I put my Windows PC into the closet. That was when I sent the phrase „I love you“ to 22,000 fellow employees and the CEO. „I love you too, Bing, but let’s not let anybody know,“ he e-mailed back.

I want to thank you for my Airport Extreme, the small white box through which I get my Internet. Before it, I used to have to plug in and configure this horrible router. It never worked. I often ended up screaming and crying and throwing hardware at the wall. This thing? You just plug it in and use it. Sometimes as I fall asleep I watch the little fellow, with its round eye glowing green in the darkness, a beacon of easy functionality.

Thanks for my iPod, which pretty much defined how I listen to music now. And for iTunes, which you made too easy not to understand. And for my iPad too, which despite all protestations is really nothing more than an Angry Birds machine. No, you can’t work on it. So what? Work isn’t everything.

And thanks for my new iPhone, which channels a million apps and does everything well except the phone part. A pompous Silicon Valley dude I know used to say, with a weary grin, „Every year is the year for mobile.“ Until you decided it was, Steve. And so I never have to generate a single unaided thought for the rest of my life. What a relief!

And oh, yeah. Thanks for Toy Story too. And Up. Really loved Up.

It’s been your world, Steve. And we’ve been lucky enough to run along behind you, picking up goodies as you dropped them in our path. It’s a little scary to think that one day you’ll go off to your famous mountaintop and not return with the next big thing. But at least we can all say we lived in a time when there was a person with such an imagination, and offer thanks in whatever digital or analog format we choose, wherever on earth we may be. We can do that now.

This article is from the September 26, 2011 issue of Fortune. You can access it online here

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s.mueller

Google+ Invite

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Für alle, die noch nicht dabei sind und befürchten etwas zu verpassen, hier der Invite bzw. die Einladung zu Google+:

https://plus.google.com/_/notifications/ngemlink?path=%2F%3Fgpinv%3D3Z732vKRgEY%3Am7My1SYIwFk

Ob Google+ eine Chance hat gegen den mehr als 750 Mio. User starken beinahe Monopolisten Facebook? Wir werden es sehen…

SOM

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s.mueller

S-Bahn München: Live Fahrplan

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Münchens S-Bahn lässt sich nun in Echtzeit live verfolgen. Zu jeder Linie sieht man auf einer Karte Münchens stets die aktuelle Position der jeweiligen S-Bahn. Und sie bewegen sich sogar…

Aktualisierter Link zum Live Fahrplan (02/2018):
http://s-bahn-muenchen.hafas.de/bin/540/help.exe/dn?tpl=livefahrplan

 

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s.mueller

The Interactive Brand Ecosystem (Forrester)

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The Interactive Brand Ecosystem: Putting Digital At The Heart Of Your Brand Campaigns – Forrester

View more presentations from iCrossing
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s.mueller

Facebook Ads Optimization

Facebook Ads Optimization Guide

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s.mueller

SOM on IMD: Managing Digital Native Employees

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Dr. Karsten Jonsen, a research fellow at the IMD at Lausanne recently published an interesting article on the new generation of employees that increasingly enter the workforce – the digital natives:

Managing Digital Natives – Creating a work environment for tomorrow’s workforce<

Having grown up in a digital world, everything older generations had a hard time to learn is common sense to this generation. This will have major implications on how they work – which can cause a lot of conflicts but also brings up great opportunities.

The article nicely explains what makes these digital natives special and how employers should manage them in order to get the best result for both sides.

Here are some elements and my comments to them:

Digital Natives are:

Playful, like to set their own rules, enjoy freedom and try to avoid unpleasant tasks: agreed, but I disagree with the fact that they value fun more than fulfilling their duties. Today’s young professionals are very ambitious and critical towards themselves. They have grown up not only with all the amenities of our times but also in a more competitive world.

Entitled, feeling that they are the project, constantly improving their own brand, focusing on their own wellbeing: agreed, although the team spirit is in my eyes still being appreciated by the digital natives. But if this is something that is not being nurtured by the management, then yes, they are focusing on their own brand only.

Instantaneous, praising fast and random access to information, desiring instant gratification and constant interaction, ability to quickly handle large chunks of different information, great talent to assimilate to changing frameworks: agreed, but this is an explosive one. Today’s young talents are very demanding but if their demands are not fulfilled they can easily react and assimilate to new situations, such as for example a new job position in a different company. Today’s networks further support this.

Digitally dependant, „being offline“ experienced as a serious constraint: agreed, being online is not an option, it is part of our daily life. Thus as explained in the article, shutting them off from their digital networks will not result in more productivity. Instead a reasonable use should mutually be agreed on.

Participatory, generating information and sharing it openly with other members of the team is essential, they want to be heard and demand power early on: agreed, digital natives are used to communicate and discuss, so a very hierarchical business structure where they have wait until they may speak can be hard at first. The strong propensity to participation of course boosts teamwork and collaboration which, as also pointed out in the article, can also reach out to external resources that earlier on where completely out of reach for the company. Personal networks are „tapped“ to benefit the business goal. The better the network an employee brings along the better for the company. This however is something that often is hard to compensate as the positive results are hard to measure and are often not recognized by companies.

Karsten Jonsen and his team give four tips on how to deal with digital natives and I fully agree with them. They all show that companies have to rethink their structures and their internal rules in order to attract the greatest talents and more important (as recruitment is getting harder and harder and more expensive) retain them!

1. Give them freedom
2. Create sense of ownership
3. Coach them (and let them coach you)
4. Reward them everyday

What these points mean in detail can be read in the article which can be found via the link to IMD.

Many of the most successful companies of today such as Google or Apple make use of this new approach. Even German engineering company Trumpf has recently introduced a new work hour model which grants their employees the complete freedom on at what stages in their life they want to work how much. Every two years they can decide their weekly hours anew. CEO Nicola Leibinger-Karmueller explains this move with the fact that in the course of time, employees have differing expectations towards their job. In young years they are very ambitious, want to come ahead and get things done, in later years family building or care for the parents may be more in the focus. Many experts believe that this step will not only improve motivation and thus productivity but also have positive effects on the health of the employees.

This shows: Money is not all. A competitive salary still counts, but there are more and more factors that become relevant for employees when choosing their employer.

This article contains direct citations from the above mentioned IMD article by Dr. Karsten Jonsen and his team. The article can be downloaded via the link provided.

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