infoarch

Some time ago I wrote about the usefulness of Foursquare . At that time I shared I use Foursquare for fun, but it’s not really useful to me. Just recently something popped up that does show Foursquare is useful to me. Part of my work is to visit customers and potential customers. Some of the customers aren’t ready to do business with us at the time I visit them and ask me to come back later. So, after some time, I visit them again. Of course the company I work for has a CRM tool, but it’s a pain to go to that system before you visit the customer to check when you were there the last time and what you discussed. I usually just look up my notes stored somewhere on my iPad. But it is useful to know when I was there the last time. When I arrive at a customer I check in to Foursquare . And what does it say? ‘Welcome back! Last time you were here was in <date>.’ The interesting thing is the conversation with the customer almost always starts with: ‘Good to have you back, wh...

Giving a guest lecture is great fun, I find. I recently had the chance to interact with about 60 college students. They were in their second or third year. The topic of the lecture was social media use within company. So, Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business. My slides can be found here (in Dutch...). I kicked off my lecture with some open questions. I'd like to share the answers to one question with you. I was curious what social tools they use themselves to get things done in their lives. With all the talk about millennials being digital natives (or aren't they ), easily moving in the social space, organizing their life and work with these tools, etc I thought I'd see if this if the case in practice . I shared what I got from the students on Google+ . In sum, this is what they told me. Of the 60 students: 40 use Twitter Almost all use Facebook Just over half use Hyves (Dutch social network) 1 uses a bookmarking tool 2 blog 0 have a wiki (although all have ex...

Location-based services are very interesting, I find. And I see a big future for them. The fact that you can connect content to a location is intriguing. It's even more fascinating to realize that it's not just content linked to a location, but also the person sharing the content is linked to it. I've been using Foursquare since the beginning, checking in regularly (now 1379 checkins). I changed my location sharing strategies several times: from sharing everything on Twitter to sharing nothing and everything in between. Looking at the numbers location-based services are growing , but they're still a niche. It's great to see businesses experimenting with these services. Starting now will give them an edge when things go mainstream. But has it been useful to me? Has it made me more productive? Have I met more interesting people? Did I get interesting discounts? In short: No, it didn't. Let me explain. It's great to get badges every now-and-then, to s...