Any guest writers out there?

I would like to open up my blog for guest writers, as I’m sure that you will otherwise get sick and tired of hearing from me all the time ;-) So, would you like to contribute, just once, or on a regular basis, on a broad spectrum of communications subjects, please drop me a line at vanveenarns@gmail.com, or add a comment in the comment box.

This blog is a hobby, of course, so I cannot offer you any financial reward, just a growing number of readers, and a change to engage with other professionals. I am looking forward to your contributions!

Students don’t use social media

In the past two years there have been numerous discussions on social media forums about the use of social media by the younger generation. People come up with all different kinds of statistics, showing one day that teenagers, students, generation x,y, or z are not using Twitter (for example), and the next day that a different research outcome shows exactly the opposite. Very often these researches have no scientific backgrounds or methods whatsoever, and what makes it worse, is that people use these very shaky statistics to prove their point for whatever cause they want.

I wanted to share with you a few recent experiences I had with students from both Western and Eastern Europe. I had groups coming to my workplace, and I gave some guest lectures and presentations about the subject of social media. Before I started, I would always ask students if they use social media themselves. An average of only 5 to 10 % would raise their hand! Now, what an amazing outcome. One would expect a score close to 100%, right?

Interestingly enough, after this first question, I would always fire a few more questions at them: ‘Who has a Facebook account, who has uploaded a YouTube video, who uses Flickr, who shares music, who has worked with a wiki’? Well, eventually, all fingers were raised… They just told me that they were not aware of the fact that they were using social media.

Here is the thing: we, the older generation, need to make a distinction between the old media, and the new media, between 1.0 and 2.0. For these students, and most certainly for the generations even younger than them, the term social media is not relevant. They are just using the media that they know, and they are not aware of the underlying revolution. Nor do they care about the term social media.

So, I wonder what happens when I tweet the title of this blog post: students don’t use social media. It might trigger some interesting discussions. Hope people take the time to read this post, as clearly, my point is something else.

A website in 5 minutes

As you are reading this blog post, you have evidently found my blog. I am a Manager Internal Communications, and this is an external blog. Let me explain. I started blogging in our own organization around two years ago. Our department launched the Corporate Communications Blog, mainly to learn about blogging ourselves and to ‘lead by example’. There are now around 30 dedicated internal blogs at Océ, some of them very successful, many of them with a small, but dedicated group of followers, and some of them in a state of near-death.

So, our example worked, but our own blog ‘dried up’ a few months ago. Maybe we felt that we had done our job. Maybe running a department blog is hard. Who knows. Anyway, since I am not involved in that blog anymore, it freed up some time to finally launch an external blog. I am a member all kinds of social networks, and being a communicator, I apparently feel the urge to now and then go beyond the 140 characters and share my views with the world. Ah, vanity…, I am only human, you know.

So, I finally started a blog the other day, and once again I was struck by how easy it is. I set up a blog in 5 minutes, made choices about the design, added and deleted widgets, made custom settings, made rss-feeds available, and so on. Wow, I am a 48 old digital immigrant, who used a typewriter at University. Five years ago I would have needed the help of a designer, a programmer, a hosting service, and who knows who else, and I would have probably paid a large amount of money for this help.
Nowadays it just takes five minutes to make a blog. I used Blogger, the Google tool, but the same goes for Wordpress. They made it so easy for us. And, why call it a blog? With a few alterations I can make it look like a website. No wonder the world of communications is changing. This is what they mean with ‘the consumerization of IT’: everyone can do it. This trend is, of course, well documented and discussed everywhere, but for me it is still too early to take this all for granted. What a development in just a few years! I love it.

And our internal blogs? We made a template available, 30 site owners just took off, never to be seen by our department again. They are all doing a great job communicating internally to a well-targeted and dedicated group of readers.

Help, I will be out of a job soon. Anyone needs a web designer?