When you’re trying to find funds in order to start up your company (or your SNS) you’ll have to go through a sales pitch in order to convince business angels that your idea is worth a million dollars. So, when going up to investors, you better be prepared and get it right, your business depends on it!

A good business plan is a necessary starting point, but convincing investors personally is even more important. The web will help you find different do’s and don’ts for sales pitches. m62.net provides you with some of the most commonly made mistakes in sales pitches, and offers you a solution to avoid these mistakes. If you want some pictures to accompany 10 ‘sales pitch killers’, go to Forbes.com, and let them spell it out for you.

Adding up all of the pointers, it seems to be most important to be confident, spontaneous, but most of all: to be prepared!
When you haven’t figured out every detail of your business plan and you can’t convey it in a concise, yet persuasive way, you shouldn’t even think about walking into that room.

Posted by Kim Merckaert

Facebook announced a conference on which it will present the new features that will become available in the upcoming year. TechCrunch is talking about an ‘auto connect’ option, a Facebook toolbar, and one I find really exciting: a ‘like button’ for the entire internet. This way, everywhere you surf, you’ll be able to like things you come across. In my opinion this only shows how ‘hot’ it is to speak your mind about simply everything. People want people to know what they are thinking and when they’re thinking it.

TechCrunch cleverly adds that these innovations are part of Facebooks’ ‘quest to take over the web’. Soon every website in the world will be leading you back to facebook, and on every website, you’ll be able to start chatting with your available Facebook friends.

I’m convinced that these features will become a great success. I’m also sure that this will make Facebook an even bigger (and richer) player in the SNS world. It will only make things harder for other social network sites that are trying to gain awareness and get more users. Unless maybe they get ‘like’-ed a lot…

Posted by Kim Merckaert

Last Sunday was a historical day for the USA. A narrow majority finally approved Obama’s healthcare reform. Next to this milestone in American history, I believe this day to be remarkable in another respect as the White House was constantly Twittering as the vote neared.
Of course the White House had some good reasons for sending out all these tweets. Next to Facebook and YouTube, Twitter turns out to be a perfect media to talk directly to the American people. Using Twitter, the White House can send out controlled messages and this 24 hours a day! Since every message is read by thousands of people, it can be considered as the ideal way to mobilize support for the president’s political agenda. The tweets are in fact a logical extension of the earlier campaign strategy of Barak Obama, where the Internet and viral videos were used to spread messages as quickly and thoroughly as possible.

In our own country there recently has been some commotion about the tweets of Open VLD minister, Vincent Van Quickenborne, live and direct from the council of ministers. Although the negative reactions on these tweets from other politicians are understandable, we must admit that Van Quickenborne is in fact just using modern communication. He’s perfectly aware of the advantages of internet media, as they bring the politicians closer to the public.

I think the twittering of the White House during the healthcare vote and the tweets of Vincent Van Quickenborne illustrate a milestone regarding communication. Open and direct communication are becoming a standard and not only politicians but also companies will have to follow this trend. We are entering a world in which social media are taking over whether we like it or not.

Sources:
http://www.hln.be/hln/nl/957/Belgie/article/detail/1066036/2010/02/11/Van-Quickenborne-zet-foto-s-ministerraad-op-Twitter.dhtml

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361673,00.asp?kc=PCRSS03069TX1K0001121&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ziffdavis%2Fpcmag%2Fbreakingnews+%28PCMag.com+Breaking+News%29

By Jasmijn Nomes

Recently the online communication services company, Teneros, has launched a new service, called ‘Social Sentry’. This application makes it much easier for companies to keep a close eye on the social networking activities of their employees. For the moment Social Sentry only provides automatic monitoring of Facebook and Twitter accounts, but the company plans to add YouTube, MySpace and LinkedIn by this summer. Social Sentry allows employers to measure how much time employees are spending on social media during work hours. The product will also help them to uncover confidential or embarrassing information.
Employers looking at what their employees are posting on social media are of course no new phenomenon. But with Social Sentry this process becomes automated which makes it more likely that monitoring employees will become commonplace.

Programs like these lead to ethical questions concerning respect for privacy. Do employers really have to know all this information about the private life of their workers? Many people consider Facebook as an intimate and informal way to communicate. Lot’s of them probably aren’t even aware of the possible negative consequences of their online activities.
If employers really want to implement this kind of programs, people should at least be notified about the do’s and don’ts of social media.

By Jasmijn Nomes

In the light of crisis SNSs sometimes have to deal with, I would like to refer to the CNN article of 18th March about hacking kids. Apparently more than a quarter of British children have tried hacking. Most of the time the children broke into their friends’ personal accounts on SNSs like Facebook or their e-mail accounts. Despite the fact that the majority of the kids was convinced that hacking is wrong, or even illegal, half of them did it just for fun. Stuart Hyde, president of the Society for the Policing of Cyberspace, points out that the results of the survey have to be taken seriously, since they show that “hacking into personal online accounts can be child’s play if users do not protect their passwords.” Danger sometimes comes from an unexpected angle…

Posted by: Elisabeth Minnaert

Source:http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/03/18/england.kids.hacking/index.html?iref=allsearch

I once heard something about web 3.0 (For a clear explanation of the concept: Watch the video or check http://www.labnol.org/internet/web-3-concepts-explained/8908/), but I didn’t think about it anymore until yesterday, when I read an article in Metro about the fact that our real life becomes more and more virtual.
It is hard to believe what will be possible in the near future! Our Dare2Share team is creating a web 2.0 social network site, but in the meantime the technological world is taking giant leaps forward and is developing a new concept that really outstrips the familiar web 2.0 culture. The future of internet is mobile: everyone will be on the web, everywhere and always. Web 3.0 goes way beyond checking your email wireless in a café, it is about having access to a network that is constantly online, via cell phone or other applications (IPhone, e-reader, IPad etc.). Metro gives an example: Imagine you are travelling in Sweden and you feel like having pizza. Your mobile phone will tell you how to find the Italian restaurant that is nearest by and will lead you there.
The physical world will be mixed with the virtual world, as it were. This is a marvellous evolution, but also a creepy one. When you can reach everything at all times, you can be reached as well: Big Brother is watching you…!
Source: Metro City Clickers Deluxe 2010.03.26

Posted by: Elisabeth Minnaert

Nowadays almost everybody has a Facebook profile. Writing on someone’s wall, having more than 500 friends, posting what you’ve been up to all day and showing pictures of every party you’ve ever been to. It all seems normal and has become part of the way we live our lives.

Since social network sites are the place to be these days, it sometimes even seems real life is out there as well. But have you ever wondered what life would be like if Facebook was real? Imagine walking around in a world where everybody is constantly saying out loud what they’re thinking. And what about all the friendship requests you would be getting from people you hardly know. Not confirming these wouldn’t be very polite, would it?

If you want to see what would happen if Facebook was real, take a look at this video:

By Jasmijn Nomes

When we wanted to take a break last week after struggling hard with yet another team task, we decided to show each other funny You Tube videos. The winner was definitely David, a 7-year-old boy that seems to be a little woozy after visiting the dentist. Seeing the video just now for the first time, I seemed to be an exception. The video ‘David after dentist’ has been viewed almost 54 million times, and it was the second most-watched video of 2009, according to You Tube – only Susan Boyle was even more woozy – Um sorry…: popular.

What particularly struck me, is the fact that David’s family apparently is earning a great amount of money from ads that appear next to the video on You Tube. As David’s father told during his presentation this week at the Southwest Interactive festival in Texas, the revenues that the family has derived through licensing the use of the video and reaping the profits of the ads, is almost enough to pay for David’s college tuition.

Besides the question if the decision of David’s father to expose his son to such an extent of media-attention, was really sensible, I think there is a valuable lesson to learn here for marketers: David has shown us that there are lots of opportunities to gain enormous online attention and to create a huge buzz, just by following his example and by making use of… viral marketing.

Posted by: Elisabeth Minnaert

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/18/david.after.dentist.video/index.html?iref=allsearch

We’ve all posted blogs or uploaded photos or videos at some time. But what happens when we die? Will this digital trail that we’ve left behind haunt others forever? Is there no way to control our life on the Web after we’ve passed away?

Well, that’s where Lisa Granberg and Elin Tybring saw a whole in the market! They founded MyWebWill, which is a service that allows people to choose what happens with their accounts when they die. A bit gruesome, I’ll say, but, nevertheless, it sounds very useful.

MyWebWill offers both a free version (that simple deactivates your profile) as a premium version that allows you to customize your settings, for example a final Facebook-comment or profile picture.

In this video, the ladies explain it themselves:

Posted by Kelly Desmidt

On February 9^th 2010, the Netherlands were startled by a bomb scare at the station of Den Bosch. The whole neighbourhood was evacuated, but it soon turned out to be false alarm. Apparently, the parcel that the alleged terrorist was carrying around in the train, did not contain any explosives, although he had said so. However, the authorities had to pull out all the stops to explain how this situation could have happened. An additional difficulty for them, were the thousands of ‘tweets’ about the incident that people had spread since the alarm. Frank Vergeer, communication advisor at Inconnect, advisors agency for risk and crisis communication, explains in the television program Netwerk at the EO (Evangelische oproep) why the present internet landscape makes crisis communication so difficult. In his opinion, Twitter and similar SNSs spread a stream of rumours that cannot be reversed. The government used to take a leading role in information processes, but nowadays this isn’t possible any longer. They can only try to participate in the virtual flow of information, and rectify misunderstandings. Frank Vergeer also stresses that authorities are still discussing how to do this in a proper way. I can only hope that they find a solution before a new crisis announces itself.

Source: http://www.geencommentaar.net/

Elisabeth Minnaert