BarCamp 3 Berlin Flashback
photo courtesy of bjoern
Since the first Berlin Barcamp there's a been a major upward shift in participants and sponsors. The sessions are now dubbed "Corporate Blogging for Dummies" presented by Oracle oder "User generated content & Collaboration - Who owns our shit?" brought to you by the InvestitionsbankBerlin. And therefore more sales pitches and less knowledge transfer. Albeit, it's nice to see the event internationalized and professionalized.
Social Media Monitoring
One of the most poignent quotes of the weekend, "In the end, it's all about belief!" from the Social Media Monitoring session. Apart from the fact that after 10 minutes, two thirds of the people left because no one could hear the speakers or let alone the audience questions, the discussion was interesting for those who stayed.
How do you measure relevance in social media? Simply from links or page rank? Do you communicate differently in public, on your blog or at BarCamp? How does that play into the development of measurable standards? First and foremost, the goal is to measure for researchers and those who want to monetize the scape.
Richard Joerges, who is very active at the AG Social Media, an organization in Germany that is concerned with establishing standards, asked the audience about the issue of fake page impressions and subsequent quantity challenge. Joerges demanded a 2.0 version of measuring PIs and visits.
To really understand the impact of a social media site, someone in the audience thought that first "you have to find out who are those perceived as relevant and then those who are real...ideally you'll want to measure that difference." Numbers is a wrong word, it's reach. Even the number of comments during an ad campaign doesn't effect the quality, it's the tone of the content, what is the person really saying.
Enterprise 2.0
"Organizational culture is undefinable, it has too many layers," says Martin Koser and added a Warhol quote in his slides: they say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. What I liked about his session is that his screen kept flickering and shutting off, but it didn't really affect his message.
He talked about three levels within an organization. The first being on the surface: rituals, artifacts or myths, those that are easily changed, yet with little effect on the deeper structures. On the second level, we'll find the collective values or sense of right or wrong among the employees. And on the third level, usually the hardest to change, is the inner beings of employees, the relationships to each other, to nature and activity organization.
What I found the most intriguing was Martin's point about surface values and those on level three. If a company is propagating certain values on the first level, such as transparency or respect, but essentially is about making money, it will eventually die. In short, engrained culture is hard to change. The best example he gave were Lehman Brothers artifacts now sold by former employees on eBay. Coffee mugs with first level values such as, "Doing the right thing" or "Demonstrating smart risk management." Pure irony.