Andrea Vascellari

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• Coca-Cola forced to pull Facebook promotion after porn references – The Coca-Cola company has pulled an internet promotion campaign, after parents accused it of targeting children by using references to a notorious pornographic movie.
• Facebook introduces Questions – New Feature – Ask the Facebook community a question on any topic and get quality answers from people in the know.
• HOW TO: Help Employees Talk About Your Brand Online – The question boils down to this: If a brand is supposed to give customers something to identify with and add meaning to their lives, shouldn’t helping employees express themselves as individuals help the brand as well?
• Old Spice polishes its monocle smile all the way to a 107% sales increase. – According to Nielsen data provided by Old Spice, overall sales for Old Spice body-wash products are up 11 percent in the last 12 months; up 27 percent in the last six months; up 55 percent in the last three months; and in the last month, with two new TV spots and the online response videos, up a whopping 107 percent.
• How Big Brands Take On Social Media – Nice video interview with Bruce Upbin and David Armano.
• Convert Twitter lists to RSS feeds with one click – You can’t create more than 20 lists. There’s no function to combine lists, and managing list entries is only slightly less difficult than if you’d chiselled them into marble. Alex Kessinger created a simple web app called Twitter Lists 2 RSS. Copy the URL for any Twitter list, paste it into a field on the app, and with one click, you get an RSS feed.
• Google Maps Gets a (Much-Needed) URL Shortener – The web addresses of Google Maps that you shared with your friends used to be unmanageably huge, but Google has just solved that problem with a new Labs feature that dramatically shortens Maps URLs.
• Two Arrested In Venezuela For Tweeting Banking Rumors – According to Reuters, the authorities claim that the tweets were aimed at destabilizing the Venezuelan banking sector and that “a man was arrested in possession of a cellphone used to send the first illegal Tweet, and that detectives had also detained a woman and seized hard discs and computer equipment from her.”
• Recorded Future – Temporal & Predictive Analytics Engine – Amazing research tool.
• Prince: “The Internet Is Over” – Is Prince missing out on something by withdrawing himself from the web? Or could he be correct; is the Internet just a fad, after all?
• Exclusive: Failwhale Over San Francisco! – LOL
• Signs of Social Media | Friday Flickr Fix – This Flickr group is focused on how brands are promoting their social media presence. It includes consumer packaged goods flowing it into their packaging to signage and how it’s injected into the built environment by any brand with a physical location, including food, retail and banking.
• The Future of Online Socializing – The social benefits of internet use will far outweigh the negatives over the next decade, according to experts.
• Consumers engaged via social media are more likely to buy – An impressive 51% of Facebook fans and 67% of Twitter followers are more likely to buy the brands they follow or are a fan of.
• Twitter Users “More Likely To Get Job Interviews” – Apparently, Twitter users write better CVs and are more likely to be shortlisted for job interviews than the average jobhunter.

I’ve been interviewed by Dario Salvelli for Wired Magazine about Finland and the recent announcement (1st of July 2010) of the legal right for every Finnish citizen to have access to a 1Mbps (megabit per second) broadband connection.

The article was published on Wired Italia but since it offers some interesting stats and insights I thought to share an English version here on my blog:

Enjoy it and as usual feel free to share your thoughts with comments or via twitter @vascellari! (please remember to link back to this post so it will be easier to track and aggregate the conversation, thanks).

Andrea

Italy, 2010. Families with no PC were reduced by only 2% in the last 8 years, yet new families subscriptions of users that are willing to pay a surcharge on fees just to have a connection to 100 Megabit grew of 40% and about 78% of households with broadband access has at least one child under 18 years old. An incentive to implement the NGN (next-generation high-speed network) in Italy and not wait for the 2015 deadline set by AGCOM to assign broadband services to reduce the digital divide.

In this context, is it possible to imagine a law that includes the Internet as a fundamental right for Italian citizens? Other European countries are heading in this direction. On July 1, Finland became the first nation in the world in which every citizen has the right to access the Internet with a minimum of 1Mbps connection. This law will serve about 4000 Finnish families that still suffer from digital divide and will force providers to install cables out in Finnish rural areas where 5.3 million people live.

The village of Karvia this year will already have a 100MB connection. The plan of the Finnish Government is in fact broader and plans on providing access to 100 Mbps in 99% of the territory available by 2015 by using fiber optic and agreements between mobile operators who already use UMTS900 technology to build and expand the NGN.

“What Finland has achieved is unique not only in terms of technology but especially socially – says Andrea Vascellari, the CEO of itive.net, a digital strategy agency with offices in Finland and New York – This step also represents a turning point for strategy and communications for business, government, education systems and public institutions. In an era where the Internet is no longer an option but a core part of our daily lives we just have to hope that this decision made by a small country in Northern Europe like Finland will inspire others to move in the same direction.”

Anne-Mari Leppinen is Finnish and works for Suupohjan Seutuverkko [disclosure, Suupohjan Seutuverkko is itive's client], a company owned by six local municipalities (an area of 3700 km2 for a total of 30 000 persons) which aims at building an open fiber optic network that is already among the fastest in Europe. The purpose of this company is to build the network and use it but not to offer services: all the service providers have the same opportunities to provide services to clients on fiber and users can freely choose who to trust.

The network built in the city and region of Kauhajoki can already replace all the data traffic such as broadband, cable, satellite, digital TV and phone connection. In addition to this in Kauhajoki the fiber is used to improve the efficiency in real estate surveillance, remote control of industrial production and it also enhances the quality of life of the elderly people that live at home.

“At first I thought this law wasn’t a big deal because I thought the minimum speed of market regulation should be more than 1Mbps – writes via email Anne-Mari – This is because here everyone already has a connection with access of 1Mbps or higher, our clients already have some 10 Mbps and some 100Mbps symmetrical connection. When I read that Finland was the first country in the world, I immediately changed my mind. I hope that the next step is to implement an open access fiber optic network because it is the only way to get a qualitative competitive network and reach people who live outside the cities: in fact the problem is that the network operators want to invest (i.e. in fiber) only in the 20 biggest cities in Finland to receive higher revenues from the investment. This is understandable but what about all the other people? In rural areas people have no choice and are blocked by a monopoly that makes the total price and quality of connections far from reasonable. I hope the situation will change after this new law.”

“We were among the first to create an open access fiber optic network and many others are now following our path. The Finnish government has promised that by 2015 all the citizens will be able to access 100Mpbs but can only guarantee that the fiber optic will not be more than 2km away from all homes. This last section to get the fiber at home will be expensive for families (from 500 to 1000 euros) and I think the Government should give grants or support for these miles if you want people to really connect on fiber optic. The other problem is that so far the Government has not specified whether the network will be an open access network: this could potentially re-create monopolies that build closed networks with public money. This year, for example, on about 8 fiber optic projects that have public support ours, Suupohjan Seutuverkko, is the only non-commercial and open access one.”

Finland is not the only European nation that looks at the Internet as a civil right of citizens: In France, the Supreme Court has ruled that Internet access is a right, while Spain and the United Kingdom have similar laws in the pipeline that should be approved respectively in 2011 and 2012.

The Finnish ICT Minister Suvi Linden recently declared to the BBC:  ”We considered the role of the Internet in Finns’ everyday life. Internet services are no longer just for entertainment“

Several of the projects we work on with our team at itive.net imply change. The real difficulty is when we have to deal with systems and organizations that are often trapped by rules, both contractual or cultural that don’t leave space for innovation or paradoxically force innovation to adapt to old paths and 20th century structures. I’m not here to whine about it, in the end this is often a reality that consultants, including myself, are used to dealing with. What I would actually like to do is drive your attention to this TED video by Clay Shirky on how cognitive surplus could change the world.

Have a look at the video and check the notes I shared below…

Here are some of the points that I found interesting:

- Cognitive surplus = free time & talents (motivation/generosity) + consumer & share (tools/tech)
What happens with cognitive surplus? Human motivation and modern tools allowing that motivation to be joined up in large scale efforts.
- Social vs contractual motivation. In the 20th century we thought that the lack of contract would let people operate without any constraints… unfortunately this is not true. They operate with social constraints instead of contractual ones.
The advantage of social constraints is that they construct a culture that is more generous than the contractual constraints do. On the other hand what’s broken by contractual constraints stays broken, and this condition can persist over long time periods.
- So the trick is in understanding where we are laying on the economic side and where on the social side.
- Communal vs Civic value
Communal value: created by the participants for each other. We find it everywhere we have large amounts of public data available online (photos on flickr, videos on youtube, etc.).
Civic value: created by the participants but enjoyed by the society. Goals are not just set up to make life better for the participants, but to make life better for everyone in the society in which the system is operating. This is not just a side effect of opening up to human motivation, it’s going to be a side effect of what we collectively make of the concept.
- Long story short: people have a lot of free time, and they can do better when not trapped by contractual constraints. So organizations designed around the culture of generosity will be able to achieve incredible effects without an enormous amount of contractual overhead.
- The key: Support people who are trying to use cognitive surplus to create civic value. By doing that we’ll be able to change society.

Thoughts? Share them here on the blog or via twitter @vascellari.

Andrea

Do you want to get these report-updates in real time? Subscribe to the live-report RSS feed! This feed includes only report related items. It’s not a substitute but a complement to my main RSS feed which still remains the official one that brings you all my blog posts.

• 5 Tools to Track Twitter Trends – On any given day there are over 600 tweets per second on Twitter for a total of over 50 million tweets per day. With an overload of tweets daily it can be difficult to grasp what is really trending at any given moment. Use the tools below to quickly find current Twitter trends and trending conversations.
• Social Media Measurement Should Focus on Outcomes, Not Output – It’s not about simply looking for opportunities to drop messaging into ordinary conversation, but about finding shared interests, shared benefits and shared rewards for others in the communities where your brand interacts.
• 8 Steps to Creating a Brand Persona – In social networks, the brand and how it’s perceived, is open to public interpretation and potential misconception now more than ever. Without a deliberate separation between the brand voice and personality and that of the person representing it, we are instantly at odds with our goals, purpose, and potential stature.
• Top 10 Clever Google Voice Tricks – The phone management app is great, but even cooler hacks exist just under the hood.
• How I Use Gmail Multiple-Inboxes Lab Feature to Manage E-mail Overload – Useful productivity tips.
• 15 more awesome social media infographics – Infographics that demonstrate a mixture of both hard data and strategy practices. Hopefully, they’ll also provide some inspiration or can be useful in helping you with presentations or pitches. As before, links to the actual graphics are in the headline titles.
• 6 ways to find value in Twitter’s noise – A great example that shows how we can get insights from analyzing Twitter data.
• Social Media is the 3rd Era of the Web [graph] – A search that compares the world wide search volume on Google for new media, web 2.0, and social media. What the graph shows is that we’re at an inflection point in the language we use to describe the macro trends of innovation on the web…it’s the indicator that we’re in the 3rd Era of the Web and it’s The Era of Social Media.
• How The World Spends Its Time Online [infographic] – Millions of people across the world are constantly connected by the internet. Here’s a look at what everybody’s doing when they’re in front of their computer screen.
• Is Social a Source for B2B Leads? – Terrific insights about B2B site visitors referred from social media.
• Diesel Cam [video] – Interactive installation at Diesel Stores in Spain, being the first store that allows users to share the moment of buying and trying garments on their Facebook profiles from the store. Consumers are able to make pictures, publish them and boast their new acquisitions with their Facebook friends.
• The Fun Theory – A great Volkswagen initiative. #engagement
• Teens and Their Mobile Phones / Flowtown – Have you ever wondered what teens were really using their mobile phones for? A recent study released by Pew Internet Research has shed light on average mobile
• Public Media Joins Forces for One Big Platform – The country’s five silos of public radio and television are spilling into each other with a joint program that will allow them – and eventually the public itself — to build apps, stations, websites and other media services combining audio, text and video content from every public radio and television outlet in the country.

Check out the original post on The Next Web!

Email notifications? Yes, but only for comments left on groups and personal profiles. That’s how Facebook works. No email notifications for the administrators of Facebook Fan Pages.

How to solve the problem?

It’s simple. I found out about it thanks to a suggestion by @dogwalkblog.

1) Just click on the ‘Like’ option at the bottom of the entries you post on your Facebook Fan Page. You’ll receive an email notification every time someone will comment on it.

2) Make sure that all the boxes under ‘Links’ in your notification account settings are checked (Account Settings > Notifications > Links)

UPDATE 1: If you still feel that it’s pretty strange to ‘auto-like’ every post, here’s another tip: Add a short comment on each entry so you will receive email notifications on the following comments

UPDATE 2: Fan Page Notifier is a service which alerts you when someone posts on your favorite pages in Facebook. I just started to play around with it, have a look and let me know if it works for you too! Thanks to @nikan for the comment & suggestion!

Why this is useful?

This is great to monitor comments on recent and especially previous updates. Without email notifications there’s no other way to be notified on any interaction on older updates shared on your Facebook Page.

If you have any other suggestion or tips on how to get Facebook Fan Pages email notifications share it in the comments or via twitter @vascellari (please remember to link back to this post so it will be easier to track and aggregate the conversation, thanks).

Since we are talking about Facebook Pages, here’s mine. On this page you’ll find interesting news and insights on strategic PR, marketing, social media and communications that I don’t share anywhere else.

Andrea