Last Day at Nuxeo - Here comes StoriesOut!

Hi all,

Today is my last day at Nuxeo. I'm leaving this great company to create my own: "StoriesOut".

StoriesOut proposes communication services to innovating IT companies, both startups and more established ones:

• PR and press management
• Communication Strategies for Communities (customers, internal communication, online social communities)
• Communication Coaching

I'm delighted to announce StoriesOut's two first customers: Nuxeo and Kwaga !

From Monday 22nd, you'll be able to reach me at:

• mail: annedeforsan@storiesout.com
• cell: +33 6 07 67 30 38
• twitter: @adeforsan
  

I'm looking forward to hearing from you!

Ground Control to Major Tom, Commencing countdown, Engines On

6 days to go for a brand new adventure to start (hence the attached pic).



I'll be leaving the comfort of the employee position on March 19th to start StoriesOut, my own company the following Monday.




StoriesOut will be about Social Media, Marketing, PR and Communication services & coaching, primarily to exciting innovating IT startups and incubators. The baseline is "Let's write your story".

Huge excitement and stress.

The past few years have been tremendous. I've learned a lot, discovered even more and met stunning people.

I can't say there's been only one trigger for this shift, probably more the addition of experiences and thoughts. I've been fascinated by the energy of the entrepreneurs I've met. By technology and its ability to disrupt and change any "established" market. By the speed of high tech market and the actual real time assessments, decision-making and measurement.

I felt it was time for me to tell those stories and to create my own.

I can't wait to say more about StoriesOut!

Stay tuned.

Survival Kit: How to be 2.0 parents in 8 steps

Along with the invasion of the 2.0 shebang in our lives, my tribe develop some ackward behaviors together with the most repetitive & cryptic yells (kids usually don't speak - they're more comfortable at yelling). Usually it goes like that

- "Muuum can you tell Doris to give me the computer - It's my turn!"
- "Muuuuuum! computer's dead: I cannot install the ultimate extension of my *IM* (replace by any - we have them all) - C'mon , Mum! How can I dare writing without the latest emoticon set?"
- "Muuuum! computer's dead again: it says I cannot access the "latest ultimate gore" site, my schools pals told me to look at"
- "Muuuum! Help! for god's sake, somebody, heeeeeeelp!"

After a while of the kind, I've come to consider that I should put together the ultimate survival kit for us, poor savvy-elders, facing when not fighting against the tide of juvenile 2.0 experience.

First let me tell you what DOESN'T work
My great experience in IT project managements, quite naturally led me to set the standard dumb-user procedure. The one that goes like :

1. Learn to categorize demand (from real disaster recovery to nice-to-have user experience enhancements)
2. Attribute tickets (from "Time to go to bed! -meaning 'gosh, that one is tricky, I have to think about it" - to "calm down, here is your math exercice", not forgetting "How on earth do you think you'd fail being a better person if I don't buy the newest WoW extension?')
3. Enrich the knowledge base - ask each ticket holder to fill in a form and only answer the repeatable bugs
4. Close tickets

And you know why it doesn't work? Well... it's far too "1.0" oriented. You cannot answer them if you don't actually learn from them and share true experience. Being 2.0 parents or just parents of 2.0 kids is the same matter as usual: protect, upbringing, set and discuss limits, keep the line open of ANY discussions.

Now, here's the 2.0 parents Survival Kit:

1. Explain and Demonstrate: take time to present how you think things actually work. "My teacher says Wikipedia's rubbish. Information isn't certified nor verified. Unreliable." Don't go nuts. No harsh word to the teacher. Take some example out of a field he/ she knows by heart and check.

1. Share: the latest blog post you've read on Swine Flu / How to be a rock star using the Internet / what's Social Media / coolest tool you've find while browsing during lunch pause at the office... Surprisingly enough, sharing good stuff usually lead to receiving, in return, good stuff they've come accross :-) and ultimately - believe me or not - to passionate discussions.
   
2. Engage vs. respect: Would you even think about opening the letters your kids receive or sneak into their diaries? Of course not. Now, how do you handle it when you're on the same social network (ie Facebook)? The most efficient solution I found is to apply the same respect you have in real life (letter, diaries etc.), while sharing as much as you do in real life: publish pictures upon common agreement only, comment anything "public" status etc. and to try to go any further. Keep the communication going :-)
   
3. Bashing management: Guess what? Kids are as nice and gross on social networks as they are in real life. Can you believe it? Yes, I'm sure you can. Now when we learned about an anti-my-beloved-daughter facebook group, the situation had to be managed right away. Good thing is there's always a real person behind things like that. We discussed a lot about it and my daughter just went and talk about it to the FB group owner, who turned to be a girl from my daughter'sclass. Let's call her "Jennifer". Actually Jennifer felt really sorry about how things had turned and amplified - out of control she said. She removed the group the following day. Interestingly enough, both girls are now friends and have turned into kind of FB sentries, trying to regulate their environment on Facebook...
   
4. Real life stalking: while we could handle bashing with discussions, actual stalking couldn't be handle like that. Twice, one of my kids has been harassed via phone texts and the bad guy was lingering in front of school, following up to the front of our house, and insulting. We tried discussion and then eventually fix it with the police.
   The tricky thing about real-life stalking based on 2.0 life is that kids don't necessarily feel at ease with mentioning it. As in real-life they feel they are responsible for it.
   2.0 parents MUST tell them, and infinitely repeat this CANNOT be admit. Give your kids any means / ways to let you know... share, engage, keep the line open :-)
   
5. e-reputation management: based on the two latest items, the e-reputation management is a logical next step to discuss and clearly establish. Don't mention their future professional life - They are teenagers, remember? Do they give a damn about their future professional life? And, do we have any clue about what it'll look like, anyway?
   As I present it in a former post of mine, 2.0 life is just a natural expansion of their real-life: just explain they should behave online the way they do offline - with the highly-acceptable exception of being a powerful bad witch on WoW :-)
   
6. Anti-spam education: the hell with chain letters! They're about to get there... harsh work, I can tell you!
   
7. Highly responsive customer service: yeah, parenthood is a full time job. Now it goes to 2.0 life as well. Don't let them down while they experience trouble with the 2.0 shebang. They won't forgive you :-) And if you can't help them straight forward, you can bet someone else had met (and hopefuly solved) this issue before: google it :-)
   

Huh well, nothing real new, just new tools, new experience, extended privacy... Just don't miss that train. They're going so fast on these tracks that you might well lose them if you don't bother assisting.

Drawing from "geek and poke" - extremely funny blog- I'm not sure I attributed correctly it's CC work - if not, my apologies, the licence was written in German.

Social media vs. Propaganda

Hey guys! You know what?

I got a great news for you!

Social Media holds social in it... and therefore relates to individuals... with (most of the time) more than one field of interest. No kidding.

(Yeah I know how you feel, no need to thank me. I'm proud to release this secret to you, to bring some light in this age of darkness).




You think I'm overstating this?
Well, I wish I was.

I recently had intense discussions with friends, who were literally sick of the non-business related tweets of some of the folks they're following on twitter which I was claiming as "salt of the info", the extra compound that makes you listen to what another person's saying.

One of the major argument was based on: on social media, one must keep a strong firewall between personal and professional life. I have to admit that I had ignited the discussion with one of my recent re-tweet of a statement of the kind, adding in my RT that I violently disagreed.

So let me explain this in two steps:

1 - Social media relates to individuals not to propaganda.
Most companies on twitter / facebook etc. do take advantage of their employees' own pages / network and followers. Aren't they?

Even though companies do have a corporate account, it is their employees who actually enrich
any announcement thanks to the comment they post on their personal accounts. Leveraging their own network to deliver the info.

Right?

In my profesional life, I follow quite a bunch of marketing, social media, Open Source and ECM experts. Those I'm really fond of are those who, on top of their area of expertise, tweet on what really matters to them.


Here's a recent example (Damien is one of Nuxeo's customers and an active community member). His initial tweet enabled me to discover about a worldwide 24-hour observation campaign simultaneously conducted by 35 radioastronomy observatories, in order get redefined, global and extremely precise space map.

(More info in French here and here in English)

2 - Imposing rules to an evolving phenomenon is at best a waste of time, at worst an incredible waste of time.

I'm not comfortable with the emerging trend that accompanies emerging social tools: declare and impose rules and code of acceptable (and non-acceptable) behaviors.

Very not comfortable with that. Going this way is missing the point of what social media is about.

Social media are new channels for individuals, allowing real-time one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-one exchanges vs. the asynchronous tools we had so far (email, "static" websites...). We shouldn't expect the former behaviors of asynchronous tools to duplicate with social media.

My feeling is it'll settle accordingly to the way each of us behave in real life: by field of interest, by geography, by gender, by music preference, by family... and if you don't actually go naked to fill in the tank of your car in real life, I doubt you'll pose in the nude on your Facebook page. And even though I deeply regret it, deviant behaviors will exist on social media the way they do in real life.

To wrap-up with my inital RT that allows such (great) discussion, let me tell you:
If my boss / company/ RH people / recruitment company (past, present and future) solely base their perception of my value as a professional on comments or pics I would have broadcast on my Facebook pages / Twitter / LinkedIn... then at least they'd get a comprehensive picture :-)

(popart pic from: http://popartmachine.com/machine/daily/092208/Lichtenstein-style-pop-art/Woman-Whispering-to-Man-pop-art.jpg)