How to cope with social media use of employees that concern your organization: “threat or addition”?

By Charlotte van Nus on 21 March 2012

More and more organizations are implementing social media in their communication strategy to communicate to their external and internal stakeholders. Vice versa social media are also being used by employees to share daily activities, concerns or other organization-related content with their online social network. Employees are increasingly present during working hours and in spare time on social media. Almost one third of the employees are regularly posting organization-related messages, according to a study of Verhoeven (2012). So the question how to deal with content posted by employees on social networks that concern the organization is increasingly important.
Recently the national railways of the Netherlands (NS) has send official warnings to employees who posted messages on Twitter about defective coffee machines and used (#) hash tags of the organization and (#) fail during the winter period. This in turn could cause, from the perspective of the NS, damage to the organization.

tagged with: employees, social media use, organization brand, festivals

“Page or Stage”

By Dick Swart on 19 March 2012

Over the past three millennia the paper on which we write and read evolved into something with more or less standard proportions and orientation. We grew accustomed to reading on paper that is about 1,5 times higher than its width. This may have to do with the fact that text on paper evolved from the papyrus scroll with one column in a vertical orientation into a scroll with a horizontal orientation where the text is placed in a series of columns next to each other.  Later on this horizontal scroll was folded ‘concertina’ into a book like thing. Eventually the codex-format emerged from this folded scroll. Ever since the invention of the codex in roman times, books have always been higher then its width except for rare, silly artistic endeavors. Reading text is done best on vertical oriented pages also known as ‘portrait’. I call this the page paradigm.

tagged with: screen, stage, page

Bobbi Bear

By Guido Froijen on 16 March 2012

This week in the Lab we’ve had a presentation from Dennis Ringersma, former student and colleague from the Crossmedialab. The past years he dedicated himself to volunteer with the Bobbi Bear Organization in Africa. This organization helps sexual abused children.

tagged with: hiv aidsgraphical emoticons, durban, bobbie bear, africa

The Journal Club and Roland Barthes, An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative

By Rogier Brussee on 5 March 2012

Figure 1 Roland Barthes teaching

tagged with: narrative, journalclub, post modernism

How's hyve?

By Michiel Rovers on 2 March 2012

Last year many friends turned over from the Dutch social network website Hyves to Facebook. A major reason was the acquisition of Hyves by publisher TMG (Telegraaf Media Group).  With my friends a large number of Hyvers also removed their profile. In January last year I also switched from Hyves to Facebook. Since that day I’ve lost sight of what is happening on this social network. Until yesterday. Yesterday Marc de Vries, CEO of Hyves visited our school for a guest-lecture.  One of his comments was a warning: the fact that your friends removed their profile doesn’t mean that Hyves isn’t doing well. On the contrary, Hyves is alive and kicking. In this blog a short summary of the developments.

tagged with: hyves, social media

Refreshing

By Matthijs Rotte on 24 February 2012

When I was younger, I used too feel I had to go out. I had to meet my friends in bars, parks and squares to have a drink and socialize. I felt this way because I had the feeling that when I was not there, I was missing out. This feeling of not wanting to miss out was so powerful that for some time I argued with my parents in the middle of the night, because they were not agreeing with me going out yet again. This is called puberty.

tagged with: curiosity, social network sites, facebook

Digital fridges, analogue laundry

By Jelke de Boer on 21 February 2012

As my colleague Kees Winkel already pointed out we’ve recently started a fascinating course on new media theory at the University of Utrecht. While many interesting concepts, ideas and discussions have past in the first few weeks there is one specific topic that triggered me: technological determinism versus social constructionism. While it is a really academic discussion that stretches far beyond the domain of just these new media studies it somehow got me to think of my grandma’s washing machine?

tagged with: technology, digital fridges, determinism, innovation

De-Gamification

By Harry van Vliet on 16 February 2012

Although gamification is so 2011, I bet we will be seeing it cropping up here and there in 2012 and beyond. Why? Because it is such a simple and yet powerful concept: we all know our ‘games’ and we all can come up with examples how certain incentives helped us achieve our goals, whether it was money, game points or esteem. So why not incorporate ‘gamification’ into more (social) activities such as health, education, environmental issues and make the world a better place? There’s nothing to loose, is there? Yes there is, gamification can crowd out intrinsic pleasure or moral motives. In other words, there is potential harm in gamification…

tagged with: telos, gamification, psychology

Bringing the past to the Present

By Erik Hekman on 11 February 2012

The growing impact of information technology and digitisation, ever since the beginning of the 1990s, has given cultural heritage institutions a fresh impulse to deal with the problem of accessibility of their collections (Van Vliet, 2009). Their efforts, however, are still mostly aimed at cultural preservation, and, for the time being, have done little to bring us closer to the dream of a Virtual Collection in the Netherlands. For instance, more than 30 million art objects were still not digitised in 2008 in the Netherlands (Veeger, 2008). Meanwhile, it has become urgent to further open the door. The Internet’s dominant role in recent years has caused a change in the relationship between media producers, suppliers and consumers in the traditional media landscape. The cultural sector must therefore decide what to do with today’s digital media in response to the general public’s changing role, and for the purpose of improving accessibility. The use of multiple media resources and particularly resources like the Internet and mobile telephony seems to be inevitable. The only question that remains is: how? This paper addresses this question by focussing on social tagging and storytelling, and reports the results of an empirical study on tagging behaviour using the social tagging platform www.ikweetwatditis.nl (see also Van Vliet et al., 2010).

Fascinating

By Kees Winkel on 6 February 2012

Fascinating. I have started following a course at the University of Utrecht. This Monday morning, I found myself in a hugh auditorium with my colleague Jelke de Boer and some 430 other students. Apart from Jelke and me, I recon the average age was somewhere round 20. “Fascinating”, I found myself thinking in a rather Mr. Spock-like fashion as I really tried to make absolute sense of what I was doing there and how it happened of me actually sitting in that big dark hall with assistant professor Mirko Tobias Schäfer explaining the differences between McLuhan and Williams, ergo, the perhaps philosophical or at least academic dispute on issues of Technological Determinism and Social Constructivism. Fascinating.

tagged with: fascinating, teleology, discourse, startrek