Het rapport gaat in op belangrijke ICT gerelateerde uitdagingen voor de professional rondom “Het Nieuwe Werken” en biedt oplossingsrichtingen hoe organisaties hun medewerkers kunnen faciliteren met nieuwe werkvormen om toch “connected” te blijven met elkaar. Immers flexibilisering komt met een prijs. Collega’s weten steeds minder waar anderen mee bezig zijn. Informele kanalen veranderen of verdwijnen. Vertrouwensrelaties komen moeilijker tot stand, waardoor het delen van kennis wordt gehinderd. Het rapport gaat hier op in en biedt bovendien een innovatieve aanpak om met kleine interventies de verbondenheid tussen professionals te behouden en zelfs te activeren.

Een PDF-versie van het rapport is hier te downloaden. Wilt u liever een hardcopy, e-mail dan even.

A webcare team monitors online conversations on Twitter, blogs and other social media and has a strategy on how to deal with various types of negative responses via social media. When necesary, they can join the conversation, offer support, provide facts or anything else to steer things in the right direction. But it is not just about customer care, the webcare team can also do PR (discovering and preventing issues) and marketing (educating customers or providing feedback to product development).

Why do companies actually care about what is being said in social media? More and more companies realize that, in line with the Cluetrain Manifesto, “markets are conversations”: customers trust opinions of friends a lot more than they trust company websites, and they use information about products and services found on social media to make informed choices.

Who should be in your webcare team?
From the type of work a webcare team has to do, it should be clear that this is not a job for the IT department. Instead, people from marketing and corporate communication should be involved, and maybe even experts on your products and services. Pick your team from people who understand the norms of social media and are able to respond from a personal perspective. As such, your manager PR and corporate communication is probably not a good candidate for the job.

The tools of the trade
Webcare teams get more and more tools to discover what is currently being said about their brand, products and services. Important tools of the trade are Google Alerts, Twitter search, Technorati and Google blog search. These tools are all aimed at discovering relevant online conversations, without having to spend the whole day looking.

What is a smart social media strategy?
Unfortunately, there is no universal recipe for a smart social media strategy yet. Nevertheless, an important starting point is to accept each opinion as such, and not call opinions into question. As with any employee that takes part in an online conversation, the norm is to identify yourself as an employee of the company and behave accordingly. Also it seems important not to be drawn into online discussions: seek direct communication with the person behind the complaint. For more inspiration on social media strategies, I suggest you take a look at the IBM Social Computing guidelines.

I would like to hear your experiences with webcare teams!

The slides of our talk (in Dutch) are available via slideshare:

The physical version of the Concept Game can be played individually or in a workshop. It is also possible to play the Concept Game online.

Click here to start playing the Concept Game online. You will be asked to select your favourite and least favourite concept ideas. Please also tell us why you have selected these concepts and submit your choices. It will help us to focus our future plans and concept development.

The online version of the Concept Game was developed by Steven Haveman.

» Start the Concept Game

Key outcomes of the session

After the groups discussed key challenges modern knowledge workers are faced with, they concluded that modern knowledge workers require the following key skills:

1. Being able to consider things from someone else’s perspective
2. Being able to stand up for yourself
3. Being able to reflect on your own working practices
4. Having self discipline
5. Being able to prioritize: making deliberate choices regarding what you do and how you do that
6. Allowing yourself time to reflect and to do things properly: investing time to gain time (later on)
7. Being outward oriented; relations are key. Leverage your personal and professional network
8. Being flexible and able to switch between different contexts

So, we came up with 8 instead of the 7 skills we promised in the title Note however that we are convinced that there is no such thing as seven universal skills of the modern knowledge worker: knowledge workers come in different flavours. Yet, we feel that these eight skills are indeed key ingredients.

The good news is that, by definition, skills can be trained. The question is how you train these skills as an individual and how, as an organisation, you can stimulate your people to master these skills.

By the way, the introduction presentation is also posted on SlideShare (in Dutch):

Could it be that “on top” indeed is a core concept supporting the concepts of in sync, in touch and in flow?