iStrategy digital conference in Amsterdam with Randi Zuckerberg and Jimmy Wales …

supercharge your digital strategy in Amsterdam on October 26

October 2011 is rather fretful. I keep telling my wife that I need to put down my suitcase and stay put but how could I when the world is buzzing with exciting events like the iStrategy global digital media conference which will take place in Amsterdam on October 25 and 26?!

At this conference, on October 26, I will be keynoting on social media ROI/ROE but I will keep this for a later post. today, I would like to focus on the program first. The array of speakers is truly amazing, the program is second to none, and here are some other highlights from that list of keynotes which you shouldn’t miss:

• Randi Zuckerberg will open the session with a keynote on the future of online banking. Mr Z’s sister will namely deliver her top 10 tips to maximise your brand on… Facebook of course!,
• Tim Callan from Melbourne IT (disclosure: I am a client) will deliver a pitch on the new GTLD program by ICANN. Don’t miss this, MIT are the world’s most revered experts in this domain (their Chief Strategy Officer is Dr Bruce Tonkin, one of the world’s leading experts in domain name strategy),
• Last but not least, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, will describe how collaboration is changing not just encyclopaedias, but the whole world. Mr Wales’s keynote is entitled: “the wiki world“.

There will be plenty more speakers, like Facebook’s Julien Codorniou and Laurent Delaporte from Microsoft. Stay tuned on this blog, I will soon give some details about my keynote on “social media ROI/ROE”.

Google+ (plus?) dwindling, Google Buzz going and Diaspora begging for money

social media clones? - photo http://bit.ly/picasayann

last week was quite eventful with regard to the social media landscape … 

One of Forbes’s contributors, Tim Worstall (profile here) , has this story about Google+ and its supposed demise, in which he shows that in fact, Google’s network is still growing. That seems to be the case, as shown by Larry Page’s announcement of 40 million users last Thursday. It has yet to be proven how many actually use it though. Last week, there were more comments about how an engineer screwed up with the sharing mechanism, than about the actual number of users of the platform; by the way, the said engineer argued that this was not a platform and that the problem was there. Last but not least, mashable took a stab at Google’s Execs about the fact that they weren’t eating their own dog food. Maybe they feel a bit iffy about having to discarding their Facebook network and starting all over again? I know the feeling. Last but not least, all diaspora “users” received an email last week in which the new social media star was begging for money. Off to a bad start it seems. I personally opened my account, understood the principle but saw no added value in it I’m afraid. I know that it is said that Google+ mimicked their interface and not the other way round, but yet … By the way, as Worstall mischievously points out, is this Google plus ou Google+? He may not be a social media guru, but he asks very valid questions (excerpts per below and link to main Forbes article). At any rate the shift towards Google+ is now complete, due to the phasing out of Google Buzz (and that was revealed only a few hours ago). At least one  thing is clearer this week in the world of social media!

So the Mail on Sunday tells us, that traffic on Google Plus (or Google + maybe?) is down 60%.

[... ]

Well, if traffic was 100 when Google plus was invite only, then opening it up to all comers led to a 1,200 percent raise in traffic, then we’ve got traffic of 1,200. A 60% decline from 1,200 leaves us with traffic of 480 (doesn’t matter whether this is users, page views, visits or whatever, the math is the same). So, what the report is actually saying is that in less than a month traffic has risen 480%, or 4.8 times.  Which isn’t, really, all that much of a failure.

Now for myself, I don’t really understand this social media stuff: I get the business models, I understand what people are doing, I’m just not sure why  [...]

via Google Plus Traffic Down 60% – Forbes.