Hello, who are you?
My name is Martijn Staal. I am working as a consultant and innovator at TNO ICT and regularly post articles on blogs such as Marketingfacts. I help organizations such as Telecom operators, media companies and start-ups to determine their (social) media strategy on the field of user generated content, co-creation and communities. More specifically this means that I am working on business plans, new business models and business cases for innovative new media services.

This Wednesday (June 24th), I will be presenting on the Co-creation Event 2009.

So what’s keeping you busy lately?
Recently I have finished supervising Kim op den Kamp, who did a Master Thesis Project on Co-creation Communities. She investigated business models for co-creation and had very nice interviews with successful cases such as Starbucks, Dell and Nokia.

Currently I am working on a Digital Heritage project, where we develop a vision and strategy for cultural organizations how to cope with digitalisation of content and what sort of services are interesting. In July a positioning paper will be presented.

How would you rate yourself as a Social Media Specialist, on a scale of 1 to 10?
Of course, you should ask the organizations that I advise, but I guess they will give you a number that is above average

How do you make use of social media / technical innovation for your work, or towards your customers?
I am using social media and technical innovation for my work in a number of ways: for advising people, innovation with TNO’s customers and consumers, communicating with external contacts and for internal communication with co-workers.

First, social media and technical innovation is always a crucial part of the advice in projects that I do.
Secondly, last year we made use of a co-creation platform to generate and develop ideas for new products and services. This was used for facilitating ideas from external organizations and persons as well from co-workers.
Thirdly, I structurally use blogs to stay updated about latest developments and share ideas. Twitter and LinkedIn have become very useful tools to connect and stay in touch with contacts.
Recently a lot of co-workers are also using Yammer for internal communications and to share interesting documents.

What’s the most important reason for doing so?
I think that social media are the way to go to filter relevant information, work together to combine the expertise of the crowd to share views. In this way I am able to form an opinion about new developments and share this view with others.

When looking at one of the three subjects of this blog (social media, business models / strategies and technical innovation for cultural organizations), can you name an interesting development at the moment?
The most important development that is relevant for all organizations is that individuals do have a stronger opinion then ever. By the emergence of new technologies such as web 2.0, blogs and social networks people are able to share their opinion and have their say.

Organizations of all sorts should listen more to what their customers and stakeholders want, and respond to them by starting a dialogue. This results in more insight into people’s needs, and better and more successful products & services.

For cultural organizations this means that people want to have a say in the service that are provided. Organizations can profit from the expertise of these people, because ‘the crowd’ together knows more on specific issues than they do themselves. And for organizations that refuse to go along with this development, consumers and customers will take the initiative, without any participation from the organization itself.

And is there an aspects of these subjects shouldn’t we focus on anymore?
Try not to be ‘another weblog’ about plain new developments or initiatives; it’s all about the braining about the developments. New internet initiatives and developments are interesting, but what does the initiative mean, why is it that you selected these cases?

Furthermore, it is always interesting to hear the vision and opinion of entrepreneurs that start a new service. It the visions of individuals and discussing these with others that greater developments and implications for you and me can be extracted.

What do you think is going to happen this year, what kind of developments can we expect?
A lot of new social media initiatives, more organizations (big and smaller companies) will see that they need to have a dialogue with their customers. Also, more organizations will see that it is often better to talk with customers and stakeholders in their own environment (e.g. via groups and gadgets in LinkedIn, Hyves) instead of trying to attract & engage people on their own platform, one of the many that people have to work with.

Thanks a bunch!