E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Exploiting the Power of the Word to Communicate Better by David Tebbutt

A little while ago my good friend David Tebbutt put together a blog post under the heading Unearth, Write, Polish, Share, where he was mentioning how he was pretty much ready for a new adventure to kick in where he would be "helping others to be better communicators". And he mentioned how good it felt altogether. I can’t blame him, more than anything else, because he has been doing that for a few years now. And still going strong. However, all along he probably has been doing that in his (very little, I am sure) spare time, but with that blog post the great news is that he does it now full time. Welcome to Tebbo Towers, as he jokingly stated back then!

We do need more David Tebbutts in this world, for sure, although I bet he would differ with that statement. I have known David for a good number of years now and if there would be a motto out there that would describe him quite nicely it would be something along the lines of "exploiting the power of the word".  Time and time again we have engaged in conversations where there is always something new that I learn. There hasn’t been a single chance where that hasn’t been the case. Quite the opposite! Even back then, at the beginning of this year, when I was going through one of those phases of redefining the purpose of this blog. Remember? Back then, like I was saying, he offered to help out and provide me with some very helpful tips that I do hope folks out there reading this blog now would notice from what things used to be a couple of years back, for instance!

And he did that because he genuinely wanted to help out a good friend in need for some advice on how to spice up his own writing and communication skills to make them much more enjoyable. And although I cannot say whether he succeeded or not, I guess you would all be better judges on that than myself, I can certainly vouch that still today I pay plenty of attention to all of the things I learned from him during those conversations.

That’s why I’m extremely happy and excited to see how he has decided to move further on with his career on this front and has just recently launched a new gig, on his own, where he is on a new, exciting, and intriguing mission trying to provide an answer to this tough question: "Are your customers and prospects getting to know you properly?" And he does it already providing a hint or two of what he is up to with this answer: "They’re going to use search and the Internet whether you like it or not".

I can imagine how plenty of you folks out there, reading these few words, would be agreeing with me that it surely is an exciting journey that David has already started. And, as such, he has modified his Web site to reflect the new set of services he will be working on from now onwards. Now, I am not going to reveal much of what those would be like, but certainly under headings like Unearth, Polish and Share, amongst several others, I would strongly encourage you all to have a look and find out plenty more for yourselves! It will be worth your time, I am certain.

Thus, like I was saying earlier on, if you are one of those businesses that are still contemplating and evaluating what your Internet presence should be like and wouldn’t know where to start, I could certainly recommend you get in touch with David; there are probably very very few other people out there in the IT industry with such an extensive and knowledgeable experience that could help you get all set up and ready to go in a very short time! Even more, if you already have that online presence, whether it is a traditional one or one where you are trying to immerse yourself within the social computing world (Blogs, wikis, microblogging, or any kind of 2.0 editorial / Web activity…), David would be one of those folks who would train, coach, and provide you with plenty of advise  on how to keep things going and make them much more engaging for you and for your costumers, which is what really matters at the end of the day, don’t you think? Because after all "they’re going to use search and the Internet whether you like it or not"

Best of luck, David, on your new adventure! I am sure you will continue to shine; perhaps in a different way, but certainly continuing to make a difference in the communications & editorial world! Really appreciate your coaching, training and facilitation over the course of the years and your innate talent to always find the fine words to deliver the right messages! A leading example we should all aspire to! Don’t change, please!

Tags: David Tebbutt, Tebbutt, Tebbo, Tebbo Towers, Customers, Clients, Prospects, Making a Difference, Communications, Writing Skills, Coaching, Training, Facilitation, Web, Internet, Power of the Word, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Software, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Innovation, Learning, Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, New Adventures, Editorials, Written Skills, Web Talent, Talent, Talent 2.0

X Seminario Compartim – Las Organizaciones en la Epoca de la Participacion y las Redes Sociales por Luis Suarez

For a good few months plenty of people have been contacting me, mostly offline, asking whether I participate in Spanish speaking conference events where they could hear some of the very same stories I have been sharing over here in this blog for a long while now on the topics of KM, Social Computing, Collaboration, Communities & Learning. Specially, when related to how IBM has been going through a massive transformation with its wider adoption of social software, both inside and outside of the firewall. Up until now, my answers were rather limited, since most of those events were of a rather private nature, mostly customer workshops. Well, not anymore!

Indeed, over the last few weeks, couple of months, actually, I have had the great opportunity to participate in a number of Spanish speaking events where I have been presenting on these very same topics and at the same time I’m now in a position to share with you folks both the presentation materials, as well as the recordings of the pitches I have done. So people out there may now have a chance to listen to plenty of the stuff I have talked about over here for the last few years, including living "A World Without Email", and make some sense of it, if Spanish is their preferred language.

So, over the next few days I will start sharing some of those presentation links, as well as the recordings themselves, and that way folks would have an opportunity to get a taster of the kind of work I do, but in my mother tongue: Spanish hehe. Yes, it’s going to be lots of fun; here I am putting together this blog post in English that will talk about a recent presentation I did in Spanish on the topic of "Social Networking for Business"; English being the default language from this blog from the very beginning. Perhaps one day I will create another entry explaining why…

Either way, the links and the recordings, I guess, would also be helpful for those folks who may want to polish their Spanish skills, as well as get a grasp of the kind of flow I usually go through when tackling these topics. To get things going I’m going to start with the most recent event I presented at and which took place last week, while I was in Barcelona, Spain.

A couple of months back I was invited by my good friend Jesús Martínez Marín (From the Centre d’Estudis Jurídics i Formació Especialitzada del Departament de Justícia de la Generalitat de Catalunya) to go to Barcelona and speak at the X Seminario Compartim about the topic of "Las Organizaciones en la Epoca de la Participacion y las Redes Sociales" ("Organisations in the Age of Participation and Social Networks"), where I could spend a few minutes talking about the kind of impact that social computing and social software tools have been having in such a large organisation as IBM, specially in helping change rather quickly how we share our knowledge across and collaborate in order to help accelerate not only how we innovate, but also how we have been capable of augmenting our own day to day productivity levels.

At the same time, he invited me to share what some of my experiences have been like, over the last three and a half years, with regards to living "A World Without Email". What I have learned, what it has meant for me as an individual, as well as the organisation itself, what it has been like shifting conversations away from email into social open spaces, in short, to share some thoughts on whether it’s worth it, or not, giving up on corporate email.

Of course, as you can imagine, I couldn’t say "No!" to such kind offer, don’t you think? So I accepted and last week, on June 29th, I participated on a rather interesting, and thought provoking, morning event, along with a few other folks. You would be able to check out some of the various presentations used over at the following Slideshare URL address; and if you would want to check out some of the recordings, you would be able to find them all over at the DepartmentJusticia YouTube channel, which I can certainly recommend going through, if you haven’t done so just yet.

Lots of great content shared across by folks like Francesca Cañas (With a wonderful case study on EndoBlocLleida ), Joan Torrent-Sellens (Talking about Organisations in the New Knowledge Economy), Sandra Sanz (I particularly enjoyed her presentation on "Elements to Cultivate Communities of Practice") and, finally, David Rodríguez Gómez (With another rather insightful presentation on Factors that Influence the Creation and Management of Knowledge).

The presentation I did can also be found in Slideshare at the following URL link, which I will be embedding over here as well, so, if you are interested, you can start playing it as you may see fit:

And if you are interested as well in listening to my pitch for this time around, in Spanish, of course, as mentioned above, here you have got the direct link to it and here is the embedded version:

The YouTube video clip lasts for a bit over 1 hour and 20 minutes, and my presentation starts around the 3rd minute or so. And from there onwards, you would be able to see what I have meant with "Social Networking for Business", as well as living "A World Without Email" all along…

Finally, if you would want to do some additional reading about the outcome of the presentation and several of its highlights I would recommend you take a look into the following wonderful blog posts put together by Marta Estella under "De com un dinosaure a la xarxa es converteix en pardal", Miquel Duran under "Compartim: organitzacions, participació i xarxes" (who included as well some of the live tweeting that went on during the presentations…) and Núria Vives Leal under "X Seminari Compartim" (All articles in Catalan), amongst several others … and which have been rather faithful in capturing some of the major highlights from the entire event. Thanks much, folks, for such wonderful blog posts!

(From here onwards, just wanted to take this opportunity to share a special thanks! with Jesús Martínez for his kind invitation to participate in such a fantastic event and for helping me feel at home in one of my favourite cities! Many many thanks, Jesús, for all your help and for your support! It’s very much appreciated! And hope to see you soon again!)

Tags: Compartim, Social Networking for Business, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Personal Knowledge Sharing, Jesus Martinez Marin, X Seminario Compartim, Department of Justice, Generalitat de Catalunya, Centre d’Estudis Jurídics i Formació Especialitzada, Francesca Cañas, Joan Torrent-Sellens, Sandra Sanz, David Rodriguez Gomez, Communities of Practice, Gestion del Conocimiento, Knowledge Economy, EndoBlogLleida, Conference Events, Events, Barcelona, Spain, Marta Estella, Miquel Duran, Nuria Vives Leal, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, email, Productivity, Re-purposing Email, No-Email, Challenge Your Inbox, Progress Reports, Thinking Outside the Inbox, Information Overload, A World Without Email, #awwe

Swisscom: Main Reason Why I Will Never Stay in an NH-Hotel. Ever!

In March, if you would still remember, I put together a blog post where I mentioned how it was about time for me to start putting a stop to the constant rip-off and the many frustrations that have become more and more evident by the day, when trying to stay connected, while I’m travelling on a business trip or while on vacation. In that article I mentioned how I was going to start black-listing those hotels that would surely not meet those standards of providing good quality Internet access, whether wi-fi or Ethernet, to their guests, specially even more when they advertise those very same services. Well, to that list I’d now need to add NH-Hotels. And all of them for that matter!

I bet you may be wondering why, right? Of course, due to an overall awful experience on the recent trip that I did to Barcelona, Spain, towards the end of June. One not to forget, for sure! I was even asked whether I wanted to fill in a form to submit an official complaint about it, and, eventually, I kindly declined it. Instead, here I am, on my own blog, sharing with you folks why I’ll no longer stay, ever, and I mean *ever*, in an NH-Hotel in any city in the world. And you know why? Because of a single keyword: Swisscom.

If you would ever want to go through one of the most excruciating, painfully exhausting, horrendously incompetent, appalling, uncommitted, uninvolved, amazingly frustrating experiences on wi-fi connectivity while in a hotel, please do stay for a couple of days in an NH-Hotel and you will have the full package! And big time!!

My experience got started on June 23rd, when I arrived into the NH Podium hotel in Barcelona itself. I knew already about these hotels as they provide really good quality service; staff is very very friendly and always very helpful. The hotel offers everything you would need and for really good prices, except for one little, minor thing: the wi-fi provided by Swisscom. That’s just so poor, it’s not even starting to make sense anymore! And here is why…

I knew that their prices were a complete rip-off, since I have stayed in other NH-Hotels in the past; but I thought it may well be a good opportunity to try things out once more and see whether things have changed. Oh, well, not very likely! Quite the opposite! Apparently, making use of Swisscom’s wi-fi means having to pay nearly 18 Euros per day (Yes, you are reading it right! 18 Euros per day!!). If you are going to stay for a week the total price for their wi-fi services is nearly 70 Euros for 7 days (Yes, indeed, 70 Euros!!!), which is nearly double the amount of what I pay myself back at home for an entire month! And no bandwidth limits nor connectivity issues!

Oh, yes, that’s the second problem… If you are going to provide a rather expensive wi-fi connection at your hotel based on the Swisscom service I would encourage you to come up to the standards and provide a good quality wi-fi connection, because otherwise it’s a complete disgrace having to pay 18 Euros per day for a connection that doesn’t reach 1.5 Mbps download / .48 Mbps upload. Yes, that’s what they would provide you, if you are lucky! Speedtest.net proved to be rather helpful in this regard.

Anyway, I needed to be connected, since I was there in Barcelona for a few days spending a couple of days off, but also working in between, so needed to find a way to stay connected during that week, so I decided to go for the full week package of 70 Euros. End result? Three days down on making use of it I had already spent a couple of hours, each day!, talking to their Customer Service Representatives, because I just couldn’t rather get connected nor keep the connection going. Yes, I realise I was on the 4th floor of the building and that this may have influenced it, but then again I had to do an important video conference that week, which I did from a hotel room on the first floor and that still went down a couple of times in over the course of 90 minutes! Not very helpful and adding further up into the frustrations already accumulated over the last couple of days.

Customer Service Reps were very very helpful & knowledgeable, but, unfortunately, their knowledge run out when they discovered it was an infrastructure problem they were not going to be capable of solving during my entire stay there! Can you believe that? 4 days to try to fix a poor Internet connection? Can you imagine having to run your business under such conditions knowing that each day you are paying a rather expensive fee for a service that’s not even there in the first place? No, I agree with you. I can’t either!

So, seeing how they weren’t going anywhere I decided to go and raise my concerns to the NH-Hotel staff, who in turn decided it was not their problem, because they had outsourced the wi-fi connectivity to Swisscom and it wasn’t their problem altogether. Well, it is! It’ is very much so your problem! After all, your are hiring them to provide your clients a service they are not giving and, as a customer, I come to your hotel, because I expect that service to work; otherwise I’d go elsewhere. Well, it didn’t happen. It was not their fault, it’s Swisscom’s and there is no escape for me to try to get some decent wi-fi connectivity.

I eventually gave up! I asked to have my money re-funded back into my bank account, since I couldn’t stand anymore the frustrating experience of having paid for an expensive service that was non-existent, to the say the least. And I did get that refund… 7 days later! Once I got back home! Very funny! Even funnier was the situation where I was told I could go and get connected to the Internet from the lobby and was also kindly provided with a 24h. voucher to connect to the wi-fi while in the lobby itself. Ok, things were looking up a bit. Well, if only they were…

I found out I couldn’t get to use the wi-fi from the lobby, because, even though I was told the first 30 minutes were free, it eventually wasn’t like that. Perhaps it was for their only one computer there hooked up to the Internet, but, hey, guess what? I want to use my own Mac to connect to the Internet. That’s where I have got most of my work related stuff! Makes sense, don’t you think? So I decided to give it a try with the 24h voucher and, to my surprise, the connection worked rather well, but it was a voucher of an uninterrupted 24h connection, not just the time I may have wanted to connect to the Internet. Since I was not planning on being there 24h straight on the Internet, I could only basically use it for 3 to 4 hours, before going into meetings and a walk through the city. The next day the voucher expired and was kindly asked to pay for a new fee. No, it didn’t happen. I refused to pay.

I decided to stop suffering from not having any connectivity, when I thought I should, and get over with the frustrations once and for all. I had better things to do, people to meet, places to check out, work to do, things to get done, other than spending whatever other time on the phone trying to solve these issues. Sorry, thought you had already wasted enough of my time and my patience.

That’s why I eventually spent the entire week mostly disconnected and relying on my iPhone 3G connection, which, those folks who have been using it themselves with Movistar for a while, would certainly come forward and tell you how reliable it is as of late… Not!! I am not sure how I managed to do it, but I eventually got along the remaining of the week connected here and there, but certainly not at the optimal level I was expecting from a service I already knew was expensive, but thought perhaps it may well be worth trying again.

Not going to happen. Ever. A couple of days after I arrived back home, I received an online feedback form from both Swisscom and NH-Hotels to provide some constructive feedback on what I thought my stay was like. And needless to say that I shared my ¢2. All the way. Even to the point where I stated, very clearly, why for as long as NH-Hotels have got a contract with Swisscom for their wi-fi connection in their hotel rooms I will never, ever, stay a single night in them. Would prefer to go elsewhere, even if they didn’t provide wi-fi in the first place. At least, I would know in advance.

A few days, after I sent along that feedback form, have gone by, and I’m still waiting for an answer, or even an acknowledgement, that they are already working on one of the most serious issues I bet they have from their overall hotel service. Because I bet I’m not the only one who’s had such horrendous experience with Swisscom alone. For sure! Either way, for me it was the last one. Like I said, I am not expecting any answer back, specially since I know I may be offered one of those lovely vouchers that expires before you even blink or get offered to stay at their hotel(s). Sorry, not again. Learned my lesson through the hard way and not ready to go through it once more. Life is just too short and I have got better things to do…

So, to me, NH-Hotels + Swisscom, from now onwards, would equal an overall frustrating experience I could do without… and I guess it’s about time that someone shouts out loud what’s obvious, at least, to those of us who have experienced it so far and who from now onwards, would claim that NH-Hotels + Swisscom = Blacklisted for good!

Tags: NH Hotels, Swisscom, Wi-Fi, Connectivity, Connection, Internet Connection, Customer Service, Service, Offerings, Customers, Clients, Complaints, Swisscom Sucks, NH Podium, Barcelona, Spain, Expensive Swisscom, Rip-Off, Hotels, Lack of Service, Movistar, iPhone, 3G, Mobility, Mobile Computing, Flexiwork, Smart Work, Decent Service, Swisscom Blacklisted, NH Hotels Blacklisted