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Bye Bye Blackline - Long Live Leads United

Pieter — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 14:39:11 +0000

Dear Blackline followers,

The past months have been busy for us. We have been working on the live blogging of a conference in the transport sector, launching a Facebook and Twitter channel for eBay.be, organising in-house executive trainings and university introductions,…

Ever since introducing Blackline two years ago, our purpose has been to eventually integrate its services in our day-to-day work at Leads United. Since we were successful in our efforts, the time has now arrived to not only fully integrate Blackline’s services, but the company as a whole into the Leads United portfolio. This means we will seize the Blackline blog mid-February.

With this, we close an important chapter for us, but we open the door to a new one. If you want to know what social media can do for your internal and external communications, do not hesitate to get in touch with us via @leadsunited, hello@leadsunited.com or +32-3-466 01 88.

Best regards

Dian Wahlen, Managing Director
Pieter De Wit, Consultant

Joint forces

Pieter — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:29:12 +0000

Being a communications professional, I mostly talk about social media with other professionals, be it in marketing, corporate communications, internal communications, ... One question arises quite often during these conversations: how do we measure ROI? This is a very relevant question especially from a marketing perspective.

And apparantly not only for communication- but also for IT-specialists, as I recently found out at a seminar about social media aimed at IT professionals. However, questions there did not include ROI, but were more about the best tools to use when implementing social media ‘what wiki should we use?', 'which blogging platform best allows measuring impact?', etc... These are also valid questions: IT professionals mostly are aware of how to measure the online impact, but they want to make sure they implement the software that most easily allows measurement later on. That is, of course, because they are the people the communication department will turn to when wanting to know the ROI of their social media efforts.

Now imagine what happens when you combine the knowledge of an IT-professional with that of a communications specialist....

When they combine forces, any social media project will have a higher chance of success. Together, they know exactly what to say, what platform to use to spread the message and will be able to track impact afterwards.

So, if you are a communications professional thinking of setting up a social media project, have a chat with your IT department first. Chances are, they will have good advice and come up with questions and tips you hadn't even thought about. It has definitely proven to work for us ;-).

Student research on the use of social media increases

Pieter — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 10:28:56 +0000

If the amount of student research would be a reliable indicator, we are in for a wave of social media outreach programmes. Over the course of a number of months, I have seen a rise in information requests from communication and PR students who are researching social media for external communicatons purposes.

The requests came via numerous ways. Two girls did face 2 face interviews. I remember some email invites. Then there was a link to a questionnaire via Twitter early this week. On top of that, 3C and IAB support a research questionnaire for a Master student (if you wish to participate, you can still fill in your answers here). And then I am probably forgetting some others.

Judging by the questions that are being asked, it seems that we have come a long way from the first researches towards use of social media in Belgium. Hopefully this also means business is getting ready for a professional use of the different tools.

Regards,

Pieter