Jane's blog

Hello dear reader!

For most of the people summer holiday is almost over. Mine is yet to start. I’ve worked all summer and now I will get my well-deserved days off! I’m working out my holiday plans for the coming period. At first I wasn’t really looking forward to committing myself to anything due to never ending changing circumstances but now I’m getting hope again and joy in the fact that I can decide and do all I want by myself.
So what’s the planning I hear you say? Since it’s not 100% arranged yet I will not tell you the details at this moment in time. To me it’s part of the excitement to build up this story to you in the next coming weeks. What I do want to share with you is that it’s a combination of adventure and pure relaxing combined with luxury! Wow wow wow, looking so much forward to it! It will be a huge challenge but I know I can do it and that it will be more than worth the preparations!

Here comes the kick-ass girl from Utrecht!
Love to you all – Xxx

Social networking sites.. I have wondered myself why we put so much time of our days in them. Also, I’m interested in discovering how people are using these, and -more importantly- whether they are using them in different ways. Some integration tools appeared in the last couple of months that allow you to post something in the portal and post it to all your separate sites. This has always struck me as an impersonal way of updating a status mainly because of this nagging belief I have that different audiences really don’t want the same message.

Twitter – in the main it is just noise. Apparently the mix of business, pleasure, commentary, links, reviews and randomness seems to work. I experience it like a soap series. You put on your television because you are bored, see what’s on. If it’s interesting then you reply. If not, you put it out and it will disappear from your profile – that’s how it works with the real time posts.

Facebook – ?I think I am concluding that it serves little point from a business point of view. From a keeping in touch aspect it might serve some point, however I’m fairly sure I don’t really have 500 friends and I expect a fair number of them couldn’t care less what I’m doing anyway. For me Facebook is purely to maintaining existing friends and maybe some new contacts, but certainly not a place to show off.

LinkedIn – Does anyone ever read status updates on it? If so why? What are they looking to get from it. It’s business orientated so linking Twitter to it is pointless for most Tweets, the groups I read are so slow moving as to be almost moribund. Also, I can’t believe that my hard-working co-professionals do have time to constantly check linked-in post during working hours. My own experience is that I only check it a couple of times a week. Very little compared to the more open to direct communication on Facebook. As on any site counts: the more traffic the more chance that there’s more and therefore probably useful communication.

All in all I’m not sure what this post is about now but perhaps it is saying treat individual networks? as just that individual, try to target the people you are communicating with information that is relevant to them and where they are reading it.

Important lesson for this week: Don’t think you can be smarter than the revenue management people from the airline. Remember that you can’t fly the second stretch of your journey without having flown the first stretch! It will be invalid and you will be refused even though you have paid for it. Review your journey again if you are planning on keeping out one of the stretches!