(Nederlandse versie)

This spring I took a wine course, comparable to level WSET-3, together with my girlfriend. To bring the theory into practice, we spent the past 2 weeks on holiday in France to visit two major wine areas: Burgundy and the south of the Rhone valley. A wine-themed vacation. Here are some of our tips and tricks, do’s and don’ts.

Burgundy

Week 1 was in the town of Beaune, right in the middle in the Cote d’Or. Beaune is an ideal home base to explore the region. Even by foot: If you walk out of the village towards the west, you’ll be between the grapes right away. Burgundy = wine, that’s very clear. And Burgundy is pinot noir and chardonnay, two grape varieties you’ll get to know intimately if you stay here for a week.

Today is the sad day that Steve Jobs died. I want to share a personal story about how his words, simple as they are, have motivated me recently.

I’ve watched his Stanford speech, which I will embed below, several times in the past year. But like most people who watch this, I merely loved it, and didn’t act on it. Until this summer. When I was on holiday, I made a note in my iPhone, which is paraphrasing Steve, I think from the D8 interview.

Going to work should be motivated by a will to do something amazing, to build great products.

According to the Condorcet theorem, bigger crowds do better. If each individual independently decides with the same probability, the collective reaches ’the right’ decision fast. If the individuals can connect, the collective behavior can become very rich and complex. See Linux, wikipedia.

But on social networks, there is no collective ‘goal’ besides connecting, recreation. Still, the chatter can predict the box office receipts. And Google search terms shows where people have flu, better than any medical database. It is also shown that happiness and loneliness is contagious; if many people in your network are lonely, you feel more lonely too.

I’ve been playing with Google+ for a few days now, and find myself thinking: Is this going to be the platform? Are people going to flock to this social network, replacing Facebook and maybe Twitter?

While I was on my bike, riding in the dutch mountains (aka headwind), I thought of a way to look at this, by comparing this to other succesful sites and why they became succesful. I think the reason for the success of many online services is: they make things easier. Easier to communicate, to express yourself, to find things. Let’s look at a few carefully picked examples ;–)

Step 1: Getting acquanted

KLM started with social media to support existing channels. Try things out, like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. Get started first.

Step 2: seizing the opportunity.

The ash cloud was a good opportunity to get started with Twitter and Facebook. Call centre and web site were both overloaded. Had a 24/7 shift system, 4 people on Twitter, 4 on Facebook, 4 rebookers per shift. Management was very involved, encouraged initiatives. Very empowering. Klm added a ‘rebook’ tab on their Facebook profile, which helped in getting the right information from the travelers.

KLM discourages personal reactions by individual staff members. The company often can not do anything with it, and it can give a negative backlash on Klm. See recent incident with Thomas Acda