I hate cars. Stupid piece of scrap metal that starts breaking down the moment you fork out half your life savings to buy one. This post is however not a rant on the stagnated automobile industry but rather the glorious extent of my social network.

It seems like since the financial meltdown in Iceland, people have stopped abandoning their cars when they run out of gas and buy new ones. Mechanics will have to keep our cars running for the foreseeable future and seem to be struggling to keep up. Me thinking that I could just pop into some garage and have the family car fixed before the holidays, but no. Two week waiting time at the 3 shops that I could think off before my first cup of coffee this morning.

Time for some crowdsourcing.

As this was a very local problem, I decided to take it to my facebook crowd in Icelandic.

My first post was more of a rant really. But ended up in a conversation between the CEO and CTO of CCP, MD of Loftleiðir Icelandic and the equivalent  of Kevin Rose in Iceland (Helginn.net) ranting about the state of Iceland and the industry.

My second attempt was a shotgun tactic with updates both to facebook and twitter.

This time around my facebook family decided to point out the fact that half of my cousins are mechanics. Problem is that they tend to be just as busy, if not more when I call them. I used up most of my favors when trying to keep my cars running during the university years. Arney cleverly pointed out that Gulla is going mental over the state of our car.

Gyða saved the facebook crowd by posting her cousins garage facebook page with the comment that he was probably too busy but worth the try. But she is a super smart computer scientist, so she doesn’t count in this experiment.

So much for facebook, but my trusted network of Twitter friends had me sorted in no time. Three solid recommendations with URLs and personal contacts later, my car is going in tomorrow morning.

There is a lesson in there somewhere.

In all, I got about 15 responses to my cry for mechanic help. Most of the facebook stuff was rubbish. Twitter rocked, even got calls from people trying to help. All the good recommendations came from happy customers with URLs to their trusty companies.

…. so companies: Treat your clients well, have a solid presence online and be active on the social interwebs.

…. people: crowdsource the questions to life, universe and everything.

…. and check out Bíla Áttan, they squeezed me in and I’ll report on how it goes…. on Twitter.

If none of this makes sense, I apologize. My company Agora.is researching this heavily at the moment and I can’t think or blog about anything else.

Companies are realizing that there might be some value in a solid social media strategy while the Icelandic advertising agencies don’t seem to meet the demand.

Community managers are a scarce resource on our island but I’ve compiled a short list. Mainly to save some time when I need to pull the info next time.

It is an open spreadsheet for editing so feel free to add to it.

At the time of writing it contains:

Þetta er fyrsti bankinn á Twitter og eitt af fyrstu fyrirtækjunum sem hlustar og svarar (augljóslega séð fyrirlesturinn minn)

Þetta fór af stað með smá skotum en mér finnst bankinn hafa staðið sig vel í að svara og dæmin tala bara sínu máli: (lesist bottom up)

No real surprises there, similar to the US except for the proportionally larger representation of 16-20 year olds.

The age distribution is similar to other countries but I expected a higher female proportion. Clickity click and numbers from theNational Registry shed some light. We have roughly 47% of the male population and 57% of the female population on Facebook

The numbers you get from Facebook are all rounded and rough estimates but still an interesting exercise. I published the Google Spreadsheet for those interested in taking this further.

Just the thought of having a social media task force in matching uniforms on a Hummer with a theme tune would be awesome. But having the Icelandic government actually consider it would be enough for now I guess. Here are some ideas we can nick from our friends from down under.

We have had some activity here in Iceland regarding Open Data and Creative Commons. We should outright copy the Mashup Australia competition.

After the National Assembly meeting I’ve been dreaming about something like the Gov 2.0 task force suggestion box for Iceland. Today I actually heard some rumors we might be seeing something similar soon from the grass roots. Having the Government involved would make it a valuable two way communication tool between the public and parliament.
The Australian task force has a Blog and a list of interesting projects. They also set up Twitter and Facebook but with limited benefits according to the report.

There is some action on that front here in Iceland too as theMinistry of Industry recently set up a facebook page and is actually maintaining it.

Framsókn

174 members, 2 discussion topics and 11 wall posts

Frjálslyndi flokkurinn

I could not find an official group but the youngsters have 12 fans and a couple of photos from last October

Vinstri Grænir

128 members and 7 wall posts

Samfylkingin

Again, no official group but the local branch in Akureyri launched a group yesterday and have 21 members, 2 discussion topics and 15 photos.

Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn

217 members, 2 wall posts, 1 photo and 2 videos.

To contrast this, Appelsínugulir (orange) a group of peaceful protesters created a group last week and at the point of writing this, have 16915 members, 7 discussion threas, 165 wall posts, 24 photos and 11 posted items.

One of my last tasks at VYRE was to produce a White Paper on applying social web patterns behind the firewall. I touch on social web authoring patterns, social web elements and polish it off with some relevant case studies.

It is an ongoing crusade which was the basis for my talk at IceWeb and can be summarised with this paragraph:

Raise your hand if your company IP is largely kept in spreadsheets and word documents on shared drives or in the black hole which is the Email server. This is the case for most companies and the only way to get work done is to find the person that can navigate the file vault or to have a meeting to tackle an issue that has been solved a number of times before.

You need to jump through a form to get the download link. You can also check out the slides from Iceweb, but they won’t make much sense without my notes. The IBM dude is cool though.