Saara Laaksonen and the X-Cell project continued

I promised to write more about Saara Laaksonen. She is involved in a X-Cell project. I go to the project home page.

"Still wondering what X-Cell is about? Limited resources, knowledge and time stop people from embracing social media and digital innovation. X-Cell is testing, piloting and presenting new social media solutions to better respond to the needs of organizations, educational system and companies."

1. Limited resources
2. Knowledge
3. Time
   

Are these valid excuses for not getting involved with Social Media?

Saara Laaksonen presents the X-Cell project on her blog: "The work we’re doing includes testing and presenting new social media solutions for the purposes of local and regional organizations, schools and companies."

Target groups are:

1. Local organizations
2. Regional organizations
3. Schools
4. Companies
   

Who is Saara Laaksonen? My first thought was that she was from Turku. The reason was simple, she sent a Twitter note while on the train to Turku. Is that right? Anyway, Turku isn't the place where she is working. The location is Kauhajoki. Yesterday I leraned more about her. She is associated with Andrea Vascellari. That's why Saara tells about her projects and intentions on Seesmic.

"I think the possibilities that social media and web 2.0 offer are endless and I’m really excited about this project. In general the companies are really interested in the web 2.0 and social media tools in this region but the biggest problem to get them use these tools is TIME, the lack of time," writes Saara.

Andrea and myself have been blogging, Twittering and Jaikuing about the slow entry of Small and Medium Size Enterprises = SME's to Web 2.0, Social Media, and collaborative network applications. That's not unique for Finnish SME's. We can see the same trend all over Europe. I also remember someone from Australia commenting that Aussies are four years behind US in the use of blogs and social media.

Why is that? The United Europe is still a long term dream. We're still divided into numerous national states. EU-wide collaboration faces cultural, linguistic, and social barriers. Technology isn't a central issue anymore, but TIME might be interpreted as "I'm not interested, YET."

Social Media is still something for a small minority. This time it isn't the programmers and geeks but people with a social mindset. People who understand the deeper meaning of collaboration. Social Media requires a modern way of thinking. I think Saara Laaksonen and Andrea Vascellari are good examples of people with modern mindsets.

We need to set some examples and show the benefits of social networking. I guess companies want to get measurable results. Any ideas about how to produce the numerics?

Saara Laaksonen at saaralaaksonen.com

I learned about Saara Laaksonen through Twitter. Here is a short quote from her blog.

saaralaaksonen.com: "The X-Cell Project Written on 11 July 2008 by Saara Laaksonen.

At the moment I’m working on a project called X-Cell. The work we’re doing includes testing and presenting new social media solutions for the purposes of local and regional organizations, schools and companies. The project is going on pretty well. We have for example agreed to do this pilot case with local schools in which at least two groups of students will be testing the use of a virtual computer as a part of the course they are studying.

I think the possibilities that social media and web 2.0 offer are endless and I’m really excited about this project. In general the companies are really interested in the web 2.0 and social media tools in this region but the biggest problem to get them use these tools is TIME, the lack of time. The thing is that it might be easy and fast to take new tools in use but if you don’t do anything with them or don’t use them right, the tools are pretty much useless and you won’t get any benefit out of using them. BUT, if you put a little bit of time and effort in using them, you might get good results out of those tools."

I'll write more about SL later.