This is an article by Misae Richwoods, Event editor of The NextWomen and organizer of #140conf meetup in London

Brussels is the seat of Europe and as such it has some unusual dynamics, such as:

• The population is multi lingual with the Flemish and French divide being bridged by English.


• The national mobile operators charge for handsets instead of providing it free with a contract and unlimited mobile internet hasn't happened here yet.


• At the same time there are world renowned global brands based here like Stella Artois.


• The architecture of the city marries the most delightful stone worked terraces of yesteryear with the stark modern lines of post-war reconstruction and the towering offices that deal with the endless red tape of globalisation.

Yes, Belgium is a more traditional country than the UK and yes, many things seem old fashion. Yet there was nothing backward thinking about the first #140conf meeting in Brussels which paneled an all female speaker line up!

An all female speaker line up at #140conf meetup in Brussels!

Having organised the #140conf meetup in London since last year, it was my pleasure to introduce the concept that real time media is a game changer for business and that we need to get a dialogue started about the changes it's going to create so that we can use them as a force for good.

Many of you will recall a time when mail order meant a 28 day delivery expectation. If you ordered from Tescos Online or Waitrose, how quick would expect your delivery? With timescales now down to hours rather than days, those who want to land on their feet when the dust settles had best get informed.

Do you remember what happened when Sony Walkman vs iPod and iTunes? What about VHS vs Ustream.tv, Geocities vs. WordPress, Hotmail vs Facebook, Amazon vs Borders - across so many industries, speed is changing the game. The #140conf - the state of now - is world's premier global discussion of real time internet and it's resultant game change and was started by Jeff Pulver, one of Twitter's first investors.

First up after me was Clo Willaerts, whom some readers may know as she's both part of The Next Women Belgium and is also the founder of Brussels Girl Geek Dinners. Clo is a marketing manager and wanted to share with others her frustrations with the way the marketing industry views it's prospects.

Digital online identity is about conversation"I am sick and tired," joked Clo, "of marketers treating us like a bunch of stupid cows. The traditional sales funnel is such an aggressive model, just like it's terminology: branding and targeting. Forcing us through the funnel is creating a lot of collateral damage. Where is the conversation?"

Clo wants to help both individuals manage their digital online identity better and help brands engage with them in more meaningful and skilled ways and sees Social Media Monitoring as a powerful means of doing that.

I shared a quick testimonial to that. At the last #140conf London, Paul Taylor told how he wrote a paper called 'Cold Calling is Dead'. It went viral and Social Media Monitoring giant Radian6 approached him, loving his evangelism of this more targeted approach, and asked if he'd set up a UK consulting arm. Paul is now the founding director of 6Consulting so be careful what you wish for as it just may come true!

Do Real Time Fairy Tales Happen? Such as the one about Sarah Killen?


Beate Vervaecke knew all about dreams coming true as she spoke of the Conan O'Brien and Lovely Button saga. Did you follow it? It's a real time fairy tale for one young girl that goes like this:

Conan is an American television presenter and some people found it funny that here was a man on Twitter with over half a million followers and yet he follows no-one. It's purely one way.

One day Conan tweets out he's going to follow someone at random and that person happens to be Sarah Killen, a young lady from the USA who tweets as @lovelybutton. She starts gaining followers at over 150 per minute! Within a day she gains over 25,000 followers and exchanges a couple of tweets with Conan. That's the last he ever mentions her, meanwhile she's now becoming famous in her own minor web celeb way.

21 year old Sarah starts tweeting out to her audience and soon becomes consumed by requests for interviews and tweets, falling behind in her school work, rarely leaving the house and hardly sleeping. She recommends a number of charitable causes. She went on to announce her marriage and people donated gifts including an iMac, a wedding dress from a New York designer and lots of wine, all in return for the publicity it got their business. Not bad being as she and her fiancée had apparently only saved $30 for the big day to date!

Was it all a clever contrived publicity stunt by Conan’s PR people or was it a true fairy tale of how a chance encounter with a celebrity can change one person’s life? The debate rages on with Killen hoping that O'Brien will be best man at her wedding, although he's not made any comment to her since her followed her and exchanged two tweets, furthering some people's view that it was an elaborate attention grab on his part.

Facebook is for Friends and Twitter for Business... or is it?

The Next Women Belgium's Christel De Mayer shared with us her experiences of using social media in Europe and the USA. Did you know that Facebook is very popular in the USA for business networking and promotion? In Europe it seems we only want to use it for keeping touch with friends and make LinkedIn and Twitter the dominant business communication networks. This point aroused the audience into such debate that we were eventually all ushered on to the after party as the conversation ran on an hour after the conference was supposed to have closed!

Sisters are a Force for Good in Our Social Future

It is rare in Belgium to see many female speakers in technology fields. At the first #140conf we had an entire conference line up of them from start to end with almost 70% of the participants being female. One of the lucky men to join us was Ramon Suarez, a Spanish entrepreneur and founder of the Webmission start up conference.

"I think it was wonderful," spoke Ramon. "I saw Inmaculada Martinez speak just last week at Plugg and I really feel women will be a driving force in this revolution".

Ramon's prophecy looks set to be fulfilled as there were a number of innovative Social Media professionals in the room, most of whom were female. Saskia Videler helps clients develop effective copy (that's even tougher than you think when one consider's Belgium's diverse languages) and is found on a list of social media sites that goes on and on - LinkedIn to Facebook, Twitter to Hyves.

"Social Media is still quite new here," she explained "although the Dutch have had a faster uptake. I was able to go to Picnic Festival and I was amazed at how much cool stuff is going on. I'm really hopeful that we can use these technologies to be a force for good in the world."

Saskia is like many of the women getting active in Social and Real Time right now - young, quick to learn, tech savvy and full of optimism for the world they are creating. Ann Marcelis, New Media Community Developer for Sweet Lemon, echoed that too.

"Anyone nowadays can have a voice," spoke Ann. "We can all make a difference. It's opened the doors for lots of new people and companies. And yet at the same time, the rate of change is incredible - it is hard for businesses to keep up".

Poignant words being as #140conf Brussels was hosted by Corelio, a local publisher of several print newspapers. I spoke with Yves Kallaert, who had arranged our stay.

"We never expected it to be like this," he said at some pain. "Once the Credit Crunch hit Belgium, advertising revenues just died as everyone went online."

Paper to Digital to Mobile is Splitting the Ecosystem

As a publisher of newspapers, Corelio represents a platform that had it's own ecosystem. Online we'd expect a separate website for each component - a dating site, a used car site, a classified ads site, the news headlines, celebrity gossip, the sports results, a property site and so on. Paper was the platform bring all these parts together for many years.

Even online, the original style of website in each of these genres is now under threat from mobile phone apps that allow a magazine to be created in real time, on the fly, from a user's preferences and location. It seems that pretty much everyone needs to take a good, hard look at their business model and the state of now and begin planning for how real time will alter the way they do business. Corelio are forward thinking in so much as they've realised they need to understand the implications of these technologies and start identifying key partners to work with. Hosting the debate enables them to get right into the middle of the conversation.

Thanks go to Corelio and The Creative Stores for being #140conf's enabling partners to bring this discussion to Belgium. If you are interested in how it might affect your future or how you can use it to disrupt other business models, there are #140conf debates going on in London and Brussels as well as New York, LA, Tel Aviv and elsewhere.

This article was written by Misae Richwoods, who currently runs MRMedia Group, a company specialising in helping start ups market themselves.