This weekend The Netherlands (and many other countries too, but for the purpose of example I'll stick to NL) experienced something that happens only every few years. We had up to 25 centimeters of snow, which is unusual for us, so it disrupts life significantly. On sunday, buses and trains were canceled, destinations became unreachable, and at Schiphol airport alone, over 700 people had to spent the night because it was impossible to get anywhere.

Snow continued to fall Sunday evening, so this morning most news outlets expected chaos in traffic. The Ibuildings Netherlands offices already advised all its staff to work from home on Monday, but not every company is able to tackle it that way, so the number one question for many people this morning was: "Will I be able to get to work?". The answer to the question should be simple: either trains and buses ride normally, they have delays, or they don't ride at all. Still, many of the Dutch public transport companies struggled to get that information across. Read on for an overview and an analysis, using the public transport companies of the Dutch major cities as an example of how important it is to do 'peak management'.

At the moment, Wikipedia's list of content management systems features 137 unique CMS products. 59 of these are written in PHP.

And that's only the ones that Wikipedia finds 'notable', which means these are the ones that have significant usage or large enough communities to be mentioned. There's at least twice the amount that aren't notable, and if we count all the CMS systems that many web development agencies produce, then there's a whole lot more CMS systems out there.

In an article that was recently published by Finextra, we can read that spending on social media is on the increase. While this is an interesting article and I agree with their conclusions, they do not help managers decide on what to spend on social media and how. To avoid imminent Dilbertesque "hey, I've read that we should increase our social media expenditure, make it so." scenarios, I’m providing an overview of how I think social media should be approached.

What are social media?

Perhaps a question everybody knows the answer to, but since I encounter quite a few people that have heard the term but can't name an example of social media, here's a short answer anyway: social media are internet sites and applications where the core functionality revolves around the social interactions between people. The most well-known examples are Facebook and Twitter, but there are many more applications. Often these are targeted at a particular niche, to bring together people with similar interests or to promote collaboration. Wikipedia and Last.fm are examples of social media too. Where web 1.0 was about information, web 2.0 and social media in particular is about people.