It's Open - Social Media Strategy Consultancy

Of the three main social networks, LinkedIn always seems to be trailing behind Facebook and Twitter somewhat when it comes to new advances in technology. Several years after Facebook introduced brand pages and the opportunity to post status updates from a company, LinkedIn has adopted the same service.

What this means is that a company can post short updates up to 500 characters long which can contain short links and media. This link will show up in the newsfeed of any followers.

In theory, with LinkedIn’s more serious and businesslike persona, this is a good opportunity for businesses to share more serious information. It could also make hiring new talent, sharing new products and sourcing information a lot easier too, without alienating customers.. Additionally, it may be more inviting to businesses that don’t want to deal with a lot of spam, abuse or advertising on their page.

For LinkedIn, I suspect this is a move to encourage users to visit more often, and stay for longer. On average, users visit the site 2.8 times per month and visits 29 pages a month. More interaction from brands could help increase traffic, both in frequency and length.

It still feels very much like a place we ‘should’ be, rather than ‘want’ to be, particularly as it lacks the lighthearted atmosphere Twitter offers, or the extensive network of friends and personal information Facebook boasts.

They are getting there though. Recent updates on the iPhone and iPad apps have made it far easier to use, and bloggers and PRs are catching onto the fact that LinkedIn can be a positive traffic source if they post the right content. In fact, Tech Crunch recently admitted that LinkedIn now beats twitter for referral traffic to their blog.

It’ll be interesting to see how they get on with this new feature.

Are you a regular LinkedIn user?

Source: SimplyZesty

Considering how big a part Twitter currently plays in the media world, and in our own lives, it’s hard to believe that it’s only been around since 2006. In that time, it’s covered some of the biggest news events such as Michael Jackson’s death, Beyonce announcing her pregnancy at the VMAs and the sad loss of Steve Jobs.

Often, we hear breaking news on Twitter before it reaches the main news channels.

It’s also home to celebs like Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Barack Obama and Katy Perry, who use it to communicate directly with their fans.

This infographic takes us through the history of Twitter, and outlines a few key demographics. Interestingly, it would seem men and women use it differently, with men using it for work-related research and news search, and women being more likely to use it to chat with friends and post status updates. Additionally, 47% of Twitter users are parents, which doesn’t seem like a huge shock considering the constantly growing market of parent bloggers on social media sites.

Source: Wall Blog

I am enthusiastic about my role on the panel of this week’s Social Workplace conference in London.

Success within business is going to come from those companies who have the most ‘compelling architecture of participation’. It will be those companies who design themselves to enable ideas to come from a multiple range of sources who will prosper in the new open networked world.

Those companies who use social networks to make it interesting, easy and rewarding for a wide range of contributors to offer ideas, solve problems and improve products will be the most successful.

Most companies still operate under the assumption that the best and biggest ideas come from a few individuals. But what happens when technologies move so quickly and rivals become so new numerous, no corporate executives can think of everything.

It is now time to use social technolognies within the workplace to invent a less top-down approach to innovation, to make it the responsibility of everyone within the company to come up with great ideas.

Occupy Wall Street and the protest camp outside St Pauls in London are being driven by deep-seated cultural changes on the web and the emergence of social media.

We are living in a more open and networked world which is rendering current models of government as anachronistic. The current model of Government is based on inert citizens. The web is introducing new forms of democracy, driven by the values of social media culture (sharing, collaborating etc), where we will see the emergence of more active citizens.

The challenge for the political class is to design and make accessible new ways/platforms for people to participate, co-produce and share ideas to improve society and the economy. Democratic methods must be aligned with the emerging values of the social web especially as the web becomes more pervasive in our lives.

In his new book Public Parts, Jeff Jarvis shares some wise advice about your online reputation.

‘Anything you put online is a tattoo. It’s permanent. It won’t go away. The web remembers. People may give you slack, but you can’t be assured they will,’ he writes.

It is a great way of thinking about what you decide to publish and share online. It deserves to make its way into some social media company guidelines.

Jeff Jarvis gained this sage advice from Philip Kaplan, co founder of Blippy.

Thinking again about whether or not we can trust Facebook with our data. Having spoken with Jeff Jarvis yesterday, on a call with the Social Media Leadership Forum, he emphasised that Facebook is a sharing platform. Sounds obvious, but it is, and therefore we need to get used to the idea of sharing.

He argues that some of the data capture issues are being ‘demonised’. He said that monitoring of usages of data was a lot more lax when he was working in traditional media, when it ruled the roost, in terms of selling lists of people’s addresses and so on.

I guess to an extent he is right. Facebook is a sharing platform, and therefore – and this goes for the internet as a whole – you need to think carefully about what you are sharing. Especially with gossipy friends!

Just picked up this simple video which clearly explains how social media changes the way businesses have traditionally communicated and the need to empower staff to respond via social media platforms.

Might be worth sharing the link with a senior exec who is a bit of a laggard!!

It’s refreshingly simple…

I have read a number of pieces lately suggesting that we are not Facebook customers. Instead we are their products for their advertising masters and that they care more about our social graphs than anything else. While they make our data open, they are not open about how they use our data and so on.

Douglas Rushkoff has an interesting piece about the key commercial drivers of the Facebook board.

And The Guardian has highlighted data issues that Facebook is facing including the launch of a European online campaign, calling for Facebook to be more open about the data it is holding on us and what it is doing with it. This was set up by someone from Ireland who discovered that Facebook still had controversial personal data which he had consciously deleted.

The Europe online Facebook campaign site is here.

Facebook is going to be have to be careful on the data issues. Even my teenage daughter (a Facebook diehard) complained the other day that it changes too much. I asked her if she would ever leave Facebook and she said no because everyone is there.

I like Facebook – it is changing the world in so many positive ways – look at some of the events in the Middle East, for example. I enjoy the easy connections with other people. It was great to get birthday greetings recently from old school friends around the world via Facebook.

However the extent to which our data is being used by all these exciting new social technologies needs to be explored and monitored. We are busy using it and there needs to be proper protection in place.

Facebook wants us to be open with our data. Then it should be open too about how it is using our data. Sounds reasonable to me.

Gawker has published a piece looking at the ‘dark side’ of Steve Jobs. While Gawker praises the incredible achievements of Steve Jobs, it argues for a more rounded assessment before people rush to emulate him. Here are are a couple of extracts.

Steve Jobs and his staff:

‘Before he was deposed from Apple the first time around, Jobs already had a reputation internally for acting like a tyrant. Jobs regularly belittled people, swore at them, and pressured them until they reached their breaking point. In the pursuit of greatness, he cast aside politeness and empathy. His verbal abuse never stopped. Just last month Fortune reported about a half-hour “public humiliation” Jobs doled out to one Apple team:

“Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continued, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?” “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,” he told them. “You should hate each other for having let each other down.”

Jobs ended by replacing the head of the group, on the spot.

In his book about Jobs’ time at NeXT and return to Apple, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, Alan Deutschman described Jobs’ rough treatment of underlings:

He would praise and inspire them, often in very creative ways, but he would also resort to intimidating, goading, berating, belittling, and even   humiliating them… When he was Bad Steve, he didn’t seem to care about the severe damage he caused to egos or emotions… suddenly and unexpectedly, he would look at something they were working on and say that it “sucked,” it was “shit.”‘

Dealing with negative bloggers:

‘It (Apple) has a fearsome legal team that is not above annihilating smaller prey. In 2005, for example, the company sued 19-year-old blogger  Nick Ciarelli for correctly reporting, prior to launch, the existence of the Mac Mini. The company did not back down until Ciarelli agreed to close his blog ThinkSecret forever. Last year, after our sister blog Gizmodo ran a video of a prototype iPhone 4, Apple complained to law enforcement, who promptly raided an editor’s home.

And just last month, in the creepiest example of Apple’s fascist tendencies, two of Apple’s private security agents searched the home of a San Francisco man and threatened him and his family with immigration trouble as part of a scramble for a missing iPhone prototype. The man said the security agents were accompanied by plainclothes police and did not identify themselves as private citizens, lending the impression they were law enforcement officers.’

I have just finished reading Julian Assange’s unofficial autobiography, where he provides a fascinating insight into the mind and activities of a global hacker.

Here he talks about hacking into Nortel:

‘From Melbourne, I had commandeered, or hijacked, forty computers housed in Canada, with the intention of bombarding Nortel with guesses as to their passwords. The program I’d designed could throw 40,000 guesses per second. Eventually we got in and it was like walking inside the Sistine Chapel at midnight. You could look at all the expertise, all the evidence of civilisation, and notice their methods, their habits, their corners of liturgy and mystery. We had root control within that systems and could have transferred money or sold their commercial secrets. But we did none of those things….

‘One night I realised I was being watched. It was 2.30am and a Nortel system administrator was on to us. I tried for an hour to circumvent his inspections, block his way, all the while deleting the incriminating directory and walking backwards, clearing the path of my footprints. The adminstrator had been logged on from home, but after a break he appeared at the main Nortel console. He had gone into work. I was now in trouble: you can only obfuscate for so long, and I could no longer block this guy. He had me. Well, he didn’t have me right there and then: it was still cat and mouse….’

‘I typed: ‘It’s been nice playing with your system.’ Pause. Nothing. Pause…. I typed again…

‘We didn’t do any damage and we even improved a few things. Please don’t call the Australian Federal Police.’

‘For several years we had been Houdini-like and had invented ways to deepen our own escapological nature.’