November 28, 2011

The other social network…

Don’t get lost in all the hoopla about Twitter, Facebook and Google+ so much that you forget about one of the most valuable social networking sites on the Internet – LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is the de facto standard business social network. As such, it’s very clean, focused, and easy to use. Sure, it doesn’t have a lot of facilities for easily sharing photos, videos, and other multimedia. That’s part of the charm. It’s pretty much strictly business.

Without a lot of clutter from non-business-related posts, you can really see what’s going on. Users of the network tend to update their information less frequently too. Another bonus! You can really see what’s going on with someone by browsing down their profile just a bit. All the highlights and not much fluff.

Digging In

If you want to dig in, you can explore the Answers section. I’ve experimented with that in the past, with some good results. There can be some real gold in the Groups section as well. Find an interesting and lively group or start one of your own.

Update your profile!

But, if you do anything today on LinkedIn, let it be a quick update of your own profile. Add a photo (yes, that’s the standard now on LinkedIn; if you don’t have one up, your profile looks odd and outdated), update your experience (even if you’ve not changed jobs, tweak your summary and specialties areas), and put up a new status update (you must have at least one interesting thing to share).

Connect and Re-connect

Find five friends and invite them to join your network. The “People You May Know” feature keeps getting better and better at finding those you should be connecting or re-connecting with.

Do you and I know each other from this blog, Twitter, or Facebook? Let’s connect.

Recommendations

Another good exercise to run through periodically on LinkedIn is to go through your list of existing contacts. Find those you’ve worked with recently, or even a while back, and consider writing a brief recommendation (if you’ve got good things to say). And, if you come across someone who might be able to write a good recommendation for you – ask.

A good place to visit regularly

Don’t let this “other social network” be left out of your loop. Visit LinkedIn regularly. You may just find that it’s as engaging and rewarding as the more “hip” social networks. Or even more so, particularly for business.

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July 11, 2011

5 Things CIOs need to know about Google Plus

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock somewhere, you know that Google has launched yet another social media platform.

If you’ve been slow to examine Facebook or Twitter, this may seem like another ho-hum development. After all, there is some sort of social media network or tool being launched daily, and that’s all the marketing department’s purview anyway.

Well, Google Plus is different. Here are a few things you need to know.

  1. It’s taking off like wild fire. Though no official numbers are released, estimates are well into the millions – and it’s just been out for just over a week, and it’s only in limited, invite-only “field test” mode. Also, the level of engagement is (for now, at least) much higher than other platforms. People who are on the network are spending a lot of time there and very actively engaging with one another.
  2. It really is different. Google Plus is not another Facebook. Though it’s similar in many ways to other popular platforms, it’s different in significant ways. The fundamental model of sharing is new. Google circles allow for easy and refined sharing. Users don’t have to think in big blocks like Facebook personal updates and LinkedIn for professional connections. Google+ allows for more targeted sharing for the variety of groups of people connections that can better mimic real life (certain things are public, certain just for family, certain for the school PTO members or cycling club or work friends). There are many more differences, but this is the big one.
  3. It will increase use of other Google products. The Google Plus project is clearly part of a major initiative at Google, but it’s not just another product. As even the brand name indicates, the ambition here is much more far-reaching. Several tweaks have been released to other products like Gmail and the Google Calendar, and more are to come. Google’s Picasa and Blogger brands are going to go away, with the features rolled into Google Plus. And there is a new navigation bar that is drawing people to features they maybe haven’t used much or at all in the past. So, be prepared for photos, documents, and emails to start flowing through the Google infrastructure. Tech savvy users will soon discover how fluid and easy things can be shared on the platform, with each other, with vendors, with customers. This may present a compliance nightmare, or an opportunity to get a critical mass behind a move to Google Apps. It will at least start some interesting conversations.
  4. It’s multi-party video sharing feature is killer. Maybe you’ve spent the money on a big, high-quality video conferencing system for executives. There’s a special room, a certain protocol, and tech support required to ensure calls are setup and run smoothly. Consider a more dynamic and informal model and take a look at Google Plus Hangouts, the part of the system that allows for easy, webcam-based multi-party video conferencing. Up to 10 users can collaborate instantly and easily. And it’s feature to automatically feature the current speaker in the main window while showing all users in smaller windows below is slick and intuitive, helping to make everyone more comfortable on the platform – thinking less about how to work it and more about simply collaborating. And, it’s free.
  5. Even your iPad users can get on board. While Google and Apple continue to duke it out on the mobile front in the Android versus IOS battle, keep in mind that the Google+ platform is accessible via a web page. It’s supported on iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Symbian, and Windows Mobile platforms via the web browser.

Take a look at Google Plus to get a sense of the future, which seems to be arriving rapidly. Sure, it may fail like other big bets by Google (remember Wave and Buzz?), but even if it does it’s an experiment that’s worth watching and learning from.

Filed Under: Google+, Technology Tagged With: , , , , , , 1 Comment
July 8, 2011

Google Plus and the advantage of a fresh start

Standing on the shoulders of giants

Social media is a new concept, and in many ways we’re still trying to figure out how it works. How it does work, how it could work, how it should work. How it impacts the human experience, how it changes business, and how it all might evolve in so many unpredictable ways.

Then again, we have a lot of experience in social media too. The Facebook experiment has spread so far and wide that it gives us a broad view of the potential impact social media can have. How deeply immersed it can become in culture, how you can learn more about people online than in person, and how concerns (and lack of concern) over privacy can shape our behavior.

Twitter put a different spin on things. Ease of use, a stronger focus serendipity over permanence, and the value of limiting features taught us new lessons in how people like to interact, spread news and ideas, and congregate in real time.

All the while LinkedIn chugged along, slowly but surely luring the oldest of old school folks into the fray, showing that over time even the most conservative people will share information, open their networks, and gather online to talk shop. A contact manager that evolved into business conversations, this platform teaches a lot about the buttoned-down side of social networking.

A fresh start

Now, Google Plus enters the fray. Too late to the game, many say. And, a proven failure in the space – just look at Google Wave and Buzz. And they are a search company, after all, with a few side products like gmail that sort of fit in loosely to that model. A model that seems at risk from Not only direct competitors like Microsoft Bing, but also to the closing off of so much of the web’s content to private social networks.

But, Google has some real advantages.

First, they can learn from the last seven years of collective social media experience. Facebook showed us the way, but their reputation on bad privacy practices and the cheesiness of the gaming environment are still keeping many off the platform. Twitter’s choice to open up to third party clients and subsequent attempts to reclaim the end user clients as it’s business model evolves shows us that it’s hard to change direction on some of those early strategies once you have such a massive user base. Foursquare shows a glimpse of the potential of the local play. LinkedIn’s IPO showed the value of social media, in dollars and cents.

All of these lessons can now be leveraged by Google, who have deep pockets, a determination to organize the world’s information, a willingness to make bold moves, and a willingness to kill initiatives when they don’t work. All this, while standing on the shoulders of giants, leaves them in a great position to make a significant play in social media.

Filed Under: Google+, Social media Tagged With: , , , , , 1 Comment
June 17, 2011

Tweets should stay on Twitter, a rant

Twitter is awesome. It’s fast, fun, and flexible. You can connect personally and professionally with a wide variety of people from all over the world, in real time. Short updates make it both easy to share and to digest information exchanges. These all flow into a stream of chatter that is valuable in many ways. Until it spills over to other platforms.

Even though Facebook is also made up of streams of usually short updates, most people don’t update it as often as Twitter. Where Twitter is all about what’s happening right now, Facebook feels more like what is happening today or in the last couple of days (after filtering out all the Farmville-type updates, of course). A single photo, link, or text update usually summarizes a lot of information. Maybe a few updates come in spurts, but nothing like Twitter. Which is why it’s so annoying when people establish a direct link between Twitter and Facebook, sharing every tweet on Facebook and clogging up the stream, making it harder to see what other friends are up to.

Perhaps even more disruptive is the Twitter to LinkedIn link. LinkedIn is a much quieter, more conservative platform than Twitter or Facebook. It’s pretty much just about business, and the updates are far less frequent and far more focused on business-related issues. When a Twitterer spews every tweet over to LinkedIn, it seems even more annoying. It’s even harder to see what others are saying or sharing, and the tweets seem even more out of context.

Sure, the occasional cross-over tweet, done with some thought and consideration, is perfectly fine. Sometimes there is an update that’s appropriate to multiple forums. That makes sense. But, the direct and constant connection seems to be all about the sender without consideration for the reader or the decorum of the platform.

One some level, I think I get it. You know different people on different platforms. And users of each platform don’t necessarily use the others, so you want maximum reach. But, as a heavy and regular users of all of the platforms, it’s very annoying to see the same updates (all of them) multiple times, in multiple places while making it harder for me to see others.

What do you think? How do you use these platforms? What do you see in your various update streams?

Photo credit: futurowoman

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September 2, 2010

Experimenting with LinkedIn Answers

Lately I’ve been experimenting with LinkedIn Answers, a section of LinkedIn for asking and answering business questions (no selling, advertising, recruiting or job searching allowed). So far, I’ve answered 22 questions on a variety of topics. Nine of those answers have been tagged as “good” by the person who asked the question, and two more have been labelled as the “best answer” among the responses. So, I’m batting .500 overall with a couple of home runs.

Right there is a little bit of the magic of LinkedIn Answers. People provide thanks and confirmation that you’ve helped them through the rating system. Many also write a personal note of thanks or follow up the conversation via email. It feels good to know you’ve helped someone, and that encourages more participation in the system (at least it does for me).

It’s fun and productive to help people. It’s also interesting to learn about the challenges facing other organizations around the world. Through this process I’ve chatted with folks from all over the US, Canada, India, Singapore, the U.K., British Columbia, and Japan about topics ranging from Non-profit management to Internet marketing to tips on using LinkedIn.

I’m still feeling my way around this part of LinkedIn, but I can tell you that it is very active. It’s also very interesting how the system seems to prioritize the questions you see based on your network. Those more closely linked to you seem to float to the top. It also learns what sort of questions you like to answer and encourages you to go deeper in those areas.

This sort of personalization feels very natural. And once you’re in that flow, you end up helping a lot of people and keeping a finger on the pulse of the challenges people face in your area of expertise. A couple of nice by-products are the many opportunities to expand your network and show off your expertise a bit, which helps enrich your profile (more on that in another post).

LinkedIn Answers is well worth exploring. Go check it out.

Photo credit: coletivomambembe

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