Eileen's Social Technology

Social Business, Social Media: Getting it right

Microsoft releases global survey results on ‘Enterprise social’ adoption

Microsoft have released an interesting infographic about productivity and how workers perceive that social tools will benefit them in the workplace.

Microsoft recently commissioned a global study asking 9,908 information workers in 32 countries what social tools they’re using, the value they’re seeing, and what barriers they’re encountering.

The results show that employees across the globe are interested and excited by enterprise social tools and are taking social tools to work with them, even if it goes against company protocol. The survey results are detailed in this deck and summarised in the infographic below:

Research highlights include:

  • Nearly half of employees report social tools at work help increase their productivity; but
    • More than 30% of companies underestimate the value of the tools, often restricting their use.
  • More than 40% of employees feel there isn’t enough collaboration in their workplaces, and that social tools could foster better teamwork; as a result
    • 33% say they are willing to spend their own money to buy social tools.

There are interesting statistics about the way that men and women differ in their adoption of social tools:

  • Men are more likely than women to attribute higher productivity levels to social tools in a professional setting.
  • Women are more likely than men to believe their company restricts the use of social tools.
  • Men are more likely than women to say these restrictions are due to security concerns, while women are more likely to blame productivity loss.

Different industry sectors had concerns about social tools adoption too:

  • Financial services and government employees are most likely to say their company places restrictions on the use of social tools, likely due to the high level of regulation in those sectors.
  • Professionals in financial services (74 per cent) and government (72 per cent) are more likely than those in other fields to say these restrictions are due to security concerns,
  • Professionals those working in retail (59 per cent) and travel and hospitality (57 per cent) are more likely to blame productivity loss.

There are some interesting responses in the data and a validation that Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer was in line with its future direction to securing its place in the market as a social business increasing team collaboration and ‘drive business value’ for organisations.

Eileen is a social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

May 31, 2013 Posted by | Social Business | , , | Leave a Comment

Automatic hashtags in Google+ Good or bad?

Google+ has long recognised the value of hashtags – as had Facebook.  Both platforms have followed Twitter’s lead and are including hahstags in posts. Now Google+ has gone one step further and is now including automatically generated suggested hashtags in its posts. Google suggest appropriate hashtags and displays them on each of your posts

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Multiple hashtags appear as a list as in this post from NASA

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Clicking on the hashtags brings up a list of related posts and other hashtags

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Automatic hashtags will help you find better, more relevant content according to Google. But hashtags can be hijacked.

When a hashtag starts to trend on Twitter spammers take over the hashtag to promote unrelated links,malware and other hashtags. Hashtags are also used for marketers to display promoted stories in your feed.

Using the hashtag terms that you are interested in, and read regularly makes you more amenable to read the advertisers promoted post and information.

if you hate the inclusion of automatic hashtags  then you can turn them off in Settings if you prefer.

But if you really want to get discovered, then use popular hashtags in your Public facing posts. Hashtags that can be easily categorised by Google+  will ensure that you will be much more likely to appear in other’s timelines – and spread the message about your brand…

Eileen is a social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

May 28, 2013 Posted by | Campaign, Google +, Social Media | , | Leave a Comment

Are you being ‘used’ for your connections on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is an amazing tool and the site that professionals rely on to keep in touch with their connections and maintain that connection throughout your career. It is often frustrating to try and get in touch with someone only to find that they have moved companies and you no longer have their updated details or new phone number.

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With LinkedIn you can maintain the connection easily, staying in touch as each of you move roles and progress across companies, email address and phone number.

Used correctly, LinkedIn is very powerful.

Some connections use the LinkedIn Openlink Network, available to premium subscribers.

This enables connections to connect with and send messages to anyone in their network.

Others might append LION to their display name to indicate that they are a LinkedIn Open Networker and open to connecting.

But LinkedIn is also ruthlessly used by people who use you to mine your connections and get connected to your own business contacts, partners and customers. This can put your own LinkedIn connections at risk – especially if you maintain good relationships with your clients and partners on LinkedIn.

You could lose competitive advantage, and run the risk of losing business, simply by adding a new contact to your LinkedIn network.

You might receive a message to connect in LinkedIn like this. The messages might be from someone you didn’t know and they might say:

“Hi Eileen, We’re both connected to [CONNECTION NAME] and she mentioned that you would be a great person to connect with. I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.
Kind regards [NEW CONNECTION NAME]

If you look at their profile you might find that they work in a similar role or geographical area to you. Their website says that they work with different customers, but they blog about moving into working with the sort of clients that you actually have.

By connecting with the new connection, you might find that they are connecting with all of your hard-won LinkedIn contacts with the aim of doing business with them.

LinkedIn makes it easy to to this by publishing your connections to your contacts by default.  You can turn this setting off in your profile so that no one can see your other connections unless you have mutual connections.

The setting is in the Profile tab of your settings and is accessed by clicking the “Select who can see your connections” link. Change the drop down list box to “Only you”. if you want to protect your connections from being spammed by people they do not know.

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If you want to protect your LinkedIn connections and customers, maintain the business relationships you have the consider changing the privacy of your connections and make sure that your customers stay loyal to you – no matter what social network they use…

Image Credit: pasukaru76

Eileen is a social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

May 10, 2013 Posted by | LinkedIn, Social Networking | , , , , , | Comments Off

LinkedIn announces invite only LinkedIn Contacts

LinkedIn is moving even closer to becoming your one stop shop for managing your business relationships. It has been adding features to contacts for some time now with tags and notes fields so you can use LinkedIn as a CRM tool.

imageNow with its introduction of LinkedIn contacts you can bring all of your contacts together from your address books, emails and calendars.

Not only that, but you can remind yourself of the last contact you had with your connection before you go to meet them. Currently this facility is in beta in the connections Notes field, but this re-vamp brings threads together in one UI.

You can now organise your contacts by their job titles, and sources – as well as managing your saved connections.

Existing contact information — such as tagged and location specific information are still there and there is an option to de-duplicate address book imports with the ‘potential merges’ tab.image

When a connection is highlighted, there is the option to see all related information about the contact.

You can see your recent conversations with the contact, any meeting that you arranged – as well as notes about the connection.

You can set reminders about meetings, document how you met the connection – important when you’re managing hundreds of connections and tag the contact from one new tabbed interface.

Information about your connections now appears on your contacts page.  You can now see recommendations, job changes, birthdays and other opportunities to get in touch with your connections.

Register your interest at LinkedIn to be added to the waitlist

Eileen is a social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

May 8, 2013 Posted by | Customer Relationships, LinkedIn | , , | Comments Off

50 billion devices with Cisco’s Internet of Things

50 billion things on the Internet by 2020? That’s a huge amount of ‘things’. This Infographic from Cisco opens up a mind-blowing set of possibilities.  Even cows can be connected to the Internet.  IPv6 brings a huge amount of possibilities into our home and working lives. You never know, we’ll have talking socks and RFID trash next Winking smile 

This is well worth sharing again…

Eileen is a social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

May 1, 2013 Posted by | Internet | , | Comments Off

LinkedIn moves closer to becoming the professional site we rely on

LinkedIn has repositioned itself as a go to site for business professionals. It acquired slideshare last year and has incorporated some of its features into its company pages. You can now drive extra engagement with page followers by attaching files such as presentations, pdf’s and white papers and adding them to company page updates.

LinkedIn is the top social media site for business executives according to a survey reported by Forbes and LinkedIn wants to make sure that it stays that way. It has recently introduced features  such as LinkedIn Today

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Users can also follow their favourite influencers.  LinkedIn has identified thought leaders in its network and you can now follow them – just like you can follow companies. The program is now closed but you can apply to be considered a thought leader and might just be included in its list.

We use social media for a variety of reasons – and those reasons are different to the reasons we use Facebook for.  Hubspot has a nice infographic showing the differences between personal social networks  and business social networks and their different needs. In summary these differences are:

Personal Social Network

Professional Social Networks

Distraction, Having fun Aspiration, Achievement
Spending time Investing time
socialising, staying in touch Maintaining Identity, searching for opportunities, make useful contacts
Find content that suits personal interests Get updates on Brands
Get entertainment updates Read up on current affairs
   

LinkedIn is also testing sponsored content – similar to Facebook’s sponsored stories which will be filtering down to our mobile devices in 2013.  The new UI is certainly much better than its old interface.  The ability to manage connections ands use LinkedIn as a CRM tool for notes and details as well as using Tags for good CRM.

LinkedIn is becoming a very credible business tool that professionals use extensively. And with its income up 66 per cent in Q4 2012 it is a tool that more and more of us will come to rely on absolutely.

Eileen is a social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

April 18, 2013 Posted by | LinkedIn | , , , | 2 Comments

Your Facebook status is not as private as you thought it was

Do you REALLY trust all your friends on your Facebook feed?  Recently Facebook has added a share link to status updates. Here’s an update I posted earlier on Facebook.

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You can see that it is really easy to share this text only post further.  Much further than you wanted it to if you have only sent the post to a limited number of friends in the first place.

From the help text these are the levels of sharing you can do:

  • Sharing with a broad audience: Use the share menu that’s located at the top of your homepage and timeline to let others know what’s on your mind. You can update your status and share photos, videos, links and other application content. Things you share will appear as posts on your timeline, and can appear in your news feed. To control whether or not specific people have the option to view your stories, you can change the privacy settings for each piece of content you post.
  • Sharing with a small group of friends: Use the Groups feature to share content with a select group of people, like family members, your soccer team or your book club.
  • Sharing with an individual: You can use the share menu at the top of a friend’s timeline to write or share something on his or her timeline. Friends of your friend will also be able to view your post. If you’d like to share something privately, you can always send someone a private message.

But sharing status updates that were never originally meant to be shared with a broader audience seems wrong. Having the ability to control whether that status update can be shared

This means that anyone who reads your Facebook status update can share it with, not only their friends, but make the status update public. Anyone else can then share this further.

The Facebook privacy page does not mention that status updates that you originally thought were just for your Facebook friends, now can be shared with anyone outside of your friends and their friends.

So be careful what you put on Facebook.  It might be reaching a much greater audience than you ever intended it to…

April 12, 2013 Posted by | Facebook, Privacy | , , | 5 Comments

Using LinkedIn company pages to extend your reach.

More and more of my client work involves LinkedIn nowadays. Lots of LinkedIn users use LinkedIn to advance their career. Now companies are really starting to see the value of LinkedIn for three reasons.

Customer connections and customer relationship management

Finding new clients and partners

Elevating their own personal brand so that they stand out in the crowded jobs market.

imageBut companies are using LinkedIn too to make better connections with their customers. Maersk Line and LinkedIn have been talking about the benefits that Maersk Line gets from LinkedIn.

Maersk uses its LinkedIn company page to really connect with its customers.

The page has over 32,000 followers and updates its page daily.

Most of its updates have comments – all have likes by the community. Its products and services page has recommendations for almost every service Maersk offers. 

As it says on its Maersk social blog – every recommendation of its products and services extends its reach of the network. 

I suspect its structured groups will increase its reach and engagement further.

There are almost 3 million company pages on LinkedIn – some large organisations such as IBM, Deloitte and Shell. Small organisations have a great presence too. Almost 200,000 company pages have been created for UK organisations.

The UK small businesses seem to have embraced LinkedIn pages too. Over 82,000 UK based businesses with less than 10 people have company pages. That is 45.8 per cent of the total number of pages.

And 40 of these small businesses with 1-10 staff have over 1000 followers of their page.

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Contrast this with US based businesses. There are over 742,000 businesses in the US that have LinkedIn pages. 318,550 are from businesses with less than 10 employees. That’s 42.9 per cent compared with 45.8 per cent of firms in the UK.

Three companies in the US with only 1-10 employees have over 5000 followers. One is a valid small business (not a government organisation) too:

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And the most followed company on LinkedIn? Worley Parsons. Headquartered in Australia it has over 53.5 million followers. The company keeps its users engaged by its mix of social updates, career information and news.

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LinkedIn has several ways to increase your reach, stay top of mind in across industry. Adding valid credible comments to companies you follow means that other followers will get the chance to see your profile, connect with you and start up a conversation with you.  Just like groups, company pages give you exposure well outside of your  first degree connections.

It is worth looking at engaging with companies if you want to really extend your reach and connect across the industry.  all you have to do is click ‘Follow’ Smile

Eileen is a social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

April 10, 2013 Posted by | LinkedIn, Social Networking | , , , , | Comments Off

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