Tumblr user shames naked boy pic by contacting his Mum on Facebook

Is it usual to send naked photos of yourself to someone you have only just met?  Tumblr user aheartbeatchanged did not think so.

She captured the exchange from the dating site Let’s Date.

 

There was an exchange of messages where she complained about the unsolicited picture, his use of the word ‘your’ instead of ‘you’re’. you can see the rest of the screenshots at the Daily Dot.

The guy told her that she was a prude and ‘no wonder your(sic) single’ she snapped. She sent him a message saying that since he was pretty easy to find on Facebook she was going to send his mom screencaps of this conversation to ‘show how you treat women’.

Sadly her Tumblr page can not be found so we will not be able to see the results of her actions. But if the comments underneath the Happy Place post are anything to go by, I suspect that the deletion was either due to:

1: A totally fabricated post designed to generate social media attention, fun, shock value, pass-along value

2: Trolling on her Tumblr account criticising her decision to alert the guys mum

3: Moderation on her Tumblr account due to posting of offensive material#

There are many sites with images that are much more explicit than the image that aheartbeatchanged posted so the Tumblr must have been removed due to the level of comments on her post. The comments on the Daily Dot  and other sites are evenly split both praising the woman and condemning her for her actions.

Let’s Date has also clarified that "while the users may have met on Let’s Date, the inappropriate photo was not sent via Let’s Date as the app’s messaging platform does not allow users to send pictures to each other, they are only able to send text."

If the sending of naked images or yourself are now the normal state of flirting during initial dating rituals, why do some people get upset when these unsolicited images are sent. It it is unusual to send naked images of yourself during initial courtship, why are people so bothered that she complained to his mum on Facebook.

But the question that lost of us would love to know is, how did his mom deal with the public naming and shaming request? Did she ignore it, humor it, or totally tan his hide?

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.

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.

Yahoo back on the up after Tumblr acquisition and Flickr revamp

Yahoos reinvention is going rather well – despite detractors condemning Marissa Mayer’s strategy since she joined Yahoo in July 2012. Last Monday it announced that it was going to pay 1.1 billion to buy the popular microblogging site Tumblr.

Tumblr with over 108 million blogs has been around since 2006. It specialises in short form blogs, known as tumblelogs. These microblogs feature links, images and short posts or status updates and are easy to upload from mobile phones.

Yahoo now intends to include display ads on Tumblr blogs. Ads are really important to Tumblr – over half of Tumblr’s visitor base is under the age of 25. Younger users tend to be early adopters of technology and drive site popularity. It is not surprising that advertisers will want to place as many ads as possible on Tumblr to attract clicks from this age group.

Yahoo intends to use two types of ads. It will include ‘normal display ads’ which appear on the Tumblr blog if agreed with the blogger. The revenue is then split with the blogger. The other type of ad, ‘native ads’, will appear in your news stream just like a blog post.

The difference is, readers will start to see posts that appear on their Tumblr feeds from brand bloggers that they did not elect to follow. These posts are similar to the featured post in Facebook – but these extra posts are really paid for ads.

Yahoo wants to put brands ‘front and centre’ by placing ads in the users’ stream. All Tumblr post types ‘will be supported’.

Tumblr delivers 20 billion page views and 225 million unique visitors per month and gets 24 billion page views per month in engagement.

But Yahoo wasn’t content with just buying Tumblr.

It has also announced a redesign for ailing Flickr giving its users 1Tb of storage space for free. Yahoo claimed that it was offering the most free space offered by an Internet company.

The Flickr redesign is visually appealing. Larger image formats show photos display in a timeline format. Focus is on image display and giving screen estate to pictures.

The intention is for users to store their whole lifetime in photos. And with 1Tb of free storage, it is possible to do this.

Pro users, who previously had access to 1Tb of storage space can continue with their pro membership – at a reduced annual fee of $25. These accounts will remain ad-free in Flickr and get unlimited space – i.e. more than 1Tb if you ever needed that much storage. You can not now create a pro user account.

Under Mayer’s leadership, Yahoo seems to have a  strong vision.

To capture the cool kids on the Internet, and make Flickr cool.

Since Marissa Mayer joined Yahoo, its stock has risen from 15.65 to over 25.81.

The cool kids on the Internet are getting a place to share and search for content.

They are influencing the next generation of internet-savvy users who live on their mobile devices and tablets.  They have conversations  with their peers and are driving adoption of social platforms.

Yahoo wants a piece of that action. And with its Tumblr acquisition and revamp of Flickr, it intends to make sure it gets it.

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.

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

OKO

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Now 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.

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.

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  

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.

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

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.

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.

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…

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.

But 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.

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:

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.

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’

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.