Archive for May, 2009
LinkedIn Check List May 29th, 2009
I have been fan of LinkedIn for quite some time but have to remind myself about how powerful it can be when you use it they way it was designed. Originally people seemed to use it as a way of creating a digital presence so they would apppear in search engine queries for themselves. As with all social media there is a reasonable investment of time needed both in building your contact base/community, developing content and using it as a networking tool (participing in the community). Having a lot of people linking to you and not actively managing it is only vanity.
Following on from the previous mail on Twitter here are some checklist items for LinkedIn.
Beginner.
- Set up a profile, including detailed biographical details and photo.
- Find friends/potential contacts and add people to your network.
- Allow LinkedIn access to your contacts (via webmail) to speed up process by seeing who is on LinkedIn.
- Use search facility to additional people and customise mail invites to them.
- Ask someone to recommend you.
- Add any blogs or website information.
- Analysise other people connections to see if any could be relevant to your company/industry.
- Ensure LinkedIn details on are your business card and email signature.
Intermediate.
- Look for relevant groups related to your industry and join them.
- Recommend someone for their work if appropriate.
- Allow access to your contacts book and see who else is in LinkedIn.
- Comment and participate in groups you have joined.
- Decide on schedule of regularly checking LinkedIn and updating status.
- Monitor and vet LinkedIn requests.
- Forward a profile and share connections/recommended contacts with others in your network.
- Create extra links with people when you receive their busines card by checking to see if they are on LinkedIn.
- Watch the status updates to see who is linking to who.
- Use LinkedIn as a research tool to gain insight into a company before presenting to them.
Advanced
- Use applications including:
- - Incorporate your blog feed with wordpress.
- - Post presentations you have done using SlideShare.
- - Collaborate online using the Hubble Work spaces application.
- - Monitor company reputation through Twitter feed with Company Buzz.
- Spot an opportunity and set up a special interest group. Invite contacts and potential contacts. Keep alive with content & events.
- If appropriate use LinkedIn as platform for company news.
- Upgrade free account and utilise InMail and directly contacting prospects.
Joy Redmond from Flexitimers did an excellent post on how Karina Heavey set up the 121 Business Network on the IIA website.
Let me know what hints, tips, steps I have left out!!
Tags: Checklist, LinkedIn
Posted in LinkedIn | Comments (2)
Twitter Check List May 25th, 2009
The IIA managed to get a bumper crowd out last week to its Congress in the Crown Plaze Hotel in Santry. This year the Congress was followed immediately by the awards which made it a long day but gave a much more opportunity for people to mix and network.
Colm Lyon from Realex Payments delivered the strongest of the morning sessions with a focus on leveraging the values of the organisation is solidifying the company’s strategy. He also spoke about the need to engage staff in the process. All things that people know but can get forgotten as companies look to an uncertain future. Realex Payments has made great strides in intenationalising its reach and offer and has great visibility of what Irish companies are doing in other market places outside of Ireland. They handle the transactions for their client’s offers which are delivered in other countries but managed from Ireland. A much needed “can do” attitude.
The afternoon sessions were all well attended and I participated in the Social Media Working Group one which was led by Brendan Hughes of FBD and moderated by Krishna De. The session was structured to give participants a snap shot of what they could achieve in different social media by picking a company and building mini plans using Twitter, Blogs and Facebook/LinkedIn.
In building the session check sheets were developed for each that might be useful if you are looking at how you can leverage these different platforms. The Twitter check lists is below. New Twitter applications appear on an almost daily basis but its a handy beginning point. It is structured to cover beginning, intermediate and advanced. Let me know of ones I have ommitted.
Beginner.
- Set up a Twitter account in company name.
- Find friends and potential contacts.
- Watch Tweeter feeds from others.
- Reply to relevant tweets.
- Tweet areas of interest.
- Search areas of interest through www.search.twitter.com
Intermediate.
- Design the backdrop for your twitter feed.
- Upload photo or avatar.
- Build an editorial calendar and research topics
- Build community by increasing following base
- Direct message new followers
- Engage in conversation by reply to tweets
- Actively monitor by installing www.Tweetdeck.com or www.monitter.com
- Post messages using www.tinyurl.com
Advanced
- Analyse activity with www.twission.com
- Post photos using www.twitpic.com
- Live Tweet at conference or event.
- Set up remote Twittering through SMS http://agtweet.com/or call www.twitterfone.com
- Integrate Twitter feed with Facebook and
- Actively monitor and respond to @replies
- Back up your tweets through www.tweetake.com
- Integrate with outlook with www.outtwit.com
- Track hot topics with www.twitt(url)ly.com or www.summize.com
- Upload video with www.tweetcube.com
- Filter your tweets through www.twittersnooze.com
- Track if you have been unfollowed through www.quitter.com
- Tweet to specific group www.grouptweet.com
- Retweet comments you see to share with your network
Some photos from the session are available here.
Tags: IIA Net Congress, IIA Net Visionary Awards, Social Media, Twitter, Twitter Checklist
Posted in Online Tools, Twitter | Comments (3)
What is your online reputation number? May 15th, 2009
How influential someone is in PR has alway been a bit foggy to say the least. It is easy to claim you are influential but proof has normally been in the form of being able to open doors or hidden in the infamous black book of contacts.
In theory online makes it easier to check how influential someone is. Things have moved on in terms of people merely using the web to increase their digital footprint. To date there has been a bit of land grab in terms of occuping certain spaces and putting up profiles and leaving them to gather dust. This was useful at the beginning where you could find someone’s LinkedIn profile when you searched for their name but its hardly an indication of their influence – its merely that they exist. Now as people gather and participate in communities around them it is easier to get a better sence of their consistent presence on the web but also their level of contribution.
Piaras Kelly posted about what your Facebook connections could indicate about you sometime ago and Tom Murphy has posted more recently about an Andrew Smith comment on how the media are using LinkedIn profiles to vet the credibility about a potential spokesperson.
There is no doubt that this will continue to evolve further but it is not an easy task to acertain someone influence as Micah Baldwin comments in Mashable.com. As a starting point he points to
Incoming Traffic – Pageviews, Incoming traffic from search engines, rss subscribers
Incoming Links – Primarily manual links such as blogrolls, in-post deep links
Reader Engagement – Internal searches, time on site
Recommendations – Retweets, share stats
Connections – Number of mutual connections, number of mutual connections on multiple sites
Track Record – Age of domain, number of blog posts, length of engagement
Engagement – How often and long a person has engaged with a service online
It is possible to get a manual snapshot of someone by using some of the tools that are available. By inputting someones blog url in Technorati you can get a numercial indication of their authority and ranking. By looking at their Twitter profile you can see how many people are following them and how many updates they have made. LinkedIn will show their connections, groups, length of time on the community and you can check how active they are in that forum. Similarly with Facebook and other social media.
None of these are perfect measures and having lots of stuff online does not equate to being influential but its a better start than taking someones word for it.
Surely there is good scope for someone to develop a FREE application that is comprehensive enough to take account of the different platforms (ie number of retweets on Twitter, pics through Twitpic etc to the strength of connections in Facebook rather than numbers) so that it goes beyond a popularity contest and give a genuinely useful figure. Following 500 people is very different to being followed by 500 people. It would encourage people to move from ‘I am online’ to ‘I participate and contribute online’. If there was an acceptance of the importance of a ORN (online reputation number) number and people could increase that number by engaging more surely this would lead to an uplife in genuine online activity.
I imagine such applications would be greately aided by people inputting their handles, user names for the different platforms with boxes to fill for a wide range of social media. This is probably especially true as people use different usernames and handles. There may be some issues with walled communities but technology normally finds a way around these.
I am sure that there are a few out there that come close to this but I have not found any to date. Let me know if I am missing the obvious. A simple tool could always progress into a more complex one.
Tags: Blogging, Facebook, Online Reputation Management, PR, Public Relations, Social Media, Twitter
Posted in LinkedIn, ORM, Online Reputation Management, Online Tools, Public Relations, Twitter, Uncategorized, social networking | Comments (3)
Did George Hook Cause the Twitter Numbers to Jump? May 7th, 2009
I was part of a panel at the last Enterprise Ireland eBusiness Masterclass moderated by Darragh Doyle and had the pleasure of listening to Roger Galligan from Cognotent (also Irish blogs and Irishpressreleases.ie). In his presentation he discussed how the traditional media was one of the key drivers of new media tools and platforms. No real surprise here but he had some great examples including a large jump in Irish Twitter joiners when George Hook of the Right Hook Show joined and discussed twitter on the show. The shows twitter feeds are now follwed by over 3,855 people.
I have heard estimates of current Irish Twitter users ranging from 8,000 to 20,000 but certainly it has experienced unquestionable growth. This scarey growth path is tempered slightly by the Nielsen survey which maintains there is a 40% retention rate with 60% of US users failing to return a month after signing up.
The Right Hook is not the only media outlet to have a Twitter feed. The Irish Times use it mainly as a distribution medium for breaking news but I believe Twitter is an ideal medium for radio and especially live shows, both as an update mechanism and also engaging people and offering an opportunity to repond/discuss as the show is in progress. This could have a pretty big impact on their SMS text ins especially if they are using premium text in numbers.
Roger also discussed the good and the bad of Twitter espcially on the Swine Fever outbreak, similar to Karlin Lillington Irish Times article but I think this cartoon that he showed capture it very nicely.
Swine Fever Cartoon
Tags: Enterprise Ireland, George Hook, Irishpressreleases.ie, Nielsen survey, Right Hook, Roger Galligan, Twitter
Posted in Events, Twitter | Comments (0)
How much time does social media take? May 1st, 2009
The IIA Social Media Working Group (disclosure - I am a member of this group) produced a white paper on blogging and launched it at a well attended breakfast last week. Brendan Hughes, eCommerce manager with FBD, Michelle Daly, Paddy Power Trader and Aedan Ryan, Director of Puddleducks.ie all gave some practical insights into running a blog, what they experienced in terms of feedback/community and increased findability. Aedans personal findings reflected the findings of the white paper from why blog, to the benefits of it while Michelle presented a more complex arrangement of running multiple blogs. Both integrated their blogs with other online properties from Twitter to Facebook. All three companies have well presented blogs and take it seriously.
Emmet Ryan of Villa81 gives a snap short of the launch in a short video of the launch.
So the big question – how much time and resource does it take. Aedan, who would be reflective of many Irish SMEs, spends 4-6 hours a week on his blog. Michelle was a bit more coy in terms of actual resources invested but did discuss the outsource model that they utilise. At the Blogger Collision course many people reported spending up to 3-4 hours per post, with some posting every day. Assuming that the blog is unlikely to stand by itelf then you also needs to factor the other social media into the mix:
- Twitter (30 min to 1 hr a day if not posting regularly and mainly monitoring),
- Facebook (10-30 mins a day checking, 1-2 hr for multiple updates),
- Bebo (similar to Facebook),
- Flickr 30 mins per photo upload session (captioning etc),
- Pix.ie 30 mins per photo upload,
- YouTube (30 mins upload but 4 hr editing, 1-2 hrs of production is simple),
- Podcasting (20 min upload, 1-2 hr of editing if short, 1-2 hr of production and planning)
- Monitoring (30 mins per day).
This is all very much on the back of an envelope (and does not take account of the creation time) but it can grow into double digits per week very fast and I would imagine that digital is taking a disproportionate amount of the percentage time that people have to spend on marketing – especially at this early stage. There is no doubt that Social Media engagement does deliver but has great capacity to soak up every hour in the day. My experience has been that without some structures you can get extremely distracted and follow ‘interesting’ trails that lead to other ‘interesting trails’. As new tools, blogs and interesting pointers from twitter emerge being disciplined is now even more important.
So if you are looking to invest in social media here are some pointer on managing the time element a bit better.
- Use outlook or some online calendar to dedicate time in the day when you catch upon socia media rather than when you feel lilke it.
- Decide in advance how much time you are going to dedicate to it.
- Be methodical in the list of social media you run through to ensure you dont forget some.
- Allocate time to research and monitoring.
- Use RSS feed to keep up to date on blogs you follow rather than random surfing.
- Use tools such as Tweetdeck to Monitter to help give a snap shot of activity.
- Build an editorial calendar and stick to the frequency that suits your business.
All this before you even start to think about what you want to say. The good news is that once you get into a rhythm you get much faster and efficient
Tags: Blogging, paddy power, puddleducks, social mediam IIA, Twitter
Posted in Blogging, Events, Twitter, social networking | Comments (0)