All posts in “LinkedIn”

What tech will be in the office of the future?

September 26, 2012 / Comments Off on What tech will be in the office of the future? / Posted in: Blog, Social Media News

Jordan Benedet is a Manager on the Client Strategy and Innovation team at Social Media Group. Follow @jbenedet.

Technology is changing at light speed. Everyday, a new breakthrough is announced that promises to simplify (or even save) people’s lives. I welcome these changes with open arms because I really enjoy understanding how technology can be applied to solve problems in the real world.

My last SMG blog post promoted the healthy lifestyle of Taking an Unplugged Vacation, which can provide time for your mind to be refreshed and help you focus on having fun or simply relaxing in a hammock. I also mentioned that the days where people are tethered to their offices are disappearing fast because technology has enabled us to be more mobile.

Yesterday, I stumbled across a closely related post on Venture Beat, which showcases the results of a recent poll deployed by LinkedIn to over 7,000 members in 18 different countries. The polled asked participants this question: “Name a technology that you feel will be obsolete in the next five years?“

The results are both expected and surprising. It’s not surprising that tape recorders, fax machines and the infamous rolodex were touted as the tools/technologies that will likely disappear in the next five years. Surprisingly, the most popular office dream tools were to have a clone to help you through the day and to have a quiet place where napping is allowed. (Bonus: a detailed infographic on napping was recently created by Patio Productions.)

Most respondents were confident that the rise of portable computing devices, such as tablets, smartphones and cloud storage technologies, will help fuel an increase to flexible working hours. Therefore, the office of the future will likely have a much stronger reliance on both telecommuting and video conferencing. As LinkedIn’s Connection Director, Nicole Williams, put it,  “The key message that we got is that the world is changing. It’s becoming more flexible.”

The poll also revealed that most people don’t feel that resumes, which ranked 14th on the list, will not be completely replaced any time soon. I’m sure this was probably not what LinkedIn was hoping to see, but I’m willing to bet that this will change quite quickly.

Are the top answers inline with what you believe the office of the future will look like? I’ll be honest, I’m pretty stoked for the whole clone thing to become a reality, but I won’t hold my breathe for it.

Office of Future - LinkedIn Infographic

[VentureBeat]

How Is Your Personal Brand Doing In Social Media?

September 25, 2012 / 1 Comment / Posted in: Blog, Social Media Fundamentals

As personal branding continues to become increasingly important, so does the need to use new strategies and techniques such as leveraging social media tools to build your brand.

A social recruiting survey report published in July 2012 by jobvite, which is said to have become an industry benchmark, found that:

  • 92% of recruiters use social media for recruiting
  • 66% of recruiters are now using Facebook for their talent hunt
  • 55% of recruiters are now using Twitter for their talent search (watch what you tweet!)
  • 43% of recruiters who use social recruiting saw an increase in candidate quality
  • 73% have hired a candidate through social
  • 31% of recruiters using social have seen a sustained increase in employee referrals (reflective of the sharability of information via social channels – employees get to tell their friends when their company is hiring)

Ignoring social media as an extension of your personal brand is likely to limit the opportunities available to you. So, how do you create an impressionable personal brand that will put you in favour with those who may be poking around your social profiles validating if you are the right one for the job?

Branding Your Social Media Presence

In a recent interview on blogtalk radio entitled ”Polishing Your Personal Brand”, Joellyn Sargent pointed out that to create an engaging personal brand, the following should be considered:

  1. Who you are
  2. What you want to be
  3. How you see yourself
  4. What you want people to see
  5. What others perceive (how they receive your message)
  6. What they believe (what resonates, or sticks from your message.

What this really boils down to is two very important questions – What you are passionate about? and What makes you unique?

Tips to Build A Healthy Personal Brand in Social

At Social Media Group, part of the work we do is help to create social media guidelines for companies and their employees so that they can avoid or manage the reputational risk that comes with social media blunders. Your personal brand is not immune to this risk; here are some tips that can help you build a healthy personal social media brand presence:

  1. Create a strong tag line that represents your passion and what makes you unique
  2. Share interesting and engaging content that largely aligns with your audience
  3. Be careful with your language and tone and refrain from sharing your personal business (e.g., negative information about your employer—the internet does not forget, so keep it clean!)
  4. Pay attention to other people in your social community and engage with them on their profiles, this way they are likely to reciprocate and engage with you on yours
  5. Connect with groups, companies, people that  align with your passion and interests
  6. Keep your social profiles updated: your resume should match your LinkedIn profile as much as possible, the additional recommendations from teams you have worked with and managers that you worked for are a good edge
  7. Share your personality and not your privacy – keep personal details to a minimum to avoid identification theft

How has personal branding in social media impacted your career?

How HOT is Social Media Lately…

May 28, 2012 / Comments Off on How HOT is Social Media Lately… / Posted in: Blog

Wangari Kamande is a Research Analyst at Social Media Group.

I am sitting on my couch this quiet Saturday evening reading June’s edition of O magazine – an uncommon activity as I rarely buy magazines. I am one of those boldly unashamed people who walk into a Chapters store, picks a favourite magazine, finds a spot near the in-store Starbucks, and reads through each and every article (but my ‘redeeming’ quality is that I always return the magazines to the rack that I found them). Why am I talking about this? What does this have to do with social media? There was one fateful day when I forgot my smartphone at home; I literally felt lost with nothing to do in between breaks for lunch and waiting for an appointment – I had to get something to fill my time – hence O magazine. You see, when I have my phone I’m mostly perusing through my social sites reading up on what’s new and what’s going on with other people’s lives…so I wondered if this “subconscious” craze is still taking over the world’s populace.

Let’s review some high level statistics and see…

Growth of Usage

According to a study by GlobalWebIndex, purported to be the world’s most detailed global insight study into consumer behaviour online:

  • Social networking has seen 23% growth in the last 2 years
  • Micro-blog updates have increased by 11% and video uploads by about 6%
  • Forums have become significantly less active, showing a 6% decline in activity and blogging seems to have remained stagnant at 27% in the past two years
  • China is the most socially engaged country in the world, with 84% of users contributing at least once a month. Russia, Brazil and India follow in that order
  • Onlinemba.com reports that 66% of all online adult users are connected to one or more social media platforms. In addition, social media use for both personal and business purposes has been increasing steadily in the last 10 years

Social Media Platform Statistics

According to the Realtime report:

The list goes on, what appears to be social mania is just a new way of doing what humans have done always, communicate!

Social Brands

Websites continue to be the primary brand engagement point for consumers online, according to an earlier version of the Globalwebindex study nearly a third of consumers online are engaging with brands on social media, no doubt a clear sign of social traction for those brands that are doubtful if social media is here to stay.

According to some overwhelming stats coming via Facebook’s S1 registration statement courtesy of its initial IPO, as of Dec 31, 2011, more than seven million apps and websites were integrated with Facebook.

Mobile and Social Media

Since Facebook is such  hot news with the whole “to buy or not to buy” driving investors mental – again from its SI registration statement, Facebook identified 425 million active users of Facebook via mobile devices (mobile, social media – something is cooking really fast here).

To emphasize how quickly all this is changing, according to digitalbuzz of the 6 billion humans in the planet, 4.8 billion own a mobile phone and only 4.2 billion own a tooth brush. Now really – I get the sense here that the new ways of getting us all to connect are supposedly surpassing our need for dental hygiene. Mobile is something to watch especially with the social overlay that is now quickly becoming the faster and cheaper way to connect with others.

Still not convinced of the value of this social movement? I would like to hear from you…

 

Community Manager? What's that?

November 21, 2011 / 2 Comments / Posted in: Blog

 

community management

Community management is a hot topic in social. In fact, there are 48,258 people who list Community Manager as a title or Community Management as a keyword on LinkedIn.

So it’s a hot space – I know this because I work with clients everyday supporting community management. I’ve got a bird’s eye view, so here goes my rant about what is a community manager.

Community managers have been around for years. Really, people have been managing digital communities in some form or another since the dawn of message boards and chat rooms. Not until the mass adoption of Facebook, Twitter and the like has it become a defined profession – and rightly so.

An active social media program in an organization disrupts traditional departments and silos. No one feels this more acutely than the community manager. Everybody (and their dog) has their own definition of what a community manager does because there are a number of demands and responsibilities that fall within the community management title.

According to the Community Management Round Table (in their State of Community Management 2011 report), the top attributes of a Community Manager are “The desire to be helpful, someone who is concise and credible, a sense of humor, curiosity, fearlessness, influential, persuasive, diplomatic, patient and mature. The expertise required for the role of community manager is strategic business acumen combined with exceptional communication and people skills.”

What do I think?  A community manager is a passionate strategic thinker who is a content creator and a moderator, a listener and informer. Essentially, it is someone who encourages conversation and engagement around a product, brand, issue or cause. I asked my Twitter and Facebook networks to tell me their definition of a community manager. As expected, quite varied:

  • @jeremywaite: A community manager should be in-house. No one else will be as passionate about your brand
  • @Sparkle_Media: in-house community management is a goal: a person/role to add to client team; interim & freelance CM’s can add bandwidth
  • @nav_een: CM should be patient, thick-skinned, creative, wordsmith. I agree with @sparkle_agency that CM should be in-house.
  • @heyneil: The catalyst for conversation in brand social spaces, the moderator of objectionable content and the person who escalates questions or issues to appropriate people within the organization. Also, the person who filters the brand team’s request for activity in the social spaces using best practices.

There’s so much juicy stuff in those comments from folks in my network. What’s your take? Is Community Manager a profession that’s here to stay or just a trendy job title for something else? When should (could) Community Management be outsourced?

Social Media Roundup for March 11, 2011

March 12, 2011 / Comments Off on Social Media Roundup for March 11, 2011 / Posted in: Blog, Social Media Roundup

Today, our thoughts are with the people in Japan. We expresses sympathies and condolences to those who have been devastated by the earthquake and tsunami.


Earthquake rocks Japan – photos on CNN.


Here are some things that caught our attention from around the ‘net this week:

Updates for apps we love

From SMG analyst Brandon comes news that a few popular apps were updated this week. All of which included major social/sharing related features and improvements.

  1. Flipboard now supports Instagram: http://wp.me/pZtZH-Z0
  2. Linkedin launches LinkedinToday and updates iOS app to include functionality: http://www.linkedin.com/today/
  3. Instapaper updates to 3.0 includes native article sharing to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinboard and a whole whack of other social features: http://blog.instapaper.com/

Music aficionado Brandon adds, “Oh and SoundCloud’s “local focus” was Toronto yesterday.”

Paula Deen embraces her eponymous meme

[Paula Deen Rides Bambi]

Speaking of fans, it was very cool to see celebrity chef Paula Deen respond in such an enthusiastic way to the ‘Paula Deen Riding Things’ meme.

Via The Daily What:

As if you needed another reason to be madly in love with Paula Deen, it seems the Butter Queen is not only aware of her Internet meme, Paula Deen Riding Things, but is actually quite fond of it.

“I think its great to see how creative my fans are!,” she recently told Bites on Today. “I feel like I’m the new ‘Where’s Waldo.”

Not a Viral Video

Michelle’s submission this week comes from AV Club with a critique of a recent “not-a-viral-video” campaign featuring Jennifer Aniston. Given the focus we’ve got on content strategy with our clients, this resonates with us big time.

Genevieve Koski writes:

vi•ral vid|e|o (vi´rel vid´ē ō) n. a video that becomes popular through the process of Internet sharing, typically through internet media sharing websites.

not a vi•ral vid|e|o (not a vi´rel vid´ē ō) n. a video that’s been brainstormed and test-marketed by a well-paid ad agency, which stars one of the biggest, beigest celebrities in the world slumming with a bunch of viral-video shorthand, released to a bunch of media outlets via a press release titled “Jennifer Aniston sex tape” that urges them to help make it the next “Internet sensation” along with a gentle reminder to mention Smartwater.

Read the rest of the column and watch the video at AV Club.

True blue Fan sites rule.

The cult following of Disney’s Haunted Mansion caught Maggie’s interest this week.  Chef Mayhem, the creator of  DoomBuggies.com explains the site “…is a celebration of imagination — it’s as simple (and as complex) as that.”

SMG-ers at SXSWi

Steve, Jeff and I (Leona) are enroute to Austin. We are all looking forward to catching up with friends and making new connections. See you there!