Using Social Media In the Workplace

By James Zipadelli

A survey by Accenture says that everyone needs to learn how to use technology and the knowledge that young adults age 14-27 — millenials — bring to the workplace, because the “old” IT rules need not apply.

In, “Jumping the Boundaries of Corporate IT: Accenture Global Research on Millenials Use of Technology” young adults in the U.S. and Asia-Pacific also have a more positive view of technology, whereas in European nations such as Italy, France and the Netherlands, technology is seen more negatively.

The anonymous survey was done over an 18-month period in 13 countries around the world, excluding Africa and Antarctica, says Gary Curtis, Accenture’s chief technology strategist. Accenture is planning follow-up research over the next 18 months and they hope to have new U.S. data by the end of 2010.

Survey findings

• 77 percent of U.S. young adults say, “Technology helps improve the quality of my work.” 62 percent surveyed in Asia-Pacific feel this way and 32 percent agree in Europe.
• 73 percent surveyed in the U.S. say, “Technology helps make it easier to communicate with my peers and supervisors.” 53 percent agree in Asia-Pacific and 34 percent agree in Europe.
• 30 percent surveyed in the U.S. age 18-27 say, “State-of-the-art equipment and technology will be vital in my employer selection.” 65 percent in India agreed with this question.
• Working adults in China spend the most time — 33 hours per week — on social media Web sites, texting or instant messaging. Their U.S. counterparts spend 19.3 hours per week on those sites.

Curtis, 60, says this research has helped him understand the value of technology and social media. ”For example, I wasn’t an active Facebook user prior to research,” Curtis says. “This has real value, I’m a regular Twitter user, but I have found sources that are very interesting. I fly almost 400,000 real miles per year.”

Curtis hypothesizes that there is a correlation between technology and the work/life balance.

“A lot of new technologies extend business availability into personal life. On my Blackberry, the thing never stops giving messages,” Curtis says. “I get 300-400 per day. The fact that I have a device more or less enables me to deal with it. Those things become part of your personal space, they can rob you of personal life balance. These technologies become an extension of work.”

According to Curtis, he does put his Blackberry away from time to time, but not for long.

“I go places where there is no digital service on vacation. Much of Baja [Calif.] does not have digital service,” Curtis says. “I find it to be refreshing but after a few days I find I’m falling behind in my work. You have to make choices in work and life balance.”

‘Millenials’ speak up about technology and work
Working adults DigitalMediaBuzz.com spoke with say technology is very helpful in the workplace. “I use social media websites every day, all day, for work specifically,” says Stephanie Robinson, an associate at R|F Binder, a public relations firm in New York City. “Once I get home I don’t do as much.”

“A variety of my clients are on twitter and Facebook, and I have had the opportunity to advise them on the launch of their pages,” Robinson, 24, says. “We host social media meetings every Friday and help with Twitter chats once per month. We’re looking to partner with mommy bloggers and are always looking for different ways we can promote our clients’ pages. Facebook has been an amazing platform for consumer interaction for my clients.”

Robinson’s colleague, Tara Maroney, 25, says she finds social media websites useful at work. “I use both Facebook and Twitter for clients, and in the past I have also monitored a LinkedIn page for a client,” Maroney says. “Twitter is valuable because it gives me a quick snapshot of what’s happening in the news.”

“I am an avid New York Times follower, and getting instant updates of what’s happening helps me do my job better,” Maroney continues.  “I also follow a number of reporters and this gives me insight into the types of stories they are working on and what sources they might be looking for. Facebook I find less helpful from a professional standpoint but I do use it to see what’s going on and to monitor if anyone is talking about my clients.”

Kate Farber, the firm’s director of interactive solutions, says it’s beneficial to use social media to reach out to clients. “No matter the age of us or our clients, everyone is very interested in getting involved with social media and we’re here to help them do that,” Farber, 27, says. “A lot of the Millenials in my company read blogs and Twitter to keep up to date on their areas of expertise. They’re pitching journalists via Twitter, connected with them on LinkedIn, reaching out to bloggers, etc. Social media has really become an integrated part of the PR business.”

According to Farber, personal and professional lives become blurred with technology, so she advises employees of any age to use good judgment while online.

“Some of the ‘best practices’ we recommend to our employees and clients alike are to practice full disclosure when engaging in social media - make sure whoever is reading your comments know your connection to the company or brand,” Farber says. “Also, taking the time to listen to what others are saying online is crucial to successfully engaging them. And don’t forget, when you write something online it could theoretically live there forever - clients, employers, the media - basically anyone could read it.”

Robinson says she limits the amount of personal information she posts on Twitter and Facebook. “Even though I have some of my friends on Twitter, and it’s my personal page, I would never write anything inappropriate because I’m still representing the company and still representing the client,” Robinson says. “I will Tweet interesting stories from food blogs or other online sites, which is helpful for my clients and for me. I do accept friend requests (on Facebook) of some of my colleagues, but I don’t go out of my way to friend them considering I still have pictures from high school and college on there.”

Spinning Tweets of Gold: Twitter’s Revenue Model

By John Greaves

Twitter, the social networking giant that has revolutionized the way we interact with each other and search for information, seems to be planning to monetize using third-party applications. On the other hand, it might be planning to charge companies for access to its site’s products. Or maybe it will just sell ad space. It’s still not clear despite Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s promise that we would know how his company plans to start making money in early 2010.

The question of Twitter’s move toward monetization has been a topic of discussion for years, and of course, Twitter has a history of promoting third-party apps without being paid for them. So intense is interest in how Twitter will monetize that a hoax last year concerning paying for premium accounts led to a firestorm of outrage that increased when protesters learned they were the victims of a prank by BBspot.

This is partly because Twitter’s investors have long maintained that they were in no hurry to make money off the micro-blogging site. Stone told reporters in 2009 the company wasn’t fretting about the need to monetize. “There are no dates when we need to break even. We have plenty of money in the bank,” he says.

The question remains, what is Twitter planning and will it be successful? In 2007 Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter and the current CEO, let slip some of the ways he thought the site could generate income. “Two more-straightforward ideas: 1) Ads on the site. We have a little AdSense on there now, but we haven’t really tried. As the traffic grows, some tasteful sponsorships might be sellable. 2) Charging companies who are using it for marketing or other commercial purposes. If an organization finds Twitter to be a valuable communication tool with their customers/constituents/etc — especially if we’re sending lots of SMS’s for them, which cost us money — it seems viable to make an offering around that,” he said.

Steve Hofstetter, a comedian who has helped create apps for Facebook and the iPhone as part of promoting his brand, is enthusiastic about Twitter monetizing through ad revenue.  “Click on their website right now, you know they have that little useless twitter definition, who gets utility out of that? People in the office enjoy that, if you made that a tiny little ad; it doesn’t just give utility to Twitter, marketers put ads on sites because they’re good for the consumer, I’ve found good stuff through banner ads,” Hofstetter says.

Nevertheless, according to Radar Research founder Marissa Gluck there is a problem with simply relying on advertising to monetize social media. “In terms of advertising, click-through rates and engagement historically tend to be very low on social networks, consumers aren’t really there to search out products or to purchase, they’re not in that mode, they’re not in that mentality, so consumers are not really engaging with ads on social networks because they want to engage with their friends,” Gluck says.

On the other hand, Gluck points to the fact that Twitter wears many hats in the social media arena and can perhaps choose multiple revenue streams to be successful including the second option Williams mentioned. “Twitter is everything from a social network to an RSS feed to a broadcasting platform, so Twitter is a little bit different, which is why for Twitter it makes more sense to look towards paid subscriptions from commercial enterprises as well as advertising,” Gluck says.

Ian Swanson, the CEO of Sometrics, a company that helps developers and brands monetize the social Web, thinks Twitter is right to avoid the ad model for now. “If you look at the expertise of the company, you’ve got to say is this a media company, is this a company that belongs on Madison Avenue or is this a tech company? They really know their strengths. Hey we’re really good at building this platform, really good at the technology - so let’s allow the brands and third-party applications to build on top of our platform and if we go through and charge people for that access, almost like taxing the system, eventually they’re going to make money and that’s just a smart approach for them.”

This echoes comments made by Stone to the Reuters Global Technology Summit in May 2009. “”There are no people at Twitter who know anything about advertising or work in advertising. So we don’t have anyone there to make or take those calls,” Stone says.

It is obvious that third-party applications have figured out how to monetize using Twitter. A PR Newswire press release notes that TwitterJobSearch, the first real-time job search engine, has evolved its offering to include an In-Stream Ads service. Back in 2007, Steve Poland even blogged on easy ways to make money with Twitter using third-party applications. Ad.ly “enables Twitter publishers to make money from the content they produce on Twitter by sending one tweet every day from advertisers that they approve.”

The question is not whether it’s possible for Twitter to monetize itself. Rather everyone is wondering whether 2010 will be the year when Twitter begins to spin tweets into gold.

Twitter Goes Local

By: websitemagazine.com

Twitter has added a new trending topic functionality, this time with a local tilt. On the right side of your Twitter home page, you will see a notification of trending topics that you can change (at right).

[Read More and Discuss]

Postling

Businesses that have adopted social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr  and blogs as a way to market, listen and respond to their customers have found that logging into different sites every date to post updates can be a major time suck.  This is particularly true for agencies and other marketers who post on behalf of multiple clients or companies with multiple brands. Postling offers a software-as-a-service solution that can streamline this process. In three simple steps you can publish your blog post, update your Twitter and Facebook status with a link announcing the post and upload any photos in the post to Flickr. Postling supports Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, Squarespace, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. Adding an account is a breeze.

Features:

• Simplify publishing workflow
• Organize your social media accounts
• Comment aggregation
• Collaborate with team and clients

Take a tour and see all of Postling’s features.

Are Twitter’s Trending Topics All Talk, No Substance?

By Rebecca Henely

As 2009 drew to a close, Twitter showcased one of its most recent site features – trending topics – by releasing the top 10 list of trending topics for the year on its blog.

Much buzz has circulated about the marketing and journalistic potential of trending topics, a service by the social networking website that began in April and tracks the most common phrases of its users’ tweets at any given time, but Pete Spande, SVP of sales and marketing at Federated Media, states he did not find the list, or trending topics themselves, very useful. “For me, the trending topic is a mixed bag. Often times, the trending topics don’t lead to much discovery,” says Spande, whose company connects marketers to online publishers.

The list, released by Abdur Chowhury, chief scientist at Twitter, gave the top 10 news events, people, movies, TV shows, sports teams, technology and hash tags (Internet memes circulating on Twitter that are marked by a “#” symbol before a word or a phrase mashed together). Overall, the most popular trending topic and news event was the June 2009 contested Iranian presidential election.

“In 2009, Twitter’s Trending Topics helped us understand what was happening around the world showing us that people everywhere can be united in concern around important events; excited about a new movie; or geek-out about a major new technology,” states Chowdhury in the posted blog on Twitter.

Yet Spande says most of the information about trending topics could be found from other sources. “Apple is the most talked about company. Michael Jackson was a popular celebrity topic this year…. All very straightforward,” he says.

Spande adds that while he believes Twitter is shaping the culture of the Internet, he is unsure of the role the trending topics themselves have in the conversation. “Much has been made about how Twitter influences the opening week for a movie and breaks news. In both of these cases, and many other cases, there are two distinct groups participating in a trending topic. There is the group of people adding to the conversation and the group that is sharing that conversation through retweets, @replies, etc. When Iran protests were dominating the Twitter trending topics, there were many more people sharing than influencing the conversation. In other cases, like Avatar’s release, there were hundreds of thousands 140-word movie reviews contributing to the conversation,” Spande says.

Rich Brooks, president of Flyte New Media, an Internet marketing and Web design company, also expressed skepticism of the idea of trending topics being useful, especially in marketing.

“I think it was a very cool thing that has mostly been overrun by spammers and irreverent and usually irrelevant memes,” Brooks says. “Occasionally I’ll find a breaking news story that way.”

When asked if he would recommend trying to get a business to use trending topics as a means of advertising, he says he would not. “There may have been a time that this was effective, but for most small businesses trying to ‘catch the wave’ of a trending topic [that] has very little import, and trying to start your own, can be insanely difficult,” Brooks says, adding that trending topics could be an indicator of customer satisfaction, but it should be treated as one of many.

“I wouldn’t bet my business on trending topics,” Brooks says. “Twitter, like the blogosphere before it, tends to be a bit of an echo chamber. It’s a very slim, technologically savvy audience, and not always representative of the nation, or the world, as a whole.”

Rebecca Henely is a freelance writer and journalist based in New Jersey.

Google Wave Apps: A Bevy of Options

By Linda Broughton

Google Wave allows an individual user to merge all the most popular online applications in a single platform. This platform, a Wave, allows each Wave user to flow into and out of the waves of friends, family, colleagues and any other Waver open to sharing. A user can have as many ‘waves’ as he or she wants, create and install a myriad of applications, save and store and share all sorts of content and multimedia. Users can join public Waves or create private Waves. They can simply watch a Wave grow or they can jump in and share. Like life online, Wave evolves daily, diluting the digital divides that were once installed between search, storage, share and social applications.

When the Wave came out in May 2009, there were a number of third-party applications already awaiting Wave community use in the Wave extension gallery. Some of these applications compete, others collaborate and many are just unique — the point of the Wave is that users have choices and third-party developers have an open marketplace where they can compete for popularity and adoption.

Ribbit created a conference call gadget that lets Wavers go from email and instant messaging to online verbal discussions. Not unlike Skype, Ribbit’s application lets users chat as they review the Wave at hand. No screen sharing here — to share an off-wave idea, the user has to embed the link within the Wave while talking. It’s a good way to stay on-topic and have a clear record of what’s been discussed.

AccuWeather.com immediately presents the weather of a selected location and date, inviting Wavers to plan real-world get-togethers. Retro-chat lets users ‘go back in time’ and simply instant message each other within a wave. Napkin lets Wavers literally draw out ideas — the name is inspired by how enthusiastic diners used to sketch their ideas on the back of napkins. Wave has a lunch gadget that lets people in a Wave poll where to eat their next meal, a gadget for Wavers to make lists, chart gadgets, photo gadgets, game gadgets and more.

The most heavily hyped social application is 6rounds, an interactive video chat and all-round communal platform. 6rounds resembles an online version of a never-ending house party. There are games like spin-the-Heineken-bottle, chess and darts, white boards for drawing fun and files sharing applications for video, photos and links. Like Facebook, users on 6rounds can give each other gifts. They can edit and draw on their video images, playing as they chat.

6rounds lets application users meet other users. Although, when I first joined, this public feature irritated me as the other users interested in meeting me were all single men. But after chatting with a 6rounds community manager, Natasha Shine, I learned to overlook the gatecrashers and enjoy the party. Shine says that while 6rounds already lets already established friends and family chat and play, through joining Google Wave, 6rounds now encourages Wavers with similar interests to connect with each other in a fun, social environment where they can play a few games and get to know each other. As a community manager, Shine introduces people and ensures that 6rounds users feel comfortable with the variety of social tools at their disposal. She’s the platform’s hostess, trying to make sure that a few obvious come-ons don’t scare someone like me away.

6rounds isn’t the only video chat extension in the Wave — Ribbit and a few others are now offering online video chat. Like a real-time and incredibly interactive Facebook, 6rounds plans to make money off of advertising, personalization and offering community members the opportunity to give real and virtual gifts.

Google Wave itself surged into the online realm, but it’s not been adopted as quickly as initially predicted. With all the applications, the platform itself is incredibly versatile. However, too many choices can be overwhelming to users, so the third-party applications themselves offer a great way to introduce people to the Wave.

Linda Broughton works in public communications with the EU institutions in Brussels, Belgium. She is originally from the USA, but has worked with and studied European affairs for the past four years. She keeps a blog on the EU and life in the capital of Europe at euforus.blogspot.com.

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