LinkedIn & Social Networking Strategies

According to the 2010 Social Media Marketing Report , 67% of marketers plan to increase their use of social media channels including blogs, Twitter, and Facebook……

As more companies integrate social media into their marketing and communications plans, emphasis needs to be on creating a social media strategy. Also most web designers and developers realize the impact social media networking has on the web industry, but unfortunately, very few amongst these use this means to promote their profession and find more projects. There are great possibilities using social networks that can boost your business, create sales and more leads.

Normally Facebook and Twitter are two of the most common and important social networks that can be used to promote people / company brand, and allow many technique applications can be used on them. Now introduce another popular one:  LinkedIn. I am also not familiar with this one. So should be a good chance, isnt it? 🙂

#LinkedIn’s power

LinkedIn is a social networking website designed for business professionals. It allows you to share work-related information with other users and keep an online list of professional contacts.

Like Facebook and MySpace, LinkedIn allows you to create a custom profile. However, profiles created within LinkedIn are business-oriented rather than personal. For example, a LinkedIn profile highlights education and past work experience, which makes it appear similar to a resume. Profiles also list the your connections to other LinkedIn users, as well as recommendations you make or receive from other users.

By using LinkedIn, you can keep in touch with past and current colleagues, which can be useful in today’s ever-changing work environment. You can also connect with new people when looking for potential business partners. While people outside your personal network cannot view your full profile, they can still view a snapshot of your education and work experience. They can also contact you using LinkedIn’s anonymous “InMail” messaging service, which could lead to new job opportunities.

If you are still blur, get a quick view on the next video play.

However, it is not good enough when you just had these tools, you must help yourself or your group / company to develop the relevant and suitable social media strategies. So below I introduce 7 steps for a successful social media strategy:

1. Determine Your Goals and Objectives
2. Research, Research, and Research some More
3. Create a Digital Rolodex of Contacts and Content
4. Join the Conversation to Develop Relationships
5. Strengthen Relationships
6. Measure Results
7. Analyse, Adapt, and Improve

For more details, please click me.

To sum up, people need to use social networking to prove their worth and the value of their work., which may involve actually giving them professional advice and help for free.

References:
LinkedIn
Social Media Examiner

Corporate / Enterprise Wiki Strategies

As I mentioned in week 3’s post, I thought Wiki is an abbreviation for Wikipedia previously, so now it is a great opportunity for me to improve this part.
Wiki is an useful micro-blogging tool, is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly.

So about the business wiki? It is one of the most powerful Enterprise 2.0 tools and is capable of transforming the nature of communication within a company. While normal corporate communication flows in a straight line, often from top to bottom, a business wiki can create a synergy of communication that flows from the bottom up. Designed as a simple-to-use collaborative tool, wikis have risen through the ranks of content management systems. From replacing an internal knowledge base to providing templates for reports and memos, wikis are invading the workplace and changing the way we do business.

Five excellent strategies help to improve business wiki:

1. The World Wide Wiki
Global communications is an obvious target for a wiki in the workplace. Provide a method for teams with members in different locations to work together seamlessly and share information on a project, and the simplicity of editing makes it easy for satellite offices to offer input back to headquarters.

2. The Wiki Knowledge Base
An excellent use for this is as a replacement for knowledge bases and frequently asked questions (FAQs). The collaborative nature of wikis makes it the perfect tool for small teams of people who need to create and distribute information to a large group of readers.

3. Wiki Project Organization
Wikis can also play a role in enhancing meetings, and in some cases, replace them altogether. A wiki can be a great place to store meeting minutes and provide the opportunity for employees to offer additional input outside of the meeting.A wiki can also reduce the number of meetings needed to keep a project on track. Communication and synergy of ideas are the two main goals of most meetings, and a wiki is an excellent tool that can accomplish both of these goals.

4. The Wiki Meeting
A wiki can be used to centralize the information and organization of an entire project. Not only could it store meeting notes and provide brainstorming synergy, it can organize the project into an open environment with two-way communication. With wiki organization, all participants in the project can get the same information and are able to share ideas seamlessly. It provides a way to empower the employee and let them take ownership of the project, driving it with their own ideas and, in the end, providing better solutions.

5. Wiki Documentation
Wikis are designed to be a simple, easy-to-use collaborate documentation engine. They are also battle-tested with hundreds of millions of people using wikis every day. Because of their open design, they can be the perfect tool to provide documentation for a wide range of projects, from large to small, and from technical to non-technical.

Check an video play about  Zoho Wiki – online content sharing and group collaboration:

In a word, using Wiki is a fast, cheap and highly effective way to run an business project, and help people to acheive target.

References:
What Is Wiki
The Business Wiki

Blogging Strategies for Business Purpose

As my previous posts, I have discussed some about the strategic use of social media tools. In this week, the lecture make it more particular.

Nowdays, for almost every business a blog will help enhance the visibility and show people what they know. Sure, there are some services like snow plowing where having a blog might be a waste of time, but even landscape businesses could benefit greatly from having a blog. Here is a wonderful business blog instance show why it is successful. 

# Ecoki

Ecoki is a blog site that offers a wide range of articles, tips and ideas on everything related to living a green lifestyle. The beauty of this blog is the clean, grid-based template. This style makes it easy to read and showcases the various topics. In addition, they make it simple to navigate the site by adding easily visible headers, such as featured article, latest news, popular items and resources. Sometimes just calling out the specific areas on your site is all you need to do to get people more engaged with your content.

In addition, Ecoki has two types of navigation bars. The top navigation bar calls out the main topics they cover, including food, technology and design, and the navigation directly under it showcases their media delivery, including articles, video and info on contributors. These two different navigation bars give more power to the readers by allowing them to choose how they want to consume the content.

Tip from Ecoki: If the content for your blog site includes multiple topics, consider the grid layout design. It’s easy to follow and allows you to showcase multiple areas in a simple format. Also, one smart strategy is to add in photos to break up the text in your grid layout and make the site more inviting and less static.

So now for my particular business blog strategies are:

1. SEO

Business blogs need to be more optimized than private blogs, as they need better placing in search engines, to reach targeted audiences, and potential customers. SEO Advantages of Blogging is:

• It educates your audience
• It adds page after page of content visible to the search engines
• It provides content that your audience can easily share and link to
• It shows that you are an authority in your specific industry
• It provides link bait opportunities
• It provides content syndication opportunities
• It provides opportunity for deep linking to main website content pages
1. Social Media

This part takes the most time and effort, and delivers the greatest benefit. Social media engagement – facilitating conversations with customers and prospects – yields qualified sales opportunities, strengthens customer relationships, extends brand awareness, and delivers a litany of other direct and indirect revenue enhancements.

1. Internal Strategies

Some organizations are technologically challenged, publicity shy or just not willing to experiment in public. An internal blog is visible only to employees. Content and comments can be tightly controlled, wide open, or somewhere in between. Internal blogs allow employees to learn how to use blogging tools in a safe environment. Internal business blogs can be used in a variety of ways.

• Project Management – When rolling out a new software system, a building expansion, etc.
• Human Resources – Answering general questions about insurance, company policy, etc.
• Team Building – Use a blog as a virtual forum for connecting employees in different locations.
• Leadership Communication and Interaction – Leaders can share their vision with employees, and if desired, get feedback and field questions.
• Operational Communication – On a tactical level, blogs are excellent for sharing success stories and ideas for improvement.

References:
Blog Strategies
SEO Blogging
10 Top Business Blogs

Calculate ROI of Enterprise 2.0

It is a long way to review the week 4’s knowledge, but I have to do 😦
For most people, Return On Investment(ROI) is a quite strange phrase. Before the lecture, I am also not familiar with it, so help myself introduce this phrase first.

Return On Investment(ROI) used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiency of a number of different investments. And to calculate ROI, the benefit(return) of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment; the result is expressed as a percentage or a ratio, the formula is showed below:

In the above formula “gains from investment”, refers to the proceeds obtained from selling the investment of interest. Return On Investment is a very metic because of its versatility and simplicity. That is, if an investment does not have a positive ROI, or if there are other opportunities with a higher ROI, then the investment should be not be undertaken.
Here is a great video shows how to measure social media ROI:

While in the Enterprise 2.0 field, especially enterprise social software, calculating ROI can be a daunting and overwhelming task.The gains and costs are very difficult to measure directly! Next are three examples of the types of analyses that you can do to measure the ROI of E2.0 in organization. And the benefit of collaboration isn’t just the knowledge and information that employees input into the network, but also the information that employees glean from the network to take back to their jobs.

However, there is little doubt that Enterprise 2.0 delivers ROI today, at least on the collaborative side (social networking side). Recently, researchers have even been able to put a real numerical value on social connections. My point is just that it’s difficult to determine where the returns (often the most important ones) will appear when the tools have so many downstream effects. That’s not to say either that Enterprise 2.0 ecosystems can’t be directed to some degree to achieve business objectives. In fact, I believe the the next generation of workers will be experts at achieving their goals by eliciting and then harvesting the knowledge and capabilities they need over the network.

References:

Return On Investment – ROI

Determining the ROI of Enterprise 2.0

Legal risks of Social Media for Organisation

To start discuss, let’s have an overview look first, which has displayed in the lecture already:

Social media is now available in numerous different  formats including forums, weblogs, social blogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures, video, and countless derivative applications that pop up almost daily.  It provides organisations with many opportunities such as business development, branding and client communication, but how about the disadvantages?  The image above is show us the model of legal risks (normally the threat is internal or external to the organisation or both), then based on this, it is necessary to establish the SMP (social media policy).

#: A Social Media Policy (SMP) is a document that suppliments a contract of employment to be legally enforceable by an organisation on its employees. The aim of an SMP is to clearly communicate what is acceptable conduct on Social Networking Sites by an organisations employees and contractors and what conduct is unacceptable and would make an employee liable to dismissal. And an SMP is distinct from an organisations Social Media Strategy (SMS) which is a high level document that communicates how an organisation plans to participate in social media.

To take a bright insight, the following part makes Facebook as an example:

Recently, many incidents from Facebook’s content have drawn most of people’s ire. The most incidents include:taking a lot of heat in the media recently over the desecration of pages set up to tribute two recently deceased young children, racist content, bullying, and scam advertisements. Specially the Prime Minister, with the claim that Facebook is not doing enough to remove objectionable and illegal items from the social networking site. But what is it that Facebook’s users can do to compel Facebook to take down content, and what exactly is a “Take Down Right”? Lets have a see about Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities first.

Jurisdiction:Assuming that these terms are contractually binding, in the event of a dispute, any action against Facebook for breaching the terms must be brought in a State or Federal Court located in Santa Clara County, California. Considering that Facebook’s users are spread around the world this could difficult for most.

Take Down Rights Certain defined take down rights are created in the statement as follows:

 3.6. you will not bully, intimidate, or harass any user;

 3.7 you will not post content that is hateful, threatening, pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence;

 3.10 you will not use Facebook to do anything unlawful, misleading, malicious, or discriminatory;

 5.1 you will not post content or take any action on Facebook that infringes or violates someone else’s rights or otherwise violates the law.

Facebook’s right to take action against Users:

4.8 if you select a username for your account we reserve the right to remove or reclaim it if we believe appropriate (such as when a trademark owner complains about a username that does not closely relate to a user’s actual name).

 5.2 we can remove any content or information you post on Facebook if we believe that it violates this Statement.

 5.3 we will provide you with tools to help you protect your intellectual property rights.

 5.5 if you repeatedly infringe other people’s intellectual property rights, we will disable your account when appropriate.

What can users do?

Facebook encourages users to report content that they find “questionable or offensive”, and to restrict the privacy settings to manage their pages or groups that they set up. Facebook sent an email to Australian Facebook page owners today to remind them to moderate pages effectively to prevent objectionable content.

Reference:

Legal risks of social networking for business

Do organisations need social media policies?

Legal/Social: Facebook takedowns – what must Facebook take down?

Benefits & risks of implementing Enterprise 2.0

Last week, Jason talked about the Enterprise 2.0 implementation.  Honest to say I hate this, because I am not good at analysis, and even sometimes it makes me feel confused, when the issues involve to business things. I am a typical IT people who like the actual and visual thread, isn’t it? Okay away from the topic, actually just a notice: this task is cruel for me, if I made error here, please point out and help me to improve~

The benefits of implementing Enterprise 2.0
General Overview: Enhance productivity, efficiency, knowledge, reputation and staff engagement

Detailed Case Study: TELUS is a national telecommunication company in Canada that provides products and services to 12 million customers across the country. The business situation of TELUS is they wanted to shift from a formal learning environment to one in which team members were encouraged to contribute to and obtain knowledge from colleagues for greater collaboration and cost savings. To solve it, the company is adopting Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to support its new culture of collaboration through features, such as social networking, wikis, blogs, and team sites. At the same time, this solution brings a sort of benefits: cost savings, faster speed to insight, heightened engagements, and better sharing of institutional knowledge.

 

 

The risks of implementing Enterprise 2.0
General Overview: Security, loss of control, reputation, reliability, productivity and resources

Detailed Case Study:  Many major companies have already taken steps to ban employees from using social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, and they may have the same concerns about any corporate social tools. This situation is due to more and more companies is adopting new and emerging technologies (e.g social networking) to increase profit and expand reputation. At the same time, they believe that employees will waste a lot of time “playing” with such features. Thereby cause the loss of productivity. That is why companies should try to find a balance here, where the usefulness of the tools is not overshadowed by employees wasting valuable time using them, and better their productivity, not reduce it.

Reference:

TELUS Embraces Social Computing, Streamlines Formal Learning

Implementing Enterprise 2.0

Evolution Web 1.0, Web 2.0 to Web 3.0

Just a quick recommendation: here is an excellent instance of the development from Web 1.0 to Web 3.0. Take a look, hope it could bring you a new perspective 🙂

Personal productivity —> Web 2.0 tools

BRAVO! From last week’s lecture, I got a deeper insight about the Enterprise 2.0 : Social applications in a business setting. In other words, Enterprise 2.0 is the companies use Web 2.0 technologies to collaborate and connect people together. To enhance review, Web 2.0 is a new web, its platforms that facilitate participation, contribution and interaction among large groups, and the service gets better as more people use it. For better present and understand, I found a simple instance from the YouTube, it covers the knowledge of Enterprise 2.0, take a look 🙂 

Now let us move to the topic of Web 2.0 tools. Actually, before I touch on this subject, I do not have the concept of Web 2.0, even I used to use Facebook, Flickr…… However until now Web 2.0 tools is a large group already, which has Social Networks, Twitter, Social Media, Tagging, Blogs…… Today I will talk about the list three typical tools, and most of them are I have been previously unfamiliar with:

Tip: click on the tool’s name to open search engine, and click image on the right side to play the video.

• Wiki

Before I thought Wiki is an abbreviation for Wikipedia,  yet in fact Wiki is a website that allows user to create and edit any interlinked web page, using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. So obviously it is a good way for me to discuss or share any ideas, opinions with my friends. Or even strangers who interested in my fields. The information expand widely!

• RSS

RSS stand for Really Simple Syndication, it is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works, and all of them are displayed in a standardized XML file format. It also allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. For example, if I go to a blog that i interested and subscribe, then I could view all posts of this blog into one place at one time, and get timely updates. Save time, isnt it?!

• Podcasting

Podcasting is a series of digital media files (either audio or video) that are released episodically. It allows user to create, watch online, or download through web syndication. Also it provides subscribe. The common example is YouTube, I often watch TV episode on it. On the other hand, I can upload media files to it as well. The simple way to do it is just create a account, and do step by step!

 WANNA FIND OUT MORE WEB 2.0 ONLINE TOOLS AND APPLICATIONS? PLEASE CLICK HERE

A successful blog & Personal blogging strategy

Sorry for the late post, cause I have been busy couple of days 😦

Now let us get down to business. To be honest, for myself I do not like to record too many personal stories or thoughts on the Internet, I prefer to chat with friends directly. However it is obviously to see more and more people, they are willing to join the team of bloggers. As I learned from the first and second lectures, people feel glad to use a world of new Web 2.0 technologies to brand themselves or enhance reputation, and Blog is the typical one of them.

How to make a successful blog?  In my view, Attraction and Interaction are the two key points. Okay, further to say, Attraction focus on the content, while the Interaction focus on the communication between the bloggers and audiences. These two crucial elements could be summarised as the purpose of  my blog. Therefore to achieve this aim, I have planned list three blogging strategies:

• Fantastic Content

This does not mean using  plenty of sham information to cheat the audiences! It is all about the media elements, such as apply the relevant images, videos, audio, to enhance the expression of the content. This is a good way to stress own performance among a large number of similar  topics. Furthermore, the concise of content is also significant.

• Expand Readership

This strategy present the Interaction that I said, also propagate the Web2.0 technologies. To determine a Blog is success or not, one important part is the comment field, this also could be displayed as the amount of readership. Current, the common used social community platforms are Facebook, Twitter, Flickr(more about the photos). Simply click the “share” button to attract more potential readers. Or for some mature Blogs, click the “RSS” button to subscribe.

• Regularly Update

Try to keep the Blog intact and fresh, update frequently is necessary. Normally it is my weakness…… However now it is based on the weekly tasks, so probably that seems better for me.

Here is an successful example  Neko’s Blog , Neko is my best friend, different with me she like to record her daily life. Have a look, just ignore the japanese words there, the appearance and interaction design are all excellent!

Hello There!

Welcome! I am Yvonne, an undergraduate student, and this is my last semester in QUT. Choose INB346 as one of my subject, casue i wanna learn more about the Web2.0, seems it is still a fresh topic even the Web3.0 will cover it. Errr, actually I am not good at chatting, so if you guys feel boring here, i apologize and i will try to make it the best 🙂