Social Media for business

A well structured, and easy to follow presentation from PresentationAdvisors (view more) covering how to approach social media for business. I’m sharing it here both for the content and for the presentation style - which is very crisp, uncluttered, and easy to understand. It demonstrates that slides don’t have to be full of bullet points to get a complicated message across - even without a speaker there to talk to the slides.

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Facebook continues march of world domination

Vincenzo Cosenza has just updated his world map of the most popular social networks by country for Dec 2010.

Facebook is now the market leader in 115 out of 132 countries, although LinkedIn and Twitter are on the rise as second or third networks in many countries (Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, UK and the US).

Check Vincenzo’s site for the full story, or

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The Social Media Universe

Social media, E2.0, conversational marketing, and Crowdsourcing are all topics that are I’ve been following over the last couple of years, but so far it has been an interesting diversion, not my day-job. That is still the case, however I’m now convinced more than ever that everyone in R&D, marketing, or PR must start living and breathing in this new space.  

It is no longer acceptable to assign a stagier, student or new-grad as a department’s social media rep - and to have them re-purpose content from press releases into the social media stream.  (Ok - so it hasn’t acceptable that way for some time, but we all know places where this is still the way it is done …)

My personal mission is now to fully grasp this space, from end to end, and to map my journey through it here and elsewhere.  This will help me get my thoughts straight, and I hope that it will also serve to help others.  

Follow my thoughts by subscribing to my Social Media feed / View my Social Media category

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Is Social Media a fad?

Great intro to social media and why we all need to be in the conversational marketing space. The video is from socialnomics.com

Crowdsourcing a new name for this site?

Updated on 14 Aug 2009 by Andy Bryant

I’ve been pondering over the name of this blog for a couple of weeks. When I started hosting my own site on the net the .name domains were just being launched - so I dived right in and grabbed andy.bryant.name, thinking everyone would follow in this trend. It had been great for email, and for pointing people towards my web presence; but the expected ‘next big thing’ growth in the .name domain clearly hasn’t happened. I frequently have to assure people that .name is a valid domain.

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How social media can make history

Another excellent TED talk, with a crystal clear presentation from Clay Shirky on how the world of media has changed. If you have a message and want to get it out to the world, or have a product and want to market it, you need to spend 15 minutes of your life watching this.

“While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.”

Social Networking Services

Home of the Social Networking Services Meta List

Wow. I thought there were only a few of these (Friendster, Linkedin etc). It seems there are hundreds. As I checked, the total was 380.

Technorati: social_networks

Job Hunt: Supernetworking

On the subject of networking, one of my colleagues just recomended this book. Looks interesting.

Supernetworking: Transform Your Contacts into the Perfect Career Opportunity by Michael Salmon

LinkedIn Contacts & Networking Tool

LinkedIn is one of a new breed of contacts management tools, that take old-school-tie networking to another level. It works on the principle of connectedness, in that you enter yourself, and the people you know. They then enter the people they know, who enter the people they know, and so on. Once you've built a network, you can then search it for companies, or people you want to meet. If you get a match, you can request the contacts that know you to initiate get a referral, thus making a personal introduction.

There are a number of similar tools out there, however most either have questionable privacy rules, or are more suited for finding a blind date. LinkedIn is much more driven by business networking, and doesn't appear to be designed to steal your contacts list for spamming purposes.

They are currently running as a free beta, and while they may start charging in the future, I suspect this will be for employment agencies running multiple searches in parallel. In order to retain the value of the network, individual use should remain free.