Old tech, new tech

Social email provider harmon.ie has published the results of a study which shows that only 10% of CIOs on the Fortune 250 and Global 250 lists are active participants in public social networks.

The 10% that do have social credentials show they understand what it takes to drive business transformation by using social tools to help flatten hierarchies, speed up business processes, and boost efficiency and agility through collaboration. It’s no surprise to find Google’s Benjamin Fried or Microsoft’s Anthony Scott on the list, and I’ve long been aware that SAP has been working hard at social (plus it’s a tech company). It would be tragic if Omnicom Group weren’t socially aware, and Office Depot has a strong commercial reason to be ‘social. Royal Bank of Scotland’s Ian Alderton is in a market where all kinds of technology has to be harnessed for competitive advantage, but the one that strikes me as the very strongest indicator widespread acceptance of social media is Cora Carmody of Jacobs Engineering Group – a real business to business operation.

Read more »

LinkedIn Privacy

I had the following email, which I’m sharing here, with the English tidied up a little.

LinkedIn’s privacy settings have changed, meaning your picture can be used for their social advertising.

This has been a blanket change, rather than opt in, so it’s worth letting others know as well.

LinkedIn obviously recognised the value of trust in business, hence using the images of  people known to the advertisement target. I am surprised, however, that they haven’t seen the flip side of this and taken it to its logical conclusion. Creating a false trust can at best be short lived. In a business network which has previously been trustworthy, if a little staid (business and conservatism make good bedfellows), this could be very damaging to LinkedIn and individuals alike.

I’m disappointed that this is twice in one week that I’ve had good cause to write somewhat negative reports on a network that until very recently had more trust than the others.

I couldn’t see the point of business contenders like Viadeo – just more to manage – but LinkedIn could find itself with a serious challenger if it continues to abuse the trust of people who have been loyal to it for years by failing to consider the user as it grows.

The email: 

I received the following message from a contact and I am forwarding it for your awareness and due consideration.

Without attracting too much publicity, LinkedIn has updated their privacy conditions. Without any action from your side, LinkedIn is now permitted to use your name and picture in any of their advertisements.

Some simple actions to be considered:

1. Place the cursor on your name at the top right corner of the screen. From the small  pull down menu that appears, select “settings”
2. Then click “Account” on the left/bottom
3. In the column next to Account, select the option “Manage Social Advertising”
4. Finally un-tick the box “LinkedIn may use my name and photo in social advertising”
5. and Save

How to inform your connections? Simple! Via ‘Inbox > Compose message’ in Linkedin, you can send a message to up to 50 connections at once, all of whom will appreciate being informed.

Did LinkedIn Just Set it’s Path to LinkedOut?

An email arrived today. Linked In and Tweets. My soul soared. At first glance it looked like LinkedIn was removing the Twitter spam from its update streams. Sense reigned!

It was a shortlived euphoria. I’d misread. LinkedIn is not only NOT eliminating the ability to send updates from Twitter to LinkedIn accounts. it’s stopped supporting the standalone Tweets Application.

I have no idea what LinkedIn wants to achieve. Pure hypothesis might be:
- it wants to appear more on trend and sees Twitter as a way to do it
- it’s playing a numbers game so that it can show exponential growth in status updates to investors, who notoriously overvalue numbers of users as a factor rather than profits (No, the dotcom boom appears not to have taught some people much.)

Read more »

Alerti Social Media Monitoring and Management Service

Guest Post, Murray Newlands, Influence People

As a Public Relations professional, keeping up with your campaigns is a big part of your day-to-day work, and staying current on industry trends is a must. A social media monitoring and management service can be a big help. Whether you are a newcomer to the idea of social media monitoring or a veteran who is one of the 2 out of 3 professionals who isn’t “happy” with their current social media monitoring tool, I am happy to announce the launch of Alerti in the US and UK this week.

Alerti’s founders were on a mission to create a single, customizable interface for managing and sharing information from the web. Their result offers all of the advantages of the big name services at a fraction of the cost. I expect their current userbase of thousands of French users to grow substantially in the coming months. I’m working with Alerti and am excited to offer Waves PR readers a chance to try Alerti FREE for 3 months. More on that in a minute…

Alerti In Action

Alerti provides a simple, effective tool with a single interface to collect and manage relevant information from around the web, empowering you to follow what is being said about you, your brand, or your competitors on the internet, to measure the engagement of your communities, and to interact with them.

Read more »