Online Rambles

The Half Life of a Bitly Link

2011-10-17T15:38:00.000+01:00

Over on the Bitly blog, there has been some interesting work looking at the half-life of a bitly link once it is shared on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Direct (email or IM etc). Aside from a bit of debate about whether it is half-life or median time they are working out the results are quite interesting.

You can read the full blog post is here but in summary:

Mean Twitter link half life = 2.8 hours
Mean Facebook link half life = 3.2 hours
Mean Direct link half life = 3.4 hours
Mean YouTube link half life = 7.4 hours

Outside of YouTube there is very little difference in how a link performs by platform. It's all about the content it points to.

Can Brands Use Foursquare Tips Lists?

2011-08-16T10:31:00.000+01:00

Foursquare has just launched a new feature that allows users to create tip lists such as 'Best places to get lunch on Tottenham Court Road' or 'Best bars in London' or 'Best photo spots in London' etc. The concept being that users are continually discovering things about their local area and this gives the platform to share their tips easily. At the moment this can only be done via the website but hopefully soon users will be able to create tip lists on the go via mobile.

When you log on to the 4sq website you will now see a lists feature and some suggestions based on your check-in history. You can create any lists you want from here and add places either from your own history or anything that exists on 4sq.

At the moment there are no tip lists that I can see when I check in. It is my understanding though that once tip lists start being created you will be able to see your own lists and those lists you follow in the 'To-Do List section'. New lists will be recommended to you in the 'Explore' section and these will be based on your check-ins. So if I check-in to a restaurants I will be able to find top restaurant lists.

So what does this mean for brands? Well, potentially this could be pretty interesting for brands as this offers a great way for them to share their views and thoughts with their followers. Fans of brands love being engaged and involved with those brands and this offers a great platform. There is also an opportunity for brands to infiltrate the lists of influential foursquare users and attract visitors or customers in that way.

I hope that my local area starts being populated with some lists so I can experience how useful and how easy they are to find. I suspect the ability to search for tip lists will become ever more important and so that functionality may need to be improved.quite quickly.

On with the discovery!

Me and my fans

2011-07-08T15:33:00.000+01:00

I want 500,000 fans. Can you get them? Well, errr, yes. But what's the point?

I get asked one question a lot when it comes to social media, Facebook in particular, and that is what the value of a fan is?

Everyone wants a nice simple answer along the lines of £3.51. So if a brand spends £50k generating 100k fans and each one is worth £3.51.... Good business, count me in, where do I sign up?

Lets get this straight. I can get you as many fans as you want. Display, hiding content behind like walls, paid search, Facebook ads. You keep spending and the fans will keep on coming. It's what you do with them that creates the value.

You see they are not really fans (after all they only clicked a button), not in the true sense of the word and they are absolutely worthless to you unless you engage with them and add some value to the relationship. All of which must be linked to the success of your business, or else what's the point?

What do you want your community to do?
Have you researched your target audience, who are they?
Do you know what they want and how best to influence them?
What does your conversation calendar look like?
What does your community management look like?
How are you measuring engagement?

Don't go on a fan hunt for the sake of it and then sit back proudly saying look at my fans. Understand what you want to do and with whom and then start small and use the reach of the social graph to pull in more fans that are engaged, relevant, and valuable. Get this right and you can acheive some truly staggering results from sales to product development to promotion to distribution to brand ambassaors.

Always remember: "A few can activate many" and you won't go far wrong in your approach.

How many friends can you handle?

2010-11-15T16:51:00.000Z

I have just experienced a collision of coincidences.

Recently I have been reading Professor Robin Dunbar's book called How Many Friends Does One Person Need. I have also just seen on Mashable that Path a new personal network has launched and they use Robin Dunbars book as part of the rationale behind their proposition.

I would highly recommend reading Robin Dunbar's book but in a nutshell he comes to the conclusion that humans are only capable of handling a maximum of 150 relationships and that this applies to social media as much as any other type of relationship.

Path is a personal network that will only allow you to have a maximum of 50 friends. The concept being that with so many social networks being used for promotion (be it self promotion or spam) the essence of sharing information with close friends or family has been lost. From what I understand Path is exclusively based around photo sharing. At the moment Path is only available in the US and only on the iPhone but with plans to roll out further.

So will it work? Well Professor Dunbar's research points to the fact we will be a lot more comfortable in this environment, but will we really? Will this network augment our social networks as Path claim or will it simply be another site trying to find a twist to get some visibility in a saturated market and one that will ultimately fail?

You can read the Path blog here.

The Web Is Dead

2010-10-12T13:41:00.000+01:00

This was the title of the fascinating article I read in Wired Magazine this month. I would highly recommend you subscribe or buy the magazine to read the full article.

The thought string the writers are tugging at is the fact that you can spend all day using the Internet without ever actually surfing the web.

You listen to your music using Pandora or Spotify, update Facebook using your mobile phone application, check the latest news using Pulse. You send messages using email, Facebook, or MSN, you may even set your Sky+ to record using your iPhone app. The point is you have used the Internet all day but never actually surfed the web.

Is surfing the web dead, how does search fit in to the new application driven Internet? What does this mean for all of the money being spent on developing big new corporate or recruitment websites. Should the focus be on actually getting your message to these applications rather than creating a destination of choice that is found by browsing?

Quite often the power of the application can be the speed you can get to the relevant content over quality of the whole experience. Does quick and easy beat all else?

Interesting times ahead for sure.

As a side note, if you have an iPad I would highly recommend subscribing to your favourite magazines using their apps (if they have one). It completely changes the way you can experience the articles and experience the advertising options.

BranchOut for a new career

2010-09-23T10:26:00.000+01:00

I have spent the last few days looking at BranchOut, the new career networking application on Facebook.

It's an interesting idea and one that on the surface certainly blurs the existing lines between having Facebook as your personal network and LinkedIn as your professional one.

So how does it work? Well it's pretty simple and rather than me type it out you can see the video below for an overview.

So what's the verdict?

It's far too early to tell at the moment but it's success seems at a personal level seems to be very dependant on how you and your network use Facebook. Take me for example, here are my Branchout network stats:

140 Friends
2 Friends using BranchOut
1,004 Extended friend network
49 Companies in my network
481 Companies in my extended network
0 Jobs I can search

Now let's look at my LinkedIn stats:

523 Connections
5,937,053 Extended connections
100,000 Companies in my network
2,066 UK Jobs I can search

I know this is slightly unfair but this is what I mean about how I use my different networks. I have lots more connections on LinkedIn than I do on facebook but that is because I choose to keep my facebook network as people I actually know and would choose to go for a drink with in the real world. LinkedIn I am happy to connect to like minded industry professionals and peers. The success of the app is also heavily reliant on my friends downloading and using it.

Of course it's good to know that if I am interested in company X and my friend works at company X I can use that friend to network in. The problem is that he is my friend and I didn't need BranchOut to tell me that, I already knew. If I didn't know a friend at company X then I would go onto LinkedIn and have a look at my extended professional network.

If someone does get a careers app right on Facebook and it gets widespread adoption then it really could be a game changer but I do not think this is it and I don't think LinkedIn will be losing too much sleep.

Google Instant - Marmite Genius!

2010-09-13T09:50:00.001+01:00

Marmite seems to be the effect that Google Instant has had on the blogging community. I love it..... I hate it......SEO is dead.......SEO will be much better.....

The instant feedback on Instant seems to be pretty polarised.

I really like Google Instant but then again I really like Marmite. I am really impressed with the way I can adapt and deepen my search in real time and find my way to relevant content much faster. I find the way the results come at you takes a bit of getting used to and I am sure it is this UI piece that a lot of users are finding the hardest. I am confident though that it won't be too long before we are all comfortable with this and it is the norm.

So what of SEO? Well I don't believe for one second this is the end of SEO. Far from it. I only have to look at how my own search behaviour has changed in this short few days to know this. I believe that some tweaking may definitely be required though. Let me try and explain what I mean. If I am typing in my search query I use both the predictive results in the drop down and the instant results to refine my search as I go. This allows me to get to what I am looking for much quicker. So the future for SEO quite possibly looks like a combination of tightening right up on long tail terms but also understanding how the Google keyword predictor works as this will definitely steer the direction of a users search.

Interesting to watch and see how this one develops.

Social Media - Just be normal

2010-08-31T14:12:00.001+01:00

I often get asked about social media etiquette and how best to behave. What are the do's and what are the don'ts.

Here is the question I often pose back: How do you behave when you are out and about at a social gathering?

This gathering could be a pub or a dinner party or a conference. The chances are at these events and venues there will be a mix of people you know and people you don't. Of course you want to introduce yourself and talk a bit about yourself but you don't want to bore the pants off everyone. You don't want the lasting impression of you to be the loudmouth that wouldn't shut up about themselves. If someone asks you a question, you would answer it. You would take some time to talk to other people and find out about what they do and what they like. You might mingle and ask someone you know who that person is over there that you don't know. All in all you would want to come away having learned more about people you know, having met some people you didn't, and probably hoping that people liked you.

You don't want to be the loudmouthed gobby idiot whose only topic of conversation is themselves and deep down everyone else is thinking 'please don't let me get stuck with them!'. People might be tolerant on the surface but it's probably just because you are louder than everyone else and in their faces. But trust me they are thinking about how to get as far away from you as possible.

So there you have it. How you behave in social media is just how you behave in any other social environment. Just simple common sense. Simples.

Facebook Places - A natural step

2010-08-19T14:13:00.000+01:00

So facebook has finally unveiled it's own location based service, or LBS as the cool kids say. Called Places and only available in the US it seems to me a logical extension of the facebook platform.

There will be the over reaction of stalker based fear that seems to go hand in hand with anything facebook does at the moment but I'm sure the more enlightened will see this for what it is. A natural next step.

Almost as guaranteed as stalking will be predictions of the demise of 4sq and other similar services.

I don't see that as being the case at all and in my opinion this move could actually boost foursquare. I think that facebook will increase awareness of and improve participation of LBS. Especially when you consider that in its current form facebook places appears to be a check-in style application without the benefits that a service like 4sq offers in terms of recommendations, tips, rewards etc. Sure it may well move into that space but perhaps joint ventures or app plug-ins will present themselves.

I'm looking forward to the UK rollout and hopefully the next generation of LBS that will be developed as a result.

You can read about facebook places on their blog here.

iPhone has 10% of UK Student Market

2010-07-14T12:04:00.000+01:00

I was recently asked to look into the penetration of iPhones into the UK student population.

What sounded like a pretty simple question turned out to be harder to answer than I first thought. This is largely due to the apparent reluctance from Apple and the network providers to provide detailed sales and demographic information.

I did manage to track some stats down and then had to make some assumptions along the way to try and get to an answer and it went something like this:

As of April 2010....
Number of iPhones sold worldwide = 50.7m
UK represents estimated 8% of iPhone market
UK iPhones = 4.056m
Penetration of iPhones for 18-24 yr olds is 12%
UK iPhone penetration of 18-24 yr olds = 486,720

How many 18-24 year olds are students? Well if we guess at 50% then that gives 243,360 students an iPhone.

According to the BBC, the total number of students in the UK is around 2.4 million.

This would mean that iPhone penetration for the student marketplace is around 10%

Of course this doesn't take into account students outside of that age bracket and I have had to make some assumptions. This does however give a broad indication.

I would be interested to see if anyone else has some figures they can add into the mix so we can get a clear picture of this audience group.

iPhone vs Smartphone Content Consumption

2010-07-13T15:23:00.000+01:00

A recent report from ComScore highlighted the main content consumption of iPhone and smartphone users. I have taken the data and put it into a quick to consume table. (click to enlarge)

This data is US centric and it would be interesting to see how this compares to the UK

It is no surprise that music tops the iPhone list whereas across smarthpones generally music is much further down the list. Aside from that however consumption is pretty similar across both sets of data.

This chart really reminds me of the ones that were doing the rounds about 10 years ago when we were looking at what everyone was doing on the Internet. It didn't take too long for job hunting and recruitment to make an appearance on that chart and then swiftly rise up the rankings.

Will we see the same pattern emerge here?

Social Media Counter

2010-07-01T16:01:00.000+01:00

Chirp chirp went TweetDeck as the next tweet arrived this morning. This one from the excellent Carve Consulting (follow @carveconsulting) and I saw this social media stats counter that has been put together by Gary Hayes (@GaryPHayes)

It's awesome! Enjoy

AR Still A Gimmick?

2010-06-18T15:25:00.001+01:00

I wrote about using augmented reality in recreuitment over a year ago on this blog. You can read the original post here.

I have followed this fantastic technology closely over the last year and whilst there have been quite a few gimmicky applications, I am now starting to see some really clever uses of the technology. What I mean by this is times where the use of AR actually enriches the experience rather than providing a fun marketing angle. Don't get me wrong the marketing uses in campaigns such as Coraline or Ironman2 have been great but they are fun rather than useful.

There are many examples now showing where AR is adding value, here are a few I particularly like. I am sure many of you will have seen these but they are worth pointing out agian.

Lego
Lego have started putting AR codes on their product boxes so that when you are in the lego shop you can see what the model looks like before you buy it to help with your purchasing decision. Simple and clever!

London Underground
The combination of GPS, Compass and AR is starting to show real value. Layar is a reality browser that is the power behind many great applications in this field. I particularly like the Acrossair London Underground application that allows a user to find any underground station from where they are and even now features a live departure board.

US Postal Service
Here is a neat little application that allows you to virtually fit a box around whatever the object is you are looking to send and then adjust it until you have got the perfect sized box. You then know whch size box to buy for your package. Simple and clever.

There are more and more intelligent uses coming out. Worth thinking about more?

Are Instant Interviews A Good Thing?

2010-05-20T11:55:00.000+01:00

TwitJobSearch have recently launched a new service that allows candidates to search for a job and then request an instant interview via Skype.

The idea is that a jobseeker uses TwitJobSearch to find a relevant job, they then simply click on the Skype logo and submit their Skype ID to the recruiter. The recruiter can then click on that Skype ID and start a video chat/interview.

TwitJobSearch have produced a demo video to show how this works. A more polished version will follow I'm sure:

There is no question that this really demonstrates not only the power of TwitJobSearch but also just how immediate and interactive social media is and the reach this can give to organisations that embrace it.

I must admit though that I sense some hurdles to overcome:

From a recruiters perspective they have nothing that helps screen the candidates. Could this mean endless video conversations with unqualified candidates?
Is this intended to be used purely as a sense check and then the candidate goes through the formal process as per all other candidates?
How do recruiters avoid making decisions on what they see rather than what they hear?
Does the Skype candidate have an advantage over the candidate that has applied online via the careers website or indeed a candidate who doesn't have a Skype account?

I am a huge fan of advances like this and this is a glimpse of the power of social recruiting. I do however think that these questions and I'm sure many others need to be answered in order for this to get the attention it deserves for all the right reasons.

Paid Advertising vs. Earned Advertising

2010-04-26T17:00:00.000+01:00

Neilsen has done a joint piece of research with Facebook to try and understand the value of paid versus earned media. Whilst of course Facebook would only commission a piece of research that is going to be favourable, the results are still quite interesting.

The full report can be downloaded here

The research focussed on the theory that consumers trust their peers more than anyone else so to that end how does lift from a standard homepage advert compare to a homepage advert with a social context and how does that compare to an organic advert sent from a friends newsfeed.

When simply using a homepage advert, awareness increased by 4% and purchase intent increased by 2%

Now comparing those who had seen simply that homepage ad to those that had seen the ad with social context there was significant lift.

Next the focus was on comparing the ad with social context to the homepage ad with and organic advert. Here we see a significant increase in ad recall and brand awareness.

So looking at all 3 together:

Now of course this research was done with consumer brands in the US but we can still apply the learnings from this in recruitment communications.

Organic adverting is by far the most effective however by it's very nature it will have the smallest immediate reach
Enable social advocacy within your advertising
There is significant benefit to 'seeding' social networks with paid for adverts as long as it is done intelligently and with relevance
Hitting the right balance will substantially increase recall, brand awareness, and interest in the employment proposition.

The Ad Exchange

2010-04-20T13:53:00.002+01:00

Ad exchanges have been around for a few years but they have very much been under the radar. This year you will hear more and more about ad exchanges and how in a lot of people’s opinions they will change the way that publishers sell their inventory and potentially limit the amount of direct inventory that can be bought.

So what is an ad exchange?

Lets start with ad networks. An ad network does exactly what you would imagine it does. An ad network connects multiple advertisers with multiple publishers. They tend to throw a few benefits into the equation as well in terms of adding a layer of targeting capability. Simply put the model looks like this:

For single ad networks they face a continual problem of one side having more or less demand than the other. The may have lots of publishers with inventory and not enough advertisers or vice versa with lots of demand and not enough inventory. When you multiply this model out over the hundreds of ad networks in existence then you get a complex supply and demand model. For single advertisers this can make life very difficult. Enter the ad exchange….

An ad exchange forms a central body that allows the different networks to trade with each other whilst keeping just one trading relationship in place. The relationship with the exchange. The model now looks like this:

All supply and demand has now been linked across the networks through the exchange. What happens now is a bid system similar to that on Google. In simple terms it works like this; A network has an impression for a publisher site which it can then send that into the exchange to get bids on it from the other networks. The other networks bid on it using their targeting criteria and available budgets for their own advertisers and gain an understanding of relevance. The bids are then sent back to the original network and if the highest bid is higher than the one it had from it’s own advertiser then the winning bidder has it’s impression served. Both networks take a cut of the impression price and the exchange charges a flat fee. Next impression is up for grabs and here we go again.

Mastery of the ad exchange will allow advertisers to get a fantastically targeted campaign across a wide range of media with great efficiency.

Sources: Lies, Damned Lies

No Such Thing As Social Recruiting

2010-04-07T15:20:00.000+01:00

It is just part of recruiting!

Before I get booed and hissed at let me explain what I mean.

Recruiting is all about finding, attracting and retaining the best talent and it has a lot of elements to it. You need to understand your audience and what they want, you need to make sure you have an employer brand proposition and creative platform, you need to make sure you are engaging with your audience, you need to have a good website and candidate management system, you need to have a good interview and assessment process, and you need to have an active keep warm and talent pool management strategy. This is before you have looked at other elements such as onboarding, inductions and alumni networks. This is recruiting.

When we talk about understanding your target audience this is the part where we look at who they are, the motivations, the size of the audience, the media consumption and their behaviours. This naturally takes us into a channel strategy of which platforms such as social media will be looked at along with other engagement channels like search engines (PPC & SEO), ad networks, editorial content, ambient, radio, press, and television. You need to understand how to use these channels, what your goals are for the channels, how to measure them and how effective they may or may not be for your target audience and the goals of your organisation. This is all part of defining a good recruitment strategy.

I am a huge advocate of utilising social media as part of the overall recruitment strategy. I think they offer an incredible opportunity to engage with candidates, build up advocacy, and give organisations a great opportunity to listen, learn and evolve. The more we can support, encourage, and deliver good use of social media as part of the recruitment process the better.

But part of the recruitment process is what it is. It is not the saviour of your shoddy brand proposition or poor website and non-existent candidate management system. It won't replace your PPC and SEO strategies and it won't deliver on tactical requirements like some other channels will. Social media forms a part of your overall strategy. If you don't have the other pieces in place then ultimately you will fail.

While I think about it, when will it be ok to drop 'social' from social media?

Free tools to help 'measure success'

2010-03-12T14:22:00.001Z

I was recently pointed to Anil Batra's Website Analytics, Behavioural Targeting and Optimisation blog.. Anil has written an article on free tools that are available to help measurement of website traffic, social media buzz, search volumes and competitor analysis.

It is a subject that is being spoken about more and more across the board and even starting to move up the food chain a bit in terms of importance and that is really good. It is still all to common that measurement is a last minute addition to strategies where in fact benchmarks, measures and KPI's should factor in the development phase. How many examples do you see of data being captured and even made to look very pretty but there is no real understanding of what is being measured against or indeed what constitutes real success. You must figure out your measurement needs first.

I'm going off the point. The point is to help you understand what free tools are out there so you can understand this a little better.

This is taken straight from Anil's blog:

Web Analytics

For monitoring the on-site behaviours of your users and the performance of your site, use the following free tools

Google Analytics – http://www.google.com/analytics
Yahoo Web Analytics – http://analytics.yahoo.com/

Search

Use the following search tools to learn what keywords your customer/potential customers are searching for so that you can optimize your site accordingly.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
SEOMOZ has set of Free tools - http://www.seomoz.org/tools
Google Webmaster Central – Provides you data on how your sites in crawled and indexed by Google.
Bing Webmaster Center - Provides you data on how your sites in crawled and indexed by Bing.
Google Trends - http://www.google.com/trends
Google Insight for Search - http://www.google.com/insights/search/#

Social Media

I already mentioned two tools in my blog post titled “Free Social Media Monitoring Tools for Small Businesses”, here they are again (and two new ones) :

Google Alerts – http://www.google.com/alerts
SM2 by Techrigy – http://sm2.techrigy.com/
Twitter Search – http://search.twitter.com/
Yelp.com – Good for small and medium size businesses. Find out what customers are saying about you and your competitors.

Competitive Analysis

Want to know how your competitors are doing compared to you? Use some of the tools listed below. Keep in mind that all of these tools use different ways to collect the data and hence the actual data you get from one tool will differ from the other but overall it should provide you good competitive information.

Search and Social Media Tools – Many of the tools listed above can provide you competitive information as well. E.g. Set SM2 to monitor the keywords that describes your competitor and you can start to see what customers are saying about your competitors
Alexa - http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo
Compete - http://www.compete.com/
Quantcast - http://www.quantcast.com/
Google Trends for Websites - http://trends.google.com/websites
Google Ad Planner - http://www.google.com/adplanner. Here is my review of Google Ad Planner

Thanks to Anil for this list. I know there are a lot of other free tools out there but thought this list was a good starter for 10. Please let me know what other tools are out there that you think should be on the list and I will re-publish a new one with your feedback.

Manage Your Application Via Your Mobile?

2010-02-09T14:35:00.004Z

I was recently sent a link for Taleo's new talent management system Taleo 10.

I don't want to get into a debate about which is the best talent management system, there are other people with core businesses in this market that can do that with far more wisdom than I, but the one thing I thought was interesting was the mobile element to Taleo 10

I was particularly interested in the planned development of applications for iPhone and Blackberry that allow users to [and I quote] "browse, share and apply to jobs, communicate with hiring managers and track application status"

To me this represents a pretty big step forward from not only being able to browse jobs via mobile devices but also as a candidate manage your complete recruitment process via a mobile device. A few questions sprang to mind immediately and I would welcome thoughts:

Are candidates at a level of confidence in mobile communications that they would be happy to apply for a position and manage their application in this way?
How many employers offer some sort of bespoke mobile experience?
How many employers have considered let alone implemented a mobile strategy?
How important is this?

I am interested in thoughts and views on this subject and also any experiences that anyone would like to share.

Interesting Social Media Research

2010-02-05T11:05:00.012Z

'Social Media & Mobile Internet Use Among Teens and Young Adults' is the latest piece of research by Pew Internet. The research is US based and the sample audience is 800 12-17 year olds that were telephone interviewed from different parts of the US and some 2,500 adults (18+)

You can read the full report here

Some of the numbers are not what I expected but the trends pretty much are. Here are some of the highlights that I have gleaned from the report:

1) Blogging has declined in teens and young adults while simultaneously rising in older adults

14% online teens now say they blog compared to 28% in 2006
Decline also reflected in less incidents of teens commenting on blogs within social networking sites
Overall the amount of blogging has remained steady although the age demographic has changed dramatically
Teens prefer shorter, faster updates such as status updates on social networks or texting to keeping longer journals such as blogs

2) Both teen and adult use of social networking sites has risen dramatically

73% of wired teens use a social networking site - up from 65% in Feb '08
47% of online adults use a social networking site - up from 37% in Nov '08
Adults are increasingly fragmenting their use with 52% having multiple profiles.
Facebook is the most common social network amongst adults with 73% having a profile. 48% have MySpace and 14% have a LinkedIn profile.

3) Teens are not using Twitter in large numbers. While teens are bigger users of almost all other online applications, Twitter is an exception.

8% of 12-17 year olds use Twitter
Older teens are more likely to use Twitter than their younger counterparts. 10% of 14-17 yr olds compared to 5% of 12-13 yr olds
Teens are more likely to update status on other social networks
Young adults lead the way when it comes to status updates with one-third of 18-29 yr olds posting or reading status updates

4) Wireless Internet use rates are especially high among young adults and the laptop has replaced the desktop as the computer of choice for those under 30.

55% of 18-29 yr olds have accessed the internet wirelessly on a laptop
55% of 18-29 yr olds have accessed the internet on a mobile
28% of 18-29 yr olds have accessed the internet wirelessly on an e-reader or gaming device
African American adults are the most active users of the mobile web

5) Other core activities tracked in the survey for teens found:

62% of online teens get news about current events and politics online
48% of wired teens have bought things online like books, music or clothing. Up from 31% in 2000
31% of teens get health, dieting or physical fitness advice from the internet and 17% of teens get advice on hard to discuss topics such as drugs and sexual health.

Can You Near Me Now?

2010-01-11T16:00:00.005Z

I have just checked out one of Google's latest developments for the mobile. Well iPhone or Android to be precise. It is 'Near me now' and it's quite nifty.

Google basically takes your GPS location and then allows you to see what is near you by category such as restaurants, coffee shops, bars etc. Or you can choose the 'Explore right here' option and you will get a list of everything immediately around you. If you can't see the category you want you can expand to show more categories. The content is delivered by Google's local search.

This new functionality is currently only enabled for Google.com but it does work in the UK. If you go to Google on your iPhone it will probably default to Google.co.uk. If it does, scroll to the bottom of the page and click the 'Go to Google.com' link, then click the link to allow Google to use your position. As soon as there is a GPS fix you will be able to use the new functionality.

I was fortunate enough to be in New York last week for a pitch and whilst I was there I tried it out. (US seem to have been more adoptive of local search and so chances of success seemed higher!) It was nothing earth shattering but it did work and I could read a review of a restaurant I was standing outside without having to do any physical searching. Handy if you wanted a quick snapshot I suppose.

I am interested in the question of whether this sort of thing could or should be adopted in recruitment? I don't know but I am keen to see what people think. If you were standing outside an organisation and simply by clicking 'Near me know' you could get jobs information or maybe employee reviews. Would that make for an interesting proposition? GPS seems to be enabled in more and more mobile devices and certainly I have seen lots more apps that use GPS as part of the functionality. Will candidates ever search for information in this way?

Answers on a postcard please.

Time for a change

2009-12-08T11:28:00.003Z

I haven't blogged much in the last few weeks as I have been busy getting ready for a new challenge that lies ahead of me.

Taking the famous headline 'New Year, New Career' at it's literal best I will be starting a new role in January 2010 at Work Communications.

I have immensely enjoyed my time at TMP and when Friday arrives it will genuinely be a sad day. I have learned huge amounts in the near 9 years I have worked here through working with great people and with great clients. I have been given the opportunity to focus on digital and creative solutions and I would like to think that I have contributed a lot to TMP in return for the opportunities I have been given.

The time has come though to further my career and my development and work with new great people and new great clients. I am thrilled to be joining the team at Work and can't wait to get stuck in and make a difference.

In between then and now will be lots of Christmas fun and festivities.

Ho! Ho! Ho! Merry Christmas Everyone

LinkedIn All Of A Twitter

2009-11-16T12:22:00.004Z

As of last week, Linkedin has integrated with Twitter to let users publish their LinkedIn status updates via Twitter and vice versa to share their tweets on their LinkedIn profile.

It is pretty straight forward to do. Just under the your status update text box you will now see a Twitter logo and a small check box. If you check this box when you put in your next status update you can sync to your Twitter account and then post your update automatically to Twitter.

(If you have already installed the Twitter app and synced your account you wont need to re-sync)

You can also update your LinkedIn status via Twitter by adding the #in hashtag at the end of your tweet.

In my opinion this is a great addition for LinkedIn. I think the status updates are generally underused but I also think they have the potential to be really powerful. This integration simply makes it easier for users to take advantage of this feature and to put some more context and content to their professional profile.

Battle Of The Brands

2009-10-29T15:01:00.006Z

Ever get the feeling that sometimes you are just getting carried away and not paying attention to anything around you?

Sometimes I feel there is confusion or maybe even conflict between personal brand and company brand. It is so easy to get carried away with developing your personal brand that you can often forget to take your company brand with you. Ultimately this is going to prove costly.

Let me try and explain. If I represent a company that works in a particular industry and I am working on all kinds of initiatives to engage candidates, drive employer brand, and position my company as an innovative communicator and employer of choice then it stands to reason that not telling anyone the name of my company is not a great move. I mean you wouldn't run an advert without your company name on would you?

So why do so many people do it on Twitter? All of a sudden it is sod the name of the company and it's all about look at me and what I am doing! Personal brand has been put before the company that is paying your wages and comes before what you are employed to do.

If you only swim in a very small pond where everyone knows who you are and the company you represent then you can get away it as long as you don't want to swim outside of that small pond. Not the best marketing development plan though.......

Don't get me wrong, personal brand is very important but so is your corporate/employer brand. If you can't justify your activity or demonstrably measure the effect you have had for your organisation then you have failed. Simple as!

So here are some things to consider that might help on Twitter:

Set up company profiles that have clear publishing objectives
Tweet as both yourself and your organisation
Reference your organisation in your tweets if you don't have a company profile
Don't feel you have to use Tinyurls.
Reference your organisation and use relevant hashtags to spread your message
When tweeting as your organisation keep to your objectives
Define your objectives, ahem!
If it's not relevant, don't do it!
Make it measurable

Please don't fall into the trap that it's all about you. It isn't and probably never has been.

The exception to the rule?

2009-10-05T14:13:00.008+01:00

Following on from my last blog about the change of consumer behaviour and the rise of good enough I arrive nicely at the next stop on my journey of discovery. Craigslist. This one baffles me and frankly in my opinion it takes cheap and good enough to the next universe let alone the next level.

For those that don't know, Craigslist is local classified directory catering for pretty much everything including jobs, housing, romance, activities and advice. It started in San Francisco in the mid 90's as an email list and developed up to the website you see today in the late 1990's.

And that is really what brings me on to the point of this little ramble. The website is virtually the same as it was in the late 90's. Nothing has changed. There have been no web 2.0 modifications, nothing that brings it up to date with the latest best practice functionality and nothing that frankly you would expect to find. It looks like an old dinosaur of a website.

This dinosaur though packs quite a punch when it comes to the numbers it delivers. According to the website:

20 billions page views per month
50 million US users
50 million new classified ads a month
1 million new job listings a month
120 million discussion postings a month

This makes Craigslist the biggest job search site in the US, the biggest dating site in the US and the biggest flat hunting website in the US.

It is not even as though the management at Craigslist (although the entire company is only 30 strong) is defying it's users to enable it to keep the cost model the same. According to CEO Jim Buckmaster in an interview he gave with Wired Magazine in all of the complaints and requests they receive from their users, the structure and design of the site never comes up. In fact he argues that if they are the leader in terms of time spent on the site and number of people who post then they must be doing something right.

In essence Craigslist cuts through everything and simply focuses making sure the simple stuff works. The stuff that allows users to do what they want to do. In their world everything else is not important.

Makes for an interesting conversation on website design and best practice functionality.

A side order of wiki with that?

2009-09-29T13:46:00.005+01:00

One of Google's latest product launches has gone quietly under the radar. Sidewiki is product that allows you to add comments to any website you are looking at. Sounds interesting doesn't it?

Well it is and as always with Google it has kicked up a bit of a debate along the way amongst the small group of people who know about it.

In order to be able to post comments or view other people's comments then you must have the latest version of the Google toolbar installed and have sidewiki enabled. This in itself has raised questions about how effective such a tool can ever be as in one swoop you have knocked the user base right down.

Another issue that has angered a small but vocal group is the use of the word wiki. Essentially sidewiki allows you to post a list of comment against web content. This hardly constitutes a wiki. Maybe sidenotes would be more appropriate, although I daresay not as exciting!

Some say this is google trying to control and rank conversation and then ultimately sell advertising against it. Of course, Google tell us this is all about participation and enhancing the user experience by giving them access to richer more informative content. Google will also cleverly use its quality ranking to push comments of a higher quality to the top and as such pushing trivial and spam comments away from the user.

(click to enlarge image)

How can we live without such insightful comments as these?? (Thanks to the Guardian for alerting me to this example) Whether you like or dislike The Mail Online I would argue this isn't exactly enriching the user experience.

So is this a stroke of genius by Google that will slowly build up momentum and become mainstream or is this ultimately doomed to fail?

In an ideal world where spam doesn't exist and people only write insightful and useful comments I can see how this could work. However, I think Google will struggle with this as I can't see how it will beat the spammers and the idiots who just post stupid comments. Google will provide the tools and we will ruin them.

We All Love Crapification

2009-09-15T09:17:00.005+01:00

I recently read an article in Wired Magazine called 'The Good Enuf Revolution' and it really got me thinking about who has the most successful strategy and it is especially pertinent in today's economic climate.

What is the Good Enuf Revolution? Well it is nicely summed up in the picture below:

For those that don't know this is a Flip digital camcorder. Pure Digital (now part of Cisco Systems) saw a gap in the market when it came to Camcorders. There was no budget equivalent of the disposable camera in the camcorder market. So, they created one. While Sony, Panasonic and other well known electronics manufacturers were spending all of their time developing high spec and high def camera's the gap was opening. The Flip Ultra was low quality, had a tiny screen, no colour adjustment, basic controls and no optical zoom but it was simple to operate and quick to upload. In other words it was good enough! 2 years on The Flip video camera is the best selling video camera in the US and accounts for 17% of all sales. Sony and the likes are desperately trying to catch up.

Why so successful? It is simply down to the fact that the vast majority of us aren't interested or don't care about all of the fancy bits we just want something that is good enough.

The Wired article goes on to list other examples such as:

MP3s - all the focus was on high sound quality delivered by CD's and in comparison the sound quality of an MP3 file was rubbish. But they were cheap, simple, easy to manage and portable and ultimately this was more important than quality. In other words good enough.
Skype - net calls can lag, they often drop off, the quality can be poor. but it is accessible and free and now accounts for 8% of international calling minutes. In other words it is good enough
Netbooks - low power, very few features and tiny but they are simple, cheap and meet our needs for surfing the Internet and emailing. In other words, yes you've guessed it.. good enough!

There are other examples in cloud computing, the military, advertising, trade shows and many more.

So what is this, is this the crapification of everything or is this the fact that what matters most to people is making things accessible, simple and good enough?

It's interesting stuff and a trend that will continue to grow and something that all companies offering products and services need to bear in mind. This is not crapification, this is improvement.

As Robert Capps from Wired nicely puts it:

'Thanks to the speed and connectivity of the digital age we have stopped fussing over pixel counts, sample rates, and feature lists. Instead, we're now focused on three things: ease of use, continuous availability, and low price.'

Be warned people. The Good Enuf Revolution has only just begun!!

Designing Your Twitter Posting

2009-08-27T08:34:00.005+01:00

This is the most commonly used sentiment right now but honestly it's true, where did the Summer go?

Work has been incredibly busy and there seems to be a real sense of things picking back up, I've been addicted to streaming music videos via my PS3 on the new Vidzone platform and I've been desperately trying to get down to the golf range in preparation for the Parque da Floresta challenge!

In the middle of all of that excitement I got an email from Craig Robinson (I'd definitely recommend his blog) our Head of Creative titled 'How to write tweets'. I was certainly intrigued and so followed the link in his email. It took me to an article written by the daddy of usability Jakob Nielsen about a series of usability studies he is carrying out.

He is effectively running sessions focusing on having the same message written in a number of different ways and looking at the good and bad in each approach.

He explains everything far better than I can so you can link to his full article at the end of this blog post. A couple of interesting points he raises though:

Text is a UI and in fact the shorter it is, the more important it is to design text for usability
Readers tend only to read the first few characters as they scan down a list so make them count
Be aware of the characters required when re-tweeting to gain real value in the viral effect
Twitter has a high decay function. Effectively this means that posts submitted via Twitter will get lots of clicks in the first few minutes and then none
Linked to this decay Twitter time passes 10 times faster than email time

Read the full article here

Where has all the content gone?

2009-08-04T10:29:00.005+01:00

This is annoying me now as I can't get it straight in my head! One of the things that makes Twitter so powerful also seems to be making people lazy. What am I talking about? Content.

This is how I see it. On the one hand you have this excellent network of people to share and receive information. If you follow carefully then you can get access to all sorts of interesting information. It really is brilliant.

On the other hand it's largely all the same information being shared. Everyone is following the same people and re tweeting the same content. The net effect is that whilst on the surface their seems to be loads of tweets going on, when you break it down it's all linked to the same content.

Sweeping generalisation I know but as a trend the original content pool seems to be shrinking in favour of simply re-tweeting what someone else has written. I think it would be so much better if people were pushing their own content out rather than other peoples from the same small pool.

As an example of what I mean look at Mashable. Mashable is excellent because they give their views on things, deliver good content and spark debate. But lets be honest we all follow them already so simply re-tweeting their stuff is a bit lazy. The same goes for the other main publishers of content. I think if there was more original content it would be so much better.

And no, answering the question of 'What are you doing?' literally is not very helpful. Honestly who cares if you are going to a very important meeting or heading to the shops!

So maybe I am way off the mark here but Twitter seems so much better when there is lots of enriching content and opinion being sent rather than one persons opinion being sent round by everyone.

Or maybe the simple solution is I just need to follow more people. Not sure this is the right answer though.

Last click wins

2009-07-31T15:41:00.003+01:00

There are a lot of fantastic developments going on at the moment in the world of online recruitment advertising. I think it is great that there are so many conferences, blogs, groups and forums set up to educate, spark debate, and share ideas. It is exactly what we need to continually develop and improve our industry.

I just want to step back for a bit though and dip into the eye opening and refreshing world of tracking and analysis. Trust me you need to get this bit right, it is way more than being able to put a list of media in a ranked order based on cost per application or looking at pipeline information from your ATS.

For me there are 4 key areas of MI to consider:

1. Media performance
2. Site analytics
3. Pipeline analysis
4. Brand engagement

I know there is more than this but if you can get these 4 nailed and integrated then you are going to be in a pretty good place when it comes to understanding the online influences and journey of your candidates. Once you have this data you can cut it just about any way you want such as by geography, sector, job family or even individual job role. Once you can do that you can design a very efficient media strategy based around any objectives you want.

Let’s have a look at some of these (Please note that 3rd party ad serving is needed for some of these data analysis techniques)

Media Performance

Before we go any further here I will ask 2 questions:

Did you set any measures of success for your media campaign?
What benchmarks are you using to ascertain that a media is performing to a level you would consider to be successful?

The reason I ask is because generally this still isn’t being done which makes it all the more entertaining to see a list of media ranked by performance when the rank isn’t actually based against a measure of success. (By the way cost per click/application isn’t a measure of success, sorry to those of you that use this metric)

So, set some measures, work it out and plan your media strategy properly.

The second part of this is linked to the brand engagement piece so I will mention it here. You need to take the time to understand how your candidates are exposed to and consume media in order to really be able to work out your media performance.

We still live in a last click wins environment. The media a candidate finally clicked through on must be the best performing media, right? Wrong! Little thought is given to the media and messaging a candidate may have consumed before they actually completed the action. The result of this is you go back to your ranked table of media (that isn’t ranked against anything meaningful remember) and drop of the apparent worst performers. Then stone me if the overall campaign doesn’t drop through the floor. Why? Because decisions were being made without considering the entire picture.

Site Analytics

So much attention is paid to how the media performs that sometimes the way candidates are interacting with the website destination can be totally forgotten. Potentially huge sums of money can be spent making a lovely shiny website destination that it seems odd to me that more people don’t analyse how people interact on it. Sure you might have an analytics package plugged in but are you actually using the outputs to inform decisions. Do you know how to and do you know what is important?

Have you got any benchmarks and objectives set for your website?
What pages/sections are candidates engaging with?
How many visitors are new vs returning?
How long do people spend on your site?
Where are your drop offs?
What are your conversions like?

Don't forget what happens here will have a big effect on the outputs of your media analysis and you may not even know it.

Pipeline Analysis

This is where the real fun begins so I’m going to keep this in the context of online media otherwise I’ll be here all day! Here are some things to consider:

If you have a drop down source list – do not trust it and please don’t make any media decisions solely based on it. More often than not candidates will either choose the first media on the list because they are just trying to get to what they consider to be the important part of their application or they will choose a media that they think makes their application look better. I have made a poor performing media turn into a top performing media simply by putting them at the top of the drop down list.
If you are using a stand alone distribution tool, integrate it into your ATS so you can assign a media source code to remove the reliance of drop down lists.
Display advertising can be integrated into your ATS media source data, do not believe those who tell you otherwise.
Look at any media reports from your ATS in the wider context of the other analysis I have mentioned to ensure you make an informed decision.

I haven’t touched on things like creative placement analysis or rich media interaction reports here. I will leave those for another day!

If you can get some of these basics cracked then you will be in a pretty good place.

The World Is Changing

2009-07-15T11:42:00.003+01:00

Some interesting little sound bytes in this video put together by HP

What is a Social Media Expert?

2009-07-13T08:52:00.003+01:00

I saw this on Twitter courtesy of @DavidMurdico at Supercool Creative and had to post it.

Look familiar?? I am sure you have all bumped into an Ashley.

Whilst this is very funny, it does highlight a serious point. Simply knowing lists of words or social media websites does not make an expert. I am going to write an article about developing a strategy and managing your online reputation very soon but trust me it is a lot more than rolling off an endless list of websites that have no relevance whatsoever to goals that haven't even been decided yet! Stop shouting and start listening!

Rise of Social Media in the US

2009-07-09T09:23:00.004+01:00

I read an interesting article by Brian Solis on the PR2.0 blog. Following the release of Forrester Research’s 5 year forecast on Interactive Marketing Spend 2009-2014.

I think Brian sums it up very well in his own article that you can read here but the highlights are these:

By 2014 the US interactive marketing spend will near $55 billion and represent 21% of all marketing spend
Interactive marketing spend will include search marketing, display advertising, email marketing, social media, and mobile marketing
Overall advertising budgets will decline
Majority of spend is in search marketing
Highest compound annual growth over the 5 years is in social media at 34% and the 3rd most prominent advertising channel behind search and display
Second highest compound growth is in mobile at 27%

The broad trend is nothing new at all but the mix up is interesting. It will also be interesting to see how much social media advertising is predicted to grow in the UK over the next 5 years and how much of that spend is for direct recruitment and employer branding.

Will we see a mainstream uptake over the next few years? I certainly hope so but we have got a long way to go yet in terms of understanding.

Social Media Tips

2009-06-02T11:45:00.020+01:00

One of the most frequent things I get asked about by companies and individuals alike is how they can use social media to attract and engage with candidates and also what sort of things they should be saying on them.

At first glance the world of social media can seem like a fairly scary and intimidating place with lots of sites and content out there. I mean how on earth are you supposed to know your engagement ads from your hashtags?!?

There are some people out there that try and make social media sound as complicated as possible and try and convince you that the dangers of getting it wrong could quite literally ruin you! And you'll never guess what....... A great way of avoiding this armageddon like catastrophe is to pay them, the 'social media expert and guru', to plan and manage this on your behalf. Well what a stroke of luck you bumped into that expert, I think you've probably saved your company. No question!

Rubbish rubbish rubbish! I'm sorry but this really annoys me. Yes of course you need to have a thought through strategy and some clear objectives as with anything else you do but it certainly isn't some sort of witchcraft! There are some fantastic talents in our industry that will genuinely help you get the most out of social media and let YOU reap the rewards. Right let me check myself because I'm rapidly climbing up onto my soap box. Sorry, rant over. Now where was I? Oh yes, tips for social media.....

Tip 1 - Understand what you are trying to achieve. Is it to build communities and share relevant content? What is that content looking to address, is it challenging perceptions, good news, job information, all of the above? Have a purpose and objectives.

Tip 2 - Let your company have access to social media websites, unblock unblock unblock.

Tip 3 - Don't try and climb Everest if you've never done any rock climbing. What I am trying to say is that it is okay to start small and work your way up. Start with a blog and get that going, maybe then create a twitter account and link them together. Or, maybe start with a Facebook page and use your current employees as the first level network. Search on Facebook to see if any one has set up a group for you already. They could be existing employees or maybe an alumni group, if they have invite them in. Maybe start with none of this and create a group on LinkedIn. Ultimately you can start wherever suits your business and your target audience but don't feel pressured to be doing absolutely everything.

Tip 4 - Keep your careers website as your central hub. Ultimately this is where you want to direct everyone. I do however have one ask of you here..... Please make sure it holds a decent candidate experience!

Tip 5 - Don't try to control things or be afraid of what people are saying. It is scary at first if you aren't used to opening yourself up but embrace the comments and feedback and use them to change if you need to. Ultimately this will pay off in the long term.

Tip 6 - Let your employees contribute. This is all about 2 way interaction and finding out about the real you.

Tip 7 - Build your network. Use your existing team and employees to build your initial network. Search for people and companies that are relevant and link to them then network through their contacts.

Tip 8 - Don't let it rule your life! Participate and keep content updated and relevant but don't think you have to spend your life sending out pointless messages just for the sake of it. That's not what it's about at all.

Now these may seem quite simple and obvious tips, and you know what, they are!

Overall you want to be moving to this kind of communication stream:

Forgive me for my ability (or lack of it) to produce diagrams or produce exhaustive lists of different social media websites, but hopefully you get the gist of what I am trying to say here.

Anyway, that is my take on some basics to get you going. Hope it helps!

WolframAlpha - What's it all about?

2009-05-18T08:50:00.004+01:00

I have spent the last couple of hours looking at the new 'computational knowledge engine' WolframAlpha and there is no denying it is mindblowingly clever.

It takes a bit of time getting used to the queries and the way results are displayed when you first go the engine. I, like I'm sure a lot of people, have been Googlified (what a word that is!) over the last few years and my immediate instinct was to type in the same type of thing I would put into Google and look for the list results. Now maybe that is just me and everyone else out there is a lot smarter and already figured this out but that's not how this engine works.

In effect WolframAlpha is a tool for bringing knowledge to you through the use of highly advanced mathematical algorithms. If I had access to this when I was doing my A-Level Maths and Physics exams I would have screamed through it!

So what does it do? Well lets have a look.....

Start easy, type in London and submit. First off you get some assumptions - it is a city not a surname and you mean London UK not Canada, Kentucky, or California. Incidentally if I was based in Canada and typed in this query it would assume London, Canada. Then you get an overview of the factual data of London - population, time, weather, map and elevation. All of these can be interrogated for further information. If you do the same search on Google you will get a map and links to attractions, visit London guides and Mayor of London etc. This nicely illustrates the key difference, Google is a search engine and finds related links to help you navigate the Internet, WolframAlpha uses all of the power of the Internet to answer questions and give factual information about things. Grasp this and you're off!

Try it with a company, say HSBC and you get all the stocks and share information, dividends, returns, history, projections and a links to the website including satellite imagery. You can also compare companies, give it a go. Compare HSBC and Barclays

Try calories in a pint of milk and you will get your answer of 320 which is the mean answer. Ask for more and you will get the range from fat free through to full fat. You will also get it displayed as a % of your RDA, full nutritional information and comparisons to other foods.

Try a simple calculation, what is 3615/5? 723 is you're answer. Nothing special here because you will get the same result on Google. So step it up, try '200 pounds + 15%' and have a look at that. then go nuts and try this one for size, 'y=2/(z+1)'. This is a calculus question to differentiate y and out pops the answer '-2/(z+1)^2. And yes, this is the correct answer.

Once you get going, you just can't stop.... what is the life expectancy in England, how much is 1lb of gold worth, probability of getting a full house in poker, how common my name is, what happened on my birthday. Seriously, I have never needed to know these things before but now I am craving the answers! It's like the first time I used Google......

Have a look at the demonstration video to see what you can do. This also shows its crazy ability to understand gene sequences!

It is very early days at the moment and there are some issues to overcome, for example it will understand the $ sign and the € sign but not £, that you need to type in manually. The data is all American pretty much and so struggles when you input local sports teams or name requests for example, but these are all small details in the grand scheme of what this has the potential for. The vision for WolframAlpha is that eventually you will be able to ask it about any kind of systematic factual knowledge. Pretty impressive.

The advertising is currently based around corporate sponsorship but the website does say that more targeted offerings may become available in the future.

I guess for me, whilst this is undoubtedly incredible, the question remains will it have the ability to get to its goal fast enough to attract the critical mass required?

It promises to be fascinating to find out, watch this space......

Online facts and figures

2009-05-14T17:10:00.018+01:00

I have found a few interesting online facts and figures recently so thought I would share them. If it makes someones life a little bit easier when talking to a client about the world of online then it's job done in my opinion. Enjoy!

Total Internet Users - 1,596,270,108 (Internet World Stats, March 2009)
UK Internet Users - 43,753,600 / 71.8% Penetration (Internet World Stats, March 2009)

There are loads of facts and figures out there. Try a few of these sites for info:

Internet Advertising Bureau
Internet World Stats
Internet Stats Today Blog
Nielsen
Comscore
Office For National Statistics
NORAS
ABC Electronic
PwC Media Centre

There is loads of stuff out there, this is just a snippet. I am always interesteed in finding new resources so if you have any hidden gems please share them.

You're following how many????

2009-05-14T15:13:00.003+01:00

So this is how it goes, or something like this anyway......

You join twitter, you find some of your friends and colleagues and you follow them. Then you are reading some of your favourite blogs and you spot you can follow the author so you follow them as well. Some of the people that you have followed may reciprocate and follow you, some may not. During your days and weeks of merrily tweeting away, some random fellow twitterer's follow you based on your content. Do you reciprocate?

I guess this is the question I am interested in. In the true spirit of social media you should follow as many people as you can. You will learn things, network at a very quick rate and get your content out to a very wide audience. However, in the same vein you will also be bombarded with tweets that are largely irrelevant and then focusing on the people and topics that are of genuine interest to you becomes harder and harder. So is this the right thing to do?

Or, should you only follow people you know or are interested in so whilst your networking will be more limited it is much more targeted to you?

Should you follow as many as you can and then rely on the multitude of tools that are available out there that can help you filter down content?

Are you following all of these people because you are secretly hoping that they will follow you and that's kinda cool, even though you're not sure why?

As with all social media there is an element of racing to see who can get the most connections regardless of whether it actually enhances what you are looking to achieve. I guess I am just interested in people's thoughts.

There is no right and wrong here, it is in accordance to what you want to do, that's the beauty of it.

Virtual Training

2009-05-12T13:44:00.007+01:00

Hello everyone! My name is Das Aldrich and you may see posts from me on here from time to time.

I live in Second Life and like to keep an eye on what is going on in virtual worlds. I know that virtual worlds such as Second Life aren't everyone's cup of tea but I genuinely believe when you look at them as a 3D realtime communications platform there is real opportunity to be had. So.....as I walk around I might just mention things if I find them interesting.

Here is an extract from today's Metro:

"Allowing an unqualified medical student to get to grips with a patient could be risky – after all, they don't get a second life. Well, that's all changed for trainees at one medical school – who can now practise their craft on virtual patients in a hospital on Second Life. Students are able to treat patients, check their pulses and take blood samples before consulting with colleagues.

'They can diagnose a patient in a safe environment. If they make a mistake and kill a patient then it does not harm anyone,' said Maria Toro-Troconis, of Imperial College London, which has set up the online hospital. 'They learn from their mistake and hopefully do not make it again.'
In the Second Life hospital, nursing and medical students are taught strict rules on cleanliness.
If they fail to wash their hands, the simulation stops. Ms Toro-Troconis said the virtual hospital was a fun way of learning and also a valuable aid, allowing students to practise newly learned skills."

I think this is a great application of the platform and one that can be taken into recruitment. Think of the possibilities as part of the onboarding process for instance. Sure it's not right for everyone but it is right for a few. Go on, open your mind!

Catch you later!

Das

Augmented Reality

2009-05-11T10:48:00.007+01:00

I love this. We have started using it at TMP and its applications are incredible.

For those of you that don’t know, Augmented Reality (AR) is the combination of computer generated images and real world images in real time. A full description can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality

I am going to show you a couple of examples from the world of consumer advertising but to get the real 'wow' factor I would recommend you experience AR for yourself. Whilst video's are great to have a look at AR in action, they really don't do it justice.

Have a look at the Toyota advertising for the IQ. In this example using the marker you can see the IQ in 3D and tip it from side to side but also ‘explode’ the IQ out so you can see all of the component parts. Very cool!

The brilliant thing is that AR is not restricted to using a computer and a webcam. It is ready for mobile as well.

Ford ran a mobile campaign using AR for the Ka using markers in their advertising. You had to download the mobile application to your camera phone and then when you saw the Ka advertising, launch the mobile app, point the camera at the marker and hey presto! a 3D Ka would appear on your phone.

Let’s bring this amazing technology into recruitment, the opportunities are fantastic.

Watch this space…….

Awesome!

2009-05-08T13:15:00.005+01:00

I saw this and had to share it. This is one of the coolest pieces of video I have seen for a long time. Courtesy of the BBC

Enjoy!

Twitter polling

2009-05-08T12:07:00.004+01:00

I recently asked a simple question on Twitter:

"I am looking to get mobile broadband, anyone have any opinions on who is best? Or who I should definitely avoid?"

Now I expected a few of my friends to give me their words of wisdom and indeed they did, my favourite being told to avoid BT beacuase they are shiznits! What I didn't necessarily expect was the host of helpful tweets I received from the Twitter community about the different operators telling me which were good, which were bad and why.

What a powerful tool, in near realtime I reveived a host of useful information on mobile broadband. This is just the tip of the iceberg.......

In case you were wondering, the Twitter community votes T-mobile the best mobile broadband provider. Nice one Twitter!

YouTube if you want to......

2009-05-07T14:16:00.003+01:00

I thought Hazel Blears' quote on Sunday showed an interesting viewpoint.

"Promote your message via YouTube if you want to. But it is no substitute for knocking on doors."

Now I'm not going to tell you that I'm a fan of what Mr Brown produced but I do think it showed how some senior and influencial government officials just dont get it. I think Hazel Blears could be in for a shock to find out how a well thought out online communications strategy could knock on more doors than she could ever imagine.

And we're off!

2009-05-07T13:33:00.004+01:00

I thought it was about time I started my own blog, so here we go!

Exctinig stuff here we come!