Archive for the ‘Social media’ Category

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My online CV? Just add me as a Friend.

January 17th, 2012 by David

There has always been talk of personal/professional social media profile consolidation – with no solution. Facebook is personal and LinkedIn is professional.

But will this always be the case?

Even if one network is theoretically easier, the challenge has always been how you prevent your not-so-employment-friendly Facebook persona from becoming a scary CV (even though bits of it could actually represent a decent example of where you sit within your working network).

A recent NY Times piece (http://nyti.ms/yv3aqx) brought a few new social media tools to my attention that I think solve that common question: How can you bring LinkedIn’s ethos of professionalism and career focus to Facebook? Can there be a common ground (as the article suggests) between the overused sentiments that Facebook is for fun and LinkedIn is for professional purposes?

BranchOut and Be Known essentially do what LinkedIn do, but display what you want perspective employers to see and filtering your profile from what you do not. So how do they shape up?

BranchOut (http://branchout.com/)

BranchOut is a professional network itself. When you visit a BranchOut profile page, it immediately doesn’t look anything like a Facebook profile. The clean display and simple layout make it easy to navigate, and it’s easy to find people who you have professional relationships with. By importing your details, it gives the impression of an independent outlet, without you having to worry about keeping different profiles updated.

However, networking is slightly stymied by having to ask to make a connection with someone in order to see their network, taking the discretion away from the viewer, and so in a way, defeating the purpose. None the less, it is still a useful tool, and since it is retained within the Facebook platform, makes it easy to maintain.

Be Known (https://apps.facebook.com/beknown/)

Sitting within the regular Facebook template, this app immediately feels like it’s just a tab on your profile. It is as much part of Facebook as your photos and notes. While you are expected to input a certain level of background information, it doesn’t feel that much different from adjusting the privacy setting on your profile page. (Which does in itself raise a question: Couldn’t this whole debate be settled by adjusting those privacy settings, and using some of your better judgment and remove those tags of those infamous photos from Ibiza?)

And just in case it’s not you looking to network on Facebook, there are a few useful Facebook recruitment apps for your friends.

Hire My Friend (https://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=328891100642)

Promote your Friends who are job searching to your other Facebook Friends with the Hire My Friend Facebook App. You can include a brief description of their skills and a link to their LinkedIn Profile.

CareerFriend (https://apps.facebook.com/insidecareerinfo/)

CareerFriend uses your Facebook friends’ employment information to find potential job opportunities within your network. After connecting with your Facebook login information, CareerFriend creates a report that includes your friends’ employers, occupations, and reviews of related careers.

Of course it does raise the question, is the whole exercise even necessary? Maybe it’s better to keep your personal and your professional profiles separate? While the line between the two can often be blurred, how often do opportunities come up through a friend of a friend?

David Macnamara

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I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll…….blow the house down?

July 6th, 2011 by David

On July 6th, commentators within the media and journalism industries are predicting a cultural shift in the way news is reported and consumed. Why? Because The Huffington Post, the US news website famous for using the online community to generate much of its content, will open its doors to the UK blogging community with the arrival of a UK edition on Wednesday. And I can’t wait.

Anyone even vaguely familiar with blogging communities will know that there are vast numbers of talented, eloquent would-be journalists out there churning out content that rivals much contained within the mainstream press. And the papers do acknowledge this (to a degree), with opportunities for freelance comment through their own blogs. The Guardian is just one example of a paper utilising this talent pool to provide informative and entertaining blogs on a plethora of subjects. But editorial styles must still be conformed to, and one can assume that getting the opportunity to write for these papers isn’t available to most online writers, no matter how talented.

The Huffington Post, on the other hand, has over 9,000 bloggers to generate all of its news and opinion pieces (suitably, that stat was found using Wikipedia). With such a wide range of contributors, the content can’t fail to be stimulating and engaging, with readers actively encouraged to join the debate and air their views. Currently, the UK edition has contributors that number “well into three figures” and this is likely to increase. Plans for celebrity writers will almost certainly be in the pipeline, if the US version is anything to go by.

Those championing paid-for-news should be nervous. The Huffington Post gets more views in the US than The New York Times site, and this could well happen over here as well – it all comes down to content. The well worn adage ‘content is king’ still applies, and for The Huffington Post UK it is crucial – with good content comes readers. The Times has a pay-wall, The Telegraph is (reportedly) considering one, and a shift towards online content for The Guardian (a step in the pay-wall direction?) all points to online being the place for news in the future. And if the Huffington Post rivals these papers in terms of editorial and reporting quality, would you use an outlet that had a pay-wall or just get your news for free?

With plans for 11 other country specific editions, this may be the beginning of a different breed of news generation and consumption. How will the established order in the media industry – and PR industry – react to a brand new outlet? Will it be accepted? Criticised? Or just ignored? Watch this space.

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#panoramamail

July 5th, 2011 by Louisa

The direct industry took yet another knock, this time at the hand of Panorama and the totally unrelated issue of scam mail which the programme clumsily cobbled together with the issue of  so called “junk mail”. It’s a running joke at Eulogy! that you can mark the beginning of silly season by the inevitable expose likening advertising mail to Satan himself.

This time however, direct marketers were ready. The industry comprising 280,000 jobs, the industry which contributes £27bn to the economy, the industry that created Tesco Clubcard joined together under the DMA and took a stand and let it’s voice be heard. And what a roar it made! Using social media and the hashtag #panoramamail debate whizzed round twitter; 574 tweets were logged reaching 48,000 people.  Eulogy! spent much of Monday seeding the hashtag and encouraging industry members, thought leaders and consumers to join the conversation whilst the programme aired. And judging by the buzz, the industry’s first foray into social media self defence was a resounding success. We felt proud to represent the industry.

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What a Twit

May 25th, 2011 by Ben Gold

Ryan Giggs. Family man. Manchester United legend. BBC Sports Personality of the Year. A great of the modern game. But clearly rubbish at PR.

This whole affair, to coin a phrase, has left football fans around the country chuckling away and the reputation of one of British football’s greats in tatters. But it shows that all the money in the world cannot buy you good public relations support.

Giggs has clearly been badly advised. His team of legal and public relations advisors have taken on too much and lost it all in the eyes of the public. And it could have been so different if he hadn’t been so desperate to cover this up. In the days of Twitter and social media, there was only going to be one winner. And that was the masses.

Of course hindsight is easy. But Giggs had the reputation among sports fans and the media alike that he was a saint. A respected winner. Let’s get away from the stupidity of his indiscretion; after all, he’s a footballer and they all do it. What should he have done? He should have taken the likely one hit – a front page of the News of the World – with people up and down the country thinking something along the lines of ‘what a load of rubbish, as if Giggsy would do that’. It would have been forgotten the next day, no-one would have taken it seriously and he’d be able to brush it off. Whether he should be able to or not is another matter, but that’s what likely would have happened.

This whole case sets a precedent. Can newspapers outside of UK jurisdiction now just out a case like this and then let the internet do the rest? After all, Twitter went after this like vultures, in a mob-like manner. But I am sure that the Sunday Herald doesn’t care too much – reports suggest that they had over 1 million views on Sunday to their website when they broke the story (even though it wasn’t even covered online) and almost 2 million views on Monday as the story started to really unfold. Apparently, their online readership grew 220%. With these kinds of figures, plus the rise in print circulation from the day itself, it is unlikely to deter other papers in the future.

And now? Well, he’s the man who tried to take on Twitter. He’s the man who tried desperately to block it. He’s the man who cannot deny it. And he’s the man who stands here today with a reputation in tatters, a laughing stock, and as he approaches the end of his career, something that he’s likely to be remembered for. It could have been so different.

I don’t really care about footballer’s private lives; it doesn’t really interest me and he’s a complete idiot for doing what he did. But I, like so many others, now find it pretty funny. I’m particularly enjoying ribbing our resident Man Utd fan here in the office who’s devastated that her hero has been revealed as a love cheat. He’ll probably score the winner on Saturday night at Wembley. It might be the last time he scores away from home though.

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When did social networking become our social life?

February 25th, 2011 by Elaine

It all started with ‘My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding’.  At first, it was all about the show itself, getting totally engrossed in the frankly astounding events in the lives of Josie and Swanley, Paddy and the dress designer Thelma (who surely has made enough to retire by now). But very quickly my obsession with the programme developed into something much more; the need to constantly tweet while watching it.  Every time the narrator let forth a gem of wisdom such as “her brother, John-boy, is attending the communion ceremony as an African Prince”, I felt the need to repeat this to my Twitter followers, many of whom were ignoring the television to write the very same sentence. I also missed huge chunks of each show by excitedly searching Twitter for the glorious reactions fellow gypsy-philes were having to the wonders unfolding on the show.

Much has been said about the inevitable impact that Twitter and Facebook have had on our social lives (including this interesting piece from Gord Hotchkiss), but it really is incredible how strong the urge is to reach for the nearest mobile device when consuming media which once upon a time, used to be enough all on its own.  Take Masterchef, for example. I love Masterchef, as my colleagues and family will tell you, proven by my bookshelves groaning with cookbooks and my constant droning about how much I love Dhruv Baker, last year’s winner. However, when the long-awaited new series started last week, I spent so much time tweeting about how much I disliked the new format and finding out through Twitter / Facebook what everyone else thought, that I actually missed over half the programme.  When I tuned in again the next night, I forced myself to put the Blackberry down (well, actually, I was forced to because the rollerball broke), I realised that I actually loved the new format and I’d missed some cracking dishes the night before.

It’s not just about television, either.  As Hotchkiss rightly points out, we’ve now got to a point where social networking is starting to overshadow social interaction.  And I mean basic conversations with our friends and families.  I heard a client talking the other day about her two teenage children, who will sit on the sofa chatting to their friends for hours.  ‘How perfectly normal’, I hear you cry.  But these teenagers were not chatting in the verbal sense.  They were writing on each other’s Facebook walls. How sad that something so full of potential and innovation has turned into something which actually starts to negate all that it stood for in the first place: the ability to communicate.

So the moral of the story is that although it’s fantastic that we now have a medium, literally at our fingertips, with which to share and express opinions and pure joy about the programmes we love and the world around us, maybe it’s time we all gave in to the broken rollerball once in a while?  As my husband loves to tell me, maybe we all need to “stop talking about it and flipping watch it!!” And maybe even talk to each other once in a while?  Verbally?  Now there’s a thought…

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