All posts in Networking

New Twitter is being rolled out

by Chris M on February 17, 2012 in Networking with 2 Comments

If you’re plugged into Twitter, you’ll know that over the past few months Twitter has been rolling out new versions for mobile devices and finally they are rolling out similar changes to web version (twitter.com).

Some of the features you can expect are:

  • Clicking on tweets to view photos, videos, retweets and the likes.
  • Connect, in the navigation, allows you to keep conversations going by seeing who’s doing what and being able to engage accordingly.
  • Discover, based on your interests, Discover will provide you with useful information relative to what you enjoy. This information is pulled based on your location, who you follow and what’s happening in the world.
  • Embeddable tweets! You’ll now be able to embed tweets easily on your website.

Whilst we’re on this topic, don’t forget to take a tour of the new features as well as the Twitter brand pages – @NPRNews and @Audi have done this already!

Do you like the changes?

My Top Six Twitter Tips

by Alessio on February 16, 2012 in Marketing, Networking with 7 Comments

Some of my good friends are finally starting to ‘get’ Twitter, and as a result, I find myself tweeting and sharing more. Below are some of my top Twitter tips for noobs and veterans alike.

Schedule your tweets. This may not make much sense, but nobody wants their timeline filled with rapid fire tweets from the same person. Schedule your tweets with tools like HootSuite or Buffer and never flood your followers’ feeds again. Chances are, you’ll probably end up being unfollowed.

Share news that you’d want to read. Seems simple enough, right? People are still tweeting about their breakfast, their cats and other random things that nobody cares much about. By sharing news that would interest you, the benefits are two-fold. Firstly, your tweets become more compelling and secondly, you will start attracting and interacting with people with similar interests to yours.

Give more than you receive. Social networks are all about sharing. Help other people on Twitter. Give advice where you can, help solve problems and answer questions in areas where you consider yourself an expert. You’ll gain more trust and become the go-to person in your particular field. Who doesn’t like being an expert, right?

Keep it real. Be yourself. Nobody wants to follow users that only tweet links. Spice up your tweets with sprinklings of your own personality. Found a link you want to share? Let your character shine through by adding a short review of the content in the tweet. Don’t be scared to say what you feel and stand up for what you believe in. Also, be honest. Make a mistake? Own it. People are more forgiving if you own up to mistakes rather than making excuses for them.

Remember your manners. Someone tweet a really cool link? Give them the credit by either retweeting them, or tweeting the link and mentioning them with a ‘via @whoever’ in the tweet. On the flipside, if someone retweets you or mentions you, say thank you. A little bit can go a long way. Asking for something with ‘please’ could also make all the difference. Especially if you’re asking for some retweets to get a message out to a large group of people.

If it doesn’t fit into 140 characters, you don’t get it. Tweets are meant to be concise. Short, sweet and to the point. Don’t tweet an essay. Nobody wants to click on a link to be taken to an external site to read your whole tweet. If it doesn’t fit into 140 characters, don’t tweet it. Post it on Facebook. Or Google+.

Share The Soundtrack To Your Life With Soundtracking

by Alessio on February 9, 2012 in Music, Networking with No comments

There are many social networks out  there, that allow you to share nearly everything in your life. Soundtracking is one of the newer social networks, with iPhone and Android apps, that allows you to share the soundtrack to your life.

You sign into the app with either your Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare account, which are integral to sharing the music that you’re listening to. The user interface is slick and functional, and the layout is pretty similar to Foursquare and Instagram, with buttons along the bottom and a pronounced sharing button in the middle.

By tapping on the sharing button, you can choose to share the song you’re listening to in one of three ways. You could either use the music search function, or use the music ID function, which works similarly to Soundhound and Shazam, which identifies music by ‘listening’ to the music you’re playing, or you could select the song that’s currently playing on your iPod app.

The nice thing about the app is that you can also add a photo to your post, either by taking a new picture, or uploading an existing one from your phone. You can also add a location to your post via Foursquare and add a description, which will make up the body of the text when sharing to Facebook and Twitter.

Once your post is shared, people viewing it get taken to a Soundtracking page, where they will have the option of previewing the song and buying it from iTunes. From here, they also have the option of liking the song, loving it and sharing a comment.

Soundtracking has an average four and a half star rating on the iTunes App Store and the reviews are all positive. Soundtracking adds a musical dimension to sharing, which is a welcome addition to social sharing apps.

Do you use Soundtracking? Do you think it has a place amongst the other social sharing apps? Let us know in the contents below.

Top Gear Celebrate 10 Million Facebook Fans

by Chris M on February 2, 2012 in Cars, Marketing, Networking with No comments

It’s a good accomplishment to reach 10,000 fans, it’s an incredible accomplishment to reach 100,000 fans and then there are some brands which even reach 1,000,000 fans. It doesn’t stop there though, Top Gear has reached 10,000,000 fans and counting – what an achievement.

In celebration of reaching 10 million fans, Top Gear put together a video, take a watch:

I think the idea of creating celebration videos for goals being reached is excellent, not only does it encourage even more people to like your page, but it creates hype around your brand because of the achievement.

Have you reached 10,000 fans or more?

Geeky Fun: Timeline Movie Maker for Facebook

by Alessio on February 2, 2012 in Networking with 2 Comments

It’s time to have some fun with Facebook, you hear? Timeline Movie Maker is a collaboration between Facebook and marketing agency Definition6. It will only work if you’ve upgraded to the timeline profile.

Head over to the Timeline Movie Maker website and click on the Make Your Movie button. You’ll be required to grant the app permission to access your Facebook information, and here you also get to choose who sees activity from the application.

Click on the Ok, Use App button, grant Timeline Movie Maker permission to access posts in your News Feed and a box will pop up with a progress bar, putting the wheels in motion for making your personal Facebook movie.

You’ll see the app capturing your good side, finding memories and flying over your timeline. This just adds to the experience and makes waiting for the rendering of your movie that much more bearable.

Depending on how much information you have on your Timeline, this could take quite a while.

The result is a one minute movie that features highlights from your timeline. And it’s pretty fantastic. Once the movie has played, you can share it or replay it. You also have the option of changing the soundtrack to something more suitable and you can change the images in the movie with other images from your Timeline.

I think this is a fun little web app that takes you on a slightly nostalgic trip and is a pleasure to watch and tweak until you get the perfect Timeline movie.

Have you tried out Timeline Movie Maker? What do you think?

Serenade someone on Facebook with Heineken

by Chris M on February 1, 2012 in Networking, Women with No comments

Valentines Day is right around the corner, that’s right, February 14th, and Heineken are giving you the opportunity to serenade someone! The campaign, Serenade, is attached to a Facebook Application, which allows you to choose someone to serenade in a few easy steps.

Take a watch of the video:

Viral video by ebuzzing

Right, let’s serenade! Here’s what you’ll do:

1. Click through to the Serenade Your Date Facebook application.
2. Who you want to serenade.
3. Why you want to serenade them.
4. What you want to do with them.
5. Why you chose that person.

DONE! Wait, check this out: once the request has been sent to someone, you have to wait and see if they accept it! Haha, gota love that mechanism, the one little thing that will potentially make this campaign go nice and viral.

The question is: because it’s a leap year, are all the ladies going to serenade the men this time *wink*

Please note that this is a sponsored post.

FBI to build social media monitoring application

by Chris M on January 31, 2012 in Networking, World News with No comments

This comes as a bit of a scare – The FBI are looking for a team of developers who can build a heavyweight social media monitoring tool for them to they can keep an eye on what people are doing on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and so forth.

Sure, there’s a lot of “bad” that happens on these sites, I’m sure you’ve all seen things before that you felt shouldn’t be there, but the things most of us see are probably not what the FBI is interested in, I’d imagine they’d want insight into potential terrorist attacks and actions of that magnitude. That said, I find myself asking whether this would be a good thing or a bad thing?

The FBI has announced that the following features should be available:

  • Provide an automated search and scrape capability of both social networking sites and open source news sites for breaking events, crisis, and threats that meet the search parameters/keywords defined by FBI SIOC.
  • Ability for user to create, define, and select parameters/key word requirements. Automated search of national news, local news, and social media networks. Examples include but are not limited to Fox News. CNN, MSNBC, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
  • Ability for user to create, define, and select radius search functions that can be searched independently or in combination with an identified key word search/parameter.
  • Provide automated filtering of data that has been searched and collected based on defined search parameters.
  • Provide instant notifications of breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats that have been vetted and meet the defined search parameters.
  • Ability to display alerts visually by geo-locating alerts onto a geospatial map. Displayed alerts should be prioritized (i.e. color coded) in accordance with FBI defined priorities.
  • Ability to clear alert or maintain alert until its final resolution to be determined by the FBI designated user.
  • Ability to save and archive the alerts.
  • Ability for user to instantly select desired national and local news feeds to monitor breaking events and emerging threats, scrape the vetted news and social media information.
  • Ability to immediately access geospatial maps with coding in addition to providing critical infrastructural layers. Preferred maps include but are not limited to Google Maps, Google 3D maps, ESRI, and Yahoo Maps.
  • Ability to create templates that will allow user to quickly summarize (i.e. who, what, when, where, and why) threats/incidents identified and alerted by the application with geo-coordinates included. Ability available to immediately ingest the information into the Spot Report for time-sensitive threats/incidents.
  • Ability for user to immediately disseminate the summarized threat or incident by either single alert notification or mass notification to the appropriate field office and FBI Executive Management.
  • Ability to capture and summarize the investigative efforts conducted by the Field Office for resolution of the incident.
  • Provide “Spot Report” folders to save and archive past reports.
  • Ability to support Field offices by region by pre-designated or established tabs that will mirror the basic functional capabilities as the main SIOC site.
  • Each tab should have the flexibility to make immediate changes to effectively support the mission requirements for a specific division.
  • Ability to instantly search and monitor key words and strings in all “publicly available” tweets across the Twitter Site and any other “publicly available” social networking?sites/forums (i.e. Facebook, MySpace, etc.).

That’s quite a hefty list, it’s going to be interesting to see if they can recruit a team of top-notch developers to get involved!

Good thing or bad thing?

Get more clicks on Twitter [infographic]

by Chris M on January 29, 2012 in Marketing, Networking with No comments

Here’s a good infographic for those of you who are interested in using Twitter as a marketing tool:

Got any tips? Share them in the comments.

BMW’s interactive projection mapping

by Chris M on January 27, 2012 in Cars, Networking with No comments

I’m an Audi fan, but I can’t help but appreciate BMW’s social media ventures, especially their latest one that involves interactive projection mapping to catapult the new 1-series into the market.

The game tied into Facebook nicely, posting scores to a real-time Facebook leader board and sharing them with friends, thus creating the whole viral strategy.

Pretty awesome!

How To Get A Job Using LinkedIn

by Chris M on January 26, 2012 in Business, Networking with 2 Comments

We usually use social media to hang out with friends and be social. Social media is also about networking, and getting to know new people. Social networking is also about making connections with people that we would not normally meet, but whom we share mutual interests with.

The most obvious place to start would be LinkedIn, the professional social network. It allows you to add professional and personal information to your profile, add your CV or resume, and lets you link your Twitter and Facebook profiles, which, if handled correctly, can be a good idea. It is important that you keep your professional information relevant, up to date and comprehensive. In fact, LinkedIn also has a recommendation feature, whereby you can ask your contacts to recommend you for a specific job you did. This contact can be an employer, a colleague or even a customer.

With LinkedIn, there are many ways of tackling your job search. The most obvious of these would be to go directly to the Jobs tab in the LinkedIn navigation bar, or the Jobs You May Be Interested box in the sidebar. These job recommendations are based on the keywords in the information that you’ve provided regarding your current and past work experience.

Another option would be to target specific companies that you would like to work with. You can search the company’s employees to see if you know someone within the company, or perhaps any mutual connections and request an introduction.

You could also choose to send an email to your LinkedIn network, informing them of your availability, but I would advise against this, as it could come across as spam. Remember, you want to keep your LinkedIn connections and grow your network to advance your career, not jeopardise it.

LinkedIn also has status updates. It would be a good idea to update often, as it shows that you are taking time to develop your professional networks. Keep your updates relevant to your industry and keep them professional.

It is also recommended that you join groups that are related to your career interests. Play an active role within those groups, take part in discussions and build relationships. Once you’ve built solid relationships, add those people to your contacts and grow your network.

LinkedIn also has a Questions and Answers section that can greatly work to your advantage. Look for questions that are relevant to your industry and answer as many of them as possible. By answering questions and helping people, you will come across as an expert, making it particularly attractive for potential employers to take a look at your profile and possibly contact you with a job offer.

LinkedIn is a particularly useful tool while searching for a job, but you should keep in mind that you should take some time in cleaning up and maintaining your online persona. Anyone can do a Google search of your name and most times it will return results from social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Have you got any other tips for getting a job using LinkedIn? Tell us all about it in the comments below.

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