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ionSearch 2013 – Marcus Tandler: CEO & Partner of Tandler.Doerje.Partner “Whats next in search”
Tag Archives: Social Media Expert
Google Helpouts Mentors Community and Blog
Here it is: A GooglePlus Community for Google Helpouts that I’ve just created upon launching Google Helpouts that gives individual experts, teachers and mentors to sell their expertise and advice via a video chat service provided by Google.
One more thing; There is also “Helpouts Plus” a dedicated Google Helpouts Blog covering news, updates and discussions about Google Helpouts.
If you are interested to share your ideas via the “Helpouts Plus” blog or participate in managing the Helpouts community by becoming an admin, Please visit this page and drop me a line.
Related articles
- What’s the new “Google Helpouts” #Google #Helpout (pooriast.wordpress.com)
100 Days #SocialMedia Q&A on Twitter
Starting from today September 18th 2013 , for the next 100 days until December 16th 2013, I am going to answer all the questions about social media and related issues on my Twitter.
I expect to answer up to 240 questions per day, I expect to send 12000 tweets during this period.
You can ask questions by either of these two methods:
1.By using any of the following HashTags: #SocialMedia #WordPress #Somia (somia can be used as an abbreviation for social media) and include no link in your tweet so I will find your question and 1st retweet and later reply it.
2. By mentioning my handle @pooriast; Although I’m trying my best not to miss any question via the HasTags, using the mention almost guarantee my response.
I decided to do this Q&A as a sign of friendship and yet it helps me to find out where I need to learn better and what are the most important and most common challenges for social media users.
I hopefully will be able to give answers regarding the following topics and issues:
Social Media as a general topic, Social Media applications in Marketing, Public Relations, Branding, Market and/or public opinion surveys and analysis, Facebook Open Graph, Facebook Apps and Integrations, Twitter Apps, Instagram endless possibilities in PR, Marketing and Content Creation, WordPress as a full scale web applications canvas, Web and Social Analytics, CRMs and other SAAS business applications, Webmaster Tools both Bing and Google, GeoLocation and Geo-Tagging, Data Structure, Micro Formats, Schema, Taxonomies, SiteMaps, Feeds and all the related HowTOs, tips, tricks, mash ups, interrelations, Authorship, Influence, Klout, Content protection, Online Copyrights, DMCA, plagiarism monitoring etc.
Please feel free to join this Q&A, share you ideas and express your opinions, your participation at any kind is deeply appreciated.
Disclaimar:
– No Affiliation Guranteed; Through this Q & A, Neither of my suggestions and recommendations are meant to advertise or promote any particular beneficiary, Nor my links and referrals to different sites and apps are because of financial gain, I have a restrict policy against using any kind of affiliation links in this blog and my Tweets, My suggestions are only based on my best knowledge and experience.
– No Obligation, I accept no obligation about any possible lost or suffer that might appear to those who follow my advice.
– I might be wrong.
Your LinkedIn Skills Should Get a Major Overhaul
It’s been a while since LinkedIn has added a fresh and attractive feature to its users profile, where there is a list of “skills and expertise” of a user and other users,who are connected to him or her can endorse the user by relevant skills. It’s a pretty engaging feature and since it has been launched most of the users have been using it extensively.
The list of skills and expertise endosed by connectons on LinkedIn
However LinkedIn has made this feature free and easy, and users can endorse each other with no hassle. Well this freedom of endorsement had been criticized by some bloggers; the critics say the endorsements haven’t been backed by any facts except the users votes. According to these social votes or endorsements Jeff Weiner ( CEO of LinkedIn) has so far received 63 endorsements for his skill and expertise over “LinkedIn” itself.
According to the criticizing point of view a guy with sense of humor but in total blindness on social networks and the related issues, might asks his connections to endorse him a hundred time for his “fake skill” on LinkedIn. Well our funny fellow shall easily be more skilled about LinkedIn than Jeff Weiner!
Very well, the reason I am writing this post is not to discredit or criticize LinkedIn over its “skills and expertise endorsement” feature. In despite of rejecting it, I shall say I love it, it is truly social, unique, engaging, crowed generated and liberal. A great advantage of the endorsements feature is its easiness, in a blink you can endorse different people for different skills through a pre-populated endorsing widget at the top of your LinkedIn profile.
So in respond to the critics, I’ll say if someone has a great deal of business to do with LinkedIn, he certainly knows with whom he has to dance. Certainly people are smart enough not to refer to the “funny fellow” to sort out business with LinkedIn. After all, these endorsements are only one type of citation, yet there are a large number of ways to find out someone’s true skills.
The point of this article, therefore is not the way that LinkedIn collects the endorsements, but it’s to remind those skills that we ( LinkedIn users) simply ignore to add to our profiles.
Few days back I was editing my profile on LinkedIn, suddenly I found out a sad truth and as far as I did dig deeper, sadder it got. And then loads of questions blown my mind;
Why no one has listed qualities such as: friendship, integrity, honesty, dreaming, transparency, responsibility, goodwill, humor, enthusiasm, sympathy, humanism and helpfulness along with the rest of his or her expertise and skills?
I had randomly searched profiles of my connections and their connections and the connections of my 3rd level connections, The result was “Null”. Not even one of the profiles had contained the above skills. I thought so strange, a feeling like the effect of insomnia, or a scene in ” Fight Club”, I asked myself; What’s happening to us? How on the earth it’s possible to get this epidemic amnesia?
How can you be manager without goodwill, a designer without dreaming, a leader with no sympathy, a marketer with no humor, an artist with no weirdness, an engineer with no integrity, a professional with no helpfulness or a marine biologist with no enthusiasm?
To be straight forward, I am not trying to be a preacher here. What I’m saying is strictly business. The above qualities are essential professional skills, which need to be developed and cared constantly, no matter what you do, what’s your position, your job description and experience, in the lack of the above skills you head nowhere. Whether you are a rocket scientist or a delivery boy you’ve got to have needed skills, and they include business ethics, social behavior and professional values. There are even a number of the above skills in each and every job being posted, they are just too obvious to be ignored.
I am sure people with higher expertise in behavioral science, human resource development, organizational and professional behaviour and business ethics could have endless talks and write ups on these issues, yet my job is to study and observe social media in order to find solutions, make applications and deliver marketing campaigns, For me it was a surprise or accident to find out what we all missed in our list of skills. I truly believe in this quote, by John Steinbeck: “It is the nature of man to rise to greatness if greatness is expected of him.”
‘ Well now lets see why almost all LinkedIn users have just missed to add these high quality skills to their profile?’
I’ve come out with a theory that seems to justify our behavior. Perhaps I can translate this phenomenon as getting overwhelmed by the huge mass of interactions, information and technical aspects of social networks.
For the first time in the history, We have gained the most advanced communication tools, state of the art socializing platforms, constant changes, endless technological evolutions, but we are also people with less privacy, daily updated priorities, our social life is being scored by Klout and Analytics and without we even notice, for many of us when we buy a dress, order food or plan a trip; the most important priority is to make sure our photos while wearing this dress or having that dish or doing another activity will get an enormous number of likes on Facebook. -Please note I am not criticizing anything here, I am just explaining the situation. – Therefore, we are very much influenced by the weaves of feedbacks we receive from social networks in a multi-direction and cross-platform atmosphere.
Many of us have experienced how this atmosphere can turn to a hurricane within few minutes, and leave us with ruined relationships, missed opportunities, embarrassments, misunderstandings and so on, these things happen so often for us, and people we know across our social networks. Reason? it’s normal we are the first-timers, we haven’t been adopted to all these changes and their consequences.
Our parents have spent their lifetime educating us, it took them years teaching us how to behave in an appropriate manner at home or in public, but they naturally left us no clue on how to manage our social network activities, in fact many of us now trying to teach our parents how to share a link on Facebook or how to mention us in a tweet instead of calling us every other day.
Back to the point, With all these vibrations and transformations things get much more serious when it comes to LinkedIn, LinkedIn is not Facebook in despite of all the common features, because LinkedIn is the professional social network!
It means we act much more carefully on LinkedIn, we just want to be careful after all the mess we think we might have created on Facebook and Twitter, What happens on LinkedIn directly affects our job, financial issues, income and professional connections; Have you noticed the number of likes, comments and shares on LikedIn is much much less than similar interactions on Facebook? Because we usually take Facebook as the territory of our private life, a place to socialize with friends and family ( putting Facebook fan pages and groups aside), Overall we feel safer and more exposed on Facebook, But In LinkedIn we are alert.
The fear of unknown risks, rules us not to expose our inner layers, in practice many LinkedIn users try hard to expand their connections, but they just do not feel comfortable to interact with them.
As a result, when it comes to the skills, users freely go into details by adding detailed technical skills, some even include vastly common skills such as MS Word but they missed to list the fundamental skills such as: transparency, honesty and integrity, because they are feeling the fear of potential risks and prefer not to expose things, which are related to inner layers of theirselves although listing the missed skills, is necessary to reflect their professional abilities.
The above theory, more or less justifies users behaviour on LinkedIn, so we shall note LinkedIn is also accountable for creating this cold situation.
In compare with other major social networks LinkedIn lacks the unique social networking features to fulfill its objectives, it dose not even allow the users to upload and share the photos.Lack of photos and colors have created a rigid and cold atmosphere, when we see how Pinterest is popular among women, we surely acknowledge the warm and friendly elements that photos add to the web.
We also have to acknowledge the objectives of LinkedIn might carry some concerns to preserve the professional elements throughout the site but on the other hand LinkedIn shall put more trust on the users, lets just imagine how a humorous person acts at home or private life by being cool and entertaining and how the same person act differently at the office to satisfy and express his humor while maintaining the professional codes.
Maybe providing more icebreaking features is what led LinkedIn to develop the skills and endorsements feature, the above theory supports the endorsements as a right move by LinkedIn to make its network more social, engaging and human friendly.
What is the most important trend in social media right now and why?
Have you ever thought what are the most important trends Among all Social Media Trends ?
To answer this questions we even don’t need to use any analytics application and it won’t take an extensive research to discover and measure most important trends in Social Media.
Social circles of Influence (Photo credit: aafromaa)
Gaining followers and fans in one hand and gaining shares, likes, PlusOne, retweets, mentions, replies and/or any type of citation on the other hand are the most important trends in Social Media and these trends seems to be everlasting trends as they define social influence and the higher influence is all that matters in Social Media.
Gaining more influence is the most essential trend in social media, just in a way that gaining more visitor is always the most essential measure for websites and most important trend among webmasters and analysts.
No matter who you are, where are you, what you do and what’s happening in the world being influential is most important thing. Breaking news, daily or seasonal trends are either created, boosted up, used and/or managed by the most powerful influencers which shows no trend is bigger than the trend of influence.
Stop Self Declaration of Social Media Titles
I happened to see an article, which triggered a topic that I wanted to write about for a long time. I am sure if you are following news and blogs you have faced a large number of silly self declared titles such as: “Social Media Guru” , Social Media Master, Social Media Prophet, Social Media Mastermind, Social Media Revolutionist, Social Media Philosopher, Social Media Pioneer, Social Media Thinker and even Social Media God!
I like to be simple, brief and straight forward; I don’t say most of the guys who tag the above titles to themselves are idiots, but I guess most of them think their audience are idiots.
Mel Ramos Superman (Photo credit: Marshall Astor – Food Fetishist)
Dozens of logical and technical facts are supporting my statement. I try to mention few of them below:
– As it’s sharply highlighted in this article ¹: “How could anyone be an expert in something that’s still evolving, still undefined?” Honestly that’s a very enlightening question, Have you seen the social media definition in dictionaries? how about Wikipedia? do we think these definitions are solid? Well, I personally don’t think so, and when we are still trying to define the meaning of a phenomenon we are far from having tons of social media gurus.
– Social Media as its being seen today concerns many fields and subject, Someone who likes, tries or performs in social media must have great experience in journalism, marketing, social science, analytical skills, deep knowledge and clear vision on the internet and web technology and tens of more different skills. The expertise in social media is as complex as social media itself.
– Social Media has been established and being developed as the result of nothing but science and technology, using the words such as guru, prophet, god etc is a serious case of misunderstanding.
– An expert, a true pioneer, an inventor or an entrepreneur would never disclose his/her plans and ideas to gain more followers on Twitter. Dose Mark Zuckerberg has any time or motive for silly show offs when he was creating Facebook? At that time there was no Twitter but I never heard or seen Zuckerberg has made such buzz on Orkut and Friendster, If today anyone who retweets Mashable’s posts is social media expert then Zuckerberg should be worshiped as the God.
I never seen a person as successful as real pioneers tries to justify his/her knowledge by tags such as I mentioned above. To get more proof for this statement please refer to this TED video and see the way Wright brothers made the flight as one of the greatest achievements by humans, ever. Yet see how Most people don’t know about”Samuel Pierpont Langley” who also wanted to fly failed. To get more idea of what I’m talking about please see this video again on TED, “Ernesto Sirolli” says: the problem with communities and public meeting is that entrepreneurs and smart people won’t attend i.e. it was like this then, and it is like this now, Those who are really creating something influential usually don’t make any publicity or noise. The noise or publicity usually being created after something is built and succeed, even then the creators don’t bother for publicity as there are so many people have nothing to do but to retweet other guy’s success.
– In any project confidentiality has its own weight, but its weight in social media marketing and PR projects is much heavier than traditional marketing or web development projects, in social media marketing sometimes the objectives are achievable only if no one ( audience and competitors) realize it is a marketing campaign. Therefore unknown introverts might be most successful social media marketers.
– Social Media has created lots of possibilities for people, audience and customers to find out the truth, at least more truth than ever. People read share, like, discuss and eventually judge, If two years back by being opportunists some guys named themselves the above tags now they face a crowed which is being more educated about social media day by day. This fast education transforms what they call expertise into social skills, If a how-to for doing a function on Facebook was so popular 1 year back, today it’s only a social skill which is adopted or discovered by many ordinary users whether they have seen that how-to or not. The author of that author is respected but can’t be called social media master.
– We are living in a world that everything is being crowed sourced, problems, issues, tips, tricks, solutions etc. Today the crowed itself is leader, master or prophet. If someone wants to capture these titles he has not realized the true power of social media and its era.
I personally, hope to waste less attention on unnecessary noises and be sharp enough to detect the real social media phenomenons and influencers.
Please Note:
I truly respect all the great and respected people who work hard and invest their time and talent to create a better world via social media and related technologies, This article won’t address to any person particularly, what I wrote is my general and humble opinion.
1- I Declare Open Season On Social Media Experts: Closed by: Sam Fiorella
Pooriast 