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Month: December 2013

How an introduction in connection request makes the difference

In last days I’m receiving a lot of connection requests within Facebook and LinkedIN. 100% of these are unqulified ones: from people I’ve never met before or I’ve never interact with and without any introduction. Because the easiness to click “Send connection request” and “Add as a Friend” button, It makes people lazy in giving you any kind of introduction about themself. This is a common and unfair behaviour on online networking. Doesn’t matter if you are trying to contact an Open Networker or Not. Even if your target contact is an open networker, it doesn’t mean that you can avoid to introduce yourself. Because your target contact is an open networker, she/he receives hundreds of contact requests and you probably will be just one of them, just a new stamp in her/his contact list, a new email address to “spam” to. After 5 minutes you’ve been added, probably she/he will have forgotten your name and your face. Ok, you have a connection more and probably you can access to her/his friends/contacts list and so what? Which is the goal you are reaching? Networking online is just the same as networking face-to-face. Would you ever approach to a person during an event without introducing yourself and asking her/him for their business card and address list? I suppose you wouldn’t. If you act like that, in the best scenario the person probably will give you her/his business card but she/he will forget you one second later. In the worst case she/he will completely ignore you even if he is an open networker. The politeness isn’t an option. Here is some advatages you can gain introducing yourself: You’ll be noticeable. Being a contact used to receive unqualified connection request, just because you’ve introduced yourself, you will  be noticed by her/him. When you’ll send a new message, she/he will recognize you. You’ll be intersting. If in your introduction you’ll give a reason-why and you’ll show that you payed attention to the contact’s profile, you’ll drive your target contact to “study” your profile too. You’ll establish a relationship. Seeing a personalized message, a target contact will be impelled to write you back. You’ll get her/his attention and you shall establish a contact since the beginning. Paying attention to a small detail, such as writing 2 lines in your contact request, you are already helping your business. Is it a so big effort, comparing to the benefits?  

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We are Italians, they don’t

I want to apologize you, World, for the drama/comedy you have been seing  since last 20 years from Italy. Sure, you could use what you’ve been seing to produce tons of fictions with a lot of new italian cliché but probably you’ll be forced to pay for the rights and for on-line distribution, if you want to distrubute it to the italian market, you’ll probably and rightly choose to not supply the italian market with this new contents. So we’ll never know it and Italians shall continue to perceive themself as the best population in the world. When I say Italians, I don’t mean the wide population. There’s a part of them having a “limited strategic view” and working hard to try to improve the cultural and economic environment, feeling and knowing that actually Italy is a part of a most enlarged world and it can still have a key role in this networked-map. They are those “conservatives” and “foreign lovers” thinking that a WebTax is a way to kill the digital business, that the incentive to the pressed publishing but not to the digital one will reduce the markets only to the big publishers. Pay attention. Those Italians are the ones you share the office with in London, Shangai, New York, Berlin, Melbourne, Istanbul. More, those are the ones that probably are still in Italy but they can’t break the silence wall even if they are called by Government to set the development program and the Government, day by day, disattends their advices writing norms and laws going in the opposite direction. Those Italians are the one that everyday are fighting against a system that is more oriented to “destroy the enemy” than  to “make the future”; to create the way to conserve privileges than to help the economy. These people (we) are Italians, you’re favourite fiction characters aren’t.

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Business Networking – the book

It was November 2004 when I joined Linkedin and I started approaching online business networking, finding out year by year the great opportunities belonging to this activity. Since then, I experimented and observed numerous ways to build and manage professional relationships using social web capabilities. Ten years later, my friend Gianluigi Cogo ( a real innovator in social related processes) and I publish “Business Networking, How to use social web for building professional relationships”  (title translated) targeted to italian market. As written in the introduction, the book doesn’t claim to be a complete work (it is quite impossible, due to the on going social web evolution) but it offers a framework for understanding how to organize a profitable on line business networking. For this reason, the book starts from an introduction of business networking theory, going through tools and methodologies for both personal and corporate implementation, giving a sample of cases from “real world” and analyzing the impact of each action. More, we decide to complete our work with a “virtual” round table. The last part of the book cointains an interview to main protagonists of social media scene in Italy and Europe. You’ll find how  Mauro Lupi, Barbara Bonaventura, Mafe De Baggis,Vincenzo Cosenza, Gianluca Diegoli, Marco Massarotto, Alberto D’Ottavi, Robin Good, Giorgio Soffiato and others are approaching at online business networking. Actually book is in Italian only, but if you’re a plublisher and you’re interested in translating it, please contact us. In the meanwhile, if you are interested in online Business Networking, you can follow us on Professional Networking on Scoop.it where we collect the best practice for turning online contacts in amassadors and increasing revenues.

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The new Facebook algorithm will force pages to be more social

It seems that the new algorithm is penilizing post from Pages, favouring updates from friends instead. According empiric observation from Original Marins Page Manager, the organic reach of pages has been decrased by a 40%. This means that the Organic Visibility of page contents is going to be negatively affected by this new algorithm. Comparing with the previous EdgeRank, the new Facebook system has three improvement: Story Bumping. The content recency will be less important in selecting what to show on newsfeed. According to Facebook this will let to see about 70% of published story against the before 57%. Last actor.Will evaluate the last 50 more recent interaction in order to prioritize contents coming from actors which we interact with in the near past time. Chronological Ordering will order in chronological order the updates written by our closest friends. These improvements favour organic contents coming from personal profile more than the ones published through Pages, that will be pushed to advertise their content in order to appear in the timeline. While many social media marketers are blaming Facebook for forcing them to enter a cicle of advertisment (promoting page -> promoting contents), observing the way the new algorithm works, we can find out some guideline to rethink the Facebook Action Plan. 1. Interaction will be the key The last actor feature prioritizes in timeline posts from users we interact more with. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter if the post is recent or not. The more a content is “actioned” by closest friends, the more It will be highlighted on timeline. Beacuse the Cronological order has a low impact in ranking, if a user share a content and this content gains comments, like or other sharings, in theory it should never expire.   2. Facebook Panda The second attention-point is related to the source. According to the interview to Lars Backtrom – News Feed Manager at Facebook – by AllThingd (“Like This if You Like Pandas! Facebook Says Publishers Shouldn’t Fret About News Feed Changes.“), It seems that Facebook will mix a lot of variables in the news feed selection. Among them the prestige of the source: according to Backtron, given a certain content, if it comes from a trusted source will be better ranked than the same content coming from a non-trusted one. This means that importing feeds from news aggregators, for example, will be less valuable than an original and direct linked content. Another cut will be made on memes and “strategies employed by people who get distribution on Facebook“, like photos with call-to-action builded in order to get actioned by users and distribuited. Read also: News Feed FYI: Showing More High Quality Content (Facebook.com) 3. Conent quality and real engagement So what…

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