Category Archives: English

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Posterous has been acquired by Twitter

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Posterous has been acquired by Twitter. This is the official email I received:

I’m thrilled to announce that Posterous has been acquired by Twitter!

The opportunities in front of Twitter are exciting, and we couldn’t be happier to bring our technology and expertise to hundreds of millions of users around the globe. Plus, the people at Twitter are genuinely nice folks who share our vision for making sharing simpler.

Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption. We’ll give users ample notice if we make any changes to the service. For users who would like to back up their content or move to another service, we’ll share clear instructions for doing so in the coming weeks.

You can find more information answers to other questions you may have here.

Finally, I’d like to offer thanks to everyone, especially those who have been with Posterous since day one. The last four years have been an amazing journey. Your encouragement, praise and criticism have made Posterous better, and I really appreciate everything you’ve done.

Thanks again and I look forward to building great things for you at Twitter.

- Sachin

LinkedIN announce the Company Follow Button

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Linkedin announced to have released the Follow Button for Companies. Companies will be adding this button to their websites, making it easier for any consumer on the web to begin following companies of interest, on LinkedIn.

Clicking on the Follow Company button and, as long as you are logged onto LinkedIn, you will automatically “follow” the company. As for Facebook Pages, the button will permit to users to stay updated about news from Company Pages.

Introducing the Follow Button for Companies, LinkedIN avoids users to search for firms within LinkedIN but they can start follow a potential interesting company also from outside the network, as it happen for Facebook Fanpage Button. Users needs only to be logged in LinkedIN and they will automatically follow brands, just clicking on “Follow”, receiving news and updates from Company.

What will be next step?

Klout: What’s wrong and how to keep your score up

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Klout

Klout is probably the most famous service for measuring influential people. Basing on your activity on social media and reaction you generate, Klout assigns to you a score that summarizes how much you are influential on your network.

The Score is the combined result of three indexes: True Reach, that measure how many people you really reach with your content; Amplification probability, the likelihood that your network respond to your content; Network Impact measures how much influential is your network (the more interact with influential people, the higher will be your Network Impact)

Even if the algorithm has been improved in order to get more accuracy in the evaluation, there is still a “logical” bug. Indeed Klout modify your score also when you’re not engaging in social media.

In the past 10 days, due to personal issues, I couldn’t access to my networks and create or share any contents. Since the 1st February my Klout Score started to decrease.

Also if, according to “Understanding Klout Score“, “Being active is different than being influential” (it would be the right approach”), the logical chain seems to be: if you are not active, you can’t generate conversantion and, if you don’t, you loose your reputation and your capability to be influential. It is confirmed by another statement in the “Influence is built over the time” section:

[So] being inactive over the weekend or taking short break won’t have a major impact on your Score, but if you’re inactive for longer periods your Score will decrease gradually

It is a non sense. If being active is different than being influential, why my score will decrase if I am inactive for more than 3 days?

A good improvement of algorithm would be to freeze your klout score when you’re not active and to calculate again when you publish about a topic you were recognized as influential. Time wouldn’t affect negatively Klout Score. Better, it can but only if your “impact” and your engagement capability has been changing during this period. If reaction will be large, the elapsed time will increase your score. On the other hand, it will descrease.

Anyway, here some tips to get your Klout Score Up:

Keep limited the number of networks measured by Klout. If you can’t monitor every network you have signed up, Link only those you are sure you can monitor and you can interact with. [Also if Klout suggests that "adding more network" helps your score]

Try to engage the most influential people. Even if the interation with non-influendial don’t affect your score negatively, interaction with influential improve it.

Just publish what is working. If you want to keep an high klout score, experimenting is not a good solution. Post only what is surely able to generate interaction and engagement.

Don’t be inactive for more than 2 or 3 days. After this time, as Klout say, your score will gradually decrease.

Don’t be a spammer. The more you publish, the more engagement they expect. It’s important to create few and good contents more than “share, share and share”.

Y-Generation: Linkedin, personal branding and reputation

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Y-Generation doesn’t pay attention at social network as professional tool. I was told about it when I was invited for a speech at Ekonomi Universitesi in Izmir and I got it again last week at University of Ca’ Foscari in Venice. Invited by Gianluigi Cogo to talk about how to use Linkedin for career, I observed that a large part of students not yet have signed up a LinkedIN profile, prefering Facebook. Furthermore Facebook is mostly used as a entertainment tool.

These highlights matches with the JobVite data I used for my speech. Indeed the Social Media Recruiting Survey 2011 shows that less than 40% od job seekers has a LinkedIN profile and 86% of Companies use LinkedIN in order to hire talents.

During conversation with students, I also guessed the low attention to the personal privacy and as well to the potential impact of shared contents on their career. The common approach is “I share only with my friends” but they didn’t image that information published could be used by recruiters or companies.

Perhaps personal branding and reputation have to be driven before to students and then professionals.

 

Overviewing Social Media Education

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Source Image: Scuola Media Virgilio

Due to an advising project I’m working at, I reserached the offering in social media education. In particular I focused on USA, Italy and Turkey. Analyzing the informations collected (about 100 training and certification programs) I identified three kind of offerings:

  1. The Generic one, usually focused on general topics such as “how to build a social media marketing plan” or “the social media management”. The objective of this courses is giving a basic understanding of social media world and contents usually are entry levels. In the description there is a redundancy (spam) of keywords such as strategy, effectiveness, efficiency and go on. This courses are usually targeted on marketing managers and executives, sales managers and sometimes CEO.
  2. The Technical one, I find out the specialized programs, usually focused on social media platform such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN. Here too, descriptions are full of “effectiveness, strategy, efficiency” but add to them the “how to do”. The target are quite the same, but not for the CEO and some developer.
  3.  The  Process-Driven one . Not so frequent, these kind of courses and programs are designed on Industry or has a goal-oriented approach, such as: “Social Media in Turism”, “Social Media for Lead Generation” or “Social Media for Chemical”. These programs usually mixes in the right way the strategic and operative approach, giving the basic for both designing and executing a social media plan. [Personal Note: I’m quite proud to find out the Italy as the country using more this approach].

Pointing out to a price-positioning analysis, (no. of hours / price) I found that Generic Courses are the most expensive. The Technical One are the cheapest and the “Goal-Driven” have a wide range of pricing, in relation to specific topic. What all the analyzed trainings are missing is the methodology of teaching, usually avoiding the “Training on the job” and “practical use”.

Is this your perception too ? What would you expect from a training course on social media?