BT Global Services

Business Ready 2012 – Twitter Assisting the BT Global Services London2012 team in a project looking at how businesses can better prepare for London 2012.

Viewpoint – Twitter Viewpoint is an email-newsletter from BT Global Services which rather than sitting as a separate project I have been working to integrate into a Digital strategy bringing together the email, website and social media presence

Viewpoint – Blog Carries stories and features that formerly would only appear in an email newsletter but now reach a wider audience which can interact and add their view to stories.

Business Sustainability – Twitter I developed a social media engagement plan for the BT Sustainable Practice team

BT Network – LinkedIn Group that I created on LinkedIn which has over 6000 members and is developing into a vibrant business focused community.

BT Global Services – Facebook Page Mainly BT people and customers have signed up as Fans of this page with Viewpoint and other BT features posted to Fan’s profiles.

Councillor / Mayor of Lambeth

Councillor Wellbelove – Twitter As an elected representative and whilst I was serving as the Mayor of Lambeth I have extensively used Twitter to communicate my work and of those I meet during my work as a councillor.

Clapham Town Ward – Twitter Feed for the Labour Party campaigning in Clapham Town Ward, London Borough of Lambeth.

Mayor of Lambeth – YouTube was the YouTube channel I set up  to carry video of events I attended as Mayor.

Mayor of Lambeth – Facebook carried stories and images from events I attended as Mayor.

Personal

Wellbelove – Delicious my ‘delicious’ links

Wellbelove – Ecademy my ecademy profile

Wellbelove – Friendfeed my Friendfeed

Wellbelove – Stumbleupon sites I’ve stumbled on

Wellbelove – Twitter my social media focused feed

Admittedly it is a huge challenge to maintain so many feeds, and I use tools such as Tweetdeck and Twhirl together with various apps on my iPhone and iPad to post messages.  I have only posted to the wrong account a couple of times however this was more to do with me being tired than the fault of the applications.

Barcode linking to Virtual Business Card

This week I have been researching virtual business cards and how these can then be added to the real world.

I wanted to create a real life business card which would include details of my social networks along with a method to link to a virtual card which would contain my latest and a more comprehensive list of contact details.

For my virtual card I used retaggr.com where it was easy to enter details and link to my details on the increasing number of social networks where I have profiles.

I then used QR-Code to create my barcode which can be read by the ScanLife Mobile App. When scanned it will redirect to my virtual contact card.

Scan Life has a huge number of opportunities, whilst in this case they are taken to a web page this is just one possibility. Other opportunities for the technology would be to send a customer to a money off voucher, more product information, link to details of special offers, contact details for an account manager… a huge number of opportunities only limited to the imagination of marketeers and the number of scanners downloaded.

Facebook business card

Finally I set about creating my real world business card. I’d seen several examples which had taken the look and feel of social networks and with a few screen grabs, cropping, cutting and pasting I pulled together my Facebook business card.

After designing, and adding my new QR-Code barcode, I uploaded my design to VistaPrint.

In the business world where it is more important than ever to network and be remembered by your contacts – and where you’re social CV can help give others additional confidence to do business with you – the corporate business card will need a little bit more imagination.

Mashable reported that in December 2009 that Chrome overtook Safari with 4.63% of the browser market rising to 5.2% in January 2010.

I have been a long term fan of Chrome, and my usage recently increased. With useful SEO extensions now available the % of searches that I do via Chrome will only increase.

Brilliant programme from Five’s The Gadget Show with their top 5 apps for mobile phones.

In a Twitter world can family and friends have any time to grieve? In pass years the pressure of 24 TV news has made it increasingly difficult to delay the making of deeply personal announcement of a death by family and friends. Previously news channels would have speculated and had the helicopter flying over the home or hospital but in the age where gossip can travel around the world and back again in seconds the momentum of the speculation is now unstoppable.

At the time of Michael Jacksons death 15% of Tweets on Twitter were relating to the speculation over his death. Such was the demand for information Twitter became overloaded. Facebook status updates were dominated by the news along with bookmarking sites being bombarded by links to news pages about his death. Within minutes of confirmation of his death Michael Jackson’s Wikipedia page was updated.

Now any hospital worker; doctor, nurse or cleaner could break the news via social networks and controlling this is almost impossible. Even close family cannot be protected as those at the bedside dealing with their loss may not have had time to get in contact with those who are close.

Hospitals, Police and other emergency services (if they have not already) will need to tighten polices regarding the sharing of information together with providing support to the bereaved families who have lost the control of how they break the news.

We all  need to question our own behaviour which seems similar to the traffic slowing at the scene of an accident.

In a world where everyone wants to be the first to break the news, could you be dead on Twitter before you actually stop breathing?

Described by them as ‘the place where you and your peers congregate to connect, share, and collaborate. Great content is just the beginning, and now it’s time for you to take the next step: Create your professional profile and your custom home page on My developerWorks. Then find and connect with like-minded peers, and invite them into your My developerWorks network to share expertise and build groups for further interaction and collaboration.’

The sign up to the service is open to anyone, though not exactly intuitive. The register button takes you to the sign in page when you then have to select the register button! If you make a mistake on any part of the form it lost most of your entries after the error was highlighted.

Similarly when selecting a screen name, which has to be unique, there is no way of checking if it is available prior to entering it together with the captcha field, so if it is not available you have to enter a new name and another captcha.

Once you have registered you can then edit your profile and they say ‘Search for contact information and organizational information about your colleagues. Locate expertise and build your own social network. Get access to the information your colleagues are collecting and publishing.’

On several occasions I got a ‘oops that didn’t work’ screen so clearly there are some glitches which have not been fixed prior to launch and I have yet to be able to either view my profile page or edit it.

You can search for people by keyword or by name.

In a users profile I found the following

Roles:

Skills:

Area of interest:

Goals:

Professional expertise:

Biography and interests:

With a large number of users already on this platform, IBM have already jumped the first hurdle of signing up users. Their challenge now is to get those already on the network to see a value of creating profiles. I will be also interested to see if the network grows to include the ability to add video and other features.

With massive growth in the last year (600% according to compete.com) 70% of users joined in the last year.

With 35% of Twitter users having 10 or fewer followers and 9% of Twitter users not following anyone at all, many of the new followers may not understand how social networking works.

Many attempting to access this rapidly growing network often seem to expect the masses come rushing to hear their messages, however this environment is not for one way discussion – to be successful you’ve got to either have some real hot property that twitter users are going to be eager to follow or actively engage with the community.

Some simple rules for starting with Twitter:

• Post at least a message a day to show people who visit your page you’re twitter account is active
• Find others who have similar interests and follow them (don’t follow just anyone)
• Only follow those who are active users – active users are more likely to follow you
• Follow others in small chunks, keeping the gap between followers and followed no more than 200
• Use friendorfollow to discover who you follow who does not follow you back
• Re-post messages of interest, giving credit to the originator
  • to do this precede message with RT or Retweet ‘@theirtwittername’
• Reply to messages of interest
  • to do this precede message with ‘@theirtwittername’
• Send messages to those who follow you thanking them for their follow*
• Follow those who follow you*

* Auto follow and auto notes to new followers can be done via SocialToo.

And of course follow my twitter (I promise to follow you)

These tools amalgamate results from several sources including technorati and google blog search.

Companies and organisations need to monitor these networks to measure the success of their social media campaigns together with working to minimise the impact of negative conversations about their brand.

You cannot, and should not attempt to, control what is said about your brand in social media, however by being aware of these conversations you can utilise what is said to help drive improvements in your organisation and through reasonable responses aim to mitigate their impact.

When a work colleague died I remember receiving a group email, shocking but at least there were others around in the office to look to for support. In the age of social networking there is every possibility that you could discover that someone close died via a profile update. With the rapid growth of mobile internet you could be in the middle of a meeting, stood in the queue at the supermarket, out for a meal with friends or picking up the kids from school.

Whilst you could be in all these scenarios to discover the death of a friend via a telephone call, the ‘accidental’ impact of discovering of someones death from a wall post or status update on a social profile seems to have an added loneliness and depth of shock.

So what happens next?

Some friends may wish to post messages of their shock and sadness on the profile of the deceased. Others may feel this inappropriate, feel that such public displays of grief are inappropriate. 

Who should decide if and when a profile is removed?

Should relatives be given control?

At funerals I have always disliked the saying ‘they would have wanted…’ said so many a time by people who have no idea what the deceased wanted at all.

A solution to this would be a ‘living will’ on social networks – a ‘death wishlist’ or ‘social network after life’. At some point after signing up to a social network you should be given the option to select what you would like to happen to your account after you die. I would imagine that most will not bother, but for those of us who do not want others to speak in their name, this could be a way of securing that our wishes are met. 

A ‘passed on’ option or ‘dead’, if you would prefer to be more blunt, could be useful – this would enable friends to stay friends but not have the deceased pop up every time an application wants you to choose friends to invite. Pre-programmable options after the ‘dead’ option is activated could include a series of status updates – spooky but could also provide some comfort (or hilarity). 

In the absence of a ‘Facebook Death List’ I’d like to let my wishes be known:

• Post away on my profile after I’ve gone, for me death has traditionally been a social event. At least on-line there wont be any stale sandwiches 
• My profile can stay, but if you’re a friend don’t feel embarrassed to delete me as a friend if seeing me in your friends list makes you feel uncomfortable
• Take photos at my funeral (no one ever does this which is a shame when everyone made such an effort to look good – and of course look gorgeous in black). A HD video stream would be even better.  
• Make sure the coffin and later pictures of my gravestone are tagged just to make sure anyone who might stumble by my profile understands why I haven’t updated my status in a while.
• If someone can post messages each year to a newspaper on the anniversary of a death then I cant see why you can’t make it easier for people by keeping your profile open so they can post messages there.

Social networks have become such a major part of our lives, for me, I don’t see why they shouldn’t be a major part of death. I just hope that my last profile picture is a good one as I hopeit will be around for a lot longer than I was.

So what would you’re ‘Death Wish List’ be? Should Facebook let you decide what happens to your profile after you’re death or is this for you’re family to decide? Will last.fm discover new meaning? What happens to your last tweet when you are no longer able to twitter?

This is a welcome addition to LinkeIn, making the service more sticky for users whilst providing you with far more creative ways to promote yourself to perspective employers. There is a danger that some over enthusiastic users could damage their reputations rather than enhance them – though for the rest of us this could be rather entertaining.