Cision, a global provider of media monitoring, research, distribution, and evaluation services for the public relations profession, has released an informative new tip sheet, available for free download, titled: Using Twitter to Become Part of the Conversation – How Twitter can become a Key Element of your Communications Effort.
Their top three tips:
1. Get in the game
2. Choose your friends
3. Listen closely
Melitta
Thanks to Thierry Weber of Culturepod, we now have a videocast of the presentation of Dr. Surabhi Aggarwal on intercultural communications from our lunch seminar of 30 January 2009.
View the video: Geneva Communicators: The Challenges of inter cultural communication >>
Enjoy the show!
A US webinar on 27 February, titled ‘Media Relations Lessons from the 2009 Peanut Butter Recall‘ will examine real product recall cases and their handling in the media, sharing best practice and lessons learned. With those in Corporate Communications often being asked to produce emergency communication plans, this webinar could offer useful insights to help construct such plans. Find out more at: www.health.newsbios.com.
The University of Geneva is holding 10 evening seminars on communications themes from February to June 2009. The conferences are on a variety of themes ranging from crisis communications to media and democracy in the Middle East. All conferences are in French except the conference of 2 June in English on the theme “Communication in International Organisations” featuring Keith Rockwell, Director of Communications, WTO.
Could ‘the Conference Bike’ be the solution to effective meetings we’ve been waiting for?
Melitta
Many thanks to all the participants who attended the GCN lunch event today at the Swiss Press Club. Approximately 50 communicators attended the lecture by Dr. Surabhi Aggarwal (Professor of Communications at the International University in Geneva) on Intercultural Communications. It was an interesting discussion followed networking around an exquisite indian buffet lunch.
View the photos of the event on the left hand column of this page or on our Flickr page.
Stay tuned for video excerpts of the event online soon. We will also be sending around a copy of the slides to the participants.
We look forward to seeing you at the next event.
Patricia, Melitta, Glenn, and Vincent
Article on Tech Crunch on alternatives to Google:
Pipl.com: People Search Engine So Good, It Will Scare Your Pants Off
Google may be good at many things, but people search is not one of them. For that you’ll have to use a more specialized search engine. Spock
and Wink (merged with Reunion.com) are the people-search destinations most TechCrunch readers could probably name off the top of their head. However, slowly but surely—and mostly, very quietly—a new player has been making serious headway in this search vertical, and it’s name is Pipl.com.
Going by ComScore’s December numbers, Pipl is leading in the US with 557K unique users to Spock’s 260K, but is trailing internationally with 1.35M uniques to Spock’s 2.38M. How has Pipl pulled this off? Matthew Hertz, the company CEO, tells me it’s mostly word-of-mouth. It’s a simple answer but it rings true. Just take it out for a spin and you’ll see why—it’s just good. In fact it’s so good it’ll probably scare some people’s pants off when they see what information it is able to—legally—drudge up.
It produces not only links to all of your profiles on social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, blog mentions, and photos on Flickr. It finds mentions of your name in public records, including property records, SEC filings, and birth databases. It also finds e-mail addresses and summarizes “quick facts” about the person. For instance, a search for “Roi Carthy” turns up quick facts like these:
Roi Carthy is an Israeli-based entrepreneur and startup consultant…
Editor’s note: Roi Carthy is currently writing for TechCrunch…
For those interested in learning more about Social Networks and how they could help you do business online, a new book by Bill Ganz: ‘Belonging to Networks’, is now available for free download at: www.fasttrackonlinemarketing.com .
The digital book contains Ganz’s preliminary research into the power of social networks and is available ahead of his full book titled: ‘The Art of Engaging the Audience in an Online World’, which is due to be launched at the end of 2009.
Melitta
Employee Engagement is a term that is being used ever more frequently in communication circles but, being an internal communications concept, it can be difficult to learn from the experience of other organisations. However the British Civil Service has just made its Employee Engagement plans and fact-sheets available publicly as it develops a cross-government approach to employee engagement – a useful point of reference for anyone interested in EE.
Engagement is also the latest topic discussed on the Melcrum blog, as Chris Gay, EE specialist, shares her insights into How to create an engaged employee from day one. She points out that companies can do a lot more to create a positive relationship between new hires and the organisation, not least by actively using their natural excitement during a holistic induction process.
Melitta
An interesting article from Fairfax Business Media (FBM) on Social networking stands to benefit businesses:
LONDON, 11 AUGUST 2008 – Mention social networking and most people immediately think of sites like Facebook, MySpace or Bebo which let people create lists of friends, send messages to each other, share photos or music, join groups with like-minded-individuals and just generally keep in touch.
Images of industriousness rarely spring to mind, yet many organizations have realized that it’s not all just super-poking and games of Scrabulous, and want to use their own social networks for the benefit of their businesses.
The potential for social networking tools to connect huge numbers of people has been clearly illustrated. Companies want to harness that power themselves, and not just for marketing or recruitment, but also for internal communications and collaboration.
One HR executive recently, rather mournfully, said to me, “Fifty percent of our staff are on Facebook. Why can’t we get that kind of buy-in?” Although Facebook is primarily a tool for organizing your personal life, people also use it for business and, increasingly, companies realize that they have to provide such tools internally or else employees will communicate over the web, potentially risking sensitive company data.
Another significant driver pushing companies to adopt social networking tools is the need to locate expertise within companies whose employees are dispersed across many locations and time zones, a problem exacerbated by restructured offices that emphasize teleworking and hot-desking. It was this, along with the emergence of Web 2.0, that formed the backdrop to IBM’s exploration of social networking.
“One of the most important things within IBM is finding expertise,” says Alastair MacKenzie, Lotus Software brand executive at IBM.
“It is fundamentally important to us both in terms of our efficiency and our competitive advantage in the marketplace.”
IBM started in the most logical place: Blue Pages, its internal phone directory, to which it added profile pages that employees could update. Now those profiles can be tagged with keywords.
“We started hot-desking seven or eight years ago, and we became unable to find people [within the organization],” says Brendan Tutt, social networking subject matter expert at IBM.
“So we had to build a tool to enable us to find people and the skills they have. Having found them we can tag them with keywords useful to us. Tagging is a very big part of our internal tools: tagging yourself, tagging documents, or tagging people.”
But Blue Pages is not just a way to find people by keyword, it is also a way to research a particular person or subject area, by pulling together blog posts, bookmarks (saved in a Del.icio.us-like social bookmarking application called Dogear), and documents related to that person or subject tag. This gives the searcher not just a good overview of how someone describes themselves, but how they are defined by others, and by their own actions and interests.
These interconnections are also described in a graphical view which shows how people are linked together, and thus who to approach for an introduction to required expertise. Social network mapping exposes the network’s structure, so it’s easy to see who is best connected in a given community.
IBM has also built status and location awareness into its tools, so it’s easy to tell whether someone is busy and which time zone they are in. This lets people pick a more appropriate moment to get in touch or schedule meetings. This is, in a business context, what’s called ambient intimacy — the quiet broadcast of information about what you’re doing — which allows people to feel connected to you.
Having battle-tested the software internally, IBM decided to fold five Blue Pages technologies — Profiles, Communities, Blogs, Dogear and Activities — together into a commercial product, Lotus Connections, which became available in June 2007.
Jeff Schick, vice-president of social computing for the IBM Lotus division, says that Blue Pages clearly lent itself to a commercial product. “We were hearing so much marketplace buzz and so much was going on in Web 2.0, and it was clear we had an opportunity to build something for the enterprise,” he says.