A new solution to internal communication?
Could ‘the Conference Bike’ be the solution to effective meetings we’ve been waiting for?
Melitta
Search engines
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…
Social Networking to gain business
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 resources
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
Social Networking and Business
An interesting article from Fairfax Business Media (FBM) on Social networking stands to benefit businesses:
There is no doubt that social networks are useful tools for helping people in business find each other, communicate, collaborate, and maintain large networks of contacts. By Suw Charman-Anderson
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.
Speech writing – the new Rock ’n’ Roll?
Last year, it seemed there was continually politicians and business leaders in the news because of their latest speech. At the time, it got me thinking about the power of this communications medium, but none of these speeches compares with the global impact Obama’s inauguration speech has had.
As a medium, speeches have a lot to deliver. They have to entertain, inform, inspire or influence us, whilst simultaneously raising the profile and reputation of the speaker – who only has one chance to get it right.
A great speech can last for generations; we are still looking to the speeches made by people such as Martin Luther King (“I had a dream…”), John F. Kennedy (“Ask not what your country can do for you…”) and Winston Churchill (“Never has so much been achieved by so few…”) for inspiration and example. So deliver a great speech and you could be making history!
With so much pressure on getting it right, speech writing can be both absolutely terrifying and hugely exhilarating making it, in my opinion, the ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ of communications.
So if you haven’t tried speech writing yet, I’d wholeheartedly encourage you give it a go. It’s hard work, but like everything that requires that extra effort, the rewards are high!
To get your regular speech writing and pubic speaking fix, try visiting a local Toastmasters club, there are 14 in Switzerland, including two in both Geneva and Lausanne.
‘Rock on!’
Melitta
Top 10 Intranets of 2009
This week Jakob Nielsen announced the best 10 Intranets of 2009, with the observation that Intranets are becoming more strategic, attracting more support and resources, and are improving significantly in design and userabily.
Read his full announcement >
Melitta
Good news: it’s time to deliver bad news
In an article published in The Guardian this week, Danny Rogers, editor of PR Week, looks at the ongoing success of PR despite the current economic downturn.
The article suggests that the Internet is partly responsible for this, since PR’s biggest advantage over advertising is that it can create an ongoing dialogue with audiences, rather than simply broadcasting positive messages. The growth of blogs, social networking and Google has made such dialogues essential if today’s organisations are to impress and thrive.
The article goes on to look at how the need for companies to continually communicate with stakeholders, particularly during hard times such as we are currently experiencing, is good news for the PR industry who craft and deliver the messages – especially those linked to governments and the finance industry where the most bad news is to be found. Read the full article >
Melitta
Employee Communication spending to rise in 2009
An interesting article on the Internal Communications Hub suggests that despite the economic downturn, companies plan to increase their spending on Internal Communications in 2009. This is positive news given that surveys in the latter half or 2008 showed that staff felt that there was a lack of management communication and this was resulting in plummeting morale and productivity.
It is not all good news however. There is evidence to suggest that in many organisations, only a third of workers will believe the messages they receive from managers. Therefore, Internal Communications specialists will have a key role to play in 2009 to help leaders restore employee confidence and performance to the levels needed to steer them through the current economic challenges – but to really succeed, they will need to engage and involve stakeholders from across the organisation. Read the full article >
Melitta
NYT article about hurdles advertisers face, using social networking sites
For some time, Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest advertiser, has been dipping its big toes into the vast pool of Facebook, now the world’s largest social network. I recently knocked on the doors of both companies to hear how the experiment was going. Neither was inclined to say much.
Independent experts on Web advertising have been watching, however, and what they see is a myriad of difficulties in making brand advertising work on social networking sites. Members of social networks want to spend time with friends, not brands.
When major brands place banner advertisements on the side of a member’s home page, they pay inexpensive prices, but the ads receive little attention. Seth Goldstein, co-founder of SocialMedia Networks, an online advertising company, wrote on his Facebook blog that a banner ad “is universally disregarded as irrelevant if it’s not ignored entirely.”
When advertisers invite members to come to pages dedicated to their products, they can attract visitors only by investing in expensive creative material or old-fashioned promotions like prize contests.
And when they try to take advantage of new “social advertising,” extending their commercial message to a member’s friends, their ads will be noticed, all right, but not necessarily favorably. Members are understandably reluctant to become shills. IDC, the technology research firm, published a study last month that reported that just 3 percent of Internet users in the United States would willingly let publishers use their friends for advertising. The report described social advertising as “stillborn.”
All Web sites that rely on ads struggle to a greater or lesser extent to convert traffic, even high traffic, into meaningful revenue. Ads that run on Google and other search engines are a profitable exception because their visitors are often in a buying mood. Other kinds of sites, however, can’t deliver similar visitors to advertisers. Google’s own YouTube, which relies heavily, like Facebook, on user-generated content, remains a costly experiment in the high-traffic, low-revenue ad business.
Financial data would show the current state of Facebook’s advertising, but none are available. Facebook is privately held and a spokesman told me that it does not disclose revenue or any information about its ad sales.
Read full article here!