The 2011 National Business Ethics Survey is the seventh such report published periodically by the Ethics Resource Center, but this year’s edition turned up something unexpected. According ERC, “active social networkers,” which the organization defines as those who spend at least 30 percent of their workdays on social networking activities and who make up about 11 percent of employees who engage in social networking,

are much more likely than non-networking colleagues to accept behaviors that have traditionally been considered to be “questionable” or marginal behaviors (e.g., keeping copies of confidential work documents for use in a future job, personal use of the company credit card, taking home company software).

The survey also found that active users are also far more likely to experience pressure to compromise ethical standards (42 percent versus 11 percent of less-active networkers). On the ethical upside, these same active networkers also expressed a greater willingness to share unflattering information about their organizations and co-workers, which one would guess is logically linked to another quality of this group identified by the research: an increased likelihood to report lapses in ethics. These extreme social networkers may be more-frequent whistleblowers, but they also suffer for their outspokenness, being far more likely to experience retaliation for reporting misconduct than co-workers who are less involved with social networking (56 percent versus 18 percent).

The greater likelihood of social networking power users to learn of ethical lapses (or even opportunities to cut corners), as well as their increased likelihood to report violations, makes sense: After all, these are people who are probably receiving and sharing far more information than less-frequent users. But the greater propensity of active networkers to break the rules has no obvious explanation. Perhaps those choosing to utilize social networks to such a degree are naturally inclined to use whatever tools are at hand to get their jobs done rather than stick to the letter of the law (or strictly within the policies of IT) and this correlates with a greater willingness to bend the rules, but that is pure speculation.

What do you make of these findings?  

Image courtesy of Flickr user miss_rogue

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“More and more people becoming part of this uber talent marketplace … They are entrepreneurs of their own lives,” Nishar said. That doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily going out and starting up their own companies. But in the new talent economy, everyone’s in charge of their own destiny.

So what is LinkedIn doing to capture more users during this transition? And what can users do to take advantage of LinkedIn’s tools?

Nishar said the first step is for users to create their profiles, and for LinkedIn to help them to build their professional networks. According to Nishar, users with completed profiles are about 12 times more likely to find new jobs through the site than those who don’t.

But LinkedIn doesn’t stop there — it’s also trying to help users get relevant information about their field with its top headlines in the industries that users work in. Nishar said the goal is to make users aware of what’s happening in their professional world, but to allow them to do so in just about 15 minutes a day.

Finally, LinkedIn wants to be mobile, with apps and optimized web experiences that help users connect from wherever they are. LinkedIn recently launched a new iPhone app, but has yet to build a comparable experience on the iPad. But when asked if an iPad app was coming soon, Nishar demurred, saying he couldn’t confirm or deny one way or the other.

While LinkedIn is all about networking, it’s not about the same type of social networking and sharing as, say, Facebook. So LinkedIn isn’t interested in driving up the amount of time its users spend on the site, Nishar said. Since LinkedIn’s goal is to make people more productive, it can’t do that if users are there all day. Instead, LinkedIn tries to measure how much value users get out of the time they do spend on the site, by what they do when they visit.

Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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These days, everything is distributed: our teams and co-workers, our customers and clients, and even our networking efforts. You can live in San Francisco, have an assistant in New York, and serve clients in London. It’s also possible to have many followers on Twitter and Facebook, and tons of posts and comments written about you or your company on a daily basis around the web. Somehow, you have to find a way to manage all that interactivity, and keep your team, your customers and your followers in the loop as well. It’s a lot to handle, and it can easily become overwhelming.

Postling enables you to post to your blog, schedule tweets and respond to comments using virtually any social media outlet. You can write a post once and publish to all your social media accounts at the same time, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and Flickr.

Organize and Schedule

You can group your social media accounts by brand so that you can stay organized and work efficiently, which comes in handy if you own more than one business, have multiple locations, or want to manage your business and personal accounts from the same place.

On top of that, you can also connect multiple users to your accounts so that assistants and team members can post to your social networking and media outlets, too, and with granular permissions for every person, you can easily protect your privacy by only allowing access to certain accounts.

Another helpful feature of Postling is its ability to schedule posts, which means you can write posts ahead of time, then schedule when you want them to be published.

Monitor Comments

Postling also gathers all the comments your readers leave on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms and organizes them in a single place, making it easy to respond across all social networks without having to access multiple sites.

The Postling dashboard provides an overview of your recent posts and the comments they receive, and each comment gives you the option to reply directly to the correct account. Comments are threaded, so it’s easy to understand the flow of a given conversation and chime in at any point.

You can monitor what people are saying about you and your business by tracking your streams, RSS feeds and reviews from around the web, such as Yelp and CitySearch, and with email alerts of comments, you won’t miss anything.

The Postling analytics dashboard allows you to gauge the effectiveness of your social media and networking efforts by showing which days your posts are most effective, as well as your post-to-comment ratio.

Postling currently supports integration with most social networking and media platforms — including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — most major blogging platforms, as well as YouTube, Flickr, Bit.ly, Yelp and CitySearch.

The starter plan is free and includes one account per social network; if you need more users and accounts, Postling’s has plus ($9/month) and premium ($49/month) plans.

Of course, Postling’s not the only app that enables you to work with multiple social media accounts. Alternatives include tools like TweetDeck, CoTweet, HootSuite, and Engage121, but Postling’s ease of use, along with the number of platforms it supports, makes it my preferred choice.

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Social Analytics

The new social analytics features allow users to discover people who share common interests and find content that they are likely to find interesting, based on their own profiles and interactions with the tool. Social analytics powers a range of widgets, including:

• Do You Know recommends people for users to add to their network based on your existing connections, tags, organizational relationships, and actions that they have taken.
• Things in Common helps users identify what they have in common with others — such as a list of the communities that both belong to, or a list of the tags that they both use.
• Who Connects Us shows the social path that links a user to a person.

Particularly in larger organizations, where it’s impossible to know everyone or keep up-to-date with everything that might be relevantant, this type of social discovery (similar to that found in many consumer social networking apps, like Facebook and LinkedIn) should be very handy.

Social Everywhere

To help users access their social network at any time from anywhere, Connections 3.0 is supported on a wider range of mobile devices, with support on Android and iPad to add to the existing support for BlackBerry, Nokia and iPhone. There’s no additional cost for the mobile clients.

Additionally, Connections is also being integrated with other software to enable social features within those tools. As you might expect, Connections plays nicely with IBM’s other tools, such as Lotus Notes and Sametime, but new in 3.0 is integration with Microsoft Sharepoint.

Connnections 3.0 also includes a raft of other new features and updates to the existing applications, at-a-glance details can be found here. The new version will be available on Nov. 24.

Do you use Connections? Let us know what you think of it below.

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Alex Bogusky, widely regarded as the guru of advertising until he recently left the helm of MDC Partners, describes the SuperMe as, “a highly-sharable and incredibly robust digital version of our selves… We have created these alter egos and now we not only refuse to live without them but we have a new expectation for the contribution that other products and services should make to our lives.”

That expectation, says Bogusky, is that products and services must help to support or augment the SuperMe in some way. In his post, Bogusky looks at this possibility in detail, using the auto industry as an example (if you can’t think of a way your car can augment your digital SuperMe, you’ll be impressed by his ideas).

But the concept of the SuperMe has implications for those using and enjoying social media as well as those trying to harness it for brand-building purposes. To build a brand through social networking, you must ensure that your brand helps others build their brand. Your brand must support your audience’s SuperMes.

Individuals and the SuperMe

Following Bogusky’s logic, we social media users want to work on our SuperMes as and when and how we choose. The more, and richer, the opportunities we have to do that, the better. We select social networking tools — and their specific features — based on what those tools facilitate (how they support us in developing our SuperMes), as well as who else is using those tools. But, as Bogusky says, we’ll also select whatever products we can, to some degree, on the basis of the value they provide to our SuperMes.

The questions of privacy and security around the content we place on social networks relates directly to the authenticity of our SuperMes as realistic reflections of who we actually are. This applies as much to the issues of prospective employers finding photos of your last wild party online as it does to strangers being able to access your personal information through a casual web search.

Would you use Twitter to contact a contractor about a quick work question, rather than sending them an email or using Twitter’s DM feature, which would keep the message private? Even something as simple as this decsions plays directly into the issue of the SuperMe. The manner in which you’d respond to a work query posed this way does, too.

These questions ultimately relate to the bigger issue of the types of information we, as users, use to build our SuperMes. They raise issues around what constitutes true authenticity — do you need to reflect every aspect of your life or personality in your SuperMe? — as well as the strength of our desire to belong within our individual social networks, our social circles, and our communities.

Organizations and the SuperMe

Organizations that understand the concept of the SuperMe can harness it and use it to their advantage.

Perhaps your staff will be more satisfied if you allow them access to Facebook and Twitter at work, and find subtle ways to encourage them to include work contacts, and report company news, in the information they publish. I found out about Yahoo’s takeover of Flickr through the Twitter and Flickr streams of a friend who works there. I’m kept up-to-date on the social club antics of a company my friend works for through her social network activity — activity that makes me want to work for her employee-focused employer.

Businesses that want to build their brands among consumer audiences might consider how they can augment customers’ SuperMes. One company I know held a competition that required customers to take pictures of themselves at recognizable national sites with the company’s products, and submit them to an online gallery, as part of a competition to celebrate the organization reaching a truly global customer base. Facebook Groups and Pages, Twitter competitions and Flickr groups are just some of the tools that organizations can use to engage audience members in ways that help them build their SuperMes.

As Bogusky points out in his article, though, your brand can support customers’ SuperMes without actually employing any specific social networks, through products themselves. For example, provide a camera in the rear-view mirror of the car you’re about to release, enabling drivers to take pictures of the kids in the back seat. You could tie this in to an online competition — submit your pictures of families on holiday in family cars, for example — but the addition of the functionality itself gives users the opportunity to develop their SuperMes in new ways.

Tapping into the basic human need to belong, in this case through the opportunities provided by social networking, and by grasping the notion of the SuperMe, might be a good way to build your brand, whether it’s personal or professional.

How are you using social media to meet the needs of your — or your customers’ — SuperMes?

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Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?

It sounds a bit like an “unstrategy,” but I was fairly constant in my approach and thought objectively about my activity on these sites rather than always shooting from the hip. Now that I’ve been freelancing full-time for a year, I decided to revisit my predominantly ad hoc approach to social media and see exactly what my unstrategy had delivered.

The Networks

The networks I use for work-related purposes are LinkedIn and Twitter. I might use Facebook if more of my business contacts were users, but currently my contact list there consists entirely of friends.

LinkedIn is, of course, a business network, which makes it easy for beginners to get their heads around. Uploading my work history and details was easy and the profile pages are straightforward for non-subscribed users to access. On LinkedIn, my contact list consists almost entirely of people I know — I’ve met them and worked with them.

One issue I’ve found with LinkedIn is that the service requires you to provide the name of the company you work for. For an independent consultant working for myself, without a business name or company set up, this is a problem: my bio that says I work “at freelance” (for want of a business name), which, since I’m a professional writer, bugs the heck out of me.

I’ve joined some LinkedIn groups, and participate in relevant conversations, but I haven’t yet learned a whole lot from that involvement. I use the LinkedIn job search functionality, which seems to display nothing more than listings from domestic job sites. I also review jobs posted in the groups I’ve joined, although these tend to be U.S.-centric and inflexible when it comes to those in remote locations. As such, LinkedIn hasn’t opened up a whole new world of job listings to me.

Twitter is a much more open-ended tool for me, offering scope to connect on levels other than work. That said, I consider my primary audience there to be work contacts with whom I’m also friends, though of course my contact list contains more people I don’t know than people I do. My Twitter profile links to my LinkedIn profile, since most of my followers are following me for professional purposes.

I’ve often reviewed job listings on Twitter, and periodically follow recruitment agencies (who I always end up unfollowing), but so far I haven’t found that kind of wide-net approach useful. Perhaps the time I’ve spent on freelance job sits has jaded me, but I’m conscious that anyone can post anything as a “job” on Twitter, and I’m not excited by the idea of trawling through endless listings that either require me to live in another country or be prepared to work for less than I can afford.

The Results

Despite the issues I just mentioned, my social network unstrategy has helped me obtain some of my largest clients in the past year. It has also allowed me to secure contact with people who, though they haven’t offered me work, have acted as middle-men, successfully recommending me to others who need my services.

The networks’ official job-finding offerings have produced little in the way of results, yet my involvement on them has been crucial to my bottom line and job satisfaction over the past twelve months. I obtained my largest new client last year simply by sending a connection request on LinkedIn. And my most valuable work-generating connection is a Twitter follower I used to work alongside.

There’s one caveat, though, and it’s this: Face-to-face contact has also been essential to my success finding work using these online tools. Sure, if I had an enormous personal brand and reputation as a guru beyond my personal sphere, I might be able to attract work contacts from strangers through these social networking tools. But as an Average Joe Freelancer social media user, I’m not in that position.

For me, social media is a good tool for ensuring that I’m in contacts’ minds even when I haven’t seen them for a while. It also gives me the opportunity to illustrate my skills by example, and without me having to embark on promotional strategies like newsletters, direct mail or warm calling — all of which entail time and financial costs.

By staying top of mind on social media, and supporting that presence in the real world through irregular but not infrequent in-person contact (usually achieved by having lunch or going out for coffee), I can promote my offering productively and — best of all — enjoyably. My review of my efficacy in using social media for work showed that without in-person contact, I struggle to create connections that produce work opportunities. And this may be something I’ll work on in the coming year.

But it also showed that without social networks, I’d have to expend a lot more energy, time, and money illustrating my skills and remaining in touch with past clients and colleagues. And it wouldn’t be anywhere near as fun!

Where do social networks fit within your promotional strategy? Are they producing results?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?

Image by stock.xchng user Gastonmag.

Why Bother?

Social networking isn’t always a cakewalk, but it can be fun and insightful. Every person who uses social networks will give you a different reason why you should consider getting back into social networking:

• it’s fun and entertaining
• it lets you access the thoughts of some of the leaders in your profession or areas of interest
• it’s a good vehicle for building your personal brand
• it’s a great way to stay on top of what’s going on
• it provides inspiration
• it helps you connect with other interesting people

Of course, we all know that there are downsides to social networking, but you may find that you don’t want those negatives to prevent your from enjoying the good stuff.

Social networking isn’t a life sentence, and it needn’t take up your every waking (or even spare) moment. There are benefits to be gained through being part of social networks that suit you. So why not give social networking another try?

Getting Back Into the Social Saddle

Okay, so you started out social networking, went crazy, got burned (or burned out), and decided to take a break. After any bad experience, it can be hard to give credence to the suggestion that you should try again.

What you need is a low-risk social networking strategy that preempts the possibility of your becoming overwhelmed, worn out or disenfranchised all over again.

1. Start slowly. If you’ve been out of the social network loop, you probably had good reason for it. So rather than rushing back to the same old setup — the setup that may well have driven you crazy last time — consider taking things slowly.

Think twice about simply activating your existing accounts and taking on the familiar burdens. Look around — the social networking landscape changes by the day. There’s likely to be a network or two you’ve never heard of before. Maybe they’d suit your needs better than the ones you used to use?

2. Work out what you need. Ask yourself what you want to achieve by using social networks. Do you want to build a professional reputation and following, or exchange jokes with friends? Both? Or something else altogether? What kinds of status updates do you want to be able to publish?

Working out what you want to achieve through social networks before you reengage will make it easier to identify your needs — and a social network that can meet them.

3. Find a place for it. If you’ve worked out what you need from a social network, you shouldn’t find it too difficult to give your engagement with social networking a context — to give it a place in your day or week, and your philosophy.

This works in the other direction, too: By finding a place for your social network activity, you’ll be able to discount social networks and modes of network engagement that don’t fit with your personal approach. Finding a place for social networking — and keeping it there — helps to keep your involvement manageable and on track.

4. Assess and reassess. If you’ve already become disillusioned by social media, you’re likely to be wary of heading down the same dead-end path again. Keeping a close eye on your engagement with the networks you decide to use can help you to avoid burnout in future.

Try completing a mental check every so often as you’re using social networks. How do you feel? Are you enjoying the experience? Do you feel you’re giving more than you’re getting? What have you learned or gained from the network recently?

Do this periodically, and you’ll be more likely to avoid frustration and burnout, because you’ll adjust your engagement continually on the basis of the return you feel you’re getting.

Have you recently resurrected your social media presence? What advice can you provide from your experience to help make the process a success?

Image by stock.xchng user chadart.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?

Even those of us who aren’t using social networks simply to vent or share jokes with friends run the risk of burnout. Once the heady, bowl-you-over wave of a fad like social networking sweeps us up, carries us along for a while, then breaks, we can find ourselves awash with the realities of that fad, our heads barely above water.

The comments of some of my break-taking contacts reveal what this means in the world of social networking. “I’m on Twitter hiatus until I have something awesome to report,” says one. Another explained that people seemed to update their statuses too often, and talked about themselves too much. A friend added that less was indeed more on social networks. All three had once been avid users of social networks.

Some of us, though no more endeared by social networks than any other tool, believe we need to stick with them for professional purposes. If we’re going to follow the social marketing mantra and stay committed to an ongoing plan of consistent action, we need to avoid social network burnout. Here are my tips for enduring the social media marathon.

1. Be realistic.

Many social network users initially see them as a kind of silver bullet — a means to promote themselves, engage with others, build a following, gain insight and have fun, all at the same time. While social networks can deliver all these advantages, they also have other, less endearing qualities.

To avoid disappointment, as well as burnout, it’s important to be realistic about what social networks are, what they take and what they deliver. Building a following takes time and hard work. You won’t be intrigued, amused or educated by everything you see on the networks you use.

I think it’s also important to be clear about why you’re engaging with social media, so that when things are looking less than rosy you can still see the opportunities and upsides. Otherwise, instead of altering your approach to better suit your needs, you may simply start asking “What’s the point?” — and risk disengaging from a medium that can deliver valuable benefits.

2. Be choosy.

Between the few major and countless boutique social networks, it’s no wonder many media consumers are suffering social saturation. The fact that a social network exists and targets you doesn’t mean you have to join it. Be choosy about the plethora of options. Weigh up the pros and cons of each, and try to get an idea of which ones will give you the greatest return for your time and energy.

Similarly, be choosy about how you engage, and who you engage with. If you’re unimpressed by the updates of a given contact, break the link with them — life’s too short to be frustrated or bored by contacts on a social network. Constantly reassess your contact lists and the content you’re seeing — avoid connect-to-everyone-who-connects-to-me syndrome, and you’ll be less likely to suffer burnout.

3. Pace your participation.

Inundation leads to exhaustion. The secret to longevity is to pace yourself. Take a long-term perspective to your social media involvement, and on that basis, assess what you’re capable of each day or week. Perhaps you’ll make decisions about the topics you’ll focus on, or the way you’ll use the social network, as a means to ensure that social networks don’t become the main focus of your day (unless, of course, they’re your business).

For the majority of us, social networks are just one of multiple tools we use, yet many claim that social media “takes up too much time.” Pace your participation to suit your level of interest, schedule, social media objectives and life context, and you’ll be better placed to maintain the regular communication that your followers appreciate — and avoid burnout.

4. Keep control.

Over time, I’ve watched as various contacts succumbed to peer pressure to engage with social media in a range of innovative, unprecedented ways…and then become saturated, burnt out and disenchanted with the social networks they used.

We’ve all seen public figures undermined as they’ve gone all-out to please their social media following and beat “competitors” in the social media popularity contest — and slipped up.

Maintaining control over the way you engage with the social networks you use, and the influences you’ll allow to impact that engagement, is an important component in a lasting social network presence.

5. Don’t let it dominate.

When you start to think about every activity you undertake as an opportunity for engaging with social media, you know you’re in trouble. Feeling guilty because you didn’t tweet today, or taking photos of an event specifically so you can upload them to Facebook can engender a lasting cynicism about social networking. “I’m doing all this stuff,” you may find yourself thinking, “but I’m getting nothing back.”

We all have plenty of other things to do besides update our statuses on the social networks we use. Make sure you engage with those other activities fully, and wholeheartedly, rather than seeing them simply as more Facebook fodder.

Decide for yourself where social networks fit within your professional and personal life, and you’ll likely find your participation with those networks more enjoyable and beneficial than if you allow them to take over.

So far, these tips have helped me avoid social media burnout. What are your secrets?

Image by stock.xchng user patita_rds.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?

It’s a busy space, Goober competes with desktop multi-IM programs like Pidgin, Adium, Trillian and Digsby; web-based services like Meebo; mobile apps like Fring and Beejive; and programs that add social networks to the mix, like Socialite. It also wants to compete with services that add voice and/or video chat functions, like VoxOx and Nimbuzz. The elephant in the voice and video communication arena, of course, is Skype, which has just rolled out a Windows-only beta of group video chats. Google Talk already offers video chat, and its acquisition of Gizmo5 will certainly result in upgrades to Google Voice. And Goober also gets to compete in the silly name contest.

So why do we need another multi-protocol communication service? Goober claims it has the following advantages over Skype and other VoIP providers:

• Users can call more countries (277), although Goober doesn’t offer incoming landline calls like Skype and Google Voice.
• Users can chat with users of protocols including ICQ, MSN, Google Talk, Jabber,
  AOL, Yahoo and QQ.
• The program integrates with Facebook and Twitter.
• Goober will offer six-way video conferencing on both PC and Mac (during the beta, conferences are limited to four).
• Outgoing call costs are 25-50 percent less, with calls in the US and Canada offered at a “record low” $.01 per minute.

I’ve tried the Mac beta, and while it’s usable, it’s not as elegant as the app from Nimbuzz (although it beats VoxOx’s ugly interface by a mile). The cluttered interface is not enhanced by obtrusive, animated banner ads.

Entering one’s IM and social network accounts is simple enough, although one must provide passwords, as there is no support for oAuth or Facebook Connect. It is possible to enter more than one account from the same service, but I wasn’t able to use Google Apps credentials to add Gtalk accounts.

Its tools for managing contacts are limited. Goober allows users to create groups, but if a contact appears twice (for example,  as a Gtalk and Facebook connection) the entries can’t be merged. One can’t sync or import address books, either.

I’m disappointed that Goober doesn’t support Growl, having opted instead for non-standard on-screen notifications. Goober also has mobile and web versions, but these are really different products with less robust feature sets.

For Mac users, Goober offers video conferencing options not (yet) available on Skype. For daily IMing, though, I’ll probably continue to use Adium.

Goober is offering the first 5,000 people to download the beta of Goober 3.0 a free voucher for $5 in credit. Try it, and let us know what you think in the comments.

The Search

My search was for my work: I’m doing some content strategy work for a client at the moment and I’d been wondering about the latest developments in the field.

First up, I entered “content strategy” into Google, without the quotes, and got over 45 million results. The top results were an A List Apart article from 2008, then Wikipedia, then a bunch of articles on the sites of people who sell content strategy services. Interesting results that Google turned up that I didn’t find elsewhere was a Google Knol on content strategy, as well as a link to a content strategy interest group from the Society for Technical Communication. This last result, in particular, was interesting from an academic and current discipline-based perspective.

Meanwhile, a search on Twitter turned up an similarly endless list of results. There was a lot of replication and retweeting, sure, but the first page of results presented an article published that day about an approach to setting content strategy. The retweeting gave the effect of reputation — multiple retweets of the same resource created the impression that the article was a good one, and worth looking at.

That first page of results also produced a more specific A List Apart article from March of this year on the usability and strategic purpose of FAQs. The results also informed me of a content strategy meetup that I didn’t know existed and provided anecdotal information on the importance of content strategy in product and service adoption. Of course, as I scrolled through the results, they kept being updated with further relevant tweets, in real time.

As you’d expect, Delicious provided a range of handy article-based results. Where both Google and Twitter had thrown up some articles designed merely to promote agencies and businesses in the content strategy arena, Delicious seemed to have more educationally focused results. Again, the number of bookmarks for each article implied a sort of “credibility meter” rating that I found helpful.

Some of the articles were classics going way back into the annals of content strategy history (2007!). Others were current articles published in the last couple of weeks, blogs focused on content strategy, and highly regarded “news” web sites devoted entirely to the topic of content.

My Facebook search predictably turned up more results for businesses and services than it did any other type of content. Although I’d expected to be unimpressed, some of these results lead to professional blogs, articles, and other content that was intriguing and informative.

The good news for those selling their wares through social networking is that Facebook associates a name or personality with the content with far more power than any of the other networks I’d tried until this point: it seemed as if the individuals I’d selected from the search results “owned” the topic of content strategy somehow.

Harnessing Social Media Search

My search as pretty broad, but when we don’t know much about the topic we’re searching on, broad searches are the kinds of searches we tend to use.

My little social media search experiment suggested to me that I’ve been wasting my time being frustrated by the major search engines. I’m always a little suspicious of the results they show, and the searches I performed on various social networks here showed me why: in the often impersonal digital realm, I appreciate personal recommendations. This is one of the reasons that more people are moving on social networks for their search needs; it’s a topic that Om discusses in more depth in “Why Google Should Fear the Social Web” (GigaOM Pro link, sub. req.)

The other benefit of social media is, of course, that I could ask my followers and contacts directly for their recommendations of content related to the topic I was interested in, and, if they had a similar interest, they might oblige me with good resources. That’s something that definitely can’t be said for a search engine.

I also enjoy the social network benefits of real-time results, and the ability to tap into content that isn’t necessarily so heavily optimized for search engines that it sits on the first page of results indefinitely. If someone has come up with an exciting new take on my topic in the last, say, week or so, I’d like to access that information quickly and effectively. I think this might be where social network search really wins out.

Accounting for Search Bias

Each of the services I searched on had some kind of bias — whether it was a business-related bias (like Google presenting Google Knol in its results) or a user-based bias (such as Facebook presenting people with content strategy businesses in its results). Ultimately, it’s important for us as searchers to understand the limitations of each service, and use the tool that best suits our searching needs at any time. Overall, though, I found some great material using social network search, and I’ll happily be using it from now on.

Do you use social networks for research? How?

Photo by stock.xchng user GlennPeb.

This question isn’t uncommon, though. Along with queries like, “How can I use Facebook for business?”, it reflects the growing desire of businesses to rectify past false starts with social media, and harness the possibilities they offer for branding and promotion.

What Business Assumes About Social Media

The question “Which social network is best for business?” assumes a lot of points about social networking, including:

• that every business must use social networking tools
• that there is a single social network that will allow a business to reach the largest possible number of audience members
• that any business’s social networking requirements can be met by a single social network

And that’s just for starters! To me, it also seems to imply that the business wants to tick the social networking box without actually committing to the realities of the medium, or its potential outcomes.

In Your Case…

The organization I was working with is a business-to-business industrial component supplier. Some time ago it established a Facebook page, but these days, not much happens on that page, and the team has realized it’s not sure how the company can use Facebook for business.

This company isn’t unique: many businesses set up Facebook pages when everyone was jumping on board to see what all the hype was about, and/or be part of the much-hyped “social networking revolution”. Yet they didn’t know what to do with those pages in the longer term, and now the pages languish, unattended, across Facebook. Of course, the same applies to other social networks.

To me, off the bat, the concepts of Facebook and an industrial component supply business didn’t really seem that complementary. And the more I thought about it, the more I found myself asking if the business of selling to industrial clients is suited to promotion or brand building via web-based social networks.

The Costs of Social Media

It seems hard for many who work in social media to believe, but social networking is not for everyone. It should be a conscious choice, not an obligation. Yes, your organization can get a free account on most social networks, but that is not a reason to use social media, nor does it mean that social networking is free.

Like any other branding and promotions tool, social media costs businesses in terms of strategy, execution, maintenance and review time. An ill-thought-out approach to social media can cost an organization valuable reputation and credibility, as well as precious promotional budget and team labor.

Step 1: Set a Social Media Strategy

In the case of the business I’m working with, there may be opportunities for promotion and engagement via social media channels, but they’re not particularly obvious or clear-cut.  If this organization decides to use social networking tools, a well-researched, well-planned strategy will be needed to ensure the efforts stay on track and produce measurable outcomes that can be assessed with the rest of the promotional mix.

The fact that the business has a legacy Facebook page, visited mostly by its own staff, shouldn’t restrict or direct future strategy. There is no “best” social network for business. This organization’s strategy should depend on the company’s audiences and resources, and its ability to match these to social networking tools. But the business’s success will depend on its ability to implement that strategy and evolve it over time.

If an assessment of these considerations shows that the company doesn’t have the wherewithal to implement a social networking strategy now, I’d recommend they hold off. A review of the situation in six months’ time may well find them in a better position to make the most of social networking in a clear, strategic and successful way.

How important do you feel strategy is for businesses that want to use social media? What advice do you have for businesses that are inexperienced in this area?

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Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Social Media in the Enterprise

Almost on a daily basis, I come across opportunities to refer business to someone. Sometimes I’m asked for a resource, like if I know someone who can design business cards. Sometimes a possible connection just pops in my head, like if a person I come in contact with mentions something that reminds me of someone else or of an opportunity that might interest him or her. Other times, though, I miss the opportunity to make a referral simply because no one comes to mind right away. Yet, if I gave it some thought or asked some of my existing contacts, I’m sure I could easily find a resource to fill the need.

As a business owner, maximizing these opportunities is really important for several reasons:

1. It solidifies your place in the customer’s mind as a go-to resource, as someone who can always help solve problems and find solutions,
2. It reinforces relationships you’re building by showing your willingness to help those around you, and
3. It opens the door for reciprocal referrals between you and other service providers to which you regularly send business.

But how do you make sure you’re ready to act the minute an opportunity presents itself (or at least not very long afterward)?

Step 1: Have Tools in Place to Support You

There are tons of CRM and contact management applications available to help you manage an ever-growing database of connections. Highrise is my favorite; I like the simplicity and ease-of-use of 37Signals tools.

Of course, even the best tool won’t help you if you don’t populate it with data, and this can be the most intimidating part of starting to use contact management software. My recommendation is to ease into it. Start from today and add new contacts you come in contact with. To get existing contacts into the program, try adding a few each day until you have everyone set up. There are ways to import contacts from other programs, too. Just be sure to go through all applications and places where you currently keep information about contacts, including your email and social networking accounts, past blog entries (for example, if you interviewed someone for your site or they provided a guest post), and anywhere else you might find a long-lost resource.

The most important thing, though, is to be sure and tag each person in every way you might search for him or her. For example, you might tag a virtual assistant as VA, virtual assistant, web designer, website designer, etc., depending on that particular virtual assistant’s expertise and skill set.

Step 2: Get to Know the People in Your Network

Learn what your network does. Learn what they need. Recently, someone asked if I knew of anyone who did a particular type of web design. At the time, no one came to mind, but then just a week later, I met another person who fitted the bill. I did an email introduction, which will hopefully lead to shared referrals between the two of them.

Pay attention to the little details about people, even things like hobbies and past work experience. If someone is an avid reader, for instance, you might need a book recommendation one day, or maybe you’ll read a great book that you can pass along to that person. As you discover these little tidbits, enter them (again, as tags) in the person’s contact record.

Not only does paying attention to the “little things” help you along the way as a business owner, but it also deepens your relationships and builds your credibility.

Step 3: Keep Your Network Top of Mind.

Always be thinking of the people around you. How can you help them? How can you help not just your clients and followers, but also fellow business owners? Every connection, every referral and every introduction strengthens your network and your business. People will come to trust and depend on you for quality recommendations and resources to help them in their lives and businesses.

Step 4: Show Initiative

Show people you can help them. When someone asks for a web designer and that’s out of your area of expertise, go to your contact management software and search for “web designer” and see who shows up. Nothing will impress a customer more than you going the extra mile for him or her and sending over a list of quality web designers.

By developing a strong and comprehensive list of resources, it becomes even easier to take better care of your customers and clients, as well as all the relationships in your network, and of course, there’s something to be said for good karma and paying it forward.

What tips do you have for maintaining a better “little black book”?

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Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Social Media in the Enterprise

Privacy and social networking is something that we’ve discussed at length here on WWD; I particularly liked Dawn’s comments in “Private or Personal in Social Media?” Unlike Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg I don’t believe that the “age of privacy” is over, but there’s no doubting that the more of your “stuff” that you share online, the less control you have over your privacy. Perhaps social networks will evolve to give us reliable, granular, context-sensitive privacy controls, such as those that ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick argues for. But until they do, we all need to be careful about who we share our stuff with, and where we share it.

Do you think that privacy and social networking are fundamentally incompatible?

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For several weeks, I tweeted the same type of content I always have — just more often. On average, I tweet about once an hour, for seven to ten hours each week day. I noticed that the active, high quality Twitter users that I follow tend to tweet at least three times per hour, so I decided to emulate their process and also tweet two or three times per hour.

The result? I saw no noticeable change in the number of mentions, @replies or retweets (RT) of my posts during and after the experiment. I normally receive an average of five to eight mentions per day and that’s how much I saw during the experiment, too, even when I doubled or tripled my tweets.

Since the experiment, I’ve returned to my pre-experiment tweet average. Since upping my tweet quantity didn’t appear to have any value, there’s no reason to bombard my followers with more tweets.

I asked people on Twitter why they thought the experiment hadn’t made an impact. Many people responded that it’s the quality of posts, rather than the quantity, that makes all the  difference, and there were also some responses that suggested I should have also tried changing when I posted, rather than sticking to my usual schedule.

For me, this provides some evidence that quantity doesn’t matter much in social media, although I still don’t believe there are any hard-and-fast rules.

Have you tried a similar experiment? Did you get different results?

Focusing only on traffic numbers, instead of the concentrating  on sharing content and building relationships will send you down the path to burnout. Here at WebWorkerDaily, we have multiple writers contributing  to help keep the content fresh. But for one-person blogs, blogging daily works for some and not for others.

If I had been blogging daily since the day I wrote my first blog entry back in 2000, I would have quit long ago. I know this because I’ve been burned out by blogging many times — and I’ve never blogged more than a few times a week.

It’s natural for bloggers to want many people to stop by, read and comment. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there is something wrong with pressuring yourself to churn out content daily like a machine for the sake of traffic when blogging is just one of many things you do. If you do that, you’ll sacrifice quality and your mental state.

So how do you decide how often to blog ? What’s the magic formula? There’s no definitive approach to figuring this out. Instead, take time to ponder these questions to help you find what will work for your blog.

• Review your business goals. Increasing blog readership is a worthy goal, but how does the blog support your business’ goals? If your web site itself is the income generator, then you’ll need frequent fresh content. If the blog is for promoting you as an expert in your field, which in turns supports your consulting business, then you probably don’t need to blog daily.
• Know your audience. What jobs do your readers have? How much of their time do they have for reading blogs? How active are they on blogs and social media? What industry do your readers come from? Are they reading during the workday or after hours?
• Identify your contributors. Is your publication a a one-person blog or a group blog? Group blogs cut the chances of burnout.
• Look at the length of your posts. Some people with large followings write 1,000+ word posts; these people tend to publish less often. Readers may better tolerate daily posts when they’re shorter: 200-400 words. Some bloggers mix it up with longer posts on a weekly basis, with shorter posts filling in the other days.
• Check web site stats. After adjusting your blogging frequency, check to see if the stats have changed. Remember that while a change could be associated just with the frequency or posting, it could also be because the content quality or level of blog promotion changed.

If social media teaches us one thing, it’s this: There are no rules. This doesn’t mean all those “golden rules” and “commandments” are off the mark; these give folks an idea of what works. But blogging endlessly blinded to your goals gets you nowhere. Stay on the path and steer clear of burnout by knowing your goals and audience.

What other factors help you decide how often to blog?

Photo by stock.xchng user Jorge Vicente.

Preparing to Start a New Group

Before you start creating the group in LinkedIn, brainstorm the topics you want your group to be about and do a little research. Search for those topics in  the Groups Directory to see what already exists. If the group that you want to create already exists, don’t give up hope just yet. Take a closer look at those groups to see if they’re active and have a decent number of members. Plenty of people start groups without following through.

If your topic does have active groups, look for a gap. Can you narrow the topic? Combine it with another topic? A little mind mapping may help find a unique twist on your topic.

Picking a name for your group is important. You could name the group after your brand, but doing this may turn away potential members who don’t use your brand yet are very interested in your topic. Browse the group names on offer. Would you want to be a member? Remember that LinkedIn lists the groups you’ve joined in your profile unless you turn off the visibility setting. As you think about a name and topic for your group, consider whether members would want to have the name showing in their profile.

Creating and Promoting Your Group

By this point, you have your name, topic and purpose of the group figured out. While writing the description of the group, include the keywords that will help people find your group. Before promoting, list the group on the Groups Directory and add content such as tips, links to valuable articles related to your topic and upcoming webinars and events. Posting some content to the group before promoting it is a good idea, as it gives people a taste of what to expect if they join the group.

Once you have posed some content to the group, you’re ready to start promoting it. Mention your group to all of your social media and marketing resources. Put it in your email signature. Add it to your web site and blog. Tweet about it. Post information about the group in your LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Buzz and other social media status updates. When promoting the group, let prospective members know what they will get out of it. You could write a blog post about the group outlining what’s in it for the reader.

Maintaining Your Group

As the group owner, you can send emails to group members. These emails have a high deliverability rate because most email services recognize LinkedIn’s email address, which lowers the rate of ending up in the spam folder. Take care in balancing how many email messages you send to the group. I’ve left some groups and changed my settings for others because they sent too many messages that overwhelmed me more than they helped me.

You may want to assign the “group manager” role to colleagues to help out in maintaining the group. Group managers have the same administrative access as the group owner, which includes managing membership and discussion. The only actions the manager cannot do is transfer ownership and close the group.

“Group moderators” have the ability to police and delete group content, manage RSS feeds and feature a discussion. Moderators cannot control invitations and requests to join the group, or make changes to settings. Group members join the group and control their own settings on how other group members and the owners can contact them, and how to receive notifications from the group.

Groups can have subgroups, which can be useful for some businesses. For example, the GigaOM Network could create a group page and each publication (WebWorkerDaily, jkOnTheRun, etc.) could be a subgroup.

Think of a group as providing valuable information just like in a blog or email newsletter. The best and most successful blogs, email newsletters and groups focus more on providing value and less on promotion.

How does your business or brand use LinkedIn?

Related GigaOM Pro Research: Social Media in the Enterprise