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What a LinkedIn Premium Account Offers December 14, 2009

Posted by carolhagen in linkedin.
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The most frequently asked question in my social media consulting business focused on construction and B2B is “Should I pay for a premium LinkedIn account?”  Well you can decide for yourself with this video, the LinkedIn premium account welcome overview:

So now that you know what you get, I am interested in hearing from you about your successes with these features, particularly openlink.

The Free Droid Apps have me Hooked December 10, 2009

Posted by carolhagen in Construction Industry - Software, Document Imaging, communication.
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Ok, I had told everyone that I was waiting to buy it, but like a kid waiting for Christmas, my techie side got the best of me.  In an earlier post I noted app faves for Blackberry and iPhone.  Now I have to give you my Droid list. 

Google Navigator with Voice Search – for Hands free navigation (Garmin-like GPS with voice recognition) – Found my way to appointments in Tucson with no glitches the day after I purchased.  Since it’s Google its updates are simple and the app is Free on the Droid.

Voice Recorder - up to 2 hours of record time, when you’re driving and have something you need to remember or you have a complex meeting discussion for reference, record it then drop it into your Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system.

Pixelpipe Lite – for sharing stuff, and sending it to EverNote or an ECM system.

Swift – for those that need to Twitter, it’s  better than TwitDroid unless you want geo locations annotation.   There’s an app called Google Maps for Twitdroid for that.

Bizkit – for tracking expenses on the road, meetings, events and finding my nearest contacts.

BabelDroid - to translate from English to Spanish, German, Italian or French using voice recognition - will eventually offer call an interpreter.  It works well for phrases and comes in handy here in Arizona with construction personnel in the field.

Congress – to find your legislator based upon your current location, by state, or zip. Being able to email or call them immediately is handy. 

Google Goggles – it’s easy and fun to aim your camera and know what you are looking at.  Great for landmarks, artwork, etc.

Google OCR – good for printed text that you need to edit.

Google Sky Maps – for you wanna be astronomers.

National Anthem – for when someone wants to have it played and there are no musicians or singers volunteering.

Trapster – for reminding you of where all those photo radar cameras are on the highways and intersections (they are everywhere in Tempe, I-10, SR 51, etc in Arizona).

I realize that like the iPhone, the Droid will create a few hurdles for the IT department (that I hope to address in an upcoming blog post) since they have Blackberry Enterprise Server already deployed and now the owner wants the latest toy (again).  Let me know if I should add any other apps to my “free” list.  I will be trying out the paid stuff over the holidays and focus on construction and business related apps in a future post.

Social Media Use in Real Estate and Construction Industry December 8, 2009

Posted by carolhagen in linkedin, twitter, web 2.0.
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I finally found a definitive study from Business.com that devotes a portion of their research to my niche…the construction industry.  In the 2009 B2B Social Media Benchmarking study published in November discussed such things as ”What do people consider to be the most useful social media resources for business information?” and ”How do B2B companies judge social media success?”  Some of these finding like only 17% of real estate and construction use Twitter to find or request business related information isn’t surprising, but over half of the survey participants visit company blogs and company profile pages on social media sites.  This free study is a must read so you know what the Most Popular Business Social Media Initiatives are, how executives use social media differently and how they measure social media success.   

Source: Business.com’s 2009 B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study (http://www.business.com/info/b2b-social-media-benchmark-study 

 

  

  

 

LinkedIn and TweetDeck Together at Last December 7, 2009

Posted by carolhagen in Construction Industry - Software, linkedin, twitter, web 2.0.
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My workshops have been attended by construction firm execs, IT and marketing personnel, and we have spent plenty of time discussing Tweetdeck and Twitter.  LinkedIn was already being used by every student in the class.  Now we all need to take advantage of the recent upgrade to TweetDeck (v0.32.1).  TweetDeck has just added LinkedIn accounts to make it easy for you to view LinkedIn updates in your own personalized column…a one stop shop.  Here’s how to get this working.  Under your TweetDeck settings, choose accounts and add your LinkedIn info:

Once you have that done, you can add your own LinkedIn column based upon your preferences.  From TweetDeck click on the add column button and select the LinkedIn icon.  You can decide what items to include like recommendations, connections, status updates, etc.  Here are your choices so you can be a smarter, more efficient listener:

Now that you are listening, have you tried out the Twitter options on LinkedIn?  I blogged about it a few weeks back.  Read it here if you missed it.  Now have you all considered using Twitter (or some other microblogging application) for your company press releases?

Apps for LinkedIn – Words of Wisdom for Developers November 23, 2009

Posted by carolhagen in Construction Industry - Software, linkedin, web 2.0.
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With today’s announcement that LinkedIn has opened up their API to software developers and TweetDeck stating in their blog that LinkedIn will be integrated into their next release, it is only a matter of time before we all have more business apps than the iPhone. 

Here are a few suggestions to all those developers that want to make millions and really do have some great ideas that I just gleaned from the book Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application by Jason Fried:

  • Design smart by drawing out a few screen shots and then making them HTML before you start to program
  • Create a buzz before release with a few snippets and ask for email addresses to get early adapters enabled
  • Be passionate and create a blog for your adopters and keep your readers updated
  • Don’t wait til everything is perfect to launch…get a beta out for people to try
  • Keep it simple and streamlined so no one needs training to use your app
  • Offer a free version that’s easy to signup for
  • Focus…not every app is for everyone.  Keep your eye on your target audience!

I thought this would get you all to read the whole book.  What’s in it for me?  Better designed, useful apps for me as a LinkedIn user of course!  I’m ready to try out new Web 2.0 apps for LinkedIn (especially for those focused in the construction, architectural & engineering industries) and hope to hear about all your successes soon.

Share Tweets with LinkedIn Connections (even if they don’t have Twitter) November 20, 2009

Posted by carolhagen in Construction Industry - Software, twitter.
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There’s a new application available in LinkedIn called Tweets. This does more than just the plain add your Twitter account and tweet at the same time you update your LinkedIn status.  It give you access to your Twitter followers and their tweets from within LinkedIn.  You can retweet and reply to your tweets too. 

But these are not the gems of the application.  What I really like is if your LinkedIn connections don’t have Twitter you can directly share the tweet message with them.  It doesn’t even have to be your own tweet.   Just click share and then pick your LinkedIn connection to compose a message.  It will default to the subject “Interesting Tweet Found in LinkedIn Tweets”  and put the tweet in the body of the message. 

Now go try it out and tell me how you like it!

More Tips on Blog Subscriptions November 13, 2009

Posted by carolhagen in Construction Industry - Software, twitter, web 2.0.
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As promised this is a continuance of ”Attracting Blog Subscriptions“ highlighting other functions and features of Feedburner.  Today we’re spreading the news of your blog  (and if you attended my recent seminar Web 2.0 tools for the construction industry or one of my Social Media on a Shoestring Budget workshops , this is a homework assignment).  If you have a few subscribers, why not make it easy for them to share it with the friends and co-workers?  You can do that easily giving them options to email it or share it on Facebook.  The tool is called FeedFlare and it’s found under the optimize tab: feedflare1

This gives the viewer of your blog feed or site an opportunity to pass it along, make it more popular with Digg and spread your message.  Once you choose FeedFlare, select the options you want for your feed or site and it will show you what it will look like to your readers:

feedflare2You can reorder the choices you selected by dragging the Share on Facebook or Digg it hyperlinks using drag-n-drop. You’re done when you hit SAVE. 

The next time your feed goes out, all your subscribers will have these choices to share and you will reap the rewards! 

There is also a FeedFlare catalog of other choices to add including english to spanish translations, adding links to your favorite charity, event promotions and Map It
(to Link to a web mapping service display for feed items that have location context associated with them). 

Go ahead and experiment. Try out FeedFlare and let me know about your success.  We love your comments.

Oh, and since you read the whole blog post, you can add a follow me on twitter flare with these instructions from HyveUp

I’ve been Beta’d by Twitter November 11, 2009

Posted by carolhagen in Construction Industry - Software, twitter, web 2.0.
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I was pleased to see a notification this morning on my Twitter account that I believe will be valuable to all the listeners in the Twitterverse.  Here’s a screen shot of the Retweet To Share Tweets (Beta):RetweetToShareTweets

I think Twitter got this one right.  If I want to know what my followers are really interested in, it should be their retweets.  After all it is a call to action for their own followers and represents the groundswell of our followers reach too.  What better way to understand the value of content than from our followers.  This is a keeper as far as I’m concerned.  Now will this feature be incorporated into some of the popular aggregators like TweetDeck?  How do you decide when to retweet?

Attracting Blog Subscriptions November 6, 2009

Posted by carolhagen in Construction Industry - Software, email, web 2.0.
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It’s a funny thing how everyone has a blog but most have a dozen subscribers if that.  In business you need to publicize your blog everywhere.  I tried promoting it via a plain hyperlink in my email signature but no one clicked on it…that is until I made it an animated subscription.  My email  signature now automatically cycles through the last five posts.  Every email recipient has the opportunity to see the topics I’ve recently discussed and decide then & there whether it interests them.  How’d I do it?  It’s easy…

  1. First Sign-up for Google Feedburner and enter your blog’s information (title, original address aemailblogsignnd new feedburner address). and save your feed details.  Don’t worry, this is free. 
  2. Click on the Publicize tab.
  3. Select the Headline Animator.
  4. Select email signature.
  5. From the dropdown, choose email signature and click next
  6. Follow the instructions in the pop-up based upon your email service.  It’s available for Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook Express, Outlook 2003, Yahoo Mail and has workarounds for Gmail and Apple Mail too.

There’s plenty of other great features to help you with optimization and publicizing your blog with Feedburner.  I’ll make this a series of how to’s for the next few weeks.  If the construction industry starts using collaboration 2.0 (aka social media) for marketing and communication, for sure they will want to learn all these blog tips. 

Share your success with us.  We like to hear from our readers!

Social Media Challenges in Business Similar to Early Internet Adoption October 30, 2009

Posted by carolhagen in communication, twitter, web 2.0.
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Here we are 40 years after the Internet was first used to send a message and business is repeating history with their adoption rates to new technologies. 

From a Robert Half Technology Survey and mentioned in Stowe Boyd’s blog post Enterprises Block Social Networks, 54% of US companies with over 100 employees have completely blocked sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.  At the same time, analysts at Gartner are telling IT managers, Loosen up on social networks, security.   These opposing views remind me of the early years of the Internet.  You could walk into a business in the early 1980’s with a dozen PCs and one of them was not connected to the network.  That lone PC was connected to the internet, but it wasn’t safe to have the entire office on-line.  The reasoning was that some hacker could break in and steal all your accounting data and the employees would spend all their time surfing the net rather than working.  

This battlecry has reared it’s head in the business world with Social Media as “someone might say something negative about us.  We don’t trust our employees to work during working hours.  Lock it down.  Turn it off!”   The control must be kept by the CIO or communications director, and our lawyer and HR department are ready to reprimand any employee that crosses the line.  Oops, only 30% of business have a social media policy.   You can get help with social media and email policy from my earlier blog post Email Records retention Can Be Tricky.

This fear of social networking will handcuff the enterprise while competitors will leapfrog ahead.  If you don’t trust your employees with some responsibility, why did you hire them?  As Paul Proctor, a VP at Gartner says, “You cannot protect yourself from everything. You must learn to balance risk and performance.”  AIIM has gathered a number of statistics from surveys and research that help to explain the current state and where we are heading.   Here’s just a snippet to share:

Over half of organizations consider Enterprise 2.0 to be “important” or “very important” to their business goals and success.  Only 25% are actually doing anything about it, but this is up from 13% in 2008.  Knowledge-sharing, collaboration and responsiveness are considered the biggest drivers.  Lack of understanding, corporate culture and cost are the biggest impediments.

Let’s look at this from the perspective of the business leader.  They hear the word social and think of twittering “I’ll meet you at the pub after work”.  The word social needs to be replaced with business  collaboration when you bring the discussion from the IT department to the Board of Directors.    The real questions that business should be focusing on are:

  • How can we harness “collaborative” networks to improve communications, knowlege sharing, marketing efforts, etc?
  • Should our deployments be internal or external? 
  • Have we developed our business strategy to include these technologies?

There are numerous business reasons to embrace Social Media including public relations, brand building, lead generation, crisis management and search engine optimization.  Now that Twitter has deals with Bing and Google, to crawl the twitterverse,  I suspect a few more firms will be appointing a “corporate twitterer”.    You want to be planning now as I read in the Social Computing Journal , Nielsen Norman Group estimates “a timeline of approximately three to five years for most organizations to successfully adopt and integrate social technologies into their intranets.”  Better shake a leg.