2010 January

Will Social Media Week Move Further East in 2011?

January 8, 2010 By Des Walsh

If you are going to be in or near Berlin, London, San Francisco, São Paolo, New York or Toronto in the first week of February and you have an interest in social media, you need to check out the program in the respective city for this year’s Social Media Week. This will be the second such event.

Looking at the lineup of cities participating in this second Social Media Week, I’m

impressed by the fact that in one year it has gone from being in one city, New York, to being in six this coming February, and – no doubt a tad selfishly -
wondering if the event in 2011, assuming there is one, will add more cities in the Eastern Hemisphere.

From the website:

Social Media Week conferences take place simultaneously in multiple cities around the world. The aim of each event is to advance the use and understanding of social media in the corporate, public and non-profit sectors.

The first such event was held in 2009 in New York City and according to the Facebook site attracted some 2,000 people to 35 events, with another estimated 5,000 participating virtually, via the web and specifically via Twitter and Facebook.

It’s good to see the Eastern Hemisphere represented by Berlin. And it would be good to see in 2011 some representation further east of the current centers. Looking at the country usage for “global headline sponsor” Meebo, there may not be a huge incentive from their viewpoint to add centers further east, but India is better represented in those stats than the UK, and the Philippines not so far behind.

For some other current sponsors there is an understandable New York/ US weighting of interest, but one would have thought that IDEO would have an interest in, say a China node for the event in 2011 or subsequently.

It’s not as if there is a lack of interest in the topic in this part of the world. In precisely the same week appropriated as Social Media Week for the six city event in the US, Canada, Brazil and western Europe, there will be a simultaneous two day event, dedicated to social media marketing, in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Maybe trying to encourage the event which started in New York to “think East” is too much of a challenge. Would it be smarter to think about an event which starts here in the Eastern Hemisphere? If so, where would be a good place to start? Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Delhi, Bangalore …? Suggestions, anyone?

Image credit: Hemisferio Oeste, by Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez – via Wikimedia Commons

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: London, New York, San Francisco, Sao Paolo, Social Media Week, Toronto

Learning How Twitter Lists Work: Part I

January 7, 2010 By Des Walsh

I’m a bit late to the Twitter Lists party, but starting to catch on

Having started to uncover the mysteries of Twitter lists, I thought a post or two might help a few people understand this still fairly new way of managing your Twitter presence and the various conversations within the great Twitterville (thank you Shel Israel) conversation. This is almost certainly a “move along, nothing to see here” post for anyone already using lists, but may help some others.

In spite of some prompting, I had been slow in addressing what these lists are about. A friend had been saying “You don’t have Twitter lists? You must have lists.” While I thought that was good advice – this friend is always up on the latest in the fast-moving world of Twitter – it was something on my list of things to get around to.

And the other day I did get around to it. In my way, which was first to search for a guide on the subject. I immediately found Twitter’s own guide to lists, which after checking a few other links I found to be actually quite straightforward.

That was when I noticed the little link on my Twitter page – “Listed” with a number which was as I recall 91 (it’s now 98 as you can see from the screenshot here). I clicked on that and found I was on all these people’s lists! OK, I’m a slow learner sometimes, but that amazed me.

Time to get with the program.

So, with the help of the guide I’d found plus some experimentation, I figured out how to create a list and add people to it. In line with my main professional interests I started with two lists, one for social media leaders and the other for coaches. Then I added one for more local connections – “Queensland”. I started adding people to the lists.

That was not an immediately intuitive process, but I found by opening someone’s profile page and then mousing over a gray box in the top menu bar of the page, I was shown options for managing my lists. Then by just clicking on the box for the appropriate list I was able to add the person to that list.

I have to say I was amazed – and pleased – to see this morning tweets from two people for whom I have great respect, expressing appreciation for being on one of the lists.

I can see already that it’s a good way to follow a more focused area of conversation.

I discovered also a way to see at a glance how I am perceived by others on Twitter, by way of what lists I’m on. This could be a valuable aid for helping market yourself or others. More of that tomorrow.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: coaches, Queensland, Social Media, Twitter, Twitter lists

How Much Do You Want People to Join Your LinkedIn Network?

January 2, 2010 By Des Walsh

Why it makes sense to personalize your invitations to connect on LinkedIn

When I decided after Christmas that I wanted to have a clear inbox on LinkedIn before the New Year arrived, I clearly underestimated the scope of the task.

I finished up spending the better part of a day sorting it all out, dealing with a lot of Pending items, including invitations, from people whose names I had not recognized at the time, or where I had not grasped at the time what our professional connection might be.

Typically, those Pending invitations had used the standard, boilerplate one-liner provided by LinkedIn, the very blunt “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”.

I knew that some, maybe most, would be from people who were simply trying to build as big a list of connections as they could and as fast as possible. But for both social and professional reasons I did not want to consign them all to the archive without checking to see if there was the possibility of a mutually useful connection.

I firmly believe that, if you want to build your professional network on LinkedIn, you should take the trouble to personalize your invitations and not rely on the boilerplate invitation. I also believe that it makes sense to apply the advice of LinkedIn to only connect with people we know and trust. It is a professional network after all.

That one-liner is almost certainly not going to be a problem for your closest professional colleagues and connections, especially if you are new to LinkedIn and they know that.

It could well be a problem for people who don’t know you so well and – hold the ego – might not actually remember you, or remember you enough, at the time of opening the email. If they don’t recognize your name instantly and also know and trust you well enough to accept your invitation unhesitatingly, then some other things could happen, none of them in your interest.

Of the five ways people can respond, including the one you want, “Accept”, the most risky, and the one you really don’t want is “I don’t know” – run up a few of those (five, last time I heard) and LinkedIn will tag you as a spammer: also, you won’t be able to invite again any of the people who chose that option.

By the way, there are plenty who would disagree with my views on this topic, including some close friends and colleagues. I think the protagonists on both sides of the “quality versus quantity” debate on this subject both got tired of the debate a couple of years ago. If you are interested in reading more about that, a Google search on something like “LinkedIn quality vs quantity” will bring up a number of posts from here and there, such as this nicely argued one from Valerie Gonyea: she, like me, is on the “less is more” side of the debate, but sets out the other side’s approach in what seems a fairly clear way.

Back to my day of sorting my LinkedIn inbox.

Some requests were for introductions to other LinkedIn members and where I was not sure that I had dealt with those at the time (LinkedIn’s internal mail management tools are not user-friendly) I sent messages asking how things had worked out and whether at this stage there was any way I could be of help. There were also some inviting me to join LinkedIn groups and I responded to those as appropriate.

The other messages were those pending “one-liner” invitations to connect networks. There were about twenty five of those.

To them I sent a message using variations of the following text explaining my approach to connecting on LinkedIn and inviting conversation (the original version of the text was shared with me by LinkedIn veteran expert Scott Allen a few years ago – although I take full responsibility for what I have done to the original text):

Thanks for inviting me to connect on LinkedIn. I would love to start a dialogue, get to know each other and find out how we might be of service to each other. Feel free to email me at deswalsh@gmail.com and we can get started.

I should explain that I use LinkedIn as they recommend and I find I can manage in a more mutually effective way, and I only connect (create a permanent referral link) with people I know well professionally. In most cases that means we have worked on some kind of project together or have communicated fairly extensively on social networks. At least I like to have had a chat, via Skype (my ID there is deswalsh), so I hope you will feel free to connect there.

If that all works for you, I look forward to hearing from you. In any event, I wish you a very happy and prosperous New Year.

As I say, I sent out about twenty five of those. I stopped when I got back to invitations from mid 2008, figuring that for any before that date (and even some more recent) the inviter will most likely have no recollection of ever having invited me to connect. That was a couple of days ago. I’ve had two responses, and have exchanged interesting emails with those. So far I’ve had no abusive responses, although I have had one or two “how dare you!” type responses when I’ve done this in the past.

Two out of twenty five? Was it worth it? Well, both are interesting people and took the trouble to reply very professionally. I feel good about being connected with them.

Do you have interesting LinkedIn invitation experiences to share, or tips?

Filed Under: Social Networks Tagged With: invitations to connect, LinkedIn, professional networks