Tag Archive | LinkedIn
September 19, 2013  

Leaders: surf on social networks to not get carried away by the wave!

LEADERS AND THE WAVE

Equity risk, marketing, legal or image… Rather than see his heckled by sounding social networking reputation, the manager can choose to engage proactively on social networks.

The leader is a media

The question is no longer whether lightning may fall, but where and how it will hit! Power reaction online for about a DG can affect, temporarily or long term, the market price of his company or brand perception .

Capitalizing on the transformational power of social media while mitigating its risks calls for a new type of leader. The dynamics of social media amplify the need for qualities that have long been a staple of effective leadership, such as strategic creativity, authentic communication, and the ability to deal with a corporation’s social and political dynamics and to design an agile and responsive organization.

Social media also adds new dimensions to these traits. For example, it requires the ability to create compelling, engaging multimedia content. Leaders need to excel at co-creation and collaboration—the currencies of the social-media world. Executives must understand the nature of different social-media tools and the unruly forces they can unleash.

Equally important, there’s an organizational dimension: leaders must cultivate a new, technologically linked social infrastructure that by design promotes constant interaction across physical and geographical boundaries, as well as self-organized discourse and exchange.

This interplay of leadership skills and related organizational-design principles organizational media literacy, which is defined along six dimensions that are interdependent:

1. The leader as producer

With video cameras achieving near ubiquity and film clips uploading in the blink of an eye to YouTube or other platforms, the tools for producing and sharing rich media are in everyone’s hands. More than a few executives have started to incorporate video streams into their blogs.

2. The leader as distributor

Business leaders have traditionally disseminated information along a controlled, linear chain that begins after the development of a formal meaning-creation process—think of how your company creates and distributes memos explaining new initiatives. While traditional distribution pathways won’t disappear, social media revolutionizes the standard information process by reversing it. Social communication makes distribution the starting point and then invites company audiences to cocreate and contextualize content to create new meaning. Messages are rebroadcast and repurposed at will by recipients who repost videos, retweet and comment on blogs, and use fragments of other people’s content to create their own mash-ups.

3. The leader as recipient

Social media has created an ocean of information. We are drowning in a never-ending flood of e-mails, tweets, Facebook updates, RSS feeds, and more that’s often hard to navigate.

As a first step, leaders must become proficient at using the software tools and settings that help users filter the important stuff from the unimportant. But playing in today’s turbulent environment requires more than just filtering skills.

In traditional corporate communications, consumption is a mostly passive act: you are pretty much left alone to make sense of messages and to assess their authenticity and credibility. In the social-media realm, information gets shared and commented on within seconds, and executives must decide when (and when not) to reply, what messages should be linked to their blogs, when to copy material and mash it up with their own, and what to share with their various communities. The creation of meaning becomes a collaborative process in which leaders have to play a thoughtful part, as this is the very place where acceptance of or resistance to messages will be built.

4. The leader as adviser and orchestrator

In most companies, social-media literacy is in its infancy. Excitement often runs high for the technology’s potential to span functional and divisional silos. But without guidance and coordination, and without the capabilities we discuss here, social-media enthusiasm can backfire and cause severe damage.

To harvest the potential of social media, leaders must play a proactive role in raising the media literacy of their immediate reports and stakeholders. Within this 360-degree span, executives should become trusted advisers, enabling and supporting their environment in the use of social tools, while ensuring that a culture of learning and reflection takes hold. As a new and media-savvy generation enters the workplace, smart leaders can accelerate organizational change by harnessing these digital natives’ expertise through “reverse mentoring” systems.

5. The leader as architect

Leaders who have steeped themselves in new media will testify that it requires them to navigate between potentially conflicting goals: they must strive to establish an organizational and technical infrastructure that encourages free exchange but also enforce controls that mitigate the risks of irresponsible use. This is a tough organizational-design challenge.

Most companies have a defined formal organization, with explicit vertical systems of accountability. But below the surface of org charts and process manuals we find an implicit, less manageable “informal organization,” which has always been important and now gets amplified through social media. The leader’s task is to marry vertical accountability with networked horizontal collaboration in a way that is not mutually destructive.

6. The leader as analyst

As companies start to digest the consequences of the Web 2.0 revolution, the next paradigm shift is already knocking on the door. The next generation of connectivity—the Internet of Things—will link together appliances, cars, and all kinds of objects. As a result, there will be about 50 billion connected devices by the year 2020.3 This transformation will open new opportunities, spawn new business models, and herald yet another major inflection point that leaders must manage.

It’s imperative to keep abreast of such emerging trends and innovations—not just their competitive and marketplace implications, but also what they mean for communications technologies, which are fundamental for creating an agile, responsive organization. Executives who monitor weak signals and experiment with new technologies and devices will be able to act more quickly and capture the advantages of early adoption.

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May 30, 2013  

Pros and Cons of Social Networking for Insurance Agents

  social-media2 Nowadays we can almost say that virtual life became as important as the real life, at least when it comes to business. It certainly helped us to broaden the number of acquaintances.The computerization of socializing has become an inevitable part of the present and the future.General internet statistics shows that it took the radio 38 years, the television 13 years, and the internet 4 years to reach 50 million users. These statistics speak for themselves.

Social media has become an increasingly important tool to engage clients and understand their needs and preferences. More and more agents are starting to use such websites as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in order to interact with their customers on a daily basis.

Recent statistics

  • one out of every seven minutes spent online is on Facebook
  • 61% of LinkedIn members use it as their primary professional networking site
  • 34% of medium and 27% of small businesses use social media for business
  • 340 million tweets are sent every day
  • 62% of marketers say that social media has become more important to their marketing campaigns in the last 6 months

But as much as this type of communication can help you, it isn’t perfect. Here are the general pros and cons of this situation.

The pros

  • Price- most social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are free to use
  • Speed -sending personal messages takes seconds
  • Ease- easy promotional method for your career
  • Opportunity- engage with people that you wouldn’t meet in real life
  • Promptness- present the up-to-date information or publicize events in real time
  • Comfort – with a business social network, you can take your entire network with you
  • Availability- you can be active on social media anywhere
  • Growth- broaden your clients data base

Sounds perfect, doesn’t it? The advantages have caught your attention. On the other hand, you should be well aware of the possible pitfalls.

The cons

  • Sharing- personal information is easily available and can put you at risk
  • Fraud – fake advertisements can invite unwanted viruses and spywares to your computer
  • Tracking- employers can always track you
  • Hacking- you can get hacked

However, there is no need to panic about it, as there is always the solution for every situation. Just follow this simple and effective advice that will keep you out of trouble.

How to Use Social Media Safely and Effectively

  • Use privacy settings wisely
  • Change your password often
  • Make sure everything is right before sending an update or a tweet or anything else
  • Carefully map out and consider the negative and positive side of the information you
  • Would like to post and how it is going to influence on your personal and professional life
  • Humanize yourself and you will see more people will come to you
  • Maximize your business’s potential by participating in social networking sites
    also remember not to be too pushy about your achievements
  • It takes time to establish the fruitful relationships, so don’t rush
  • Be sure to maintain security settings so you could avoid cyber-stalking and identity theft or any other form of harassment

The concerns about social networking should not overwhelm you. Just find the right platforms for your business and develop a following. Eventually you will see results. Do you know other effective methods that you would recommend in order to boost up the career perspectives?

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May 23, 2013  

Social Media Etiquette

  social media About the importance to understand that all thinks written by anybody on social media can be seen by everybody. It can impact their life… and their company depending on what they are writting!

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May 9, 2013  

Big data: data analysis revolution for when?

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Keys data on Big Data summits

On Big Data, there are some summits every month in town from United States, Uk, Ireland, Germany and India.
In all of each, there are:
1. 80+ Industry Speakers,
2. 1000+ attendees,
3. 25+ hours of information given,
4. 50+ case studies proposed.

The last event in San Fransisco

The last conference in April 2013 gathered some of the greatest minds in the space; from Facebook , to LinkedIn , to Google , to Citibank, to the NYSE and eBay.

The event had attracted a fair amount of “Big Data Newbies,” lured by the prospects of a better performance or a better career. Statisticians wanting to get their hands around particular technologies or former database administrators curious about “what the business really cares about” came together to find out what was really hiding behind the “Big Data Hype”.

Big data is not so big

Gartner, In a recent podcast, explains how, despite the emphasis on large datasets, the term “Big” in “Big Data” could actually be irrelevant. “What is Big today, might be normal tomorrow,” Frank concludes. This is quite different from IDC’s definition, which puts the bar at a 100 Terabytes here. Frank’s point is difficult to debate. In fact, it broadens the spectrum for what should fall under the “Big Data” umbrella; and that’s a good thing. As an industry, if we want every company to realize their potential with data, we need to obsess less about the size of their databases, but rather, focus on their assessment of what “Big Data” is for them.

The 3Vs and Big Data: not married!

If you look at the genesis of the term “Big Data,” you’ll find that the industry often refers to the “3 Vs”: Volume, Variety and Velocity. The “3 Vs” have put a lot of emphasis on storage technologies to the detriment of the analytics field. If you look into the evolution of technologies supporting “Big Data,” you’ll find that storage is doing well but that analysis technology isn’t evolving as fast.Between 80s and 2010, Storage has seen a revolution: price divided by 30000 and capacity exponential. Analysis, at best, has seen an evolution but absolutely not revolution at all from now. The future revolution of big data is in its capacity to analyses the data automatically and without knowing completely what’s we search exactly, identify important links in between data and see new data inside big data. This is the challenge of 2010’s decade.

Related articles

1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2013/04/22/big-data-isnt-about-big/
2. http://theinnovationenterprise.com/summits/big-data-innovation-summit-april-2013-san-francisco

May 3, 2013  

April 2013: Stats of WorldOfInnovations.net

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Global overview

For the first month, 623 pages have been viewed and 385 unique visitors have seen WorldOfInnovations.net website. The visitors come from 53 different countries.

Top views by country

% calculated in comparison of pages viewed.

1. France: 193 (31%)
2. United States: 149 (24%)
3. UK: 33 (5%)
4. Japan: 27 (4.5%)
5. Canada: 13 (2%)
6. India: 13 (2%)
7. Germany: 13 (2%)
8. Colombia: 13 (2%)
9. Netherlands: 11 (2%)
10. Pakistan: 11 (2%)

Top pages viewed

% calculated in comparison of pages viewed.

1. Home page & archives: 250 (40%)
2. Q1 2013 Tablets stats: 33 (5%)
3. Babolat: 33 (5%)
4. Top Internet Browsers: 30 (5%)
5. How to innovate with social media: 26 (4%)

Top sites which referrer

% calculated in comparison of unique visitors.

1. Google: 87 (23%)
2. Bing: 29 (7.5%)
3. Yahoo: 24 (6.2%)
4. Twitter: 21 (5.5%)
5. LinkedIn: 19 (5%)
6. WebCrawler: 17 (4.4%)
7. WordPress: 14 (3.6%)
8. Blogger.com: 6 (1.5%)
9. Facebook: 3 (0.75%)

April 21, 2013  

How to Innovate with Social Media?

TOP6 - Social Media

TOP6 social media in the World

The 6 first social media are: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest.

Did you know that there are more devices connected to the internet than there are people on the entire planet? This global pipeline of data keeps the world connected, and nowhere is its presence is felt more strongly than in social media. Every minute of the day thousands of photos are shared on Instagram, tens of thousands of tweets are exchanged on Twitter, hours of YouTube videos are uploaded and hundreds of thousands of pieces of content are posted to Facebook.

SocialMedia for Business

Social media for Business: the entry gate?

The question is to know if in 2 or 3 years, the entry gate of all online services of a company will have to be linked to social media: for internet web sites, as entry gate to detail products sold, for extranet for the customers and the prospects, allowing them to discuss about the company thanks to social media, and for dedicated services: giving news, playing virtual demo of products, answering and sharing topics.

How to do this? Companies will have first to develop their brand to these social medias and imagine some dedicated contents to update on social media (news, games, events…). In a second step, some links will have to be processed between these social media and standard online channels of companies. For managing this step, social media will have to reinforce their IT security which is yet insufficient for companies standards. The final step will be to make the reverse and put some links inside the companies’s systems in order to allow customers to have additional information & services thanks to social media.

More statistic on Social Media

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April 1, 2013  

5 Minutes To Create a Mind-Changing Presentation

Mind-Changing Presentation

Reading this blog article will take you only 5 minutes — 5 minutes to find out how to draft great presentations and to become a more effective and convincing presenter.

What´s the reason for this article? You have probably participated of those meetings where most of the speakers stared 80% of the time at the screen just to read every single bullet point on each of their cluttered slides. After three minutes tops the audience fell in a deep trance and was neither able nor willing to follow many of the presentations any longer.

Nancy Duarte is a communication expert who wrote two excellent books on the subject: “Slide:ology” and “Resonate.” I strongly suggest you read at least “Slide:ology.”

Another person who strongly encouraged to think differently and more creatively about the preparation, design, and delivery of presentations is designer and communication expert Garr Reynolds. His book “Presentation Zen” combines solid principles of design with the tenets of Zen simplicity.

Some of Garr’s key points:

  • Use multimedia wisely. Question: Can your visual be understood in 3 seconds? If not, don’t use it!
  • Include short stories to explain your main points.
  • Respect your audience. The most important thing is that you get your audience involved and engaged.
  • Limit your ideas to one main idea per slide.
  • Move away from the podium.
  • Take it slowly.
  • Keep the lights on. Turning the lights off — besides inducing sleep — puts all the focus on the screen.

See More details

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