Leaders: surf on social networks to not get carried away by 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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• The Next Frontiers in Social Media (grasshopper.com)
• Social media and your small business: Perfect together (hiscoxusa.com)
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Big Data: PRISM by Numbers

One day after The Guardian revealed that the U.S. government has been secretly collecting call log data from millions of Verizon customers, The Washington Post reported Thursday that the government’s monitoring of American’s data goes much, much deeper. The FBI and the National Security Agency are mining the servers of the country’s biggest technology companies for the purpose of hunting spies and terrorists. The program, code-named PRISM, is massive in scope and involves web services that many Americans use every day.

Below, 6 numbers to explain PRISM.

9

The number of tech companies involved in the PRISM program. Here’s a list, from an NSA slideshow, including the date when monitoring began:

• Microsoft (September 2007)
• Yahoo (March 2008)
• Google (January 2009)
• Facebook (June 2009)
• PalTalk (December 2009)
• YouTube (September 2010)
• Skype (February 2011)
• AOL (March 2011)
• Apple (October 2012)

So far Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Yahoo have flatly denied that they provide the government backdoor access to their services, according to a variety of news sources. Twitter, which says it has been particularly vigilant in protecting user data from government agencies, is notably absent from the list. Dropbox is next in line to be added to PRISM, according to the Post.

10

The number of different types of data that are collected through PRISM. E-mails, instant messages, videos, photos, stored data (likely items stored on cloud services like Google Drive), voice chats, file transfers, video conferences, log-in times, and social network profile details have all been monitored by the government. Through PRISM NSA officials can even conduct live surveillance of someone doing a Google search, according to the Post.

$20 million

The annual cost of PRISM, according to NSA documents obtained by the Post.

2007

The year PRISM was established. The Post describes an “exponential growth” in the program since President Obama took office. The government has snooped on other forms of communication in recent years as well. On Thursday, Senator Dianne Feinstein confirmed that the NSA phone log database has been in place for at least seven years.

1,477

The number of times PRISM data was cited in 2012 as part of President Obama’s daily briefing, a high-level intelligence presentation given to the president, the vice president and select cabinet members. According to the Post, at least 1 in 7 intelligence reports from the NSA make use of PRISM data.

51%

Confidence level intelligence officials are supposed to have of a target’s “foreignness” to make use of PRISM data. The massive database is aimed at surveilling spies and foreign terrorists, not Americans. However, large amounts of American user data is also picked up as officials hunt for threats. The NSA describes this as “incidental.”

Related articles

• PRISM by the Numbers: A Guide to the Government’s Secret Internet Data-Mining Program (newsfeed.time.com)
• Doublespeak Denials Of PRISM Participation Were Careful Lies (techcrunch.com)
• The strange and unbelievable similarities in Google, Facebook, and Apple’s PRISM denials (venturebeat.com)
• Secret program gives NSA, FBI backdoor access to Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft data (theverge.com)
• What is the NSA’s PRISM program? (FAQ) (news.cnet.com)
• Report: NSA PRISM program spied on American’s emails, searches (pcworld.com)
• Facebook and Google insist they did not know of Prism surveillance program (guardian.co.uk)

The Rise Of Social Commerce: How Tweets, Pins & Likes Can Turn Into Sales

1 article showing how in the future the social media will be the entry gate for e-commerce web sites that will generate more and more revenue. We will for sure use more and more social media to access the right web site we would like to watch, more than web search tools (as Google, Bing or Yahoo).

This is why search tools companies buy currently social media web sites as YouTube for Google or Tumblr for Yahoo. These aggregation will continue in the next years.

Related articles

• What’s A Rich Pin? (smallbusinessmavericks.com)
• Silicon Alley Insider: The Rise Of Social Commerce: How Tweets, Pins And Likes Can Turn Into Sales (businessinsider.com)
• E-commerce Retailer BellyBling Utilizing Social Media Marketing for Modeling Contest (prweb.com)
• The Marketer’s Guide to Proper Social Media Etiquette (hubspot.com)
• The Eight Biggest Social Media Customer Service Fails of 2012 (staples.com)

TECH in AMERICA (TiA)

by Josh Luger (courtesy BusinessInsider)

BI Intelligence

Overall usage on social media platforms is exploding. Millions and millions of consumers are expressing likes on Facebook, tweeting about products on Twitter, and pinning on Pinterest every single day.

Retailers and brands are therefore increasingly focusing their attention on social commerce.

But, many struggle with the question: how do you convert a “like,” a “tweet,” or “pin” into a sale?

In a new report from BI Intelligence, we look at successful examples of businesses and business models for generating commerce via social media-based strategies, analyze Pinterest’s success as a social commerce platform, look at Facebook’s potential as a social commerce contender, and examine the e-commerce conversion and order value gap.

Here’s an overview of the converging trends that promise to transform social media into a viable commerce platform:

The rise of mobile: The rise of mobile, which means shoppers can price-compare and solicit advice…

View original post 432 more words

Social Media Etiquette

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!

Related articles

• The Marketer’s Guide to Proper Social Media Etiquette (hubspot.com)
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• The Dos and Don’ts of Social Media Etiquette (geeksugar.com)

How to Innovate with 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.

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

• 100 social media stats (mediabistro.com)

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