• • An opportunity for naukri
• Intel CIO Diane Bryant ticked off the advantages of sites like Facebook:  the engagement, the opportunity for collaboration, how easy it is to discover what your friends find interesting and important. All those "social media" type things Bryant, says, would be useful within a company like Intel. Substitute friends for colleagues (and many people already do), and you get the idea.
• But Bryant is not about to unleash an unvarnished version of Facebook within her company, or hack together some version of the service to make it work
• "Why isn't there a social media application for the enterprise?" Bryant says. "There is a huge need, and there is nothing there."
• • Insights, opportunity: Linkedin inspiration
• "We have a product in beta called Company Groups, which our company uses a lot," Hoffman says. "We're still iterating a lot on it, but it's a tool that let's people put their personal networks together in such a way that it helps the whole company do its tasks. Just as an individual might ask, how do I stay informed? How do I share information? You'll be able to do that within a company."

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• • Opportunity Clue
• My new found  love is for Wednesday night’s as the team of Lighthouse Insights have started to have a ball. Our Facebook wall chat at 10 PM every Wednesday is getting more interesting, slowly pulling new crowds and old faces pouring in with support is wonderful. This Wednesday, our guests were the founders of Creativa India, Himanshu Bhalla and Dinesh Juneja.

• According to Facebook policy last updated on April 2010, "When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends' names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. ... The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to "everyone." .

• 1. Leverage Your Social Graph
• People get jobs through other people, not computers
• Ten years ago, it would take you a lot of effort to ask your friends who they know and to remember where all your friends work. Now, you can tap your social graph on social networks and have all of that information at your fingertips. For job seekers, this means that you can get introductions to people who work at companies you’re interested in. For companies, this means growing your business though introductions instead of cold calls. The internet is your personal research laboratory.

• Here are a few tools that will help you tap into your social graph during your job search:

   
   
  • 1. LinkedIn. LinkedIn gives you access to hiring managers through your close connections. After creating your profile, upload all of your email contacts so that you have a foundation to build upon. Then, search for a company or position, filter your results by location and see who in your immediate network can introduce you to a hiring manager. LinkedIn forces us all to do more research on employees and companies before interviews. All of their information is online, so it’s created an expectation that you’re doing your homework.
   
  • 2. InTheDoor.com. Think of InTheDoor.com as a job board overlay on your Facebook social graph. It connects Indeed.com’s aggregated job board database and your Facebook social graph to show you who in your network can connect you with specific openings. You can find jobs at your friends’ companies, search for jobs in different cities by preference and search by company and job title.
   
  • 3. BranchOut.com. Much like InTheDoor.com, BranchOut utilizes your Facebook social graph. The main difference is that you access BranchOut from within your Facebook profile, and it gives you more of a professional identity. It was always hard to build a professional identity on Facebook but BranchOut has tried to solve that. With $18 million in a recent venture capital round by Redpoint Ventures, more than 3 million job listings and 20,000 internships listings, this site is serious business. Like LinkedIn, you can get recommendations on your page, and like Foursquare, you can earn badges.
• 2. Use Augmented Reality and Job Search Apps
• “Augmented reality” blurs the line between what’s real and what’s computer-generated by enhancing what we see, hear, feel and smell. If you have an iPhone, you should download the “Layar” application. Once installed, click on “Layars” from the bottom menu and search for “JobAmp Mobile.” When you use this layar, you will be able to see all the companies near your current location and what positions are open at them.
• This information is very useful if you see a company you’re interested in when walking around your city.
• 3. Build Your Online Influence
• Companies were interested — and still are — in passion, teamwork and cultural fit. In today’s world, not only do you need strong hard and soft skills, but you need to develop online influence. When two candidates look the same on paper and are both good communicators, the differentiator will be their online influence.
• Online influence is measured in how many connections you have, who those connections are (and how influential they are), who and how many people are sharing your content and backlinking to your website and more. Klout.com, a site that measures online influence and gives you a “Klout score,” is becoming increasingly popular with employers.
• 4. Use Multimedia Instead of a Paper Resume
• 5. Turn Yourself Into an Advertisement
• Another way to get people’s attention is to advertise yourself to the specific people and companies you’re looking to work for. The four most common ways to advertise yourself are through Facebook social ads, Google AdWords, blog advertisements and LinkedIn Ads.
• You can see an example of this being done by Alec Brownstein in 2010, when he advertised himself by targeting specific executives at companies he wanted to work for.

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• Whether it is an employer searching for potential recruits or an employee exploring career change, social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are fast emerging as effective recruitment platforms.
• A Ma Foi Randstad Workmonitor study reveals 90 per cent of Indian employees have individual accounts on social media sites, out of which 81 per cent use them for professional purposes. While these purposes vary from getting information about an organisation's work culture to tracking movements of executives and events of companies, the focus largely remains on jobs.
• Curiously this is not a widespread global phenomenon; only 29 per cent of the global workforce use the social media to look for jobs, the survey says. In India the trend is common across all levels, though employees in the 35 to 44 age-group and income bracket of Rs 2 to 10 lakh per month follow it the most.
  
• HR experts, however, maintain that middle- and senior-level executives are the biggest beneficiaries of such platforms, because at that level there is always a talent shortage. "Unlike employees at the junior levels, middle- or top-level people do usually use job portals. To identify the right candidate, search firms and companies are heavily dependent on networking portals," says Vibhav Dhawan, Managing Partner, Positive Moves Consulting India, an executive search firm. The use of social media for professional purposes has doubled in the past year, he says. "More people are using these sites every day and this, in turn, becomes a large and sorted data source."
• Kris Lakshmikanth, founder of Headhunters India, believes using social media does not yield instant results.
• "Just because somebody has put up his profile on LinkedIn does not mean he is actively looking to switch jobs. There are plenty of passive job seekers as well," he says. "Our job is to approach them in a professional manner and build longterm relationships."

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• Professional networking refers to developing relationships and contacting people from various professions and backgrounds.

• 1.  Makes people aware of your presence

   

  If you want to acquire a good job, marketing yourself well is critical.

• 2.  Recommendation

   

  Active networking can help you to earn recommendation from experts.
• 3.  Solves various problems
• Networking gives you the opportunity to contact experts and request them for suggestions
• 4.  Offers you good information
• Professional networking sites allow you to participate in various discussions.
• 5.  Simplifies teamwork

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• • Strong focus strategy
•   People who refuse to get on LinkedIn today are like those who resisted the use of email back in the mid 90’s. It’s that important to businesses in 2011.
• The main reason I am such an advocate for LinkedIn is its pure business focus.
• LinkedIn was created to be a communication medium for professional people

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• • Uses of LinkedIN
• Use LinkedIn as a research tool
• Use LinkedIn to follow up after conferences
• Before we had LinkedIn it was much harder to keep that connection going!
• Use LinkedIn to join meaningful conversations
• to stay current with people
• Use LinkedIn to create your own directory

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• So here's my conclusion: employment as we know it - is broken.
   
   The employer-employee psychological contract is coming apart and we all pretend that it's not an issue.
  
• • Factors that jobseekers look at
• People are loyal to various other factors that the "employment brand" connotes. The increasing consumerisation of society has meant people want to work for firms that are considered "cool" right now. It was Microsoft some eons back, Google then, Apple now, and who knows that then.
• Some people are loyal to their profession. When I was a HR Manager in a professional service firm - which did SAP consulting projects - it was pretty evident that if you hired a SD MM specialist and didn't have a project for him for a couple of months he would up and leave - irrespective of the fact that you had a great "employment brand". He wouldn't think of changing his skills as long as there was a market for it.
• Some people are loyal to their bosses/ mentors - and follow them to whichever firm they go.
• There is research that now more and more people want their brands and their workplace to be part of something larger than just being a market leader.
• And sometimes they just want to be connected more to people.
   
   Sure there are various kinds of industries employing various kinds of people - and there will be many people just getting by. Working for a paycheck. Waiting for the clock to strike the shift time - and to get out.
   
   Those people are not going to be the one who're going to give you great ideas and make your firm more competitive.
  
• • What to do
• So if you want to hire the best for the roles you have maybe you have to tear up that organogram and job description and how you want them to work. You have to tear up your performance management system. Get rid of that industrial era mindset to "work"
   
   Because in the Organization 2.0 employment will not be anything like the employment that we know.

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• Culture is the Employment Brand
• Your company's employment brand is shaped by conversations that are triggered by questions like this on social web these days.
   

   

   Your employment brand is built and shaped now by such conversations. It is what your employees say to their friends and what their friends reply to questions like the above.
   
   In short, if you want to really impact the employment brand - start with the culture of your organization. Because that is the brand that people actually care about.
• If you are authentic about the kind of culture your organization has - conservative, experimental, edgy or whatever it is - you will attract people who would be comfortable with that culture.
  
• Culture is also defined in various contexts. If you're a bank then you have a certain kind of culture, right. Not really. Because if you're the bank's BPO or IT center in India then the culture would be either subtly or radically different. If you're in another country the national culture would also shape it.
   
   So how do you showcase your myriad cultures to the myriad applicants who apply to you or the people you want to hire?

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• Pendse, who joined Cognizant in April last year, got hooked on to the company's Facebook-like platform called Cognizant 2.0, or C2, which allows him to connect with thousands others and share ideas without any intervention or mandate from the project managers.

  "I find it quite cool, and worth spending time on. Ever since I started using it a year ago, I have kicked off around a dozen discussions, and now spearhead few special interest groups," he says. "In my last company, I was made to use a communication and email system, which looked really pre-historic,"
• And, on top of all that, there are bans to use Facebook and Twitter in offices," says Pendse.
• "Why do we have so much of difference between our personal computing and work computing experiences?"
• Top tech firms are realising that keeping the new generation glued, they need changes beyond pure salaries, which is already considered hygiene by new recruits such as Pendse. Launched around two years ago by Cognizant, the C2 already has around 60,000 active users and the site records over six million page views every month.
• • Important Insight
    
• "The millennial actually have a completely different expectation in terms of how they work, they love to have virtual experiences," added Frank.
• From the time a new customer project is kicked off, to when it's actually delivered, Cognizant 2.0 glues the entire workflow together, across varied skills, geographies and business units. "The work flow is not a boring experience, it's so much refreshing,"
• For Cognizant as an organisation, the system helps it not only knit the project groups together, but also reduce the entire time taken to identify who can do a particular project better than the rest.
• "It's like a Google search—we put the skill set required, and it throws up different project teams and individuals with prior experience in dealing with such situations,"
• At TCS, the country's biggest software exporter, nearly one third of its over 1,50,000-strong workforce is actively participating in the company's TCS uses wikis, or personalised, websites that bring together specialised communities, apart from other tools to help its employees collaborate better. While Justask enables employees to ask questions openly, Ideamax encourages employees to share their ideas about a particular technology or a process.

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• • PeekFace.com just launched some 6 months or so ago, and it is still in beta, but it's utility to job seekers seems quite compelling if you live in the metro areas of Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington or Wilmington to share job experiences with each other. This site starts to take the function of a corporate reputation scorecard for attributes of job satisfaction. All companies are added, and administered by the company. While you can not always use others experience to make a decision, you can use their experience, to help you evaluate complimentary corporate culture. Thanks Jim Stroud!
    
  • VocationVacation.com-- wow I had never heard of this service, but it is a novel idea, of sort of a travel agent for professional dreaming, with real value and opportunity. Ever want to be an Actor, Artist, Bootmaker, Corporate Filmmaker, Chocolatier, Nonprofit Director, Professional Speaker, or Photographer? How about a Pro Wrestling Event Coordinator?

• How and why we communicate with others
• We talk to survive
• The desire to communicate is hard-wired into all of us. It was an effective survival mechanism for our ancestors, who shared information about food supplies, dangerous animals, and weather patterns, and it continues to help us understand our world, including what behavior is appropriate and how to act in certain situations. People talk because sharing information makes life easier.
• Our motivations for sharing online are the same as the motivations of our ancestors. We often update our status because we need information.
• Research has shown that the majority of tweets that mention brands are seeking information rather than expressing sentiment, and one in five tweets is about a product or service. (1)
• We talk to form social bonds
• Decades of research in social psychology has shown that people talk to form and grow social bonds. Conversations ensure that we understand one another. One key aspect of this is communal laughter. Research has shown that if people laugh together with strangers, they are as generous to them as they are to their friends
• Talking to someone sends out strong social signals. It shows people that we consider them important enough to spend time together. This is also true online. People update their status to produce a feeling of connectedness, even when people are geographically distant.
• (3) Status updates often contain social gestures and people often respond by liking or commenting on the content, not because they actually like the content but because they want to send out a social signal to build the relationship. In many cases, the conversation that follows a status update is much more important than the status update itself. More than the act of sharing content, marketing campaigns need to support conversations.
• The access I had to information was bounded by what was printed, and available in local bookstores and libraries. The limit to the amount of information I could access was tangible. That world has irreversibly changed.
• Research has shown that social bonds are central to our happiness. The deeper the relationships someone has, the happier they will be
• (4) Women talk to form social bonds more often than men. Many of their conversations are aimed at building and maintaining their social network. Men more often talk about themselves or things they claim to be knowledgeable about, often because they are trying to impress the people around them.
• Thanks to the web, our access to information is increasing exponentially, and is not going to stop. A single query into a search engine produces millions of results. People are adding information to Wikipedia faster than we can read it: 1000 unique articles are added every day, on top of all the edits and additions to existing articles. We’re creating 2000 tweets per second, 48 hours of YouTube uploads per minute. In 2002, we recorded and replicated 23 exabytes of information. We now record and transfer that much information every 7 days.
• We talk to help others
• This increase in the information we can access has two important side effects:
• For many, it is important to them to be perceived as helpful, and so they try to share content that they think other people will find valuable. (6) This is especially clear when we see people share information that may not reflect positively on themselves.
• 1. The capacity for information processing and memory is not increasing at anywhere close to the same rate.
• In this sea of information, people often complain of “information overload” and although the amount of information we can now access is unprecedented, the feeling that we’re drowning in information is not new. In fact, it was first felt and described after the invention of the printing press. The word “deluge”, which means a sense of drowning, was a common metaphor for information in the 1600s.
• We talk to manage how others perceive us
• While people talk to make their lives easier, to form social bonds, and to help others, most of our conversations are a form of reputation management. (7) Research has shown that most conversations are recounting personal experiences, or gossiping about who is doing what with whom. Only 5 percent is criticism or negative gossip. The vast majority of these conversations are positive, as we are driven to preserve a positive reputation.
• 2. This increase in information will have a profound impact on the world of marketing and advertising. Over the past 50 years, the predominant model in advertising has been to attract people’s attention – mostly by interruption, sometimes by surprising people with a juxtaposition of different aspects of society, creating new memes.
• Quick tips
•  The exponential increase in information we can access, combined with the fact that our brain has limited processing capability, means that a strategy based on interruption is now a race to the bottom. More advertisers, delivering more information, in an already overwhelming sea of information, competing for the same volume of attention. This ends badly for everybody.

• Build marketing campaigns that grow social bonds. For example, for Mother’s Day, the online florist 1-800-flowers.com used Facebook to have mothers vote on the products that they would prefer to receive as a gift. this generated stories in the News Feed, to be seen by their children.the motivation to grow social bonds led to four out of the five top-selling Mother’s Day products being the ones voted for on Facebook.

   

  Build marketing campaigns that enable people to help each other. Sephora fans on Facebook organized to send each other unused cosmetics samples. One person starts a box of 30 samples, sends it to someone else who takes 15 samples out and adds 15 of their samples back, before sending it on to a third person who does the same, and so on.
• While it’s important to understand the increase in information and the static nature of our brain’s processing capabilities, the critical thing to understand is how these relate to what is holding people’s attention. We’re watching less TV, and spending more time online. We’re spending less time online consuming content from broadcasters and businesses, and more time communicating with other people – most often with our friends. Advertisers are competing for people’s attention by going head to head with those peoples’ friends. It’s easy to see who wins here – we care a lot more about our friends and family than about what brands have to say, no matter how interesting or relevant the message. It’s annoying but acceptable to interrupt a TV episode of Friends, it’s not acceptable to interrupt a conversation amongst real-life friends.
• • Touchpoints

• WHAT WE TALK ABOUT

   

  Many of our conversations are about other people
• One study on what people talk about found that about two thirds of conversations revolve around social issues. Another study found that social relationships and recounting personal experiences account for about 70 percent of conversations.
• Marketing and advertising is about to experience a paradigm shift. In 5 (maybe 10) years, we won’t see much advertising built on interruption because our information overloaded world will have rendered it ineffective and inefficient. All advertising will be context sensitive, personalized, and relevant. The distribution channels for this advertising are the technologies being invented now.
• • How this will change advertising
• We share feelings, not facts
• Content that is positive, informative, surprising, or interesting is shared more often than content that is not, and content that is prominently featured is shared more often than content that is not, but these factors are minor compared to how arousing the content is.
• These findings have important implications for advertising. BMW ran a successful campaign called “The Hire,” which induced feelings of anxiety through elaborate car chases and generated millions of views. Content that is non-arousing, for example, content that makes people feel comfortable and relaxed, is unlikely to be shared. Public health information may spread more effectively if it induces feelings of anxiety rather than sadness. (11)
• We talk about the things that surround us
• Our everyday offline conversations tend to be about whatever comes to mind, independent of how interesting it is.
• Offline, many of our conversations are driven by a need to avoid awkward silences
• . While people most often talk about what is visible or cued by their environment offline, when online they don’t need to fill a conversation space so they can think more carefully about what might be interesting to others.
• We talk about brands in passing
• Five major shifts

• Lately, I’ve been talking to people about five major shifts that I see happening. Each is big enough to warrant a post of its own, so over the next few days I’ll write about each individually, and then write a post about what it means to think of them in combination. I’ll link to all from this post. In the meantime, here are the five major shifts:

   

  1. The amount of information we can access is increasing exponentially.

   

  2. The web is being rebuilt around people, rather than being built around content.

   

  3. For the first time in humanity, social interaction, and influence, are measurable.

   

  4. Technology is driving a large increase in understanding how we make decisions, and it’s not how we assumed.

   

  5. Mobile technologies (phones, tablets, etc.) will change society in ways we can’t yet predict
• How to understand Facebook: Use it.
• Because we communicate much more frequently with the small number of people we are emotionally closest to, about half of conversations that mention brands are with a partner or family member. (12) Of these brand conversations, 71 percent are face to face, 17 percent are on the phone, and only 9 percent are online. (12) When it comes to spreading ideas, we need to target people’s closest ties.
• Start using Facebook every day. Look at what people are doing. Think about what they are not doing. Look at what businesses are doing. Look at what they are not doing. Study businesses that have high engagement (look at the ‘people talking about this’ number on their page) and figure out why. Look for patterns across posts that have high engagement.
• • How to understand fb
• People are using these two platforms in completely different ways. Facebook is for communication with people you know in real life. Twitter is a way to get information about celebrities, sports personalities and news outlets that you care about. The vast majority of active Twitter users have never posted a tweet. The same appears to be true for Google+. It is unlike Facebook or Twitter. The people who are using it, are using it as a way to connect with people they don’t know in real life around niche hobbies, currently skewed heavily towards technology and photography
• • Facebook vs Twitter vs Google +
• • Change: The only constant
• People complain that it changes too often. This is an understandable complaint, but it’s not going to change. This is the world we now live in. The only certainty is that things will continue to change fast.
• Stop talking about “social”
• if you’re trying to get people to talk about your brand, put it in their physical environment, as people will talk about things that surround them. Huggies had people upload their favorite photos of their babies to Facebook and then had the most popular photos printed on buses and in subway stations.
• As I read, watch and listen to other people describe the changes in our industry, I’m consistently seeing two problems:
   - Not enough people are recognizing that the web is being fundamentally rebuilt around people, and that this is going to change how all of us do business.
   - Too many of the people who are thinking about social, are thinking about it as a distinct entity
• • VERY IMPORTANT 

• WHO WE TALK TO

   

  Most of our communication is with the people closest to us
• Research shows that people have consistent communication with between 7 and 15 people, but that most conversations are with our five strongest ties.
• We communicate with the same 5 to 10 people 80 percent of the time.
• They talked about apps, mobile first, emotional design, measurement. But social design was a glaring omission. All designers should be recognizing, and should be on top of, this shift. Yes, “social” has become a buzzword, and there are many charlatans selling themselves as “social media gurus”. But this shift is very, very real.
• Keller Fay found that 27 percent of our conversations are with our spouse/partner, 25 percent are with a family member, and 10 percent are with a best friend. That’s 62 percent of our conversations with the people closest to us. Only 5 percent of our conversations are with acquaintances, and only 2 percent are with strangers. The remaining 31 percent is with the rest of the people in our social network
• George Colony, the CEO of Forrester, gave an interesting talk where he described three social thunderstorms. The first and third thunderstorms were interesting – moving from browsers to local apps interacting with the cloud*, and the rise of social design within enterprises. But the second thunderstorm is where George missed the same shift as the readers of A List Apart.
• George misunderstands the shift with the social web. He said “social” is:
   - Running out of hours: people have a finite amount of time in the day and are already interacting with social applications more than many other activities such as exercising.
   - Running out of people: penetration of people interacting with social applications is hitting 80 to 90% so doesn’t have much room to grow.
• • Misunderstood

• We can map how frequently we communicate with others onto our social network structure:

   

  

• This analysis makes no sense. Social is not a feature. Social is not an application. Social is a deep human motivation that drives our behaviour almost every second that we’re awake. It doesn’t matter if we’re online or offline, on a browser or using an app. Humans are social creatures. George says 86% of US online consumers are social, and describes a “post-social” world. Again, this makes no sense. 100% of online consumers in every country in the world are social because it’s deep in our DNA to make connections and interact with other people.

   

  The big shift that George is misunderstanding is that the rise of the social web is a structural change being driven by online life catching up with offline life. The winners in this world will be the ones who assume social behaviour in everything they do. It won’t be the ones thinking about social as a feature or product in isolation. The winners will be existing businesses who build on top of social platforms to rethink how their business operates. Here are three recent, and simple, examples:
• • Social: An embedded human behaviour
• • Excellent Examples
• When you buy tickets on Ticketmaster you can see whether any of your Facebook friends have bought tickets, and if so, where they are sitting. Simple. Want to spend time together? Sit next to them. Want to do your own thing? Sit far away, or don’t buy a ticket.
   - When you book flights on Air France, you can see if any of your Facebook friends are on the same flight and where they are sitting. Same as Ticketmaster – sit close by, or far away.
   - When you browse for gifts on Etsy, you can use the things your friends have liked on Facebook to filter your results. Your friend likes Bill Murray? Here are all the products about Bill Murray. This moves the experience from a random and almost limitless set of options, to deep social personalization.
• Who is listening to us changes what we talk about
• Who we talk to online has a large impact on what we talk about. Many people think carefully before posting status updates. Sometimes they have an explicit audience in mind for the post and need to consider whether it will be interesting or offending to the rest of the people they are connected to.
• These are three dead simple integrations that substantially improve the core product/service experience. The leading businesses are recognizing that the web is moving away from being centred around content, to being centred around people. That is the biggest social thunderstorm, and all of us are going to have to understand it to succeed. So stop talking about social as a distinct entity. Assume it in everything you do.
• • Web centred around people
• December 13, 2011  7  

  We communicate with four, but consume from many more.
• When I talk about how how social networks are structured, certain things always resonate with people. One of these is that although the average Facebook user has 130 friends, they only communicate directly with four of those people in any given week. Direct communication includes likes and comments on their posts, posts on their wall, chat conversations, video calls, and private messages.
• People I talk to are always surprised at how low the number is – only four people per week, and only six people per month. What’s more, the majority of people in these small groups remains consistent from week to week – for example, our partner, our closest friends and family. Changes in people from week to week is usually posting a like or comment with a much weaker tie, for example seeing someone we went to school with get married, run a marathon, or have a baby.
• When we talk in public, we’re very careful about what we say. For example, online public ratings tend to be disproportionately positive when they’re linked to our real identity. This is especially true when the other party involved can reciprocate. When people post anonymously, their ratings tend to be almost 20 percent lower than when they use their real names.
• Although the average Facebook user is only communicating directly with four of their 130 friends in any given week, they are consuming content from a much larger number of those people. After all, over 50% of active Facebook users come back every day. If you include consuming updates from people as communication, then people are interacting with many more than four, but much of the communication is asymmetrical in nature. I may not communicate directly with you, but I do keep up with what’s going on in your life.
• • Asymetric Communication
    
• • Gossip: A human Tendency
• This isn’t a new phenomenon. In years gone by, we kept up to date through word of mouth – chatting with people in our town or village as we went about daily life. We spoke to a small number of people regularly, and because approximately 70% of conversations are about other people, we learned a lot about many others through interacting with a few. We gossiped, because gossip helps us understand how others behave, and helps define social norms. Many of the same motivations exist in consumption of others’ updates online.

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• Facebook and one-night stands

      By Paul Adams in Marketing
• Many people ask me for tips on being successful on the Facebook platform.
• Facebook is about relationships. It’s about unending dialogue between you – the brand, and people who are interested in talking to you. You need to approach Facebook like you would a long-term relationship. Facebook is not a one-night stand.
• • Comparing Offline Relations with FB
• The comparison to real life relationships goes beyond the dating analogy. The one thing I’ve found to help me create successful things on the social web, is to think deeply about offline relationships independent of technology. How people interact socially online is learned from their offline social interactions. Think about how offline relationships work. They are formed from many sequential interactions, most of which are very lightweight. An hour here. An hour there. A beer here. A meal there. Real relationships take time. They take work. At times they take a lot of really hard work just to keep them alive. Facebook is no different. People liking your page is the equivalent of shaking someone’s hand. People are just saying ‘Hi, let’s get to know each other a bit better’. Imagine a sales rep measuring success by how many hands they had shaken.
• Think about relationships. Create a plan for Facebook that is measured in years, not weeks or months. This will be hard, because agencies and brands will need to work together in new ways. New types of contracts, new types of engagements without a middle or an end. Be patient. Create the best first date you can, then create the best second, third and fourth dates you can, and take it from there. Have lightweight interactions with people. Be flexible. Be responsive. And stop trying to sleep with your fans on the first night.
• • Facbook: A LONG term relationship

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• • Imp to understand strengths of new medium rather than continuing ur approach acc to existing medium
    
• 8  

  Why marketers misunderstand Facebook
• We are experiencing the sixth great communication transformation brought about by new technology. Each transformation dramatically changed our perception of our world, and each was initially misunderstood. With each transformation, people made the same mistake. They looked at the new medium, and applied their ways of working with existing media to the new medium.
• The first transformation was the invention of the alphabet, roughly 3500 years ago, which led to writing. This profoundly changed communication as for the first time, there were permanent records of information. Prior to the alphabet, everything was spoken and the only record of transactions was memory and good faith. It also made people much more aware of what they were saying, and made people much more aware of what they said. When people first used the alphabet, they wrote as if they were speaking to a person or audience. For example legal documents often started with “Oh! all ye who have heard this…” and often ended with “Goodbye!”. The alphabet was met with scorn from many leading thinkers of the time. Plato and Socrates (who refused to write anything down) lamented that once people could write, they wouldn’t bother to remember anything.
• The second transformation was the invention of the printing press. The printing press made replication and dissemination of data possible, leading to the Renaissance, the Reformation and the birth of science. Print also made documentation stable as people could trust that what they were looking at was the same as what other people were looking at. The printing press also brought something new – for the first time, people were faced with too much information. This prospect led many to declare that print would lead to disorder in society. People were scared at the prospect of the printing press. They were worried that anything they wrote down could be copied, and copied, and could spread across the world.
• The third transformation was the invention of the telegraph, roughly 150 years ago, which allowed people to communicate with people thousands of miles away, in close to real-time. This was a revelation. Information that just two years earlier had taken days to arrive at its destination could now be there in seconds. The telegraph also changed the understanding of what a message contained. Prior to the telegraph, a message was always a physical object. The telegraph forced people to think about a message as an abstract concept and it was also misunderstood. The telegraph led people to believe that the death of newspapers was imminent, as the telegraph would contradict their false claims as fast as they were published.
• The fourth was the telephone, which allowed people to talk with others no matter where they were in the world, but that’s not how people first thought of it. In fact, Alexander Graham Bell traveled across the country proclaiming that his new invention was a new broadcast device, for broadcasting music and sermons. Businesses, when considering the telephone alongside the telegraph, dismissed it as a toy, because it did not leave a permanent record of conversations, and because it appealed to emotions rather than the letters and numbers of the telegraph.
• The pattern of misunderstanding continued. The first television shows (and the fifth transformation) were screenings of plays, and the first television ads were a single shot of a man reading out a radio ad script.
• • Web: An interactive Medium
• We’re seeing the same pattern with the sixth transformation – the web - and it’s being exacerbated with the shift to the social web. Remember that the web is in it’s infancy, and the social web we’re seeing emerge now will simply be the web in a short number of years. The web is not a broadcast medium, it’s not a platform for interrupting people. It’s an interactive medium. In fact, the social web is very close to offline interaction. You wouldn’t interrupt people in the middle of a telephone conversation with an ad, so why do the same thing on Facebook?
• The social web requires marketers to build relationships with customers. This requires one to one attention. It requires responding to every post or comment that people leave you. More importantly, people are looking for short term wins on a platform built for long term relationships. Relationships take time, and are formed from many sequential interactions. Too many marketers are currently approaching Facebook by trying to close on the first date. And even if they succeed, it’s unlikely to be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
• What you know about advertising on TV, or in print, does not apply on Facebook. It’s a completely new, and transformational medium. It took our ancestors many years, at times decades, to understand the new technology that faced them. Let’s not make the same mistake. Don’t apply how you work with existing media to a new transformational medium. Think about the properties of the medium, and figure out the new ways of working that will be required: Patience, time, one-to-one attention.
• • IMPORTANT

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• Kik and creating a sense of place

      By Paul Adams in Communities, Sociability
• You can walk into any bar on any street and immediately make conclusions about whether it is for you. How bright or dark is it? How clean or dirty is it? What’s on tap, Budweiser or India Pale Ale? What’s on the walls? Who is in there? What age are they? What are they wearing? The list goes on. These are some of the things that make up an environment, and they give us signals about whether this place is for us.
• • Importance of Environment
• One of the most important things when designing online social experiences is to consider how the product decisions you make contribute to the “feel” of the place you have built.
• Take the example of Kik, which has seen impressive growth since launch by anyone’s standard. When signing-up, Kik aggresively went through your contacts, picked out people already on Kik you may have communicated with at some point in the past, and put those people right in your Inbox as suggestions. Putting aside the glaring lack of informed consent (that’s a post for another day), it seemed like Kik was trying to help get you started by connecting you with people you may know.
• However, my experience with Kik was that I could only recognise about half those people. And as the suggestions have continued coming in, I’m starting to recognize none of them. Having people I don’t recognize as a suggested connection gives Kik a certain atmosphere, shaping the environment. It’s less like dinner at a friend’s place, and more like the anonymity in a sweaty heaving nightclub. This is a place where it’s encouraged for strangers to connect.

• This aggressive suggestion system may have fueled the impressive Kik growth, but it has also determined the Kik environment. It’s the wallpaper, the choice of furniture, and what’s on the menu. And looking through the comments on the Android App download page gives you a sense of that environment:

   

  

   

  If Kik is a place for strangers to give their vital statistics, how could it possibly be a place for connecting with your closest friends?

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