Visually Exploring Your Network

LinkedIn have a impressive feature that allows you to visualise your professional network to help you see the relationships between you and your connections. Check out LinkedIn Maps to create your own.

Here’s how it works: your map is color-coded to cluster groups from your professional career, such as your previous employer, school mates, or networking groups you’ve been part of. In my map, my Sputnik Agency collegues are blue, while my friends connected through the Social Melbourne network are orange and another employer Revium are green.

It's evident that people who work together are all inter-related and interesting to see how a few people I know also seem to know others in seperate network groups, this can be explained by the fact Ive worked in Melbourne most of my life within the technology industry.


What does your own map look like?

Foursquare helps you search for stuff your friends like

In January 2012, Foursquare announced the Explore feature, which leveraged its 1.5 billion checkins into personalised recommendations for users. By collating millions of tips,  Foursquare now allows you to search for places you’ve and for your friends have visited, but also placed you haven’t been or that have a foursquare special deal.

Here’s what Foursquare had to say about Explore:

"The vision for foursquare is much much bigger – it’s about adding an ‘interesting’ layer to the whole world, tailored just for you...Whether you’re planning a night out in your neighborhood or a vacation in Europe, what should you do? Which of your friends should you ask about things? How can you save money? Where can you easily find great places you’ve never been to? How do you search for personalized recommendations in the real world."

When you visit Explore and login to your account, you see a Google map and various search options.

The results then display all of the data you and your friends have given over the years you have been checking-in to locations. If you’re looking for a beer in your area, you’ll be shown a map of all of the local bars and pubs, along with user generated content about them including tips, photos and visitor comments.

It looks like Foursquare has finally worked out a highly valuable way of using all the data it has been collecting from us for years. It’s also in a great position to monetise the killer app by replicating Google’s search and selling busineses a pay-per-click paid listing that would show at the top of the search results.

Evolving into Immersive Consumerism

People are facinated about knowing what the future holds. This infographic video, “Digital Life: Today and Tomorrow" projects what life will be like in 4 years from now in 2015. It makes some interesting points about our daily lives being immersed with technology such as social media and mobile computing.


Digital Life: Today & Tomorrow from Neo Labels on Vimeo.
This made me think of how marketing will evolve in its application of geo-targeting of the publically available information we post up about ourselves on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. How will this effect the everyday lives of people when exposed to omnipresent branding? The video below explores coruption of the technology like we have already seen with Spam email and viruses.


Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Then there's the scientific side of enabling technology and how we would go about if we could evolve to develop a Sixth Sense to access the meta data without using a smart phone. The next video is of Pattie Maes talking at Ted about SixthSense. Is this part of Homo Evolutis? as Juan Enriquez puts it that humanity is on the verge of becoming a new and utterly unique species.

Using LinkedIn to promote your personal brand

With the number of Australians now using LinkedIn surpassing 2 million this year, the social platform LinkedIn has become more than just networking for professionals, it’s become the business to business (b2b) marketplace for many Australian companies and the recruitment ground for both HR agencies and companies head hunting talent.

Last week at the Social Media Club Melbourne, Cliff Rosenberg the Managing Director of LinkedIn Australia & New Zealand gave a presentation to a very packed room on the new LinkedIn Signal tool which works a little like twitter in the sense of being your very own personalised news service. Signal aggregates comments from everyone on LinkedIn who's in your professional network, the companies you follow and industry groups you have joined.



Described as your personal business intelligence dashboard, Signal allows you to access the most relevant insights from the constant stream of status updates and news from your connections. Conversely, it can also be used to put your business at the centre of conversation with your customer and promote your products and services informally using a viral word of mouth approach.

LinkedIn Signal offers 8 filters to modify your stream. To see what people are tweeting or sharing on a particular topic you can narrow or expand your view of the stream based on the following filters: Network, Industry, Company, Time published, Geo / Region, School or keywords and hash tags such as #SMCMelb.

As a way to get your business into your customer’s Signal stream you should actively participate in LinkedIn groups and respond to relevant requests for LinkedIn Answers. Additionally you should also regularly update your LinkedIn status. This activity will also increase your visibility on LinkedIn by ensuring you appear more often on your connections’ home page feeds and Linkedin Signal.

Like any social network, you need to be proactive and consistent in your efforts to make LinkedIn work for your business and personal brand. Some tips to help nurture your business relationships include: sharing relevant content via status updates and sending contacts individual messages when appropriate. Note: By integrating your Twitter account with LinkedIn, Tweets that contain #in will automatically be posted to your LinkedIn account.

This blog orginally appeared on Revium's blog

Facebook Datamines Real-Time Conversations for Ad Targeting

Last month Facebook started to profile real-time conversations to target ads using a worldwide test sample of 1%, which gives them a sample size of over 6 million people.

While advertisers can already use Facebook to reach users based on profile data such as age, gender, location, keywords, interests and preferences through "likes", this recent addition provides real-time processing of data from status updates and new wall posts so that users are served with corresponding advertising messages that are relevant their current conversations.

For example: Users who update their status with "Hey mate, let’s go out for a beer tonight” could get an ad from the local Irish pub, a new boutique beer or the latest drink alcohol responsibly message by the South Australian government (see video below).



While Facebook is not the first website to serve targeted ads (Google started back in 2009 with behavioural advertising program called Adsense) this latest immediate attempt to reach the consumer with a marketing message during a conversation is a major breakthrough.

With real-time delivery of advertisements, any online discussion taking place in our lives such as getting engaged, planning a holiday, organising a dinner with friends turns has become a new marketplace for brands to raise awareness or gain top of mind at the time when people are ready to purchase their product.

This immediacy is even further enhanced if combined with GeoTargeting technology which would put brands directly in front of a potential buyer when they are activily out shopping.

If 57% of people talk more online than they do in real life as the following video suggest, then digital marketers have a great opportunity of tapping into the online conversation.

The World Is Obsessed With Facebook from Alex Trimpe on Vimeo.

Social Media Marketing for B2B

The buyer behaviour of B2B customers is changing. Interuptive sales techniques such as cold calling and industry advertising have become outdated as time poor B2B buyers have become increasingly self reliant thanks to the Internet and social media. B2B buyers are turning to peers and trusted advisors when making a decison to purchase.

Therefore one of the primary goals for using social media for business is building "social authority". A organisation or individual's social authority is developed by establishing themselves as the "expert" on a given industry or subject. In effect you need to carve a niche as the authority on your subject.

The above graph demonstrates that B2B buyers are more likely to take the advice from a blog or social media network rather than hear the pitch by a salesman.

Design Victoria Social Media Breakfast

This morning I attended the Designing your Social Media Strategy at Camberwell Council Offices in Melbourne. The presentation featured Emily Doig of @socialmedia_AU and Jess Pryles @sugadeaux

My tweets from the event

@portz
Notes from today's preso on www.facebook.com.au/socialmediadaily #smbreakfast

@portz
not one size fits all, customise your content for the different platform streams #smbreakfast

@portz
Acknowledge negative sentiment in the stream then take it offline #smbreakfast

@portz
Time spent maintaining social media business profile depends on your objectives #smbreakfast

@portz
The power of th RT, connections are the most important value of Twitter via @sugadeaux #smbreakfast

@portz
Listening to @Sugadeaux speak about using Twitter to promote her business #smbreakfast

@portz
Each post is a brick in your wall of content that can't be penetrated by your competition #smbreakfast

@portz
To get social media taken seriously in your business make it someones KPI #smbreakfast

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Design Victoria Social Media Breakfast