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First:
Listener comments responding to our discussion on ‘mean girls in PR’… Thanks to Jessica Suter from The Change PR, Lizanor Barrera and our own producer, Kristine Simpson, who submitted an audio comment (and graciously edited it in). The consensus from everyone is there are a lot of good, honest and ethical women and men working in the profession (and yes, there are a few stinkers, too…).
Next:
We officially announce Gini’s new book, Marketing in the Round, co-authored with Geoff Livingston. The publication date is May 2012, but it’s available to pre-order on Amazon and other sites (just in time for the holidays). It will be launched in Canada at Third Tuesday (Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver). Congratulations, Gini!
Then:
We move on to talk about some recent changes to Twitter and Google.
Joe sees the new features/updates as an example of how innovation is still occurring rapidly in social media; Twitter is looking more and more like a user friendly service. Martin admits he still likes the Twitter.com platform because he feels at home there.
Joe is disappointed by the changes to Tweetdeck, because it has fewer features and will now carry only Twitter and none of his other social feeds. He’s going to revisit Hootsuite.
Gini mentions Market Me Suite as another alternative.
Martin says he’s been a Hootsuite user for a while and likes the functionality. He wishes they would let users customize column width in order to see more streams at a glance.
Google introduced Currents, a magazine reader (not yet available in Canada) and is integrating Gmail with the Google+ platform.
Joe likes the quality of the interaction on Google+. He says you can describe Google+ as a place you go for ideas, Facebook, as a place to interact with friends and Twitter where you find out what’s going on. Within that model there’s lots of room for each platform to survive and thrive.
But what about LinkedIn? Martin believes many LinkedIn features could be integrated into Google+ to make it a good business networking and information resource.
Joe feels too many people on LinkedIn are promoting themselves as they look for jobs; what’s missing is the culture of generosity.
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We’d love to hear from you.
Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the Inside PR Facebook group, leave us a comment here, message us @inside_pr on Twitter, or connect with Gini Dietrich, Joe Thornley, and Martin Waxman on Twitter.
Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.
This week’s episode was produced by Kristine Simpson.
Hi Guys,
Great show, as always.
At the end of the show Joe shared his frustrations with LinkedIn, and it being too promotional in nature. In most cases I agree with his comments. There is a lot of junk floating around LinkedIn, but it still has immense potential — especially in the groups. LinkedIn has the highest density of business users, and many of the members are looking for real opportunities to connect, share and learn.
The challenge is moderation. It’s a small group of users that ruin the LinkedIn experience for everyone else. These users have an agenda like get a job, generate a lead or share a blog post, and they don’t understand or care about the etiquette of social media. If these users are effectively moderated in the groups, the quality conversations will rise to the top.
I have found this first hand in my LinkedIn Group, Sticky Branding. We make a point of moderating the group daily. We delete spam, job ads, job inquiries and inappropriate content. Promotional content is moved to the Promotions section of the group, and people who try to feed their blog into the group also get the bulk of their posts moved to Promotions. The moderation process takes about 20 minutes a day, but by constantly culling the promotional content it leaves room for our members to have quality conversations.
It is a challenge to constantly cull the promotional content, but the benefit comes from the scalability of LinkedIn Groups. For example, the Sticky Branding Group has grown organically from 0 to over 17,000 members in under a year-and-a-half. I don’t think I could have achieved the same scale as quickly on other platforms like Google+ or Facebook. And this scale provides an opportunity for even more people to engage and share their points of view, which creates a richer experience for everyone involved.
LinkedIn may not be the most social of the social networking sites, but it’s the entry point for most business users to social media. If you’re trying to engage a business audience the LinkedIn Groups can be very powerful.
Thanks,
Jeremy Miller
Hey,
Thanks for airing my comments 🙂
Kind regards
Jess
PS. You pronounced my name correctly 🙂
The most effective manner in which I have been able to leverage LinkedIn is to write on their platform. While not every post I write is shared broadly, my followers do comment on the fact that I am consistent. Consistency is a core brand building principle.