How will Google’s move into realtime search effect SMEs?

December 10th, 2009

It was only a matter of time before Google jumped on the realtime search bandwagon that Twitter has created for us. As of a few days ago, alongside the normal static search results Google will also display related Tweets, blog posts and news articlesposted in realtime.

I think this is a great step in the right direction but I’m yet to be convinced of the value unless Google can offer me a little more value. As a test I searched “Obama” and behold the second search result was the live box. For the next 3 minutes I sat and watched mindless Obama-based Twitter opinion scroll through with the occasional blog thrown in.

The problem was, none of the tweets were interesting…at all. I suspect it may well be that way for most things I search. To test, I searched for “Kent” something I would be far more interested in getting some live results for, and as suspected the live box did not appear. I can only assume that this is because there just isn’t enough data for Google to show (although a manual Twitter search show them coming up about 5 a minute).

What surely would be more useful would be to seperate the box from the normal results and have it appear in a fixed position in the screen so we can all get used to where it is. Next, introduce tabs so I can select if I want to see, just Twitter, just news posts or just blog posts and maybe give me a tab if I’m being brave and want to see everything at once.

Until, they make the data easier to digest and seperated and until they start showing real time data for anything more specific than “Obama” I just can’t see the use. As it stands it’s good for doing brand and opinion research but then there are plenty of tools that do that, and with a far better interface.

Great to hear what other people have to say about the latest development.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Industry | No Comments »

Are your tweets heading for oblivion?

December 10th, 2009

Are you tweets heading for oblivion?

With the Twitter party getting bigger and bigger any small business without the blessing of a 4 figure following might think it’s impossible to find customers on Twitter and they might be right. That said a tactical approach to Twitter and a little bit of time invested each day could open up a whole new customer pipeline and the revenue that goes with it.

Here are some hints and tips that might well help you on your journey.

1. Understand what Twitter is.

News flash, Twitter isn’t just a rip-off of Facebook’s status updates feature, nor should you believe the media hype that says Twitter is just a hangout for celebrities to tell each other what they had for lunch. What Twitter is, in fact, is both a mass communication device and the closest thing you’ll ever get (yet) to a real time search engine. I will go into both in more detail in future posts but to summarise both purposes:

- Realtime Search Engine: Something happens on X-Factor and within minutes the Twitterverse is full of everyone chiming their opinion on who should be in and who should be out. Pretty useless for most, very useful if you are a record company executive trying to decide which of the acts you want to sign. In the same way if you are a company and want to know what people are saying about you or your competitors then a quick (and free) search on Twitter website will give you your answer.

- Mass Communication Tool: If you’ve got a special offer for customers gone are they days when paying for an expensive mailing campaign was the only way. While useful, because humans are changing the way they consume data and are constantly being bombarded with new sources of information, email newsletters are less effective because people have less and less time to read them. People now want information in short bursts and once again Twitter provides a quick and free way to do this.

2. Get that profile right.

As with any social network getting the profile right is a must. For starters, pick a name related to your business. If you’re a company with a good reputation make sure you use that in your @name. Or go the other way. If you want businesses in Kent to follow you then a name such as @businessinkent might be the way to go. Secondly include a one line biography and a link to your website, you want people to go there if they like yout tweets. Next, an icon and background image. While the standard Twitter one complete with a chirping bird is nice it doesn’t say a lot about your or your business. Include your logo or a headshot as your icon and use the few hundred pixels of visible background space to include your company logo, a summary of what you do and a full set of contact details.

3. Understand how to tweet.

- Tweet: A plain simple message that goes out to all your followers. You can use 140 characters and if you include a link they will automatically be shortended by link shoretening service bit.ly.

- Retweet: If one of your followers likes your messsage they can retweet it. To do this they add “RT @yourname” at the start and tweet it out to their followers. This is always good as you message gets out to more users and you might just find yourself with a few new followers.

- Mention: This is where someone tweets to their followers including @yourname somewhere in the tweet. They may do this to tell people how good you are for some reason, which is great because (hopefully) their followers will become your followers.

- Direct Message: You can message someone directly by tweeting “d theirname” before typing your message. You can only send direct messages to people that follow you. Great way to inject a little personalism into your communications on Twitter.

4. Automate your approach… but not too much.

Managing your Twitter following can be a time consuming act and there are some automation tools that can make life a little easier. One particularly useful thing to do is sent out an automated welcome message to everyone that follows you. For this we use a site calledwww.socialoomph.com. You can sign up for an account and add as many Twitter profiles as you want. One of the options here is to send out a message to anyone that follows you. Some people consider this spam but I think it’s worth doing. Heed the advice on the page and don’t ram a sales pitch down their throat, say hello and politely invite them to look at your website or blog. Maybe 90% of your followers won’t even read it, but it costs nothing and what is the harm.

Something you defintely shouldn’t do is automatically following people that follow you. We’ll talk in more detail about gaining followers in another post but needless to say you end up with a far too equal ratio of followers and followees, and while I don’t mind (and can’t help) the odd spam bot following me from time to time, I certainly don’t want to follow them back.

5. Tweet often and tweet on the move.

Its a trap we’ve all fallen into, myself included, but people need to know your active and your followers will increase if you are seen to post relevant engaging content. That doesn’t need to be just what your doing/think but can also be RT from people you follow and even links to news stories or blog posts that you think will be useful to your followers. And if you have a smartphone make sure you take advantage and tweet on the move, especially if your an entreprenuer that travels often. There are some great apps like Twitterific that let your do this on the iPhone with relative ease.

Sign up for a free trial account today at http://www.conflux.it – We launch in January

Follow us at: http://www.twitter.com/confluxit

Tags:
Posted in Industry | No Comments »

Should you add a LinkedIn connection if you’ve never met them?

November 20th, 2009
An interesting email exchange with Will Kintish over at Kintish led to an interesting debate, should you add LinkedIn connections you’ve never met? My argument was yes, Will’s was strictly no. Our interaction came about after a mutual connection connected us by email given our mutual interest in making LinkedIn work for businesses. I’d never met him but invited him to be a connection given that we might both be able to add value to each others projects.
His argument was that he wanted to create a network of connections that he could then leverage to other connections, safe in the knowledge that they are trustworthy, experts in their field and add value when a referral is made, For that level of trust to be present he said he needed to meet his connections in person first.
My argument is that this approach contradicts one of the main reasons for using LinkedIn; to be able to create a global network on a scale that simply wasn’t possible even 5 years ago.
I agree that your network needs to be a valuable one and I think “open networkers” have taken the global idea too far in the other direction. You need to be able to trust them but you can check a potential connection’s credentials on their profile and with their recommendations. You could continue to communicate through groups and the answer boards without making them a connection but then you lose the ability to recommend and be recommended and you can’t make hookups between your connections reducing to overall value of the LinkedIn experience.
Anyway enough of my opinion, I think this is a great debate to open up for comment. Does anyone else want to weigh in?

An interesting email exchange with Will Kintish over at Kintish led to an interesting debate, should you add LinkedIn connections you’ve never met? My argument was yes, Will’s was strictly no. Our interaction came about after a mutual connection connected us by email given our mutual interest in making LinkedIn work for businesses. I’d never met him but invited him to be a connection given that we might both be able to add value to each others projects.

His argument was that he wanted to create a network of connections that he could then leverage to other connections, safe in the knowledge that they are trustworthy, experts in their field and add value when a referral is made, For that level of trust to be present he said he needed to meet his connections in person first.

My argument is that this approach contradicts one of the main reasons for using LinkedIn; to be able to create a global network on a scale that simply wasn’t possible even 5 years ago.

I agree that your network needs to be a valuable one and I think “open networkers” (or LIONs as they seem to be called) have taken the global network idea too far in the other direction. You need to be able to trust them but you can check a potential connection’s credentials on their profile and with their recommendations. You could continue to communicate through groups and the answer boards without making them a connection but then you lose the ability to recommend and be recommended and you can’t make hookups between your connections reducing to overall value of the LinkedIn experience.

Anyway enough of my opinion, I think this is a great debate to open up for comment. Does anyone else want to weigh in?

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Industry | 1 Comment »

Are you making good use of LinkedIn?

November 4th, 2009
‘Facebook for professionals’, ‘An online Cv’, just a couple of phrases I’ve heard to describe LinkedIn. For some people that’s all LinkedIn is and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’ll admit that when I first signed up, being an entrepreneur I had no need for anyone to see my CV and hire me and thought of socialising on the site was pretty unappealing seeing as I could do a much better job in real life. Most importantly I didn’t think I would be able to find any business on there.
That’s said I chipped away at it, a few hours per week at the start until fast forward 3 months and I have to drag myself away on a daily basis. As well as providing more scope than emails for communicating with the many people I meet at networking events, I’m found both clients and partners that I’d never have known existed without LinkedIn.
I thought I would share with people some of the things that have worked for me. If anyone else has tips and tricks they want to share please put them in the comments section.
1. Take time to fill out your profile.
It sounds silly but if I had a £1 for every profile that is missing a photo or missing a large chunks of career and educational history I wouldn’t be on LinkedIn. What’s even worse is people that include the companies they’ve worked for but then only include a few words of description about what they actually did there. While a complete profile won’t win you business directly, if I’ve had you or your business recommended to me I’d want to see that you care enough about what you do to fill out your profile. More importantly if I’m checking you out for a particular role I want to know what you did for a company, not just what their name was.
Time taken: 1 hour
2. Make a group for your business.
Yes you can create a profile for your business but I’m sure you’ll agree they are a little basic and nothing more than a stats page for your company and a sign post to it’s employees profiles. Groups on the other hand are full blown communities where anyone can post links, news items and form and participate in discussions. Most importantly your groups logo or picture will appear on the profile of everyone that joins to show their connection with the group. So create a group, invite all your staff, stakeholders and customers and generate some discussion, you can even go further and post your blog posts in there. Then (hopefully) next time someone stumbles across your group they’ll find you an engaging and proactive business, who wouldn’t want to work with one of those.
3. Recommend.
In  my opinion the first of two of the most powerful features on LinkedIn. Recommendations allow you to write a paragraph or two supporting one of your contacts present or previous jobs. It might seem time consuming but karma goes around and etiquette dictates that most of time they will write you one back. Worth it? Yes, its all well and good you bigging up your skills and past work achievements, but why not have your boss/clients/co-workers confirm it all. LinkedIn reward you by putting a thumbs up against your name and guess what, if I’m looking for a partner to work with, 10 thumbs is going to stand out a lot more than 1.
4. … and refer.
The second of the most powerful features in my opinion. It’s happened to most businesses mine included, someone will call, a friend of a client thats been told how good we are. Great it’s business that you haven’t worked for but is often down to blind luck. LinkedIn makes it slighly easier. When you visit the profile page of anyone you’ll see some options on the top right corner. One will be ‘Forward this profile to a connection’. Click it and you’ll find you can send the profile to any one (or more) of your connections. So if you’ve got connections you think would work well together, why not hook them up, it’s what makes the world go round.
5. Get introduced.
When looking at search results you might have seen numbers next to profiles, 1st, 2nd or 3rd. This is LinkedIn telling you that you have a mutual line of connection. If it’s first it means your connected already. If it’s a 2nd it means you share a mutual friend, if it’s a 3rd it means they’re a friend of a friend of a friend (lost yet?). If you’re looking to get in touch with one of these people with a number and you don’t have any way in yourself, use your mutual connections to get you there. Go to there profile and with the links in the top right corner you’ll see a link “Get introduced through a connection”. Click on this and you’ll be able to write a message to the person you want to connect with and a note to your mutual connection. The request will then head on its way, via your mutual connection and with any luck you’ll be in contact in no time.
6. Just get involved.
Get involved, join groups, answer questions, follow discussions, post news articles, update your status, just be active. People need to know what you do, know you take it seriously and know that you know what you’re talking about. By doing all of the above you’ll prove just this. A casual answer to a qustion posted in a group led to one of my biggest clients recently and a simple status update led to message from someone who’s become a key supplier on one of my projects. At the time I didn’t think either would lead to anything but I’m certainly glad I did. Even if you spend ours a week participating with no response all you need is that one new client to make it worth it.
Hopefully the above will be helpful for you, if anyone cares to add their own comments or suggestions please do so.

‘Facebook for professionals’, ‘an online CV’. There are just a couple of phrases I’ve heard to describe LinkedIn. For some people that’s all LinkedIn is and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’ll admit that when I first signed up, being an entrepreneur, I had no need for anyone to see my CV or hire me and thought of socialising on the site was pretty unappealing seeing as I could do a much better job in real life.

That said I chipped away at it, a few hours a week at the start until fast forward 3 months and I have to drag myself away on a daily basis. I’m happy to say I’ve found both clients and partners that I’d never have known existed without LinkedIn.

With that in mind I thought I would share with people some of the things that have worked for me.

1. Take time to fill out your profile.

It sounds silly but if I had a £1 for every profile that is missing a photo or missing a large chunks of career or educational history I wouldn’t be on LinkedIn. What’s even worse is people that include the companies they’ve worked for but then only include a few words of description about what they actually did there.  If I’m checking you out for a particular role I want to know what you did for a company, not just what their name was and that you care enough about what you do to have a complete profile.

2. Make a group for your business.

Company profiles are nothing more than a signpost to who works there. Groups on the other hand are full blown communities where anyone can post links, news items and form and participate in discussions. Most importantly your group’s logo or picture will appear on the profile of everyone that joins. So create a group, invite all your staff, stakeholders and customers and generate some discussion, you can even go further and copy your blog posts in there. Then (hopefully) next time someone stumbles across your group they’ll find you an engaging and proactive business, who wouldn’t want to work with one of those?

3. Recommend.

In  my opinion the first of two of the most powerful features on LinkedIn. Recommendations allow you to write a paragraph or two supporting one of your contacts present or past jobs. It might seem time consuming but karma goes around and etiquette dictates that most of time they’ll write you one back. Worth it? Yes, it’s all well and good you bigging up your own skills and past work achievements, but why not have your boss/clients/co-workers confirm it all? LinkedIn even rewards you by putting a thumbs up against your name, nice!

4. … and refer.

The second of the most powerful features in my opinion. Friend of a friend referrals in real life are nice but often down to luck. LinkedIn makes it slighly easier. When you visit the profile page of anyone you’ll see some options on the top right corner. One will be ‘Forward this profile to a connection’. Click it and you’ll find you can send the profile to any one (or more) of your connections. So if you’ve got connections you think would work well together, why not hook them up, they might do the same for you.

5. Get introduced.

When looking at search results you might have seen numbers next to profiles, 1st, 2nd or 3rd. This is LinkedIn telling you that you have a mutual line of connection. If it’s 1st it means your connected already. If it’s a 2nd it means you share a mutual friend, if it’s a 3rd it means they’re a friend of a friend of a friend (lost yet?). Go to their profile and with the links in the top right corner you’ll see a link “Get introduced through a connection”. Follow the instructions and you request will then head on its way, via your mutual connection and with any luck you’ll be in contact in no time.

If anyone wants help setting up on LinkedIn or has any questions please email andrew@moveaheaddesign.com or call on 0871 662 9109.

Posted in Industry | No Comments »

New Kent Round One websites launches.

October 23rd, 2009

Move Ahead Design, working with the University of Kent is happy to announce the launch of the new Kent Round One website – www.kentroundone.co.uk

We started working with the University in March 2008. They approached us looking to develop and brand a website that could provide a central location for students to find out information about training and support workshops offered by various departments at the University, along with information on volunteering, work experience and placements abroad.

We launched the first version of the website in September 2008 and produced a range of posters, flyers and postcards to help promote the service. The service was a success with students and received over 2,000 visits during the year.

Wanting to build on the website we worked with the University again in to add an event booking system and improved the design and layout of the website. In addition we will be developing and sending a regular newsletter to website subscribers and creating an interactive Facebook page to take full advantage of the social universe.

Speaking before the the launch, Tracy Crowther, Student Enterprise Manager at the University of Kent said, “Employability is a key issue. Employers expect a great academic degree but to stand out, students need to offer more. Kent Round One brings together all those employability and enterprise opportunities that we offer at the University of Kent. I’m looking forward to the launch of the new site with the brand new look and events page, highlighting all the exciting and various events that we have on offer for 2009/2010.”

The websites  is the first of it’s kind for UK universities and after the successful launch in early October, Andrew Davison, Managing Director of Move Ahead Design said, “We were excited about the potential of this project when we first started working on it last year. To get the chance to now push the site to its full potential is amazing. Making it easy for students to get involved in CV, career and enterprise training is hugely important and from a technical point of view we want this site to be a benchmark for other universities to follow“.

The work has only begun with this site and we’ll keep you all updated on it’s success.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in New Clients | 1 Comment »