Whether you see it this way or not, basketball is a game of strategy, leadership and engagement. This is why March Madness is doubly exciting; it's not only one of the United States' biggest annual sporting events, it's also a unique public display of something we don't see that often, which is teams working together and achieving greatness as a result of a
The recent decision by Marissa Mayer to abolish telecommuting at Yahoo has sparked a firestorm of criticism and debate in social media platforms and executive suites, and put a spotlight on the increasingly accepted practice of virtual work. You can review a good summary of the polemic here. Certainly, at first glance the policy change seems to go against prevailing workplace trends and HR logic – where maximized work-life balance fosters more happy, productive employees.
So many people look at or hear the words social media and immediately imagine Tweens chatting and college kids sharing photos of their partying debacles on Facebook. If you haven’t figured it out already; there’s a lot more to social media than that.
Social media is now a part of any savvy business model. Companies and organizations can use it to up their revenues and to increase their means of communication and networking between other businesses.
We came across a great post on SCORE, which outlines four easy to understand facts about social media best practices. We love that out of the millions of tips for utilizing social media to its highest potential, SCORE picked these. They’re completely foolproof and offer anyone an easy intro into using social media and looking savvy at doing so. Without further adieu, we present you with SCORE’s four facts for social media use:
1. Provide promotions or coupons on your Facebook page; more people will Like it if you do so
Via SCORE: According to this RocketMedia infographic, a majority of a business’ Facebook fans were originally attracted to hitting the “Like” button because they thought doing so would get them special deals or promotions.
2. Launch campaigns mid-week
Via SCORE: Although most campaigns are deployed on Fridays, the amount of actual social media engagement peaked the most on Tuesdays (engagement fares the worst on Fridays). Although the study wasn’t conclusive on why this is so, you could use common sense to deduce that most people are more-or-less gearing up for “weekend” mode on Fridays and they’re probably spending more time on confirming dinner plans than on a shop’s website.
3. Make blog posts about 450 words
Via SCORE: Three to five paragraphs seems to be the “sweet-spot” length for blog posts that get shared more often than their shorter or longer counterparts.
4. If you’re going to post to Facebook once a day — post between 1 and 4 p.m.
We’ve noticed different statistics; posting in the a.m. around 9 or p.m. around 4-5 seems to work for us — but the amount of clicks you’ll get really varies depending on your audience. Our best advice is that you should try different times out and see what gets the most engagement from your users!
Photo Thanks To: SocialMediaOnlineClasses
We’re always interested in ways to improve our work quality — and, perhaps more importantly, our enjoyment while on the job. Today we came across an article on Entrepreneur.com titled 4 Ways to Discover Your Strengths and it was so fantastic that we had to (while giving Entrepreneur.com ample credit for having written it!) share it on Look-Solutions for all to see. Here’s what Entrepreneur says are the four ways to rekindle, better understand or simply kindle your strengths:
1. Watch for signs of excitement. When you engage in an activity you are truly good at, your excitement is visible. Your pupils dilate, your chest is broader, your speech is fast and fluid, and your arms spread wider. “You can see someone feels alive and motivated when they’re using a core strength,” Kashdan says.
Ask a close mentor when you appear most animated or observe yourself for a day. When do you feel most engaged? Most energized? “When people are using their strengths, they pop out of the backdrop,” Kashdan says.
(If observation sounds tricky, you can also take an online survey, like the VIA Character Strengths Test to help you identify and rank your greatest strengths.)
2. Break away from job titles. To uncover your gifts, you need to explore new roles. “Think of your company as a laboratory,” Kashdan says. Encourage flexible roles and see how it goes. “If people are excited about trying something else and you have some evidence that they could be good, then experiment with it,” he says.
For example, one executive wanted a more creative, innovative workplace but wasn’t the man to do it himself. Kashdan helped him identify a maverick on his staff — someone creative and unconcerned with others’ opinions — then put that person in charge of innovation. By assigning roles based on strengths, rather than job titles, they were able to create a stronger team.
3. Notice what you do differently than everyone else. In a situation where you are truly using your strengths, you will stand out from a crowd. Your approach will be unique. To name your strengths, you want to identify those moments and articulate how you are different.
Kashdan recalls one executive at an early morning meeting who told an animated story about letting his kids run free at a crowded aquarium. “His focus was not on safety but on promotion,” Kashdan says, highlighting a support for autonomy that would help him manage independent workers.
4. Describe your strengths creatively. When naming your strengths, avoid what Kashdan calls “wastebasket terms,” meaning overused words like ‘passionate’ or ‘dedicated.’ Instead, come up with a unique term that captures your specific strength.
“By coming up with an exciting word, you avoid all the typical connotations,” Kashdan says. He uses terms like storyteller, autonomy supporter, investigator, energy incubator, and battery. That specificity helps leaders apply their gifts. “Once you can put a word to your strengths, it becomes much more embedded in your everyday life,” he says.
A recent war of words – played out on the Web between Gawker and Reddit - was only the latest example of the argument surrounding the right approach for screening comments on the Intranet. In this case, the folks at Gawker helped to out one of the most notorious trolls on Reddit, which is a popular hangout for anonymous users who like to push the envelope on what is appropriate content.
The history of email may be short (just a mere 41 years long, in fact), but it’s come such a long way in that time that it’s worth noting. It’s also worth learning about considering that it consumes such a big portion of our everyday lives. Think about it: How many emails do you send a day? How many emails do you receive? According to an article on Mashable, email comprises 28 percent of our workday.
With all of that said, here’s the 41-year history of email as we know it:
1971: U.S. programmer Raymond Tomlinson allegedly sent “QWERTYUIOP” as the first network email, and he was the first to connect his computer to his mailbox by using an “@” symbol.
1977: Tomlinson’s emailing method worked for networked computers using the same software, but many people began using the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPA) to connect outside networks.
1981: The American Standard Code for Information Interchange adopted a process of letters, punctuation and symbols to digitally store information.
1985: Government and military employees, students and academic professionals were common email users in the mid-1980s.
1991: ISPs allow widespread Internet access, but there were limited options for use until Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1991.
1998: “Spam” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary after its growth in the mid-1990s — not to be confused with the 3.8 cans of Spam consumed every second in the U.S.
1991: Astronauts Shannon Lucid and James C. Adamson sent the first email from space on a Macintosh Portable: “Hello Earth! Greetings from the STS-43 Crew. This is the first AppleLink from space. Having a GREAT time, wish you were here,…send cryo and RCS! Hasta la vista, baby,…we’ll be back!”
1993: IDM and BellSouth marketed the first PDA-functioning 20-ounce cellphone, which sold for $900 and served as a phone, calculator, fax, email device and pager.
1997: Microsoft purchased Hotmail for approximately $400 million.
1998: The romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail, starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, hit theaters (and thewebsite’s still live).
2003: The RIM 850 and 857 original BlackBerry smartphones were released, revolutionizing the mobile platform by concentrating on email.
2004: President George W. Bush signed the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 into law, which gained criticism for its lack of action against spammers.
2008: President Barack Obama became the first president to use mobile email and admit his addiction to his BlackBerry, and despite security concerns, he currently uses it in office.
2011: A study finds the worst email passwords are password and 123456. Others worthy of note: QWERTY, monkey and letmein. The password 123456 was also found to be the most common passwordduring a 2012 email hack.
2012: There are more than 3 billion email accounts across the globe, and approximately 294 billion emails are sent per day. Roughly 78% of them are spam.
Thanks to Mashable for finding this article!
Photo Thanks To: RambergMediaImages
In the big scheme of things, social media is still relatively new. And so, people frequently ask us here at Look-Solutions: “What exactly is the purpose of Twitter? I don’t get it.” Inadvertently, we find ourselves staging impromptu lectures on what the purpose of a site like Twitter really is. And when awesome examples of Twitter’s true power show up in the media, we’re sure to share those.
One such example is this one, as written about on Good: students at a public school in suburban Pittsburgh are staging a sit-in style protest to the crappy food they’re being served (at a higher cost) in their cafeteria via Twitter. How so? Here’s the rundown from Good:
Instead of launching a cafeteria sit-in or school walkout over school lunches, students in the Plum Borough School District in suburban Pittsburgh are proving that all it takes to stage an effective protest is a smartphone and Twitter. The price of a lunch has risen to $2.50, and students say they’re not going to pay more for lower quality food. The social media savvy high schoolers have pledged to boycott the cafeteria food and bring a sack lunch from home. They’re using the hashtag#BrownBagginIt to let the world know why.
One student named Will tweeted yesterday, “everybody in plum who is in elementary to high school start #BrownBagginit to protest against the district high prices and low quality food.” The volume of tweets with the hashtag made the protest one of the city’s trending topics on Twitter.
What’s interesting is that instead of a typical sit-in or protest, a hash-tagged campaign via Twitter has the power to reach many more people, and to become much more widespread in terms of its sharing capacity.
Photo Thanks To: kmakice
Who remembers the Time of Day Lady?
Who can recall the number that you could call to hear a woman’s recorded voice state that “at the tone, Pacific Daylight Time will be . . .” with the recording automatically updating at 10-second intervals?
Trivia: It was effective September 2007, “Time of Day “information service was discontinued in Southern California.
So let us know if you remember ?
Let’s just start with this: the man who illustrates the cityscape in this video is amazingly talented. Watch (and feel your jaw drop) as he effortlessly illustrates the lower half of New York City in a time-lapsed one and a half minutes.
As communication consultants we have been “prousting” that brands need to provide directed content to their clients that will provide an engagement experience versus the need for brands to get that Like. I can’t begin to tell you the amount of heated dialog this consultant and a few of my colleagues have had with clients surrounding the fact that Likes don’t really move your brand and that interactions are key. So we have been very excited to see that brands have moved from looking at follower counts to focusing on interactions. The good news is that getting more interactions is pretty simple: Post more (good content). The bad news: It takes a lot of people to do this well.
A new study from social CRM player Spredfast found that for each message that a brand posts on social media, it gets 400 interactions from consumers on average. The study, which looked at 154 companies with average social bases of 1.8 million, found top-performing brands are now publishing 4,900 messages on average (per quarter), with an average engagement of 2 million interactions.
“These messages, or social content, each provide new opportunities for audiences to engage with social brands,” said Jim Rudden, CMO of Spredfast. “While quantity doesn’t equal quality, our Social Engagement Index shows that as brands increase contributors, groups and activity, their external engagement rises disproportionally.”
So what does this mean? Brands need to hire real social teams, not just a fresh-out-of-school kid to “do the Facebook and the Twitter.” In fact, top-performing brands i.e., Nordstorms— based on social structure, configuration and activity — have 21-30 people participating in social programs within the organization. Brands have had to move rapidly beyond the time when one social manager or even a small social media team is expected to own all social activity.
The big question is: How does one move to driving interactions? Brands need to publish content that followers want to interact with and use the right social media platform to drive that interaction. A recent client published an average of 55 times per day on Twitter versus 18 times on Facebook. Facebook yielded 580 interactions per message compared to 50 per Tweet; knowing your data is key.
What is the take away? Think twice! Create a well-planned, well-managed program that allows for your brand and/or organization to connect internal resources with social customers, coordinate internally to ensure the right messages are being distributed to the correct people and accounts and that all this can be pulled together in a meaningful way. Then be certain that all of those who touch your messaging are clearly aligned and working to achieve the goal of the brand or the specific interaction you are trying to drive.
