The Twitter “Black Hole”

I was recently putting together a presentation on Employer Branding when I ran across what I would like to call the Twitter “Black Hole”.  Many companies are using Twitter for posting jobs as part of their employer branding strategy which makes perfect sense.  However, Employer Branding is about how you look to the outside world.

On Twitter, there are 3 visual ways that will help you with this Employer Branding.  There is of course, the profile picture.  Getting rid of the “egg” as a profile picture is a basic step that everyone has conquered.  Having a personalized good background is another visual that a lot of companies have mastered, but when it comes to the Twitter “cover” picture (Header), that has been lost in translation. A missed opportunity to make a statement.  Or are you sending your candidates into a black hole?

This phenomenon is not only showing in recruitment and employer branding accounts but also on many corporate accounts.  Why?  I think it is more about ignorance that inability.  Some organizations are doing it right as shown below.

Having a great cover picture (Header)  on your profile is a great asset as we all know since a picture says more than a thousand words. The picture should say something about you or the type of company that you are.  Like on Facebook there are creative ways to make use of this picture as shown below.

Next step?

Time to update your 3 Twitter visuals and brand your account.  Knowing the dimension of these picture is key, so here are the dimensions for your reference:

Twitter profile picture: 81 x 81 pixels (Max 2MB)

Header picture: 520 x 260 pixels (Max. 5MB)

Background picture: 1600 x 1200 pixels (Max. 2MB)

Have you seen any creative use of pictures on Twitter profiles?  Let me know!

The War of The Ecosystems

Toen in de eerste helft van 2011 Stephen Elop, de CEO van Nokia, aankondigde dat Windows Phone het nieuwe smartphone besturingssysteem van de Finse fabrikant zou worden, vertelde hij erbij dat hij verwachtte dat dit het derde Ecosysteem zou worden in de toekomst. Wat bedoelde hij eigenlijk?

Ecosysteem?!?

Vroeger was het leven eenvoudig. U kocht een mobiele telefoon en een SIM-kaart en kon daarmee bellen en SMS’en. Het merk van die telefoon was allesbepalend in uw gebruikservaring. Die tijden zijn echter voorbij. Wij gebruiken nu meer en meer smartphones en tablets die draaien op een volwaardig besturingssysteem. Bij deze toestellen is eigenlijk het merk niet meer de bepalende factor. Ondertussen is dat het besturingssysteem geworden met alle mogelijkheden, apps en gerelateerde diensten. De twee belangrijkste ecosystemen zijn Apple met iOS en heel het iCloud-gebeuren, en Google met Android en alle bijhorende Gmail diensten.

Android heeft momenteel een marktaandeel van ruim 70% van de smartphonemarkt, terwijl iOS met de iPhone schommelt tussen 15 en 20%. Op de tabletmarkt heeft de iPad een marktaandeel van ruim twee derde, terwijl Android-tablets de rest van de markt innemen maar langzaamaan aan een inhaalslag bezig zijn. Apple en Google proberen te bereiken dat de gebruikers van hun besturingssysteem uiteindelijk ook gebruik gaan maken van de extra diensten die ze erbij krijgen. Dat zijn vooral Contacten en Agenda, die allen perfect via de internetverbinding van de toestellen zullen synchroniseren en natuurlijk ook diverse cloud-opslag voor het opslaan van allerhande bestanden zoals foto’s en documenten.

De bedoeling is de klant zodanig te verstrengelen met die diensten, dus met hun ecosysteem, dat die in de toekomst bijna niet anders meer kan dan dat ecosysteem trouw te blijven. Klantenbinding! Zowel Google als Apple lijken daar aardig in te lukken…

Wat met BlackBerry en Microsoft?!?

Zeer recent heeft BlackBerry de nieuwste versie van haar besturingssysteem voorgesteld. De nadruk lag daar vooral op de gebruikservaring en niet zozeer op de toegevoegde diensten, die uiteindelijk toch in de eerste plaats op de bedrijfswereld zijn gericht. Voor de particuliere klant heeft BlackBerry eigenlijk niet echt onderscheidende diensten meer aan te bieden, die hem kunnen binden aan het BlackBerry ecosysteem. Bij Microsoft ligt dat echter helemaal anders.

Reeds zeer veel mensen beschikken over een Hotmail of een Live account. Dat is onlangs omgeschakeld naar Outlook.com maar uw oude adressen zullen wel actief blijven. Net als bij Google kunt u als particuliere klant niet alleen uw email bij Microsoft laten synchroniseren, maar ook uw contacten en uw agenda, naast niet te onderschatten andere gratis diensten als bijvoorbeeld Skydrive of OneNote. Met de introductie van Windows 8 als nieuwe besturingssysteem voor PC’s en Windows Phone 8 voor smartphones, heeft Microsoft een sterke combinatie op de markt gebracht. De innovatieve tegelinterface (Modern UI) is zeer intuïtief en gericht op de trend dat binnenkort bijna alles met aanraakschermen zal werken. Kortom, Microsoft heeft eigenlijk alle wapens ter beschikking om een succes te worden op de mobiele markt, maar eigenaardig genoeg blijft dat succes uit.

Uitdagingen in de toekomst

Op dit moment heeft Android zonder twijfel de sterkste kaarten in handen om nog een hele tijd de onbetwiste leider te blijven in deze oorlog van de ecosystemen. De grote hoeveelheid verschillende Android toestellen van diverse fabrikanten in zowat alle prijsklassen zal de overgrote meerderheid van de klanten blijven lokken. Het besturingssysteem is nog in volle ontwikkeling en zal nog diverse belangrijke verbeteringen ontvangen. Maar de Google synchronisatiemogelijkheden zullen tegen einde 2013 enkel nog volledig werken op Android toestellen.

Bij Apple is het altijd al zo geweest dat volledige synchronisatie enkel op de eigen iOS apparaten mogelijk is. Hun probleem is dat iOS ondertussen in vergelijking met de concurrentie bijna saai begint aan te voelen. Het zijn voor het grootste deel de apps die de klanten blijven lokken, niet zozeer het besturingssysteem.

Tenslotte kan Microsoft de beste troeven voorleggen op vlak van innovatie en aanvullende diensten, maar wordt dit eigenaardig genoeg door de markt niet zo ervaren. Hierdoor lijken de verkoopsuccessen uit te blijven, hoewel het natuurlijk nog afwachten is. Het platform is nog jong en zal slechts met zeer veel moeite kunnen opboksen tegen het geweld van Google.

Corporate Social Media Amplified!

One of trends for 2013 will be “Amplification”. The times that companies and people rely on asking others to redistribute their posts and messages is over.  Just like with email, you as a fan are getting too many messages and notifications (many of you are turning them off) and thus ignoring these requests.

As more and more of the employees are becoming active on social media, companies are realizing that they are low hanging fruit when it comes to brand ambassadorship.  They want to enlist them as ambassadors and are setting up awareness sessions in the hope these employees will actually help spread the word.  .

Companies are also looking for new ways to get their messages promoted. Help is on the way in form of Social Media Amplification Applications.  The concept is simple: Leverage employees, partners, customers and fans to share your company’s social media messages on your behalf.  The objective is to drive traffic to websites, campaign or blogs to generate leads.

How does it work?

Step 1: Find amplication application

There are a number of these applications available today.  I predict that there will be more coming in 2013.  GaggleAMP, SocialSeeder, Spread.US and Socialtoaster are in the forefront today.  For more details, see below.

Step 2: Recruit fans

You will invite and recruit fans, influencers and employees to join your distribution community.  You might have to implement some form of gamification (2^nd trends for 2013) in order for them to join your circle of amplifiers.

Step 3: Create Messages

Create the content you want to get distributed through the community. And make it easy for your amplifiers to distribute it in their social networks

Step 4: Amplication Process

The amplification application will inform by email (or other forms) your community there are messages ready for distribution.  The amplifiers then can select which messages they distribute in which social network.

Step 5: Monitor & analyze

As with any campaign, you need to monitor the process, analyze the results and fine-tune your next steps. Continue to engage your community of amplifiers.

Who are some players?

GaggleAMP, US based company, is the social marketing platform that lets companies amplify their social media reach by leveraging individual employees, customers and partners. (source GaggleAMP)

GaggleAMP empowers a company’s stakeholders (both internal and external – employees, customers, constituents etc.) to promote synchronized messages across social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Users can share these messages on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn automatically, by e-mail notification or from the website thus giving the user full control of what is getting shared where.  The gamification option makes this tool more engaging.

In addition to the message amplification, GaggleAMP provides a myriad of unique analytics about how the messages perform in the various social media networks including message reach, clicks, comments, Likes, shares, re-tweets and more.

Pricing starts at $25/month for 50 messages shared.  There is a 7 day free trail period.

SocialSeeder, a Belgian company, unlocks the power of your true influencers.

As a company tapping into the potential of social media your holy grail is to find and identify super influencers to quickly spread news and create a buzz on new products & services.

SocialSeeder facilitates employees, clients, fans, partners & other influencers to seed the messages you want to bring across via social media and allows to measure the impact in full detail through a personalised dashboard. (Source – SocialSeeder).

SocialSeeder, is focusing on Social Media Campaigns.  You start by creating your list of amplifiers (Influencers & Ambassadors).  You follow this up with the creation of campaign which will result in an email being created where you ask the amplifiers to distribute via the networks of their choice (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ or even email). The user has full control of which message gets distributed where.

A comprehensive number of statistics are available to both track each amplifier and message amplification by platform and hits.

Pricing starts at 25€ per campaign/month.

SocialToaster, a US based company, allows an organization to recruit supporters to help automatically create word-of-mouth referrals and traffic through Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. (Source – Socialtoaster).

SocialToaster amplifies corporate messaging on brands’ social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn), proving that there is immense value in social media engagement. Loyal fans of a brand called ‘Super Fans’ are mobilized with an email whenever the brand has blog postings, events, articles, or promotions for them to promote. With just one click, Super Fans share the brand’s content with peers across all of their selected social networking sites. The visibility of the message increases exponentially as the content is shared. (Source Socialtoaster)

Socialtoaster allows you to run in the cloud and on your own servers.  Other interesting features are gamification and viral recruitment formulas.

Pricing starts at $399/month.

Spread.us, US based company, is a twitter-only tool that allows you to promote campaigns and blog posts. It enables website readers to automatically share and distribute newly published content from their favorite content or blog on Twitter. (source: Spread.us).

First you enlist the support of your supporters by inviting them.  You then create the perfect tweet which will get distributed automatically via their accounts.  Then you track the performance of the post through a number of statistics.  The biggest drawback of this tool is the lack of control on the user’s side.  Opting out is the list only option for the end user to stop tweets being posted through his/her account.

Pricing starts at $0 for up to 5 subscribers.  Between 6 to 25 subscribers (fans) you will pay $4/month with variable pricing if fans increase or decrease.

I am sure there are other programs out there.  So if you know of any please let me know and I will add them in my next review cycle.

What are your thoughts on these applications?  Good thing or not?

I look forward to your reactions, comments, feedback and input.

Participation – Amplification – Gamification

This is the time when everyone creates a list of things that were or things that will be.  Normally, I do not participate in this ritual but this year I  can’t stop myself.  The reason being that the lists I am seeing are so out there in terms of predictions that I want to bring back to pragmatism to 2013.  I see 5 major trends for 2013 and here they are!

Participation - Now that Facebook has reached over 1 billion members, it is fair to assume that in Belgium we will round the cape of 5 million in 2013.  With LinkedIn having 187 million users, we will pass the 1.5 million users in Belgium in 2013.  However, I am predicting a boom of twitter usage in Belgium with thanks to the traditional media. Inspirational is the radio with programs such as #hautekiet or #touché, TV with the hashtag #7dag or #SODD, and traditional magazines such as Flair, Humo and many more.  Slowly they are driving consumers to Twitter and thus comes the explosion of number of users.  I think we could be looking at 2.5 million accounts with 1 million active users by the end of the year.

Amplification - Many companies are setting up company accounts on social media but they are struggling to get the following they would like to have.  However, they are forgetting the “untapped potential” they are sitting on.  A fair amount of their employees is active on social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) during and after working hours (survey Vanguard Leadership October 2012).  Unfortunately, they rarely follow, like or support their company on social media.  And these would be the best ambassadors for your company.  Remember the old days when they were motivated to recommend their company to their friends in the real world…

Companies are taking notice and we are seeing that large companies are running “awareness sessions” for their employees with a number of goals in mind: provide information about the general use of social media, explain the social media policy but mostly to ask employees to become social media ambassadors for their companies.  This leads to another trends for 2013, the introduction of social media “amplification software”.  These software packages will allow companies to post messages on the corporate accounts, inform their employees, ambassadors and influencers about these messages and have them re-distributed by their employees, ambassadors and influencers.  Tap into the “untapped potential“.

Gamification = Even though this word has been on the lips of many, I think 2013 is the year when it will become real.  The gaming techniques will find their way in which we use social media, learn, or do business.  Today the emphasis  lies on badges, mayorships, free goods, etc. but the evolution is going to be quick and innovative.  A true revolution in the making.

So the biggest challenge for companies in 2013 is how their are going to use awareness building  to inspire their employees’ participation to social media to become ambassadors and amplify the corporate messages using a number of gamification schemes.

How far on this journey are you today?

Finally, I want to wish you all a Merry Christmas!