A Tweet is not a LinkedIn Status Update
I was recently forced to delete one of my LinkedIn connections. Why?
I like to follow the LinkedIn status updates posted by my connections. They inform me about big projects they work on, about seminars they visit, about job changes and other career-related events. Until recently I was happily following these updates from my iPhone.
That is, until LinkedIn decided to offer a connection between its status update and Twitter. One of the usage scenarios – a Tweet with #in is passed to LinkedIn as status update – makes perfect sense. Once in while you tweet something that is worthwhile knowing for your LinkedIn connections as well: just add #in and you’re done. The second usage scenario however – all Tweets are passed to LinkedIn as status update – turns out to be a pain for those following status updates using the iPhone LinkedIn app. In fact, it just turns into a useless copy of Twitter. You have to wade through 20 Tweets of person X before encountering a single LinkedIn status update of another person, and then another 17 Tweets of the same person X before encountering the next. As people say on Twitter: #fail.
Apart from this practical issue, it usually doesn’t make sense to connect Twitter one-on-one with your LinkedIn status. LinkedIn gives me the career overview of my connections. Careers develop relatively slowly, and so status updates are relatively sparse. That is a completely different model than Twitter, where the update frequency is typically much higher.
So, to be able to see status updates of all my connections on the iPhone LinkedIn app (and not just Tweets from person X) I had to delete the connection. Which makes me very curious: how do you handle this?
Social networking is so full of…tricks.
Social networking is a hype. Say what? Arguing this is like swimming upstream in the flow of twittering linkedin facebookies. But what’s the alternative? Going with the flow, creating or applying yet another Top-10 of Do’s or Don’ts for This or That Social Platform?
There was a time when a bunch of creative and visionary people started playing with social networking concepts. In no time they became the center of attention, with lots of followers, and were able to make a living out of it. Such entrepeneurs still exist but the majority of people involved with social networking nowadays are followers and copycats. That’s fine, but unfortunately many seem to believe social networking is just another bag of tricks.
Take for example the authenticity “trick”. The first CEO’s, Vice Presidents, Support Engineers and R&D Managers that started blogging and twittering in an authentic way introduced a new kind of marketing based on intimacy, conversation and trust. The genuine posts written by those early adopters were read and believed by many potential customers, positively influencing sales figures.
Soon this was picked up by marketeers, massively adopting the new authentic marketing channel (where’s the authenticity in that?). And so it became a trick. In a recent Dutch radio campaign various employees of PricewaterhouseCoopers address the listener and talk about potentially interesting subjects. The point is, however, that these scripts are so obviously produced by a large marketing department trying to imitate authenticity that it is hilarious at best. What started off as spontaneous personal outings has become an industry of professionals offering their customers to help with their authentic advertising. Sounds like a contradiction in terms to me.
Yes, we at Driving the Vortex do read the lists of Top-10 tips about social networking. Then when visiting a customer we forget about it completely and listen to the unique challenges facing them. And if our unique solution involves social networking of some kind (and they often do), then we might apply some of the techniques often encountered as tips. But only to improve the chance of success for our customer, not as a trick upfront.
Social networking en crowdsourcing tijdens DIS 2009
Vorige week heb ik de DIS 2009 bezocht, oftewel de Dutch Innovation Seminar die in het teken stond van de impact van social networking op organisaties. Algemene indruk: leuke workshops en een betrokken publiek.
De plenaire sessie begon met een praatje van Menno Lanting. Hij was wel vermakelijk maar verder dan algemeenheden kwam het helaas niet. Enne… LinkedIn uitspreken als “linkut-in” was waarschijnlijk onbedoeld grappig.
Monique van Maare, de volgende spreker, gaf inzicht in de sociale keuken van IBM. Het meest interessante uit haar praatje waren de Innovation Jams: real-life voorbeelden van ideasourcing.
Maar de laatste spreker, Bert Mulder, stal wat mij betreft toch wel de show. Met een, mij zeer aansprekende, nuchtere benadering van wat toch wel een hype genoemd mag worden veegde hij de vloer aan met de jubeltaal die zo vaak gebruikt wordt als het over social networking gaat. Van marktwerking en innovatie in de zorg naar neuzelaars, vertellers en netwerkers. Bert zet haarscherp neer hoe bestaande sociale netwerken zoals LinkedIn en Facebook misschien ondersteunende technologie kunnen zijn, maar dat de werkelijke sociale netwerken veel ongrijpbaarder zijn. Bekijk zijn presentatie hier.
Na deze plenaire sessies kwamen de parallelle workshops aan bod. Erg jammer dat je maar naar 2 workshops kon gaan. Er zaten veel interessante tussen, en zelfs de minder interessante werden boeiend door de discussies die ontstonden.
De discussies die mij het meeste bij zijn gebleven:
- Welke kansen heeft de gemeente Amsterdam laten liggen door binnen30minuten zo traditioneel op te zetten en geen ruimte te geven voor echte interactie?
- Wat is de definitie van crowdsourcing?
Deze laatste discussie heeft me nogal verwonderd want wat maakt het uit hoe je het precies definieert als het maar duidelijk omschreven is wat je doel is en hoe je er komt?
Kortom een geslaagd event van de Baak, met een mooie verscheidenheid aan sprekers en bezoekers. Was je zelf ook bezoeker en wat vond jij ervan?
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