The evolution of the LinkedIn Homepage

During the 10 years history of LinkedIn their homepage have had very different kind of looks. Do you still remember some of them?

Evolution of the LinkedIn Homepage from LinkedIn

How can a researcher use social media?

I was asked if social media is good for researchers. Well of course! (And what else can I say as a researcher and as a social media holic?)

Source: uef.fi via Johanna on Pinterest

While I was thinking about the issue from my own point of view (I started a LinkedIn group for Finnish social media researchers last year and have got a lot of useful information from that) I found out a web page by University of Eastern Finland. They had lots of good hints on it so I wanted to translate some of the stuff for my own blog too.

Many of the tools in social media are free of charge for universities and specialists


True. But I add a warning: even if they are free now, it does not mean they remain free of charge in the future too. Keep in mind too that the services may disappear any day if they are profitable for the service provider.

With social media tools you can co-operate with people from different organizations without the mess of account bureaucracy

Yes. E.g. in Yammer you can have a secret group for your project people, invited by their emails.

You can reach useful tools that help working that your own employer do not provide

E.g. on my university laptop the only picture editing tool is Paint and I am not allowed to add e.g. GIMP that I am otherwise using - I lack the admin rights to my computer. However with help of Sumo Paint I can do some picture editing in the net without installing the software.

Get visibility for you and your research – build your web identity (expert brand)

The brand goes to two-ways - it is good for the university's reputation that it has researchers valued in social media networks while it is also good for the researchers themselves if their employer is seen as valued organization. So both are needed. The more links the university pages are get from social media the more they are valued by the search engines too.

Collaboration and networking
•Find the researcher community of your own field
•See e.g. services like LinkedIn, LeMill, Mendeley (sharing pdf’s) and ResearchGate.

Source: lemill.net via Johanna on Pinterest

ResearchGate is like LinkedIn but for researchers.
Xing is the professional network in German-speaking area. LeMill is started in Finland for sharing sharing open educational resources but it is maintained in English

In these groups you can ask ideas for good sources, tell about good conferences, get visibility to your publications and your projects. Maybe you get funding, maybe new projects or coworkers. You never know what can happen when you let the social media do its wonders!

Rich communication enabled by the tools (e.g. chats and video chat) gives you more presence in your interactions – all over the world and with help of instant messaging and Skype you can reduce the amount of emails - and phone costs.

I love the way Skype is working for groups of about 10 people. You can ask an opinion from your colleagues and the one who is online answers you. The others can go through the discussion when they are online too and add comments if needed.

In social tools it is easy to co-write, save and share documents, edit and share the pictures and use picture databases

The services I am using are GoogleDocs for co-writing and Dropbox for saving and sharing the documents. I use a lot of Flickr for finding pictures that can be used freely.

The materials and videos from conferences can be shared through social media

SlideShare and YouTube are good services for this. In our recent Mindtrek seminar I was tweeting for SOITA project and made some seminar videos to YouTube. The materials we provided were added to SlideShare and later on also to our Storify story of all SOITA presentations.  I do think that we have reached much more people with help of social media than we otherwise could have reached.

Social bookmark services researchers can not only collect useful links for themselves but share them with a group of people or in public

For links I currently use mostly Twitter and Pinterest. Pinterest is ideal for collection of links, we have e.g. one for CMAD event which our university project is co-organizing with others. I also use the new secret Pinterest board for stuff that is not public yet. I used to use Delicious and Diigo too but think they lack the social effects I get from Twitter and Pinterest.

Now - what would you add?  What possibilities did we forget?

One researcher people have praised me is Alexander Stocker. He even has a Facebook page for his blog where he tells about his research work and the conferences he has attended. After all the praise I just wish my German would be better. Another great example is Alf Rehn from Åbo Akademi in Finland. He must be busy with all of his projects but still he has time to be active on Twitter too.

LinkedIn Demographics & Statistics - July 2011

Found this from SlideShare, interesting stuff!

LinkedIn Demographics & Statistics - July 2011

View more presentations from Amodiovalerio Verde

Referral Key: Are you taking on new clients?

Today I got an email asking me:

Are you taking on new clients?

Well, hell yea I am!

Hi Johanna,

If you're taking on new clients, I'd like to include you in my private referral network to send you business leads through Referral Key.

Please accept my invitation below. Thanks!

Best,
NN
Company Name
City
+358...

View invitation from NN

"The new, fast growing networking website is using the power of communication to help small businesses build powerful referral networks online." - Boston Business Journal

If you do not wish to receive this type of email from Referral Key, please click Unsubscribe.

This looked so much about a spam message I almost skipped it. But as there was a name of a person I appreciate I looked further and did a Google search about Referral Key.

Some social media specialists join every new SM service but I am not one of them. I like to sit back and wait to see if the service will survive after the first hype period.

So I learnt to know that in this service I can get leads if I pay for them and I can get paid if I help others get leads. Not sure if I want to do it - at least via a service like this. I rather help a friend (in Finland we have this thing called Friendtrepreneurs) give a favor from a favor. If someone I don´t know well enough offers me 10$ for a lead I do not bother.

I think these lead contracts work best when they are agreed between two partners. So if you´d like me to give you leads for your social media platform or service, contact me and introduce your product for me. If I like it I start recommending it to my customers and everytime you get a new customer through me I´ll get a fair reward. And the other way around, whenever you recommend me for a training, a workshop or a content creation project in social media, you will get a reward from me. None of us would do this only for money as there´s our own reputation on the table - we only recommend things we believe in.

So for now I stay away from Referral Key and trust my contacts to recommend me even without a dedicated service like this. And we still have LinkedIn for recommendations...

Some LinkedIn stats

And I'll continue with LinkedIn (data from the same source, Socialbakers)

Top-50 countries (showing them all as there were not more, for Facebook there were 211 countries listed)
# country users penetration Pen%
1. United States 47 508 959 155 388 440 15.31%
2. India 9 796 249 25 726 380 0.84%
3. United Kingdom 6 487 004 30 675 020 10.40%
4. Brazil 4 330 359 18 287 120 2.15%
5. Canada 3 982 296 17 862 080 11.80%
6. Netherlands 2 691 560 4 392 060 16.04%
7. France 2 449 874 21 951 000 3.78%
8. Australia 2 116 473 10 058 600 9.95%
9. Italy 1 888 028 19 163 680 3.25%
10. Spain 1 827 759 13 843 060 3.93%
11. Mexico 1 370 625 26 108 560 1.22%
12. China 1 221 773 381 600 0.09%
13. Argentina 1 218 155 14 050 240 2.95%
14. Germany 1 177 625 19 101 700 1.43%
15. South Africa 1 150 498 3 777 440 2.34%
16. Belgium 858 359 4 114 880 8.23%
17. Sweden 717 815 4 234 540 7.91%
18. Denmark 698 441 2 673 120 12.66%
19. Pakistan 679 282 4 371 700 0.38%
20. United Arab Emirates 626 125 2 231 240 12.58%
21. Philippines 615 210 22 682 100 0.62%
22. Portugal 582 126 3 680 160 5.42%
23. Turkey 554 118 27 554 780 0.71%
24. Singapore 539 953 2 581 280 11.49%
25. Indonesia 520 717 36 413 540 0.21%
26. Switzerland 489 899 2 547 160 6.43%
27. Ireland 475 050 1 879 600 10.28%
28. Israel 470 220 3 337 900 6.39%
29. Malaysia 459 971 10 451 380 1.76%
30. Norway 445 413 2 543 940 9.52%
31. Poland 428 167 6 135 100 1.11%
32. Russia 423 281 4 297 860 0.30%
33. Romania 418 128 3 200 960 1.90%
34. New Zealand 393 021 1 908 420 9.33%
35. Saudi Arabia 373 658 3 833 320 1.45%
36. Japan 339 384 3 351 240 0.27%
37. Egypt 335 124 7 372 760 0.42%
38. Hong Kong 304 541 3 606 000 4.30%
39. Finland 290 298 1 934 420 5.52%
40. Greece 250 147 3 288 940 2.33%
41. Thailand 195 469 10 137 640 0.29%
42. Ukraine 191 974 1 407 440 0.42%
43. Czech Republic 170 083 3 416 460 1.67%
44. Hungary 139 858 3 243 600 1.40%
45. Bulgaria 123 926 2 026 180 1.73%
46. Croatia 117 728 1 350 120 2.62%
47. Qatar 104 908 311 860 12.48%
48. Kuwait 104 802 735 420 3.76%
49. Jordan 100 772 1 576 340 1.57%
50. Bahrain 60 381 281 200 8.18%

And 9 countries with over 10% of population in LinkedIn
# country users penetration Pen%
6. Netherlands 2 691 560 4 392 060 16.04%
1. United States 47 508 959 155 388 440 15.31%
18. Denmark 698 441 2 673 120 12.66%
20. United Arab Emirates 626 125 2 231 240 12.58%
47. Qatar 104 908 311 860 12.48%
5. Canada 3 982 296 17 862 080 11.80%
24. Singapore 539 953 2 581 280 11.49%
3. United Kingdom 6 487 004 30 675 020 10.40%
27. Ireland 475 050 1 879 600 10.28%

Use @Manymoon at @LinkedIn

Interesting new tool to be used either in LinkedIn or in Google Apps. Any of you using this? Do you recommend it?

10 Commandments of Community Management (2011)

Being known by a service is nice, isn't it? LinkedIn just recommended me this one-hour-old presentation (!) - how did they knew I'd like it? Dunno but I did, hope you like it too. :)

10 Commandments of Community Management (2011)

View more presentations from Get Satisfaction.

Organizing @LinkedIn contacts

I want this feature (but dont want to pay for it)

Buying and recommending products using Social media

I saw a video called Blank in Youtube. First it felt funny because of the example used: to buy a Blank or a Blank but actually it was a good example: you can choose the brands yourself - Coke vs Pepsi, Toyota vs Mercedes, Nokia vs Iphone...

So how is buying decision done? You search for information from Internet and from your friends. And when you are using the product you start talking about it in different forums in Internet and also in real life as an advocate.

At the moment I´m talking about different amusement parks in Facebook. First I studied a theme park´s home page and then asked my 150+ contacts if they are recommending it. I trust more to them than the official truth by the seller and in few minutes I got answers. And when a friend is reporting that they have visited a park I´m asking for comments - was it worth the investment?

This is the way people are making the decisions nowadays - with help of social media. Would you like me to help in reaching your advocates? If so, you can find me e.g. from LinkedIn - with 33 thumbs up :).

LinkedIn spam

Last week I got a LinkedIn invitation from a genius who was a fan of Michael Jackson. At the same time he holds several amazing positions:

-Owner of Global LINK SERVE
-C.E.O of FORD
-C.E.O of Toshiba Japan
-Director in Nokia
-Director in sharp Electronics
-Director in Sony Electronics Company
-Director in Lexus
-Director in colgate Palmolive usa

He must be a busy guy...

What is really amazing is that he has got 15 new contacts after yesterday and there´s now only 2 people between him and me.

Why isn´t this account already closed? I would think LinkedIn notices if someone sents thousands of invitations in a short period and starts suspecting something weird. And if someone is CEO for several companies at the same time, doesn´t it ring a warning bell somewhere?

And what does the people think when they accept invitations from a stranger?

There is an option to report about spam in LinkedIn too but in this case I chose the option of I don´t know this person and after that there´s no way to report about the spammers. :P

LinkedIn for Dummies

When I create a training material I often call it "... for dummmies" and people find it funny (since they don't actually want to be called as dummies). "For Dummies" is however a synonym for basics, i.e. no background knowledge is required to understand the presentation. Now I found LinkedIn for Dummies video that tells you everything you need to know about the service :).

Social media figures

Yle is tweeting its news, but only in English. Interesting, what will be the next Finnish media to join Twitter?

The latest news was about Facebook: "While some employers are blocking employees from logging onto the social utility site Facebook during office hours, other companies are urging their marketing people to tap into the money-making potential social media holds."

Guess how many Finnish FB users there is? According to Yle: some 1.5 million Finnish users! Recently I read that 20% of Internet users in the world use Facebook, now I'd like to know how many Finns use Internet.

Some stats from Tietoviikko:

1. Qzone has 200 million users
2. Facebook has 175 million users
3. Microsoft Windows Live Spaces (blog network) has 126 million users
4. MySpace has over 100 million users.
5. Google's Orkut service has 67 million users.
6. LinkedIn has 36 million users.

Twitter mania is ongoing in States: they were 4 million people in the U.S. visiting the site in February while in January it was only 2.6 million.

LinkedIn - what it is for me?

I showed you the video about LinkedIn. Now I'd like to add some other nice sides of the service:

1. It's always interesting to see who knows who. Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo has only 6 contacts in LinkedIn (Bill Gates has 5 and Jari Sarasvuo has 2). Anssi Vanjoki has 1 recommendation (he has recommended 3 persons) and 189 contacts and I have 18 colleagues who are connected to one of Anssi's colleagues. And there's only two persons between me and Obama according to LinkedIn...

2. LinkedIn shows very clearly who are the contacts that I and x shares. If I am looking for a job, I can see if the hiring person knows someone from my network and ask my contact e.g. if he/she would be a nice boss to work with ;). I have also been often very surprised to see how small the world really is: e.g. my Spanish friend knows my Russian colleague.

3. Speaking about jobs, there are also job ads in LinkedIn.

4. From LinkedIn you can easily follow where your old colleagues or class mates are currently working and you can see their email addresses from there.

5. Your turn: what is the feature that you like in LinkedIn?

LinkedIn @ Common Craft

Don't know what LinkedIn is or what to do with it? See this neat video:

Judging people every day

Not that long ago you needed to make hard decisions once a year: to whom to send Christmas cards. Who belongs to your (extended) family, are your neighbours worth a card, do you still want to greet your old class mates or colleagues that you saw 10 years ago and what about people you never see: the postman, your landlord.

Now you need to judge people every day: to accept an invitation or not in one of those social networks. E.g. Facebook was meant for friends and LinkedIn for colleagues, right? Now I got FB invitations from people that are not in my phone's contacts and from people that I have never seen in real life. Sounds like a close friend? How about people that share the same office but with whom you never worked or even talked, you know their name but that's it - can you really consider them as your colleagues in LinkedIn?

I'm a friendly person and sometimes making these decisions is very difficult. If i accept an invitation from x that I don't know that well do I then need to invite y that I know much better? If I reject an invitation do I need to explain why I did it? If I have way too many friends in a system, I can't actually follow them all - a recent study was saying that you can follow "only" about 150 persons. And then the privacy issue: I don't want to share the same stuff with my friends and my so called friends. I wrote earlier about my blogs: I have several of them and their themes are tailored for the audience. At the moment I can't do the same in the social networks - or should I create several accounts? Not very handy...

Any comments? Do you find it easy to make these decisions?