Why do people share online

Interesting study about why people share online found via Timo Rainio, thanks :).

Why Do People Share Online? from Heuvel Marketing

Trends in Internet by Mary Meeker

Enjoy Mary Meeker's newest report about Internet trends:  

KPCB Internet Trends 2013 from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

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

The most important social media services in Finland

Last month I blogged in Finnish about the stats brought by YLE, the Finnish broadcasting company studied the most important social media platforms Finns are using.

They came up with this kind of list:

TOP 9 Social media sites in Finland according to Yle
1. Facebook - about 2 million Finns over 13 years
2. Suomi24 - a Finnish discussion forum owned by media company Aller has  1.7M registered users, during the last year 40% of them have logged in (also anonymous commenting is possible)
3. IRC-Galleria has 451 000 registered users, about 200 000 of them are visiting it weekly.
4. LinkedIn has 440 000 Finnish users
5. Twitter is used by around 300 000 Finns
6. Foursquare has about 75 000 registered users
7. Google+ about 50 000 Finnish accounts, but only some 20 000 of them are in active use
8. Instagram no estimates of users
9. Pinterest - no estimates of users. 

Early this month Antti Leino got some estimates of Finnish Pinterest users: 
100 000 Finnish accounts, almost 60% of them ladies.

Spam blog comments

For a reason or another I have been getting a lot of spam comments to this blog lately. I share some examples with you so that you know how they are like:

Wow, amazing blog structure! How lengthy have you ever been blogging for? you make blogging glance easy. The entire look of your site is magnificent, let alone the content material! My web site ... acai berry label comparison

Hi there! This post could not be written any better! Reading through this post reminds me of my previous roommate! He continually kept talking about this. I am going to forward this post to him. Fairly certain he will have a very good read. Thank you for sharing! Feel free to surf my blog -

This is really fascinating, You're a very skilled blogger. I have joined your rss feed and look ahead to in the hunt for more of your excellent post. Also, I have shared your site in my social networks my webpage - achilles braces 

How do I know they are spam? Because they are far too generic to be real - these comments could (and have) been added to any blog.

So sorry spammers, my blog is not worth of your time :P.

The most popular Google services by usage by Alexa

According to Alexa Google is the most popular site in the world while number 2 is Facebook.

And the most popular Google services aka sub sites by usage (hours spent on the site) are:

 

Percent of all Google site visitors

1. Search google.com  71.36%
2. Gmail mail.google.com 44.93%
3. Profile accounts.google.com 36.34%
4. Google Drive (Google Docs) docs.google.com 9.12%
5. Google Plus plus.google.com 7.72%
6. Google Translate translate.google.com 6.07%
7. Help support.google.com 5.00%
8. Maps maps.google.com 4.91%
9. Google Drive drive.google.com 4.10%
10. Play play.google.com 2.59%
11. Adwords adwords.google.com 2.18%
12. News news.google.com 1.75%
13. Sites sites.google.com 1.01%
14. Code code.google.com 0.91%
15. Feedburner feedburner.google.com 0.78%
16. Product forum productforums.google.com 0.74%
17. Groups groups.google.com 0.67%
18. Url url.google.com 0.56%
19. Developers developers.google.com 0.56%
20. Picasa picasaweb.google.com 0.55%
21. Image search images.google.com 0.53%
22. Ejabat ejabat.google.com 0.46%
23. Google Scholar scholar.google.com 0.14%

Interesting isn't it? So Google documents are used more than Google Plus while Picasa for storing and viewing photos is not used that much. By the way, for a researcher the Google Scholar is quite useful service. :)

Amazon has an hidden empire in the web

If you think Amazon.com is for buying books you may be surprised by this presentation. It is one of the giants of the web. How come?

Amazon.com: the Hidden Empire from faberNovel

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.

How can an organization full of specialists use social media for PR work?

I was interviewed for a thesis about using social media for PR and I wanted to share my answers with  you too.

Do you think Social Media is a good platform for PR activities?
PR is defined in Wikipedia like this: Public relations (PR) is the practice of managing the flow of information between an individual or an organization and the public. Public relations may include an organization or individual gaining exposure to their audiences using topics of public interest and news items that do not require direct payment.The aim of public relations by a company often is to persuade the public, investors, partners, employees, and other stakeholders to maintain a certain point of view about it, its leadership, products, or of political decisions.

Yes of course it is a good platform for PR. There are a lot of possibilities you can do for free and you can reach the people who are interested about you easily without any middle-men (aka journalists) who choose the messages they want to deliver further – with social media the public itself makes the decisions of what is important to them and what they want to distribute further to their own networks. Social media is not making the content creation any easier than it was before because just like press the public wants good quality content too (they can be even more demanding). People can easily start following brands in social media. They can look for you or they can find you via their own networks e.g. when someone retweets your content.

Social media is also a good channel to get feedback from customers and other interest groups.

How can Social Media be used for PR?
Wikipedia says: "Common PR activities include speaking at conferences, winning industry awards, working with the press, and employee communication."

So when you are e.g. speaking in a conference, you can inform about that in social media in very many ways:

• tell in Facebook that you are going to be in the conference
• if there is a LinkedIn (or Facebook) event about the conference, you can join it and promote it to your followers too
• live tweet from the conference
• stream from the conference (live-video)
• add the video of the presentation to YouTube
• take photos of the conferences and share them in social media
• add the presentation material to SlideShare
• blog about the conference

If you win industry awards you can share the information in your social media channels mentioned above and you can add the information to Wikipedia which will make your public image better.


For working with press Twitter is ideal as many journalists use it for news hunting. You can also share materials with them e.g. using Pinterest (for links) or some photo services like Flickr for photos.

With social media services you can also communicate with employees, you can e.g. have Facebook/LinkedIn groups where the open positions are informed or ask them to contribute to your blog or have internal microblog channel in Yammer.

What are the risks using Social Media for PR?
The biggest risk is forget about social media.

Another risk is in resourcing. When you start using social media you need to keep updating the channels also in the future, long breaks in content creation are much worse than no social media channels at all. Sometimes the social media channels are given to hands of people who do not understand that it is different to talk with your own friends in social media than with customers of a company and in those cases a lot of bad publicity can be got.

Organizations also need to prepare themselves for crisis: what do they do if something unexpected happens, who can answer and how fast can it be done. E.g. removing customer comments from Facebook pages or blogs is not a good idea as social media culture is open.

What are possible activities for an organization full of specialists like us using Social Media for PR?

Your key resources are your employers the specialists themselves. Try to encourage them to participate to social media with their own name and to include their employer in their profiles. Give them social media trainings and give them reasons to participate. Define how much resources they can use for social media monitoring and participating during the office hours.

Social media around the world 2011

Found an interesting report from last year about the social media usage around the world and especially in Europe. Looking at the figures we have no reason to be proud of our usage...

Some points from the report.

•  98% of Europeans are aware of social media and 73% belong to at least one social network (on average they belong to 1.9 networks while 50% belong to only one, normally Facebook) while in Brazil 86% belong to networks (on average 3.1 networks). The southern Europeans are the most active in social media (maybe they are the most social Europeans in real life too?)
• 44% of respondents wanted to take part in co-creation of products and advertising
• 2/3 of employees are proud of their employer - but only 18% of them are talking about their employer in social media. Maybe because 2/3 European employees have limited access to their social media at work (the northern Europeans can access their social services more than the other Europeans).
• Also 60 % of employees would like to get help from their employer about the social media usage, only 25% had a written social media policy in their company and only 13% had been given a social media training
• we use more and more web through our mobile devices, but only 12% of mobile users use location based services and only 4% are aware of augmented reality

Social media around the world 2011 from steven van belleghem