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Category Archives: Social Media
Book Review: What the Plus! Google+ For the Rest of Us by Guy Kawasaki
Guy Kawasaki is back with a new book What the Plus! Google+ for the Rest of Us that I was anxious to have them send over for review. I have had the pleasure of interviewing Guy a couple of times now (see the archived audio interview here) and was sent Enchantment for review and liked his writing style. This book was not an exception to appreciating how he simplifies things. As a Google+ early adopter I was curious to view it from the eyes of a new person but I came away learning a bunch of things along the way in the ~200 pages.
The chapters walk you through reasons Guy likes and believes in Google+, creating your profile and into mastering circles and streams. He does a great job of explaining how circles work in simplified terms and why you should build your circles around you interest. As well as share your own circles with others.
Before you start commenting away or posting your own material Guy explains how important your profile is to those to draw people in and have them circle you. I know I need to go back and now update mine a bit more. Your own picture is a key along with reasonable information about who you are and why they may find you interesting. All of us have something to share and that is what Google Plus is for.
Hashtag etiquette and netiquette – Virtual Gratification Syndrome (VGS)
Have you ever wondered what proper hashtag etiquette is? Do you know those that overuse hashtags for some sort of tracking or not knowing how to restrain themselves? I bet they have Virtual Gratification Syndrome, or VGS for short.
There are numerous articles already in existence but in the age of ROI, tracking and social analytics it seems that posts are being padded. Mainly when the posts are set to auto tweet. Think back to LOL and the little emoticons that now have so many you have no clue what they mean.
but there are those that I like to call “Over-Hashtagers.” They add hashtags to their tweets, their status updates, posts on other peoples’ walls, emails and text messages. These enthusiasts sometimes even have more than one hashtag to add to whatever it is that they’re saying, but at that point, no one really reads what they’re saying anymore because it is riddled by so many hashtags.
This was a great summary of overhashtaggers from The Minaret at the end of 2011. It emphasises in the article that overuse often drives people away from reading your posts or understanding exactly what you are trying to share. I know I have been guilty in Instagram but that is the way searching is still done in there for public pictures. But for tweets, Facebook posts and blog updates I refrain. I believe that proper keywords, categories and titles will convey what you want and get the search engines to find you.
If your organization is tracking your every post and using some form of ranking on hashtags then you are doing something wrong. Think about customer engagement, not how many times a hashtag shows. Think about generated content and how long a user stays on your site. There is much more to finding information than a subject line with seven hashtags. Another point is that when an event is over, there is a reasonable amount of time to continue using the tag itself. Like summaries and thoughts. There is also a point where it is way too early. Both of these points apply when the posting has nothing to do with an event, but everything to do with driving only statistics for usage of a particular tag.
Speaking of that, make sure to go read all the posts on Virtual Gratification Syndrome (VGS) from my archives.
LinkedIn app for BlackBerry OS 7 launches and still sucks
UPDATE on Oct 25 2012: The reviews were not showing correctly and were for version 1.5 quoted below. It seems that the article only specified the new version under the note section at the bottom of the article. I am happy to report users are liking it. New post being completed now.
I have previously used the LinkedIn application for BlackBerry and was horribly disappointed. With the newer devices being on the market for some time, LinkedIn finally updated their app to support BlackBerry OS 6 and 7 and still failed. Complaints started right away and their star rating began to drop even more.
Courtesy of BlackBerry blogs
Can't even log in... Blocks immediately... Going to delete this app.This sucks. Donkey balls.Works for a while and then locks out. Then nothing resolves except resetting!It appears that LinkedIn seems to have stopped supporting this app. It provides very basic functionality (e.g. ability to add connections, access messages, see certain updates), but does not provide access to many other features (e.g. Groups, endorsements). This app also runs as a background task, with no option to turn it off. Updates that are on my desktop sometimes take hours to be reflected in the mobile app.
As you can see, people are disappointed that a business oriented device is not getting the development effort of a business oriented social network. I have been disappointed for some time with the evolution of AppWorld and this is no surprise. I would expect the BlackBerry team to provide resources to developers at large companies to offer free apps with excellent performance and capabilities to strengthen the platform.
See my other posts on TheSocialNetworker that discuss AppWorld
Facebook version 5.1 for iOS launches, some good & some bad
Facebook has launched app version 5.1 for iOS and put some new features and fixes in including camera, Messenger and gifts. Features include:
I will say that gifts are an interesting venture as Facebook then gets a cut of the sale. The idea is that you see it is someones birthday and want to immediately send a gift to them. Have any of you this this feature? If so leave a comment.
As for problems that are being reported, some users are experiencing crashes and reinstalling often helps. A few reports were made of users not being able to log in. More reports about group issues, broken newsfeeds and the worst of them all not being able to log in once logged out.
I don’t expect Facebook to sit long on issues as they had not done an update in quite a while to the mobile app, unlike previous release time spans.