Perry

Hewitt

Tag: linkedin

Friday 5 — 5.23.14
1. How does your LinkedIn profile rank? LinkedIn taps into inherent narcissism by exposing your percentile in profile views compared with that of your connections, or with others in your company. Disappointed in your results? LinkedIn suggests that you beef up your summary, add more skills, and join more groups.
2. There’s a big opportunity for native mobile apps to take advantage of your handheld’s hardware from camera or accelerometer. This week, Facebook announced an imminent mobile app feature that uses the microphone to identify ambient TV shows, music, or movies. The app then offers up the content to be approved for inclusion in a status update.
3. In a surely wholly unrelated initiative, Facebook changed the default privacy setting for new users to be “friends and family” versus “public” and announced a new privacy check up tool to be rolled out in the coming weeks. Here’s hoping your new privacy settings will keep your mobile device microphone from reporting you are home in your pajamas watching Veep, rather than at the Childish Gambino concert featured in your status message.
4. The internet of things means, sadly but inevitably, ads running on all those connected things. Like on your thermostat. Or your refrigerator. See the full list as well as a couple of clarifications from Google.
5. Why did that video go viral? Success can be attributed to eliciting strong, positive emotion. Be sure to keep it upbeat — people want to see the daring rescue attempt, but no one wants to know that the kitten actually died.
Weekend fun: Speaking of viral video, here’s a slick maneuver from a clever young man who caught a foul ball — and perhaps tried to win a heart.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
May 23, 2014
Friday 5 — 5.9.2014
1. You likely don’t need a set of graphics and stark statistics to remind you how much work email has encroached on our personal lives. Also: thoughtful essay on how excessive corporate email promotes burnout rather than productivity.
2. Email marketing is a staple of corporate and nonprofit outreach, but how do you get those overloaded recipients to open it? See these five tips for email subject line that attract readers.
3. Here’s a comprehensive rundown on LinkedIn strategy for evolving from a resumé parking lot to an online newspaper. Growth plans include investments in mobile, international expansion, and “delivering massively personalized experiences.”
4. WordPress.com parent Automattic closed $160M in funding on a $1.16B valuation. Known for its robust developer community and emphasis on clean user interface, WordPress now powers an astonishing 22% of 10 million websites today. The investment’s a strong bet on WordPress to continue its growth beyond niche blogging to become the best publishing platform in the world.
5. Smartphones, smart watches, smart toothbrushes are now all available to contribute to our families’ personal data exhaust streams. These data streams are loyalty cards on steroids, providing a live feed of behaviors which when aggregated are a potential goldmine for retailers. Prediction: myriad law suits to emerge over parents’ use of their children’s personal data in return for discounting.
Weekend fun: Perhaps amusing only for soccer fans, Arsenal players respond to mean tweets. Extra credit for gratuitous Vorsprung door Technik joke.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
May 9, 2014
Friday 5 — 2.21.2014
1. Facebook forked over $19 billion for WhatsApp, and the internet is full of articles explaining why. Among the most compelling is Buzzfeed’s take that WhatsApp posed a significant threat. WhatsApp is growing fast globally, consumes a great deal of young users’ smartphone time, and fills that critical “staying in touch” niche that Facebook would like to own.
2. The visual social network Instagram, another Facebook purchase, is looking like it might be living up to its relatively modest $1 billion price tag. Explosive growth and high engagement mean that Instagram is increasingly attractive to brands. It has exceptionally high engagement with affluent, young women — a demographic particularly attractive for retail.
3. If you’re an online publisher — and pretty much all brands are these days — you might be interested in Echobox. This analytics package offers data-driven insights about your content’s performance both on site and as shared across social channels. The end result is fewer charts and numbers, and more specific recommendations for your content.
4. LinkedIn this week entered the realm of “platisher” — the dreadful coinage for part platform and part publisher — as it opened up its content marketing Influencers program to everyone. Like Medium, LinkedIn will cultivate brand names and high-quality submissions, but sees value in building a broad-based content empire.
5. Just where will we wear the internet of things? We’re easing in with wristbands and the stunningly awkward Google Glass, but there’s more to come. Quartz provides a list of body parts likely to be adorned with tech in the near future.
Weekend fun: Jimmy Fallon took over The Tonight Show this week with a celebrity-studded vengeance, but the #hashtag2 performance sealed the deal.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
February 21, 2014
Friday 5 — 10.25.2013
1. For a number of years instinct and analytics have been telling us that photos are effective in social posts. That hypothesis seems validated by this week’s confirmation of Facebook and Pinterest domination of web referrals, with the former putting heavy emphasis on images in the newsfeed and the latter a nexus for image curation.
2. In an entirely related vote of confidence for the visual web, Pinterest has raised another $225 million. Pinterest is developing a global strategy, with more than a dozen country managers slated to be hired this year.
3. LinkedIn is going long on the mobile use case, rolling out a new iPad app and the compelling LinkedIn intro email feature. LinkedIn intro aims to provide color and context to your mobile email by surfacing relevant LinkedIn info about the sender.
4. Facebook is home to the accidental news consumer — most users come for other reasons, but many end up seeing the news. An important finding is that younger people who are far less intentional about going to news outlets are consuming news via the social network.
5. Wikipedia remains an invaluable news source — but how is it developing and replenishing its stable of editors? Unlike the rest of the web, which has become more global and female content creators, Wikipedia’s skew toward technical, Western, and male-dominated subject matter has persisted. Does this limited pool ensure Wikipedia’s decline?
Weekend fun: Eight million people have already watched this toddler in his Halloween costume, but in case you’d like some inspiration for your own …

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
October 25, 2013
Friday 5 — 08.23.2013
Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.
1. Yahoo may be back on top: Comscore names Yahoo #1 in U.S. unique visitors, and that’s without counting Tumblr’s 133 million blogs. A little early for Marissa Mayer to proclaim, “How do you like me now?” — but I sure hope she’s thinking it.
2. Have you checked out Whisper? This mobile app for sharing secrets is getting 2.5 billion page views a month. Some terrific UX work and an interesting network structure where users aren’t featured — each post rests on its own merits.
3. Some good data on teens, mobile apps, and privacy from Pew and the Berkman Center. Teens may be getting savvier about their online footprint: those who seek advice about managing privacy online are more likely to disable the location feature.
4. What’s your 14-year-old doing on the internet? In September, she could be networking on LinkedIn as it opens its doors to teens and enables University pages.
5. From teens to seniors: Y Combinator demo day showcased a number of promising startups, but I agree with TechCrunch that TrueLink is a big idea. It’s a credit card that enables families to help their seniors stay financially independent but avoid scams — huge market opportunity there.
August 23, 2013
5 tips for your post-college social media self
If you’re reading this somewhere between finishing your last college final and returning the polyester academic robe crumpled on the floor of your dorm room, you’re in the commencement process. Your brain is on emotional and practical overload: you’re simultaneously figuring out how to say goodbye to friends; planning for (or praying for!) a new internship, job, or grad school; and wondering how on earth to pack up all the stuff you’ve accumulated during your college years. Here’s a manageable to-do list: five ways for new graduates to get your digital and social media presence in order.
1. Set up and clean up your LinkedIn profile. Of the five profiles sent to me this week from recent grads, three of them had typos — and two candidates had misspelled their major. Have a friend read your profile for common sense, grammar, and spelling. Do the same for a Google+ profile. Pro tip: try your name on Google image search and see what comes up. If you don’t like what you see, update your online profiles and let indexing do its work.
2. Review your social media privacy settings. If you’re 21 today, you were 12 when Facebook launched, 14 when Twitter emerged, and are now far too old to be messing around on Snapchat. Younger users tend to be savvier about privacy settings, but just in case: read these Facebook basics and settings controlling who can find you, then hop over to Google and check out Me on the Web. While not all companies will hire through Twitter like this the web is, increasingly, your resume.
3. Put together a listening system. Are you still looking for a job or entering a new field? Set up a system of alerts and feeds to keep you informed. Google Alerts have been around forever but are surprisingly useful — enter one or more terms relevant to your area of interest. For blogs and sites you follow, try feedly and its fantastic mobile interface. Use the content you follow to your advantage — at very least you’re staying informed, and at best you’ll have current and relevant ideas to share with co-workers.
4. Manage your inbox and contacts effectively. Email is an overwhelming and unwieldy system where, some say, information goes to die. Gmail does have a number of features to improve email management from starred senders to priority inbox; check out Lifehacker for a useful selection of hacks. Mobile email ninjas may do well mastering all the swipe actions of Mailbox to prevent overload. And while a new grad won’t need a fully-fledged contact management system, be sure to keep your contacts in a way that ensures they’re accessible and in context.
5. Own your own domain and a sensible email address. It’s true that each new release of gTLDs makes your URL less relevant and search and social more important. That said, for less than 10 bucks a year you can have your own domain name, and refer it to a profile page on LinkedIn or about.me. And now’s the time to set up email forwarding via your academic institution, if they offer it, or settle on an email address that omits your year of birth or favorite Twilight character.
Congratulations! The good news is that it’s neither difficult nor costly to set up a reasonable online presence. The even better news is that digital and social technologies provide you with the keys to find and connect with people and ideas to continue learning beyond the campus you’re leaving behind.

Photo credit: Ladies Home Journal 1931, courtesy George Eastman House
May 21, 2013
LinkedIn turns 10
So, LinkedIn is turning 10. The Next Web ran this comprehensive recap of the pivotal moments in its evolution — complete with jazzy infographic and a fun look back at its clunky 2003 web design.

LinkedIn’s main differentiator was being among the first user-generated content networks focused on expertise. As an early adopter (user 6818 — you can find your own member number embedded in your LinkedIn profile URL after “id=”), I pulled together some thoughts on what I’ve observed as milestones contributing to its success.
1. Recognizing that they are a data company, and making some high-profile data scientist hires like Daniel Tunkelang — and enabling them to attract strong teams.
2. Embracing mobile — a little late to the game, but a snazzy, much talked about tablet launch in 2012 and frequent updates since.
3. Continuously improving the social aspects for average users sharing content — image integration that’s easy on the eyes, a longer character count than Twitter, a Like feature just like that other social network.
4. Cracking the code for content original to LinkedIn. Other companies, like Facebook and Tumblr have shuttered similar efforts (here’s a good piece from RWW). While I’d argue that they have a natural advantage over Facebook and Tumblr in terms of shared audience purpose, they get credit for bringing in a range of thought leaders who make the site compelling and who become champions for the platform.
5. Moving from text heavy resumes only to portfolio display opportunities — presumably the success of Bēhance and others has prompted LinkedIn to cast a wider net by supporting more visual experiences.
6. Rolling out new applications like a new contact importing/ management service (see email offer at right — perhaps more compelling if the data pulls someone not in the office next to mine) that try to make LinkedIn the default drive for your connections.
While not a specific feature, I’d argue that LinkedIn’s ultimate killer app was shifting the social norm around job hunting. Back in the day, leaving a copy of your resume on the printer meant only one thing — you weren’t intending to stick around your current role very long. Now keeping your LinkedIn profile up-to-date is more a sign of career attention than looming transition. And arguably, in some fields today the bias is in precisely the opposite direction: people who don’t update their LinkedIn profiles are less likely to be actively engaged in their own career development — which as Tom Friedman reminded us last week in his bleak 401(K) world column, is a dangerous place to be.
May 6, 2013