Advocate's Studio

Often viewed as somewhat ponderous and not very agile, the Fortune 500 and the proverbial tortoise have much in common. However, it pays to keep an eye on that tortoise. Nora Ganim Barnes, PhD and Eric Mattson of Financial Insite have published a study indicating that,while progress has been somewhat slow, the Fortune 500′s social media journey is further along than expected. The study measured progress primarily by the number of companies maintaining “public-facing” blogs.

The data for the study was collected in February and March, 2008, so it is already a year old and pre-dates the mainstream Twitter boom.

According to the report, 16% of the primary corporations listed had a public-facing blog with a post within the last 12 months, including three of the top five.

Although the percentage was somewhat surprising to me, the breakdown by industry was not. Blogging corporations are more readily found in tech and related industries. However I was heartened to see social media adoption among some decidedly non-tech industries, such as insurance and banks, with Progressive Insurance and New York Life among them.

And these blogs are interactive! Over 90% take comments and have RSS and subscription. Over 80% linked to a corporate Twitter account. Others had unconnected Twitter accounts. A sizeable percentage are using podcasting and video to enhance their content.

While the results pale in comparison to soc med activities at schools and the Inc. 500, it is heartening to see the big corporations make the leap into Twenty-first century marketing. This is good news for lawyers seeking to connect with clients on-line. There clearly is someone listening on the other end of the line!

As with any good fable, there is a moral. Slow and steady certainly fits here, but for rainmakers, the better moral might be “if you build it (your on-line presence) they (your corporate clients) will come.”

Read the report here

Hat tip to the Resource Shelf.

Oh me oh my. So much to write about today and not enough time or space. So, for now, I am going to limit my rantings to updating my earlier blog about LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook and the social networking phenomenon.

Google has just announced plans to implement a service called “Friend Connect” to permit people to employ applications from their usual social networking haunts, like Facebook or Plaxo, while visiting other sites and, ultimately, across the Web. This announcement is hot on the heels of similar announcements by Facebook and MySpace pledging to permit members to utilize their personal profiles and applications on other websites. Google’s Director of Engineering David Glazer indicates that “[a]t the heart of Google’s service is the use of Open Social which will allow third parties to build and develop applications for the site.” Thus, by using Friend Connect, any website owner should be able to add code to his or her site to get a social interface feature without complicated programming. The former “walled garden” approach of the social networking sites, which encouraged interaction only between members of the individual sites, is crumbling and making way for a new social order permitting “socializing” across websites and the entire Internet. As David Glazer adds: “[s]ocial networking is going mainstream. It used to be proprietary, but now it’s going to be open and baked into the infrastructure of the net, not just one site or one source,…”

Damn straight its getting mainstream. Just check out who is maintaining a presence on the big three. Even hackers, the “ethical” ones anyway, have their very own social network, called, what else, House of Hackers.  For an up and coming social networking site that combines wiki’s with passionate discourse under “niche” communities, check out Wetpaint. And here is a top ten list of social networking sites for women. Ladies only, please!

But all is not an electronic bed of roses for the users of social networking sites. For a cautionary message with a legal bent aimed at social networking site users, check out this video at Findlaw.com. In the same vein as those oft-repeated warnings to business users to avoid including anything on these sites that one may not want a prospective employer or client to view, the applicable laws mandate that site users employ the same precautions against defamatory and/or infringing material generally applicable to traditional media in connection with on-line postings. These common sense limitations aside, however, the clear direction of the Internet and the Web 2.0 revolution is the organizing, simplifying and socializing of the vast information repository that has grown in the cyberspace soil. Wallflowers, beware. The future is NOW!

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 With all due apologies to Linda Richman, I thought I might take a stab at the social networking site LinkedIn, suss out its value to the business professional as source for networking, and ascertain whether it really is “MySpace for Grownups.”

As described in the Wikipedia entry for “LinkedIn”:

LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003[1] mainly used for professional networking. As of December 2007, its site traffic was 3.2 million visitors per month, growing at an annual growth rate of about 485%.[2] As of May 2008, it had more than 22 million registered users,[3] spanning 150 industries.

It is described as a business social networking site: you sign up as a member for free, fill out information about yourself relevant to your networking aspirations and seek to make contacts with other LinkedIn members. You can search for other members based on various criteria and invite them to join your own network, building a virtual database of contact details. You also can access second and third degree contacts – persons known to your first level contacts – via your first level contacts. Theoretically, this web of contacts is intended to generate jobs and business opportunities. Employers and corporate members can list jobs and search unconnected members for likely candidates. This is where the site’s profit margin comes from: recruiters or businesses that wish to be able to mine the profiles of members outside the contact network pay for the privilege. For the rest of us, LinkedIn represents a “gated access approach”, intended to provide members with a sense of security regarding their information and the quality of contacts. There is also a forum called LinkedIn Answers which permits members to pose questions to the community for general discussion. LinkedIn Groups allows you to join a group based on your school, your industry or your profession.

For the mobile user, LinkedIn started a stripped down mobile version in February, 2008.

The value of LinkedIn and comparisons to the wildly popular social networking sites MySpace and Facebook are not new topics. Over a year ago, Seamus McCauley wrote in his blog “Virtual Economics” that the problem with LinkedIn is that it doesn’t do anything. “You sign up, you find some colleagues, you link to them and then…nothing.” Umair, in the blog BubbleEdge Generation, claims the real problem with LinkedIn is that there is no meaningful opportunity for interaction: LinkedIn is too clean compared to the “ugly, nasty, digital ghetto” of MySpace. In other words, LinkedIn apparently has sacrificed open dialog for gated security. The commenters on these blogs do not necessarily agree with these conclusions, describing circumstances in which LinkedIn has provided them with real value. Facebook, which also has the “gate” of requiring an email upon sign up, appears to bridge the MySpace and LinkedIn models.

There does appear to be some utility in LinkedIn, however, as its growing popularity attests to. The following chart, from simplyhired.com shows an increase in jobs secured through LinkedIn, although the other sites, which have an overall numbers advantage, have shown a similar increase during the same period.

 

LinkedIn also is favored among Internet marketers. The Nonlinear Creations Internet Marketing blog contains a recent entry concerning the marketing effectiveness of LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook and two other social networking sites. Using its own website as the “bait”, NLC noted that approximately 18% of its web traffic comes from social networking sites. By far, visits from LinkedIn created the highest average time per visit and the most pages visited. As a result, LinkedIn, as well as Facebook, outperformed site visitors utilizing other channels. NLC also noted that the LinkedIn visitors tended to convert more readily into prospects than visitors from other social networking sites. NLC concludes:

If your company is in the B2B space, consider taking the time to understand and exploit LinkedIn. It offers a very real, very tangible return on the effort.

Apparently, even Facebook thinks that LinkedIn’s business networking model has value, given its recent addition of a networking function known as “friend grouping” by professional contacts. In light of the above-mentioned complaints regarding the “sterility” of LinkedIn’s interaction possibilities, a Facebook model with more opportunity for relationship development combined with business contact organization might prove formidable.

In any event, from the perspective of “it can’t possibly hurt to get more exposure”, these online networking tools likely will gain more utility and favor as more people join and avail themselves of the professional benefits. Consider adding your profile and exploring the features – one never knows where “the Social” might lead.