Blazek was over the line, but there is a point to be made about LinkedIn etiquette

A two-part moral for the day: in a digital age, never put in writing anything that you don't want uploaded to the internet and get to know the etiquette of the social media platforms that you're using.

These are lessons learned in no uncertain terms by Kelly Blazek, the co-founder of the Cleveland Job Bank, an organisation set up to help job-hunters in the US city.

Last month, Blazek was contacted by twentysomething university graduate Diana Mekota, who had just relocated to the city and was seeking employment.

Having made an initial contact with the Job Bank, Mekota followed up by requesting a connection to Blazek on professional social network LinkedIn.  She received the following response:

Image via Imgur

While this is stunningly rude and overly aggressive, if you can slice your way through the rhetoric, Blazek makes a point; why should strangers expect to connect to your networks on LinkedIn?

Unlike other social network which require no real effort to build personal connections, LinkedIn is a professional platform and it takes time and effort to properly cultivate a robust, useful network of connections.

Once you have accepted on LinkedIn, they can view and contact your connections, creating the digital equivalent of photocopying your contacts book (kids, ask your parents).

Many LinkedIn users will have spent considerable time building their digital networks through real-world interactions, attending seminars, conferences and networking events and eating innumerable canapes.

Contacting strangers on LinkedIn is frowned upon, specifically because it enables them to mine your contacts without having done any legwork.  Worse still, they could sour relationships with both long-standing and freshly minted business contacts by dropping your name into their (potentially unwelcome) introduction.

If I receive a request from someone that I don't know, I send them back a short, polite request to remind me of how and when we met. Unsurprisingly, many of them fade into the online ether, never to be heard from again.

However, there is also a balance to be struck: if you completely shut yourself off from the prospect of engaging and connecting with strangers, then you might just miss that key opportunity to bring new business into your organisation, or miss the perfect job opportunity being offered by a recruiter.

As an addendum it should be noted that Blazek's pugnacious and surly response forced her to make a public apology, close her Twitter account and delete her blog posts as well as hand back her Communicator of the Year award, details of which can be found here.

Facebook's growing pains are at least in part down to its parents

The above image has been doing the rounds of Facebook and bobbed into my newsfeed just in time for the site’s tenth birthday.

One decade and 1.2 billion active users later, the slightly seedy ‘who would you rather’ concept of thefacebook – comparing photos of female university students – has evolved into the digital juggernaut that is today’s byword for social media.

But Facebook is far from a faultless success story, with allegations of handing over users’ details to third party agencies (including the NSA), a failed bid to purchase zeitgeist social network Snapchat and dissatisfaction amongst users for exactly those reasons outlined in the graphic above.

I’m no Zuckerberg apologist but I find the aesthetic amends that have been made to the site relatively palatable. Facebook is a digital platform. It is part of the technological sphere and as a result will doubtless undergo a raft of iterations during its life; that is the nature of the beast.

What I intensely dislike, however, is Facebook’s ‘mother knows best’ attitude to what we should or should not be seeing. This video from Veritasium outlines the core issue - Facebook would like us to sponsor posts.
Obviously!

Perhaps of greatest concern to the site are the numbers of teenagers who are reportedly cashing in their social media chips and taking their business elsewhere, with one report going so far as to suggest that Facebook may have jettisoned three million US teenagers in the last three years alone.

For the majority, however, the threat to leave Facebook rings hollow. How many of us who are in our late twenties and early thirties – the genuine early adopters of the platform – would actually close our profiles?

I know of only a handful of people my own age who aren’t active on Facebook: one who is hiding out from the Russians – no, seriously, he is – and another who just doesn’t ‘get it’.

The truth is that we’re now hardwired into the Facebook experience.  People’s whole lives will soon be charted via their Facebook page, a portent of which has already come in the form of the little baby found at the very bottom of your timeline, marked ‘born’.  Creepy, no?

Where else would we go? No other social media platform offers the same level of flexibility that you can get from Facebook.  Twitter? Too short. Google+? Just for geeks. MySpace? No. Just…no.

While it has all the makings of a true vox populi, we have to remember that we don’t own Facebook. 

It isn’t ‘ours’ although it’s where we handle most of our social activities and store our photos. It belongs, in fact, to a group of shareholders and I’d wager dollars to doughnuts (or quids to croissants) that what they’re really interested in is ensuring that the ubiquitous adverts are continuing to rake in the funds.

And with the site’s revenues hitting £7.9 billion in 2013 (up 55%) and annual profits totalling £1.5 billion – that’s just over one dollar per user – I honestly don’t think that they give a shit whether we're seeing what our friends post or not. 

Why Google+ is the one to watch in 2014

If you mention ‘social networking’ to most people, it’s not unreasonable to believe that the first name that pops into their heads will be Facebook. 

There’s a good reason for that, as Facebook has recently surpassed 1.19 billion active global users since its launch in 2004.

The root of its success is that it embodies the ‘social’ element of social networking far more completely than any of its competitors. A digital Jack-of-all-trades, Facebook allows you to upload life events, photos and videos, share your location and manage your social calendar all through a single portal.

However, as with any product that relies on popular consensus Facebook’s foundations are built on shifting sands and security is never guaranteed.  As tastes and technologies change, users find themselves organically migrating from one platform to another.  

Facebook, we’re being told, is undergoing a crisis as the teen market – so vital for the success of so many products – is abandoning the service in droves. Teenage apathy, after all, was the giant killer that brought down the once unassailable MySpace.

So if Facebook’s reign does begin to wane, what young upstart will take up the crown? Believe it or not, it might just be Google+.

Once maligned with a shrug by those in the know as the ‘why bother’ of social media, Google+, the social platform bought to you by – you guessed it – Google, is really starting to find its feet.

Offhandedly dismissed by many commentators on its launch in 2011 as a den of geeks and boring, grey-socked technology people (potentially due to Google’s on-going invitation only soft launch policy, re: Gmail), Google+ has built its user base spectacularly and now occupies the slot of second most popular social network, with 540 million active users.

Compared to Facebook’s 1.19 billion, this may not seem all that impressive, but considering that Facebook was launched nine years ago while G+ has only just marked its second birthday, this is not something to be sniffed at.

While businesses have faltered in their efforts to position themselves successfully on Facebook, Google+ makes it far easier for companies to integrate their presence into the site and it is now not uncommon to see a red +1 button on a company’s website.

There is also far greater benefit to businesses in having a Google+ presence.  Let’s not forget that the bedrock of its core business is the search engine market so a company profile on Google+ (supported, perhaps, by some sponsored content) offers a boost to brands when it comes to their placement in Google search rankings.

Combined with a solid SEO strategy, the implication (tacit as it may be) is that if you use Google’s products then you may just find yourself heading up the list of ‘organic’ search results.

With a combination of business appeal, seeming omnipotence and good timing, Google+ is definitely one to watch over the coming year.

This post was originally written by me for inclusion on Core Marketing website. 

Think before you Tweet: a cautionary tale

Peaches Geldof is potentially in some very hot water indeed.

The daughter of Boomtown Rat Sir Bob, Peaches is facing a potential contempt of court for tweeting the names of two women who allowed Ian Watkins, former singer with the band Lost Prophets, to abuse their children.

The act of tweeting these women’s names to her 160,000 followers is enough that Geldof could find herself facing up to two years in prison, should the Crown Prosecution Service opt to make an example of her and use the full extent of the law.

While you can understand Geldof’s actions - as a mother herself, the shocking actions of Watkins must raise particular levels of bile – they are still in contravention of the law.   

The victims of sexual crimes are granted anonymity for life under the British judicial system. The protection of their identities is sacrosanct and extends to the prevention of publication of any details that could lead to the identification of these people.  Clearly, naming these women could quite easily lead to the identification of the children.

Peaches Geldof

Far from being a stand-alone incident, this is just the latest in a string of examples of people – both celebrities and ordinary Janes and Joes like you or I – who have broken the law by making often flippant or emotionally-fuelled remarks on social media.

With an increasing number of people taking to social media, the risk of poorly worded or ill-considered tweets being in contravention of the law is on the rise.

Take, for instance, Sally Bercow the wife of the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow.  Mrs Bercow landed herself at the centre of a litigation brought by Lord Alastair McAlpine through her ‘irresponsible use of twitter’.

Her tweet was, of course, subsequently retweeted by some of her 56,000 followers, further spreading the libellous message.

When I was studying for a journalism degree at university, the majority of the second year was given over to provide an understanding of the theory and practice of media law, so I feel comfortable that I’m not going to accidentally defame anyone.

This is, however, clearly not a practical solution to an ongoing problem; people have neither the time nor the inclination to get to grips with the finer points of libel law before sending their first tweets (whether they should is a different conversation for a different time).

Social networks provide us with outlets through which we can broadcast our successes and frustrations and just as in the real world, these often come without the benefit of a filter. 

Particularly in the case of events such as those surrounding Watkins, we can feel that an expression of our anger or frustration across social networks would be no more damaging than to do so with our friends in the pub.

There is an epilogue to this story, featuring another musician called Ian Watkins, although he may be more familiar to many as ‘H’ from the pop band Steps.

A tale of two Watkins. 'H' is on the left. 

Not only has he had to suspend his Twitter account due to the outpouring of misguided abuse from those not careful or willing enough to check that they had the right Ian Watkins, but the US entertainment website E! published his image in error as part of a story on the on-going trial.

The message, therefore, is clear: spare a thought for what you type into that little box on Twitter, because as we are all now publishers so too do we all fall under the auspices of the courts.

This blog was originally written by Dan for the Core Marketing website.