By Alexandra Reid
There has been a lot of discussion about the blurring lines between personal and professional use of social media. Many questions have been asked and proposed solutions have been fiercely debated: Should employees be restricted on how they use social media both personally and professionally? Should there be restrictions on how they speak about their employers or places of employment? Should corporate social media accounts be used for personal interaction, and what determines if a conversation has become too personal? Should employees even be allowed to use social media during work hours? What should the ramifications, if any, be if an employee speaks ill of his or her employers or place of employment?
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By Alexandra Reid
Yesterday’s Zone5ive was a hot ticket. In fact, the near-capacity crowd Tweeted about it so much it trended on Twitter. The event’s success can be owed to the fact that co-presenters, our own Francis Moran and Kathryn Schwab of Cyan Solutions, demonstrated what they were talking about by producing a content-rich presentation that they – and attendees and event organizers from OCRI – promoted aggressively, predominantly through social media.
In their presentation, Moran and Schwab laid out the necessary ingredients that companies need to garner media coverage in both traditional and new media. According to Moran and Schwab, the two key elements are strategy and content. Companies must have their PR resources – either internal or external – research and then target relevant media and provide them with irresistibly rich content in order to ensure their stories get told. Blasting news releases out in hopes of getting covered simply don’t work. The media landscape is shrinking, budgets are being slashed, and the pressure on journalists to produce unique and brilliant stories is weighing down more than ever before. Don’t make them do any more work than they have to. Plan out your story and package it for them. By providing the right journalist with the right story at the right time, you can vastly increase your chances of getting your clients’ story told. New media channels are no different. By providing the right audience in the right forum with the right story at the right time, you can help ensure your content gets shared through reposts, retweets, comments and mentions, which can also boost the relevance of your content in the eyes of journalists.
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By Alexandra Reid
Quora’s rise to popularity is abuzz on Twitter, blogs and other media sites as a surge of people are trying out the social networking tool for the first time. Poking around the site myself this past week, my first impressions found it to be rather unintuitive. It seems that I am not alone in my opinion, as questions about how to use Quora and why it is important are being frequently asked, rather ironically, on the site itself. More importantly for my ongoing social media research for clients, I noticed that very little discussion has developed to provide insight as to why Quora is important for B2B companies and how it could be used to best effect.
First, what exactly is Quora?
Quora is “a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.” Like Wikipedia, Quora is a collaborative effort, where users are meant to document the world around them. Over time, the database of knowledge should grow until almost everything that everyone wants to know is available in the system. Over the last couple of weeks, Quora’s traffic has doubled, likely making it the new “breakout site” of 2011.
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By Leo Valiquette
The verdict is still out as to whether Goldman Sachs’ investment in Facebook heralds an IPO, but the $50 billion valuation it places on the popular social media platform is nonetheless a scary portent.
While Alex blogged last week about what this deal could mean for those who use Facebook and other social media tools for work and play, I couldn’t help but think that history may be repeating itself.
Late last week, CFRA’s John Budden and Rob Snow discussed the logistics around Goldman Sachs’ “special purpose vehicle” intended to skirt around the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission’s 500-shareholder rule. Rob characterized the US$500 million being put into Facebook by Goldman Sachs and Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies as a venture capital round, for lack of a better term.
“It’s just a staggering multiple for a private company,” Budden said of the lofty valuation the investment places on Facebook. Consider that $50 billion against the hard numbers: For 2009, Facebook had revenues of around US$777 million and net income of around $200 million.
“It has the feelings of the bubble that we experienced in year 2000, but it is different in character,” Budden said.
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By Alexandra Reid
Facebook has raised US$500 million from Goldman Sachs and Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies, according to the New York Times.
The injection of cash values Facebook at about $50 billion. The social network now has a bigger capitalization than Boeing, at $48.7 billion, and Time Warner, at about $36 billion. The deal has reportedly fueled the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s examination of the growing trade of privately held shares of well-known social networking sites. The concern is that Goldman is planning to craft a “special purpose vehicle” that may be able to dodge the 500-shareholder rule, which requires a company to disclose certain financial information to the public, even if it hasn’t filed for an initial public offering. Through this vehicle, the investment would be managed solely by Goldman and therefore would be considered just one investment, even though it could potentially pool investments from thousands of clients.
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There has been a lot of discussion about the blurring lines between personal and professional use of social media. Many questions have been asked and proposed solutions have been fiercely debated: Should employees be restricted on how they use social media both personally and professionally? Should there be restrictions on how they speak about their employers or places of employment? Should corporate social media accounts be used for personal interaction, and what determines if a conversation has become too personal? Should employees even be allowed to use social media during work hours? What should the ramifications, if any, be if an employee speaks ill of his or her employers or place of employment?
