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Results of a search for social media related sites from Bali, Indonesia

Having just finished reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, the last section of which (“love”) is set on the beautiful island of Bali, Indonesia, only a few hours north of where I live, I have been relishing in the past couple of days some memories of Bali, where I have spent some very happy and also educational times.

That in turn led me to wonder about the state of play with social media in Bali today, and then in Indonesia generally.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Des Walsh.

Having promised people for ages that I would provide a seminar series on social media strategy for business, I’ve finally put the content together and am ready to launch the program in September.

The question I’m addressing right now is whether it would be more effective to deliver the program primarily via teleseminar or webinar.

There are various options available, some free, some for a price.

When I started to consider this, it seemed fairly self-evident that, for a seminar on social media, using a webinar format would be the way to go. With a webinar you can illustrate your presentation more effectively by showing participants specific applications or sites in action.

I have no shortage of material to present in webinar format. Just wondering whether that is the right vehicle for the purpose.

What started me wondering about this was listening recently to a very successful teleseminar leader talking about the significant number of people who do not listen in live but to a recording later. My recollection is that it was/is by far the majority who do not listen to the presentation live.

My assumption is that, for those people were not in on the live event, it would be easier to download an audio version and listen to it later at a convenient time and place than to make time to watch the recorded webinar version.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Des Walsh.

ZoomInfo has probably collected information about you and others who share your name: is what’s there accurate?

It was in the course of researching and authoring a book on LinkedIn for recruiting with my colleague Bill Vick that I first learned about the online business information service ZoomInfo. Why it came up at the time was that it was commonplace for the recruiting specialists we were interviewing to mention using ZoomInfo as one of the tools they used to find out about candidates.

Since then, when I have mentioned ZoomInfo during presentations, it usually seems to be only people with experience in recruiting who know about it.

What I found particularly interesting once I looked into ZoomInfo was the fact that, unlike sites such as LinkedIn where you need to join and then provide information about yourself, ZoomInfo does not wait for anyone to upload their own information and, as my experience and that of others attests, stores and displays information about people who do not even know of its existence.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Des Walsh.

However talented and experienced a Baby Boomer might be, however fit and ready for action, the fact is that her or his age provides a challenge when it comes to looking for a job.

So I was pleased to be invited onto the Career Success Radio show to talk about how Boomers can use social media to enhance their prospects in the job search market. The show was broadcast a couple of days ago.

Dynamic co-hosts of the show, Keith Keller and AnneMarie Cross, spoke with career counsellor and coach Jenni Proctor and me about ways Baby Boomers can leverage the power of Linkedin and other social media platforms to fast-track their job search.

A third guest on the program was Bob Age, co-founder of a successful, Australia-based social networking site for over 50′s – About My Age. Given the subject of this post I should probably mention that the About My Age site is not specifically about job search, but I am sure that for many over 50s a site like this must provide some valuable networking and support, for job seekers as well as others.

I enjoyed the conversation and I’m pretty sure the others did too. We actually went over time, but the extra bit not broadcast is on the mp3 file below.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Des Walsh.

When offered the chance to have a new book for my birthday recently, I wavered between a work of fiction and Seth Godin’s Linchpin: my first thought was to indulge my love of literature and take the novel.

I’m happy that I chose Linchpin instead. The book’s central premise, as I understand, is that to be successful in the world we are now in and as it is developing, you need to either be already an indispensable linchpin or set about becoming one.

I would see this book as essential reading for anyone in the job market: the book’s subtitle is “Are You Indispensable? How to drive your career and create a remarkable future”. But the implications go beyond the kind of career that entails getting and keeping a job: the concepts developed and illustrated in the book are just as relevant for anyone creating or developing a business or professional practice.

The world has changed: have we?

With the ongoing impact of the global financial crisis, we live in a time when many people have either lost what they thought were quite secure jobs or have become very fearful of that happening any day now.

So how should anyone deal with that?

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Des Walsh.

For anyone explaining or advising on how best to operate in a social media enabled world, it is a commonplace now to emphasize the crucial importance of “listening to the conversation”. As just one example among many, Paul Chaney in his book The Digital Handshake: Seven Proven Strategies to Grow Your Business Using Social Media devotes a whole chapter to the topic, under the heading Listening is the New Marketing.

There are more and more tools available to help companies in that listening process. And I’m all for companies making use of those tools.

But lately I’ve been reflecting on various events in business and politics, locally and globally, that indicate to me that a lot of what we call “listening” offline is less about really trying to understand the other’s viewpoint and more about appearing to listen while waiting to seize the advantage in whatever the issue of the day might be.

Is it possible that our “social media listening” is going to be only as good as our “offline” listening? And what does that say for our likely success or otherwise?

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Des Walsh.

It’s a great idea to have an international Social Media Day, nominated as June 30, and it’s great that Mashable got the idea going. The rationale is good:

Social media has changed our lives. It has not only changed the way we communicate, but the way we connect with one another, consume our news, conduct our work, organize our lives, and much more. So why not celebrate?

I just wish I had picked up on it earlier: the post launching the idea is dated June 8th, but I and a few others, it seems, have only just become aware of it.

That will teach me to keep a closer eye on the feed from Mashable!

There is an impressive lineup of events around the world. No doubt someone will do an analysis of the list and we can speculate about what the results tell us about social media  – or at least about social media enthusiasts – around the world.

Some of my immediate impressions:

Largest group so far is New York City with 415 indicating attendance, followed in order by Antwerp, Belgium, then Barcelona, Spain, then Atlanta GA and then Boston MA.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Des Walsh.

Conversations about social media in business often start with questions about tools. “Should we have a Facebook page?” “Should we be on Twitter?” “Should we have a blog and if so how do we go about that?”

These are perfectly reasonable questions. But they jump the gun.

Before any decisions are made about social media platforms or tools, there needs to be a serious discussion about company objectives and social business strategy.

And about company culture.

Because a social business strategy that doesn’t fit with company culture is bound to fail.

Sometimes (usually?) it will become evident that there needs to be cultural change if the social business strategy is to have a chance of success. The principle of getting a good fit beween the strategy and the corporate culture still applies – it’s just that the process becomes a bit more complex and dynamic.

It is clear to me, from case studies I’ve read and listened to and from anecdotes shared by fellow social business practitioners, that the toughest challenge with social business or social media implementation may not about platforms or tools or even, in many cases, about budgets, but about culture.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Des Walsh.

Dave Buck, coaching maven and Coachville CEO, who is also a soccer coach, has a gift for applying insights and approaches from coaching games in the sporting arena to other areas such as life or business coaching.

I admit that there was a time when I thought  the idea of applying the principles of coaching for sport to coaching in other areas was  interesting enough, but not compelling enough for me to try and apply it in any systematic way in my own coaching.

Then early last year I decided to get out of my comfort zone and undertake a Coachville Business Academy course Dave Buck was running, called Coach the Game – the Spirit of Play.

Benefits of the course included:

• Understanding the important distinction between focus on outcomes vs. mastery
• Recognizing how to organize practices and projects into a game worth playing

At the outset of the course we were given the task of identifying a game we wanted to coach. It had to be a game we had played: one thing Dave Buck is quite insistent on is that we can only coach effectively the games we’ve played.

I chose to work on social media for business.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Des Walsh.

In this post I’m sharing my experience as a Foursquare newbie and specifically as a Foursquare newbie uncool enough not to have an iPhone or other such smart device.

In a post here just over a week ago I wondered about Foursquare and how relevant it was for business. I also said at the time I was not eager to try Foursquare, but as in politics a week is a long time in social media. And a couple of informative comments on that post prompted me to take a closer look.

I then decided that, whether it was on Foursquare or Gowalla or one of the other location-focused services, as a social media strategist (as well as being curious as to what the fuss was about) I needed to get with the program and experience what was going on here.

Uh oh! No smart phone

My immediate challenge was that it looked as if I needed an iPhone, Blackberry, Android or Palm to access Foursquare, or to be in the USA and use SMS. A quick call the the phone service provider showed that my contract there has another seven months to run, so the option of a smarter handset was not on.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Des Walsh.