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The Social Network Mid-Life Crisis

Jan 2017/in , , , /by

Each social network has its own persona. We have the style icon, all looks, in Instagram and the hotheaded, no-filter urbanite that is Twitter. Then, there’s the socialite, Facebook, and the professional, LinkedIn – both who seem to be undergoing respective identity crises.

FaceInTraditionally a sharing point for family and friends, Facebook is crossing into professional realms. TechCrunch recently shared Facebook’s announcement that it is testing out job features. The idea is to give businesses the ability to promote job listings from their company Facebook pages. These recruitment features include job post creation, posting, and even the ability to receive applications. Similar to applying directly through LinkedIn, Facebook is considering a prepopulated format when applying through the network.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has tested LinkedIn-esque features. Last year, Facebook tested out “Profile Tags” that showcased a user’s interests, skills, and personality. Sound familiar? Take a peek at your LinkedIn endorsements.

LinkedBookLinkedIn users seem to be favoring the social aspect of the professional social network. My colleague finds about every third LinkedIn update on her feed to be more personal than professional. However, it’s difficult to pinpoint what’s driving this behavior.

A confusion of what is “work related” is possibly to blame for the increasing clutter on our LinkedIn feeds. For example, the included quote was pulled from a lengthy LinkedIn post.

linkedbook formula

The quote was accompanied by a big, smiling, “selfie.” Though work and career are essential themes to the post, the emotional description and personal image reflect Facebook’s intimate reputation more than that of the professional networking psyche originally associated with LinkedIn.

The pseudo-work related post formula has spread like wildfire across LinkedIn. Always, a personal photograph follows the assertion. Another “selfie” shot I came across this morning was captioned, “Ready for my first interview!” I can’t image any interviewer not checking the LinkedIn profile of candidates before meeting.

LinkterAlongside the emotional, personal posts popping up throughout your updates are the political statements. Statements an employee wouldn’t dare utter in the office are suddenly posted for every co-worker to see in dark gray Source Sans font.

Rather than these posts being overlooked, LinkedIn users can’t resist the bait. Each political post is accompanied by Tweet-worthy replies from every part of the political spectrum. Even posts without political themes are subject to these users.linkedbook politics

There’s no confusion of these being unrelated to work (unless one’s industry is, in fact, politics) so what’s driving users to share these on LinkedIn?

LinkedBlrLinkedIn may be, accidentally or not, encouraging unprofessional behavior. Just as Facebook has begun to mimic LinkedIn, LinkedIn is mimicking other social networks, especially those heavy on the social. Earlier this year, LinkedIn began developing its own version of Facebook’s “Instant Articles”.

Nowadays anyone can “publish an article” to LinkedIn’s “news” in the same style used by any unprofessional blogging platform including the micro-blogging network Tumblr, with its neo-new wave, post-punk persona. After publishing a blog an article, it will be conveniently placed into the view of their connections via LinkedIn’s “Recommended Reads” emails’ “Published by your network” section. If you play the game right, as outlined here by this highly-shared author, LinkedIn Editors will push your news to the featured #dailyrundowns. Though curated by the human hand, the Daily Rundown sometimes consolidates trends across all interests, creating one noisy summary. Take a look at the below headline on death.

LinkedIn Editors

In a world of information overload, the last thing we need is a noisy, one-stop shop. From retail to news to TV channels, our society is demanding filtered, specific access points to what we consume. If LinkedIn loses its sense of self, we lose a productive, professional networking tool and the relevant-information sharing possibilities it offers. On the flip side, if Facebook loses its carefree persona, I may have to limit the number of cat photos I post.

Still not sure the lines are being blurred? Check out this comment made on LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner’s recent update:linkedbook post

Mobile with LinkedIn

Relying too much on LinkedIn?

Sep 2016/in , , /by

LinkedIn mobile
Sometimes it seems that executives change positions faster than your morning coffee can brew. However, even when executive changes affect your business directly, you might be the last to know.

It can be overwhelming, keeping track of the perpetually changing status for management in your companies of interest – customers, partners, or competitors. Often we are forced to just rely on the traditional online professional networking platforms like LinkedIn, for professional updates.

Unfortunately, LinkedIn is dependent on user inputs for updates, and much of its value as a business intelligence tool is stunted by a trend involving executive level professionals neglecting their LinkedIn presence.

How Professionals are Using LinkedIn

LinkedIn is meant to encourage connections, learning, and sharing. Users of LinkedIn build a professional identity online, a concept inspired by traditional paper resumes, to build networks with colleagues and classmates while maintaining a presence in the job market.

For Market Research

In addition to its most famous uses as a job-search tool and professional social network, LinkedIn claims you can find “the latest news, inspiration, and insights you need to be great at what you do.”

Motivated by the claim, LinkedIn users have been applying the network to marketing and sales research. A solid 41% of B2B marketers consider LinkedIn their default social platform, as indicated in a 2015 Social Media Marketing industry report.

For Building Brand Awareness

It’s true that LinkedIn is brimming with information. Companies eagerly post content, hoping to hop on the social marketing wagon and build brand awareness. You can cultivate this awareness with LinkedIn when you have a well-maintained company page, augmented with equally well-maintained executive profiles. However, LinkedIn tends to be biased since a company’s own social media experts curate and manage company-specific information.

When Executives Don’t Give LinkedIn What it Needs to Succeed

Although executive profiles are a positive tool for brand cultivation on LinkedIn, many C-level employees do not maintain their profiles, if they have one at all. A creator of multiple start-ups, Shaun McConnon, publicly boasts about not being on LinkedIn. Those top executives who do have LinkedIn often neglect this presence to the extent of violating the main rule for LinkedIn success: always keep your profile updated.

According to recruiter Andrew Johnson, not maintaining your LinkedIn profile could be for a number of reasons, including:

  • It rarely crosses their mind, due to infrequently signing in.
  • They prefer to wait for the 3-6 month mark.
  • They wish to avoid their “network” demanding opportunities, requests, favors, and so forth.

Here at FirstRain, we noticed a rising trend in executive-level employees neglecting or forgoing LinkedIn profiles. If you follow us on Twitter, you have seen some examples of Management Changes across various industries:

Management Updates

Event detected 8/23/16 and tweeted on 8/30/16

Since LinkedIn updates originate from the users themselves, this trend of slow to non-existent updating throws a major wrench into the network’s use as a timely and useful research tool to understand management turnover.

LinkedIn Management Turnover

Event detected on 8/5/16 and tweeted on 8/10/16

To see more of our management turnover updates, head over to our Twitter page.

How Does this Affect You?

If you are relying on LinkedIn alone, you might be missing top-level changes in companies of interest. Such changes often indicate a shift in direction in terms of company control, power, culture, or even a combination.

In sales or account management, an executive change can act as a catalyst for relationship development. Management changes can cause previously out-of-reach companies to become more hospitable or better aligned with your product or service. On the other side, if a change stems from a negative cause, think layoffs or poor leadership, you may consider the change a reason to contact your account.

At the end of the day, meaningful and valuable business relationships are possible only when you know your accounts intimately and executive level changes are a key part of this.

Don’t Jump Ship, Just Grab Another Oar

LinkedIn isn’t sinking and there’s no reason to jump. Instead, simply supplement the network with a tailored research tool. FirstRain presents key insights on your customer, competitors, and industries of interest in a streamlined manner so you receive the updates you rely on without the noise. Unlike other business analytics engines, FirstRain incorporates the business web and social media content for a one-stop shop of business intelligence.

Management changes are highlighted in at-a-glance panels and cover management and executive hires, departures or internal moves within a company, and board changes. Management Change analytics include senior level hires and retirements, executive promotions and resignations, and even plans for departure. To easily consume these key insights, the changes are presented for a specific company, account, industry, or topic of interest and can be further filtered down by your choosing.

FirstRain Management Changes Panel

Events detected 8/10-18 on and tweeted on 8/18/16

Where LinkedIn is lacking, there’s FirstRain to help.

Want to see just how FirstRain fits into your day? Here’s a video for those of you in sales.  For those of you in marketing, read this overview.

Have thoughts you want to share or questions you need to ask? We’d love to hear from you.

INmarket-header

Explore the impact of data across every industry and every sector at INMarket on July 8th

Jun 2015/in , , /by

The dawn of data-driven is here. Gone are the days of getting excited about backwards-looking analytics and reporting. Join us at INmarket on July 8th, in San Francisco to explore how data and AI are driving billions of dollars of revenue for B2B marketing and sales. Predictive intelligence will impact all industries, businesses, and our daily lives in ways we can only begin to imagine.

Speakers include senior executives from Cisco, Forrester, LinkedIn, Salesforce.com, MongoDB, CSC, NetSuite, Lenovo and many more. The agenda will include topics such as:

  • How data and predictive will become the central nervous system for all sales and marketing
  • The CMO’s perspective on how to compete and win
  • Winning the in-market customer: The sales leader’s perspective
  • A guide to the universe of B2B intent data: What data is truly predictive?
  • How to build a data-driven organization
  • The past and future of B2B marketing technology

As a partner of 6sense, we’re happy to share a 25% off discount code with you (plus all registrations go to . Use code FIRSTRAIN when you register and we will see you there!

Twitter-Egghead

Trying to be a Social Seller? Don’t be an Egghead

Aug 2014/in /by

“Just like having a website in the 1990s, buyers are now judging the legitimacy of an organization based on their presence (or lack thereof) on social media.”

Rachel Clapp Miller over on the Force Management blog recently wrote a great piece on how to incorporate social media into your sales process. According to the research she quotes, social is proven to helps sales organizations drive pipeline by

(1) engaging with buyers earlier in the sales cycle,

(2) maintaining relationships with current customers and

(3) demonstrating valuable market insight.

Whenever you start using a new social media site, it prompts you to change your avatar, the image associated with the content you create/post. Your avatar basically represents who you are and an increasing amount of sales people are starting to use their professional ‘headshots’ across all their social business networks. This allows them to create a recognizable brand for themselves as social sellers for when they finally meet face to face with the customer. [Have you ever experienced the delight of meeting someone that you have followed and engaged with on a social network? I have many times, and it is a great feeling!]

Many companies are also starting to dictate that their employees join and engage with their customers on social networks – primarily Twitter and LinkedIn. Recently I saw a huge influx of people joining Twitter from a specific company. I found them because they were all retweeting the same corporate tweets I was tracking. However, I also noticed that many of them were eggheads.  An egghead is a twitter user that doesn’t change their profile pic. As an ‘egghead’ you are surely going to be ignored–some might even think that you are a spam bot of some sort. So I asked someone that worked there about what was going on. It turns out that their CEO had announced at their annual meeting that everyone had to be on social. So the eggheads got on social, and many of them still haven’t hatched.

Remember the old mantra, people buy from people? Your buyers are not going to engage with your eggheads. However, hatching an egghead into a social seller who will provide value to their network doesn’t happen overnight. You have to put together a social media plan that will help your sellers be successful on social. This should include tools that will help them quickly share content that is not only promotional for your own company and products, but will also provide insights into subject matters that your customers care about.

With that being said, I think it is time for me to retire my very own avatar. A couple of years ago I wrote an ebook that was beautifully illustrated. It included a hand drawn cartoon of me. Since then, I have used that picture as my Twitter avatar. My network knows me as such and I am concerned that by switching I might be masking myself with … well … a real picture of myself! But that’s ok- the aim is to provide value and engagement to my old friends and my new ones as well, and a fresh look could help do the trick..So follow me to see the “new” @danielabarbosa

notes

The Things We Learned at DF12–and how they’ll affect Dreamforce ’13

Sep 2013/in , /by

It seems like Dreamforce ’12 took people by surprise. Refrains of “It’s massive!” popped up all. over. the web.

 

We obviously now know to expect that Dreamforce ’13 will be just as giant. But what else did we learn last year that will influence how we all exhibit this year?

 

Side note: if you consider yourself a FirstRain competitor, please ignore this post. In fact, please do the opposite.

 

1. A successful business is a social business

 

I bet that if, for some reason, your company hadn’t embraced social media last year, that was the first thing you did when you got back from Dreamforce. How could you not, especially after Sir Richard Branson called you out on it? “For a business to not embrace social media … you’ve clearly got your head in the sand.”

 

Being on social media not only gives you an easy channel to engage more and different people, it allows you to really connect with people on a more personal level. Nowadays, people appreciate seeing the human side of corporations—and the corporations realized that at DF12.

 

This year, I expect WAY more traffic on Twitter (and Facebook, and LinkedIn…) and an effort to be more personable and, dare I say, casual—and, hopefully, some very cool ideas coming out of it.

 

Which happens to segue nicely to my next point:

 

2. If you want to stand out, you need to get creative
Dreamforce is huge. We’ve established this. So what can you do to make sure to get foot traffic at your booth, which is a tiny (but I’m sure very lovely) island in the Moscone Sea?

 

We just talked about how people like to see the clever, human side to a business. So if you want to get noticed, you need to get creative with how you promote your company in the run-up to Dreamforce. Recognizing this, for the second year in a row, we at FirstRain have made a Dreamforce-themed video, which is getting a lot of love, and a funny Dreamforce-themed Tumblr (check them out—you won’t be sorry!). We’ve seen other creative videos and Tweets pop up here and there, too (and we love it!).

 

Make sure you have the material to impress once people want to know more—but getting people to know your name in the first place is half the battle.

 

3. There are more apps out there than anyone knows what to do with
My prediction: at Dreamforce ’13, there will still be more apps than anyone knows what to do with. And there might be even more than that. Because people have now seen that being able to provide a quick and easy solution to any sort of business need, isn’t just nice—it’s what people expect. Oh, and if they don’t currently have your solution, the only way they’ll consider buying it is if it’s compatible with the solutions they already do use.

 

Expect to see an explosion of integration at this year’s Dreamforce. Have we mentioned that FirstRain can be dropped in to just about any CRM or corporate platform? And it’s mobile, which is also necessary.

 

Come visit us at booth #N1924! We promise to have cool swag (free lesson #4).

 

Vasquez8101

The Battle of Social Media Platforms

Aug 2011/in /by

Over the past few weeks the blogosphere has been buzzing with predictions on the impact of Google+ in the business world, adding to the growing focus on the benefits of social media for business. Currently, most businesses use LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter as tools to promote their brands and many are now asking whether Google+ will become the next big player in the world of social media marketing. It’s kind of overwhelming to think about adding yet another social media tool to one’s marketing arsenal when we’re still discovering how to use the ones we already have.  And yes, it may be too early to start casting Justin Timberlake for a Google+ movie, but I think it’s a safe bet that—sooner or later—this platform is going to be BIG.  The days where people say “Facebook me” may be coming to an end sooner than you may think, to be replaced by people asking you to join their “circle.”

For the rock-dwellers this last month, Google+ is the newest social network on the scene.  Introduced by Google in late June, it combines the ideas of Twitter, Facebook and Skype into one jumbo social media sandwich. Already, Google+ has reported 25 million users during the last month. Of course, this number is small in comparison to the hundreds of millions of users on Facebook or Twitter, but the trend is significant.  So what exactly is making Google+ gain traction so quickly? There have been plenty of other social networks (including platforms launched by Google, remember Google Buzz or Google Wave? No? me either) that haven’t even come close to attracting as many users as Google+. Intrigued and curious to see what this fuss was all about, I searched around and asked a co-worker to send me an invite to their Google+ circle.

And guess what? It turns out that Google+ seems to live up to its hype.  Not only does it remind me of the social platforms I already use, but it has removed the kinks that I couldn’t stand and made the platform simpler, better and overall, more fun.  For example, Facebook is known for having mega problems within their privacy system. I find their privacy control settings confusing and almost impossible to understand, consequently I am not sure what information I am sharing with the public. Google+ on the other hand, had privacy and filter settings that I found relatively easy to use.  I enjoyed being able to see what a person sees when each one clicked on my profile.  I could also reduce the chance of a person seeing an embarrassing picture of me (note to my employer: there are no embarrassing pictures of me on the internet …) by restricting what information could be shared within specific circles.

Another major problem I have had with Facebook is the overwhelming amount of noise on the site.  Like most people, I am not interested in half the information other users are sharing with me. Google+ allowed me to filter information I read, received and shared. In many ways, it’s similar to the way FirstRain helps its users. FirstRain filters out the junk in the consumer Web for busy professionals the same way Google+ gets rid of the noise of social media. As a result, I didn’t feel as if I was wasting my time scrolling through unnecessary information such as what people ate for breakfast. Potentially, Google+ will enable me to establish a circle solely for business acquaintances and share information that only relates to my company.

There are other appealing features as well, such as their ability to microblog more than either the 140-character Twitter limit or the 400-character Facebook limit. Plus, by combining Google+ with Gmail & YouTube, you get an enormous social media powerhouse, allowing business professionals to access all aspects of social media at once, without having to change websites and without having to rely on multiple platforms.

Although, ultimately, the jury is still out on success and Google+ and what it means for Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites, my advice to businesses is that it’s a good time now to become familiar with the Google+ interface and begin thinking about integrating Google+ into future marketing strategies. Business pages are currently prohibited from the site, because according to Google, they want to wait until they can implement it right.  And since it’s likely to be a few months before they’re ready, business marketers like us have been given the gift of time to formulate a Google+ game plan … and hopefully one that lives up to the all the excitement.

battleground

Why Salesforce buying Jigsaw is just the first shot in a new battleground

Apr 2010/in /by

We find and analyze management for our customers. It’s one of the most popular things we do. So we know that helping users get a better, richer picture of who matters in the companies and markets they care about is valuable intelligence.

Enter from stage left: Salesforce.com buys Jigsaw.com today.

Jigsaw has a mixed reputation – from Michael Arrington of Techcrunch originally calling them evil in 2006, and then in 2009 just calling them amoral – to the New York Times describing them as driven by users self interest. They’ve been growing, but not like LinkedIn; revenue has been doubling, but was it enough to go it alone? But whatever you may think about their business model, and your “friends” revealing your contact information into a central database, the net result is more than 1.2 million members and more than 22 million contacts.

Salesforce has positioned this as entering the $3B data services market – and creating “new opportunities” to partner more closely with other data providers like D&B, Hoovers and Lexis Nexis. But I think this is a classic misdirect. I agree with Michael Maoz – what’s really going on here is the convergence in the needs of CRM and the social process.

Users want dynamic, current data. They know that today the most up-to-date information is on the web. It’s in networks, it’s in blogs, it’s living in the thousands of phoenixes (or should that be the correct Latin phoenices?) rising from the ashes of the breakdown of traditional journalism. They don’t want to get data from databases built from manual processes and filings – they are simply always out of date.

And so for Salesforce, the ability to pick up a dynamic contact list and the continuously updating process behind it (since we have to assume LinkedIn was not for sale) is a way for them to bring that dynamism into their CRM platform and into their moves into social media. It’s a smart move. But I do wonder what the long term impact is for the traditional, static databases. I know at FirstRain we are replacing Factiva today because our intelligence is richer, fresher (and easier, but that’s another story) – will Salesforce end up competing with Hoovers et al?

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