the power of the network

Posted by luke on Nov 24, 2008 in blog | 1 comment

I needed to tap into my network of people across a few social networking sites today, to recruit a part-timer for a project and to see if anyone could help find a home for the Social Tech Solutions empire.

In total my update went out to around 750 people across three platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) – through a status message I sent out a simple request for people to get in touch.

I’d hoped for 10 or so, during the day…

…within 30 minutes I had 30 replies.

Wow.

THAT is the power of the network, to be able to broadcast out a simple message – in this case on twitter, which automatically updated my Facebook status (would be nice if LinkedIn status could be done via twitter too – hint hint, any techy friends listening?) and get 30 replies in 30 minutes.

An hour later, I was visiting an office space with a friend/business partner of mine which we’ll likely rent together and I have plenty of likely candidates.

In further evidence of the power of the network: I noticed a business contact had changed their LinkedIn status to mention they were working on a particular project… which I was writing an article about for here (to be published later in the week – when its finished) a quick email exchange later and a meeting is set up so we can collaborate.

Within 2hrs my network has provided:

A good group of potential employees
A business partnership
and Office space

My “Springers final thought for the day” – courtesy of GrindVision:

the most successful people are great networkers and in in this day and age the most successful businesses are great at social media

I couldn’t agree more.

what we did on sunday

Posted by luke on Nov 18, 2008 in blog | 0 comments

Not actually what I did on Sunday (which was travel back from London)… but a charitable project we are supporting: What we did on Sunday

Aiming to raise funds for Cancer Research UK, a group of fixed wheel cyclists are planning to ride across Europe.

We’re really proud to be providing technical support, advice and hosting to the website. I’ll post the link to their just giving page as soon as its up on their site.

In addition I’m still looking for a personal fund raising challenge for this year, having completed the Bournemouth Pier to Pier swim for the British Heart Foundation for the last 2 years – all suggestions in comments or via email very welcome.

Finding people gets easier and scarier

Posted by luke on Nov 12, 2008 in internet news | 0 comments

A new service came out of beta this week 123people.com - in their words:

123people is a real time people search tool that looks into nearly every corner of the Web. Using our proprietary search algorithm, you can find comprehensive and centralized people related information consisting of images, videos, phone numbers, email addresses, social networking and Wikipedia profiles and much more.

Now I tried a few searches including myself, whilst it was kind of frightening just how much about me is online it didn’t pull up anything I wasn’t aware of.

It seems to be most effective for people in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and the US… so for purely academic purposes I tried searching for Jessica Alba which it suggested on its front page.

Wow.

Directory listings, Social Networking pages, Email addresses and phone numbers to suit all of your stalking reconnection needs.

Sure, most of this stuff was easily accessible anyway, its not doing anything really new apart from the way it presents the information and the accuracy compared with a google search of the same name.

Its only purpose is to locate people, so you avoid all the pointless links from other search engines and get straight to ways of getting back in contact.

useful, yes if you need to contact someone – scary, yes… try it, search for yourself…

why your business needs to engage with social networking

Posted by luke on Nov 11, 2008 in internet news | 0 comments

Facebook now has 120 million active users.

That is 2% of the worlds population.

Think about that for a minute, if you take out those who dont use or have access to the internet – thats a high percentage of people.

We’ve decided to conduct a simple survey of 100 people who work in businesses around our area – how many use social networking, how many have a business strategy for it… now that’s something else to think about!

As soon as we’ve completed and compiled our survey, we’ll publish it here.

Bye bye Google Chrome

Posted by luke on Nov 10, 2008 in internet news | 0 comments

Like a fickle lover, I switch my allegiance back to Firefox.

Yes, I did find google Chrome to be slightly faster on most sites, but in the end I stayed because of the quick start option on new tabs (where it shows you the most popular sites you’ve vistited in a nice lazy “click on me” style!).

True to form, firefox users can add this “speed dial” plug in to get essentially the same (which is also more tweakable) functionality.

That just left my one big gripe – the lack of active bookmarks in Chrome – why? Dear Google… what made you miss this out? I’ve found my browsing less productive as I prefer to use active bookmarks to a feedreader, chrome just couldn’t hack it. When… (assuming they do?) fix it, I’ll be back to Chrome in a flash… oh yeah and it keeps hanging in youTube… a Google site… FAIL.