No matter whether deep scans in the social web are illegal in some situations, inappropriate, helpful or what ever, they will be made. Hiring managers and recruiter are not only trying to find an exact quality match but also a cultural match for the respective team. If qualification would be the only aspect, a computer could do the hiring. 

Common sense to do it right

Now – how can a job seeker and candidate for a respective position help recruiter and hiring managers by looking what they supposed to look? XeeMe is a simple yet very powerful tool to help recruiter save a huge amount of time and ensures that those who do a background check in the social web are finding the right profiles.

XeeMe is a social presence management tool that puts all the social presences in one spot and can be shared with one personalized URL – like http://XeeMe.com/AxelS. If you look at my XeeMe you get all the social sites I am on – AND – all the social sites I suggest you to explore. Simply by virtue of sharing this URL with you I imply permission to check it out any way you like

Job Seeker

If you are looking for a new job, we recommend you create your XeeMe and share it as part of your resume, cover letter or any means of applying for a job. Share the sites you like to share – the more the better. Let people know where you are and what you are. If you write a blog and expose your skills and capabilities, share it! You LinkedIn profile is equally important than your other presences. Keep in mind that networking and communication skills are more important than ever before – not only for sales and marketing managers. Engineers who are well connected are more likely to solve problem by asking their connections for help. Well connected bookkeeper are more likely to find an answer to unique situations by asking their network than those who are not connected. An open minded person is more likely to add value and improve the general team spirit than somebody who only works with a close chest. 

Recruiter & Hiring Manager

If you are recruiting new talents and want to know more about the candidates social presence, ask them to share a XeeMe with you. Not only it save at least an hour of research per candidate but makes sure that you have an implied "GO" to review their social networks and sites. All it takes is to ask if they would be so kind and help you help them. One of the best ways to do that is to share your own XeeMe with your candidates. That way they not only see what it looks like but also get to know you much better and develop trust much quicker. To accelerate the adoption, recruiter or hiring companies may actually add a customer registration page on their respective website.

Keeping relationships with candidates is another very time consuming task for recruiter but as a 'PRO' that's what recruiter do. Sending emails and conducting phone calls cost a lot of time and resources. Keeping connected in the social web brings both even closer together – yet is way less time consuming. XeeMe/Focus is a powerful application inside XeeMe that helps manage thousands of social connections. 

Not only for job seeker

Obviously XeeMe is not only for job seeker or recruiter. It was designed to help everybody to connect with others across networks. But it appeared to be a powerful tool in the highly stressed job markets around the world.

Axel

http://XeeMe.com/AxelS

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As many of you know, Twylah transforms your tweets into an awesome looking website that organizes and brands your tweets. What many of you may not know is how to optimize your Twylah pages to get the most out of your Twylah experience.

Following are the top 3 strategies you can implement TODAY to get significantly more value out of your Twylah and Twitter activity.

Custom domain

The best way to increase the effectiveness and impact of your Twylah experience is to host your Twylah page on your own domain or website.  Custom domains for your Twylah pages can dramatically increase the footprint of your website on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo!.

Hosting your Twylah page on your domain helps you:

• Gain control over your own content and traffic
• Get more search traffic from your Twitter activity
  
• Transform your tweets into on-line leads or sales on your own website.

The instructions are simple:

1. In your DNS manager, create a new CNAME and name it "tweets"

2. Point the CNAME to www.twylah.com

3. Verify that the new subdomain points to the right place (when you go to tweets.YOURDOMAIN.com, it should take you to www.twylah.com)

4. Email customdomains at twylah.com to let us know it's set up — please be sure to specify your Twitter username and the new subdomain info

5. The Twylah team will "flip the switch," and your Twylah Page will render on your domain

For more detailed instructions, simply email customdomains at twylah.com.

Power tweets

The only way to give your Twitter followers MORE of what they are looking for, when they are looking for it, is through a Twylah power tweet. 

A power tweet (a tweet from Twylah as opposed to Twitter or other client) creates a custom landing page for your tweet, which includes an automatic link back to your Twylah page, the text of your tweet, any linked content, and other related tweets of yours. 

Because Twylah pulls in “related tweets” on the landing page, you are giving your audience more content on the same topics they just clicked on.   As a result, power tweets increase engagement (as defined by time spent on your Twitter content) by 40x! 

Viewers who land on power tweet links typically spend several minutes with your content and your brand.

Manage topics

Twylah pages are centered around your Twitter content, specifically the topics you tweet about most.

Twylah chooses your topics based on the frequency and recency of your tweets.  If you want to add a topic, you may need to tweet about that topic more and more frequently.

Additionally, you can “manage topics” through the drop down menu at the top right of your page.  Just sign in to your page, click on the drop down menu.  You can hide up to 10 topics and “pin” your top 3.

Summary

By implementing any one (or all 3) of these strategies, you are sure to enhance your Twylah experience and results. 

And if you don’t yet have a Twylah page, you can get more information and/or request an invitation here: http://www.twylah.com/

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Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google's Sergey Brin

An interesting post to read. In the  Guardian,  Brin said he and co-founder Larry Page would not have been able to create Google if the internet was dominated by Facebook. While Google was a great company in the 90's they never understood that our society is massively changing. It isn't Social Media and its tools that change the world – it is our society that rapidly moves to more democracy, expressing their opinion publicly, grow to much more individualism and autonomy and therefor embrace Social Media to fulfill their interests. If you don't think so, think about this: Non of the social networks or tools ever advertised or promoted their products. Unlike any other technology that was pushed and introduced to the world with massive marketing budgets, convincing people to use it – social media platforms were taking in storm. Why BECAUSE WE WANT IT BADLY.

And when I say 'Google' doesn't understand social, I mean the Google Management team. Google is a legal entity, a bracket for the activity of people who live inside this organism. Google doesn't do anything – the people in Google do – or in this case don't. They don't understand that our society is shifting at a speed that can only be compared with the industrial revolution.

About a year ago I wrote a post addressing Larry Page to forget competing on a social network and start building a social search engine. The result is a massive undertaking to get Google Plus into the market and keep business as usual inside Google. Why didn't people run and take on G+ like the many other networks? Because Google thinks and acts like a software company from the 90's. Neither the product nor the team is social. 

Google is getting dangerously weak

I agree to a certain extend that the freedom of the Internet is at risk. Too many try to put in rules and regulations. Not only in dictator lead countries but also in free and democratic nations. In the US people think about requesting Facebook passwords from employees, in Germany Gema controls what YouTube can show and similar situations pop all over the world. Google would be the one who can change that not Facebook. Isn't Google the one who bend over backwards to keep the business in China? Isn't Google the one who owns YouTube and let Gema control what you can see on YouTube?

The Microsoft – Google – Facebook dominance

Google is light years away from protecting the freedom of the web. Google is known to be 'big brother', many are scared of the fact that Google keeps everything we do, we say, we post simply by cashing it so even if we delete it – Google keeps it. After the unwanted dominance of Microsoft, we experienced the dominance of Google and now the next "dominator" is Facebook. The only group however that has effectively the power to let anybody control the web are the 2 Billion users. And we have seen this in the SOPA or PIPA discussion, we saw the influence in Egypt and other nations and we – the population of the world – continue to expand our democratic rights. Facebook is certainly one platform to execute those rights but nothing more than the platform. Twitter is another one, Pinterest is just about to become yet another platform that allows all of us to express ourselves on a global scale.

Dear Sergey

I'm sure you didn't read my post to your partner Larry. Not only because you don't know me but primarily because you are not listening. And the ones who listen for you don't respond – let alone you responding. That is the difference between you and Marc Benioff, Richard Branson, Tony Hsieh and Barak Obama who all respond to series requests – you only ignore it – most likely don't even know about it. How should you be able to build the Google of the future if you don't know what the people of that future want and need, what they may get excited about and frustrated over? You don't even recognized the major change of our society. The good news however – you still have time to make a change, make a difference, participate, become part of it . IF and that is a big fat if, you are still hungry enough to want it and want it as badly as the society wants that evolutionary change we are already going through.

Feel free to follow us.

Axel
http://XeeMe.com/AxelS

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Silicon Valley remains to be a phenomenon when it comes to technology innovation and startups. And Social Media is no difference. XWeek is an initiative from XeeMe Inc. helping users around the world getting a view into those technology boosters before they become as well known as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or lately Pinterest. Every other week users will be introduced to a new technology or new product, being able to hear from entrepreneurs what the vision of their company is and where the industry is heading.

XWeek also helps startups to get additional exposure to the market and to people they may not know.

This week XWeek is introducing Twylah

a very interesting summary and publishing tool to re-purpose your Twitter content

Twylah on XWeek: April 16 – 20

Twylah creates an excellent looking summary page from your most important tweets. It may look like ourCEO’s Twylah. If you are active on Twitter you may introduce your updated Twylah daily via Facebook and the other networks. Why should you do that? Because a person is on average just a few minutes on each platform a day – do you catch them all when they are there? Never. :)

Join the webinar, tweetchat, read blog posts from expert users or see the video interviews.

Click for the details

Axel
http://XeeMe.com/AxelS

My friend Bob Thompson wrote an intriguing post about the status of Social Media, which in turn sparked this post. Basically those companies who have a brilliant social media strategy don’t brag about it. And the reason is simple: Why should you share some of your most significant competitive advantages. As many of you know, I’m involved in several of those major strategy developments and can’t and won’t talk about it other than teaching how it is done.

Rethinking Competitive Advantages

New technology was always introduced with big announcements. We were proud of installing this or that, whether it was CRM, ERP, CAD or XYZ. Social Media however is different. We put our toes in the water, then we do more, hire an agency and the agency does a big splash about our social media initiative which is nothing more than a tactical and often less successful marketing campaign. Again – social media is like sex – we won’t talk about it – unless we don’t have sex and may brag what we dream about it as if…

A social media strategy is first and foremost about our plans to be more social, more caring, more approachable, reach out farther, expand our presence, be a better company do everything we can with one goal in mind: “have more people who want to do business with us”. This goal is fundamentally different to the goal of “having more revenue”.

Finding more people who want to do business with you

This goal is like finding more partners that love us, it is about more friends more relationships. If a company can reach that goal, that company knows that it achieved a sustainable position in the market with a positive long term effect. If you look at Apple as a company that made more revenue and profits and you try to find out how the company is managed and how it is structured and where the key items in their balance sheet are – you look at the wrong direction. If you look at Apple as a company where more and more people want to buy their products and want to be a customer,  you look at how they sell, what they produce, how they service the market, what they do for business partners and how they develop their ecosystem. If you look at Zappos as a company and what they did to completely outperform all their competitors and how they grew the revenue they did, you may look at their margins, the effectiveness of their operations, what their product portfolio looks like and how profitable their vendors are. Again – you look in the wrong direction. Instead if you look why so many people want to do business with Zappos, what fascinates their customers, why they get recommended so often, what those customers want and why they prefer Zappos over others, you learn about the love Zappos puts into their customer relationships, their company culture and the customer experience.

Social Media Puberty

Most businesses are in “Social Media Puberty” – ignore what is said, know it all better, and just want to have sex (revenue). Only after the many attempts, trial and error, they find out that there is much more involved to succeed than what THEY want. The leadership team, like a young man is coming to their single biggest discovery in their evolution: ‘It makes all the difference, when you figure out what the girl / customer wants’.

That’s the point in time when you develop a strategy that is in both cases a strategy of life. It very much involves who you are, what you want and finding the other party that likes what you do. The emancipation of customers brings yet another twist to the game and it is getting even more complicated. And said strategy is becoming more mandatory for a successful end.

Social Media Strategy

Once we developed our plans and have a pretty good idea what we want, we stop bragging about it, we just follow our plan. We may tell everybody and his dog about a new car, the next party, the movie we are going to see but we won’t say a word how we attract the partner of our future. And with our customers there is no difference. Did you chat with your friends how they think about this or that approach? Most likely, so chat with your customers about your strategic thoughts. Did you give your love some indication what you want to do in the future and check if that is a match? Do that with your customer. Did you start planning the future with your love, even though it may not go this way? Do that with your customer.

Now – there are obviously thousands of things that are different, man versus a company and building a relationship between a team of many employees and a whole market makes it even more complicated. But that is what the Social Media Strategy is all about. And as you can imagine the old strategy models won’t hold in this new environment.

Speed Up WordPress Before and After

Do you see those “Pingdom Before” speed results? 8.27 seconds load time! When I saw that,“Speed Up WordPress” jumped to the TOP of my to do list for this blog. 8.27 seconds. That’s ridiculous.

It took a few different experiments to speed up wordpress, and after much tweaking and un-tweaking,  I was able to make my blog load a lot faster! As you can see, 704 milliseconds!

The results vary based on time of day and other factors out of my control, but usually, my results are around a second or less.

Here is what I did; the good, the bad, and the ugly! I am telling you what worked and what didn’t work for me. Hopefully, this will save you some time as you try to speed up WordPress loading time for your blog.

Some things to know:

• I am on shared hosting on HostGator.
• My theme is Suffusion.
• My WordPress version is up-to-date.
• I don’t claim in any way to be a WordPress expert. I am not telling you what to do – I am merely telling you what I did.
• I will cover the basics of what I did – if you want me to explain something in greater detail, please let me know in the comments.

First, I took a baseline of my blog’s performance. I performed the baseline tests multiple times, on different computers, and in different browsers. I absolutely need the benchmarks to see if my efforts to speed up wordpress succeed.

• Pingdom - 8.27 seconds
• YSlow - D, 63
• Google Page Speed - 78

Speed Up WordPress by Optimizing My Cache

This area took me the longest. I did a LOT of experimenting here. I already had W3 Total Cache installed and my site obviously wasn’t doing so hot.

I took it down and tried WP Super Cache. That really distorted my blog, so I disabled it and tried again to speed up wordpress with W3 Total Cache. I must have had W3TC configured poorly previously so I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the ideal settings for me.

So many of the tutorials online are not an ideal set up for shared hosting like I have on HostGator. Luckily, I found something I could really work from to configure it.  A member of the HostGator support staff posted his W3 Total Cache configuration on his blog at http://projects.pithyphrase.net/w3settings.

I downloaded his config.php file and installed it into my Performance Settings and hoped it would speed up WordPress better than the configuration I had previously. JUST A NOTE: If you decide to install his settings, BE SURE TO CHANGE THE SITEMAP SETTINGS!!

Some key things I think you should know if you are on shared/reseller hosting like I am:

• Don’t enable database or object caching. These are not ideal settings for shared hosting.
• Minify on auto didn’t seem to work for me. I had to use it manually.
• Apparently, eTags aren’t great for shared hosting as well.

I fussed and fussed here, frustrated that I couldn’t find a SIMPLE explanation of how to do this. Finally, I think I have it configured well. This took me WAY longer than it should have.

Later, I also installed a plugin, FV Gravatar Cache, to also cache my gravatars.  I am not sure how much it helps or hurts – but felt it was worth a try.

Speed Up WordPress by Optimizing My Images

I was using a Flickr plugin that allowed me to find and insert images from Flickr into my posts. I also was changing the size of each picture from its original size when I displayed it in my posts.  Not good.  Simple fix: I went to Flickr, downloaded each picture in the size I needed, and uploaded them to my site.

Then, I installed the plugin WP Smush it.  This is a GREAT plugin. Made a big difference on most of my images. In my opinion, this is a MUST HAVE plugin to speed up WordPress.

Another thing I noticed was that on my blog post, 7 Tools To Discover Your Digital Identity, I was calling forth images from Spokeo to illustrate one of my points. Unnecessary.

To fix this, I took a screenshot of that section of my blog post, optimized that image, and used that instead.  That seemed to help with my loading time as well as that post no longer had to call multiple images from Spokeo.

Speed Up WordPress by Optimizing My Plugins

I had fun with this part. I like plugins. I am a bit of a gadget geek and I have to continually practice restraint on my blogs. I simply want every plugin in the world!

While viewing my “waterfalls” on Pingdom, I noticed my social share plugin was a real drag.  I swapped it out for a couple of others that I had used in the past, and didn’t see much of an improvement.

Then I installed the Digg Digg Share Bar now owned by Buffer. It has lazy loading which I love. Doesn’t slow down my site to load anything. Definitely saw an improvement there.

I did have to forfeit a bit of design options. I liked that I could add color to my social share bar and the splash of color it added to my site – but I prefer the ability to speed up WordPress. Also, I liked that me share bar now has Buffer and Pinterest. Nice!

Speed Up WordPress Plugins

After that, I found another awesome plugin that I am a BIG fan of. P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler).

With this, I scan my plugins and see how each one affects my site.  On my first scan, I found a few offenders that I was unaware of.

As you can see on the image to the right, my plugins had a major impact on my loading time. 81.8% of my page load time was plugins! There is no way I can get my loading time to around one second if it takes over over a second just to load my plugins.

The plugin with the largest impact was “Viper Proof”. Bummer. I really liked this plugin. Unfortunately, as much as I liked it, it had to go for now.  Maybe a version will come out soon that will be less impacting.

The next plugin doing the most impact was Jetpack plugin from WordPress. I don’t use the benefits of Jetpack to justify having it, so it was deactivated as well. Not worth forfeiting the chance to speed up wordpress.

The third largest was CommentLuv Premium, which there is NO WAY I was getting rid of, so that stayed.  There is NO way I am having a social media focused blog without it. I love to go to ComLuv+ blogs and I love to offer my readers ComLuv+ options in their comments. I personally have to have it.

My fourth largest plugin demand was Akismet. I am experimenting with it activated and deactivated. I may not need it because CommentLuv Premium may discourage spammers for me sufficiently.  At the moment, it is deactivated, though I may turn it back on.

Speed Up WordPress Plugins After

In my first post on this blog, I shared the plugins I am currently using. In my efforts to speed up WordPress since this first post, my plugins have changed a bit.

• Akismet – DEACTIVATED
• CommentLuv Premium*
• Easy WP SEO*
• Flickr Photo Post – DELETED
• Google Analytics for WordPress
• JetPack – DEACTIVATED
• ManageWP Worker – DELETED
• TF Social Share – REPLACED WITH DIGG DIGG
• W3 Total Cache
• WordPress Editorial Calendar – DELETED
• WordPress SEO
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – DELETED

Some plugins that have been added since this original setup:

• Dashboard Luvvers Widget
• Digg Digg
• FV Gravatar Cache – To Speed Up WordPress
• Meta Robot – Deactivated
• P3 Plugin Performance Profiler – To Speed Up WordPress
• Social Media Metrics
• Viper Proof – Deactivated
• WordPress Ping Optimizer
• WP-DB Manager – To Speed Up WordPress
• WP Smush It – To Speed Up WordPress

Speed Up WordPress by Optimizing My Database

I installed WP-DBManager to optimize my database.  I don’t know if this is the best plugin for this or not – but it certainly seemed to do the job for me. I like that I can get a backup of my database. I also like that it will run on a schedule to keep my database tidy.

SPEED UP WORDPRESS BASELINE RESULT CHANGES:

• Pingdom - 8.27 seconds,79 –>1 second or less, 91
• YSlow - D, 63 –>B, 80
• Google Page Speed - 78 –>89

A few things holding me back in my efforts to speed up WordPress/optimize WordPress

Third-party plugins:

• Some of these don’t have expirations in the headers
• Some of these don’t have optimized images
• Some of these don’t have minified files

I began tweeting being an executive of my former company – I remember what it was like when I started ;)

If you google “how to use twitter” you’ll receive over 10 Million results.  Brilliant tips and tricks how to set it up, how to follow etc. but how should I actually make use out of Twitter was not really to find – obviously I did not have the time to grind through 13 Million results.

I searched for “why should I use Twitter” and the results were still 85,000 – but most were an epic explanation what Twitter is.

Michael Campbell writes: “Twitter is a way to get your message out”, uhh really? Blogul says “It is a cross between blogging, texting or SMS” hmm, if I’m not doing either am I off? Wayne Moran posted: “Twitter is all about the relationship and the socializing.” true,  but is that helping those who don’t know?

So why should I use Twitter?

1) Because it is the one medium where almost any news is available before you and everybody else can read it in traditional news sites on the Internet – let alone news papers.

2) It is one of the fastest ways to get on top of peoples mind

3) It is the most efficient way, to get and stay in touch with people who are relevant to you.

4) It is the most effective way to communicate your own news with the people you care about.

5) It is by far the easiest way to learn what is on top of mind of friends, customers, partners, competitors…

I’m a very busy executive, I just don’t have the time for Twitter.

Don’t waste a moment with Twitter. Seriously – just don’t . But how much time do you think you have for your business friends, customers, partners, management team? You travel around the world because you want to be in touch – right?

Rule No.1 Be on top of people’s mind

1) Have a browser window open and tweet once in a while
2) You want to be on top of people’s mind – right? Here you go.
3) If you are not only present but share interesting thinghs you see, or you think about, you REALLY get on top of peoples mind
4) You drive an hour to see a customer to strengthen your relationship. OK you have to do that. But how about augmenting this by keeping the dialog on Twitter? You just doubled the number touch points.
5) Help your client with what they are dealing with, regardless whether it has to do with your business or not.
6) Do what the world class sales people do on a golf course: socialize.

If Tony Hsieh, CEO of Billion $ Zappos or US President Barack Obama has time for his connections on Twitter, why not you?

I’m not interested in reading about somebody is walking their dog or having pizza for breakfast.

No one is. If you read this type of stuff – you are following the wrong people. In Twitter you only read things from people you are interested in. If your interest is rather random and you follow whatever comes your way… that’s what you get

Rule No.2  Only follow people who are highly relevant to you

1) Start by looking for the people you know and you are interested in
2) Expand by following people you DON’T know BUT you are very interested in
3) Look for topics you are really really really interested in and then follow people who contribute interesting content.
4) In order to read the hottest latest and greatest, find people who typically tweet about it and look for people who re-tweet others when they find cool stuff. If something happens in the middle of nowhere, you may not know the person who tweets it – but somebody is re-tweeting it and someone else is re-tweeting that re-tweet. It took me only a few seconds to read about the earthquake in Japan, long before the News picked it up – and my connection to Japan is rather weak but my overall network is strong enough to get that RT (Re-Tweet) within a few seconds.

If you see Michael Dell, CEO of Dell responding spontaneously to  someones tweet, only because he is just following some 600 people – not 60,000 like some others.

I have no time to sit for hours and find the right people

Well, most people take years to get connected to important or interesting people, some couldn’t make those connections in their entire life time. Stop bitching about hours of work to connect to the top people in the world.

Rule No.3 Make investments in relationships

1) You can connect by simply following every industry leader or anybody who is important to you. Lookup the person and click follow. Note: This is nothing at this point other than you see what they write.
2) Start commenting on their tweets, re-tweet if you feel it is of interest to those who are following you.
3) Over time, that person may read your answer or comment and maybe even start following you as well.
4) Time is what it takes – because you are building a relationship to somebody who would potentially never take your call, read your email or otherwise respond to you.

If you read through the tweet stream of some twitter luminaries like Liz Strauss, you will recognize that most of her tweets start with an @sign and a name – simply because she is using Twitter to continuously strengthen her relationships and she is one of the most trusted twitter users in the TwitterSphere

I have no time to read every tweet they write – this is w-a-y to much

Rule No.4  Only read what’s relevant to you

Unless you are retired you probably never read an entire news paper. It would simply be too much content and with too less relevancy. You also probably never read an entire lexicon.
Now – if your goal in life is to have a conversation with a person just tweeting about walking his dog. Would that tweet still be stupid – or would you consider it an great opportunity to chime in?

And if you follow Rule No.2 you won’t get in trouble with tweets from people you are not interested in.

Ok, So I want to get “my message out” and blast as much as I can about my business

This is what many people do all day long. From smallest to biggest companies. Some use tools to do that automatically and others hire people to do that for them. Those who ‘should’ read it however consider it spam. So all I can say: WRONG

Rule No.5 Don’t sell on Twitter

1) When you write a tweet, imagine for a second – what would your best friend tell you about it, what would your best customer think, how would your worst competitor talk about it.
2) Make sure you contribute some value to the people you are connected with. Promoting a product is usually no value.
3) Review the answers to your tweet and check if there are retweets – that gives you a good indication of your value. No re-tweet, noo feedback – maybe it was of no value.
4) If you start selling and promoting, you jeopardize Rule No.2 and 4 and as Rule No.3 is what everybody is following, it won’t be read anyway – so spare your energy.

Even Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com who is known to always take an opportunity to sell is pretty balanced on Twitter not overselling to his followers.

Summary

To be one of the first to know what is going in, follow the relevant news provider and those who always re-tweet interesting stuff. That’s all it takes. In order to get in touch with top notch people, follow them, respond, share what is relevant to them, never spam and you have the best chance of all the available techniques to actually get in touch. As your network has grown and you became attractive because of interesting content, you become a contributor of those news and you can do this faster and more effective than any other way.  And since you maintain a dialog and communicate 1:1 with the people who are relevant to you, most likely you discover Twitter as most efficient way to keep and strengthen those relationships. That you know what is on top of peoples mind is only a result of all the above.  What took people years, market research and a whole staff of people helping, can be done in real time with minimal effort.

@Axel

xeeme.com/AxelS

Thought I’d share this video showing what market leader Intel thinks about Social Media and how they help their team to adopt and successfully use Social Media.

I only hope it is encouraging their team not scaring it off. Unfortunately it is loaded of things not to do rather than leveraging the opportunity. But hey – it’s a beginning.

Social Media Experiment Update 5 – aka – “What is the social media experiment update after negligible social media interaction for several months?”

As you may have read in my last post, my personal life took an abrupt change in course on December 16th when my son begged me to homeschool him.  In order to add in such a huge, time-consuming, commitment into my life, I chose to back-burner this social media experiment until I could recapture more time.

Interestingly, just as calories impact your body whether you count them or not, I have discovered that the social media experiment rolls on whether or not I tend it.

This update is about what happened to my social media numbers between December 18, 2011 to March 01, 2012. In general, all of my numbers did better than I expected.  The rate of increase was much slower than it had been previously, but still, there was an increase in blog traffic, followers, fans and friends. The two metrics which showed the biggest decline were my “XeeMe” points and my Empire Avenue social media stock price.  Everything else pretty much held steady.  (In the past few days of social media activity, my XeeMe and Empire Avenue numbers are on an upward trend, as you will see in my social media experiment update on Friday.)

Frankly, I am pleasantly surprised by the results.  I am very curious to hear your opinions on a few things, so after you read this, PLEASE share a comment below about why you think I continued to have traffic and an increase in some of my social media metrics.

So here is the update:

This blog started on November 11. It has 9 11 posts currently.

There are 218 242 comments on the blog, 67 of which are my responses to comments.  175 comments are from blog visitors.

I have had 1427 2186 unique visitors and 536 816 returning visitors since Nov 1. A total of 1963 3002 visits.

Social Media Presence Change Since Dec 18

Thanks to Google Analytics and to TwentyFeet, I am able to see the traffic and my number of Twitter/Facebook followers on any particular day.  If you want to track your Twitter, Facebook Page and Profile, and YouTube followers, I strongly recommend TwentyFeet to track these and other social media site metrics.

This blog received 1242 visitors while I was gone.  Not an amazing number but still – more than I expected for an untended and non-promoted blog.

My Twitter followers increased by 18 followers.

My FB friends increased by 49 friends and my FB fans increased by 13.

Klout fell 6 points and my PeerIndex held steady.  XeeMe and my Empire Avenue stock both fell quite a bit.

I totally recognize that these numbers are completely unremarkable.  However, as I say that, I realize this blog was only a month-and-a-half old before I went on hiatus, and I was on hiatus for several months.  So, the fact that this blog got any traffic at all completely surprises me!

Where did this traffic come from?

Here is the breakdown of my top ten traffic sources:

• 270 – organic google search
• 211 – direct traffic
• 210 - bizsugar
• 134 – rss
• 76 - paper.li
• 43 - justretweet
• 31 - facebook
• 28 - ingerverheul.tumbler
• 27 – t.co
• 23 - xeeme

Below is the summary of social media experiment updates:

However, this is slowly and steadily changing. Today 60 – 80% of the so called educated purchase decision is based on recommendations.

Recommendations in turn are made by trusted individuals or groups that have no or no significant interest in the sale but helpful and experienced people using or knowing the product or service in need. And the number of recommendation based purchases is steadily growing. I'm sure it will hit the 80 – 90% range in the next 5 to 10 years. Already today people are searching for experience, do their background checks, seek for user reports and more. The website with the actual offer or e-commerce shop is the last step in a product or service evaluation process. 

Now – what does that mean to SEO? Why should a business invest in search engine optimization if most of the purchase decisions are based on recommendations? Wouldn't it be smarter to invest into the "recommendation chain" instead in SEO? Wouldn't it be more effective and successful to make sure people recommend a product than hoping to come up higher in the list of search results?

Well – today not every consumer is looking for recommendations, experience and other indicator what product or service they should buy that fits their needs. But in 10 years most of the decision maker in the age of 35 are the 25 year old from today – who would just not buy a product based on the fact that it shows up on the first page of a search engine. If they had to decide to put $1,000 in relationship improvement versus SEO – guess where they spend their money?

Today somebody may type something into the search field to get some idea what product, service or technology may come up. The highly optimized site may show up on the top. Then what? Purchase right away? Never. Now the next step is checking all the results. And here comes the key: User based feedback from blogs, communities, groups, Q+A sites and more. What the searching user gets is now a good picture and quickly realizes that this first item on the search engine may not be the best. Often times it is not taken BECAUSE it shows up first, which makes many buyers suspicious. 

While we have tens of thousands SEO consultants fighting for their profession, there will be people who buy it. Like people advertise in Yellow Pages still today believing it makes sense. The same people will pay for SEO even in 30 years but the primary SEO business will be gone in 5 to 10 years. I couldn't find any reason why it would be of value.

P.S.
The City of San Francisco finally banned the distribution of Yellow Pages as 90 tons of paper where thrown away a few days after the books where delivered. The only reason they still get printed is to get the ad dollars from the mom and pap shops who never knew that the books are basically go straight from print to trash.

Axel

http://XeeMe.com/AxelS

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