JoelFoner.com

Which Secrets will we Find in the Social Web?

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every Tuesday at 12pm noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm Eastern time

This Tuesday, Sept 7 at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

Which Secrets will we Find in the Social Web?

Personal information is now scattered throughout the web, stored in and exposed by thousands of social networks, millions of blogs, email lists and other collections. Systems like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter provide a mindbending amount of information about people and their relationships, and these are only the “big three” out of an ever growing number of “social” systems.

Marketers are, of course, digging in to this treasure trove of information to improve results, however we are likely at the very leading edge of understanding the impact of public social information. What will the social web expose about us on the personal, societal and species level? Will we learn things we never knew? Will we learn things we wished we never knew? Will it change the way public and corporate policy is developed and analyzed? How will it change the way we interact and relate to each other?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon!

Read more…

Social Media Applied – How to Get Projects, Recruiters and Hiring Managers to Find You!

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every Tuesday at 12pm noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm Eastern time

This Tuesday, Aug 3rd at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

Social Media Applied – How to Get Consulting Projects, Recruiters and Hiring Managers to Find You!

Techniques for finding consulting projects and full-time jobs have changed radically in the last few years. Some of the changes have been driven by the emergence of social media. Others have appeared through changes to recruiting and hiring processes (for full-time positions), changing beliefs and strategies employed by hiring organizations, and large dose of new recruiting automation technologies.

While plenty has been written about social media marketing for products and services, little information is available to help job seekers understand how these changes affect what it takes to get found on this new playing field.

The number of applicants for any project or position outweighs the number of available opportunities by a wide margin (in recent times this number has been as high as 6:1, and is still almost 5:1). The large gap between supply and demand, coupled with new, advanced technologies, have changed the landscape of recruiting and seeking work in fundamental ways.

There is good news. Once you understand the new recruiting model, how the “recruiting ecosystem” fits together, and how companies, hiring managers and recruiters look at the process today, you can change what you do and obtain better results.

Instead of submitting your resume to job boards and wondering why you can’t get any results, you can know which possibilities to focus on, and how to get recruiters and hiring managers to start sending you messages asking if you’re interested in what they’re offering!

Moving from blindly submitting resumes, and getting no response, to having an inbound queue of recruiter and client requests is not instant. It does not rely on magic. It does not rely on luck. Each step is fairly easy, although some of the pieces involve new skills. There is real work involved, but this work can be done bit by bit. These new skills will pay you dividends for the rest of your career – so now might as well be the time to learn them!

Our session this week will be a slightly different format, in that I’ll start off by presenting some techniques and approaches developed and proven from experimentation, interviews with recruiters, and discussions with hiring managers and consulting firms, followed by a group discussion about how to best get from “Where do I start?” to fielding regular inbound queries asking “Are you interested in this opportunity?”

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon! Read more…

Parallels in Real and Virtual Community Development

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every Tuesday at 12pm noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm Eastern time

This Tuesday, May 11, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

Parallels in Physical and Online Virtual Community Development

The development and character of communities in both physical and online environments are affected by a variety of design decisions. Some decisions affect whether the community “takes hold” as well as its growth rate, while others affect the character, level of engagement and social behavior of the community. How are community design and development decisions similar in physical and online environments, and how are they different? What can these design decisions accomplish, and what needs to be accomplished in other ways? What can physical and online/virtual community designers learn from each other?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and Read more…

How Should We Deal with Cyber-Bullying?

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every Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm Eastern time

This Tuesday, May 4, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

How Should We Deal with Cyber-Bullying?

Bullying has become a consistent concern of school administrators, teachers and parents. What is the best preventive approach and response to cyber-bullying? This week, we’ll discuss how we should handle and respond to cyber-bullying.

On one end of the spectrum, a middle school principal recently sent a strongly worded email to parents directing them (not asking – directing) to remove their childrens’ social media accounts, to install monitoring tools, and to monitor their txt messages.

At the other extreme, some take the position that the genie is out of the bottle, and we should educate kids while not using direct control to manage their use of communications tools.

I wrote a post about a related topic in January “The Mobile Invisibility Cloak of Today’s Internet-Enabled Kids,” and when I heard about the principal’s email mentioned above I thought it might be  time for us to talk about this issue head-on.

Does technology create cyber-bullying? Will controlling technology stop it? What approach should we use to prevent cyber-bullying, and what should we do when it is discovered? Which strategies will instill the most useful skills and beliefs in our children for their future?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and Read more…

How has our Networked Society Changed Personal and Business Relationships?

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every Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / SL time

This Tuesday, Mar 23, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

How has our Networked Society Changed Personal and Business Relationships?

Today’s society has changed, and been changed by, the emergence of systems and tools that have provided a near real-time communications fabric that connects us individually and collectively in new ways. They expose our social graphs, encourage us to explore each others’ social graphs, enable us to meet new people and re-connect with people we’d lost track of, all with speed and a level of ease and fluidity that was unheard of a few years ago.

It is easy to find commentary denouncing these systems as the emergent cause of the downfall of individual relationships and society in general. Is it really all one-sided? Are there advantages and positive changes brought on by our new socially hyper-networked world, as well as some risks and negative implications? We are in the midst of an evolution that is only enabled by technology, but is far more about us and how we relate than the technologies themselves. A while back I wrote a post The Networked Audience is Here. Now. Are You Ready? That post focused on professional presenters, but the true impact has much wider reach. This week we’ll explore the effects of these changes on our relationships in general.

How has the emergence of our networked society changed the way we relate to each other, the way we communicate, the way we create and maintain relationships? Have we started to change the nature of human relationships—what it means to be social, what it means to be part of a society, or what culture itself means?

Much of the literature on the web about the impact of networked society on relationships focuses on personal and intimate relationships, and this bias is reflected in the reading links below. That being said, the same issues apply to many types of relationships, including family, purely social and business relationships, so please read them in that light, as we’ll be discussing this larger view of the topic.

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon SL for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and Read more…

Google Buzz Hands-On Workshop

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every Tuesday at 12PM noon SL (US Pacific Time)

This Tuesday, Feb 16th, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

Google Buzz Hands-On Workshop

There’s been a lot of buzz about Google Buzz this week. We’ve all probably heard about various security concerns, and rather than re-hashing that, I thought we would do something a bit different. This week we’ll have a hands-on workshop focused on two goals:

1) Develop a list of best practices with what we know so far about Google Buzz in “public mode.”

Public posting is the most common mode so far, as people experiment to see how Buzz is, or is not, like the other social networking services that we already know. Some things take a little practice and tinkering, and already there are some key things to know about interacting with Buzz. Let’s find out what we know as a group!

2) Get some hands-on experience using Google Buzz in “private discussion mode.”

Private Google Buzz posting is a feature that has received relatively little coverage that I’ve seen. I think this is potentially one of the “killer app” parts of Buzz, and suspect it will be the usage mode that gets Buzz to be a go-to tool for team coordination of projects and other not-so-public discussions.

I’m going to try to have a web conferencing rig running for this week, so we can have a live shared browser view while working through what we know and what we can figure out.

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon SL, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon! Read more…

The debates about Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) appear to be continuing unabated. Integrated Marketing Communications, if you haven’t run in to this phrase before, is a set of strategies that remove the traditional boundaries between public relations, marketing, advertising and other corporate messaging, in both the online and offline spaces, to create an environment where all efforts are coordinated in a synchronized way.

These debates repeatedly raise a few questions. Is IMC a winning strategy? Is it the future? Is it the right thing to do? Can it be implemented in an old-school organization? … and others.

Recently I’ve been attending #IMCChat,  a great weekly Twitter Group Chat hosted by Beth Harte (@BethHarte on Twitter) and Anna Barcelos (@abarcelos on Twitter), and after these sessions and a number of side discussions decided that it’s time for me to weigh in.

Many of the arguments for and against separation of advertising, marketing, product management, branding and public relations are internally focused. Questions abound as to the merits of having silos, or silos with communication, or no silos at all, with discussion focused on whether these approaches work for the organization.

Inward-Facing Analysis is Fundamentally Flawed

I believe that any inward-based analysis is fundamentally flawed, that the battle was already fought in public on the social web, and has essentially nothing to do with the “view from inside the castle.”

Why do I feel comfortable making such a bald proclamation? The answer lies in the social media era itself, which I think of as starting around the time of The Cluetrain Manifesto, which was published ten years ago and recently revised. The words of each of the 95 theses seem to be just as powerful today as they were ten years ago, and perhaps even more so.

Three Reasons IMC has Already Won Read more…

What is a Twitter Group Chat?

When you first start out with Twitter, you find that you can post status updates, and your followers will (may?) see them. Then you learn that putting an “@” sign before someone’s Twitter name creates a reply. Conversations with more than a couple of people get pretty awkward with only these tools.

Luckily, some folks figured out that by adding a “hashtag” (#), you create a unique phrase that is easy for Twitter Search to find. This is what enables Twitter Group Chats to work. For instance, searching for #hockey will find an on-going stream of Tweets about hockey.

It didn’t take long for people to realize that you could organize a group chats with hashtags. Twitter Group Chats are highly socially viral. They encourage lots of social interaction, and spread quickly, assuming the topic is interesting.

Twitter Group Chats are socially viral in a big way, and here are the six reasons they spread so quickly!

1) Starting a Twitter Group Chat is “Too Easy” Read more…

Is “Professional Rewriting” And Blog Plagiarism The New Normal?

Please join us for a discussion every Tuesday at 12PM noon SL (US Pacific Time)

This Tuesday, Jan 12th, we will be at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

Is “Professional Rewriting” And Blog Plagiarism The New Normal?

I recently heard the term “Professional Rewriting” for the first time. At first I thought “this is a bad joke.” My stomach started to feel queasy after searching a bit for the phrase on the web. While some services focus on what you would expect of a true writing and editing service, a surprising number go past that position. In some cases they suggest that it is ethical and “not cheating” (in as many words!) to have them take your basic ideas and write a paper from scratch using your concepts – even if the goal is to hand that paper in to a teacher, professor or academic journal with you named as the author.

For the next stop on the “you must be kidding” tour I looked more carefully at Read more…

We thought we knew the world of public presentations. We developed material, practiced the craft and delivered an experience to our audiences. Our craft was to entertain, to inform, to provide an experience. The audience’s role was to sit, absorb the experience, be quiet, and wait until some lucky few have had their chance to stand and ask a question or make a comment.

Then things started to change rapidly. Technology-enabled societal shifts started moving the ground under our feet.

The Rise of the Networked Audience

Through global communication technologies, people of all types now have access to each other and access to information at any point in time or space. They’ve gotten used to the idea that they can and should be able to discuss, rate, rank, prioritize, link and create conversations in text with anyone, at any time. They comment on and rate everything—movies, web sites, blog posts, music, videos, books, vendors, manufacturers… and you… and me. Social media everywhere has made this hyper-connectedness a part of everyday life.

They expect to do these things with the premise that everybody gains. That it’s their right. That sharing information and opinions is a duty, a core ethos of society. It gives us all the ability to help mold the world by collectively indicating what we think is good, and what isn’t so good. It’s a way to help other people make choices. It’s a new way of looking at the world. It is a new sort of collaboration.

This kind of communication can be terrifying because everybody in the room and around the globe can now Read more…