Social Media Usage Across Cultures

Since this post was published in 2010, the worldwide map of social media has changed dramatically.

For example in Brazil Facebook has replaced Orkut and in Russia, the number of social media users is growing at a very fast pace, mostly on their own local sites Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki.

Read more :

→World Map of Social Networks : http://sco.lt/5wsYJl

→ 4 Fascinating Facts on the Social Media Landscape in Russia http://sco.lt/5Bq5bd

-> China: 600 Million Social Media Users. China’s Web in 2013, http://sco.lt/8rPz8r

Anne Egros, Intercultural Executive Coach

[tweetmeme source=”AnneEgros”]

With the globalization we have seen an increase of usage of social media everywhere.

According to Nielsen research(January 2010), global consumers spent more than five and half hours per month on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year.

However there are great differences on how people use social media  in different countries. For example Brazilians are the top social media users worldwide according to anotherglobal survey byNielsen(June 2010). People in Brazil communicate mainly  in Portuguese. The social network made by Google,Orkut,has been adopted by 50% of Brazilians internet users but is not very popular in the United States.

For global marketers and people who want to develop both local and international networks,  it is important to determine  how people from different countries interact with social media.

There are five…

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Beware the Very Real Effect of Negative Social Connections

See on Scoop.it – Education For The Future

There’s a growing body of evidence supporting the idea that your friends’ friends wield tremendous power over you without you even knowing it.

Social networks are the groups of real friends that we all share and interact with.

Anne Egros‘s insight:

“Birds of a feather really DO flock together”

In the article, the negative effect of social networks is shown with obese people who tend to connect with other fat people on many levels of connection.

Emotions are the tools people use to connect with social network friends usually faster than in the real world where people tend to be more inhibited to expose themselves in person.

The phone works two ways though and the positive effects of your online friends may outweigh the negative impacts.

For example you can join people who have common goals and interests such as losing weight, staying fit and healthy, aging, raising kids or living abroad etc. Social networks can sometimes help you get extra motivated and less isolated.

What do you think ?

See on networkedblogs.com

Online Education as an Agent of Transformation

See on Scoop.it – Global Leaders

Online education is beginning to show itself as a disruptive innovation, introducing more convenient and affordable services that can transform sectors.

Anne Egros‘s insight:

Online (higher) education or E-learning, will change the way students will learn and it will help serve students who cannot afford traditional on campus teaching today. With globalization it is inevitable that traditional learning processes will be challenged and prestigious universities may lose their competitive advantages to the benefit of more collaborative and multicultural entities.

However the need for face to face meetings will still be there. The students may meet in person in local clusters to work on projects while using online materials instead than on campus classes.

The word MOOC has been introduced to designate MASSIVE OPEN ONLINE COURSES (FREE ONLINE COURSES) OFFERED BY THE BEST UNIVERSITIES AND ENTITIES. Already many universities offer online free courses  The top three MOOC-makers are Coursera, Udacity, and EdX

Another trend in education is crowd-sourcing, an open way to solve complex problems by using social media tools to get fresh ideas through group collaboration. For example, I use Memrise.com, an online learning platform that users feed with their own ideas on how to memorize a specific topic.

See on www.nytimes.com

Related resources:

• Why online education won’t kill your campus
•  A complete list of Massive Open Online Courses 
• Will MOOCs Change the Way Professors Handle the Classroom?
• Education for All Crowdsourcing Challenge

 

 

 

Get A Personal Brand Assessment On Twitter Using Twylah

 

You Are What You Post  Online !

If you are looking for a job or you are starting a business, it is time to consider Twitter to build your personal brand. If you are already using Twitter for building your reputation online, it’s time to look at the value of your brand.

Based on the frequency and date of your tweets, Twylah creates a dynamic, engaging, navigable website of your Twitter content, organized by topic.

Have a look at my page : http://www.twylah.com/AnneEgros

Most recently Twylah has launched a “Brand Assessment and Action Plan” to understand how your tweets are aligned with what you want to be known for, in other word with your personal brand.

• Is your Content Focused ? Choose the right key words for the rig audience

• Are You Consistent ? Maintain visibility requires you to tweet frequently about  your top brand messages

• Is what you post has resonance ? You have high resonance when your content fits your target audience

Watch the video from Eric Kim, CEO at Twhylah for more details:

I also discovered WeFollow, a utility created by Digg creator Kevin Rose that helps users find online experts  who have same shared interests providing you a source of relevent content for your brand.

What Do You Think About Twitter To Build Your Reputation ?

Related articles

• Big Trend for 2013: Visual Aggregation of the Social Web (prwarrior.typepad.com)
• Tweetsumé: 6 Steps to Tweet Your Résumé (socialmediatoday.com)
• How to Create a Big Brand by Going Small (slideshare.net)

Why I’m quitting Facebook

See on Scoop.it – Global Leaders

Douglas Rushkoff says the social networking site used to be useful, but has lost his trust with a feature that misrepresents his “likes” without his consent

Anne Egros‘s insight:

While I agree with many of the author’s arguments against Facebook, it is still a precious tool for people like me who are expatriates and have fiends all over the world.

However it is important to realize what is going on behind the Facebook scene that is not really pretty.

I have selected from this article the problems I think are true and some are clearly unacceptable:

1-Facebook has never been merely a social platform. Rather, it exploits our social interactions the way a Tupperware party does.

2-We Facebook users have been building a treasure lode of big data that government and corporate researchers have been mining to predict and influence what we buy and for whom we vote.

3-The true end users of Facebook are the marketers and we the users are the product. And we are its workers. The countless hours that we — and the young, particularly — spend on our profiles are the unpaid labor on which Facebook justifies its stock valuation.

4-More recently, users — particularly those with larger sets of friends, followers and likes — learned that their updates were no longer reaching all of the people who had signed up to get them. Now, we are supposed to pay to “promote” our posts to our friends and, if we pay even more, to their friends.

Facebook is not the Internet. It’s just one website, and it comes with a price.

Before privacy violation get worse at Facebook,  I already advocated for quitting it without losing your friends : Read more about the recommendations on keeping the good part of FB : 

Dump Facebook, Keep Your Friends: A Step-By-Step Guide 

To be honest I did not quit my FB account yet but I have reduced significantly the time spent on it and I cancelled all my FB notifications by email. I have also reduced the number of people who can see my information by using specific groups.

See on edition.cnn.com

Related articles

• Craig Kanalley: Prominent Writers Call Out Facebook As It Deals With Teenager Problem (huffingtonpost.com)
• Why I Quit Facebook – The Most Un-Social Network (unfinishedman.com)

Are Sociability And Klout Scores Related To Innovation ?

See on Scoop.it – Global Leaders

In the past decade, the word “friend” became a verb, the word “like” became a noun, and “tweet” became more than a birdsong.

In the original article “Do You Hire For IQ Or Klout Score? I have extracted the following interesting questions related to the shift FROM a knowledge economy TO a social economy

-How do you currently evaluate and place prospective employees?

-Do you consider the social influence of new talent in your recruiting process?

-Do you have a process for evaluating which types of projects should be managed collaboratively (socially) versus individually?

-Where appropriate, how do you encourage and foster social networking across your organization?

-How do you encourage and foster external collaboration outside of your company and across sectors of industry?

-What incentives and performance management systems do you have in place to encourage “creative teaming” vs. “functional innovation”?

-What are you doing to help your leaders understand their role in transitioning from a knowledge economy to a social economy

Here my comments:

I think we should start by evaluating the skills and personality types needed for each function and working environment.

Being social is just one skill that alone can’t make someone  or an organization creative or foster innovation.

I think good analytical thinking and judgement is very much-needed in a social economy as we are totally overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge we can get for free from the internet.

Too often people forget the facts and favor sensationalism or sentimentalism, even journalists don’t check their sources they find on YouTube or other social networks.

This article does not convince me that we have enough proofs to conclude that being social and having a high Klout score is linked with creativity and innovation.

Are you ?

See more on www.fastcompany.com

Related articles

• Add Some Klout to Your Recruiting (edenchanges.wordpress.com)

Are You In Control Of How You Spend Your Time ?

1-What have you done since you read this article ?

2-What tips did you find useful ?

3-What other strategies did you use ?

Examples of what I did for saving time for my business:

I tracked my time on Social Media Platforms and concluded:

#1: I spent too much time learning about Facebook pages and other social media tools in details, now I know more than enough to be able to make a distinction between what works and what don’t  and more importantly I have now in my network a bunch of very good social media experts and online marketing professionals I trust whom I can use for myself or recommend to my friends and clients.                             

#2: Time zones and geography: To be effective I have to post when my clients are active on the Internet. I learned how to use some automatic tools that post for me when I sleep on Twitter for example but it was not really efficient. I also dug deep into cultural preferences and clearly saw that Facebook was not used for business in most of my target countries but used for casual family and friends contacts.

#3: Linkedin authorize you to follow 50 groups (and more if you use sub-groups), I found this is way too many, so I just kept the groups but stopped all the notifications by email. That way I don’t have too much distractions in my inbox. I also leave some groups and join others based on my interests at a specific moment. 

#4: Use Email Filters and Folders. I try to automatically put incoming emails in folders by topics or people. I have one  for all notifications from Facebook, one for Twitter and one for each client or important people, one for blogs and newsletters I follow etc..

#5: I started to use Scoop-it a magazine-like curation tool that help me keep interesting articles that stay there so I can search certain topics and save me time when I need to write an article or a blog. It is better than Twitter for that purpose.

#6:Un-following  people on Twitter:  I am using “ ManageFlitter“ to eliminate accounts I followed in the past that are no longer active and I want to focus on people who share my interests.

                                                                                                                                               

Related articles

• 6 Tools to Manage Your Twitter Followers (searchenginewatch.com)
• 52 cool facts and stats about social media (2012 edition) (prdaily.com)
• 8 Great Twitter Tools to Try (inc.com)

Anne Egros, Intercultural Executive Coach

Are you always busy, yet not finishing all you want to do or enjoying the way you spend your time ? Time is the most precious asset we have that once spent is lost forever, unlike other precious things we may lose such as money, a job or even love, as we can always replace them. So why most people don’t think about time as an investment and don’t choose wisely how to spend it  as they do about their own money ?

Most people have to go to work because they need money for their families to buy food, clothes and have a roof over their heads not because they love their jobs. Ironically, for money we trade most of our waking hours, minimum 5 days a week for 40 or 50 years, giving away our youth and often our health, until we are too old to enjoy activities we really love…

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