Facts and Examples of Online Impact

The 4th in the series of "videos" called "Did you know" from the Economist has been posted - http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/did-you-know-4-0-video-by-the-economist/ and provides interesting statistics on online channels and use. Apparently advertisers are turning to mobile devices for their spend which only makes sense since most Americans have a cell phone and its expected to be the computing device by 2020.

And a phenomenal example of the power of YouTube is the "United Breaks Guitars" songs and video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo by Dave Carroll. I saw in the news last night that he spoke to US Congress on behalf of passengers' rights. He mentioned that he did meet three VPs from United and after a year of trying to get compensation, and after his videos and songs went viral, they have offered to compensate him. He did mention doing a 4th song and video, I guess to explain how the story ended.

They didn't teach us about this in Public Relations when I went to school. If United was smart they'd write a song saying they were sorry and that they've corrected their ways...they could turn this around some if they tried, that's if they are smart and join the online conversation - they certainly can't stop it.

Personal Web Presence or Brand

Believe it or not you now have your own brand and web presence - if you are on any of the social networking sites or have contributed online. Its a hard concept to wrangle but there are some steps you should take right away.

1. Audit your online presence - what accounts do you actually have and how active are you in them? Are you on Facebook weekly? LinkedIn daily? Twitter? Do you have a blog? any videos on YouTube? any presentations on SlideShare?
2. Think about who is looking at you - if a potential employer "Googled you" what would the results look like? would they be representative of you? of the professional you, that is?

It goes back to - if you don't want everyone to possibly see something, don't share it online.

Employers are now looking at web presence to get a sense of the person - do they have friends? are they well adjusted? mature in their comments? intelligent in their comments? do they have a range of interests? is their overall behaviour acceptable? (e.g. not profanity or malicious comments).

You need to consider what you are really saying about yourself when you participate online. You also need to consider your audiences. Are your friends on Facebook really your friends? or are they colleagues, bosses, and potential bosses? There is an email going around about a young woman who complained about her work and her boss on her Facebook page forgetting that the boss she was complaining about was one of her "friends". OOps - she got fired.

It is always important to have goals, and even more critical to have goals for what your own online brand is. If you want to leverage the Internet for your career then you need to shape your presence to one that is professional. You never know who may read what you've written.

Intranet for business or for communications?

There is a shift happening in intranets in terms of the role they play and their purpose.

• It used to be that intranets were seen as information repositories, a place to store stuff to refer to later, or as one client said "like a garage for your business documents".
• Then people started seeing the value in using the intranet to communicate to all employees so that consistent messages were sent to everyone.

Some organizations are still within those two phases, however, more is being demanded of intranets.

• The business has now realized that they are paying for something and they should be getting something back - enter ROI, efficiencies, productivity, and yes, collaboration and knowledge sharing.
• And finally, the intranet is being edged out by more of a "portal" experience where employees can access all their online applications from one interface.

The intranet is changing and organizations need to recognize and identify opportunities to use the intranet both to achieve business results as well as to strategically communicate to the employee and have employees communicate with each other.