How Social Media Influence Equals Free Jumpers

Have you ever heard of PeerIndex? It’s an online influence measurement service similar to Klout and Kred.

By being an influencer on PeerIndex, you are able claim perks (PeerPerks) which come in all shapes and sizes.

Last year I was sent whiskies from Flaviar, coffee from Kopi and the best of them all was clothing from Jack Wills

Happy Christmas, God Jul, Frohe Weihnachten and 圣诞快乐

Here is our Christmas greeting from Link Humans, I wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Highlights of 2012:

  • We partnered with LinkedIn at Talent Connect Europe, their annual flagship event
  • Trained over 1,000 recruiters, marketers and sales people on how to use professional social media
  • Worked with clients in Europe, Asia, South and North America, achieved official partner status with both LinkedIn and HootSuite
  • Over 12,000 followers on Twitter @LinkHumans and 800 followers on LinkedIn
  • Over 100,000 pageviews on the Link Humans blog where we published very popular social recruiting case studies about L’Oreal, Sodexo & Nestle.

We look forward to linking more humans next year, have a great holiday and see you in 2013!

How to Master YouTube Marketing [Video + Slides]

phil nottingham holding court

Last month’s Social Media Meetup was “How To Master Online Video Marketing” with SEO expert and blogger Phil Nottingham.

Video is of course very topical, well in fairness it’s been topical for years now. I personally feel that more and more companies are starting to use video as an essential part of their online strategy, not just a nice little add-on.

Phil’s Approach to video

I like the fact that Phil challenges his clients about why they want to do video. For instance, is it better to do a blog post or a video? One rule of thumb is that video is the appropriate form of content when it would lose something if it were just text and image.

Work out the following in this order:

  1. What you want to achieve with your content?
  2. What is the story and the hook?
  3. Who’s your audience?
  4. What is the appropriate form? (This will be clearer at this stage.)
  5. What are the technical implementations?

Once you’ve answered those questions, you can decide on the other details, such as pre-outreach, outreach, and content creation.

Technical video information

Here are a few technical tips to bear in mind when creating and uploading videos:

social media london

  • Always export your videos at full HD (1920 x 1080), YouTube ranks HD videos higher than the rest. Any major editing software can export in HD resolution, even if the video wasn’t originally shot in High Definition.
  • Export just under 5000kbps.
  • Include keywords in the filename , title, description, and tags as per traditional SEO.
  • Include a closed caption (transcript) file and don’t rely on the native YouTube closed caption, especially if your video contains music or noise. Always upload your own, as this is the narrative of what’s going on in the video.
  • Include a ‘no follow’ link to your video, to increase traffic to your main domain as well as to your YouTube profile.

Other practical YouTube tips

  • Consolidate your channels: having several YouTube channels isn’t bad practice per se, but it won’t help you with SEO. It’s much harder to see progress if you have your content spread on different platforms. However, if this is your case, feel free to link them to each other.
  • Associated website: YouTube has recently rolled out a new featured that lets you link your YouTube channel to your own website. This will allow Google to pass traffic to your website via YouTube more easily. This feature is currently available only to partners who enable ads.
  • Audience Engagement: regularly check the analytics page on your YouTube account to see your audience retention for your videos. This is an indication, for you and for Google, on how well your videos are doing and at what point your viewers engage the most/the least.audience in thrall
  • “As seen on…” attribution: this feature is very useful if you work in a business. This is a link that leads you to a curated page on YouTube with a list of videos that are related to yours. These videos are not necessarily YOUR videos, and they provide supporting content and context for your viewers.
  • YouTube 3D: even though the 3D videos on YouTube aren’t really high quality, millions of people watch these videos. It’s worth having a few of these videos to drive traffic as well.
  • Pre-roll ads: pre-roll ads are relatively cheap and it drives a lot of traffic to that specific video. As the viewer’s count increases, people who stumble across your page will see the number of viewers and it will encourage more organic subscribers. Invest in the YouTube ads systems, whereas they’re pre-roll ones or homepage takeovers.
Here is the video of Phil speaking and below you’ll find his presentation slides as well.

 

Don’t miss our next meetup,  “How To Your Turn Customers Into Brand Ambassadors” with Becky Gloyne on Tuesday 18th September at The Green Man.

Many thanks to Bernardo Donkor for helping with this post, Bernardo is a blogger at TechLume.

My PeerIndex Social Media and Influence Interview

peerindex score jorgen sundberg

Here’s an interview I did with the good folks over at PeerIndex. They kindly invited me to an event in London a few months back and we’ve kept in touch since.

My PeerIndex profile (and everyone else’s) is unfortunately frozen so looks a bit dated but they are working on a new layout to presented soon apparently.

You can see the original piece article here: PEERINTERVIEW: Jorgen Sundberg.

1. What attracted you to social media?

I started using social media when I was still a technology recruiter. Historically, recruiters relied on their own database, job adverts and referrals. The calibre of people I was looking for would never apply to jobs, their details on our database would most likely be out of date, so referrals was the main source of finding ‘fresh blood’.

Until of course one day I discovered LinkedIn, luckily ahead of most of the competition. We were able to network on LinkedIn, identify and approach the right candidates, especially the ones who weren’t looking for new roles. So I have social media to thank for a good run in recruitment – and now I am a social media consultant.

2.How do you use social media in your line of work?

In several ways, first of all I use social media to have a professional identity. I know most people will find my LinkedIn and Twitter profiles when they google me. Second, I use it to connect with people I do business with; partners, customers, suppliers and such. Third, I use it for branding; sharing useful updates from our blogs, industry sites, general social media tips ‘n’ tricks. Finally, we also use it to target new clients based on demographics, location, job titles and so on.

3. What five tips can you give on how to be a good influencer?

  • Know your purpose – what brings you onto social media in the first place? Is it to get a job, promotion, clients, investors? Have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and try to set some success metrics if possible (e.g. X number of relevant followers by end of Dec).
  • Find your voice – you ought to look at what 3-5 things you want to be known for online. The more targeted you can be, the better. Nothing wrong with talking nuclear physics and lol-katz but make sure you get the balance right.
  • Find your peers – who will be useful for you to engage with? Who would you love to have read your new blog post or retweet you? Identify the influencers in your space and make sure you get on their radar for the right reasons – apply a non-salesy approach here please.
  • Be a leader – retweeting Mashable and TechCrunch all day is not original. Stop looking at what everyone else is doing and do your own thing. People will respect you for having your own opinion and daring to do something different. And you will become a leader in your niche over time.
  • And as the question included the word ‘good’, remember that you have influence and you have to use it for good things. Help out with charity campaigns whenever possible, retweet and highlight contributions for less known users and try to be helpful if you have the time. Remember that you are setting an example for lots of new users every day.

4. Where do you see social media going in the next five years?

Finally dropping the word ‘social’? I have a feeling social media will be embedded in everything we do from now on. Humans crave attention from other humans and social media has enabled us to get this wherever we may be (provided there is 3G or WiFi of course).

5. Who is your favourite influential tweeter?

Outside the social recruiting bubble that I operate in, I enjoy tweets from @Queen_UK. Who knew she had such a sense of humour? And adopting technology at that age, well done.

meerkats selling insurance again

6. Three websites which you would recommend are:

Again outside the recruitment / HR world, I would recommend:

7. If you were an animal what you be and why?

A meerkat, need to sort out car insurance.

photo by: marfis75

Just Cracked Forrest Gump’s LinkedIn Password

Remember when LinkedIn had about 5 million passwords leaked? This is when I cracked a joke on LinkedIn which I was very pleased with.

The joke was: “Just cracked Forrest Gump’s LinkedIn password: 1forest1″.

And I got a few Likes and comments, one comment in particular from Krista Canfield who is the communications manager at LinkedIn – glad it landed well over at Mountain View.

Obviously a play on words, here’s a clip to remind you: