There is no doubt that the growth of Slideshare has got B2B marketers excited about using social media again. It has become the world’s largest content sharing community. Combine this with the reach of Twitter and LinkedIn and the platform has become a vital part of the best B2B social media strategies. The site has seen dramatic growth amassing more than 60 million visitors and 3 billion slide views a month.

For those in the B2B arena it is clear that certain social media platforms just do not facilitate engagement with the right target market. Are you really going to engage a key business decision maker or Managing Director in and around the topic of advanced web analytics on Facebook? More often than not B2B marketing involves the creation of thought leading content, traditionally this would have been in the form of case studies, reports, factsheets and brochures. In the digital age, users are looking for digestible content that they can use within their own presentations as well as research into new products and services.

Presentations by their definition look to condense key information into a series of impactful slides, a perfect social object for distribution as part of a content strategy. 71% of B2B companies are doing more content marketing than last year and in some cases are estimated to be spending a quarter of their marketing budgets on content marketing.

Here are some nice little tips if you are developing a Slideshare presentation as part of your B2B social media campaign or ongoing content strategy;

The Slideshare sweet spot is between 10 & 30 slides! Keep it succinct, it is not a numbers game!

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19 images is the average per Slideshare presentation, equivalent to one per page.

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Average number of words per Slideshare presentation is 24! Don’t dribble on and stick to the point

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Slideshare Infographic

Sources: Infographic by Column Five.  Column Five infograhic sources: Content Marketing Institute, Slideshare.net, Quantcast, Comscore

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In the second part of our series on online influence, we round up the three best tools for measuring social media influence; along with a look at their advocates and sceptics.

In my last post I paraphrased Brian Solis and Vocus in defining an online influencer as someone who has online reach and someone who produces quality, relevant content. These are three of the top tools used in social media marketing to identify them:

1) Klout: markets itself as ‘The Standard for Influence’ and combines what it calls True Reach, Amplification Probability and Network Influence to generate an overall Klout Score from 1-100 (100 being the highest and most influential) of a social media user.

Advocate: Michael Cohn offers a nice summary of precisely what Klout measures and why it’s so important to the success of a business.

Sceptic: Steve Farnsworth’s ‘Problem with Klout’ infographic demonstrates how, on the basis of the Klout algorithm, an automated Twitter user with zero engagement can still gain a high influence score.

What we say: An influencer’s network size and quality are both measured, in part, on the basis of retweets. But a good joke, or a cute animal video could become massively retweeted, can that be considered relevant and high quality content that will ultimately change anyone’s behaviour? Unlikely. Plus, if a non-human entity can be considered highly influential, it certainly casts doubt on the reliability of the tool.

2) PeerIndex: uses an algorithm to identify, rank, and score the authority of online influencers and is considered similar to, although less widely adopted, than Klout. According to PeerIndex itself, the tool “addresses the fact that merely being popular (or having gamed the system) doesn’t indicate authority”. It therefore promises to “build up your authority finger print on a category-by-category level using eight benchmark topics.”

Advocate: Andrew Bruce Smith demonstrates how he was able to use PeerIndex’s group function to make a highly popular list of UK Social Media Power Players; he also answers to sceptics with the point that “people had a similar attitude towards statistics based language translation in the 1990s.”

Sceptic: Mark Ralph recently called PeerIndex – along with Klout – the “Emperor’s New Clothes” of social media “appealing to our vanity but leaving us naked.”

What we say: It’s good for drawing in multiple social platforms and getting a broader view, but Twitter still seems to trump the other platforms – if you’re not considered influential on Twitter, you’re just not considered influential.

3) Tweet.Grader: a Twitter-specific tool measuring ‘power and reach’ across the social platform, grading influencers with a score between 1-100 (100 being the most influential). There’s is also a hashtag search function.

Advocate: Omar Kattan recommends it as a very useful tool for tracking the influence of your own business on Twitter, but also for identifying key influencers within your followers.

Sceptic: Steve Allan accuses Tweet.Grader and its ilk of “using fuzzy maths” and “trying to make a buck by rating you and selling that information to marketing companies”.

What we say: In short, even the best of today’s influencer measurement tools, has as many sceptics as advocates. The algorithms are getting better by the day, but they aren’t perfect. While a combination of measurement tools will give good insight into online reach, there’s still no substitute for good old-fashioned research as a means of measuring quality. As a social media agency, we find the best way of identifying the relevancy – and value – of an influencer to our clients, is to take a look for ourselves and ask, are they worth following?

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Social media likes to give and take with both hands. It gives you innumerable ways of getting your company’s voice out to your target market, managing your reputation and adding value to your business. And then it takes. It takes all the content you can possibly feed it and it always asks for more.

Quality content, as Jason Miller at Social Media Examiner recently wrote, is the “fuel for your social media rocket ship”. So if you need a constant stream of content filling your social platforms, where exactly do you get the constant stream of ideas?

Miller provides a series of really insightful tips, including the use of RSS feeds, identifying blogs which are relevant to your business and subscribing to their feeds for inspiration. He also suggests jumping into relevant LinkedIn groups to see what people are discussing; as well as searching forums, crowdsourcing topics that your audience would actually like to read about by posting up a tweet or FB post and even listening to industry audio books when you’re on the go.

With the Google Panda update which came in to play in February – followed by further changes in April – ‘quality’ content is more important than ever; and social media has become an even more valuable means of sharing content and securing search visibility.

Content isn’t really a conundrum. All it takes is a clear strategy and a pre-planned calendar. With these in place, you always know where your next content is coming from and you ensure your website content is aligned with and pushed out via your social media platforms to increase that all important Google visibility.

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Last Wednesday I had the opportunity to attend a great event, hosted by the London Press Club and Women in Journalism, with Carole Stone, the Queen of Networking herself, as a guest speaker. Having heard so much about Carole Stone, her weekly networking salons and her legendary Christmas parties (what I wouldn’t do for an invite…), I jumped at the chance to attend this event!

Carole was an extremely entertaining, dynamic and engaging speaker, and, as you would expect from a woman who has over 40,000 contacts in her database, she had some invaluable tips for anyone making their first forays into the world of networking. I have listed below the key outtakes from the event, and as an added extra, for each of Carole’s tips I have written my own social media version (with some help from my colleague James), highlighted in italics….

1. Wear something with pockets – It is important to always have business cards at hand so you don’t have to awkwardly rifle through your bag to find them! (Maybe more of an issue for females!) From a social media viewpoint, ensure that you have a LinkedIn profile, and it’s fully up to date, before you attend an event. You never know who will look you up!
2. Always follow-up with an email the day after you’ve met someone. And/or send them an email through LinkedIn, adding them to your online network at the same time.
3. When handing out business cards don’t scatter them like lawyers and accountants (Carole’s words…), make sure you actually spend time chatting to the people you’re giving them to. The same applies online really, just because LinkedIn is there doesn’t mean you should ask everybody you have ever heard of to join your network. As a general rule, only add people you have had a proper conversation with or who you would feel comfortable emailing.
4. It’s not all about quantity, it’s about quality. Pick out a few people in the room who you really want to meet. Don’t fret if you haven’t met the ‘big players’ at an event, chances are they’ll have so many people thrusting business cards in their direction that they won’t remember you anyway. Old school networking tips live on, this is definitely still relevant online. Engage the up-and-coming bloggers or influencers who will want to, and have time to, share knowledge with you.
5. Always remember details. Note down one or two key details about the person you’ve just met to remind yourself who they are/where you met. Taking this a step further, you could use tools like Evernote, Digg etc to log relevant posts, articles or web pages that will help you re-engage your new contact in a later conversation online.
6. If someone is acting rude, or haughty, be honest and ask them “did you mean to sound rude when you said that?” (Maybe a tip to be used with personal discretion…). This is particularly relevant in the world of social media as sometimes irony or humour does not come across quite as well in an email or a 140 character Tweet! If you have engaged with this contact through Twitter, send them a simple @reply asking whether their last comment was supposed to sound rude… This is a win-win technique, the contact will either laugh it off or they’ll (hopefully) realise that their comment was out of line and clarify what they meant/apologise. Easy.
7. Stand up at networking events so you can get away easier. Conversely, online it’s easy to leave a conversation so get as involved as possible, comment on walls, reply to tweets and use those hashtags!
8. Carry an empty glass so you have an excuse to leave a boring conversation (“I’m just going to get another drink…). As previously mentioned, online you can leave a conversation whenever you like, but always check back and make sure you are not missing an opportunity to engage with new connections.
9. OR carry 2 glasses of wine, pretending one is for a friend, allowing you to leave a conversation to look for said friend if necessary… See above… but there is nothing to stop you having two glasses of wine anyway!
10. . Don’t worry about failure! Absolutely true in social networking online as in the real world, be bold and don’t be afraid to get involved in conversations, it’s the best way to broaden your knowledge and understanding of a subject.
11. Never toss a card aside! You never know when that contact may come in useful… Hopefully LinkedIn won’t go down.

Et voila… the top tips from the Queen of Networking… and yes, most of them are pure common sense, however it was nice to hear these things from a lady whose reputation and business success are built on networking!

Hopefully these tips will prove useful and show you that, when it comes to taking your first tentative steps into networking, both online and offline, everyone has been in exactly the same situation as you and everyone is nervous about not having someone to talk to or saying the wrong thing. Confidence is key!

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Never mix business with pleasure. That’s what they used to say. Perhaps they just meant don’t get caught in flagrante with your secretary, but let’s just say it was a belief that our corporate and social lives belonged in two separate spheres. But ‘they’ didn’t know that Web 2.0 was coming. ‘They’ didn’t have the foresight to see the two worlds were on a collision course that would form a whole new dimension: the corporate social sphere.

Business has become social. CRM – much to the Daily Mail’s horror – has become a social media interaction. Jason Lewis calls it ‘spying’ for a company to monitor and react to online sentiment. For the customer in question, it means passively receiving customer service. Rather than waiting in a call centre queue, the customer simply has a rant on Facebook and waits for a customer services representative to actively come straight to them.

Business has become personal. As recently reported by Cleveland Ohio Business News, the early days of social networking sites led to embarrassing blows for companies, when employees failed to realise that their personal social networking accounts were very much in the ‘public’ domain. We’re all a little older and wiser now. We know how to set those drug-fuelled orgy photos to private.

But in the corporate social sphere the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Social networking pages become resources for building more personal relationships with colleagues and clients. ‘Following’ industry peers on Twitter and LinkedIn becomes a constant and unlimited reach to new contacts and news.

You can look at the corporate social sphere in two ways. You can argue that the business world has invaded our personal lives and in doing so, ultimately infringed on our privacy. Or, you can look at it the other way. Our personal lives have invaded the business world. We’re not starchy, formal cogs in a machine, we’re an interwoven web of relationships – and the better those relationships are, the easier it makes it to get up on Monday morning.

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This week the Guardian online posted a blog on the rise of social media as a relevant source of information for journalists, as revealed by a recent US survey which claimed that 56% of reporters view it as an important tool for producing stories. The research carried out by Cision and The George Washington University, showed that over 89% of journalists make use of blogs while conducting their online research, with two thirds turning to social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

But, is this a good thing? Are journalism standards slipping?

There is certainly a strong advantage to using social media as part of journalistic research. Its global reach and speed means that stories can be documented and sourced as they are taking place – the New York Hudson River plane crash is a great example. Ferry passengers were able to tweet about the accident before TV crews even got to the scene.

However, social media shouldn’t be used as the sole source for stories, but rather it should sit alongside public relations – providing interviews and access to sources and experts to help paint a fuller picture. It still begs the question as to why the media is so obsessed with social networking?

Phenomenon! Everyone loves to be in the middle of a newly discovered craze and social media is currently it! Flick through the national papers and there will undoubtedly be a story relating to social media. As a PR professional, I have been told by numerous news desks and news agencies that stories relating to Facebook or Twitter stand a much higher chance of being selected than those that don’t.

Why? Because social networking provides that much needed human interest angle that the media loves, especially tabloid papers. The fashion designer, Alexander McQueen died tragically last week but rather than lament on the fashion world’s loss guess what the papers chose to write about…the string of ‘weird’ Twitter posts that he had left during the run up to his death.

So, celebrities and politicians be afraid. It’s no longer what’s lurking behind your closet that matters but what’s lurking on your Facebook and Twitter page!

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