Social Media Primer – Succeed by using LinkedIn and blogs

Image by Christopher S. Penn via Flickr

Social Media fascinates me and I am leveraging this medium to succeed in my career while taking this opportunity to share my learning and experience with all my readers. My objective is to start a discussion where my readers can also share their learning and experience with all of us to build our success together. So, without further ado…

Here are a few resources to succeed on LinkedIn:

1. On the menu bar for LinkedIn (LI) at the top, click on MORE and from the drop down, select LEARNING CENTER. Learn and sharpen your skills in areas where you lack understanding.

2. On the menu bar to the right of MORE, click the drop down, and select GROUPS and search for any groups that you are interested in. The secret is to become a member of groups within your professional field that are either building pretty fast or are the largest groups. Become a member of, for example, Executive Suite , Linked:HR (#1 Human Resources Group) , Star:Candidate for Hire , Linked Strategies , Future Social Media , Social Media Today, Twitter Strategies , Top Recommended People and any other groups that benefit you in your professional field.

In the example above, if an executive was looking for a job, these would be good groups to join – Executive Suite, Linked: HR and Star: Candidate for Hire (Two have in excess of 150K members and Star candidate is growing quite fast ). The groups, Linked Strategies, Future Social Media, Social Media Today and Twitter Strategies cover a wide spectrum of social media. I personally found, Top Recommended People one of the best groups for thought provoking and active discussions.

The following post by Sean is a good resource to get started.

(Blog-Off II Entry) Are You a LION, Turtle, HoundDog, or Alley Cat? What’s Your LinkedIn Strategy?

3. Go to Flyn Penoyer’s blog, The Online Business Networker . (This site is a mine of information on LinkedIn).

4. Go to: The Online Business Networker Membership site and download all the FREE resources and videos and study them.

5. Read the Linkedin Starter Guide To Success by Randy Schrum

6. Keep visiting Randy’s new Corporate Media site for the latest in social media.

Building your LI network:

For LI to work effectively, build your network to a min of 250 people. Participate in Group activity, Q&A sessions, become actively involved in the social media groups and that will not only build your expertise within that area but will also build your network. Once you participate in discussions and get to know people, send a personal message rather than the default LI one of:

I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.

– Mubbisher Ahmed

With, for example:

Hi xyz,

We worked together on the xyz project together at xyz and I would like to invite you to join my network.

PS: if not interested I would be grateful if you would click “archive” and not “I don’t know this person”.

Mubbisher Ahmed

The text in BOLD is very important, as if you get 5 IDK’s (I don’t knows), you can’t send invites out at random and have to know the recipient’s email address!

Blogging and becoming a thought leader:

Start a blog and publicise your blog articles using LinkedIn. The best way is to become a member of relevant groups to you. Each group has a NEWS section. This is where you can share new blogs with LinkedIn users and is an acceptable way to promote your blog by both LI and its users.

You should be able to spot many new blog postings there. Once you have done that, try and come up with a question that you want answered based around your blog and post it in DISCUSSIONS with a link to your blog. You can also use the DISCUSSIONS section to get feedback on areas that you need assistance with etc. The NEWS and DISCUSSIONS section is a great way to generate interest and traffic to your blog.

The idea is for you to be recognised as a thought leader within your field and then build your network.

Use this quick introduction/primer and it will help you succeed in the world of social media.

Please share with me your successes, failures and top tips on using social media effectively. I welcome all comments and once moderated, comments will be available on the blog for the benefit of everyone.

Related articles

• LinkedIn Stock: Which Shareholders are the Idiots? (wallstcheatsheet.com)
• What Exactly Is LinkedIn? (biojobblog.com)
• LinkedIn IPO – Shares Skyrocket (blogher.com)
• LinkedIn Beginner Tips (jeffzelaya.com)

International and UK Law and how it relates to IT and Computers

Even when I was in university, I used to be both fascinated and confused by law. It was just as well that I had to contend with just one module of law as I made a conscientious decision that when I embarked on my career, I would leave the law and related computer crime etc to lawyers. As most of my regular readers know by now, I am usually sat around subconsciously searching for a topic. I don’t usually have a list of topics lying around and usually during the week something happens that leads to an article being posted. Well, it’s either that or on the weekend, I have a sudden panic attack that leads to me writing or babbling on about something. A few days ago, something similar happened that has led all of us to this post.

While researching, I came across an intriguing paper by Warren B. Chik, titled Challenges to Criminal Law Making in the New Global Information Society: A Critical Comparative Study of the Adequacies of Computer-Related Criminal Legislation in the United States, the United Kingdom and Singapore. This led me to find another interesting paper released by the UK home office on The police recording of computer crime that seeked to contribute to the Home Office and law enforcement efforts in tackling the lack of visibility of computer crime offending, a situation that was hampering efforts to assess and tackle the problem.

Let me clarify a few things first before we go international. British law is based on common law. The underlying principle of common law is the principle that it is unfair to treat similar facts differently on different occasions. IT and computers are not likely to be governed by common law, unless there is a case precedent.

The next one is Tort law concerns civil wrong doings and is used as a civil action by one citizen against another. Tort law may be used in some cases of IT/Computers, for example under the Tort of negligence and copyright infringement.

The last one that I want to discuss is statutory law. This is the law that has been passed by parliament. ‘Statute’ is generic and collective, while ‘act’ is specific and singular. An act is thus a statute, and the acts generated by a legislative body are collectively referred to as satutes, but ‘act’ is normally used in the formal title of a statute. You could thus talk about ‘the statute on rural land use planning’ or ‘the statutes regarding rural land use planning’, but the title(s) of the actual statute(s) would be something such as ‘Rural Land Use Planning Act’.

As the UK is part of the European Union, the UK is subject to the Law of the European Union. That means that EU law has direct affect within the member states and overrules any other existent law.

In addition to the measures above, internationally, many governments assist each other through Extradition treaties. This is the official process whereby one nation or state surrenders a suspected or convicted criminal. In the UK, the Extradition Act 2003 underpins the high profile case of Gary McKinnon.

As I said in a previous post, the ugly side of social media, UK’s national law is adequate for dealing with national social media abuse but there are no international agreements/treaties in place where a cross border offence happens, for example, significant online abuse is concerned involving two individuals in two different countries. The encouraging factor I found during the investigation of that post was that even countries such as Pakistan have produced legislation to combat electronic crimes. The main act to combat computer crime within the UK is the Computer misuse act 1990

The scope of Computer law is to protect individuals and liberty, so these are the current laws applicable within the UK:

Human Rights

• Council of Europe Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms 1950 (not enforced in UK until November 2000)
• UK Human Rights Act 1998
• Consumer protection act 1987

Freedom of Information

• UK Freedom of Information Act 2000

Data Protection

• Data Protection Act 1998 (extended the scope of data protection beyond automatically processed data)
• The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 – EC Directive

Health and safety

• UK Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, supplemented by
• UK Health and Safety (Display Screen Equipment) Regulations 1992

Rights of disabled  people

• Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and 2004

Intellectual property rights

• Registered Designs Act 1949
• Design Rights (Semiconductor) Regulations 1989
• Patents Act 1977
• Trade Marks Act 1994
• Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 amended by:
• Copyright (Computer Programmes) Regulations 1992
• Copyright and Rights in Databases Regulations 1997
• EC Directive  on  the  Harmonisation  of  certain  aspects  of  copyright  and  related  rights  in  the  information  society  2001 (should  have  been  implemented  in  EC  countries  in  2002;  is  proving  controversial  and  has  not  yet  been  implemented  in  UK  law)

Contracts  for  computer  systems  and  software

• Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982 (Software)
• Sale of Goods Act 1979 (Hardware)
• Misrepresentation Act 1967 (Hardware)
• Unfair contract terms act 1977

Electronic  commerce  and  contracting

• Consumer protection – Distance Selling Regulations 2000

Torts

• Civil liability may attach to a person independently of the existence of a contract; I.e. negligence, defamation, malicious falsehood and nuisance
• Computer  Misuse  Act  1990  is  now  in  urgent  need  of  reform,  but
• Computer  Misuse  (Amendment)  Bill  2002  was  not  passed  by  parliament

Unlawful  data  use  and  data  publication, Obscenity  and  pornography

• Obscene  Publications  Act  1959
• Protection  of  Children  Act  1978
• Criminal  Justice  Act  1988 e.g.  Harassment
• Telecommunications  Act  1984
• Protection  from  Harassment  Act  1997

Mobile Payments – Coming to a phone near you

At the end of August 2009, I wrote a post – The future is bright but is it mobile? In that post, I mentioned the fact that in the developing countries mobile phones were increasingly used for a wide variety of tasks, including banking. Meanwhile in the developed world affluent consumers were purchasing increasingly powerful mobile phones, including smarut phones and were looking for more ways in which to use them. Mobile commerce hadn’t taken off in the developed world due to the availability of other payment methods available to the relatively affluent customers such as credit cards and contactless cards. The move to using mobile phones for commerce is akin to where we find ourselves in terms of laptops morphing to smart phones, as this is where traditional wallets will be replaced with electronic digital wallets operated by mobile phones.

Let’s first take a look at the history behind the scenes to understand where we are today and the importance of the latest report released on 14/1/10 on this new technology, Near Field Communications (NFC). NFC happened as a result of the NFC Forum and its members, founded in 2004, recognising that evolution meant a new, short-range wireless connectivity technology had to be created. This article on the Integrated Transport Smartcard Organisation’s website (ITSO) provides a good introduction and will bring the reader to where we are currently and the new NFC adoption by the mobile industry for mobile payments in the future. In the UK, the movement towards contactless cards was initiated by ITSO in 1998, a non profit sharing organisation owned by its members. This led to the first contactless RFID Oyster cards being issued to the public in 2003 for the London Underground by TFL. As we moved closer to mobile phone NFC, other initiatives such as prepaid cards and prepaid contactless cards used by retailers such as Pret a Manger and coffee republic were developed.

Over the last few years, banks and payment vendors have tried different technologies with a varied success rate, including the latest contactless cards. The reason that mobile phones can be used with NFC now is because finally different standards have come together to support one another and make these payments secure. So, what we now see is that ITSO supports NFC as even the UK government is prepared to fund the switch to NFC compatible transport ticketing and the various card issuers have agreed the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

Trials of NFC technology in London revealed that Londoners wanted to use their mobiles to travel and shop. Mobiles will start replacing cash as the technology is rolled out within the UK from 2011. “Decisions made in 2010 will be critical in determining which mobile network operators, which banks, which industry suppliers and which service providers become the leaders in the field,” says Sarah Clark. “Ultimately, only two or three companies in each country will succeed in building a major new business providing NFC services to businesses and consumers. The winners could be banks or mobile operators, or even a new entrant to the market.” As the technology becomes widely adopted, NFC based payments could reach $30 billion by 2012.

The following excerpt courtesy of Sourcewire. “NFC technology will be used to replace everything from credit cards and loyalty cards to bus and train tickets, library cards, door keys and even cash,” says Sarah Clark, author of ‘NFC: The Road to Commercial Deployment‘. “What hasn’t yet been decided, however, is who will win the battle to provide consumers with their new hi-tech mobile wallets.”

Consumers with NFC-enabled phones will be able to simply touch their phone to a ‘smart’ poster or product label containing a RFID chip to sign up for a loyalty programme, collect a money-off coupon, download a trailer for a new movie, access the latest travel information or go straight to a product’s website to read customer ratings and reviews and compare prices.

Social networks will also get a major boost as with a NFC phone, you can exchange details of someone befriended online by simply touching your phones together when you meet them in the real world. Or touch your phone to a smart poster as you go into a restaurant to automatically update your Facebook status and get an offer coupon from the venue as a thank you for telling your friends you’re there.

Commuters will be able to store their travel pass on their phone and mobile versions of airline boarding cards, hotel room keys and even passports will make it quicker and easier to get from place to place. Paying bills will become much simpler, too. Simply touch two NFC phones together to transfer money to a friend, buy a drink or pay for a service.

“No more rummaging around for the right change, card, keys or paperwork and no more texting your location to your friends — with NFC everything can be handled by your mobile device,” says Clark. “And, of course, NFC is a highly secure technology. Consumers will be able to instantly lock all the mobile wallet services on their phone if it is lost or stolen and then get them automatically transferred onto a new phone as soon as it arrives. They will also be able to use their phone to make payments even when the battery is flat.”

Mind Mapping – The guru fights the web

Welcome back to all my readers and I that hope 2010 proves to be as good as you expect it to be!

I first came across mind mapping when I read, “The principles of success”. Mind mapping as we know it today has been developed by Tony Buzan. I consider Tony Buzan to be the guru of mind mapping as he has been the main proponent and driver behind mind mapping. Obviously, there will always be the debate that Tony Buzan did not invent mind mapping. I became aware of mind mapping a few years ago. Coincidentally, around the same time, one day, I was sat with my daughter and she appeared to be drawing a diagram. Initially, I did not pay much attention but as I continued to peer over my shoulder, it increasingly looked like a mind map. As I curiously asked her whether she was drawing a mind map, she confirmed that she was (She was 13). So, schools have started to teach mind mapping and people of my age (early 40s) have only just started to learn it! Another reason for this post – To build awareness of this wonderful tool.

Anyway, during the Christmas break as I was researching ways of utilising social media to find myself an appropriate position that could utilise my CIO, programme management, leadership and commercial skills, I found myself facing the predicament that I had so many thoughts, articles and action items based on my research that I was starting to drown. I must admit, I don’t use mind mapping regularly (although I should) and I find it the best tool to organise my thoughts, especially when I suffer from information overload. Mind mapping software became the obvious choice as I also wanted to share the mind map with my job search coach.

As is often the case with me and my blogging, I am usually looking for ideas for my next blog posting. The kind of ideas that I look for my blogging posts are usually areas of IT and sometimes even business that I feel would help others by applying my twist of IT knowledge and knowledge gained through research across the Net. Regular readers of my blog know that I tend to shy away from reviewing software myself as that kind of research has usually been conducted elsewhere and all I have to do is provide references to these articles etc.

As I am a fan of Tony Buzan and consider him the guru of mind mapping, naturally I downloaded the trial version of his iMindMap software, even though there is a huge variety of free and subscription based mind mapping software available at the moment. The main reason, I like his software is that I believe that as he is behind mind mapping as we know it today, his software would reflect that. Now you may ask yourself, well, how do I create a mind map – Click here for the answer?

Mind mapping software saves time and there are many reasons why mind mapping software should be utilised including increasing productivity. There are features to look for when purchasing mind mapping software and it can even help with project management. As I had created my mind map, I decided that it made sense to do a post on mind mapping.

The problem, I face now is that even though iMindmap and Mindjet MindManager seem to lead in the reviews, I am not entirely sure that in today’s, Cloud Computing, web connected world these software packages are the correct choice. I would love to use iMindMap as it has been created with Tony Buzan’s involvement but in today’s connected world, it has no application for iPhones/smartphones. Mindjet MindManager is similar, no iPhone/smartphone application either. As I researched, I found mindmeister that was not only web based, had an iPhone application and was considered to be quite an innovative business. This is a real predicament for my choice, as I want Tony Buzan’s iMindMap software but I want it in the cloud so that I don’t have to worry about saving files on my laptop. I want the freedom to access it from anywhere in the world as I now have the fast connectivity available globally, albeit a few places (an minor inconvenience where I can resort to saving files on my laptop).

Now, we move to question time:

Which software would you have opted for and why? (To help you, I have a list of reviews at the end of the post)

Further resources:

• Top 10 mind Mapping tools
• Top 10 mind mapping software sites
• Five best Mind Mapping applications
• Web based Mind Mapping applications
• Mind Mapping software review, ratings and voting
• 3 Free Mind Map Web Applications Offering Map Embeds
• NEW – 8/6/10 – Inspiration software