15. Life Updates

What's up everyone? Just thought I'd give a quick update because it's been a while since my last post. I spent the summer becoming Microsoft Certified and attained a Master Certification status in Word, Excel, Access, Outlook, and Powerpoint 2007. I explored graduate school options for a while but have decided it's better to wait until after I work for a little because I am unsure if I want a masters in IT or Marketing or an MBA. I am currently exploring job opportunities, traveling, and enjoying life. Until the next time.

Peace.

14. The Outro: Return on Investment

What's good y'all? This week's post is my final post of the semester for ITEC 335: Social Media & Business but don't get too sad because I plan on blogging from time to time on a variety of topics. Anyways, this week I read about how to measure social media ROI in articles by Aaron Uhrmacher and Jeremiah Owyang.

Social media ROI is something that no one seems to agree on how to measure. Uhrmacher believes that in order to measure ROI you must have a specific metric or set of metrics in mind before you begin such as corporate reputation or customer relationships. Once you have chosen your metric you must benchmark with yourself. If you want to measure how successful your SEO is then you can use tools such as Omniture or Google Analytics. This type of measure is far more quantitative. Owyang agrees with Uhrmachers guidelines and adds that we must also keep in mind "new" vs "old" media along with measuring new attributes that come along with this "new" media.

Social media is something that is constantly evolving and because of this there will never be a formula for how to measure social ROI. I do think that the guidelines by Uhrmacher and Owyang are a good start. Each company must decide what they are trying to measure and why because without a definite reason/goal for measurement then all of the analytics websites in the world won't help you improve your business.

I want to end this post by saying that it's been a pleasure to blog this semester and that this is something I never thought I would get interested but now I can see why so many people blog and its value to the business world.

Signing off for now but don't forget to check out my future posts!

PEACE.

13. The Future of Social Media

What's good y'all? I had a very fun and exciting weekend and I hope you did also. For this week's post I decided to Google: "future social media trends". I quickly found two articles which made predictions about future trends.

The first article I read is by Jim Tobin and he believes that social media is in its infancy period right now, which I agree with. He made one very interesting prediction that caught my eye, he believes that social networks will become open. What he means by that is that there will be a utility tool which will connect all social media sites together and allow you to travel easily among them. This would be a very cool feature but I am not sure how close we are to something like that.

The second article is by David Armano about trends for 2010. He predicts that social media will become more popular and more mobile but less social as well with niche social networking sites gaining popularity and more exclusivity. Another prediction he brought up is something that will effect most of us: the company you work for will soon have a social media policy regarding things you post and what is allowed.

Both articles I would recommend checking out. Also check out this great marketing tool: http://snipr.com/v6ecv. Anyways, the Bosssss is done for this week...time for bed. 1 HUNDO.

12. Search Engine Optimization

What's going y'all? This weeks topic is Search Engine Optimization. Last summer while interning at Sonesta Collection: Hotels, Resorts, and Cruises I compiled and analyzed metrics using Omniture and Google Analytics. I also made SEO strategy sheets for each hotel with a focus on Organic Strategy (title tags, keyword phrases, meta description) and Pay Per Click strategy (keywords, ad copy). This post will try to help you get a better understanding of SEO and how to improve your site's visibility.

First, I want to give a definition for people who don't know what SEO is. This is the definition from Clickz.com: The process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. SEO includes technical tasks to make it easier for search engines to find and index a site for the appropriate keywords, as well as marketing-focused tasks to make a site more appealing to users. Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases.

Here are some basic steps on how to improve your SEO (if you want even more detail about this check out this clickz article). I would start off by defining your goals so that you can see if your SEO has been successful or not using an analytics tool. Next, I would research your competition's websites and see what websites they use. This is huge because if your goal is to take traffic that your competition would get for the same word and have that traffic redirected to your website. However, you need to be aware of the keywords that the competition has paid for because if you start using those keywords then you can yourself into some legal trouble. Another important aspect of SEO is making sure your title tags on every page on your site are unique and include the keywords that you want to target because this one of the most important ways to get your Google rank up thus creating more page views. After you have done these steps, I recommend you review your analytics tool to see how you are doing compared to your goals and then make adjustments accordingly.

In the end, proper SEO is the most important way for your website to increase its visibility and gain a prominent position in various searches.

Hope you enjoyed this week's post...The Bossssss is out. Happy Easter everyone!

11. Should Kogod encourage Social Resumes?

This week The Boss is going to discuss a term he had never heard of until today: social resumes. Brazen Careerist has recently added a social resume tool to their website which allows users to highlight ideas, blog posts, tweets, network conversations, and content you have created elsewhere. Users are still able to list and post standard resumes to the site but the whole idea of the tool is to help give employers a snapshot of your professional self based on things you do while online. I must say I think this is a very interesting idea. My only concern is how will employers respond to this because since the content is controlled by the user it doesn't give the full picture of the applicant so how seriously will social resumes be considered and are they even worth being created? If there become enough users making social resumes then this may become a great recruiting tool but until then I think that most students should be encouraged to find jobs through more traditional tools. To learn more about social resumes read this article Brazen Careerist Launches Social Resumes.

On another note, I recently came across an New York times article which discusses a new software, Social Sentry, that will automatically monitor employees activity on various social networking sites. Employees of companies as well as people searching for jobs need to become even more aware and protective of the things they post on social networking sites because if you are posting things deemed inappropriate your job search will be even harder and things like social resumes will do you no good.

That's all for this week y'all. Time for the Bosssss to get some well needed rest, until next time...

10. Online Collaboration

What's good y'all? I'm just gonna jump right into it this week. Online collaboration is a very valuable tool that even 1st graders in NJ are taking advantage of. Technology is really changing the way we learn, its kinda crazy. I don't even think that I had access to the internet in the 1st grade. The only thing schools' need to remember to do is block off certain sites which are not appropriate for all the little ones. By utilizing the internet at such a young age it is going to prepare young children for high school/college/real world far more than previous generations because online collaboration is one of the most helpful aspects that can used to complete homeworks, write papers, and work on group projects. If you want even more information about online collaboration in schools then check out the article I read.

The second article I read discussed how corporate culture drives online collaboration and not technology. I couldn't agree more with this article. If the corporate culture that you work in takes part in online collaboration and encourages/requires you to use it then you will but if not it is very easy to ignore online collaboration. The technology is there and will always be there but if the corporation doesn't make it apart of their culture then its something, besides IT people, that will not be utilized.

I suggest you guys to check out both articles. The Bosssssss is peacing out y'all...CHURCH.

9. Virtual Teamwork

The Boss is back from his spring break festivities in Seattle, not quite ready for school but ready to blog. This week I read "How to Pick your Million Dollar Crew" along with "6 Ways to Build Trust with your Virtual Team". I believe that virtual meetings between teams can add value to face to face interactions but virtual teams by themselves face many obstacles for success.

Being a senior in Kogod, I have been apart of many teams, however, none of them have been purely virtually based. In order to be most effective, I think that teams must have some kind of face to face interaction before they are able to create the trust necessary in order to be successful virtually. There is a lack of trust in virtual groups that makes it far more difficult to be efficient and successful.

I have been apart of groups where you choose your group and ones where your professor chooses them for you. I think it would be much easier to work virtually with a group that you choose verses one that is chosen for you.

The best groups I have been apart of are ones that set up times to meet up and then divide work up to be completely separately with communication continuing through gmail/gchat/google docs.

To conclude, I think that virtual teamwork is a very important aspect of successful groups but that it needs to be complemented with some kind of face to face interaction.

bosssssssssss OUT.