Twitter Secret S1 Filing

Twitter is going to IPO but why can't you find their SEC filing? Where could that pesky S-1 be hiding? Last year my colleague Ryan Field posted about the looming red herring shortage and his prediction has come to fruition. As Ryan reported, the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act was signed into law in April 2012.  The law is designed to encourage entrepreneurship both by making it easier and safer to go public and by relaxing certain fundraising requirements imposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Under the JOBS act, Emerging Growth Companies (EGCs are those that posted revenues of under $1 billion during their most recent fiscal year) are able to confidentially file drafts of their registration statement (S-1) for non-public review prior to their actual public filing.  An EGC’s S-1 is only made public 21 days before it conducts a roadshow.

Twitter is one of those EGCs so we know their revenue is under $1billion. Luckily, Twitter is expected to release the filing any day (maybe this week). Each S-1 filing contains unique information about each company but you can usually expect to see five years of financials, breakdown of revenues by type,  and other market research on the industry as a whole. Based on the Facebook S-1 we will probably see a lot of Twitter usage information too.

Watch your Twitter feed for exciting SEC news coming soon!

Social Media for Career Advancement

Whether you are looking for a job or just staying connected to your professional community, social media is extremely important to  your image. Social Media is your new online resume. According to Jobvite's Social Recruiting Survey, 89% of US companies will use Social Networking for recruiting. And, 58% of these companies recruit passive candidates, so even if you aren't looking, they are! Will they find you? How can you use social media for your career advancement? First things first, check your online reputation because others are. Google yourself and see if what comes up is appropriate.  Google has tips for you if you find something that needs to be removed. Use Reppler.com to help keep your Facebook page clean and safe. It reads your posts and rates how positive you are plus gives you tips on creating a more secure page.

Of the companies surveyed by Jobvite, 87% use LinkedIn and 2/3 use two or more networks for recruiting.

LinkedIn is really only useful if you build a robust profile and make it public so people can find you. Include detail and be keyword savvy by selecting words that are used in the industry.

• Photo - add a professional head shot
• Headline - slogan for your personal brand
• Summary - highlight your unique skills and specialties
• Experience - this should read like your resume
• Groups - be a joiner and contribute questions and answers, create your own group, you can edit the visibility of each group for more privacy
• Public Profile - claim your public profile URL and make it public then use address on cards, blogs, email sig
• Make connections - add your business cards, search by company, schools, association, add the app to your phone
• Ask for Introductions - write it up and then ask your contact to pass it on
• Ask for recommendations
• Add your company website, blog and Twitter account

Once you have your LinkedIn info added, you can use Re.vu to make a visual resume. A cool infographic of your work experience will really grab the hiring manager's attention.

Since recruiters also use Facebook and Twitter you need to make sure you have a professional presence there:

• Add the Branch Out app to turn your Facebook friends into professional connections
• Set up a professional account for Twitter
• Update your bio and link to your resume
• Learn to use Hash tags add keywords
• Twitter job search sites: TwitJobSearch, TweetMyJobs, jobshouts
• Follow people--OneDayOneJob has a nice list of 50 Twitter Users to Follow for Your Job Search

Glassdoor has free salary information by title and company. There are also company reviews. If you sign up and provide your salary information, you get access to all the salaries and reviews. You can also see if your Facebook friends have any company connections.

If you need help reworking or updating your resume, check out these resume guidelines from the Career Design Center of the College of Natural Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.

Social Media for Career Advancement on Prezi

Casual Friday: AnalyzeWords, or The Twitter Peppy-meter

Happy bunnies 'n baskets weekend!  This Friday we bring you the really fun love child of instantaneous-colorful-chart-generators and Twitter.  It’s called AnalyzeWords, and it was developed by a team of researchers headed by professors at the Universities of Auckland and Texas.  Using a program called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, they analyze junk pronoun words (which it turns out aren’t really junk) as amalgamated over a big swath of tweets, to figure out a communicator’s psychological state. To play simply add the twitter handle of your entity du jour, click Analyze Tweets, and voila, immediately you have three spiffy little chart clusters categorized by Emotional Style, Social Style, and Thinking Style.  As you can see from the picture, @JetBlue is quite chipper!  Now if only it would also work when I submit the phone number of that cute guy I met at the gym yesterday…

Social Media and Customer Complaints

Everyone has seen the vents and rants on Facebook and Twitter but do customers really expect companies to respond? Are companies using these venues to answer complaints? eMarketer's recent articles When Consumers Tweet Complaints, Should Brands Respond? and How well Do Companies Respond to Complaints? look at the bigger picture of social media and marketing and how complaints online are being addressed or not. "According to customer experience research company Maritz Research, nearly half of consumers who tweeted a complaint directed toward a brand expected the company to respond—or at least to read their tweet. However, only a third of those consumers received a tweeted response from the mentioned brand." Interestingly, older customers 55+ expect a company to address their online complaints everytime. Younger customers and those more active on Twitter believed that companies would not respond. It seems they have they have lowered their expectations based on experience.

Companies should be paying more attention to their social media outlets and answering questions and complaints more often. "Consumers are overwhelmingly positive when brands take the time to actually respond to them on Twitter. The Maritz study indicates that 86% of Twitter complainers would have liked or loved to hear from the company regarding their complaints—and out of those who heard back, 75% were satisfied with the company’s response."

Obviously, complaints can help the company improve service but companies are also discovering that participating in this type of  online conversation can help build relationships with customers. For instance Virgin Airlines tries to respond to every question or complaint tweet @VirginAmerica. Abby Lunardini, vice president of corporate communications, told eMarketer in a September 26, 2011, interview that customers were surprised to learn that someone in the airline industry was listening and responding to the online chatter and she believes that the engagement is improving service and leading to customer loyalty with more customers choosing to fly Virgin Airlines again.

Social Currency: More than just buzz

We have looked at how companies can monetize their social media with Social Commerce and we've introduced you to Famecount where you can find the popularity of brands, now with help from Vivald-iPartners  we examine how it all fits together to create Social Currency. The report Social Currency: Why brands need to build and nurture social currency explains that "today, one of the most important strengths of a brand is its social currency, the extent to which people share the brand or information about the brand with others as part of their everyday social lives." Social of media has changed how brands are built. "Social media sites are actively used today by major brands to strengthen customer service, introduce or co-create new products and entertain people." A high social currency commands a price premium and creates brand loyalty, but it takes more than just buzz. "Companies need to learn how to make their brands more social, and how to interact in new ways with their customers.

The most interesting part of the paper explains that although there are 6 components of social currency (affiliation, conversation, utility, advocacy, information and identity), brands don't need high scores in all 6 to have a high currency. Different categories of products have different needs. Categories like fast food and beer seem to be less dependent on providing a strong sense of community, whereas airlines and IT rely on their user-base to exchange news, hints, and other information.

bizologie Favorite Apps: Momento

March 24, 2011. Dear Diary, we've got a new favorite app. Actually, the diary app Momento is one of our new favorite apps. Momento starts out just like you'd use an old fashioned diary: log the date and start writing about that cute boy in math class. But the great part is that Momento lets you import feeds from all of your social networking sites and then organizes them by date. You simply add your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, Foursquare and Gowalla accounts and suddenly you've got an automatic record of each day and you didn't have to write a thing. From there you can search by dates or tags or events and reminisce about special dates in your life. You might see that on February 27th you checked in on Gowalla at the coffee shop, uploaded a picture of your BFF to Flickr and attended a fabulous Oscar Party. Momento also allows you to lockdown the app so that you don't catch your little brother snooping through your diary. Momento is available on iTunes for $2.99 and the company is considering expanding to Android.  XOXO, bizologie.

Famecount: Social Media's Most Popular Brands

Last week we talked about corporate use of social media and today we're going to see which brands and companies are the most popular. Famecount keeps track of brands, celebrities, media, sports, games, music and politicians on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. They'll give you rankings for each service by region and they also break down each category so you can come up with some pretty specific charts. On the "Facebook Stars" tab, I can break down the brand category to Auto, Food & Drink, Fashion, Restaurant, Retail and Technology. These charts will show me the total number of fans as well as fans per month, week and day:

I can also see most popular brands over all channels combined:

And trends of the fastest growing brands:

Famecount gets their data directly from the sources and you can read more about how their data is calculated here.

Corporate Use of Social Media

Recently we talked about how SMBs are using social media and today we're going to take a look at how some of the larger corporations put social media to work for them.  Burson-Marsteller has a great report out entitled "The Global Social Media Check-up 2011".  It's a great report and gives us insight into how some of  the Fortune 100 companies use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, etc.  Over the past year, they report "an 18% increase in FortuneGlobal 100 companies using Twitter, followed by a 14% growth in YouTube channels and a 13% growth in companies using Facebook pages."  And typically corporations have more than one account: On average they have 5.8 Twitter accounts, 4.2 Facebook accounts, 2.7 YouTube channels and 6.8 blogs. IBM alone has 76 Twitter accounts! That's a lot of communication, but who's listening? Corporate accounts average about 5,076 followers on Twitter and 87,979  "likes" on Facebook. According to eMarketer, most people follow a brand "to get updates on future products":

Fans and followers can get anything from customer service to a new job. TiVo is among the many companies who post jobs on their Facebook page:

And Glaceau's smartwater is hoping their new YouTube video will go viral:

SMBs Double Use of Twitter

eMarketer reports that small and medium-sized businesses doubled their Twitter usage from 2009 to 2010. According the the “Local Commerce Monitor-Wave 14” study from BIA/Kelsey and ConStat, last year 1 in 5 SMBs used Twitter for local marketing.  SMBs' overall use of social media is growing. "Twitter was still behind many other social media tactics, with nearly half (48%) of respondents using Facebook for marketing and a quarter using some other social network."  35% of the SMBs surveyed had increased their use of links and ads on social media sites over the past year, and "46% planned further increases in the next 12 months." 25% of SMBs increased their use of customer ratings and reviews in 2010 and 39% expected to increase usage of reviews before the end of 2011. Not surprisingly, younger businesses (those under 7 years) were more likely to use social media for marketing.

For more on corporate uses of social media, stay tuned to bizologie. Later this week Laura will cover The Global Social Media Check-up 2011 report from Burson-Marsteller.