When following us for a longer time you won’t be surprised we at Goyello love coffee, good code, geek tools and social media. Especially in Europe we are still facing an intensive debate about the (non-)sense of social media. Honestly, it feels similar to discussions we had just some years ago about the Internet and e-mail. For a long period of time companies tried to ban this from the workfloor. Without real success as we know today. Today social media seem to be the new victim. Companies try again to ban them from the workfloor. It seems we didn’t learn from the past. In this post I present three movies that show what’s going on. These movies are mainly based on US data, but they show a trend that is coming to Europe quickly, if it didn’t arrive yet.

More and more companies understand the need to be present at social media but not many of them do social media properly and effectively. Why? Because in order to succeed in social media we can no longer treat it as yet another communication channel. It can’t be a random activity. It should be aligned with the overall strategy. Many companies take up SM but have no idea what for and what they will do there. Then it’s like “teen sex” - Everyone wants to do it. No one actually knows how. When finally done, there is surprise it’s not better.”

Today my HootSuite client was offline for a while, which was a big surprise. In general Hootsuite is a very reliable service. Fortunately, I was informed this was due to a remarkable update. Some time late I noticed significant changes to the social media dashboard beginning with a completely refreshed HTML5 user interface, plus geo-located search, native Twitter ReTweets, and integrated Google Analytics.

For me Hootsuite was already the best Social Media dashboard for both personal and team based social media management. Today’s improvements prove Hootsuite continuously keeps improving its service.

When you open your LinkedIn page to update your status, you will notice a new feature. From today LinkedIn enabled easy sharing of news and links. A nice new feature which enables you to share what’s hot in your domain. It’s easy to share the news with your network. LinkedIn is step by step becoming more social.

Social networks are an important place to meet for marketers and increasingly for politicians as well. The 2008 Obama campaign on Twitter showed the value of social networks. Voters are online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. High time to meet your voters online! Today at the Politics Online Conference TownHall is officially going to be announced. Microsoft TownHall is an online tool that fosters, organizes, moderates, and houses online conversations, driving rich discussion around top issues and concerns. It is a place to ask, answer, and prioritize questions that are top of mind. The most popular or relevant questions bubble to the top, so participants can readily see timely topics at any given moment.

When you are working with social media you tend to forget that the adoption of social media is still rather low. I recently noticed this when I was requested to provide a presentation about online corporate branding. Still many people are hardly using the possibilities of social media. Meanwhile, it’s becoming obvious that you can improve your competitive advantage. By means of social media the smallest company is able to gain the branding image of a big corporate. Online the differences in between big and small are way smaller than in the offline world. Below I will share with you what social media you could give a try in 2010.

Apparently, the only constant thing in this world is change. Also social trends change along with the customs and we need to get used to completely different etiquette rules to survive in the jungle of social media. Like with any other form of communication people get to like us or we simply annoy them.

When using social networks we may also offend people and put them off for not following some basic rules of polite behavior. Below I’m presenting the list of practical tips on how to use Twitter in a way that we avoid irritating our potential valuable followers. I hope this list will make things easier for all of us.

The adoption of social media is increasing at high speed. You only have to watch the impressive increase of Twitter and Facebook accounts. They offer both new opportunities and challenges to stand above the crowd. If you listen to all the advice there is hardly any way to escape from it. On the other hand the group of users is still rather small. Besides many accounts are hardly used and there is a big group of very passive users. Depending on your type of business this means you have to analyze carefully where you can meet your potential clients. Because there is still a big chance you have to meet them offline! The social media area might still be a geek domain.