Blogs | Social Signal

It's SXSW PanelPicker season again. There are just hours left to vote for your favourite proposals for next year's South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin - and Alex has three dandy proposals for your consideration.

We hope you'll consider clicking your support for one, two or (make Alex's day!) all three:

A LinkedIn profile is more important than résumé, more useful than a business card and more permanent than an email address. As essential as LinkedIn is to today’s professionals, many people still struggle with the question of how to use it or what makes it useful. That’s why I’m delighted that today marks the publication of the latest book in my Work Smarter with Social Media series for Harvard Business Review Press: Work Smarter with LinkedIn.

This morning's Digital Strategy Conference sessions dug into social strategy: coupling online engagement with organizational goals. It's what makes the difference between flailing around and getting things done.

I took notes throughout Sandy Gerber's indepth look at social strategy, and Nancy Richardson's account of lessons learned so far at Lululemon. (And I had the opportunity to speak on a great panel with a gang of stellar folks, applying their real-world experience to the audience's strategic questions.)

A social speech has the power to extend your message's reach beyond the audience in attendance. And one of the most powerful ways you can do that is by encapsulating that message in a self-contained, easily-shared piece of content: a social object.

Suppose you read a tweet or a Facebook update: an urgent message about something truly vile that a public figure has said. Outraged, you click through... and discover that, actually, what they said is far milder.

Mitchell Beer has been a leader in conference communcations for more than a quarter of a century. His firm, The Conference Publishers, reports and repackages conference content - keeping it useful and relevant long after the closing gavel.

It wasn't that long ago that "notebook" just meant the paper kind that you'd carry to meetings, refer to as you worked, and jot random thoughts down in… provided you had it with you.

Then came the web, and then smart mobile devices, and everything changed. Today's web-based notebook lives on your laptop, desktop, tablet, smartphone and web browser. And the most successful by far is Evernote.

The debate simmering over Instagram's pending terms-of-service changes shouldn't come as a surprise. These days, changes to a site's or app's terms of service get a lot more scrutiny than they used to.

Most organizations would never send their leaders to a news conference in pizza-stained sweatpants and a moth-eaten Planet Hollywood t-shirt. But a startling number of them do the digital equivalent.

They stretch low-resolution logos and graphics to serve as cover images. They shovel photos online without noticing that the call to action is getting cropped out. Use intricate, complex images as pinkie-nail-sized profile photos.

The result is a blotchy, pixelated, distorted, unreadable mess.