A Blogging carnival is a world web phenomena where bloggers that are doing interesting or exceptional blogging can get free publicity within their own work sphere. It is similar to a magazine, in that it is dedicated to a particular topic, and is published on a regular schedule, often weekly or monthly. Each edition of a blog carnival is in the form of a blog article that contains permalinks links to other blog articles on a particular topic. If you would like to participate in the next Work Connexions blog carnival or synchroblog then click to read more …

If you would like to participate in the next Work Connexions blog carnival or synchroblog (Synchronised Blogging, or synchroblog, where a group of bloggers agree to post on their own blogs on the same broad topic on the same day.) then drop us an email or leave a comment in the blog entry of this news.

Writing on your blog is not gossip. While you could get plenty of traffic from your industry by spreading juicy titbits about your competitors and colleagues you will more likely grab yourself a bad reputation rather than more work or industry profile. Language can be an issue. I am not talking about swearing and such, most business people would know better than to drop bad language into a marketing tool. What I mean is tone and sophistication. You have to fit the voice to the audience. Of course I am pretty laid back here on this blog, while there are quite a few CEOs reading they tend to not be the stuffy stiff necked types (I know, I get emails from them!). You have to tune the language you use appropriately.

The best type of posts you can make, particularly in a service industry, is successful case studies.

• What was their situation like before?
• What were their goals or problem?
• How did you work with them?
• How did everything work out?
• …

Most clients would be glad of the publicity, you just need to speak to them and get permission. Obviously some will not want specifics mentioning (particularly figures) or even to be named. That’s all fine. What matters is results and that you provide enough detail to be believable.

Talk to your clients about it and you won’t get into trouble. Going behind their backs is when you start getting into the sticky stuff.

The same is true when you want to write about exciting happenings in your own business. I imagine bloggers at Apple and Microsoft have a real hard time keeping mouths shut. There will be policies on what can and can not be talked about. If not, get some. Fast.

Many companies have footers on their emails

• NOT to be repeated or reproduced
• OK to email to company
• OK to email outside company to specified individuals
• Freely distribute

You can do the same and add a tick box for blogging if freely distribute doesn’t cover that.

Most business niches have news, tactics and events that are safe to blog about. This though is mostly filler. You can get that stuff anywhere. To make it more valuable you need to dig deep and find your hook or angle on it.

The best solution, if you haven’t already got a rich source of content to draw on, is to create some news. Could you run a competition? A survey? Interview some industry figures?

These don’t need to be massive ventures, scale to fit. While one past client of mine had a terrific success year on year with a global survey that was mentioned in television and newspapers around the world, another simply surveyed their own clients and as well as producing an excellent PR story also learned a great deal about what their customers look for and feel.

Bottom line you need to answer the question; “Could this have appeared on a competitors blog with no major changes?“. If the answer is yes you have a bland post and you need to work on it some more.

Just remember you can be interesting without being unprofessional. Focus on your reader. What is useful to them? How have you or your products helped people and businesses just like them?

Most of all, what makes you different to all the other businesses they could go to?

Visit Chris at http://www.chrisg.com/

Among the questions executives ask about social media is where should it be located? Who should launch, manage and publish the blog(s), vlog(s) and/or podcast(s)? The obvious choices are marketing, public relations, human resources or communications. However, making the right decision is both critical and complex.

To some extent, the answer lies within the internal structure of the business. Taking the org. chart into acount, to determine where social media should live, a business might ask questions such as these:

1. Who is most likely to understand the use of social media and then to use it in ways that benefit our customers, our employees and our business most?
2. Who has the time, budget and expertise to create engaging communications?
3. Who is least likely to use social media to market and sell products?
4. Who is most likely to use social media to draw customers into conversation with us; thereby, developing loyal customers, brand evangelists and new customers who appreciate our efforts to give them a voice?

These questions are the basis for the internal discussion. Whoever the business chooses to host social media, they must be excellent writers, they must be creative, they must have access to everyone within the business, they must be familiar with the customers and the communities in which the business has locations, and they must be trusted as open and honest communicators. Furthermore, they must have the courage and the ability to challenge managers and executives who want to turn social media into a bottom line tool.

Yes, social media, if done correctly, will result in return on investment in a variety of forms, including an increase in loyal customers who buy more and who talk positively about the company; an increase in the ability to produce more innovative and better products and services based on customer feedback; the ability to improve the company at every level, again based on customer feedback; and an increase in new customers as they learn about and come to trust the company.

That is the 10,000-foot view of where social media should reside and what to expect from social media. But like any strategy, before launching social media as part of your communications mix, every business should analyze the tools to understand what they do and how they may be used and how social media is and is not the right fit for your business. Using these communications tools is not to be done lightly.

My best advice is to study every detail and discuss all the pros and cons. And then if you decide social media is a good fit for your business, launch the tools internally first. Get employees from every functional area involved, and ask them to be your sounding boards. As in most things, employees know your customers best, and they will contribute incredibly good suggestions and recommendations, if you engage them and give them buy in.

For more information about Lewis Green visit him at http://lgbusinesssolutions.typepad.com/solutions_to_grow_your_bu/

We have been working for some time on launching a new site focused on Business Development. We our now throwing the doors open and inviting old and new users to join our community and grow your business. Over the next weeks we will be moving data and users over to the new site, ready for a new spring campaign. So come and try it out at www.workconnexions.net

Work connexions is doing a month long competition where we will increase traffic to your website. In connexion with a special advertising campaign on the internet we are going to increase your page rank. All you have to do is write a blog post or put a link on your website about Work Connexions and then register on the site and post a free classified.

Our market is Businesses and Working professionals for our Wcx site. At present there is no social networking site that offers businesses this or the chance to interact with each other using Web 2.0 communication. Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc are all aimed at the individuals. While some of these social networking sites are used for business. We believe they are fatally flawed for business, in that they concentrate on the individual’s private life, and most professional people do not want to be exposed and interact in this type of environment.

A Manx website, Work Connexions, has been short listed for a prestigious UK national award following an awareness campaign lead by Netcetera, the Isle of Man’s leading web hosting company, to recognise and foster web design excellence in the Isle of Man. Work Connexions, www.workconnexions.com, the Isle of Man’s own social media website, has been short listed in the category of ‘People’s Choice: New Site of The Year’ in the .net Awards 2007.

The nomination follows a grassroots campaign launched in October by Netcetera in which the company encouraged the people of the Isle of Man to vote for their favourite Manx sites online at the awards website. A successful PR campaign coupled with a Facebook initiative and a dedicated web page all combined to make the Netcetera’s .net Awards drive a success.

“The Isle of Man boasts an innovative Internet culture and were happy to play a role in fostering creativity and excellence,” commented Dave Boswell, chief operating officer, Netcetera. “The .net 2007 Awards are recognised as the industry’ s most respected accolade, and this year we were determined to help Isle of Man web design receive the recognition it deserves. We congratulate Work Connexions on this achievement.”

In addition, Netcetera sponsored the Innovation of the Year category in the .net Awards 2007; Joost, Adobe Premier Express, Second Life and Google Calendar were all finalists. Google Earth was awarded the Innovation of the Year accolade.

The Work Connexions website offers interactive social media features, popularly known as Web 2.0, to both people and businesses. It includes online advertising, blogging, bulletin boards and a business directory among other services.

“Business is starting to understand the influence of social media and our site makes it easy to tap this powerful medium for people that may not have the technical know-how or the time to build their own interactive web presence, ” said Leo Cussons, operations director, Work Connexions. “It’s an honour to be recognised in the .net Awards, but doubly so because it’s in the People’s Choice category. We are delighted that so many people took the time to vote for Work Connexions and are grateful to Netcetera for their support.”

Netcetera is a full-service web hosting company with more than 10 years experience serving a broad range of customers from around the world. The company’s new data centre, the £10 million Dataport in the Freeport in Ballasalla, is the Isle of Man’s largest and most advanced.

We have a Google page 4 rank. Which means that if Microsoft has a page rank ranging from 5 to 8 on different parts of their site, We are becoming a preferred stop for internet search engines and users. Understanding the significance of this is quite major. In short if you want to advertise jobs, products, or marketing this is the place to do it. It means that we are getting the traffic…..

http://www.ianrogers.net/google-page-rank/

Work Connexions Team

Work Connexions blogger Lewis Green’s fifth book was just released by HRD Press, Inc. Called Lead With Your Heart, the book calls for businesses to adopt a model that will result in business success as well as create a better world in which to do business, to work and to live. Lewis green a relative new blogger to the Work Connexions social networking platform. Had this to say “as Social Media grows in importance, especially blogs as used by businesses, sites such as Work Connexions are important to all of us wanting to communicate and to share with our community of readers.”

Operations Director Leo Cussons says “this really proves what a lot of research is showing at the moment that blogging can significantly increase your business. Not only does it provide opportunities in Advertising, Website presence, Marketing, and Recruitment. It also means that you can build relationships across continents. Lewis Green has been significant in introducing the work connexions platform to his own business network as a place to do business. Unlike other social networking sites where the focus is on your free time activities. Work Connexions focuses on career advancement, improving ones skills and getting new business.”

“This book is about changing the way we do business. It is written to inspire business executives, managers and entrepreneurs to invest in a new business model that can be a first step to changing the world we live in,” Green says.

Green was inspired to write this book by Mahatma Gandhi’s quote, We must be the change we wish to see in the world, and what he has experienced in his three decades as a corporate manager, executive and entrepreneur.

Lead With Your Heart is about creating a business environment where business leaders lead with the heart, take a hard look at their values, implement and live by those values, and then build value-driven businesses in which people are more important than overzealousness to earn money. In this book, Green talks about creating happiness, and by doing so, he argues we change the world in good and right ways as well as reap large profits.

“I often wonder why businesses don’t spend more time strategizing around happiness, Green adds. Happiness is the driving force behind everything people do. It is the key to determining their wants, needs and desires. It is the essence of the American Dream and is as important as the air you breathe. It is true that many companies are customer-focused and invest lots of energy in meeting customer needs.

Responding to those needs should result in happy customers, happy employees, and a healthy bottom line. Unfortunately, the efforts being made by too many businesses to create happy and loyal customers fall far short of what is necessary.”

Note to the Media and Bloggers: Review copies of Lead With Your Heart are available for media and business bloggers. The author is available for interviews, TV and radio guest spots, and speaking engagements. Call 860.673.7543. The book may be purchased at Amazon.com or online directly from HRD Press or by calling 1-800-822-2801.

It is available the new issue and includes many interesting articles, including the future of the Isle of Man by Chief Minister Tony Brown, work, humour, and the rise of web 2.0. You can also download an electronic copy of the magazine online.

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Included in this issue is:

Chief Minister Tony Brown - Future Thoughts Page 14

Page 4 Zen Motivation

……….PART 3

Page 6 Guest Blog - Inferno

……….THE RISE OF WEB 2.0

Page 8 Singer & Friedlander

……….TRANSPERENCY AND BANKING

Page 10 A Printer for all seasons

……….DEBORAH GWINNEL

Page 12 Respite

………..SUDOKU, FAST FACTS, WORK EXCUSES

Page 18 Central Software

………..MOVING ON UP

Page 20 Caroline Bull

………..NEED SPACE TO THINK?

Page 12 SO YOU DO SUDOKU DO YOU?

………..YOUR NUMBERS UP

Page 12 FAST FACTS

…………SLEEP WITH YOUR MOUTH CLOSED

Page 13 CLASSIC QUOTATIONS

…………YES, THEY REALLY SAID IT

Page 23 PHOTO FOR THOUGHT

…………I COULD NOT GET TO WORK TO DAY