I recently had the pleasure of presenting to the APSCo meeting in Manchester, where we presented ideas around online reputation for recruiters, or “Reputation 2.0″.

In a great article from Advertising Age, Kunur Patel looks at the different social media models emerging in the corporate world:

1. Centralised - social media role functions at a senior level as used by Ford

2. Distributed - everyone in the organisation has a role in social media as seen at Best Buy

3. Combination - incorporates centralised best practices and distributed execution as Kodak does.

You can read the full article from the Advertising Age website here.

I remember when mobile location based services were first being touted in 2000 - in the midst of the dotcom boom and getting our heads around exactly what e-commerce was, it was all so exciting and held so much promise.

It was around the same time when I believed the hype about voice recognition software and that in just a few years I’d have no use for my touchtype training all those years ago on an old typewriter (to the beats of some rather uplifting piano music no less) but instead would be having lovely realistic (an authentic Australian accent was even promised by one vendor) conversations with my laptop.

However, it seems a different story with Foursquare and its competitors. According to a report released this week by Juniper Research revenue from mobile location based services could reach US$12.7 million by 2014. An article in the Washington Post provides a good analysis of the report here.

I’m not surprised having spent the last few weeks evangelising to everyone I know (and nearly everyone I meet) about the potential of Foursquare and other similar services. While it has been around since mid last year, it was limited to select cities so unless you travelled globally, it was hard to get your head around the potential of it, but since the start of the year it can be used anywhere now.

Foursquare is basically a service you can download to your mobile phone that allows you to let everyone know where you are - it’s like Twitter for socialites.

Instead of telling everyone what  you are doing, you let your friends know where you are by ‘checking-in’ to various locations either already in the system or you can add them if you are the first to check-in there.

For those whose ears I haven’t chewed off about this topic as yet, below is a good video from the Wall Street Journal as to what Foursquare all about. And this article also from the Wall Street Journal highlights the benefits  small businesses are gaining from combining social media with their marketing.

There are literally hundreds of mobile location based services around including Gowalla, Yelp (which has had its own problems with iliciting bad reviews which we wrote about recently) and even early forerunners like Brightkite, Loopt and My Town but Foursquare is getting a lot of attention perhaps because of its quick growth - some quote it as having more than 1/2 million users already, but its also been in the news with the recent concerns over privacy and its partnership announcements with high profile brands like Bravo and Zagats.

But if people are going to worry about privacy on Foursquare they’ll be horrified to learn about another service Blibby which goes one step further and allows you to tell your friends where and what you are buying somewhere. A story in the Financial Times this week claims the service already has 10,000 users since its launch in December ‘09.

But back to Foursquare, some including Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider, say that Foursquare’s will be ousted from its ‘mayorship’ in the space if other more established and popular social networking sites like Facebook add location based services. And the introduction of Google Buzz adds another interesting element to the mix.

Nicholas also gives a nice comparison between some of the services in his article:

Yelp

• Advantages: Scale, brand, ardent community, large app install base. More money from investors like Elevation Partners.

• Disadvantages: Not your real friends. It’s a site for writers. No Foursquare-like gaming element.

Gowalla

• Advantages: Closer to mainstream than Foursquare. Has more money than Foursquare, from sexy investors like Greylock. Not based in New York so it’s closer to “real” America.

• Disadvantages: Not based in New York, which is the perfect city for this kind of software.

Facebook

• Advantages: Huge scale. Has tons of engineering talent. Like with Foursquare, Facebook friends are your real friends — the kind of people you want to join you when you go out.

• Disadvantages: Unlike Foursquare, Facebook can afford to fail. Potential rivals also include Twitter and CitySearch

Momentum is certainly growing in all these services and a lot of people are talking about it, but there are those who aren’t convinced just yet.

It seems a pretty safe bet that business will gain real benefit from these services (a lot safer than betting on my talking laptop at least), so the real issue is whose going to lead the way.

While updating some LinkedIn training materials for a client session this week, I came across the following image from the LinkedIn blog that shows just how powerful a tool LinkedIn can be.

It shows that even though many people left the financial industry after the collapse, a large proportion stayed and you can see where they went. Interesting huh? Who would have thought.

You can read the full post here.

Heard today about a firm offering to  remove bad reviews about your business from yelp. co.uk

This is an interesting development in the ongoing “reputation 2.0″ debate.. as is this from GeekSugar:

There are a lot of business owners who’ve felt the sting of bad Yelp reviews, and one restaurant in San Francisco is getting even (instead of getting litigious).

Pizzeria Delfina decided to embrace its one-star reviews — by printing them on the shirts the staff wears. 

They triumphantly rock t-shirts that say stuff like “This place sucks” while serving their delish dishes. 

Prompted by the good people at Chinwag, we are now recruiting our very own twintern for the Summer. Graduates,  start sending your CVs to Adelaide@carveconsulting.com . We can’t wait to have the next social media expert on board for a few weeks!

Here is what our offer looks like:

You are passionate about all things social media, and are actively participating in a wide variety of web 2.0 activities such as blogging, social bookmarking, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. You would like to learn how to translate your passion into coherent and cutting-edge strategies for corporate organisations.

Carve Consulting is a digital engagement practice specialising in Corporate Social Networks, Online PR, Social Media Monitoring and Search Engine Marketing. With offices in the UK and Australia, the practice has developed corporate social networking strategies, social media marketing and social recruiting programmes for a range of private, public and not-for-profit organisations, including VisitBritain, Yell Adworks, The Audit Commission, Fairtrade, Wine Australia, Hays, ANZ Bank, and the NHS.  The practice offers strategy, advisory, research, training and managed services.

We can offer you a two month-internship in July and August where you’ll be thrown into the deep end to work on accounts with our consultants. Your day-to-day tasks will vary but will definitely include the following at some point:

-    Account management (including “whatever needs to be done to service the accounts”)
-    Client training
-    Client research
-    Report writing
-    Proactively participating in social media events

Our ideal intern looks a bit like this:
-    Passionate about social media with an appetite to learn
-    Up to date web 2.0 industry knowledge
-    Exceptional traditional writing and grammatical skills
-    Excellent verbal communication skills with ability to present  complex ideas clearly
-    Attention to detail and outstanding organisation skills
-    Ability to work to tight deadlines and be calm under pressure

We can’t offer you a full salary but will cover your travel and lunch expenses, as well as a discretionary bonus at the end of the internship. We are currently looking at expanding so there is potentially scope for developing this internship into a permanent paid position.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Carve was asked last year to contribute a chapter to the Social Media in Recruitment guide, following a well received presentation I made on Corporate Social Networking ( where ‘Social Media meets Business’ ) at the British Library.

Our chapter is focused on ‘Developing an Effective Corporate Social Networking Strategy‘ and draws on our experiences of doing just that with organisations inside and outside of the recruitment world.

The result is published by the REC Industry Research Unit and has some thought provoking contributions from the likes of Matt Alder and Bill Boorman

We’ve made the report accessible for free download via this link - socialmediainrecruitment

As always, we’re interested in your feedback / thoughts.

Cute influencer campaign for Marmite Extra Strong from We Are Social. Also proves the best ideas are the easiest told, as the deck below illustrates.

And then there’s the wrong way to launch a product extension a la Vegemite which we wrote about a while back.

On Thursday and Friday this week I’ll be leading two tracks at TruLondon (http://thetruconferences.com/) that we hope will turn into something pretty special.

We’ve been operating LiveLABS for a while now as part of our active facilitation / corporate social networking programmes, where we use our tools and best practice frameworks to address real social media / social recruiting challenges. But we’re hoping that Tru London will take live problem solving to a new level with – we hope – a cast of 1000s.
Live LABS problem-solving was really borne out of the evident frustration that many people feel when approaching social media, and – specifically – when attending social media  / social recruiting events. There is a lot of theory and a number of well-known social media case studies that tend to be trotted out at these events but they often mean little if you’re not managing a brand that’s not already in possession of bags of money and /or residual awareness.  Live LABS is all about realising the value in social media for your organisation / brand.

When is Live LABS Tru London taking place?

• Thursday, 18th February:  13.00 – 14.00 GMT (Track 6)
• Friday, 19th February 2010: 13.30 – 14.30 ( Track 23)

How do I get involved?
Live LABS Tru London is going to be live in every sense of the word: participants to the Live LABS will be able to both SUBMIT  questions and challenges, or CONTRIBUTE with ideas and solutions.

• During the event, you can submit using “#TruLondon Q [and then your question]” ( you can also email your questions in advance to LiveLABS@CarveConsulting.com paul@carveconsulting.com)  In LiveLABS we attempt to solve problems in context, so please give as much detail as you can.

As the questions flood in (we hope) from you the twitterati and the individual tracks and participants at the event,  we will be showing the questions on the big TwitterJobSearch screen, and of course you can track them via your favorite Twitter tool ( we think http://twitterfall.com/trulondon is a good one, we’ll also be hosting a widget on the Carve Blog).

• And here’s where you come in. To contribute your ideas and solutions, just tweet using “#TruLondon A [and then your ideas ]”

We will be mashing the whole Twitter/Live participation thing up into something we hope that is great fun to participate in, but also:

•    …will provide some crowd-sourced insights to your social media / social recruiting problems and questions
•    ….and bring together – Live -  some of the planet’s leading recruitment thinkers
For more information, and tickets to TruLondon please visit http://thetruconferences.com/

Let’s make it trend on Twitter

Valentine’s Day courtesy of CareerPlayer.com (which, if you haven’t seen it  / don’t know of it )  is *definitely*worth exploring.