A professional hot or not.

During my daily routine of checking the trends and happenings on Linkedin and Facebook, I found a website that seemed to mix the two.  If there were two social networks that I didn’t think had any need to interact it was these two.  My interest was captured, however, when I began to see a few more of my connections and friends using it.  Now it spans Twitter and your email contacts and invites you to choose who is the best at “social media” or “business development” or in fact one of any number of skills we may have listed on a CV. 

The next stage is what does Mixtent do with this data?  It works out your worldwide rank and the position within your connections and within your company. I am yet to see how accurate this tool is going to be, as there are a number of times when I vote for someone based on the fact that I like them or I know them personally.  And I am sure others will do the same thing.  It is interesting to think that in the future when recruiting you might simply disregard anyone whose worldwide rank is outside the top ten percent. 

If this site does hit the tipping point, then it won’t be long before we will be throwing around terms like, “So what’s your Mixtent rank at Creativity?”

Social Media – A British Love Affair

Hold the press everyone – it’s finally official. Social networking is now top of the list when it comes to our favourite British online pastimes. It’s even overtaken portals such as the BBC iPlayer, ITV Player and Sky Sports.com in popularity.

The stats are massive – last month Facebook accounted for over 12.46 per cent of all internet activity and there were 2.4 billion visits to social networking sites just in January 2011 alone.

Similarly Linkedin has more than 90 million registered users around the world and there are over 1 billion tweets a month on Twitter.

It seems the tipping point has finally come, with social media leaping ahead when it comes to influencing our online lives. And there’s apparently no end to this British love affair.

But despite all the numbers and stats, one fact remains clear – this revelation surprises no-one.

Social media is so much part of our daily lives, most of us don’t even think about using it. So it’s hardly a shock it’s dominating our internet usage.

In such a short time social media is now firmly in camp ‘Status quo’ – now that’s surprising!