Axel Schultze

You can’t fire the planet. Engage it through social media instead

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It always amazes me how, in the worst global economy of our lifetimes–where lost jobs can destroy families, and every family destroyed adds to the global misery index for us all–that when the subject comes up about employees and social media, the focus always seems to be on “Policies that help companies cover all the bases so you can easily terminate employees.” I guess some consultants can make a tidy living at that kind of thing, and sleep at night, but as usual, policy and executive fiat may ‘win’ short-term while failing to address long-term reality. What does?

(1) First, companies need to rein in, remove or at least redeploy the incompetents and abusive jerks who have found their way into more than a few executive suites. That alone Continue reading

Can uXeeMe Now?

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I’m on Klout, which purports to assess a company’s or individual’s “social capital” by the networks they belong to and the interactions they generate in those networks. You may be there, too. It’s a pretty good platform and I like the way it incorporates elements of other networks, such as importing the lists I’ve created on Twitter. Yet a new social media friend, Nate Riggs (@nateriggs), has shown how Klout can be gamed to artificially inflate one’s score. More broadly, right now Klout only lets one connect a handful of social networks (currently 12)–including some that are of marginal importance, and I can only guess are on the roster due to relationships between principals and organizations. So while there is no doubt it has some use as a social media indicator, I question its ability to fully assess and quantify one’s social capital. Continue reading

The social (selling) event of the XeeSM

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Thirty thousand business users can’t be wrong.

OK, they could be, but in this case they are right on the money.

In Fall 2009 I told you about a new service called XeeSM [pronounced see-sum], launched by Axel Schultze and the team who earlier brought us the Xeequa Social Media Academy, where you can post links to your most important social media links and other sites in one place, in my case http://xeesm.com/JEFF/. Or as I call it at my core site, a one-stop social hub. I love it for that reason alone: Instead of loading up websites, news releases, ads, email signatures and everything else with an ever-growing laundry list of social links (“Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIN, oh my”), you can now cover all your online bases with just one. Continue reading