Social Media

Apparently LinkedIn wants to move away from its status as a pure career network towards establishing itself as a more social network. LinkedIn has been overhauling the look of its homepage with a cleaner and simpler interface, which now closely resembles the designs of Facebook and Google+. Some of the new features include a newer, simpler, and more modern design, more relevant updates on top of the news feed, and a richer, cleaner comment / update / post stream. As with Facebook and Google+ there’s a line on top of the stream that shows which people — and how many — commented and liked a post. Also, the sidebar now lists statistical information on your network and other related info like jobs you may be interested in and other people you may know.

What do you think about the new design and features?

Many freelancers operate as just another anonymous resource in the crowded market. Their services lack an identifying mark that stands for something. It is therefore not surprising that, at times, it can be very difficult to prevail in a highly competitive freelance environment. In that sense, building a distinctive image and lasting reputation for your freelancing business can be very beneficial.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that having business cards, a logo, a website, a social media presence, or a slogan for their business means that they have a brand. But they are wrong. Those things, in and of themselves, are not a brand, but they can help build a brand. They serve as a reminder of what your freelancing business stands for. In a nutshell, a brand is what your clients think of when they think of you and your work. Simply being known as a good designer or good programmer is no longer enough. You should rather be known as a designer who provides elegant yet simple work or a programmer who is known for his/her exceptional ability to solve tough problems. Developing a strong brand takes time and effort. Besides exceptional work, building a brand usually requires significant and consistent marketing and PR.

Having a strong freelancing brand can mean the difference when pitching for a project or job. What do you think?

Google+ provides some interesting tools for freelancers, including Google+ Brand Pages. Another aspect of Google+ that freelancers should consider is the Hangouts feature.

Google+ Hangouts is a very interesting social media tool – especially for freelancers. It is one of the unique Google+ features that helps to distinguish Google+ from other social media tools.

If you’re a freelancer, you should think about the various ways that Google+ Hangouts can benefit you as a freelancer. Google+ Hangouts offers a great opportunity for freelancers to connect on a more personal level with individuals they would ordinarily not be able to interact with on a face-to-face basis. Google+ Hangouts are easy to use, versatile, and free of charge.

Here are some ways that freelancers can use Google+ Hangouts:

• Hosting a conference call
• Brainstorming
• Training
• Holding a status meeting
• Networking
• Building a community
• Discussing potential projects with prospective clients (instead of sales calls)
• Collaborating on a group project
• Holding “office hours” for clients

Google+ Hangout sessions can also be recorded, so a team meeting can be shared with absent members at a later date. Also, this means that a training session could potentially be used over and over. In fact, there are countless possibilities for using hangouts. Can you think of Google+ Hangout uses for your own freelancing business? Currently, the only downside is that Google+ Hangouts is limited to ten people (including the person who initiated the hangout). So, if you have a need to connect with more people, you’ll need to use another method of communication.

Interesting TEDTalk by Sherry Turkle on Social Media and its impact on human interaction and communication: Checking email during meetings. Shopping on your smartphone in the middle of class. Texting at funerals. These are a few of the examples that MIT professor Sherry Turkle offered during her TEDTalk, in which she argued that “technology is taking us places we don’t want to go.” Turkle, a psychologist who leads MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self, believes that while our constant communication and social media engagement does make us more connected, it’s coming at the sacrifice of real conversation. And she thinks that will have some serious consequences for our relationships, our self-perceptions and our emotions.

We’ve built a great widget that has been released and is now available. We would like to take a moment and describe some of the features our widget has and how you might take advantage of it.

Do you offer employment services and solutions, human resource consulting or manage a database for recruitment and permanent placement?

As one of the leading online  project marketplaces in Germany, we’ve been connecting freelance professionals and innovative businesses on our specialized industry platforms since 1999. Benefit from co-branding with projektwerk.

The widget enables you to offer your website visitors a customized project marketplace with valuable, daily updated content. By utilizing the projektwerk widget, you can provide your website visitors with interesting, sector-specific freelance work on individual project basis and simultaneously provide access to the best database for excellent freelance professionals. The widget can easily be added to your website and is totally integrated into the look and feel of your corporate design. No updating or editing necessary – the information is pulled automatically and syndicated over to your site.

Have a look at the widget on two of our partner sites:

For more information please contact:

Daniela Chikato

Mail: d.chikato@projektwerk.de

Phone: 040-43 21 30-36

This post on TechCrunch discusses the fast growth of interest-based social networks and how their emergence may affect top dogs such as Facebook for example. Interest-based social services like Pinterest, Instagram, Thumb, or Foodspotting are raking up new users at the speed of light. According to the author, Jay Jamison, part of their success can be attributed to the fact that these newcomers have a markedly different focus and approach. While traditional social networks focus primarily on users personal relationships, these new kids on the block have in common that they enable the user to focus and organize around their interests first. The crucial difference is probably the users opportunity to express his or her interests in new, engaging ways and the possibility to connect – in an authentic fashion – with people they do not already know.

Freelancers, companies or other experts of the sectors IT, consulting, engineering, creative or medical are the ideal target group of your service or your product? Than you will reach your potential customers, custom-fit via the projektwerk blog. You can resort to daily increasing resources of, at the moment 68.000 registerd members.

Your possibilities to attract attention:

• Your banner in the projektwerk blog

projektwerk is running two blogs: one in German and additionally one in English. You can read about current trends, tips or partners from different branches.

• Your article in the projektwerk blog

With the presentation of your service in the projektwerk blog you will receive several thousand readers per month. Furthermore via other social media canals potential customers will be attracted.

• Combi-adverts with the projektwerk Newsletter

Positioning without much wastage: Place a combi-ad in the projektwerk newsletter with about 250 signs, a picture (.jpg or .gif) and a link. We are sending our newsletters once a month – at the one side a general freelancer-newsletter, reaching about 25.000 recipients and on the other side the branch specific newsletter.

You can find more detailed facts and information about advertising possibilities and the mediadata of the different branches in the footer of each platform. In the following one example: http://it.projektwerk.com/partner.html

Please do not hesitate to contact us in case of questions!

Facebook today announced Timeline, a total redesign of the current profile page. Timeline chronicles your Facebook history and enables you to look at everything that has ever happened in your Facebook lifespan. Here’s a Mashable post that offers some great snapshots of Facebook’s new appearance and discusses some of the novelties. What do you think?

Picture courtesy of Mashable

Some of the new features include:

• “Timeline” – a stream of information about you (the photos you’ve posted, all your status updates, the apps you’ve used, even the places you’ve visited) that scrolls all the way back to your birth.
• You don’t have to just like something – “Facebook Gestures” enables users to express various kinds of reactions or emotions.
• Facebook apps will only ask for permission once to post content on your behalf – before apps had to ask each time before sharing information about you.
• Lightweight or trivial information is going to the “Ticker” – only the more relevant things such as status updates, photos from a wedding or a vacation, or changes in relationship status will appear in your news feed.
• And lastly, you can watch TV and movies, listen to music, and read news with your friends — all within Facebook.

With the projektwerk release on August 23th, 2011 not only the social media features and the vCard download where implemented. Another new feature is the search function for your own profiles and projects. By creating the search function we specially thought of our project providers who post several projects every day and who often saved more than one hundred projects in their accounts. The desire for a feature like this is definitely comprehensible. The annoying, manual eye-searching is now finally over. Now you can easily enter a word and all of your projects or profiles will be scanned. In doing so, not only the titles where scanned but also the entered skills and the description text.

Please notice: The Search is only working in the logged area and only in your own entered projects or profiles. You can still not search in the unlogged are in “all projects” or “all profiles”. This means: If you want to use this function, you will have to be a registered member of projektwerk. Here is a link to sign up.

Google+, Facebook’s newest challenger, has been available for a while now. Some interesting new features include: “Circles” – which enables users to organize contacts into groups for sharing, “Hangouts”  - which are places used to facilitate group video chat, “Sparks” – which enables users to identify topics they might be interested in sharing with others, or ”Huddle” – which is a feature available to Android, iPhone, and SMS devices for communicating through instant messaging within circles. If you have an account and plan to use it professionally, here are some things that might be helpful for you to know.