Have you noticed problems with HootSuite over the summer?

During August, I found that my search columns were not updating.  I have a column set up to show me all tweets that mention

“concisetraining” OR “Concise Training”

This is so that I just have one column which shows everything I have said as well as whenever I have been mentioned (with or without the @ sign).

Looking on the HootSuite forum gives the suggestion to remove the final quote from the stream – so my search becomes

“concisetraining” OR “Concise Training

Surprisingly this worked!  I then replaced the quote and it still worked.

Another client that I have worked with took one of the search options that she had out of her stream which also caused it to work.

So in summary, if you are having a problem with HootSuite search columns, try editing the search term and it should kickstart.  Let me know if this has worked for you.

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In these times of recession, training is often one of the first things that gets cut in a company.  How can a company justify the time that it takes to train each member of staff – let alone the cost.  IT training in particular seems to be a waste of time.  It is easy to use Microsoft Applications – you just need to point and click.

Most of the people I meet are self taught.  They have worked out how to make the tools do what they need it to do and repeat for each document.  This is often accompanied by swearing and general frustration as the tool doesn’t quite behave the same way each time.  But at the end of the day, the job gets done and you can move on.

Just think about a time when you could get all those jobs done more efficiently without the shouting and stress.  How about giving yourself 20% more time to do other jobs?  This is what training can give you.

From a company perspective, investing in training can be good for staff morale and staff retention as well as increased productivity.

What to Look For In Your Training Provider

When you identify the need for training, make sure you do a self analysis first.  What level do you think you are at currently and what do you want to do with your applications.  I’m quite happy to teach Excel pivot tables to anybody – but there is little point if you don’t ever analyse numbers.

Ask your prospective training provider the following questions:

1. Do they offer bespoke training.  It is important that you get trained in what you need to know – not what you already know, or what you don’t need to know.

2. How long is the training course?  It is hard to focus for a whole day unless it is a highly interactive course.  If you are ‘doing’ and learning all day, you may lose some of the effect.  Sometimes 2 x 1/2 day courses are better than 1 x full day course.

3. Are notes / exercises provided for use after the course?  It is good to be able to go back and remind yourself what happened when the course is finished.

4. What support is provided?  Can learners contact the trainer to clarify lessons learnt?

5. How is the training provided – face to face or online?  What is the procedure for each?

What other questions can you add to this?  It would be interesting to get your comments.

I don’t know if you have noticed that the Daily Telegraph Travel section have just started running a competition to ‘Win a Kindle’ during July.  It makes an interesting case study.

The competition was mentioned in the Daily Telegraph Travel section on July 2nd – win a Kindle every hour between 10am and 6 every Friday in July.  It was in the small print though, no big splash – and the direction given was to a website page

Last Friday, I thought I would give this a go.  I couldn’t remember the website page so I searched around for a bit and found a link to the  TelegraphTravel facebook page.

You could take part in one of three ways (that I could find):

1. www.telegraph.co.uk/kindlecompetition and fill in your name and email address

2. Like the Telegraph Travel facebook page and then click a link to enter your first name and email address.

3. Click the link from the TelegraphTravel twitter feed which would take you to the sign up form.

You could enter more than once.

When I ‘liked’ the TelegraphTravel facebook page at about 11am last Friday – the competition had been running for an hour, there were just over 350 ‘likes’.  There are now 1,164 likes – not a huge increase in number, but not bad for a few hours – and now they have those fans as a captive audience.

The competition was also promoted through Twitter – which took people direct to the sign in page on the website.

Both facebook and Twitter kept people informed of who had won the kindle (not me unfortunately!) and answered any questions.

This is a nice example of joined up Social Media (almost).  I would be interested on how the return on investment is measured and what was their original objective.

They are gathering email addresses – is this worth the cost of over 35 kindles?  I wonder how many of these are email addresses that they don’t already have?  I was surprised that my having entered the competition through the link on facebook didn’t appear on my wall – this would potentially have generated interest through my facebook friends, similarly through Twitter.

It will be interesting to see how the campaign changes during the next month – and what use is now made of my valuable email address.

What do you think – have you done anything similar?

LinkedIn News

is a set of news feeds that appear on your LinkedIn home page or can be displayed on your smartphone LinkedIn app.

The news displayed is selected from a large number of possible feeds, based on  and the number of people in your network that have shared the news feed.

To select which feeds to follow, click on See All Headlines (or click News from the Menu bar).  This will bring up LinkedIn today.

On the right hand side, you can choose which sources or industry sectors to follow either by selecting from the right hand side or clicking on the ? in the top right hand corner and selecting Follow/Unfollow.

The sectors or sources that you have selected to follow will be displayed on the LinkedIn today page.  This is particularly useful if using the LinkedIn app for the SmartPhone as you can see a list of all feeds that you follow.

You can also save a particular news item to review later and don’t forget to share news with your contacts so your network can benefit from what you are looking at.

Blogging is another tool in your Social Media Locker that you can use to share information and engage with your audience.  When you start to write your blog, consider the following:

1. Audience

Central to all of your social media should be knowing your audience.  Who do you want to read your blog?  Write in their language.

As an accountant, if you are trying to appeal to your potential clients, don’t put them off by using technical language.  Nothing is more likely to make me stop reading your blog than long words!

Ensure the blog post is relevant and useful to your audience – not many people will want to read in your business blog about the terrible journey you had home last Friday!

2. Professional

The blog is representing your company, make sure it is not full of spelling and grammatical errors.

Use white space to make it easier to read and where appropriate images help make a blog easier to read and understand.

3. Link to Website

If people find your blog either through your other forms of Social Media, you want to keep them looking at the information about your business.

I would generally recommend including your blog within your company website – or very closely attached.  Once you have captured interest, why not keep it?

If your website doesn’t have the facility for blogging, create a blog using wordpress or blogger, but make sure you have clear signposts to and from your website.

4. Keywords

Think about the title of your blog – and your content.  Can you tweak the title to be more friendly to search engines?Consider what your audience would type in to Google when searching for the information in your blog – and use these words as your title.

5. Call To Action

What do you want your audience to do when they have read your blog?  I don’t like blogs that sell to me, but you don’t want the audience to just go away.  Get them to do something, once they have read your blog.  This could be as simple as a comment on the content, a tweet or like, sign up to your newsletter, give you a call, download a document or read another blog.

It is a good idea to put the call to action at the bottom of the blog.

6. Regular

It is a good idea to create blog posts regularly and frequently.  I try to do a couple of posts a month – others will do a couple a week.  You need to think about how much time you have to write good quality posts as well as making sure that each post is useful to your audience.  Ideally, you will schedule the content of your blog posts several months in advance.

Blogging is one of the Social Media tools available to you.  Each business needs to decide whether it is a tool for them based on their audience and their own resources.  If you would like help with this, do give me a call.

I am often asked to present to networking groups about Social Media.  To me, Social Media is all about engaging with your contacts using the tool or tools that are most appropriate for your business and your audience.

An effective tool could be, if used correctly, a newsletter.

A newsletter allows you to talk directly to those customers who already like or use you.  They may have already worked with you, or they may have chosen to hear what you have got to say.  What better audience could you ask for?  I get either positive feedback or sales from each newsletter I send.

Newsletters (like all engagement) can backfire if you don’t get it right – consider the following points:

1. Interest

Think about who you are talking to – what do they want to hear?  I try to include both news about Concise Training as well as tips & tricks that my audience might find useful.  It is important to make sure that your newsletter is easy to read and interesting.

2. Contacts

To whom are you sending your email newsletter?  Ask permission to add somebody to your list to avoid being thought of as a spammer.  Encourage people to join up to your newsletter through your website as well as using other forms of Social Media.  I have grown my contact database slowly and carefully over the past year or so.  I get few unsubscribes and a good percentage of clicks and opens.

3. Regular

Decide how often you are going to send the newsletter and stick to it as much as possible.  I send my email newsletters out monthly – quarterly may work better for your business.  It is a decision based on your resources, your availability of interesting articles and your audience.  Once you have decided on a timescale – stick to it!  Yes, it can be a pain having to write it – but make the effort – the results make it worthwhile!  In an ideal world, you would map out what was going to be in each newsletter 6 months in advance!

Think about the time of the week you send your newsletter out. Is it appropriate to send it out in the evening – or would your audience be more attentive during the week?  What day is more likely to work for your audience?  You may want to send the same newsletter out to different samples of people at different times to test the audience.

4. Professional

Remember your newsletter reflects your brand and values of your company.  A newsletter full of spelling or grammatical errors can be worse than no newsletter at all.  Take the time to check that the words are correct and the links work.  If you can, include your brand, colour and logo.  As a starting point, I would recommend creating your own newsletters using MailChimp which is a great application, free to send to up to 2,000 contacts.  Due to time constraints, I now outsource my newsletter to David Burn of Marketing Research Projects.

5. Measure / FollowUp

Once you have sent the newsletter out, don’t forget to check who clicked on what link and how many times the newsletter was opened by the same person.  This might be a clue that you ought to follow up this person with a call?  Compare the click through or open rates over time – identify any newsletters that were / were not successful as try to identify why.

How successful have you found your email newsletter? – or why have you decided that this form of marketing isn’t for you?  Let me know.

Have you ever looked at the CountIF function in Excel?  I think it is one of the most useful functions available for quickly analysing data – and it has become even more useful in the 2007 and 2010 versions of Excel.

In its simpliest form, the COUNTIF function will allow you to count the number of rows which meet a certain criteria.  In the following example, I want to count the number of sales greater than £1000.

To do this, I put the following formula into a blank cell, =COUNTIF(G2:G13,”>1000″).  This will return the answer of 3.  I have had several clients who have used this function to analyse the results of survey data.

In Excel 2007, the COUNTIF function has been made even better!  COUNTIFS allows you to count the number of rows based on two or more criteria.

So, in this example, we could count the number of rows where the Total Income is more than £1000 and the product sold was a Monitor.  The formula would be = COUNTIFS(G2:G13, “>1000″,C2:C13, “Monitor”).  This will return the answer of 2.

What do you think, when would you use the COUNTIF or COUNTIFS functions?

I spent last week with a lovely company doing some Intermediate Excel training for their staff.  They were particularly interested in the different ways you could analyse a set of data – Excel 2007 has some different options so I thought a general summary might be useful.

1. Graphs

Graphs work really well when you need to present data.  Don’t forget you can select data that is not next to each other by selecting one set, then holding the CTRL key on the keyboard and selecting the second set, etc.  Do make sure that you select the same number of items though or it might go horribly wrong!

2. Tables

Excel 2007 has a facility to format a list of data as a table.  This automatically adds filters to the column headings and you can add a total row to the bottom by clicking the Total Row option in the Design Tab (appears when you click on the Table).  What is particularly good is if you have a table from Columns A to C, but then add a function in column D which uses cells in A to C, Column D is automatically included in the table and the function is copied to all relevant rows.

3. Conditional IF Statement

To keep track of my bank account, I use an Excel spreadsheet.  Everytime I put something in or out of the account I write it on the Excel spreadsheet and keep a running total so I know how much is in the account at any one time.  When I check the bank, I add a y next to any item that has registered in the bank account (OK, so I’m a bit annal!).  I can then SUM all the totals that have a ‘Y’ next to them so I can quickly check whether my total matches the total from the bank.  I do this using a SUMIF.  (COUNTIF is also useful).

4. Conditional Formatting

If you have a set of numbers, it is a good idea to be able to see quickly whether certain numbers are better than or worse than expected.  Conditional formatting has always been available in Excel 2003 – you can set numbers to be red if they are below a set number or blue if they are above, for example.  In Excel 2007, you can use more complicated rules and you can use icons (flags, arrows, etc) to visually denote the results.

5. Filters

Set filters on a set of data to be able to only show the data that corresponds to set criteria.  For example, a set of sales figures can be filtered to show sales by salesperson or area or department.  Multiple criteria can be set, so show Sales by TOM in the NORTH or SOUTH.

6. Advanced Filters

You can use the same idea as above but you can set more complicated filters.  Using advanced filters, you can show Sales by TOM in the NORTH and SAM in the SOUTH for example.

7. Pivot Tables

This is the traditional way people think of analysing data in Excel, but many find it difficult to understand.  Although it is easier in Excel 2007 and 2010, it still forms part of my advanced course as I think there are easier ways of analysing data as described above.

Do let me know if you use any of these methods – or if there are other methods you prefer.  Of course, do let me know if you need further information on the mechanics of the analysing!

Have you noticed when you go to edit your profile on LinkedIn, there is a section just above your summary entitled ‘Personalize your profile’? This gives you the ability to add an additional five new profile sections to your profile:

What are the new sections?

1. Publications – Add any work that you have written that has been published. This really gives your ‘expert’ status some weight.

2. Languages – Indicate your expertise in lanaguage. If you speak Mandarin, German and French like a native, make sure they are listed.

3. Skills – This section allows you to list how many years experience you have in various skills. Choose from a long list of skills from accounting to zoning and everything in between, choose a proficiency from beginner to expert and enter the number of years of experience.

4. Certificates – A list of qualifications you have achieved.  A good way of listing sought after qualifications that are achieved outside University or School.

5. Patents – Any pending or granted patents that you have.

How does this apply to me?

At first glance, it looks like these changes are aimed at people looking for jobs but it is a great way of displaying more detail about you and if you have patents, publication, why not shout about them  on your profile.  It also gives you more opportunity to get keywords into your profile.

For example, I have added ‘ECDL Advanced’ certifications to my profile – not keywords that I had anywhere else in the profile as it wasn’t relevant to other sections.  Now, if you search for ‘ECDL Advanced’ I am included in search results.

I can see recruitment companies in particular using this, though it would be better if you could search specifically by these sections. It may also be relevant for people looking for a very specific skill set.  What do you think?

Many jobs are found using LinkedIn as a job searching, advertising and networking tool.  I am surprised how many recruitment consultants aren’t using this powerful tool to its potential.  Recently, I was delighted to be asked to teach the staff of a Hampshire based recruitment consultancy how to exploit LinkedIn.

The recruitment consultants had two reasons for using LinkedIn – to advertise themselves and their company as experts in their field and to find potential candidates to fulfill vacancies.

We created an individual profile for each member of the team and also created a company profile that they were all linked to.  It was interesting for me, to get a slightly different perspective on how the profile should look, from people who were experts in looking at CVs.

Update: 20th October I’ve just noticed this article from Computer Weekly stating that 25% of FTSE 100 Companies hire through LinkedIn.

Fortunately they agreed with my ideas regarding how the headline and summary should look – though they suggested that it was  a good idea to mention any past ‘household name’ companies that you had worked with/for in the summary rather than just as part of the ‘experience’ section.

There was a general consensus among the group that they should keep their contacts private from their network.  Generally you can see all the contacts of anybody that you are directly connected to.  My group of recruitment consultants were very concerned that this would comprise the privacy of their contacts, so we changed this setting (by clicking settings > connection browse).

We talked about the potential to upgrade their account to the premium level of LinkedIn.  This currently costs from $50 / month.  This gives access to more profile results and allows you to see full profiles even if you do not have a connection to the person.  Interestingly they felt that at least initially they would spend the time to build up their own networks and groups to contact people.

It was felt that the costs to advertise jobs on LinkedIn was very reasonable compared to other internet sites and this was an area that they intended to exploit.

It was great to see that before I had left the client, the consultants were already building their network and finding suitable candidates. If you are a recruitment company, will you be using LinkedIn?