There’s been a fair bit of coverage in the city pages this week, around apparent misuse of Bloomberg customer data by the journalists in its news division.

The allegation, made in the FT and elsewhere, is that Bloomberg journalists had access to data on Bloomberg clients, which include pretty well every banking institution in the world.  Today, the plot has thickened, with news that secure instant messages – for example sent from trader to trader – have been posted online (though they seem to have been hurriedly taken down again). Read More »

It is not often that you come across a set of self help type career advice that makes a huge amount of sense and is very much worth sharing.

This Slideshare deck from billionaire LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman is one such set of advice. It’s smart. Particularly if you are about to graduate or even if that day is a few years behind you. Read More »

On Sunday 5^th May LinkedIn celebrates its 10^th anniversary. Connecting more than 200 million members worldwide, LinkedIn has become the most powerful professional online network – allowing users to manage their professional identity, build upon and interact with their connections and access knowledge and opportunities.

LinkedIn can therefore be viewed as a manifestation of the technology based network society in which we live, where location knows no bounds and individuals are given a platform to influence their role in society. This concept, theorised by the sociologist Manuel Castell, has given rise to the online self – our digital persona. Read More »

By now, we don’t need to explain the value of social media. Social networks have attracted billions of users who log in to participate in discussions, share life experiences, and engage with the content their friends and acquaintances offer up.

In turn, they’ve attracted marketing spend with promises of audience targeting well beyond that found offline. There’s no question that social networks are worth our attention.

The real question is: where will that attention focus next in a rapidly changing landscape? Read More »

Ipsos Mori has released its quarterly ‘tech tracker’ report for the first quarter of 2013, and found that now 50% of British adults access social networks, with nearly half of all adults using Facebook in the last 3 months.

Tellingly, more than half of adults access social networks via a smartphone, showing how important it is for networks to perfect their mobile offering and revenue streams.

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As we reported in January LinkedIn revealed it had hit a significant milestone as it passed the 200 million-member mark.

Of those 200 million more than 11 million members are in the UK, a similar number are in Brazil, and 74 million are in the US. It is far smaller than Facebook and Twitter, but quietly the professional social network is attracting very positive numbers. Not only are its membership numbers shooting up, but so is its value.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal  LinkedIn is now valued at more than $18bn.  Read More »

2012 was a big year for social media so as we move full steam ahead into 2013, and all the predictions it has brought, now is the perfect time to look back at the past year of social and see exactly what kind of year the past 12 months proved to be for the main players.  This infographic from Pardot takes a look at Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook (no Instagram) and gives them each an end of year school report card in terms of growth, users and ROI. Read More »

Back in September LinkedIn hit the 10 million UK member mark.  Since then it has added another one million in the UK and today reached 200 million members overall worldwide. The 11 million UK members make it LinkedIn’s joint third biggest market alongside Brazil. It’s the US though that still leads the way by a country mile with 74 million Americans having LinkedIn accounts. In second place is India with 18 million and in fifth place, behind the UK and Brazil, is Canada on seven million.

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I Tweeted recently that I’d received an invitation from someone working in social media to connect on LinkedIn who used the word “visionary” as a key word to describe themselves. I’m sorry, but you need to be a yogi, solve hunger or invent time travel to be a visionary. That or be a member of ‘Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light (left) and have an awesome moustache. Although a quick search on LinkedIn proves visionary remains a rather popular appellation.

This brings me neatly to a report on Ad Age on the growth of the social media gurus, which is a sub industry in its own right. The report says there are 181,000 social media ‘Gurus,’ ‘Ninjas,’ ‘Masters,’ and ‘Mavens’ on Twitter. Add to that a few visionaries.  Read More »

As Google fights ever harder to crack social media, it seems it might be playing a little bit dirty. The Wall Street Journal reports it is forcing people who use Google services, from  YouTube to Zagat, to sign up for Google+.

For example, those wishing to post reviews on Google owned services are required to sign in to Google+. Additionally, Google+ profiles are now appearing more and more in search. It all all allows Google to blend more data about a user together, remember you have to use your real name on Google+, giving them a more powerful sell to advertisers.

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