Karol Severin
Facebook's published values for its News Feed claim that the feed should allow users:
- To stay in touch and connected with their
friends and family
- To stay informed
- To be entertained
If your
experience has been anything like mine, you might have wondered whether the social media giant was exhibiting those values, and if so it appears we have not been alone. Change, we are told, is in the works.
Putting its money where its mouth is, Facebook announced forthcoming changes to its News Feed
algorithm yesterday. It will now give higher priority to posts from friends and family compared to Pages like news outlets.
Facebook is trying to convey that consumers are
in fact above commercial content publishers on Facebook’s priority list despite the latter providing revenue for the company. As cynically as some may react to this, it makes sense. Facebook has nothing without its users sticking around. And the News Feed is one of the most powerful facilitators for users to stay engaged on the platform.
Noah Shachtman
This article about meditation and mindfulness might seem a less than perfect fit for Social Business Bites, but it's actually quite pertinent, as it looks at how ancient practices of (Buddhist) meditation are being employed in the offices of Google, Twitter, Facebook and other companies that provide all that super-distracting content for us each day on social media.
It's a long article and I found it quite fascinating (and I admire the confidence of the author's {or editor's} "No Fad" in the headline). My question would be, how many readers of this newsletter of bite-size items will read this long article right through. I know, I'll never know, but I'd love to. :) For those of
you who do, I trust you will find it at least as fascinating as I did, if for nothing more than the ironies and conundrums it illuminates.
Across the Valley, quiet contemplation is seen as the new caffeine, the fuel that allegedly unlocks
productivity and creative bursts. Classes in meditation and mindfulness—paying close, nonjudgmental attention—have become staples at many of the region’s most prominent companies.
There’s a Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute now teaching the Google meditation method to whoever wants it. The cofounders of Twitter and Facebook have made contemplative practices key features of their new enterprises, holding regular in-office meditation sessions and arranging for
work routines that maximize mindfulness.
No, the heading is not ungrammatical, given the content. LinkedIn Skills was a feature of LinkedIn until a few years ago. It appears it is now back, although in a kind of stealth mode at present. The article explains how to access it.
This will again be a valuable tool for recruiters and job seekers. In the past I made use of it to help clients and workshop participants improve the search engine optimization (SEO) of their LinkedIn professional profiles.
For those of you who don’t remember LinkedIn Skills, it was probably the largest skills synonym database for business intelligence, synonym research and skill explanations on the web – a one-page gem that gave you the definition of any skill you were researching, 20 similar or related
skills to that skill (handy for developing Boolean search strings), a snapshot of 5 key LinkedIn groups which had members with that skill, top global locations for that skill, and top employers of that skill. It was pretty awesome! But in October 2013 LinkedIn scraped it without warning, much to the horror and disgust of recruiters everywhere.
Fast forward 3 years to 2016 and it would appear that LinkedIn Skills is back and (in some regards) better than ever!
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