How much do you drive your social media contacts to act? To comment? To discuss, retweet, and share?
Klout is a web app that measures your online “clout”—that is, how influential you are on your social media contacts. You sign up for Klout, connect to all your social networks, and Klout gives you a number between 1 and 100 ranking your online social clout. A 1 would be a user who signed up for a service, but never used it. A 100 might apply to a well-known personality like Kim Kardashian. Your Klout score is always fluctuating based on your online activity (i.e., engaging, commenting, tweeting, and responding), which Klout refers to as “signals.” The score that Klout generates from these signals indicates how influential you are to your followers and friends.
In the first video, I offer some reasons why you might be interested in knowing your Klout score, and show you how to get your social media accounts connected to Klout to start measuring your score.
For this edition of featured five free videos, I’ve chosen five sample movies from lynda.com courses in our Business segment, all geared toward the needs of the administrative professional. This weekend a group of those amazing folk who keep business running and thriving is gathering in Texas for their Education Forum and Annual Meeting. The theme of the conference is focused more than ever on education and training, and our Business segment has some excellent follow-up accompaniment to those sessions. (Of course, solid training in business-related topics doesn’t just pertain to administrative pros!)
One of our most popular authors for Business tools training, Gini Courter, will be teaching several sessions at EFAM, and I thought it was a good time to round up some of the excellent training Gini and her fellow lynda.com Business authors have created.
In this video, Gini Courter reviews the difference and view options for Outlook’s Tasks and To-Do lists. If you’re already using Outlook for email, these are definitely features that allow you to turn email into activity. The course focuses on how to use Outlook 2010 to handle both business and personal schedules, from making appointments, to creating and completing tasks, to color-coding calendars and tasks for at-a-glance review.
In this video, our popular Social Media Maven Anne-Marie Concepción explains how you can use the @mention feature on Twitter to hear what people are saying or asking about your company. Social media has become a critical activity for many businesses, and Anne-Marie’s course covers not only the fundamentals of social media marketing, but also the basics of creating a top-level online presence.
For any business document, the recipients gets their first impression from the way you choose to format your words, particularly which font you choose. In this movie, Gini Courter goes over font formatting in Word documents so you can choose the font that best serves your communication. The course this movie comes from delves into the functionality at the heart of Word: creating, editing, and formatting documents.
Meetings that feel like a waste of time or a confusing deluge of information are a common occurence. In this movie, Dave Crenshaw discusses the three principles that inform an effective meeting. Dave’s course is focused on establishing a simple, usable framework to get the most from meetings, and provides insight into how to effectively schedule, conduct, and follow up on meetings.
We’ve all had to face forms in our business days that are tedious and complicated to read, let alone fill out correctly. Microsoft InfoPath allows you to develop a clear, beautiful, effective form, so that the information can be gathered and analyzed easily. (And for EFAM attendees, you’ll get an in-depth view from the presenter herself!)
Whether you’re an administrative pro on your way to Texas for EFAM, someone holding down the fort (and holding the fort together) day-to-day, or just a person who wants to thrive in the business environment, the Business segment in our library is dedicated to helping you develop critical skills. Let us know if there are other topics you’d like to see addressed in our library in the future.
For a while now, lynda.com has published ‘New Releases’ announcements, a podcast, and a monthly newsletter. In the last few months, we’ve been reaching out via social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as launching this blog to help broaden our communication with both members and non-members about new products and new features.
How do you get your lynda.com news and new releases fix? We’re guessing that if you’re reading this post, you get at least some of it via this blog, but we’re also wondering just how many other ways you stay up to date on us. Please take a few seconds and check those services or feeds that you use—click on each one that is applicable to you. And as always, please feel free to leave comments!
We've added a new feature: Each course now has the option to easily email, print, and share about it on multiple social networks or blog services with minimal clicks. Try it!
Even if you’ve never clicked on it, by now you may have noticed a Share button like the one above on many of your favorite sites. Its purpose is to expedite the sharing of news stories, blog posts, and other page content to one or more social networks, other blogs, or simply sending to your printer or bookmarks list.
Each of the courses in the lynda.com Online Training Library® now has its own AddThis Share button, located just under the course release date. If you want to share information about and a link back to the course, click on the Share button, then choose the method of sharing you prefer.
Sharing on Facebook, for example, gives the option to post the link to your profile or sending the information in a private message to one or more of your Facebook friends. Sharing on Twitter automatically creates a shortened bit.ly URL and transfers it to Twitter, ready for you to tweet.
Enjoy! And if you like this or any of our blog posts, the Share button is down here waiting for you at the bottom left of every post.
Published by Megan O. Read | Friday, August 14th, 2009
Top group dinner shot, left to right: Some of the lynda.com production team, Andy Ta, Roon Tamuli, Nick Brazzi, Samara Iodice, Max Smith, and Andrew Geibel. Then it's Ian Robinson (author), Megan Read (me), Nigel French (author), and Nigel's friend. Center unicycle shots: the first and second photos are the multitalented author Ian Robinson, third photo is our own Nick Brazzi. Bottom group shot, left to right: Max, Nick, Deke McClelland (author), me, Robbie Carman (author).
Over the last two weeks, we’ve had authors from all over the place in our recording booths. Ian Robinson from Virginia was in-house recording some eye-catching new Motion 4 training, Nigel French was here all the way from the UK recording an interesting new InDesign typography course, and Michael Ninness was here from Seattle recording the must-see InDesign Power Shortcuts.
This week is another busy one at lynda.com! We’ve got Robbie Carman also from Virginia recording some brand spankin’ new Color 1.5 training, Anne-Marie Concepción in from Illinois recording a cool new course about marketing your business with Twitter and Facebook, and of course, Deke McClelland from Colorado recording handfuls of must-see Photoshop training.
Our authors are all hard-working professionals, but occasionally, they get to let their hair down at a nice dinner with their lynda-peeps, or let off some steam with a fun Friday lunch playing on unicycles in the parking lot. Yes, there are actually quite a few unicyclers here at lynda.com!
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