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Hear expert business advice from Tom Smith, Research Manager, EMEA, at Universal McCann, as he reveals how one should approach the development a strategy that will encourage usage within Social Networks:
“There are so many ways you can work with social networks but increasingly it’s not just about advertising it’s about having a presence in the place is where consumers interact and doing that in a way that feels credible and relevant.
So whether you can create a page of inner social network and be there but actually giving people a reason to be involved sort of as creating content that you share on your page and get users to interact with or you create applications that users can load on to their social network pages creates a genuine usage for them and makes their page more interesting or makes their life easier online.
There are some good examples like Intel created a page on MySpace that was a collaborative music project. So people could who were pitching for a place in a band could create a super group out of the best entrants. So it’s kind of rather than just being an advert on a social network it’s actually kind of acting how you want to be seen and kind of creating stuff and getting people involved. So acting how you want to be perceived rather than just talking about it.
I think business should really jump on this idea and involve their users and open themselves up to getting more people involved and have done very well.
We looked at Facebook, and they have actively got their users to collaborate with them to translate the website into hundreds of local languages around the world, you know that was done by charge by the users.
Another good example is a video rental company in the US called Netflix which were trying to improve their recommendation system that recommends new films that you should borrow and they opened it up to the general public and developers and put a million dollar prize on it and said come and create a better recommendation system for us.
So it was about collaborating with the wider community and being open with them. They shared all their data and they are going to get a better system out of it by being open and being active and being involved with the wider world.”

See more business news television shows from Tom Smith, as he gives his top expert business advice at http://www.yourbusinesschannel.com

Find out more about the very latest show releases, as well as other yourBusinessChannel news by visiting our blog at http://www.yourbusinesschannel.com/blog.aspx

Duration : 0:2:47

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This is the VOA Special English Health Report.

Loneliness has been linked to depression and other health problems. Now, a study says it can also spread. A friend of a lonely person was fifty-two percent more likely to develop feelings of loneliness. And a friend of that friend was twenty-five percent more likely to do the same.

Earlier findings showed that happiness, obesity and the ability to stop smoking can also spread like infections within social groups.

The findings all come from a major health study in the American town of Framingham, Massachusetts.

The study began in nineteen forty-eight to investigate the causes of heart disease.

Since then, more tests have been added, including measures of loneliness and depression.

The new findings involved more than five thousand people in the second generation of the Framingham Heart Study. The researchers examined friendship histories and reports of loneliness. The results established a pattern that spread as people reported fewer close friends.

For example, loneliness can affect relationships between next-door neighbors. The loneliness spreads as neighbors who were close friends now spend less time together. The study also found that loneliness spreads more easily among women than men.

Researchers from the University of Chicago, Harvard and the University of California, San Diego, did the study. The findings appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The average person is said to experience feelings of loneliness about forty-eight days a year.

The study found that having a lonely friend can add about seventeen days. But every additional friend can decrease loneliness by about five percent, or two and a half days.

Lonely people become less and less trusting of others. This makes it more and more difficult for them to make friends — and more likely that society will reject them.

John Cacioppo at the University of Chicago led the study. He says it is important to recognize and deal with loneliness. He says people who have been pushed to the edges of society should receive help to repair their Social Networks.

The aim should be to aggressively create what he calls a “protective barrier” against loneliness.

This barrier, he says, can keep the whole network from coming apart.

And that’s the VOA Special English Health Report. You can find transcripts and MP3s of all of our reports at voaspecialenglish.com. You can also post your comments and read what others are saying. And you can find us on YouTube and Twitter at VOA Learning English.

(Adapted from a radio program broadcast 06Jan2010)

Duration : 0:4:3

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Peter Schiff is one of the most visible figures in the financial media today. His predictions have been extraordinarily accurate and this has gained him much attention from the media and his peers. He has been quoted in many of the nation’s leading newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Investor’s Business Daily, The Financial Times, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, The Miami Herald, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Arizona Republic, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Christian Science Monitor, and appears regularly on CNBC, CNN, Fox News, Fox Business Network, and Bloomberg. In this interview Peter discusses gold, the Indian Central Bank purchase, possible downside in gold, how China will build its gold reserves, the US Dollar, unemployment, tent cities, the economy, future jobs, real estate, government attempt to prevent housing from correcting, government becoming a landlord, the FHA, social security and more.

Duration : 0:9:54

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The report ITV’s Granada News did on the current ‘ban’ on Parkour in Moreton – Please leave your thoughts in the comment area.

Duration : 0:3:4

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A short sketch put together for the Irish Blog Awards 2010.

You can read more about it here on my blog:
http://blog.oss237.com/2010/03/29/irish-blog-awards-2010-net-news-nightly-video/

Duration : 0:1:14

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From: http://hvg.heinemann.co.uk/login.aspx. News reports on the social effects of China’s one child one family policy: scavengers working the rubbish dumps occasionally find the bodies of baby girls, some still alive; a woman scavenger has found five baby girls, she has brought them all home to her one room shack and raised them as her own; in China, couples are only allowed to have one child, having a girl is a disappointment, it is reported that a million female foetuses are aborted and over ten thousand female babies are abandoned every year; the women tells of a baby who died before they got her home, another scavenger had taken the babies clothes and left her there to die; it is thought that one seventh of baby girls go missing, an expert explains that some of these girls are still alive just not registered, or have been abandoned, but many are aborted when the parents discover they are carrying a female baby; there are now twenty million more boys than girls in China, this difference is rising a million and a half every year, this could destabilise China in the future; a pregnant woman is under pressure to produce a boy, family and community demand it, pregnant women pray at a temple for their child to be born a boy; in Chinese tradition girls are despised and the one-child policy heightens the pressure to abandon newly born baby girls.

Duration : 0:2:33

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