Archive | June, 2009

Big Changes coming to LinkedIn

by on June 19, 2009 in Best Practices, LinkedIn

While you were busy building your network, LinkedIn was busy making a tiny but significant change. Your LinkedIn home page has taken on the newsfeed like quality of FaceBook and FriendFeed. This is a tiny change that has a huge effect. What is the big change? Gone are the neat sections dividing your content into groups, status updates, connections, etc. We are in the age of information overload. Welcome to the News Feed.

Why? LinkedIn is becoming an information resource, a tsunami that will overwhelm you if you do not pay attention. The center section of LinkedIn is now a running feed. As changes and updates occur in your network, they will “feed” into your center news section of LinkedIn. I haven’t figured out whether LinkedIn has changed they algorithm for how your activity is broadcast to your connections. What will remain true, is the more active you are within the LinkedIn ecosystem, the more likely it is your network will see your activity and remember you are “alive and kicking.”

If you are in 50 groups you may want to consider dropping the groups you do not participate in, or the ones that other people are “over-participating” in. People with spammy activity are going to have a rough time. If you take away one thing from reading this post, LinkedIn requires 15 minutes of your day, every day. More than ever, the asthetics of how you run your business will shine thru your LinkedIn activity. Be yourself and stay active within your network.

**Note – Navigate to settings in the top right and you can adjust your member feed. I set mine to my network, you may want yours to be set to everybody or simply your connections. If you do not want anyone to see your activity, then LinkedIn may be the wrong network for you ;-)

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Twitter Equals Cash for Dell

by on June 14, 2009 in Best Practices

In December of 2008 Dell sold 1 million dollars worth of computers using Twitter. Just a small dent in the numbers, but the first real statistic on why your business needs to be using Twitter. Flash forward to June 2009 and Wired is reporting that Dell has made 3 million dollars from Tweets and grown to over 600,000 followers. What does this mean?

Twitter is the latest greatest technology fad, micro-blogging. If your company has a product to sell, Twitter must be in your sales arsenal. You need followers and you need deals. Dell has sold 2 million dents and refurbs and the remaining million upgraded to new computers. Dell has not perfected the Twitter sales system, but we know they are trying. Most importantly, they are in the game. Is your company in the game?

This is not a popularity contest or quiz bowl. This is sales 101. You must find your voice on Twitter and get active. Go after the low hanging fruit. It starts with registering your name and finding good people to follow. Set your first goal at 100 followers, followed by 1,000 followers. If you are trying to buy or sell your way thru our current economic mess, then you need to get active on Twitter. Are you listening?

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FaceBook steps up the game

by on June 9, 2009 in Best Practices, FaceBook

As if 200 million plus users, 15 billion plus photos uploaded and 160 thousand plus videos being uploaded a day was not enough…FaceBook is bringing “handles” to you. Get your name…don’t delay or you will wind up being joesixpack2009 on FaceBook. Why do you care? Having a username will make it easy to direct traffic to your profile.

Note: Think carefully about the username you choose. Once it’s been selected, you won’t be able to change or transfer it.

As Seen on FaceBook Today:

Soon you will be able to have a username. Starting on Saturday, June 13th, at 12:01am, you’ll be able to choose a username for your Facebook account to easily direct friends, family, and coworkers to your profile.
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MySpace – Don’t Sleep

by on June 8, 2009 in Best Practices

It is too easy to scoff at MySpace and refer to it as the ghetto of social media. You are crazy to ignore MySpace, there is a vibrant active community of people engaging in social and professional networking. MySpace is a huge network with a lot of noise. You must work hard to cut through the excessive advertising and creative profile pages. The reward? An established network, with an engaged audience that does not object to advertising.

MySpace is second only to Twitter in noise and spam. Becoming a resource on MySpace may be more challenging than on other networks as a result. Because something is difficult, does that mean you shouldn’t do it? Really this is just an allocation of resources issue. If you have the time and resources, then yes, MySpace has huge potential for your social and professional networking.

Apply the same techniques of transparency and truthfulness on MySpace as you do on your other networks. It will take you longer to create a respectable profile, customization is a strength at MySpace. You can find your friends and share content, take the time to find bands and add them as friends and share their music. The core of MySpace is media and music, you must participate and represent with and for your people. http://www.myspace.com/sonicallstar

myspacelogo

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Fun with Images

by on June 2, 2009 in Best Practices

I was checking out some images and remembered Wordle. This image is based on the introduction to my eBook on Social Media. I am still working on a title, should be easy right? The good news is if you have read thru the Blog you can skip most of the book. The even better news is all of your friends who don’t read blogs will like the book. Any help on a Title?
wordllesocialnetworkingContenders?

“Social Media – Do It Better Now!”

“Social and Professional Networking 4 Your Business”

“Show Me The Money”

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FriendFeed – Where the conversation is happening

by on June 1, 2009 in Best Practices

FriendFeed is a website that starts as an aggregator of all of your online activity and enables you to publish directly to your profile. You can pick and choose what activities link up to FriendFeed and get published under your profile. I have my Tweets, Flickr photos, Blog Posts and shared Google Reader Posts flowing automatically into FriendFeed. You can manually post information as well, using full sentences and complete thoughts as you are not limited to 140 characters. I have the Bookmarklet sitting in my toolbar and can easily post any website directly to FriendFeed (and have it automatically post to Twitter as well).

Staying ahead of the curve is easy with FriendFeed. Why? Because so many early adopters gravitated to FriendFeed, there is an intelligent and engaging audience waiting for you. More importantly all comments are attached to the post creating conversations you can engage with from simply “liking” the post or adding in your 2 cents. Creating conversations is an art form in social media marketing, FriendFeed enables you to be an artist.

How do you find friends to subscribe to on FriendFeed? The suggested friends are somewhere between the ordinary and the extraordinary. As you subscribe to people the suggested people to subscribe to evolves based on who your subscribers are subscribing to. That may sound confusing, but the core point is that these people are selected based on popularity amongst the people you are subscribing to. This is more interesting than the suggested follows on Twitter which are less focused.

Last but not least you can check your email, FaceBook and Twitter to see who you know on FriendFeed and subscribe to them. I have found the most people coming over from Twitter, but slowly the contacts in my Gmail have been coming on board. As with other networks, it is a good idea to check monthly (or more frequently) for new potential people to subscribe to.  You can also check who is subscribing to you and Subscribe to them. As this number grows it is a good idea to use the List feature to enable you to effectively monitor and participate in conversations.

The last word on FriendFeed is evolving. This site is a great example of high tech software as a service. They are building in new features regularly and you can really customize your experience. FriendFeed has a corporate copycat in SocialCast, which is a great white label social network using the newsfeed format of FriendFeed.  As FriendFeed evolves you have to play with the features to figure out how to make them useful to you. Luckily, we are all learning together.

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