by Daria Steigman on August 18, 2010
In keeping with the time constraints of busy, always on-the-go workers, MarketingProfs has created a new “Take 10” series: short, 10-minute presentations with actionable takeaways. I was smart enough to take 10 minutes out the other day to get a LinkedIn 101 refresher course from Jason Alba.
Alba offered four “do it once” tips for setting up your profile and six “do regularly” tips for keeping your brand front and center on LinkedIn. The highlights of his “do regularly” advice:
- Pose a Question to your network at least once a month.
- Answer Questions whenever you have a few minutes of downtime.
- Join LinkedIn Groups Discussions, which let you reach an audience beyond your first degree network (or start a Groups discussion of your own).
- Use Advanced Search to find prospects.
- Use Company Search to gain competitive intelligence on your prospects and your competition.
- Update Your Status at least weekly. (I’d actually recommend doing this more often as long you have something relevant to share—be it a useful link, a blog post, information about that killer conference you’re headed to, and so forth.)
I’d add one final “do regularly” tip: Read status updates from your network. You can do that easily by pulling in the RSS feed of all your contacts’ status updates. This is a great tool for keeping up with who has changed jobs, is sharing good news, or otherwise has something worth commenting on. I tend to skim the updates (there will be a lot), looking less at who’s connecting with whom and more at who’s sharing news. See something interesting? Click through, leave a quick comment, and become instantly top of mind.
Photo by Mario Sundar (Flickr).
Tagged as:
Brand,
Jason Alba,
LinkedIn,
MarketingProfs,
Social Media
by Daria Steigman on August 17, 2010
There’s a long, fascinating profile of Nike CEO Mark Parker in Fast Company. The article talks about Parker’s bio, corporate culture, and where’s he’s taking the company and how. One line about his management style really stood out:
[Bill] Bowerman’s coaching technique–he created personalized training programs for each athlete, unusual back then–informs Parker’s management style to this day. “I spend a good deal of time coaching executives now,” he says. “Each person needs something different to succeed. It’s a Bowerman approach.”
So true, and yet so often overlooked.
Parker also talks about the importance of focusing on people rather than putting people into organizational chart boxes. You can read the entire article here.
Photo by jaqian (Flickr).
Tagged as:
Bill Bowerman,
Fast Company,
Innovation,
Mark Parker,
Nike
by Daria Steigman on August 11, 2010
There was a sound bite on the evening news recently about how a lot of fishermen on the Gulf Coast will be sorry to see BP pull out as they have grown used to the big pay days. (Now, whether this is true is for a different post–and one I’m not going to touch.) It made me think about how I, as a small business owner, handle shifting cash flows.
I have been doing this stuff a long time, so I know that consulting is a feast or famine business. Sometimes I get big pay days; other months might be quite lean. I’m pretty conservative, so I tend to assume the worst and spend very frugally. A good friend calls this “stashing the cash.”
Do you stash the cash?
Photo by Daniel Borman (Flickr).
Tagged as:
Business,
Entrepreneurship
by Daria Steigman on August 10, 2010
Mark Hurd is a very stupid man. With all the money he was earning from Hewlett-Packard, don’t you think he could have paid cash (his cash) for dinner if he didn’t want a paper trail?
You don’t have to pay me $12 million or $10 million or even $1 million. It doesn’t matter the salary, commission, or project fee. I simply pledge today not to cheat on my expense account.
It’s not a sacrifice.
It’s business ethics. And, of course, reputation.
Photo by Justin Baeder (Flickr).
Tagged as:
Business,
Ethics,
HP,
Mark Hurd
So I go out of town for a few days and miss the big sports story. No, not that story. This one.