From the category archives:

Professional Development

7 Tips for Optimizing Your LinkedIn Brand

by Daria Steigman on August 18, 2010

Optimizing Your LinkedIn Brand | Independent Thinking | Steigman Communications, LLCIn 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).

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7 Deadly Sins of Bad Speakers

by Daria Steigman on March 24, 2010

[Note: This post originally appeared on IABC's Communications World blog.]

It can hard to hold a room these days. Between the Twitterstream and the BackChannel, and our relentless need to surf as we learn, keeping your audience alert and engaged requires skill, smarts, and a great presentation.

While not every speaker can be a rock star, there’s no excuse for not doing your homework. Yet, time and time again, speakers screw up the basics.

Here’s my list of the seven deadly sins of a bad speaker:

  • He mumbles, fumbles, and stumbles out of the gate.
  • He reads his PowerPoint, which is all text anyway.
  • He makes sweeping pronouncements, but offers no data to back them up.
  • He’s giving the same speech, with the same examples, at the third conference in a row.
  • He doesn’t bother to change the date on his handouts.
  • He forgets (or does he really?) to leave time for questions.
  • He name drops, and name drops some more.

Have I left anything out? What speaker sins have you seen?

Photo by Mauren Veras (Flickr).

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5 Must-Know Things About SEO

by Daria Steigman on March 12, 2010

Is your Web site optimized, or do you mostly just have random people dropping by?

I was on another very useful MarketingProfs Webinar yesterday, this time on the topic of SEO essentials. Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo coupled a great primer on the topic with some terrific tips and free resources for monitoring and analyzing Web sites.

Here are her 5 SEO essentials:

  1. Make sure your Web site is indexable.
  2. Keywords are the foundation of SEO, so it is important to identify the right keywords for your target audience. (Google AdWords Keyword Tool is a search tool that lets you identify the volume of searches associated with a particular word or phrase.)
  3. It’s not just about identifying keywords, but also where you place them. They should appear in a number of places on the page (i.e, filename, title tag, meta tag, meta description, link text, and so forth). The best sites aim for 2-4 percent keyword density.
  4. Inbound links help search engines rank your site, and the best inbound links are one-way. (Yahoo’s Site Explorer can help you determine your site’s link popularity.)
  5. Your social footprint is becoming more and more important. (For example, Google Caffeine is expected to incorporate more social media links; Google’s real time search already is.)

Finally, Miller stressed that it is not enough to incorporate SEO–you have to measure it. She advises regularly (i.e., monthly or quarterly) measuring your rankings in search engines, your competitors’ rankings, and your site traffic from organic search.

Photo by mecookie (Flickr).

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6 Sources of Killer Competitive Business Intelligence

by Daria Steigman on February 16, 2010

What should we do with all the data? It’s a question I have been asking a lot; good solutions—not so many. So imagine my excitement when someone finally answered the question of how we can use the huge (and growing) volume of competitive business intelligence.

In a recent MarketingProfs webinar, Sean Campbell of Cascade Insights offered some terrific tools and great advice for putting the data to work for you in the business-to-business world. Here are six places to get started:

  1. LinkedIn isn’t just about people profiles, it’s also about company data. Campbell noted that company profiles are a great way to glean insights on the movement of people in and out of companies, including job openings, new hires, and recent promotions.
  2. Read job listings to see what qualifications a company’s seeking and/or hints into new initiatives. Online CVs also provide a glimpse into what people’s job responsibilities entail—and what their company is focused on.
  3. Silobreaker is a search engine that includes a clickable map of a company’s network–a great tool for visual searchers. It also pulls up added value data. (Search for Pepsi for example, and you’ll also get links to CEO Indra Nooyi and a quote from her.)
  4. People post all kinds of data on SlideShare, including presentations from invitation-only meetings that often contain corporate roadmaps. Campbell noted that SlideShare is also a good place to identify subject matter experts.
  5. Use Worldle for reverse mining. Plug in an RSS feed or a Web site and the word cloud will give you a quick look at what a company or a community is talking about.
  6. Seeking Alpha posts transcripts from earnings calls, including the Q&A with analysts and reporters that follows the on-message presentation.

Clearly, no one source will be your holy grail. But hopefully a strategy that merges data from multiple sources will help you to connect the pieces.

What are your favorite tools and sites for data collection?

Photo by Richard Summers (Flickr).

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What Marketers Are Saying About Social Media

by Daria Steigman on January 22, 2010

Want to know how communicators are using social media? You could pose a question on Twitter or you could do a deep dive. MarketingProfs did the latter, surveying 4,763 marketers and others managing communications for their organizations. That included 3,285 who specifically said they are responsible for social media.

I don’t have a copy of The State of Social Media Marketing, but I did get a peak at some of the findings. There is some great data here:

  • 48.2 percent said their organizations have a social media presence. They are typically companies that have “very little to hide.” Companies in industries with strict regulations and major repercussions for leaking information (think drug makers, bankers, insurers) are less visible.
  • 60.8 percent who do social media said that it is not part of their job description.
  • Social media isn’t cheap: Most of those doing social media are mid- or senior-level people.
  • 48.8 percent said their company has no official social media policy; 12 percent said they have a restrictive one.
  • There is a correlation between culture and the success of a company’s marketing efforts. Employees who blog (independently) can spark new ideas and increase prestige.
  • All the measurement tools are helpful, but incomplete. For example, 52.8 percent of those surveyed said that paid analytics tools are “helpful but incomplete” (versus 66.1 percent of those using Google and other free tools). And approximately one-third of respondents (33.6 percent) said that the paid tools “enable perfect tracking” (versus 28.1 percent for those using free tools).

There is also a lot of data about the disconnects between the tactics people use a lot (i.e., what’s popular) and the tactics that are most effective. For example, the most used tactics on Twitter are driving traffic (72.1 percent) and driving sales (54.2 percent)—how’s that worked out for you lately? In contract, the most effective Twitter tactics cited involved two-way communications strategies and monitoring for PR problems in real time.

Photo by webtreats (Flickr).

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