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 July 26, 2010
Jeffrey Rosen has a terrific, thought-provoking article in last week’s New York Times Magazine about the end of privacy in our new digital era. In it, he writes:
We are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent—and public—digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts…
The truth is that, for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances—no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.
Rosen looks at the implications of this digital identify and explores potential legal and technological solutions to help us manage and protect our reputations. The article is long–but it is well worth taking the time to read.
Hat tip to Tim Taylor for alerting me to this one.
Photo by graphia (Flickr).
Tagged as:
Brand,
Privacy,
Social Media,
Transparency,
Web 2.0
by Daria Steigman on July 21, 2010
(l-r) Mike Kohn, Brian Reilly, and Erin Orr offer tips on integrating social media at work.
Yesterday’s Social Media Breakfast was all about how to integrate social media across your organization. Mike Kohn and Brian Reilly of SmithGroup and Erin Orr of Fox Architects offered case studies from the architectural and engineering sector.
Six lessons learned:
- You have to start somewhere. Orr talked about “diving in and asking for forgiveness later.”
- Guidelines matter. All three speakers emphasized the importance of having a social media policy. Reilly said SmithGroup’s policy was modeled after IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines. The link on the company’s intranet says “Tweet Responsibly.” How simple is that?
- Strategy matters. All three speakers stressed the importance of having a strategy. (See Integration.)
- Integration is key. Orr said she brought together a cross-departmental team to develop the strategy. She asked each person to identify their greatest challenge (e.g., HR cited recruiting ) and used those to set the goals. Kohn said he grabbed people from across the organization to establish a grassroots start-up and begin to build broader-based support for incorporating social media into the workplace.
- Don’t skip the education. People need to know how to use these tools. Orr talked about holding educational sessions to “break down the barriers of the unknown.” Kohn said that SmithGroup also held a series of in-house educational sessions to familiarize employees with the social media strategy and how they could contribute.
- Involve everyone. You can’t have “Twitterers in a corner,” said Orr. Kohn noted that SmithGroup’s Facebook page features people across the organization, from interns to new hires to newly certified architects.
Finally, all three talked about the challenge of adding a non-billable activity into businesses that run on billable hours. With no budget for social media and no billable code, this is where you have to point to strategy, opportunity costs, and value to keep you moving forward.
Photo courtesy of Social Media Club DC.
Tagged as:
Brian Reilly,
Erin Orr,
Facebook,
Fox Architects,
IBM Social Media Guidelines,
Mike Kohn,
SMCDC,
SmithGroup,
Social Media,
Social Media Breakfast
by Daria Steigman on July 19, 2010
I used TwitterSheep to get this quick snapshot of how the people I follow on Twitter describe themselves.
In my case, this pretty much gels with what I already know. Though I was a bit surprised that “entrepreneurs” was so small. And while I’m tracking some athletes, I’ve put most of them on a list–and they’re largely not people I’m officially following.
You can also use this handy tool to peak in on your competitors to see who they’re interacting with (or at least lurking around). You might learn something unexpected.
Tagged as:
Social Media,
Twitter,
TwitterSheep
by Daria Steigman on June 15, 2010
It’s Digital Capital Week (DC Week), which means 10 days of amazing content and collaboration focused on technology, innovation, and all things digital. This morning’s Media 2.0 events included a fabulous panel on “old media’s” embrace of new media tools and a keynote by Jeff Pulver on the real-time Internet.
Pulver’s remarks resonated with me less for what he said than for how he framed the conversation: around a flatter world where individual voices can make a difference. Among his key points:
- There is a “Me the People” Revolution going on. Pulver noted that science fiction is filled with heroes who don’t know they have great powers until they discover them (think Dune or, my personal favorite, Babylon 5). Similarly, the real-time Web, and the influence we have within it, puts the power in our hands to change the world. “It’s what we do with that attention that matters,” said Pulver.
- Now Media Moments are the new It. Pulver cited Susan Boyle’s rise to prominence and the galvanized support for Haiti relief as examples of Now Media moment.
- Flash Money (via SMS technology) is changing the philanthropic landscape, as short code donations begin to change the way we give (and the way we can respond in an emergency).
Pulver used the analogy of ham radio to describe how social media offers opportunities for strangers to connect. He also talked about the “rise of voices,” and the fact that the real-time Web offers “an open frequency for each of us to connect and affect change.”
Because “sometimes it’s not the money but the voice that counts,” Pulver announced that he is launching a new online platform that gives users the opportunity to donate their tweets. Check out JustCoz, which is designed to raise awareness about good works. The early adopters include one of my favorite charitable organizations, Medicins Sans Frontieres.
Photo by Sub-Urban (Flickr).
Tagged as:
Babylon 5,
DCWeek,
Dune,
Jeff Pulver,
JustCoz,
Medicins Sans Frontieres,
Real-Time Web,
Social Media
