More on LinkedIn

 
Yesterday I posted some observations about LinkedIn as a social networking option and posed a question, using their Q&A section, about finding a telecommunications service provider in Ventura, CA.

I was quite surprised at the response. I received three from individuals with specific suggestions and three from vendors. I don’t know how this rates in comparison to others’ experience, but it tells me that there’s activity on the network and that there are folks out there who are willing to offer their advice and assistance. This is a very good thing.

And, as I do more research and make a final decision regarding my telecom needs, the six suggestions I received – yes, even the vendors! – will be at the top of the list.

This leads – rather indirectly – to an observation on social networking, marketing, business, and life in general:

You really do get out of it what you put into it.

Regardless of what your marketing strategy is, you have to work at it and make it a part of your daily routine. Even the best plans don’t execute themselves. Someone needs to be calling on prospects, writing blog posts, updating the website, or sending out press releases. And it’s a lot of work. It’s easy to put it off, but doing so will jeopardize the long-term success of your business. Even sustaining your current business level requires the infusion of new customers.

LinkedIn Groups

Taking advantage of all social networking has to offer requires time and commitment to set it up and keep it going. But as I found with my telecom question, there is an active network out there to tap into.

One of the best ways to do that on LinkedIn is with Groups. LinkedIn presently has seven general categories for groups with a total of 283,994 individual groups. So, you can probably find several groups that meet your needs.

If not – and I find that hard to believe – you can always start your own. Creating your own group is a simple one page fill-in-the-blank process on the “Create a Group” tab on the “Groups” page.

LinkedIn offers a very professional, business-oriented option for social networking, which may mesh nicely with your business model. Even if it’s not your primary social networking channel, it’s definitely worthwhile to belong and be active.

LinkedIn: The Professionals’ Social Network

 
With the gallery website up and running, it’s now time to look at social networking options to expand my network and – hopefully – my prospect and customer base. For me, LinkedIn is probably not the best place to start for this, but I’ve had my profile posted there for some time now and I’m more familiar with it than some of the other social networking sites.

The most important thing to remember about LinkedIn is that it’s a business networking tool, unlike Facebook or MySpace which have a business element to them but began their lives as social gathering places. It’s not the place to talk about your recent trip, your pets, or your favorite band.

Now that can be a good thing. You know right up front what you’re dealing with, and depending on your business it may be a great source for prospects, sub-contractors, collaborators, and other contacts to help you achieve your goals.

Your Profile and Connections

You start by creating a profile – essentially an online resume – that can be viewed by others. It’s out there 24/7, promoting your expertise to anyone who might be looking. The challenge is to get people to look…

And you do that by adding Connections. Search through your old Rolodex (remember those?) and contact lists for people you’d like to add and – if they’re on LinkedIn – invite them to join your network.

Here’s where it gets interesting. As an example, I have 32 people in my personal network. In my secondary network – people who know the people I know, but don’t know me – I have more than 1,700 contacts. And in my entire Linked In network there are more than 194,000 people. Now, none of those contacts has ever called to offer me a job, but you can see the reach the network has.

Joining Groups

If posting your profile is a somewhat passive way to build your network, joining – and participating in – the groups LinkedIn offers can really get your name out there. You can post – and respond to – questions and ideas related to the group’s activities. I admit that I’ve been a non-participant, but I just read through some recent entries for the groups to which I belong and can see the potential for soliciting information from your peers and providing it as well.

Keeping Up with Everything

Once you’re set up, it’s pretty easy to keep tabs on what’s happening. LinkedIn does the hard work for you, alerting your network connections when you make a change to your profile and informing you about what others are doing.

Adding to Your Profile

Of course, the more you have in your profile, the easier it is to renew old relationships and build your network. I just found two people I worked with more than 15 years ago and invited them to join my network. It remains to be seen if they even remember me – or if they do, how positive that recollection is – but they just popped up as links from my previous jobs.

LinkedIn continues to add options to make your networking more effective. One I just found – and really like – is the ability to link my blog to my LinkedIn profile. The titles and first few lines of my most recent posts now appear on my profile.

Searching for More

LinkedIn also offers Search options for People, Jobs, Answers, and Companies. People and Jobs are pretty straightforward, but Answers and Companies have some interesting options.

In Answers, you can either ask or answer a question – duh.  But this feature allows you to poll your peers for their insights into your specific problem. And, of course, you can share your insights as well.

Here’s a quick example. As I was writing this post, I asked a question on LinkedIn about finding a telecommunications service provider in Ventura, CA and have already received a response – basically a sales solicitation – for me to call about all my telecom needs. It will be interesting to see what else comes in, but people are reading these things.

The Companies feature allows you to search for potential employers as well as service providers and includes background information to help you find exactly what you’re looking for.

And that’s just the Free Stuff

If you’re willing to spend quite a bit more – $49.95 a month for the Business Plus program and $499.95 a month for the Pro program – you can really leverage your LinkedIn presence with more messages, more profile searches, and more alerts. But for me, free is just fine, thank you.

You Can Use Twitter to Promote Your Business

 
Since my previous post about Twitter where I mused about its usefulness in a business environment, I haven’t been able to let it go. I had the feeling that there was more to it than I was getting, that there was a business application for Twitter, and that if I just thought about it long enough, I’d figure out what it was.

Ta Da! I may not be the fastest car on the road, but I do get there eventually and I’ve arrived. I should also say that I’m confident there are other “Twitter apps” that will develop but I feel like, for myself at least, I’ve found a solid way to put Twitter to use.

You see, I was thinking about it the wrong way. My primary focus is to communicate useful information: here’s what I think, here’s how this works, etc. But that’s not the point of Twitter at all.

Twitter is a teaser. It’s the crawl on the bottom of your news broadcast. It’s the headline on an envelope to get you to open it. It’s the “New!” and “Free!” of the Internet. It’s function – or at least the one I’m most interested in right now - is to get attention and create interest.

There’s a basic formula for direct marketing that every successful piece should follow:

1. Get Attention
2. Arouse Interest
3. Create Desire
4. Generate Action

Your website and other collateral materials handle Desire and Action by presenting a compelling argument for your product, providing enough information for the prospect to make a decision, and then giving them a way to act on their decision.

Twitter gets them to the final stages of the sales process by waving a big red flag. And, the fact that you only have 140 characters makes it even more compelling by removing the temptation to start the sales process too early. With an effective Twitter campaign, by the time prospects get to your website or store, they’ve “pre-qualified” themselves. All you have to do is close the deal.

Here are some examples of how it might work for me and my online art gallery:

“Cool new abstract photos at thebacongallery.com” – 47 characters

“Love Jeff’s new work, abstract paintings, check it out thebacongallery.com” – 74 characters

“Looking for cool abstract art for your home or office, check out the bacongallery.com” – 85 characters

“Jeff’s selling early work at 50% off. Abstract prints are really cool. See them at thebacongallery.com” – 102 characters

All are well under the 140 character limit and have the potential at least, to drive traffic to my website. They all tell what it is and how to find it and provide a reason to go there – if you like abstract art.

What will make Twitter a success for any business is the network. If you tweet alone, it won’t do much good. After all, there’s a reason these things are called “social” networks. So get out there, set up and account, make some friends, and tweet away!

What Good is Twitter, Anyway?

 
I admit it. Of all the social networking endeavors, Twitter is the most difficult for me to understand. I mean, what can you say with 140 characters?

But a recent article in the New York Times has given me some additional insight; there actually may be more to Twitter than the absurd stream of consciousness I’ve seen so far.

According to the article, “By tapping into the world’s collective brain, researchers of all kinds have found that if they make the effort to dig through the mundane comments, the live conversations offer an early glimpse into public sentiment – and even help them shape it.”

And combined, the “tweets” – I still want to call them twits – appear to carry a lot of weight.

“…over the weekend, Amazon.com learned how important it was to respond to the Twitter audience. After one author noticed that Amazon had reclassified books with gay and lesbian themes as “adult” and removed them from the main search and sales rankings, a protest broke out on blogs and Twitter.”

For any business, the potential for both positive and negative coverage is now at someone’s fingertips on a massive scale, even compared to the more mundane – and mainstream – blogs.

I wrote in an earlier post that e-newsletters are probably losing ground to blogs and other social media. Well, it appears that some of these old “new media” may already be losing ground to Twitter as well. It has an immediacy and speed that are astounding.

“…Twitter was most evident during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last November and when a jetliner landed in the Hudson River in January. People were twittering from the scenes before reporters arrived.” (Italics mine.)

One last spin on Twitter that made me sit up and take notice comes from Paul Saffo, the Silicon Valley futurist, quoted in the Times article, “Twitter reverses the notion of the group. Instead of creating the group you want, you send it and the group self-assembles.”

What texting was, just recently, to groups of friends; Twitter now is to the entire Internet world.

Of course, from a practical standpoint, there are a lot of other things you can do to promote your business; Twitter still seems to be on the “bleeding edge.” But, I’m pretty confident that its move into the mainstream is inevitable. All we need now is some nice, simple, cheap software to allow us to monitor and assess every “tweet” and project how it might affect our businesses…

Integrating Your Brand Image into Your Website Design

 
If you’re building your website from scratch, integrating your company’s brand into the design is pretty straightforward. However, if you – like me – are relying on templates provided by your website host, it’s a little more challenging.

Of course, this assumes that you’ve created a brand image for your company. For those of you that haven’t, here’s a brief branding tutorial.

Essentially, your brand identity is the physical representation of “who you are” as a company, as communicated by every facet of your business, especially those that are “customer facing.”

The primary purposes of branding are to differentiate your business from the competition and to make it memorable in the minds of your customers.

Your brand should be consistent with the image you have of your company – whatever that may be – and it should be integrated into all areas of  the company from stationery and business cards to email blasts. Whether you’re conservative and old-fashioned or high-tech and trendy, the type styles, colors, and images you choose should reflect and reinforce that image.

The most obvious application of branding is in the graphics your business uses. For example, Wells Fargo has specific colors for its logo and promotional materials. It has specific type fonts and rules on when and how they are to be used. It has an image bank of photos and line art along with guidelines on what to use and how to use it. It even provides training for employees and vendors on how to support the corporate brand.

While you may never reach the level of brand awareness of Wells Fargo, Nike, or McDonalds, employing proven branding techniques consistently and over time will help your company stand out from the competition and be memorable in the minds of your customers.

So, if you’re looking at website templates – as I am now - be sure to pick one that either: (1) already reflects your corporate brand through color and image selection, or (2) can be modified to do so.

This may sound a little silly if you’re just starting out and aren’t really sure if your company will even survive, but careful planning – your business plan and marketing plan – and effective implementation – branding, advertising, public relations, and promotions – will go a long way towards helping you succeed.