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.

Developing Promotions that Increase Your Bottom Line

 
First, I can’t say enough good things about Marketing Sherpa – www.marketingsherpa.com. I can’t afford to purchase any of their reports and research at this point, but even their free information – I subscribe to their newsletters – is exceptional. Applying just the free tips and ideas will put the average marketer far ahead of the pack.

Today’s newsletter featured  the Chart of the Week: Ecommerce – Its’ Not All About Price, which shows a breakdown of how Consumer Products Marketers Rate Engagement and Sales Tactics.

While the focus is on ecommerce, the good news for those of us with just a toe in the water is this: the top performer is the good old fashioned Limited Time/Limited Inventory Promotion, which doesn’t require complex ecommerce software to implement. In fact, it doesn’t require an online presence at all! Marketers have been using this technique for – well, for as long as there have been markets.

Of the marketers surveyed, 49% rate it as Somewhat Effective and 43% rate it as very effective.

Second was Loyalty Programs, with 41% rating them as Somewhat Effective and 31% as very effective. This was followed by: Adding Customer Reviews and Ratings (to your website), Product Videos on the Site, and Special Offers such as gift wrapping, etc. I wonder where free shipping falls in the rankings…

The LTO (Limited Time Offer) is easy to use, even with a static website.

For example, with my online gallery – which is now up and running at www.thebacongallery.com - I plan to use PayPal to handle my online sales.

I haven’t set it up yet and don’t know what promotional options will be available to me with their services. However, I know I can announce an LTO in my website News section, post it on my social networking sites, send out an email blast to my customer database, and even Twitter it – when I have all that stuff set up.

When developing any promotion, it’s important to remember that all the old marketing rules apply; all that’s changed is the media we use to communicate them. And, thank goodness, most of the Internet options are still free!

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…

Social Media Makes Marketing Easier for Small Businesses

 
Once the exclusive domain of college students, social media appears to be making its mark in the business world as well. And, that’s good news for small business owners, because of the many benefits and low cost associated with social networking.

In a white paper titled “Monitoring the Social Media Conversation: From Twitter to Facebook” Vocus (www.vocus.com) provides an insightful overview of current trends in social networking. Here are some of the highlights:

1. Social networking’s “ability to connect you with the public is proving invaluable.” Whether it’s a public relations campaign, new product introduction, or other promotions, social networking circumvents traditional marketing media to give you a direct connection to your customers as well as everyone else on the Internet.
2. There are pluses and minuses to that connectivity. First, it’s usually free, so even the smallest business can put it to use. Even analytics software to monitor your online efforts is free or inexpensive. For example, my blog host – WordPress – provides free data which I can use to refine – and hopefully, improve – my posts.
3. A potential minus is the fact that your corporate reputation is out there online where anyone – from your most devout customer to the most dissatisfied – can propagate whatever content about your company that they want.
4. This openness has led many companies to learn of – and respond to – criticism more quickly. It’s been said that any publicity is good publicity and I believe that’s true to the extent that businesses respond positively, honestly, and quickly to address the criticism.
5. Another important issue is that social networking won’t be going away any time soon. The growth rate is staggering, as is the rate at which businesses are getting on board with it, and for good reason.
6. The buzz of social networks – if you monitor it properly – allows you to assess the standing of your own company as well as the competition. It provides access to the insights of a wide range of experts. You can measure and evaluate response to your marketing message itself as well its reach. And, perhaps most important, you can build relationships with current and potential customers.

Word of mouth is said to be the best form of advertising. Well, social networking is word of mouth on a worldwide scale. You tell two friends and they tell two friends and suddenly you’re getting a call from a guy in Singapore about distributing your product in Southeast Asia. (Sorry, no guarantees!)

Getting started isn’t too complicated, either. Your kids can probably tell you how to set up a Facebook page in about three minutes.

1. Establish guidelines to manage the messages, responses, and interaction of your business.
2. Decide what you want to monitor and how to best do it.
3. All online conversations are not created equal. Gauge their relative impact and respond accordingly.
4. Integrate both traditional and social media monitoring to get the most complete picture of how your company is perceived.

Above all, be honest and don’t try to avoid the problems that arise. While there may be no such thing as bad publicity, there are certainly lots of ways that you can make its impact much, much worse. Use caution and good common sense.