Using Linkedin in your Social Media Campaign

Linkedin is an underutilized social media tool.

Linkedin is one of the best social media tools out there to connect to your market. For business to business marketing, you will probably find the people are you looking for on Linkedin.  Before you do though, consider some of the Does and Don'ts of how to use it.

Don't: Use Your Work or Primary Home Email as Your Public Email
Get a Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail account, unless you really like spam with your email. LinkedIn provides some protection to your email address, but it does give your email to first degree connections and the owners of groups you join.

Do Understand How LinkedIn Search Works
LinkedIn has millions of users.  LinkedIn's search system is critical because it is what helps you find people and what powers the "people you may know" tool. The search tool is limited to:

• First level connections - your friends.
• Second level connections - your friend's friends.
• Third level connections - your friend's friends friends.
• People in groups with you
• A random sample of the rest of the database - and you do not get to see names.

In short: the more connections you have, the easier is to find people you are not connected to.

Do Have a Strategy
Quantity over Quality
The idea here is to connect with as many people as possible so you have access to as many LinkedIn users as possible. This generally means accepting connections from anyone who wants to connect with you.  If you are a marketer, serial networker or recruiter, then the quantity should trump quality.

Quality over Quantity
If you don't need max our your visibility of LinkedIn's database, then the best way to use LinkedIn is to focus on quality. Connect with people that you know or who have a reason (beyond being a prospect) to know you.  If you do purue quality, you should connect with a few "superconnectors" (people with thousands of connections) to gain access to more people in LinkedIn's database.  It will be very hard to find people you know if you only can see 23,000 people compared to 453,000 people.

Do: Join groups
Groups allow you to find people with simmilar interest quickly.  Joining in discussion is a great way to meet new people.

Don't Spam Groups
On LinkedIn there are two kinds of spam: blatant self promoting advertisements and blatant attempts to get more connections.  Take a minute to look at a discussion group before your post a message and make sure the group has posts like the one you want to make.

Do: State that you are open to connections if you are.
If you want to grow your network quickly, tell people that you are an "open networker," or even become a LION (LinkedIn Open Networker).

Don't break Outlook with your fabulous name.
LinkedIn allows people to download their freinds and their friend's email addresses.  If you make a fancy name like ">>>Bob "The NetworkGuru" Smith<<<" it will make a first impression.  But the second impression will be that you can't be found in outlook because your first name doesn't start with ">" it starts with "B."

Paul is the President of Professional Blog Service. PBS works with clients making strategic investments into business blogging, social media and search engine optimization.

Enter The Conversation in Social Media

I often make fun of buzzwords and will admit that social media is one of them. Social media is the new craze in our world. With mobile phones, tablets like the iPad, our personal entertainment options have increased it seems x10. It seems to be impacting all ages too, not just kids. I was visiting friends in Michigan and a 60 year old guy discovered Youtube. He watches it all the time. Now, he is using other tools to stay in contact with friends and family around the world. Social media is about conversation.

People's lifestyles are changing. Gone are the days of people mindlessly watching TV. Newspapers are dying. Radio no longer delivers the soundtrack of our lives. Somewhere along the way, people decided the remote control wasn't good enough.

What's left? The Internet. Portable Media Players. Video Games. Cell Phones. TiVo... Devices that give people back control of their life. Devices that people control the content on, and have firm control of the power switch.

What does that mean to your marketing? Opportunity. And it's not about branding. Or your image. Or even engagement. It's about starting a conversation. It's about helping people find what they are looking for. It's about taking what you do, what you make and letting people discover, desire, own and control it.

Take a hard look at your existing marketing and ask yourself a few questions:

What do you do that helps customers understand your brands, products and services?

What do you do that helps you understand your potential buyers?

Are you talking? Are you listening?

Or are you entering into a conversation?

Positive relationships rarely happen without conversation. Negative relationships happen easily and often without dialogue. The question is, do you have an ongoing conversation or are you just one more reason to turn off the tv, put down the newspaper, silence the radio and fire up the iPod?
Discussion:

What have you done lately to strike up a real conversation with your customers?

Paul is the President of Professional Blog Service. PBS works with clients making strategic investments into business blogging, social media and search engine optimization.

Social media and business blogging are not immune to the buzzword culture of the Internet

In the business blogging and social media world, buzzwords are king.

As I move into the Autumn of my life, I am amused at how business blogging and social media get caught up in the buzzword culture of the last 15 years. When I was younger, I got caught up in the game too. Those of us in the industry forget that the average person does not have the same passion and knowledge we do about the world in which we work. How often to you find yourself talking and the other person has no clue what you are talking about? It made me pause.

Everything that even smells of something new gets a buzzword. I have visions of smartly dressed people with stylish glasses and fancy haircuts going, "let's give it a name." Then come up with something like this:

3-6-3 Rule
A Ton Of Money
Accounting Noise
Acquisition Indigestion
Across The Board
Active Box
Activity Based Budgeting - ABB
Affluenza
After The Bell
Agency Cross
Agflation
Air Pocket Stock
Alligator Property
Alligator Spread
Alternative Energy ETF
Alternative Investment
And Interest
Angel Bond
Angelina Jolie Stock Index
Ankle Biter
Anonymous Trading
Antitrust
Arbitrageur
Aspirin Count Theory

Sourced from investopedia.com/buzzwords

What usually happens is a small segment of the population actually understands what it means. People in the know sound really smart because they can repeat the buzzword and sound really intelligent. The real genius' use lots of buzzwords in every sentence. (Wow, he's smart, he is buzzword compliant). And people buy it all the time. (I guess that's why they work).

I will be the first to admit that I loved buzzwords too. I used to sit around with my colleagues who dressed ever so nicely and play the buzzword game too. Yes, I was a buzzword expert with everyone, clients included.

No Buzzword For This
There is one constant in human evolution. Human interactions have not really changed. Despite all this technology introduced into our lives, we as a species still function pretty much the same way. While we may not feed each other to lions, we find new ways to be cruel just the same. And our fears and desires are pretty simple too. We can still be made to fear and sex still sells.

So, how does tie into the hype surrounding social media? What's all this new Internet marketing stuff about? Well, the reality is human evolution in buying has gone from the bazaar to the store, to the electronic store. Buying and selling is still done on emotions. Doing it on the Internet is no different. Now we have to either visually or through words impact people's emotional reaction to get them to buy from us. Just like we did when people stood in front of our table at the bazaar. There is no buzzword to describe this. Businesses just need to learn how to sell in this new market.

This is a absolute fact not lost on us or our social marketing efforts. Whether we are blogging for a business or promoting a post on Facebook, we seek to impact people's emotions.

In the end, humans have not changed. We are still creatures of habit. We still gravitate towards shared interest. The only difference is that we do it in a different environment today. So, if you peal off all the buzzwords and narrow down the basic human behavior we see today, success is simply watching how humans behave in their new environments. If you observe the Internet from this perspective, you will see that nothing has really changed, only the location where people congregate has.

Paul is the President of Professional Blog Service. PBS works with clients making strategic investments into business blogging, social media and search engine optimization.

 

Top Five Tag Myths

Quick Tech Primer
If you are going to write a business blog, it is important to understand that you are writing for a couple of audiences. The first audience to read a business blog is a reader. The content you write needs to be engaging and interesting to the reader so they stay and learn. But the other important audience for a blog is the search engines. You have to understand how the search engine works so you can properly tag your sites.

Before we learn how to do this, let's review Tag Myths versus the Tag Facts.

Tag Myths, Tag Facts

Myth: Tags are used for  making blogs easy to navigate.
Fact: Tags are single words (you can do more than one word, but most people don't because using quotes is a nuisance for Del.icio.us users) for providing hints for social bookmark sites. Tags are used to help users of sites like Del.icio.us or Technorati.com quickly categorize your website. Organizing your site by tag probably is a good way to make the site make little sense.

Myth: Tags and Keywords are the same thing.
Fact: Keywords are used to make your site easier to search. Tags are used as organization hints for social bookmark users. Sometimes your tags and keywords are the same thing. Most of the time, though, keywords tend to make more sense to humans and tags tend to be a collection of words. For example: your keyword is "SARBOX compliance software" your tags should be "software sarbox accounting sarbanes-oxley". Oh, and long tail tags don't really work that well.

Myth: You should select tags the same way you select keywords for your website.
Fact: Tags are used to categorize bookmarks on sites like Del.icio.us. People do not use tags the same way as keywords - they use them to indicate broad topics or emotions instead of specifics. Your tags should make it easy for someone to quickly categorize your article in their links, not as some kind of tool for telling Google what your site is about. Take a look at Del.icio.us and look what tags people are assigning to links there - you'll be amazed how broad the tags are.

Myth: Tags should be part of my search engine optimization strategy.
Fact: Using tags to game Google for higher search position is probably not going to work out for you. Most short single word keywords are incredibly difficult to optimize for and Google has been on to tag stuffing and other third rate SEO trickery for several years. On top of that, users of social bookmarking sites will simply create their own tags if they don't like yours.

Myth: Tags are a waste of time.
Fact: There are millions of users of sites like Digg.com, Del.icio.us and Technoriati.com. Users of these sites share bookmarks (read, their bookmark of your website) with their friends. And they can have 534,391 friends they share with. On top of that, Google and other search engines seem to smile on sites that come up often in social bookmark sites.

Blogging Tool Roundup

Social media analytics are a big concern right now. What tools are out there to measure the impact of your social media campaigns. Here is a fun way to measure the personality of your business blogging. Have you considered taking a look at what your online business blog personality is translating to be in Myers-Briggs vernacular? Well, I am not going to say this is totally accurate, but it is fun nonetheless. Go ahead and try it.

Personality Type Your Blog, Metrics and Terrorists

• What Meyers-Briggs personality type is your blog? Don't know? Try the Typealyzer. Then see if it matches with your actual Meyers-Briggs personality type with this quick test.
• Making blogs measurable is difficult. That's why this article on 20 Blog Analytics Tools is a must read.
• Over the last week Twitter delivered the best coverage of the Egypt Protesters. That's right, this Twitter. Why? Real time commentary from people who are where the action was. Hmm... sounds like a tagline.

What is a Conversion Point and why do you need them on your Blog?

Your boss wants to know, why should we have a business blog?

Blogging and social media can be a tough sell to your boss. After all, most corporations are afraid of really talking to their customers online. They could say something bad. Most initiatives can fail because they do not follow one simple rule, use conversion points.

Let’s talk about conversion points. These beauties are a feature built into all well structured business blogs that create immediate transactions, sales or leads. They can be as simple as a well-placed button that says, “Buy Now” or “Get the White Paper.”

One Step or Two
A great conversion point lets the customer make the transaction without leaving the page. This makes it simpler and faster for the consumer to buy—and what’s faster for the consumer is faster and potentially more profitable for the business owner.

A next-best option is for the conversion point to lead the customer to the shopping cart or form. While it takes more time and effort on the consumer’s part for the sale, it still results in a sale.

The Obvious

Before we get started with them, 78% of our own clients’ pages don’t have a conversion point. That means that 78% of these pages DON’T SELL. And if your page doesn’t sell, how do you make money?

Every page should have at least one conversion point. Better yet, let’s make a rule. Every page should have a minimum of one conversion point. Try to make the conversion point that lets the customer stay on the same page. If this is impossible, lead them directly to the shopping cart or form.

Make it as easy as possible for the consumer to purchase your product, and they will. You can't measure the success of your blog, if there is nothing being converted.

Twitter Tool to be release soon

Last Friday I tweeted: “I’m easily impressed. I’m not easily flabbergasted. @kabaim just flabbergasted me. Follow him and ask how he did it.”

Screenshot of my Twylah page. Click to see a bigger version.

@kabaim is Eric Kim, founder and CEO ofTwylah, the new Twitter tool that Eric says is going to change the way we use Twitter. Twylah (@Twylah)does all these amazing things. So many of them, in fact, that I’ve probably forgotten a few them here. http://ping.fm/64txc

Fresh Hot Content for Search Engine Optmization

Background Info: I have been in the search engine optimization business for over seven years.
More Background Info: I just left SEO land for good.  There is a better way.

First, I can tell you what isn’t working: traditional Search Engine Optimization. I could make up a lot of really impressive, buzzword rich, techno-spam to explain why. Instead I’m going to cut to the chase: search engines want fresh, hot content. Blogging is an excellent search engine optimization tool providing fresh hot content.

So the game has changed from old fashioned keyword rich, quality content with a million high page rank links to a model where the best, fastest content factory wins.

Search your name: you’ll find social networks and social news sites own it.

Search your product names: chances are you’ll run in to social media sites like dealstreamers (Fat Wallet type social deal sites), blogs and membership forums.

Search for your core products: Unless your product is described by uber competitive keywords, you’ll find blogs, forums, and news articles.

All of which have one thing in common.  The content is usually fresh, or at least surrounded by fresh content. And the funny part is that content is not difficult.  It takes some talent, some training, time and lots of discipline. Oh, and a maniacal dedication to getting more content. And more content. You can’t stop.  And that’s why most companies are struggling with dealing with the 2009 model of internet marketing.  They are stuck worrying about the wrong things like link structure, gaming Google (good luck with that), rich media and widgets, when the real issue should be having lots of fresh, hot content.

Making fresh, hot content is exactly what ProBlogService does best. And it’s why I get up in the morning. Somewhere, there’s a company that needs content.  We want to supply it.  Content is the new rocket fuel for your marketing program.

Paul Lorinczi is the CEO of ProBlogService.com, a full service blog and social media agency.  ProBlogService.com provides blog writing, management and promotion services for business.