Posts Tagged ‘LinkedIn’

25 in 5 Challenge

February 9 2010

rockpaperscissors

Inspired by Colin Alsheimer’s Social Media Challenge (follow @levelten_colin, #smschallenge) that encouraged all of us to stray from mainstream content and share a little more variety in our tweets, I have a somewhat related challenge to lay before you.

My wife uses Facebook and I’d guess spends at least and hour on the site spread throughout the course of a day. I don’t. Rarely do I use facebook to communicate with others. In fact I go days without even logging in. Despite having 302 Facebook friends, 261 LinkedIn connections and 177 followers on Twitter I probably communicate with no more than 10 people across all three media in a given week—so, not very social.

For the next five days I’ve decided to challenge myself and I encourage you to do the same. Whether you are a heavy user or passive participant in social media let’s put social media to the test.

The Challenge:

I challenge you to contact twenty-five people over the next five days that you’ve friended, connected or followed.

The Rules:

Only contact those you friended, connected or followed, but have not communicated with since that day.
Use only social media to make contact (e.g. post to a wall, send a LinkedIn message, direct message when you can).

Share:

We want feedback. Whether awkward or awesome please post comments here, on our Facebook page, or LinkedIn group. Tweet about it using #25in5 and suggest others you think we should follow. I’ll aggregate comments/thoughts on the blog next week and you can follow live action here:

http://twitter.com/mosimmons/twentyfiveinfive

If you’re a passive user of social media like me this will take you out of your social media comfort zone. Otherwise it’s just an excuse to check in with old friends, acquaintances or random people you friended on the Internet.

Ready, Go!

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Our Goal: 100 Fans

June 30 2009

Scratching your head to figure out how to measure social media’s revenue impact? You’re not alone. High-level stats may look like this:

Twitter: Following 46/Followers 153
Facebook Group: Fans 80**
LinkedIn Group: Members 68
SMS Subscribers: 24
Newsletter Subscribers: 623

Social Media Life Cycle

What do they really mean? Our numbers (above) compare favorable to others our size, I think. Actually, I don’t really know what the competition is doing, or if that’s the right measuring stick for our efforts. We don’t approach this in a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses way. Our measure so far is on quality. People that follow us, are fans, are members or subscribers appear to be really, really smart.

As a small organization we can follow a prospect through our social media pipeline through to sale, but we have a harder time quantifying the sunk costs of getting them there. We can only imagine the complexity of a larger organization’s social media efforts. It seems obvious to us that social media is about small, highly interactive groups. So maybe corporate marketing shouldn’t only the social media face of the company. Maybe it’s the local franchisee, the product manager, or the field marketer. I don’t think anyone has all the answers yet. If you come across someone that does, be suspicious, very suspicious.

We’ve taken a goal-based approach that walks the line between strategy and necessity. Much of our social media experience/experiment seeks to prove out different strategies before we suggest solutions to our clients. We practice what we preach. We also need to be in the space out of necessity. Each day social media encroaches on marketing budgets and spend, taking time and attention away from quantifiable marketing efforts.

You can do both and should. Pull together a strategy that closes the loop from direct outbound to social media inbound to quantifiable results. Pull together small teams and micro-campaigns to leverage social media, because the life-cycle of a advertising campaign is shrinking.

(We’ll take a closer look at the public’s attention span next week after the holiday, because people have shorter attention spans going into a three-day holiday.)

**Finally, we need 20 more fans to reach a 100 in Facebook. Why is this important? It takes one hundred fans to earn your way into a vanity URL for your group. Vanity URLs, custom tabs and fb applications are another reason we should be excitedly cautious about the evolved Internet today. Thanks for that little bit of advice @alexrudloff.

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MySpace Life Cycle

June 18 2009

Does news that MySpace plans to layoff 30% of its workforce signal the beginning of the end for the once-popular social media platform? The layoffs come on the heels of lost ad revenue and market share to Facebook. Some say MySpace has become the new booty call online–not a great tagline when trying to attract big brands. Lost ad revenue sounds a lot like old media, not new.

MySpace was up and running in August 2003, enjoyed strong growth and became the bellwether social media platform. It’s not a stretch to say that Friendster and the more effective MySpace platform really kicked off the social media movement.

myspace

In July 2005, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation legitimized MySpace and spurred the growth of countless imitators. Facebook, an imitator, may very well be the dagger that kills MySpace, or best case forces it into obscurity. Who knows, it might become an attractive acquisition target for Ted Turner.

MySpace celebrates its 6th birthday in August. It feels like an eternity in Internet years. LinkedIn is 6. Facebook is just over 5 years old. Twitter is 3. Marketers are spending loads of time trying to figure out how to monetize, utilize, and justify social media in the marketing mix. Old media, t.v., radio, newspapers, etc., have been around for years. Can we expect the same from social media?

Consider your ability to measure the impact of your social media spend before you go hog wild. If you aren’t tying your work into a platform that captures metrics, you might be flushing money down the drain. Something to think about.

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GizaPage Social Networking

May 21 2009

GizaPage is a social network organizer that helps manage personal and corporate brands under one roof. The idea is ambitious, but if you’re like me it just might be a cure for the five tabs I have open in Firefox right now to run through the latest news about what Matt had for breakfast, what my wife and daughter are doing today, and the latest on the direct marketing front. Basically you’re consolidating all your online profiles.

A redundant solutions for all but the person using 15 or more social networking platforms.

A redundant solutions for all but the person using 15 or more social networking platform.

Signing up is easy. You create a personalized URL as your single-source destination and click the activation link. The first thing GizaPage asks you to do is import contact from one Gmail, Yahoo, LinkedIn, or similar CRM-like applications. I’m a little hestitnat to start handing out my user name and password, but you can get around this by pulling the contacts in from one of the above then changing your password. Kind of a pain, but a necessary step regardless of their promise not to keep your info on file.

Once you get past that screen the app has you add your public profiles from basically any and all social networking sites on the web. I just went with my top five, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Delicious, and Flickr. Click next, copy and past your personalized URL in your browser and hit go.

My personalized homepage was as advertised with five tabs across the top. I clicked the Twitter tab and was surprised to see not my homepage, but my homepage displayed in TwitterTree. The Twitter app is not a total waste. It expands are trimmed URLs so you have a little more information before clicking through. It’s not better or worse, just different. The other four tabs are predictable and diaplay your profile homepages for Facebook, LiinkedIn, Delicious and Flickr. No changes here.

Why should you spend time signing up for GizaPage? You shouldn’t. Your time would be better spend reading our blog, updating your status and tweeting not creating a redundant social networking site with yet another domain and another password to bookmark and remember.

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Work From Home

May 13 2009

At about noon yesterday (GMT-2) the Internet went out in our Bucharest office, so we sent everyone home where it was believed the Internet would be more reliable. And it was.

The outage was caused by a government initiative to crack down on illegal hacks into the nation’s cable television and high-speed Internet system. (Don’t worry, we pay our bills.) Luckily we have a second line unrelated to the first that kept me going long into the evening yesterday and again today.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere. If we can close up the office for two days and send everyone home, why do we have an office. Maybe I’d have more time to stumble across articles like this from Faustine in Tanzania if I was parked at my casita.

Some people are just more comfortable working out of the home.

Some people are just more comfortable working out of the home.

Face-to-face communication must have some value. In our business it can lead to creative break throughs. If travel weren’t so expensive, we’d spend more time sitting across the table from our clients. Creative reviews over the phone lose some of the pomp you get from a in-person pitch.

Not everyone has the discipline to work from home. Many are faced with distractions at home that make work there tough. I love my daughter, but “Daddy, hugs?” in the middle of that conference call can be distracting.

If the stars and incentives are aligned, a business might just be able to operative sans office. There are obstacles. It’s tough to build a car in your living room, but the majority of these stay-at-home jobs involve a computer. We employee a fair number of stay-at-home mom’s that tend to our fulfillment needs, but they are tech savvy and armed with computers and Blackberry’s.

One key takeaway for those of us in the Internet business is that the number of people working from home is on the rise. Many of them are sitting in front of their computers, which gives Interactive marketing firms just like ours something to smile about.

Eyeballs available. No bosses looking over shoulders. Yahtzee!

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LinkedIn Tip #2 Grow Your Brain

April 15 2009

Find a group of like-minded individuals, or people that are not like-minded and you will actually feel* your brain growing.

LinkedIn’s Questions & Answers are awesome for heavy users. Like any other form of social media the more engage the quicker you are accepted to the group. WARNING: Don’t pollute the system. Obvious self-promotion here is no different than obvious self-promotion in a bar, at a conference, during a meeting. Look at me, I’m awesome, and other form of back-patting will get you nowhere in a hurry.

Use this tool for good, not evil. Be genuinely engage with your fellow group members to grow your network as soon as that relationship is mutually beneficial. Here are some pointers:

  • Ask open-ended questions that avoid specifics for a better variety of answers
  • Always include a personal note to the person that asked the question when answering
  • Write good headlines to draw people to your question. It’s the old man bites dog thing
  • Respond to answers as others post answer to encourage real banter and debate
  • Sign up to receive updates for at least the first few days to allow greater involvement

This is an opportunity to let our your inner journalist. Probe the public for good information, then leverage that information across your blog, Twitter, or within your other online communities/cliques. You’ll be glad you did.

*Individual results may vary.

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LinkedIn Tip #3 Job Bored

April 13 2009

Many of us use LinkedIn to trowel the waters for new and better opportunities. Combine apathy and dissatisfaction with LinkedIn and you get the perfect feeding ground for hungry talent.

Your network, those of your contacts and LinkedIn’s own job posting features make finding your next candidate a snap. Don’t believe me. Okay, maybe tip number three sounds better with an English accent.

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LinkedIn Tip #4 Get Recommended

April 9 2009

Don’t be afraid to solicit recommendations from colleagues and friends, but make sure you offer to reciprocate. Recommendations can give your profile added credibility.

Should the authors struggle to cast your skills, personality and work ethic in the best light you can always feed them a sample script. Sounds phony, but a former colleague or employer might struggle with details. Follow these simple rules to get started.

LinkedIn signage

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LinkedIn Tip #5 ResumedIn

April 5 2009

It’s been over three years since I printed, read, proofed or shared an offline copy of my resume. I don’t even have digital copy I can share. LinkedIn does all that for me, includes recommendations, links to my company or other information.

No need to reinvent the wheel. Give that future employer a link to LinkedIn. If they expected a paper copy odds are they won’t say anything for fear of coming across like a technical neophyte. Or, they might just think you didn’t care enough about the job to print a resume. Tread lightly.

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LinkedIn Tip #6 Expose Yourself

March 19 2009

Time to get agressive? Is your goal to rack up as many contacts as possible? If so, consider this LinkedIn tip. Add your email address to your last name in your profile. For example, Michael Simmons(mosimmons@yahoo.com) allows anyone to send you a direct connect invitation. LinkedIn figures that if they have your email address they know you well enough to make the request. You can always put the smack down on any requests you get, but consider the implications of denial after denial after denial. You might get a reputation.

FYI: People with fewer than five connections are 34 times less likely to get job offers than those with 20 or more. I’m just going to trust Guy on that factoid.

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