Are you using LinkedIn? I mean…are USING LinkedIn? It’s not enough just to have a LinkedIn account and accept the occasional invitation that comes across your inbox. LinkedIn is a very powerful, useful, professional social networking tool that should be used as a competitive advantage.
The people you know and the people that know you, can be the difference you need to win new business, find great talent, or build great partnerships. When used well, LinkedIn allows you to find connections you didn’t know you had and re-connect with people you’ve lost touch with and wished you hadn’t.
Everyone needs to decide how much time they want spend nurturing their online profiles, but here are a few easy things you can do to get the most out of LinkedIn.
Who are you? Be sure to complete your profile with as much detail as you can to help answer the question “Who are you?” from a professional perspective. LinkedIn provides an easy to monitor “Profile Completeness” tool showing how complete your profile is based on categories LinkedIn feels are important to having a strong and complete profile. Shoot for having a 100% complete profile.
How will people search for you? Think of LinkedIn as a search engine that people use to find you or your expertise. Make sure to use terms that describe what you do and terms that people will use when trying to find you or someone with your experience.
Add a photo. Remember, LinkedIn is a professional SOCIAL network and is based on relationships. People like photos and it helps make your profile more personal. I recommend using the same photo on all of your online profiles–this allows people to more easily recognize you online (as long as it’s not a photo from 1982).
Customize your LinkedIn Profile URL. This is any easy thing to do when editing your LinkedIn Profile. A custom URL can use your name instead of a long alpha-numeric URL. Custome URLs are easier to remember, better for search engine optimization, and look better in your email signature or on your business card.
Use LinkedIn to find people you know. There is no better way to understand the value of LinkedIn than to use it. Start searching for colleagues, friends, and people you trust. Use your contact list or “rolodex” to add and find people you know.
Promote your Profile. Add your LinkedIn Profile URL to your email signature so people can easily find you online and connect with you. Add it to your Facebook page, or Twitter profile. If you have a blog, add a LinkedIn badge that can link people to your profile.
Add multiple Links. Be sure to add your other online profiles or links to the ‘Websites’ section of your profile. This creates an easy way for people to find and connect with you outside of LinkedIn.
Join groups. Groups are a great way to connect with people with similar interests. If you’re a lawyer, join groups related to your practice area. If you’re a marketer, join groups that are related to your customers. I’m certain you’ll find a group that interests you. But, if not, create one!
Answers. LinkedIn has a great Question and Answer section called ‘Answers’ that allows people to ask questions and get answers using the collective intelligence of their network.
Companies. Another useful feature is the information found in the ‘Companies’ section. Here you’ll find brief descriptions of companies and all the people you have connections to at that company. A side bar also has numerous stats about the company and the employees who work there.
This is certainly not an extensive list of everything LinkedIn has to offer, but I hope it helps you get a little more out of your professional network.
Here is a great tip that will allow you to take a screen capture of anything on your iPhone. Simply hold down the home button and the on/off button at the same time. The screen will flash white and you’ll hear a camera shutter sound. The screen grabs are saved as full resolution 320 x480 images to ‘Camera Roll’ directory in the Photos app. It’s then easy to upload to iPhoto or email the screen capture. I like to use Flickit to easily upload to Flickr.
This is a very clever use of stop motion for Oren Lavie’s song Her Morning Elegance.
Here are some fun facts about the video:
The video was shot all stills – roughly 3225 still photos for the entire video, using one camera, hanging from the ceiling for the main body of the movie.
It took 4 weeks before shooting to create an animated computer generated storyboard for the video, with 3d dummies for the characters.
It took only 2 days of shooting for the live actors on set to re-create the 3.5 minutes computer sequence, frame by frame.
Some of the bed sheets used in the video were taken from Oren’s own bedroom and are now considered collectors items, worth at the moment not very much and therefore used as bed sheets.
Todd Andrlik ranks the top media and marketing blogs for Advertising Age’s Power 150 list.
SELECTION METHODOLOGY:
What Todd came up with is a largely objective ranking, which is probably why it’s already gained such popularity among marketing and media bloggers. It uses a basic multimetric algorithm to obtain a final ranking based on the sum of eight sources, seven of which come from Google, Bloglines, Alexa, Yahoo! and Technorati. The last is Todd’s own personal subjective measure.
Venn Diagram’s can be used to illustrate the amount of overlap between various sets of items. In the projects section of Neoformix I have just published an application I call Twitter Venn. It supports investigation into the relationship between how words are used within the messages of all the people using Twitter.
Basically, you type in either two or three terms separated by commas, click ‘Search’, and get something like this:
In this example, the large circle on the left contains a great many small red circles which represent messages (tweets) that contain the word ‘chocolate’ but do not contain ‘milk’. The large circle on the right has blue circles representing messages that contain ‘milk’ but not ‘chocolate’. The intersecting area has purple circles indicating how many tweets contain both terms used together. The number of smaller circles is meant to show how frequently those words or combinations of words are used by people within Twitter. The bottom right area has a small table showing an estimate of the number of tweets/day for the various combinations.
Required reading this week at FreshNetworks has been this great presentation from Mike Trap on what he calls ’scalable intimacy’, the intersection between branding and social media.
Viral marketing (word-of-mouth marketing) is a really cool thing. Just think about it… instead of spending an insane amount of money on newspapers ads, TV commercials or banner ads, you spent nothing – and let your fans do all the work for you.
With viral marketing, your campaigns will suddenly get a life of its own – and start to spread like a virus. Everyone want to see it, and when they do, they all want to share it.
It is immensely powerful, usually having 500-1000 times greater impact than what you get from regular advertisements.
Here’s a take on the idea of the social web and how it differs from page-based and broadcast conceptions of web space. The fundamental difference here is that where broadcast thinking envisions a web of HTML pages connected by hyperlinks, social thinking envisions a web of people, relationships, and content created by people.
The individual is at the center of the social web experience.
There are a lot of ways, obviously, you might draw this picture, and a lot of things you might include on it. For example, you could group the social web into communities, contacts, and content.
As marketers scale back their ad budgets, some new technologies that make it easier for marketers to track the impact of their online advertising are gaining ground.
Products based on these technologies — such as customized ads that show different products to different users, Web ads hidden inside links in text, and online coupons — are part of what is called “performance-driven advertising.” That’s because the products aim to improve and more precisely measure how a particular ad performs.
While no one format is likely to emerge as a silver bullet for marketers seeking to use their ad dollars more efficiently, the advertising industry is betting on these technologies to increase online advertising spending. Altogether, the U.S. online-ad market is expected to increase 9% to $25.7 billion in 2009, slowing from its year-earlier growth rate of 11%, according to estimates from research firm eMarketer.
Razorfish and CafeMom issued a “Digital Mom” report that examines the role of digital technology in modern moms. (Do yourself a favor and click on the download PDF icon to read the report. It’s the second to the last icon in the navigation bar.)
Here is a quick summary to entice you to read the whole thing. Anyone who is trying to market products or services for moms should read this excellent report.
“Social media and text messaging, instant messaging, and gaming, now used by the majority of digital moms, are no longer niche activities.”
“At the same time, moms with children 12 or older are more likely than moms of children under 12 to use gaming and video. Marketers have an opportunity to respond to these trends by acknowledging that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy against moms may not work.”
“Marketers should recognize the dual purposes (communicating with peers and monitoring their kids) moms of older children have for engaging with emerging technologies, particularly social channels. They should learn more about the challenges moms face when embracing technology, and provide them with better resources and information to help them guide their children.”
“Marketers have an opportunity to utilize communications channels like social networking, text messaging and gaming to facilitate conversation among moms and influence decision making.”
“Marketers should consider marketing to mom as both an interconnected woman and a mom, as her interests extend beyond parenting.”
“Among digital moms, the gap is closing between TV and other channels in creating initial awareness about products. Marketers should consider the penetration level and relative influence of each channel when determining how, when, and where to reach digital moms along the purchase funnel.”
If you’d like a quick way to scan what moms are blogging about, check out moms.alltop.
Posted by Nathan
Jan 22, 2009 to FlowingData Projects, Mapping
On Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 12pm, Barack Obama officially became the 44th president of the United States of America. As we all watched Obama being sworn in front of the massive crowd, Twitter was abuzz with excitement. Just how excited was the Twittersphere? Watch for yourself. The map starts early Monday morning. As the day moves on more people wake and tweet at a steady rate with increasing volume as the time comes nearer. Europe gets in on some of the action when the US goes back to sleep. Tuesday morning comes in with a new beginning in the air. Then boom, it’s time, and Twitter bursts with excitement.
We often hear how the media landscape is changing. But the most striking media development in recent years is really the one that makes us human, and that’s our deep-seated desire to organize and maintain relationships (or socialize).
Thanks to sites like Facebook and MySpace, consumers now experience the world through the company they keep — a very caveman-like concept. The fact that marketers are struggling with this shift is somewhat ironic. Great marketers have long known that social dynamics play a critical factor in brand and purchase decisions, and the key to success is becoming an ingrained part of the consumer conversation.
Viral marketing is an idea that spreads–and an idea that while it is spreading actually helps market your business or cause.
Two kinds of viral marketing: The original classic sort in which the marketing is the product and which a self-amplifying cycle occurs. Hotmail, for example, or YouTube. The more people use them, the more people see them. The more people see them, the more people use them. The product or service must be something that improves once more people use it.
A second kind has evolved over the last few years, and that’s a marketing campaign that spreads but isn’t the product itself. Shepard Fairey’s poster of Barack Obama was everywhere, because people chose to spread it. It was viral (it spread) and it was marketing (because it made an argument–a visual one–for a candidate.)
Something being viral is not, in an of itself, viral marketing. Who cares that 32,000,000 people saw your stupid video? It didn’t market you or your business in a tangible, useful way.
Companies can and do prosper during times of economic turmoil. Take a lesson from brands whose Depression-era advertising strategies were key to their survival.
With the recent meltdown on Wall Street and talk of a possible depression, I thought it would be instructive to do a bit of research on what happened with regard to advertising during the Great Depression. I have heard anecdotes over the years of great companies founded during recessions. What do GE, Disney, HP and Microsoft have in common? They were all startups during steep declines in the U.S. economy. GE started during the panic of 1873, Disney started during the recession of 1923-24, HP began during the Great Depression, and Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft during the recession of 1975.
This list purely consists of English social news sites. There are no social bookmarking or social network sites included. I’ve not included video sharing sites because I’ll be writing more on them and video marketing in a future article.
Here’s a brief definition of social news sites, in case you’re unfamiliar with them:
Social News websites are communities which allow its users to submit news stories, articles and media (videos/pictures) and share them with other users or the general public. Some of these articles will be given more visibility, depending on various factors such as the number of user votes for each item.
Apart from counting registered user votes, some social news websites employ human editors to determine the visibility of each news item. Certain stories will be removed from the website while others may be given a ‘featured‘ position if the story is highly relevant and news worthy.
Just back from a week at Burning Man 2008, our neighborhood picnic was greeted with a visit from the ‘Duck Flambe.’ This incredible machine was a huge hit with the neighborhood and at Burning Man. (Don’t worry, no trees or people were harmed or burned in this demonstration.)
Curious on how driving style affects gas mileage, I did a test over this past week to calculate my average fuel consumption on my commute to work. My commute is 8.2 miles (one-way) and has a mix of street and freeway driving.On Monday and Tuesday, I drove very conservatively trying to get the very best gas mileage I could.On Monday, I got an average of 23.5 MPG and on Tuesday I did a little better and got 24.5 MPG.Then on Wednesday and Thursday I drove as I normally would (faster starts and with more braking) and averaged 18.4 and 18.6 MPG, respectively.
This test showed me that I can increase my miles per gallon by 30% (or 5.5 MPG) by simply changing how I drive. This equates to an additional 99 miles per tank or a savings of $19.68 in fuel costs (assuming I fill the tank with 18 gallons of premium fuel at $4.77 per gallon and average 24 MPG).
I am amazed by these results and will definitely change how I drive to improve my miles per gallon.
UPDATE: Gary Richards, a.k.a. “Mr. Roadshow,” a journalist at the San Jose Mercury News, quoted a few items from this blog for his article Cheaper gasoline? It’s all relative on July 26, 2008.
Drop.io is a cool utility that allows you to setup simple private sharing nodes that they call “drops.” Similar to TinyURL, they create a unique URL for each “drop” you create. You can add all sorts of files and create passwords to protect your content. Your information is stored in a well organized way based on file type and it’s a very easy to use interface.
Are you using LinkedIn? I mean…are USING LinkedIn? It’s not enough just to have a LinkedIn account and accept the occasional invitation that comes across your inbox. LinkedIn is a very powerful, useful, professional social networking tool that should be used as a competitive advantage.
Viral marketing is an idea that spreads–and an idea that while it is spreading actually helps market your business or cause.
