Tag: Online Communities

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Time to revisit LinkedIn? The time might be right to reconsider its importance in your social media strategy…

So you heard that a company called LinkedIn just went public, and want to find out just what the hype is all about and how you can use it? TNW is here to get you up and running on LinkedIn before this very day is over.

LinkedIn is a social network, research tool, and job platform for professionals, although the site’s draw has been bringing in a more diverse group of users in recent months, including many still in university.

The site was founded in late 2002, launched in early 2003, and now claims more than 100 million members to its name in over 200 countries. In short, for the educated working person, LinkedIn is a website in which having a profile is quickly becoming mandatory.

More to the point, as use of the site has grown, and as the willingness of its users to upload increasing amounts of personal information has risen, a person’s profile on LinkedIn is slowly morphing into a living resume of their work that is, for the most part, generally accessible.

Let’s hop into the fun, but before we get you into the site we need to talk about how you are going to use LinkedIn.

via thenextweb.com

LinkedIn is the oldest, and in many ways, the least popular of the ‘Holy Trinity’ of social media [Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn]. You can follow the ‘via’ link above to start rocking LinkedIn if you’ve been left behind…

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Image via CrunchBase

If you’re a business owner and you’ve heard the recent news about Facebook’s attention-grabbing new feature for location-sharing and checkins, you’re probably itching to find out what Facebook Places can do for your business and how it can help you reach out to would-be customers and loyal regulars in your community.

While Facebook isn’t ready to announce any special brand-platform relationships or tie-ins just yet, one Facebook ad exec told us that the company does have plans to integrate Places with its larger marketing offerings for SMBs. The best thing a business owner can do to prepare for those offerings is get familiar with the ins and outs of Facebook and location marketing now.

Here are a few pointers for how SMBs can use Facebook Places and other marketing tools starting today.

via mashable.com

You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’d like to dig a little deeper…

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I’m a huge fan of Lee LeFever and the team at CommonCraft — no one does short, simple, insightful technology explanations better than they do and this quick tour de force on Twitter is no exception. I encourage you to watch this as well as all the great videos the have over at their YouTube channel…

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Image via CrunchBase

“Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that can be accessed through your account on their website, on your desktop, by instant messaging and mobile phones. Hundreds of thousands of people and companies, including several presidential candidates, reportedly, are users, although the firm won’t release that information.

What is known about Twitter is that its traffic is increasing rapidly, although it’s still considered a niche site. According to data from Web analytics firm Hitwise, visits to Twitter have more than doubled in the past 3 months and were up 60% in April. Twitter ranked #439 among Social Networks and Forums in late April, but its size is difficult to measure because it has so many ways for access, primarily cell phones.” Click here to read more…

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I’ve heard it all before… “my company just needs a good website to get my product out. Trust me they will come”… or another good one, “I have a facebook profile and now I can send out product updates and people will just get them.” Er, no. For years Business to Business companies have been trying to match the success, and sometime failures, of traditional media that Business to Consumer companies have had. Then the internet seemed to even the playing field. Only problem was, B2B companies didn’t have the budgets B2C companies had to market that cool website. Plus, the market for their products is much smaller. When I mean smaller, I mean I know a few companies that only have about a dozen or so potential customers. You could technically buy a dozen donuts and email each prospect one. As long as it’s not jelly filled, because that could get messy.

So back to facebook.com and can it work for B2B? The answer is yes. But it does come with a few caveats. Nothing, and I mean nothing, will work without a sound marketing strategy. Also, one of the main reason’s any tactic will fail is lack of follow through. Let’s face it, nobody has any time to do any marketing things during our busy work day right? Wrong. How may of us check our facebook account as often as we check our email? Lots, ok, we also check on our farms, but that’s totally different. So just by checking your facebook account, you have time to add a update that can make your business more relevent to prospects and current customers. So I have written five steps that can help any B2B company get more out of facebook.

via macdesign13.wordpress.com

I’m so glad I know Kiar Olson and I love his perspective on this topic — you can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’d like to read his ‘5 step’ program…

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So I launched my blog this past Monday and announced it to the Twitter world…got many retweets and congrats, and at least one blog mention (thanks again, Maggie!).

Now the reality sets in. I actually have to write this thing…it ain’t gonna write itself. After all, I don’t want to be like the bride who loves weddings and hates being married. I confess: this might be a big reason I haven’t started a blog before now. After all, it’s a commitment. I value my integrity, and now I’ve publicly said I’m gonna do this thing, I darn well better do it!

Sometimes, putting “it” out there, making it public, is a very good thing. I guess that’s why they tell you writing down your goals is so important. I think this blog is going to do some really good things for me.

• It will help me be more disciplined in when and how I write. Writing is hard work…just ask any writer who makes it look effortless (and there are a lot of them out there!). You can’t wing it; you can’t “mail it in.” Every writing teacher I ever had (not to mention every book in my writer’s library) told me the key to success in writing is to sit down and write. Regularly.

• It will force me to prioritize (or at least take a stab at it) what I want to think and write about. My really big challenge is that I have lots to learn and lots of things I want to learn, and lots of things I want to write about here. Even within the topic of learning – not to mention the peripherally related things that might end up on this blog. Ten minutes on Twitter and I’ve found 20 new websites to read…an hour on a live Twitter chat brings me new tweeps and a whole new set of links to explore. Simply by going through the process of prioritizing what’s important to this blog, I’ll get increasingly better at deciding where to focus, what to write about.

• It will help me refine my ideas. When I’m figuring things out, I’ll frequently “think out loud” (if you’ve ever been in conversation with me, you’ve likely heard me do it!). I “write out loud,” too…a sort of stream-of-consciousness process that helps me capture ideas and then mold them into something that makes sense (to me, anyway).

So even as I blog, I’m learning. Learning to be more disciplined, better at prioritizing, better at refining ideas. My big ‘ah-ha’ for the day…what was yours? Spend a little time thinking about it; you might surprise yourself.

via learningevangelist.com

I loved this post so much that I grabbed the whole post as a quote. The ‘learning evangelist’ nailed it! I blog as much for myself as I do my readers and clients — blogging is a discipline that benefits me. Far from being a waste of time, I find it actually makes me more efficient about doing ‘marketing’ because it allows me to chip away at it a little bit at time…

When someone asks me a question, if I answer them via email, I benefit only that person and perhaps the people in their circle. If I take the same content, however, and create an ’email to the world’ via a blog post, I can reexpress my own content over and over again to people and in ways I never dreamed possible!

Kudos to the ‘learning evangelist’. You get ‘it’ whatever ‘it’ is and I predict a long and happy blogging career for you…

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Facebook logo
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The reasons for creating an online store on Facebook are obvious: it has 30 million users in the UK alone, offers can be spread virally and it’s where people are spending large chunks of their online time.

Neither does creating an online store have to be expensive. Applications, such as Storenvy and ShopIgniter, make it relatively simple to add a store tab to your Facebook page.

Perhaps the key reason why creating Facebook store is a no brainer is because Facebook delivers a social shopping experience that is very difficult to replicate.

Trying to build a social shopping site outside of Facebook would be an expensive, slow and risky challenge. Not only do you have to attract users in their millions, but you also have to persuade them to start spending as much time on the site as they do on Facebook.

The fact is that Facebook has such a massive head start on its rivals (with 600 million users and counting) that it could dominate the world of ecommerce, let alone social shopping, in the years to come.

via socialmediatoday.com

Facebook. Are you on it? Comment below or ‘connect’ above to discuss how this applies to you and your organization…

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It’s a well known secret in real estate that the three most important aspects of a property are ‘location, location, location’. In social media, there’s a similar mantra. It’s called ‘share, share, share’…

“If you step back and take a look how information moves in Social Media, it’s quite different than “Traditional Media.” Back in the day, most people got their information from newspapers or magazines. The direction of information is from the few (the writer or publisher) down to the many. We’ve all seen this in action in our daily lives, maybe to the point of not even noticing it anymore. Got a favorite newspaper columnist or TV show host? One single person communicating to possibly millions of people with little interaction between the communicator and the listeners.

As we step into the Social Media arena, the direction and flow of information is between the readers and the writers. The interaction (thanks to the internet) tends to be instant and the ripple effect from this sharing of information can spread far and wide. With the users of Social Media able to contribute news and information to anyone willing to listen, we now have a conversation. Just like the conversations you are already having at the local coffeeshop or at work.

The recent buzzing and tittering by the media about Twitter and Social Media in general, it’s no wonder business owners may feel forced into using these internet-based communication tools, or perhaps miss sales opportunities their competition is getting instead of them. Not being familiar with the landscape, many make that sometimes fatal error of confusing Social Media with traditional advertising.” Source: The Secret to Social Media – Business Networking – Biznik

This isn’t something to be afraid of — it’s something to be embraced and leveraged. Using the right set of tools, sharing is easy…

As the internet marketing gurus at Hubspot say ““Each thoughtful post on your blog is a public demonstration of your thought leadership, personal integrity, humor, and professional insights. You don’t have to refute one of Einstein’s theories to get respect.” To that I would add each thoughtful ‘share’. In my seminars I ask people how many of them have ever forwarded a link to their friends or saved a bookmark. Of course EVERYONE has done that. What differs is the efficacy or efficiency of their tools.

Shareaholic

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYefcEknS2Y

Shareaholic is my personal favorite and one of the first Firefox add-ons I install whenever I move to a new computer. I also recommend ShareThis, another Firefox add-on as well…

ShareThis

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMSCJeagRAE

In closing, I’ll share with you one of my most important tactics. I’m always on the lookout for something good to share — it helps establish my thought leadership position. If something is really good, however, I’ll do a blog post FIRST and THEN share that post with others. Yes, it’s important to share but it’s ok to be a little selfish in the process by sharing something from an internet property that you own so that it drives traffic to your homebase, wherever that may be. Questions? Feedback? Leave a comment or use the contact page to reach me…

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Been laid off? Don’t despair — it may be the best thing that ever happened to you! e1evation, llc came about as the result of a layoff — a couple actually — and I’ve had some of the best years of my life since the last time that happened almost 5 years ago…

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJltcT7DH7g&feature=player_embedded

If you like the movie, you can join the Facebook group. If you need help or support leave a comment or use the contact page. I may be able to offer some encouragement…

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How to Setup a Facebook Page for your Business, Organization or Church

via youtube.com

I’m doing a training session next week at NWTC on ‘Facebook for Fun and Profit’. Unfortunately, it’s all filled up — for those of you interested in the topic that won’t be able to make it, this may help…

Posted via web from e1evation, llc

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10 Reasons Not To Ignore Your Blog For Facebook

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Image via CrunchBase

Brace yourself: Facebook is trying to take over the world. Or, if not the world, at least the entire Internet. With Facebook partnering up with popular sites like Yelp, many SMB owners may feel as if their load got lighter. I mean, why waste time worrying about your building your blog or your own site when you can grow your Facebook presence instead? If Facebook’s opening up the doors so that people can take you with them, you don’t have to worry about anything else anymore, right?

Wrong!

It doesn’t matter how hot Facebook or any of the other social media sites are looking right now. You still need to be focused on using your blog to create your own authority and brand. Want to know why?

Here are ten reasons.

via smallbiztrends.com

You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go directly to the source to get the whole story if you’d like to get the 10 reasons. #1? You don’t own Facebook…

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5 Things Every New Facebook User Should Do Immediately

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Image via CrunchBase

Facebook works.

Don’t have a Facebook account? Last time I checked, there were more than 500 million people in the world, so I know there are a few of you. If you are new to Facebook, there are some tips you should definitely do on your newly created account that take priority over everything else. In this article, I’ll show you what those things are.

via makeuseof.com

You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’d like to dig a little deeper…

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How to Combine Your Facebook Profile for Both Business and Pleasure

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Image via CrunchBase

Despite publishing intimate details of their life, most people view Facebook as a very personal network; as a platform for pleasure not for business. But if you’re anything like me, your Facebook friends consist of people from a cross section of your life; some personal friends who you’ve known for years, some work colleagues and some contacts from your professional network. They may include anyone from your best mate to your mum to your boss to an industry peer, and that makes the humble status update a potential nightmare. Do you really want your boss to see the banter you have with your mates about the girl you pulled on your drunken night out? Do your friends really care about your industry blog posts or your work chat?

The psychology behind this dynamic leads to many people I know breaking Facebook rules and setting up two profiles; one personal profile and one professional profile. After all, you should never mix business with pleasure, isn’t that the mantra? But wouldn’t it be great if you could personalise your Facebook profile to every single one of your friends, giving each of them status updates and shared content that is specifically relevant to them and leaving out the stuff that isn’t?

Well, in actual fact, you can. Clever use of Facebook’s Lists feature means that you can keep your personal friends largely separate from your work colleagues, publishing different content to different groups on the same page while ensuring that never the twain shall meet. With Lists you can dice and splice your Facebook friends in as many different ways as you like, effectively presenting a personalised profile to each different one of your friends depending on their interests, your relationship with them and what you want them to see (and not to see). For once in your life you really can keep all of the people happy all of the time.

To get started, watch the short video clip below on how to create lists of friends in Facebook. You can create as many lists as you like, from simply one for ‘friends’ and one for ‘work’ as in my video example, to multiple lists. Importantly if you’re going to get very targeted with it, any friend can belong to more than one list.

via socialmediatoday.com

This article addresses the most critical issues of using Facebook for business in a very thorough and effect way. You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article along with the authors videos…

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“No, Really, I am the Swiss Army Knife of XYZ”

TEDxBayArea May 2010
Image by ttnk via Flickr

Because of a twitter exchange, a CEO of a company sent me their website link and asked me to check it out. After a minute of arriving, I left. I couldn’t tell who it was for, I couldn’t even tell what it was. Rather than ignoring this email, I wrote back with some advice to the CEO — make it easy to know who you serve and why it matters.

It’s the easiest advice to give of course — know who you will serve and why you stand out. But each entrepreneur I know tries to skip this point. So let me just share that “we serve everyone who could possibly use xyz” is not a valid answer.
And, yet, you might ask… does it really matter? I mean, what if the product really does have scale across many segments and it’s agnostic to size of company? What if it is really the swiss-army knife an solves tons of problems? Then, can the company avoid segmentation or individual positioning? Really, isn’t it better to position towards a big space than a small space?

Well, that depends.

via blog.nilofermerchant.com

Nilofer Merchant is easy on the eyes but hard on the brain [that’s her on the right in the photo above], and I was lucky to know her during my time at Apple. Most of the time, however, she makes my head hurt with posts like this — I hate it when she makes me think so much!

You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’d like to dig a little deeper — she’s definitely one to follow…

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Your Brand On Facebook: TMI?

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase

Yesterday morning, I logged into Facebook (as I do each morning) and saw a post from my cousin’s wife that my cousin had suffered a major heart attack the night before and had open-heart surgery. Thankfully, he will be ok, but the shock of this happening to my cousin at such a young age was intense.

His father wasn’t too thrilled to learn this had been posted on Facebook before he had a chance to let family and friends know what was going on. He was fairly upset that another family member put it out on Facebook but concluded, due to her age, “That’s just this generation, I guess.”

We are living in a time where generations are divided about what constitutes too much information, or “TMI.” To younger generations, putting the word out about significant life events through social media is a quick way to keep friends and loved ones informed. It helps avoid the hassle of individual phone calls, text messages, or emails — and helps keep attention on the task at hand, in this case, helping care for my cousin.

Now that this situation is known, the family is less sensitive to using Facebook to stay on top of the situation. Why? First, because it’s not private anymore. Second, because the updates are relevant and important for those of us following his progress.

The question of brands over-sharing on Facebook is a bit different. The dynamics of what should and what shouldn’t be shared are very different. But there are similarities, too. Posts need to be relevant and they need to come at the right pace. Not surprisingly, there is a direct relationship between the two. The better the posts, the more often people will want to see them.

via mediapost.com

You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’d like to dig a little deeper…

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From Side Project to Sustainable Business Using Social Media

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase

Over the last 18 months I’ve built two profitable businesses with the help of social media. One business was a sure thing; the other was a side project. My side project was a blog: womeninbusiness.com.au. All of the important numbers (subscribers, page views and profits) are growing monthly and I’ve never paid a cent to promote it.

When I decided to drop out of corporate life, my first move was to open a consultancy. I had been working online since 2001 and by 2008 was confident I’d accumulated enough skills and experience that finding work wouldn’t be a problem.

Around about this time, Twitter was the next big thing. I realized if I wanted to offer my clients the best service I could, I’d better get to know what Twitter was, and work out it was going to be any good for business.

Little did I know that the answer would be a resounding ‘yes’—and that it would help me take my side project from an idea to a sustainable business in less than two years.

via problogger.net

You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’d like to know more…

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7 Effective Facebook Pages YOU Can Create Right Now

via marketingsavant.com

Cool! Thanks for the <3, Dana! We’re proud of the work that e1evation and Envano have done for AGCO! If you want to see the other 6 Facebook pages that Dana VanDen Heuvel thinks are effective, you can follow the ‘via’ link…

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8+ tools for upgrading your Twitter experience

HootSuite Fluid icon
Image by yjsk via Flickr

Admit it: You might love Twitter as a social network, but you probably don’t love it as a service. Twitter is the Yugo of social tools — it can take you wherever to need to go, but there aren’t a whole lot of bells and whistles. Of course, Yugos probably broke down less often.

Twitter’s simplicity is probably a big part of why it has attracted so many new users over the last four years, but once you master the basics, it isn’t long before you find yourself wishing there was an easy way to unfollow inactive users or send private messages to several people at the same time. The good news is that Twitter makes it easy for developers to create tools that can take your Twitter experience from Yugo to Lexus without too much fuss.

Here are eight Web applications that you can use to kick your account into a higher gear. Note: For simplicity’s sake, I won’t get into full Twitter clients, mobile apps or analytics tools today — those weighty topics will have to wait for their own posts.

via smartblogs.com

What’s the + for? HootSuite. If you follow the ‘via’ link, you can read the author’s perspective. For me, however, HootSuite is the one tool that rules them all. Why? As a web based app with great mobile apps for iPhone or Android, it’s always available to be my social media dashboard — not only for Twitter, but for Facebook pages and other social media sites as well. HootSuite — don’t tweet home without it!

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4 must-have social-media dashboards for your business

Image representing Gist as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

While big brands and agencies have the luxury of resources and money, local businesses don’t. What they need is a social-media dashboard — an all-in-one, Web-based monitoring tool for Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites where customers hang out — that can optimize their online presence, engage with users and manage social campaigns. But that tool needs to meet three criteria: cheap, easy to use and automated. With that in mind, here’s a list of the top four that I find particularly well-suited for business use.

via venturebeat.com

I encourage you to follow the ‘via’ link and learn more about these ‘dashboards’. imho, the list is incomplete, however, without Gist and Google Reader. What are your favorite social dashboards?

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Marketing Progress Poll Results

via churchmarketingsucks.com

With only 40 respondents, I don’t know how solid this data is but I still find it interesting. You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source to read the rest of the article. e1evation = “simply powerful social media”!

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Repurposing Content for Maximum Impact

[Hitterdals Church, Telemarken (i.e, Telemark)...
Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr

The gospel is to be communicated. This is evangelism. By what means should this communication happen? I get the feeling from the Apostle Paul that it’s “by all means” (1 Corinthians 9:22).

Paul preached and spoke as he traveled the Roman roads from city to city. He wrote and utilized the volunteer help of messengers to spread his ideas. He hit the synagogues, the marketplaces and even the prisons to share the gospel. Yet the tools at Paul’s disposal were quite limited compared to our arsenal today.

By enlarging your congregation’s collection of tools, you can stretch the value of your communications strategy and talk to new audiences in new places via new mediums never possible in the early apostolic era. Consider this:

  • The pastor’s message can be re-distributed by media through the mail.
  • It can be printed in periodicals and publications.
  • It can be offered in a media player on a website.
  • It can become part of a podcast, updating weekly with very little effort or financial cost.
  • Pieces of that message can become blog posts when re-worked for an online reading audience.
  • More pieces can be sent out as a daily devotional email.
  • Nuggets from that message can be tweeted and retweeted, or shared on Facebook.
  • Discussion arising from all of these distributions can create opportunities to converse with people previously out of reach.
  • Those conversations can become the beginnings of new content as the message takes on a life of its own by its listening audience.
  • A short clip from the message (if recorded on video) can land on YouTube.
  • Church members can share the clip on their Facebook wall.
  • The slideshow from the message can be shared online.
  • The slideshow, transcript, and audio and/or video can be packaged together and distributed by download, CD or even custom-imprinted thumb drives for other churches to benefit from.

Should we be creating new messages? Absolutely. But we can also take what God has given already and put it to its fullest possible use, spreading it around in the cloud of content we’re all breathing and then fielding the questions that arise.

The mission has never changed: Get the gospel to the world. But the tools have multiplied many times over, allowing us to do it more efficiently than ever before. Which means we can spend less time fighting to create more content at all costs and spend more time simplifying our message and distributing it effectively.

via churchmarketingsucks.com

It’s all about churches this morning @ on the ‘elevation blog’ — due in part to rediscovering ‘Church Marketing Sucks’, subscribing to their feed, and being reminded of their great content…

I want to put a really fine point on this post by saying imho — it’s all about using a blog as a homebase that automatically re-expresses or redelivers content to multiple points without additional burden on the church staff [same principle applies to business, btw!]. For example, the author puts podcasts above blogs, but a podcast is nothing more than an ‘audio’ category in a blog. Here’s an example — get it?

I quoted the whole post above for busy people — pasters, ceo’s, thought leaders — who wouldn’t normally take the time to click through to the source. Comment, call or use the contact form to connect so we can talk about how this applies to your ministry…

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