Lisa’s Blog
There is a maxim which has been stated to cadets at West Point: Risk more than others think is safe; Care more than others think is wise; Dream more than others think is practical; Expect more than others think is possible.
Imagine living your life this way. It’s the way I mentor my colleagues – be they teachers, managers, or business partners.
Risk more than others think is safe
Nothing worthwhile in life is risk free. Some of the most rewarding experiences or outcomes entail the most risk. Risk can be at minimum emotional, financial, intellectual or physical. Risk isn’t equal to recklessness. Risk creates discomfort, but should not create abject fear.
Risk encompasses failure. Failure is a fact sometimes. It is not a judgment. It is merely the facts trying to tell you to change your approach.
Accomplishment with risk is exhilarating. Thomas Paine said : “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem to lightly.” He was speaking of America’s fight for Independence during the revolutionary war. Now there was a risk. And the reward was dear.
Care more than others think is wise
Caring about the end and the means, about the people you help (or may hurt) along the way really drives you to do the best possible job. It helps you to perform to your peak ability. A friend once told me I spend too much time focused on finding the right way to do things. What other way is there? Care about the quality of what you do. And care about the people you do it with (and to, and for). Personally. Deeply. Revel in their success.
Dream more than others think is practical
“It can’t be done” or “It can’t be done now” or “that won’t work” or “you have your head in the clouds” are all off point.
Nothing new ever came into being except through dreams. Einstein. Gates. Jobs. Lincoln. Now there are dreamers.
Of course it can be done, and what better time than now? Who will find the way? The person with their head in the clouds, dreaming up the solution, focused on the future, not wed to the past. And with their feet on the ground, so that when the vision is clear, they can take off running – ahead of the pack and ahead of their time.
“I have a dream.” He certainly did, and look where we are now.
Expect more than others think is possible.
Start with yourself. Weight loss? Financial success? Work effort? Quality? Fitness? Enjoyment? Always set the bar high. Then do so for others who are your colleagues, partners, students, children – whomever. With compassion, but with an expectation of performance or achievement. Show by your example how to get over that bar.
One last thought. My hero, my father, always told me “your word is your bond.” Once given, follow through. If you get knocked down, dust yourself off and persevere. But never go back on your word.
Look in the mirror, right now, and give yourself your word – to live by these words.
The reason social media doesn’t matter is because, upon further review, it doesn’t exist beyond a label. While all the categorizing, classifying and departmentalizing was going on, that which was called social media simply settled into the center of marketing and business strategy and behavior. Everything that we called social media is irrelevant and mislabed – there’s a new way of doing business and marketing for sure, but it’s a behavior and focus on customer involvement that’s become a new norm – and that’s all there is to it.
We don’t need social media tools, social media plans, social media agencies, or social media departments, we need marketing strategies and tactics that are informed by a terribly heightened customer expectation. I’m not the first marketer to suggest this for sure, the idea of engagement has always been a part of the social media thread, but we aren’t moving fast enough to stamp out this idea that social media is somehow still a new and meaningful concept – now that we understand what actually happened it’s time to drop the term, concept, and confusion and focus on what really matters.
Prospect engagement matters
If we’ve learned one thing over the last year or two, it’s that prospects are drawn to the ability to interact with the companies, brands, and messages that they choose to absorb. Marketing and sales must include this desired behavior in order to even get an invitation into the prospect’s decision making world.
Customer experience matters
Traditional lead generation is dead, we’ve all accepted this by now, but what’s replaced it? If being found by prospects is the new form of lead generation awareness, then trust is the new form of lead conversion. Trust happens rapidly when customers have an experience worth talking about. A remarkable customer experience is the most effective form of lead generation
Collaboration matters
The Internet has enabled a world where we can work in conjunction with prospects, customers, suppliers, mentors, consultants, and staff in ways that make the finished work a personalized experience infused with the real time input. Community sourcing is a practice that underpins all product, service and business development activities.
Fusion matters
Another powerful lesson gained over the last few years is that offline activity is enhanced, rather than replaced, by online activity. The careful fusion of hi touch business building that’s done face to face with hi tech business building that enables more frequent, personalized contact and communication is the secret to delivering the most advanced customer experience.
Let’s stop measuring adoption of social media and go to work on simply measuring effective interaction in marketing.
Got $300? Hire me to get that blog up and running – GET OUT THERE!
Social Media Cheat Sheet
by Drew McLellan
FREE PDF SOCIAL MEDIA CHEAT SHEET BELOW
As I speak to conference audiences across the country about social media, one of the questions I always get asked is… how do I know which social media sites to use?
Of course… there is no single, magic or easy answer to that question. It all depends on your goals, your overall marketing strategy, your resources and your industry. It’s not a cookie cutter sort of thing.
However…there’s nothing wrong with a little cheat sheet to help you determine which sites are best for:
- Customer communication
- Brand exposure
- Driving traffic to your site
- SEO
Which is why the cheat sheet created by CMO.com is so handy. It ranks the most popular/used social media sites (from the biggies like Facebook and Digg to the less talked about Reddit and del.icio.us) as good, okay or bad for the four goals above.
You can download a much bigger, easier to read PDF version of it by clicking here.
Hat tip to my buddy Gavin Heaton, who wrote about this a couple weeks ago.
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Why You DON’T Need A Social Media Expert
TalentZooo
Most experts I’ve seen are people who understand how certain social apps work. Many are skilled at being social on the Internet themselves. They can amass small armies of followers overnight but hiring them to advise in marketing matters makes about as much sense as asking your cable guy to mastermind your next TV campaign based on his extensive knowledge of how televisions work.
Second, I will not be telling anyone they should use social media. In fact, I plan to do the opposite. I’m going to start by asking them to assume all social media is a waste of time and won’t work for their brands. That’s because I believe social media experts have been addressing this issue from the wrong end.
The central issue is not how social media can change marketing. The real issue is how social media has already changed the people we market to. I’m not just talking about the way our customers view technology or communication.
What has changed are fundamental consumer behaviors and the way business is conducted — also known as the economy. This is a much bigger issue than whether you should use Facebook or not.
Despite these initial disappointments, here is what I hope my Norwegian audience will take away from my talk tomorrow.
I hope they will see that whether you use and see value in social media or not, one thing is clear: Social media has changed the people we sell to. As marketers, it’s our job to respond and adapt to these changes. The companies that do this first will have a competitive advantage. This is nothing new, it’s just old-school marketing principles applied to new media.
I hope they will see the business debate over social media has shifted. It’s not a question of involvement but one of strategy. For the past few years, just being in social media was enough to benefit your brand. Those days are over; presence and participation are expected.
From this year on, you will start to see companies that have created social media assets applying real marketing strategies to them to create a competitive advantage.
Last, I hope my audience will understand that if they need help evolving their marketing program to address these changes, they do not require the services of a social media expert. They require the services of a marketing expert who understands social media.
Even marketers who are new to social media would be a safer bet. After all, it’s more likely that a marketing expert could catch up on two or three years of social media developments than a social media expert could compensate for 20 or 30 years of missing marketing experience.
The New News Release
From Shift Communications
Introduction
Is social media changing the way you work? My job as a PR/online communications consultant has changed an awful lot since I started as an intern cutting articles out of a newspaper or transcribing entire electoral rolls into an Excel sheet. There are a metric ton of examples I could use (monitoring, who we reach out to, client based initiatives) but the biggest one is, I believe, the communications vehicle formerly known as the “press release”.
Evolution of the “New Media News Release”
100 years ago, back when the media was all print-based, press releases (named after the printing press) were sent to newspaper and magazine reporters as a way of pitching a story. As the “media” extended into broadcast (radio and later television) the press release became the “news release” to include the new media. Much beloved by PRs, the news release is equally hated by journalists who are constantly spammed with committee written corporate-ese. However, after a famous post by technology journalist Tom Foremski called “Die Press Release! Die! Die! Die!“, a number of the PR community saw how the traditional news release could be remastered for the social media age.
Features
The “new” news release, (at my company, iStudio, we call it the Optimized News Release) is written in a pared down, spin-less fashion combined with a veritable smorgasbord of social media features. Ideally, the news is broken into an introductory paragraph followed by bullet points. A number of executive quotes are broken out in a stand alone section – a far cry from the frankenquotes found in today’s news releases.
Comments and trackbacks are enabled; there’s an RSS feed to subscribe to future releases; there’s video and a stream of tagged links from a social bookmarking service. Want to submit it to digg or save to your del.icio.us account? There’s a one click button. The release is tagged with Technorati and del.icio.us tags to make it easy to find. You can download images and all sorts of other content to put the story in perspective. The end result is a compelling web page that tells the story and the context that story is being told in.
As a bonus, the page is optimized for search and will, eventually, feature microformats to make it even easier for journalists/bloggers find exactly what you need.
Who it’s targeted to
Old releases were also, traditionally distributed over newswires such as Canadian News Wire (CNW) and as such were meant to be read by journalists and either written about or thrown away that day. The Internet means the discovery of documents is no longer linear. I can just as easily stumble upon a news release from yesterday as I can a news release from a month ago – which means any marketing collateral needs to be put into context.
With this in mind, the ONR has three audiences – journalists who need to get to the heart of the story quickly; bloggers who may find it interesting and who may want to write about it and anyone surfing the ‘net. Old news releases were written strictly with the journalist in mind but now, with the democratization of the media, anyone can write about anything.
Why it works
When “pitching” journalists (trying to get them to write about your client), PRs need to know that the old “shotgun” approach of spamming any journalist on your media list is dead. Journalists receive thousands of poorly written emails every day and the prospect of reading your 1000 words ain’t something they look forward to.
They’re busy and the news release doesn’t account for this. Instead of sending a 1000 words off the bat, PRs need to send something short, something succinct, something that gives the journalist all she needs to know about the story in hand along with a link to “find out more”. Previously the link would go to a page like this one which is pretty boring. Now you can send the journalist to a fully functional multimedia Internet page which shows not only the story, but how her readers are reacting to it, the buzz around the story and any relevant trends.
The new format works. The new media news release, optimized news release or whatever we want to call it fits the story into into the technology making it more relevant for today’s media landscape. It works for the journalist; works for the blogger and, because it’s interactive, works for the end user.
Want to find out more?
There’s plenty more reading to be done and if you follow these initial links, I’m sure you’ll be able to find what you’re looking for. Otherwise, leave a comment and I’ll point you in the right direction.
Google group dedicated to the new media news release
Five principles of the remixed release
The working group to determine standards around the release
A proprietary tool developed outside of the working group
An arguement over what it should be called featuring Stowe Boyd and Shel Holtz
Why Do People Bug Me About This!!?
By Lisa Wynn
Enough already about “John & Kate Plus Eight”. This is so annoying.
Now that I have your attention, what I find even MORE annoying is when people ask me in a snarky know-it-all voice “So, what is the ROI on this new social media stuff anyway? (cool speak for “return on investment”)
And yes, to the chagrin of my college age children, my job really does pay me to play on Twitter and blog while listening to The Fray.
Getattahere!
I say, right back, (while casually unearthing a Snickers bar circa 1997 from my purse) “OK, so what’s your ROI on a client phone call? An email, a PDF, a case study, a client holiday card, unused or under-used memberships to the chamber, or your company “sponsorship” of a dorky trade show just so you can get your logo on a cheap grab bag no one even looks at AND leaves behind in the hotel room. (Who has EVA looked at a logo on a bag or napkin and said..”Oh I must call company XYZ, they have just created a need!! ” If you answered yes – you are a total looser and you probably read the phone book on the toilet.
And what gives about snail mail and print ads, (Hello- 2009 calling!) Or paper newsletters (calculate those man hours with lip- gloss- soaked- brain- damage- intern- girl surfing her iPhone while texting her BFF for hitting on her EXBF.) How about that lunch meeting where the uninterested cheap guy you call a “warm lead” has just ordered the expensive steak, two sides, a Bloody Mary and the cream brule – so you have to order the chicken and a water. Did you recoup that cost? It’s all relationship marketing; some of it is just smarter than the other, that’s all.
This is when I say (a teeny bit snarky) “Just because it’s new doesn’t mean its wrong”
This is where there is silence and I can actually hear their cells divide.
The new rules of marketing go something like this: Tell Don’t Sell.
Nobody wants to be sold anymore, plus everyone is younger than us. (Really, look down at what you’re wearing ) plus the new generation of buyers will believe their Facebook and Twitter friends over God.
So today at my desk- and If I am reading my Google Analytics super smart secret screen correctly- per my new thought leadership social media marketing campaign as of yesterday, I was at 2713 new hits via a social media push in just under 2 weeks. That’s 187 % increase in traffic with LinkedIn being the top referrer- yes, even over Google ( I know you are but what am I..) All are potential clients in the industries we seek and in the groups carefully selected. I am now at the point where several people are emailing directly through these sites asking to “talk.” Imagine that?
Now that’s a warm lead baby.
So you go ahead and continue to lick your stamps and pay that intern who smells like bubble gum and let me know how that’s working for you.
Twenty of The Most Popular Blog Directories To Grow Your Biz exposure
From: www.searchenginejournal.com
1. Best of the Web Blog Search La Crem de la Crem, Best of the Web’s Blog Directory is very selective and only lists aged and valuable blogs. A link from here is majestic and well deserved.
2. Bloggeries has the best categories and subcategories home page on the internet. The layout is clear and concise, and readers are able to find what they are looking for in a snap!
I am really liking what Rob is doing with Bloggeries and this is bound to be one of the premier Blog Directories on the web.
3. EatonWeb Blog Directory is a real jewel with many aged inbound links and a blog rating system. You may have to pay a fee for your blog to be reviewed, but like Yahoo, the review fee is well worth the few dollars.
4. OnToplist.com is a free human-edited blog directory where you submit the RSS feed of your blog. You can also set up your own micro-directory (blog ranking) and compile a list of your favorite blogs in one place. OnToplist is also a social network that allows you and other bloggers to get in touch and promote your blog by attracting more readers.
5. Blogged.com is an interesting mix of a blog directory and a Google News type site which fuels its news feed from the blogs listed on the site. Blogged.com is very impressive and is free to list your blog.
6. One of the most selective Blog Directories on the web (and WordPress powered), Blog Search Engine is owned by Performancing’s parent company and serves search results powered by IceRocket.
7. Blog Catalog features a vast directory of categories, from academic to writing, while offering the ability to search by country, language, or user. It has a no frills design, but offers convenient member access through simple blog registration.
8. Globe of Blogs has too many features to list. In order to be listed on the site, the blog must not be commercial. The site may appear to be busy, but I like the features of being able to search by title, author, or subject. Narrowing the search becomes easier on this blog.
9. The ultimate directory of British blogs connotes all things British. It is not directed by location, but by the culture! It is asked that bloggers be genuinely “britished.” Being listed in this blog reaches readers all the way across the pond!
10. Blog Universe is the perfect place to promote your video or podcast themed blog. Its layout is easy to navigate. Although the content is limited, it is an all around good directory site worthy of submission.
11. Bigger Blogs is a relatively new blog directory with only a few blogs registered. The blog is intertwined with a business directory. The blog section is difficult to find, and it is located through a link on the right side of the business directory page. However, the benefit is that the earlier you are accepted on a blog directory, the more exposure your blog will obtain. In addition, a back link is indeed a back link, so this can help with your search engine placement.
12. Upon visiting Bloggernity, you find a crisp, clean, and easy to navigate site. Scrolling down, you find the new blogs. As there is little advertising on the home page, it is pleasant to the eye of the reader as well.
13. Bloggapedia has an interesting and eye catching homepage. Readers are easily connected to the top blogs and newest posts. Innovative categories and a colorful design make this blog directory a hit.
14. Spillbean is a well-designed blog directory site with categories such as health, society, internet, and personal. The site is aesthetically pleasing, but there are not many listings yet.
15. Blogging Fusion is a blog with over sixty categories. These categories include photo blogs and family focused blogs. Blogging Fusion has an good amount of blog listings within the directory, and it also has visitor stats available.
16. Blogflux is not only a tool for bloggers, but a directory that has the listings in alphabetic order. The blog listings are organized and clear. It is definitely an effective blog directory in which to be listed.
17. The blogs on the top listings of Bloglisting are fun, colourful, and catch the attention of the reader. Bloglisting displays the page ranking blogs, which is a helpful tool when determining with whom you want to exchange links.
18. Blogio may be a small blog directory with few listings, but it worthy of a submission. Despite its small size, there are quality blogs and a solid ability to search on this site.
19. Blog Explosion claims to be the largest blog promoter on the internet. They have a vast directory but do not seem to have direct links. However, the listing in the directory can still show up in SERP’s, so keep this in mind.
20. Super Blog Directory is a great site that offers tools to posters that others do not. You can see the latest submitted links and blogs on the site, which is a perk that draws traffic into the directory.
The above listings are a glimpse inside the large and vast world of blog directories and the valuable inbound links that your can build for your blog and your business.
There are countless more directories at your disposal, which are always just a Google, Yahoo, Live or Ask.com search away.
Twitter’s growth these days seems to be coming from abroad. ComScore data shows a 6.7 percent jump from August to September in worldwide vistors to 58.4 million (which translates to 949 percent increase from a year ago). The 20.9 million visitors from the U.S., in contrast, has remained Flat since June. These numbers do not include mobile or desktop app usage. But if Twitter hopes to become the first Web service to reach one billion users, it had better speed up its growth. Facebook, which is outgrowing Twitter in the US. even on a percentage basis, had an estimated 411 million visitors worldwide in September (up 5.5 percent from August). And Google is at 879 million unique visitors globally, according to comScore. Twitter’s recently announced deals to provide its full fire hose of Tweets to both Bing and Google should drive more traffic from the search engines. And maybe new features aimed at making Twitter more manageable such as Twitter Lists, which is expected to be introduced to all users sometime this week, will also reignite growth. Guest Blogger – E. Schonfeld Leveraging Social Media For Your Business Using Twitter As A Marketing And Public Relations Tool By Hubspot Twitter is a tool for “micro-blogging” or posting very short updates, comments or thoughts. In fact, since Twitter was designed to be very compatible with mobile phones through text messages, each update is limited to 140 characters. Truly, a micro-blog. Another way to think of Twitter is like a cross between instant messaging (IM) and a chat room, because it is an open forum, but you restrict it to the people with which you connect. I have to admit I have not always been sold on Twitter. At first I did not get it at all. Then I thought I understood it, but thought it was stupid and useless. Then I used it a bit more and got some more followers and followed a few more people. Now I think it has some value, especially as a marketing and PR tool. Ideas for How to Use Twitter for Marketing & PR
- Engage your CEO in social media. Social media is a great way to have a conversation with your market and make and mange connections with prospects, customers, bloggers and other influencers. But for a CEO, the typical routes to social media can be hard. Especially if you are a larger or global company. A CEO typically has little time to write a blog or answer lots of messages and friend requests on Facebook. I cannot tell you how many CEO blogs I have seen with only 1 or 2 posts because the CEO never had time to update the blog after the first couple entries. But, Twitter is limited to 140 characters per update, so it is all about short thoughts and comments. If your CEO can send a text message, they can use Twitter from anywhere in the world as a marketing and PR tool. Twitter is actually perfect for CEO or founder who is always on the road meeting with people and who has some interesting opinions on your market.
- Keep in touch with bloggers / media. It is really easy to follow someone on Twitter (see below). And you’ll be surprised how often they decide to follow you as well. In fact, I have lots of people I consider “famous” in the marketing and PR worlds following me. In my opinion, this is a way easier way to connect with influential people in the media than calling and emailing them.
- Monitor your company / brand on Twitter. A while back we noticed that Guy Kawasaki mentioned Website Grader on Twitter. Well, of course we had to let him know a bit more about Website Grader and maybe ask if he would also blog about it? The result was this blog article on Website Grader which drove a good amount of traffic and leads. (See below for a cool tip on how to easily monitor people talking about your company on Twitter.)
- Announce specials, deals or sales. If you are a retailer or anyone who often has special offers, you can use Twitter to announce these deals instantly to a large audience. You know those commercials from Southwest Airlines about that “Ding” application you could download and would then alert you about specials on flights? Well, Twitter can be used as a kind of free version of that. Dell and Woot have done just this type of marketing, with a lot of success.
- Live updates on events or conferences. If you participate in a large trade show or run your own corporate event, you can use Twitter to announce last minute changes, cool events that are happening (“Just announced, David Meerman Scott book signing in the exhibit hall until 11am”) and more. It is a great last minute marketing tool.
- Promote blog articles, webinars, interesting news and more. Its really easy to post a link to something in Twitter, and I often post links to blog articles on this blog, or other news articles relevant to HubSpot. A good idea is to post articles on other websites that are relevant to your business, like a customer success story or other PR coverage. If you have other content that is appealing to your audience like a free webinar, post links to those too.
Using Twitter for Marketing & PR – A Step-by-Step Guide
- Sign-up and post a profile. Visit Twitter and click on the “Get Started – Join” button in the middle. The rest is simple enough that I think you can figure it out without my help.
- Write some updates. The beauty of Twitter is that the 140 character limit is the great equalizer – I am about as good of a writer as Shakespeare on Twitter. Post a link to a news article you liked with a one line comment, mention an interesting thought you had, or tell everyone what you are cooking for dinner. Just write something.
- Make friends. Making friends on Twitter is pretty easy. Just surf around the web on your favorite blogs, people’s Facebook profiles etc, and when you see a Twitter box that tells you what they are doing click on it. That will bring you to their profile and then you just click on the “Follow” button on the top left and you are now following them. Most of the time they will then follow you back, and the audience for your 140 character insights will have grown by one person. You can get started by following me: Mike Volpe on Twitter. You can also click on the people that other people are following to find more people to follow.
- How to post URLs. Twitter is based on 140 character updates. If you have a really long URL, that doesn’t leave much room for Most people on Twitter use www.TinyURL.com to take a long URL and make it short. Give it a shot if you have a long URL that you want to market on Twitter.
- Monitor conversations about your company. Even if you don’t join Twitter yourself you can monitor what people are saying about any person, company or brand. This is quite useful from a marketing and PR standpoint. Twitter has a search engine that lets you do just this. For instance, here is a list of everyone who is talking about HubSpot on Twitter. You can subscribe to these searches by RSS to keep yourself updated. Another tip is that you can “follow” all the people you find talking about your company (just click on their username to go to their profile). If they are talking about your company, they would probably be pretty happy that someone from the company wants to follow them.
- How to “chat”. Using the @ symbol before someone’s Twitter username is how people have “conversations” in Twitter. This makes their username a link to their profile so other people can follow the conversation (sort of). For example if you wrote “@mvolpe thanks for the cool blog article about Twitter today” that would be a way of telling me you liked this article. Try it out. It’s not IM (instant messaging), but it is sort of like a publicly broadcast IM service.
Scarletts Web Is My Secret!! www.scarletts-web.com I LOVE this company. I discovered Scarlett (who has an impressive following BTW) several years ago, and sing her praises to everyone who even utters the word web site. People always ask… “who does your amazing web sites?” So now people – I am giving away my best kept secret to the blogsphere, Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook. So no more complaining! She does it all with her efficient staff and edgy designs. I have sent several people to her (sorry about the losers girl..) because she does the whole deal.. Website Development, Website Design, Graphic Design, Flash Design, Programming, E-Commerce, Application Development and Web Site Hosting…plus she is just plain nice. Don’t mess with your sister-in-law-web-dabbler. Get it right the first time. Quick and professional this one.. Scarlett’s Web® leverages diverse technical talent and experience to produce website design solutions that integrate into your information and technological needs. We provide our clients with a website development partner that can make strategic recommendations, visually design, create, and manage custom web development products, provide shared and dedicated hosting, graphic design, multimedia, and support solutions to solve core business challenges. Our website and graphic design team will provide the appropriate technologies enabling your business to succeed. Scarlett’s Web® takes your companys brand and message, constructs the information into an easy-to-use system, and surrounds it with stunning visual design, accessibility, and affordable technologies. We consider a wide range of website design technologies when developing a site; including HTML, PHP, DHTML, CSS, ASP, ASP.NET, JavaScript, and Flash, then decide which solution will work best for your company’s particular challenges.
Linkedin Love (And Cheating With Twitter) Taken from SEOptimize http://ow.ly/seEG LinkedIn in my opinion, is one of the few social media websites every professional should be using. There are many advantages to using LinkedIn, as listed by Guy Kawasaki. Plus unlike many sites where it can be time-consuming to build up and maintain a popular profile, LinkedIn requires far less effort. You can obviously use it more frequently if you’d like, but it’s not as necessary as it would be for other social media sites. So once you’ve signed up and registered your account, here’s ten tips we recommend to optimise your account:
- Fully complete your profile – Ensuring that this contains all relevant career history and interests. LinkedIn makes this easy by displaying a percentage score to show how complete your profile is. A LinkedIn profile basically acts as an online CV, so make sure you’re being honest and describing yourself and career clearly.
- Edit profile to claim vanity URL – This should be set to use your name (or closest match if unavailable) within the URL, for example: www.linkedin.com/in/kevingibbons – this will help you to optimise your own name in the search engines and also makes the URL easier to remember if promoted on business cards or email signatures.
- Make your profile publicly available – You can set the information which is publicly available to non-members/contacts, be careful with blocking too much information as this will also be unavailable to the search engines. As a minimum, I would recommend providing enough information for the search engines to index your profile and cache the external links you have listed! In terms of optimising your profile, the main goals are normally to rank for your own name, company name and possibly industry keywords related to this.
- Make connections – Increase the reach of your profile by connecting with current and former work colleagues, clients, friends and family. I’d also recommend adding any industry contacts, perhaps from people you have met at conferences/events or are connected with on other social media sites and share a similar interest.
- Request recommendations – Obviously don’t ask everyone, especially if you don’t know them that well. But having recommendations will help your profile to stand out and will help to build trust in your reputation to visiting users. This will help improve the visibility of your own profile within internal LinkedIn searches too.
- Register a company profile – If your company doesn’t already have a company listing, you should create one! Here’s an example of the SEOptimise company profile, if your company does have a profile, you should encourage employees to create their own individual LinkedIn profile’s and ensure the current employer entry is completed. This will automatically update all employees listed on the company profile, providing the company name is exactly matched.
- Make use of the 3 website hyperlinks – For SEO value, LinkedIn is very good – they give you the opportunity to add three hyperlinks to websites of your choice. If you’re not trying to optimise your site for “My Website”, “My Portfolio” and “My Blog” it might be an idea to select “Other” and choose your own anchor text instead!
- Join related groups – Find groups where other industry professionals have joined and look to participate in (or at least join) these groups. Adding value to your own profile and helping you to get found by other industry contacts.
- Use LinkedIn Answers – This can help to build up your reputation within a field. For SEO it also builds the number of internal links pointing to your profile from within LinkedIn, therefore helping to strengthen your profile in the search engines!
- Optimise your job title – LinkedIn now includes your job title within profile title tags. I’m not saying you should lie about your job, but within reason you could include descriptive keywords which may help to attract relevant search engine traffic. For example, using “SEO Account Manager” as a job title instead of “Account Manager”, if appropriate.
So these are my tips, if you have any of your own please leave them in the comments. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn too. 
FAD OR NOT? You have to watch this this AMAZING short video. Is this a fad or not? Post your comments. It is MIND BLOWING. That’s all I have to say. Watch it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8
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Advertising Agencies And Social Media: A Culture Clash?
Jason Falls Advertising agencies around the country are trying to figure out social media. How do we do it? How do we sell it? Do we have to? The answer is probably yes, you do have to if you want to continue to offer a full range of marketing services to your clients, and bill appropriately. Some agencies are doing a good job adjusting, hiring smart social media thinkers and getting smart about social media quickly. Others are still cocking their head sideways like a puppy trying to figure out a vacuum cleaner. Sadly, many ad agencies never figured out Interactive, let’s call it Web 1.0. Now you add a layer of Web 2.0 or social media on top of that and many agencies and their respective creatives (art directors, copywriters, designers) and clients services folks are rendered dumb struck at the thought of all things digital. There problem is that there exists a culture clash between ad agencies and social media marketing. The difficulty is the result of both philosophical and tactical problems. The good news is problems can be solved. But it will take some work. The Philosophical Problems Social media is, in many ways, the antithesis of advertising. Advertising is one-way communications aimed at large groups of consumers. Social media is two-way communications that requires listening as well as speaking. It can also be said that social media is a multiple-way communications method as brands can speak and listen, but also watch other consumers talk to each other. An agency’s creatives and strategic planners suddenly having to factor in listening and observing to their communications process after decades of just shouting from the roof tops presents a seismic culture shift. Social media is also about building relationships. Advertising is about driving people to a buying decision. In fact, I would propose that in most cases, advertising has nothing to do with a relationship. It’s all about persuading someone to take action, not discussing the decision-making process and becoming a trusted resource for the person choosing. As Chris Heuer says, good marketing today doesn’t try to sell the customer on something. It tries to help them buy it. Similarly, it can be said that the essence of social media, in many ways, is good customer service. I would propose that, with exceptions certainly, advertising agencies have never cared about serving the customer. They care about making the sale. Advertising is most often used to drive customers to purchase, not care for them after the fact. So, philosophically, advertising and social media are very different. Creatives, client services folks, account planners and the like are being asked to undertake a new method of communications that runs counter to everything they’ve ever been taught. The Tactical Problems Peel off a layer or two in the social media and advertising comparison and you start to see some of the real reasons ad agencies struggle with social media. Please note that I offer these opinions as generalizations but not as blanket statements. There are lots of creatives, planners and the like out there who understand the social and digital worlds. While I’m sure I may furl a brow or two with this, I’m applying general truths I’ve seen through experience working for and with and asking questions about several advertising agencies over the last few years. First, advertising creatives are taught and still primarily focus on TV, print and outdoor advertising. Despite the media trends, art schools either aren’t pushing students hard enough toward web-centric, or even web-inclusive, work; or many of today’s creatives are lost in filling their “book,” not realizing digital is the type of compelling art agencies are in desperate need of. Also, art directors and designers are often focused on the art, not the experience. User experience, whether tactile and off-line or virtual and on-, creates compelling engagement with consumers. Art often times is just pretty. Interactive or digital (website and application development and programming) professionals typically come from technology backgrounds driven by code and algorithms. They’ve got the function down pat but lack the creative side, or form, to produce effective work. To make matters worse, creative teams of art directors and copywriters are sent to brainstorm and create campaign elements but Interactive folks aren’t invited to the creative process. The creatives don’t come up with compelling interactive because the web is an afterthought. The interactive folks don’t come up with compelling interactive because they aren’t trained as creatives or they were excluded from the conceptual development process altogether. Client services and account planning isn’t taught to think web first and often just assumes someone in the interactive department will handle guiding those decisions. The creatives think someone in the interactive department will do it, too. The interactive department is under the impression the creatives are developing the concepts and wait to be told what to build. The ball gets dropped and interactive ideas are added to the concept at the last minute with little to know strategic tie to the overall concept. Don’t you find it strangely ironic that while most people in the typical advertising agency these days know little about digital and interactive, not to mention social media, that every advertising execution contains one consistent feature besides the logo: The website address? Another tactical problem is that social media revolves around content creation. Not only are ad agencies not capable or prepared to create the volume and type of content required to populate blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter, YouTube and more, but social media content must be nimble, quick, conversational and responsive. What little advertising content is produced has to be run through proofing 47 times before it sees the light of day. Providing content for clients is also antithetical to the philosophical tenants of social media. If I’m engaging in a conversation about a product as a consumer, who is a more trustworthy person to engage with, the brand manager for the product or some account guy at the ad agency that represents the product? The client is always more qualified to be the person or persons engaging with consumers about the brand. Content creation also doesn’t scale well and is problematic for billing. Let’s say you have 20 brands producing social media content and you hire two people to produce that content. Depending upon the brand, audience and strategy, if they’re doing a good job, they’re producing an average of a blog post, Facebook content, several Tweets and perhaps video, images or some other type of content for each client every day. Can you write 10 blog posts in a day? And how about this billing scenario: Let’s say a full-time agency employee producing content for a client is working 10 hours per week on that client’s social media efforts. They’re billed out at roughly $75 per hour. At that rate, which is conservative in price and volume, you’re billing $36,000 per year for their services as an agency. At the same time, you can go out and pay free-lance bloggers $25 per post (and that’s on the high end in most circumstances) and produce a similar volume of content for $6,500 per year (a blog post per day, five days per week, which is an aggressive clip for many agencies). How will you answer your client when they call you with a big, “WTF?” These are the major challenges that face advertising agencies as they transition to owning and embracing social media. There are others. Solutions Solving the problems does take time and resources. Education is going to play a major role. In order to expedite the list and open the comments for building blocks to add to these ideas, here is a brief list of what agencies can do to integrate social media into their service offerings and disciplines:
- Embrace client websites as an opportunity to engage and build relationships with customers
- Make content portable so customers can consume it where they choose, even on mobile platforms
- Prioritize search engine optimization. People start their web interactions with search the vast majority of the time.
- Learn that well-done search advertising and email marketing campaigns have conversion rates that dwarf those of your ROI numbers on billboards and TV spots.
- Use social media tools internally to collaborate on projects.
- Use those same tools to collaborate with your clients, extending the educational experience to them.
- Read industry blogs.
- Bring in social media consultants and educators to teach everyone, not just your interactive department, how social media can improve their productivity and outputs.
- Incorporate social and interactive experience into the hiring requirements for client services and creatives.
- Watch what other brands are doing on the social web.
- Embrace the enthusiasm of your resident social media advocates by having them teach you social while you teach them strategic thinking.
- Understand that mass media still has better reach but use that reach to build communities around your brands, driving consumers to brand engagement points through social media.
Now it’s your turn. What else can advertising agencies do to turn the corner on social media expertise?
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