Okay, so maybe that’s not true. But I did learn a lot last night… including that my mother has some decent marketing chops without even realizing it. But I’ll save that for later.

So Tuesday (Sept 22) night was socStardom4 at Johns Hopkins’ Montgomery County Campus in Rockville, Maryland. (If you don’t know about socStardom, it’s a series of events co-sponsored by JHU Montgomery County Campus and Network Solutions with a huge helping hand with marketing from series “co-chair” Mayra Ruiz.)

Last night’s guest was Jason Alba, founder of Jibber Jobber, a personal relationship manager for your career, and author of I’m on Linked In – Now What? and I’m on Facebook – Now What?. The focus of his talk was how to use social media to grow your business.

So why should we listen to him about this? Because that’s exactly how he grew his business into the household name it is today. (Okay, maybe it’s not a household name yet, but that’s his goal, and he’s well on his way to achieving it. He even told us a story about that last night. But you had to be there…)

So what did I learn about social media – and general marketing and relationship management — last night? Well, here are the highlights:

Managing social media: Social media can take over your life. Don’t let it. Some suggestions if you’re short on time:
Twitter: Put one tip a day on twitter. That’s it.
Blogging: Spend ¼ of your time writing your blog posts and the remainder developing relationships with other bloggers in your space.
Linked In: Use the two-minute strategy. Anytime you go on, only stay there for two minutes. (Oh, and if you’re not living in the LinkedIn Answers space, you need to do so. According to Jason, “LinkedIn Answers is the bomb!”)

Twitter: There are two important ratios you need to master: business to personal and value add to selling. If you’re only “selling stuff” all the time, people will stop listening. (I wonder if Jason would consider my tweet last night about my new ring turning my finger green a valuable “personal” tweet…)

Relationship management: Know people’s birthdays. Know their interests. And find reasons to stay in touch. One of Jason’s suggestions? “There is nothing like cutting out a magazine article and sending it in the mail.” (Remember earlier when I mentioned my mom? She does this. All the time. To me and my sister. So yes, apparently she’s doing a great job of marketing herself to us.)

2 Sins of Bloggers: 1) leaving out the “checkbox” in the comment area that allows people to follow a thread of conversation; and 2) not giving readers the ability to sign up to get your posts via email. (Hmmm… Shashi, does NetSol offer that on this blog?)

Email Signatures and Business Cards: Be creative. Be different. (Jason’s business card is pink and says “Pink Slip” on the back. He’s in the job space and helps job seekers. It’s actually clever.)

So there was a lot more I could write about, but I think I have to keep it short. Interested in more “words of wisdom” from Jason? Go to Twitter and search on #socStardom. You’ll see my tweets (@rferrier) along with others from last night’s guests.

Oh, and one last thing, two book recommendations — other than his — from Jason last night: Brag! The Art of Tooting Your Own Horn by Peggy Klaus and Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz. (Jason said the latter changed the way he thinks about relationships.)

Guest post from Robin Ferrier. Robin Ferrier is the Communications Manager for Johns Hopkins University Montgomery County. As the Communications Manager, she oversees media relations, community outreach, marketing, publications, and special events, and manages the Campus’ web presence, including the web site and its presence in the social media realm. Robin also engages in limited legislative affairs activities and works on partnership development and business development efforts for the Campus.

Robin is the President of the Capital Communicators Group, an organization of more than 1,000 public relations, public affairs, and communications professionals in the D.C. metro area. She is also co-chair of the Tech Council of Maryland’s Marketing Committee, a Leadership Montgomery graduate, and one of the founders of the socStardom series of social media events.

Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, Robin worked in Corporate Communications for Choice Hotels and also handled public relations and marketing for a national non-profit scientific organization, a small public relations firm, and a literary agency.

Two recent cases in point:

* Project ‘Gaydar’: This Boston Globe article looks at some MIT researchers who analyzed Facebook friending patterns and figured out that they could pretty accurately predict which men were gay, even if they didn’t list it in their profile. They did this by looking at the subjects’ Facebook friends; apparently, gay men have more gay male friends than straight men, so by looking at someone’s followers and plugging them into a computer model, they could infer who was gay. (It didn’t work as well with bisexuals and lesbians.)

The reason it works is that people with similar interests tend to cluster. Call it birds of a feather flocking together, or guilt by association. Either way, it shows another way that indirect information — in this case, the company you keep — can be used to reveal more information about you than you might have intended, especially when that information is accessible online.

(A further example comes from another researcher cited in the article who used predictive models, combined with follower information, to predict political affiliation based on music preference. Again, while it may be an old stereotype to associate, say, the Grateful Dead with progressives, and while you might miss a few outliers — like noted Republicans who are Deadheads — the ability to cross-check against the stated preferences of your online friends, over whom you have little control — is a new thing to worry about.)

Although I’m sure many audience research, political polling, and marketing types are salivating at the possibilities, any privacy-valuing individual should take pause. Though the logical answer — don’t post information under your own name, which basically means don’t post anything — seems pretty draconian. [link via Slashdot]

* Online Compliments Can Haunt You, Too: From the Wall Street Journal, a lawyer who represents corporations in employment cases recommends they tell employees not to post recommendations for laid-off co-workers on job networking sites (like LinkedIn), on the theory that if someone is let go for cause, but gets good online recommendations from co-workers, it might be used as legal fodder.

You know the mom-ish advice — if you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all. I guess we can amend that to simply say, “Don’t say anything at all.”

Online job recommendations are strange beasts — as Jeremiah Owyang notes, their value is already dubious, since people are only likely to ask for a recommendation when they think they’ll get a good one, but this is a new twist. Most of us are hesitant to give a less-than-shining recommendation if the other person can see it; take away the ability to give a good recommendation, and all that’s left is the mushiest of litigation-proof recommendation letters, or simply a very corporate verification of employment dates.

It’s easy to say, “Just stop posting stuff online,” though in practice, it’s getting to be like saying “so just don’t drive” or “just don’t talk on the phone” — you can do it, but the cost is increasing.

Got a comment (that’ll add to your online body of work, possibly lending more insight into your personality and purchasing habits)? Leave a comment.

I was reading an article in Entrepreneur.com and they stated that “Twitter grew 3,000 percent in April. Facebook hosted 61.2 million visitors in March. LinkedIn counts 20 million users worldwide.”

THOSE ARE POWERFUL NUMBERS. BUT HOW DO YOU TAKE ACTION?

We have been piloting classes in Social Media and we have found that there are found basic things you should do if you are going to start leveraging social media tools for your small business.

Way #1 – Google Alerts: Know Who is Talking About You
For those of you who don’t know Google Alerts, you can set up alerts to come to your email or an RSS feed based on keywords you set. You can set them up at http://www.google.com/alerts. You will need to create a Google account to get it running.

Way #2 – Get a LinkedIn Profile
LinkedIn provides the opportunity to connect with others who are also looking to create partnerships or to collaborate. LinkedIn has incorporated additional social networking capabilities such as special interest groups and open discussion threads. You can also have people recommend you and recommend them which can be very powerful for people searching for someone with your expertise to hire you or your firm.  You can get started by creating a profile allows you to post your online career history, then to connect with your network, many of which probably are on LinkedIn already. You can also set up your company on LinkedIn and get your employees/contractors connected to your company profile. This can also help promote not just you but your firm as a whole.

Way #3- Using Twitter: To Tweet or Not to Tweet
Many people, including me used to advise companies to start with a blog, but now it is probably easier to get on Twitter first.  This allows your to engage in conversations faster and better along with building a powerful network that will drive traffic to your web site and blog. This way, when you do things like an  announcement of a new product or promotion you can use Twitter to include a link back to the details on your company’s blog or website, all while waiting to get a coffee.  Connecting with people on Twitter produces the necessary personal touch so many clients and customers prefer and shows that you are really listening. You can also leverage Twitter to get instant answers to questions, feedback on brand elements and product ideas. Be warned thought, Twitter can be a time sink. Look at using tools like Tweetie, Tweetdeck or Seesmic Desktop to keep up with ongoing conversations.

Way #4 – YouTube: Internet Video is Not Just for Laughing Babies and Sneezing Pandas
Another way to capitalize on the fast pace of social media is by posting videos on YouTube. I know, I know, when you think of YouTube all that seems to come to mind are viral phenomenons like the Star Wars Kid, Laughing Baby and the Sneezing Panda. While alot of the content on YouTube is very juvenile and not very useful for work, many companies are establishing an outpost on YouTube for many reasons. To share interviews, protect their brand, have a channel to rapidly respond to PR crisis issues (e.g. Burget King) and even to demonstrate your knowledge to the world to help establish your company as a thought leader. You can started with very low overhead (I use a Flip video camera which is $100-200) and using your channel to uploading a short clip can be a rapid way to test the market and also demonstrate your knowledge to potential customers.

The irony of online video and sites like YouTube? You reach a wider audience than network or cable TV. That is pretty powerful, don’t you agree?

Way #5- Set up a Blog: How Will People Know You Are an Expert

Having just a web site is very 2005. If you are out there trying to build reputation, especially as a thought leader in a particular area, you must start a a blog now. Blogging takes disseminating information about a company a step beyond formal press releases, ads, marketing brochures and websites. A well-managed blog invites peoples’ perspectives and provides an opening for real relationships to be formed which is a critical aspect of great customer service, and a good user experience.

Blogging doesn’t have to be a huge time commitment, but expect to spend 1-3 hours to research, write and edit a post. You should also do it on a regular basis. If you are going to write daily or weekly, be consistent and pick a day to publish. I find it best to writing during mornings or on weekends to maximize my schedule. The nice thing about blog tools now is the ability to schedule. You can write a post when you have a free block of time and schedule it when every you want it to go out. Granted, some things are time sensitive but if you look to build readership, you must be consistent otherwise people will think your blog is dead and unsubscribe or just stop visiting.

Another side benefit is that search engines love blogs. Blogs that are refreshed regularly get a boost in search engine rankings. When blogs publish a new post, it lets the search engine know that you have new content and they spider your site and reindex you, helping you with increasing authority and relevance in search engine rankings.

The Bottom Line – Mix Social Media with Traditional Media and Find the Mix that Best Suits your Business

Pulling a quote from the article in Entrepreneur.com which is very appropriate – “Traditional advertising and marketing is not dead,” says Olivier Blanchard, business strategist and principal of The Brand Builder Marketing. Blanchard advocates integrating social media into a more traditional marketing and advertising plan, “so you can have a healthy mix, much like a diversified investment portfolio.”

Time is money, so before you dive in you have a solid website, e-mail list and a contact database before venturing into social media.

Remember it is conversation before conversion. No matter what the platform, the true value of social media is found in the conversation. You are not necessarily going to get tons of comments every day, or @tweets/retweeting your every word but you are engaging a potential customers or clients in the way you could not have before and than conversation naturally leads to the point were they become new customers and your investment in social media will come full circle.

In it, he and Frank talk about the common sense things we do when we meet people and follow up with them in our human networks (i.e. church, community groups) but we usually fail to do when we get a business card and say “let’s keep in touch”.

LinkedIn by its design is for business professionals to keep in touch and as a side benefit keep our contact information up to date for others to use in their address book or recruiters to reach out with opportunities.

I read the book on the flight back from Chicago to Washington, DC after the conference and it was a clean and easy read with some great tips that every person using LinkedIn should have on their process list.

Here are the top five lessons that I took away from Lewis’ teaching:

1.) After you are done adding their information to your address book, add them immediately to Linkedin

2.) When you reach out to someone, personalize your request so they know who it is and know that you took the time to ask for them to add you to their network

3.) Use “Answers” to build a reputation on LinkedIn and answer at least three questions a week in the area you want to be know as a through leader

4.) Spend at least 30 minutes a day, preferably twice a day, either in the morning, evening or both

5.) Recommend others as part of the “Good Karma” rule. If you give recommendations you will be surprised how many people reciprocate

If you haven’t had time to dive into LinkedIn or are an old pro, this book is fantastic and you will take at least one thing from it. (I did-see #2)

You can find Lewis and Frank on LinkedIn and tell them that you read this review and want to connect with them. I am sure they will be happy to meet new fans.

Linkedin Answers

- Asked 13 questions and answered 45 questions
- 50% of my questions related to information I needed for my job
- Most answers were to help people with my expertise.
- 2 of the people who answered my questions were featured in the Washington Post for that topic

Connecting people
- Connected old friends, colleagues to each other
- Connected headhunters to prospects 3 times
- Connected vendors to companies 2 times

Vendor contacts
- Used Linkedin in 2 times to find biz dev folks at companies for partnership enquiries

Job Hunt
I am still at my job so I cannot say it helped me find a job but the fact that an average of 1 person a day checks my profile out and i appear in 5 to 10 search results a day may be of some value   There is of course a funny story where I came up in a search for a job opportunity for another opening at Network Solutions and they were excited till they saw my name and I was already in the company.

Recommending Service Providers
Service providers can be added to Linkedin only if the user recommends them or the business can ask their customers to recommend them. You can ask for a recommendation to your business on Linkedin. I have recommeded 3 service providers who i was very happy with.

Getting visits to your blog or web site
You should make sure to add your web site, blog and other activities to your profile. People interested in your profile will click through to your blog or website to check it out.

If you notice most Linkedin profiles have the words “My Company”, “My Blog” , “My Portfolio” in the section labeled “Websites”. If you want to customize this you can edit it by changing the drop down to “Other” which gives you an option to add your own text label to the URL. See my previous post on Linkedin Tips

Inviting other people:
More than 8 months ago I sent out invitations for connections using my contact list on Gmail. Not a very wise thing to do but I picked people from the list with whom I had a few interactions. I am kind of a friendly guy and usually people I meet in real life at conferences or seminars turn out to be great contacts. I realized life is not always like that , a few people marked me as ” Don’t Know”. Among them were the following unnamed people:

- A gentleman who sat in the adjacent chair for 2 days  and spoke extensively and we exchanged cards at a local search conference and without my approval added me to his newsletter. The day I got his newsletter , I saw his response to my Linkedin invite was ” Doesn’t know”.
- One guy actually was looking for a job and I sent him an invite to tell him of an offer i knew in my invitation
- Someone who works for my company and Linkedin gives me a list when we login of people from your company who join Linkedin.
Now this was a few months ago and since then I prefer people invite me to my sending out invitiations. I know it sounds one sided but I do not want to get on the other side of LinkedIn. They are nice people and I always get good responses from support.

My recent interaction with support was when I once again got a restriction on inviting people by adding an email address. ( Linkedin usually allows you to add contacts into your network without knowing the users exact email address) I thought the restriction was bug because I had not sent any invitations that were marked ” Doesn’t know”. Then I realized that some of my old invititations were being looked at by people now. Some of them logging into Linkedin recently as Social networks are a craze.

What I did after interactions with Linkedin customer service is to withdraw all outstanding invitations. I saw many of my invitations had :bounced” . The only outstanding invitation I have kept pending is Guy Kawasaki. ( of course I know him http://cli.gs/92pLyW ). I have never marked an invitation ” I don’t know this person” , I have never had any reason to do so. I will still encourage you to connect with me on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/sbellamkonda

Better still if you find something good to write about me then please give me a Linkedin Recommendation.

Here are a few tips from LinkedIn support about Invitations:

1) Only use your invitations for individuals who you know.

2) The reconnect feature should be used solely to reconnect with individuals that you personally knew through a mutual employer or through attending the same educational institution.

3) If there are individuals that you wish to connect with, but they do not fall under the two categories listed above – we then encourage you to use our other features which include InMail, OpenLink or Introduction requests.

Invitations are the foundation for all members and should be used as a valuable commodity to build and strengthen your personal network.

This post was first published in www.shashi.name

Here are some recaps of what they said:

Guy Kawasaki, founder, AllTop: Twitter is a great way to find and spread information — it’s a way to reach thousands of people, immediately and free (which is great). It takes a little getting used to; give it a month or so — you might hate it for the first few days, but it’ll work out [which mirrors my own experience with Twitter, except I took longer because I am slow]

Ryan Anderson, Community Relations, Overlay.TV: They’re active on Twitter (including the executives), not just for promoting their stuff, but engaging with community. Their CEO will also use Summize weekly (now Twitter’s search) to get feedback directly from users, which is great for businesses, especially young companies.

Wendy Piersall, CEO Sparkplugging.com: You should also use other tools (depending on your business) like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. She doesn’t think you can conduct business online without participating in these types of communities.

Scott Monty, Global Digital and Multimedia Community Manager, Ford Motor Company: People have been networking since the Stone Age, but modern tools let us create networks of subject matter experts. “You don’t have to be the best accountant; you have to hire the best accountant” — online social networks let you tap into people who can help you — you’re not in it alone.

Liz Strauss, Social Web Strategist, Successful Blog: All this has changed the way she would start a business today. Use social networks to find out who’s out there; start on Twitter to listen to people and watch what’s going on. Open the door by promoting other people.

Tim Ferriss, author, The 4-Hour Workweek: Blogging isn’t for everyone, but there’s no excuse not to be on Twitter. You can use it as a blog, and you can be effective using it as a personality and brand on Twitter (like newspapers, activists, others are using it).

Chris Brogan, VP of Strategy, CrossTech Media: Small businesses should use social media tools to create  outposts where people can get to know you — put your face and presence out there, just like shopkeepers hanging out and meeting people in a town. “It’s all the same, it’s just different… but it’s all the same.”

Jason Billingsley, Co-founder, Elastic Path Software — Retailers need to build relationships and community; once you do that, your message is accepted. There are many avenues, like YouTube — many people are educating consumers by doing how-to and instructional videos. They’re informing, not selling, and by creating trust, then they look to you when they need to do transactions.

Mari Smith, Relationship Marketing Specialist: “Radical Strategic Visibility” — using Facebook, social bookmarks, blogging, Friendfeed, etc, — all the tools, in an integrated strategy.

Jennifer Openshaw, President, WeSeed.com: Bringing credibility online is important, and positioning yourself as an expert. A way to do this is to create content on your site, which you can also distribute through partners and social networking sites, so you can add value to people, even when you’re not trying to sell them stuff.

Agree or disagree with something from one of our ten social media experts? Please leave a comment below.

Though they often have some technically-oriented CMS sessions, Web Content Mavens also cover a wide range of social media topics. Last week’s session was a blend of both, entitled, “Why Every Organization Should NOT Focus on Creating Communities.” (Full disclosure: I got to the meeting a little late. Oh, and none of my photos came out very well.)

Now, to someone who’s constantly looking for ways that organizations can (and should) incorporate community to support their goals, this title is practically a dare – it’s like waving red flag in front of a bull. (Though only the most “community Kool-Aid”-soaked social media evangelist would say that community is always the answer.)

As it turns out, the title was something of a misnomer — the primary issue of the evening, as presented by Kevin Novak of the American Institute of Architects, was whether organizations should build try to build their own social media platforms, or instead, engage them where they are on existing social networks.

In other words, the “community” for any organization is out there (and not something that needs to be “created”) — instead, it’s deciding on what tools you should use to bring them in. And the answer, of course, is “it depends”: on where your audience is, and what you want to be able to do.

Kevin’s first example was the AIA, which tried to roll its own community for architects, associated with its existing Web site. After a bunch of money spent, some shifting of requirements, and a general lack of success getting participation from their desired audience, they shifted to a quick, low-cost implementation of a group on LinkedIn, that’s gotten a pretty good response thus far.

By going with an existing third-party community, there are, naturally, some trade-offs: You probably won’t get all the functionality you wanted, and you do give up a measure of integration and control. However, you do get the benefit of using an existing platform, and you’re glomming onto their existing behavior — in the case of LinkedIn, networking and professional affiliation. So, for a professional organization, it’s a case of making your organization relevant to what your members are already doing, instead of trying to get them to join another social network and do something new.

Kevin’s second example was with the Library of Congress’s pilot test on Flickr, which was a way to expose the Library’s extensive collection of public domain photos to an interested audience, for low effort and comparatively low cost ($30 for a Pro account vs. oh, $7 million for building their own system). By all accounts, it’s worked pretty well.

Despite my quibbles with the name of the session, it’d be hard not to agree with the presentation. By engaging with your audience on an existing third-party social network, your barriers to entry and participation are lower; you can leverage their existing user base and behaviors; and you can focus on doing whatever it is your organization does (instead of trying to have to cook up and maintain your own social network).

Still, it might not work for everyone — there may be groups that have to build their own community play — it all depends on where your audience is, and what you want them to do. But even in those cases, you should still find out ways you can reach across to people on other social networks (via APIs, feeds, widgets — whatever), to get the best of both worlds.

Anyway, it was a good event — I’ll be talking more about the DC tech and social media community, and suggestions for ways you can use networking and social media opportunities in your own neck of the woods.

Here are five steps to get you started after you create an account.

1. Make sure that your Summary is descriptive of what you’re looking for & what your company offers. Chris Brogan recently had a great list of ideas to pay attention to when creating your profile.

2. Connect with people that you know. You can use your email address list to see if those people are on LinkedIn. You can also search by name or company. When you find people that you know, you can connect by using their email address. They will appreciate a quick note about why you’re connecting.

3. Find a group to join. There are many! Groups offer many opportunities to meet new people. They range from location specific to topic specific

*tip – if you want to connect with people & don’t know their email address use the Group option & select one of yours. Then write a personal note telling them why you want to connect.

4. Answering questions is a great way to meet new people & establish yourself as knowledgeable in your subject area.

5. Asking a question can also introduce you to new people as well as provide you with expert advice. I recently asked a question that resulted in saving me a lot of research time.

So LinkedIn can be used to connect with like minded people, share ideas and answer questions that you have about your business. It’s a perfect place for the busy professional!

Bonus tip: You can also download all of the email addresses to create a mailing list. For example if you created a group – you could do a mass email.

For further reading:

articles at My Solution Spot

articles on SCORE Chicago

What tips do you have for using LinkedIn?

Adam Nash’s slides from the keynote are below. I asked Adam this question that was live blogged by:

Question: What is the LinkedIn spread geographically across the world? Top three countries?

Answer: Half members are from US. Very successful in countries like the UK, India, Netherlands and other places in Europe. It’s a moving target and Adam is not entirely clear – not wearing his PR hat. ( I think he also said that they had 5M members in Europe)

I also saw the business week article on Linkedin where some new stats are now in the open:

LinkedIn has 23 million users, with 1.2 million new ones signing up every month. Nye expects eventually to reach a population of 100 million professionals. He won’t say how many of the accounts are active, but says they get 7 million to 9 million member visits per month.

Another interesting quote from the article:

…the value of LinkedIn for people not looking for jobs. Nye stresses the value for headhunters in locating “passive” jobseekers. Better to find the ideal candidate and pry him or her away, than to settle for the unsettled…

The highlights of the presentation from Adam Nash Blog post :

* LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network: the new medium for how business gets done. Our members find new ways to interact with each other and improve their business every day.

* LinkedIn a Purpose-Driven Network. LinkedIn was built and designed specifically with the business professional in mind. That kind of focus and relevance makes us as valuable as possible to the professional who comes to LinkedIn for the specific purpose of getting business done.

* LinkedIn believes in Business Relevance. The one thing professionals need more of is time. We work every day to bring as much focus and value to every single interaction on LinkedIn, and that deeply affects the design of our product.

* Our focus on business relevance extends directly to our thinking around advertising and application development on our professional networking platform.