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How is your company using social media?

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

By Karen Miller

Like most people, when I saw the Wheat Thins TV ad where they delivered a year’s worth of Wheat Thins to a consumer, I was amused and intrigued by what they were doing. Of course, I went to their website, Facebook page and Twitter to see what was happening. And, they were listening to their fans and communicating with them!

Over and over it has been said that social media is all about communicating. Companies like Wheat Thins are using social media to their advantage. They are giving out coupons on Facebook, delivering Wheat Thins to those on Twitter and making product announcements on both. But this is only one example of a company using social media to their advantage.

Staples, Chase, Pepsi all have some interesting campaigns using social media that involve interaction with their consumers. The Pepsi Refresh campaign has used social media to donate millions of dollars to local and national charities. Instead of advertising on the Super Bowl this year, they are using social media sites to give away those advertising dollars to the charities. They are gaining product recognition and building brand loyalty as well as being “socially responsible.”

Chase did a similar campaign for Community Giving and Staples engages their consumers by asking questions, talking about donating to schools, showing sale items, etc. The key is engaging and communicating. Make sure you are doing both with your social media but most importantly take time to listen to your consumers.

How is your company using social media to their advantage? And what companies do you think are uniquely using social media?

Tags: advertising, Chase, Facebook, Nabisco, Pepsi, social media, Staples, Super Bowl, Twitter, Wheat Thins
Posted in Articles, Blogging, Facebook, LinkedIn, Social Media and Social Networking, Twitter | No Comments »

Can Anyone Answer LinkedIn Questions?

Friday, August 6th, 2010

By Karen Miller

Everyone is good at something and everyone has opinions. Answering questions on LinkedIn is something anyone and everyone can do. This offers the opportunity for you to share your knowledge and thoughts with others who are looking for just those opinions and thoughts.

How do you go about answering questions? If you belong to a group, more than likely you receive e-mails that inform you about the latest discussion or question someone has placed on LinkedIn. You can easily add your answer or opinion to the discussion by clicking on the comment button.

If you want to get into more in-depth questions though look at the search area on the top right corner on LinkedIn. In the dropdown you can click on answers and then search for something you know about. There are many categories that you can choose from. As an example, if you have recently started a business and know some of the do’s and don’ts, click on start-ups and small business and look for the questions where you can offer your expertise. There are so many categories to pick from and you are bound to be able to answer some of the questions. You may even want to gain Expert status, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Be bold, and share your knowledge. You just might be surprised at who you are able to help and who you can meet and isn’t that what LinkedIn is all about? Have you answered any questions on LinkedIn?

@social_dynamics

Tags: LinkedIn, LinkedIn groups, LinkedIn questions
Posted in Articles, How To, LinkedIn, Local business, Technical | No Comments »

LinkedIn Expert Status

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

Becoming known as an Expert in LinkedIn increases the likelihood of being found by prospects, adding value to your reputation and visibility to your company. When any of the 60 million LinkedIn participants see your LinkedIn Profile, they’ll see your expertise, like Jason Alba’s (below). Your audience members are all professionals and your messages are free. For a little time expenditure, the rewards of enrichment in networking and business opportunities are well worth the effort.

In this week’s list of Top Experts, Wallace Jackson has provided 33 of the Best Answers in the category of Using LinkedIn. Over time, your accumulated answers build a body of knowledge you have shared.

People can find all your questions and answers and learn more about the breadth of your expertise:

So how can you become an expert?

From your LinkedIn page, search the dropdown box in the upper right corner for Answers:

Or use the dropdown menu under More…to find Answers Home…

Select categories that you are familiar and interested in to Answer questions:

Participating in conversations with thoughtful explanations offers opportunities to make more connections to other professionals, thereby expanding your network, your messages, and your presence.

Enjoy networking while your explore connections with prospects and other professionals.

@social_dynamics

Tags: Best Answers, LinkedIn, LinkedIn Expert, LinkedIn questions, LinkedIn Search, networking, prospecting
Posted in Articles, How To, LinkedIn, Technical | 1 Comment »

Job Searching through LinkedIn

Friday, July 9th, 2010

By Karen Miller

When recruiters who work either for an individual company or an executive search firm are looking for candidates, one of the first places they will look is LinkedIn. Recruiters are looking for passive candidates as well as those who are active job searchers. Since we all fall into one of these 2 categories, it is wise to keep this in mind.

You want to complete your profile like it’s your resume. With LinkedIn you can give a lot more detailed information on your skills and experience. Most resumes should be brief, but the advantage with LinkedIn is that you can really get into the nitty gritty of what you did, mention major accomplishments, goals pursued and achieved as well as problems/difficulties you were able to overcome. Add any memberships that are relevant to your industry.

Connections are always important and as with everything in life, the more people you know, the easier it is to find someone to help you! When you are applying for a job, use the connections you have. These may be people who work directly for the company you are interested in or know someone in the company. You can ask for recommendation or introduction. It’s not all take though, you should always be willing help those you are connected to with advice, help, or referrals. The more people you help, the more people will be willing to help you.

LinkedIn now has a JobInsider Tool. It is downloadable and will show you who you are connected to with jobs listed on Monster, CareerBuilder, Hot Jobs, Craigslist, Simply Hired and Vault. This will give you a leg up and cut down on your own research time.

Companies also post openings on LinkedIn. Many of them are exclusive to LI too. Again, they will show you who you are connected to at the company. Most of the companies who are hiring through LinkedIn are looking to see how many recommendations you have and will list in the job requirements just how many you need to have. Don’t neglect asking for recommendations from your connections.

If there is a company you are interested in learning about, you can also check them out in their Company Profile. It will list information about the company including recent hires, companies where employees have worked before, job titles and job openings.

LinkedIn is a great resource for those who are actively looking for a job and it can also bring the passive candidate to the attention of recruiters. Make sure you use it to its fullest advantage by keeping your profile updated and interacting with your connections.

Do you have any other ways you use LinkedIn for job searching? Please add your comments.

@social_dynamics

Tags: executive search, job searching, LinkedIn, recruiters
Posted in Articles, LinkedIn, Recruitment | No Comments »

Beyond the Big 4 – Flickr Digg Delicious

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

By the Social Media Dynamics Team

What Flickr, Digg and Delicious can do for your business

After you’ve developed your routine on the Big 4 social media programs of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs, moving beyond to Flickr, Digg and Delicious offers important benefits:

Increased web presence
Increased search engine optimization, backlinks, Google “juice”
Increased community, relationships, new audiences
Sources of creative ideas

Flickr, Digg and Delicious each offer all of these benefits. In general, every link to your site and every additional web presence you create increases the opportunity for greater returns in new audience and higher site rankings.

Each offers you a Profile section to share information publicly about your business, website, events, charities, teams and locations.

Each offers community and group participation to develop and engage in relationships with members. Be sure to “lurk” in all sites to get comfortable with what is said. Monitor conversations. Then join in and leave comments, being sure to leave your contact information in the signature you leave on your post. Let the listening you do suggest new ideas for what more you can provide your audience in terms of education, reputation management, information and entertainment.

Flickr is image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community owned by Yahoo! Popular as a website for users to share personal photographs, Flickr is widely used by bloggers to host images used in blogs and social media. As of October 2009, it claims to host more than 4 billion images.[1]

Posting images of new products, locations, community activities, and industry events helps a business get better ranking due to Google’s affinity for indexing images and video. Join Flickr groups to engage like-minded visitors and share images. All images help: logos, photos, headshots, product and store shots, portfolio graphics and stills and video from events. The benefits can include the viral nature of your new audience sharing your images with others, increasing your prospects and community.

Look for images that you might like to get permission to use in your blog posts and the like. Note copyrights and give attribution where required. Make sure to “tag” images with great keywords and captions to make them easy to be found with search terms.

Digg is a social news website, letting people vote stories up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. The website traffic ranked 100th by Alexa.com as of April 2, 2010.

Digg likes postings of recent news including articles, fresh news events and new products and services, helping to gain short-term traffic surges while stories are current. Again the viral nature of sharing comes into play in terms of getting in front of more and more new audience members. You begin to see the value and importance of strong content and creative that’s interesting and compelling enough to share.

Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks that is owned by Yahoo. By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique URLs bookmarked URLs.

I’ve seen suggestions to submit every page of your site to Delicious. Certainly submit articles, site sections, and blog posts that you think offer great content value. Take advantage to develop your Profile, add photos and even a blog if you like. Explore the applications available to see what might be helpful.

Yahoo’s ownership of both Flickr and Delicious certainly helps get pages indexed faster. The intertwining of these services with your Yahoo and My Yahoo account increases the exposure of graphics, profile and contacts.

Many of these services let you tie back to your Twitter, Facebook, blog and other social media activities to share in their venues. So share away, develop new audiences, explore and benefit from your expanding social media universe.

[1] Source for all definitions: Wikipedia

Advice to Small Business on Social Media – Part 2

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

By Jan Carroza

Where do businesses do all this Social Media connecting?

Cookie crumbs should be left wherever your users are talking plus wherever you hope to find them. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook are a good starting point. Each offers a different audience. Twitter is for news and great for customer service. LinkedIn is for business networking. Facebook Fan Pages have become special places to give fans and customers discounts, special offers and a sense of a preferred status. Google and Yahoo offer Profile placement and there will be continual jockeying for position by offering more services. More networks will pop up or be gobbled up. Staying tuned to your prospects conversations will guide you to additional opportunities.

Other ANCHORS:

LinkedIn: Consider this part of the preparatory part that makes the first nice impression. Work on your LinkedIn Profile to tell your story in the first person. Be personable. This is not your father’s resume. Make yourself approachable to other members who would look to you for information based on the expertise you display. I share this advice a lot: Building out your LinkedIn Profile.

Next: ask for a Recommendation of your services by at least one person. Over time, try to get a 360 review from folks who have worked for you, those that you have worked for, colleagues, vendors and other members of your organizations.

Build a LinkedIn Company Profile and MOST IMPORTANTLY, put terms in Specialties that prospects would search on to find your services. Here are some guidelines: Building out your Company LinkedIN Profile. With a recommendation and keywords in Specialties on the Company Profile, you now become a Service Provider and can be discovered by millions.

Facebook Fan Page: 6.8% of all business Internet traffic goes to Facebook. Business can no longer ignore the impact and should take advantage to find their fan base where they interact. As the #2 site in traffic rank, Facebook gives a boost in search results to any business.

You have several choices of the kind of page. Choosing Local Business will let you provide hours and parking and is somewhat limited. Brand, product or organization lets you give more of a profile of your business. Community and Group pages are generally Stage 3 efforts

Create a Facebook Page

Twitter: Super for building a base to direct to Facebook or a blog or shopping cart. Twitter is used to manage reputations and customer service issues. Steady, regular communication, again with just a few minutes a day, will build relationships and convert to sales. You can build a presence in just minutes. Include a bio and image with link to website or blog. Search on topics related to your industry and “lurk” or “listen” to conversations. As appropriate, reply. Retweet others to caption the attention of other visitors. It’s the content of your conversations that will attract followers.

I would add a 6^th Strategy to Mari’s list. Continue to learn. You’ll find others whose posts you like. Ask them questions. You’ll need some tools to manage this process. Those tend to be selected as a personal preference. Services that make it easy to schedule posts, shorten URLs will save you time. There are lots of choices and just a search away.

My last advice to encourage businesses to just get started. However small, make that first step. And then another. Just keeping leaving crumbs all over with great information and point them back in your direction. Enjoy the process. It’s rewarding in so many ways!

@social_dynamics

Tags: Facebook Fan Page, LinkedIn Company Profile, Mari Smith, social media for business, social media objectives, social media strategy, Twitter
Posted in Articles, Blogging, Facebook, How To, LinkedIn, Local business, Social Media and Social Networking, Twitter | No Comments »

Social Media’s Influence on Industries and Government

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

By the Social Media Dynamics Team

Social media is certainly having an effect on individuals, businesses and schools. Social media’s reach is now helping and in some cases compromising industries and government. This is the first in a 5 part series of articles how social media is influencing our lives:

How Social Media is Influencing the Real Estate Industry

We chose real estate because being a REALTOR means accepting the standards and ethics from the industry. We recently came across the following amendment which now includes technology/internet in their Standard of Practice:

“Code of Ethics and Standards of Practice of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS®”

http://www.realtor.org/mempolweb.nsf/pages/printable2010Code

Standard of Practice 15-2
The obligation to refrain from making false or misleading statements about competitors, competitors’ businesses, and competitors’ business practices includes a duty to not knowingly or recklessly publish, repeat, retransmit, or republish false or misleading statements made by others. This duty applies whether false or misleading statements are repeated in person, in writing, by technological means (e.g. the Internet), or by any other means. (Adopted 1/07, Amended 1/10)

Standard of Practice 15-3
The obligation to refrain from making false or misleading statements about competitors, competitors’ businesses, and competitors’ business practices includes the duty to publish a clarification about or to remove a statement made by others on electronic media the REALTOR controls once the REALTOR knows the statements is false or misleading. (Adopted 1/10).

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® is holding the REALTORS responsible for what is posted on their electronic media sites. Our interpretation is as the owner of the blog or Facebook Fan Page you have a duty to monitor and clarify or remove any postings that you know is false or misleading.

Filter your blog posts and check your Facebook Fan pages often. As evidenced in recent news accounts, the viral effect of social media can get away from folks extremely fast.

More articles on Social Media’s Influence:

How Social Media is Influencing the Court System

How Social Media is Influencing the Jury Selection Process

How Social Media is Influencing Employee Networking

How Social Media is Influencing Local Politics

@social_dynamics

Tags: government, Real Estate, social media
Posted in Articles, Blogging, Facebook, Industry Specific, LinkedIn, Local business, Real Estate, Social Media and Social Networking, Technology, Websites | No Comments »

Top 10 Technologies (Digital and Otherwise) in the last 10 years

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

By Sharon Hill

10. Flash drives – Made data truly portable. The amount of storage and the speed has only improved since inception.

9. Netflix – An example of database technology readily available to just about everyone, made simple using one of the oldest communication methods, the United States Postal Service.

8. All things Satellite – Satellite Radio with the launching of XM and Sirius, GPS and Google Earth.

7. Text messaging - So much faster and easier than instant messaging and of course totally mobile. Including a picture with the text message enhances the experience many times over.

6. Digital Video Recorders and TiVo – You are in control – enough said.

5. WI-FI – This concept of connecting multiple computers to a router station was brilliant. Taking this idea to cafes, stadiums and cities it truly worthy of a #5 placement on this list.

4. iPod – Revolutionized music and how, when and where we listen. iTunes made it easy to download your favorite tunes and create your own playlists.

3. Social Networking / Social Media – Surprised it is not #1? We are still exploring this new and exciting communication medium. We will be writing about social media into the next 10 years. If you think that social media is being overstated, just make one personal or professional connection and you will feel differently.

2. Digital Photography – Taking photo after photo to the get the perfect picture without film processing fees is great. Even more, have you seen the app where you can take a picture of the check to deposit it in your bank account, truly amazing. See iPhone

1. Smart Phones – Describing the iPhone is easy. iPhone is a computer with phone privileges. There was some concern that this technology might actually increase the amount of time people worked. No so, we just work smarter. iPhones allow users to quickly and efficiently handle emails, get answers to questions, check and make appointments, deposit checks and even record memos for later listening.

This list is not exhaustive and in no way is meant to exclude any other great technology innovations. These are my personal favorites. What are yours?

@social_dynamics

Tags: digital photography, DVRs, flash drives, Google Earth, GPS, iPod, Netflix, satellite, Sirius Radio, smart phones, social media, social networking, text messaging, TiVo, WI-FI, XM Radio
Posted in Articles, Blogging, Facebook, Industry Specific, LinkedIn, Social Media and Social Networking, Technical, Video | No Comments »

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