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One of my favorite features of LinkedIn is the Answers section. Talk about a fabulous way to get help on business issues!

A while back I needed to conduct several webinars for a client. Although I had participated in several webinars, I had never conducted one and had no idea which software/service to use.

So I asked the question, What is the best webinar tool for a basic meeting, and why? Within hours, I had several incredibly informative responses recommending various webinar tools. Since the responders were experts in the field, their input was reliable. This simple use of LinkedIn saved me hours of research, and made me confident in my decision.

You can ask questions to your own network or the entire LinkedIn network. I've seen folks query their own network for input on an article, market research, and product or service offerings.

Answering questions in your area of expertise can help build your reputation and lead to new business connections and opportunities. (To say nothing of helping people out!)  People in LinkedIn are very appreciative when they receive help. Truth be told, they should be, because preparing a good answer takes a fair amount of effort.

Remember - there is more knowledge outside your business than there can ever be inside. That's why a social network like LinkedIn has so much power. Today, collaboration is king!

Podcasting is easy, inexpensive, and effective. The question is, how to use podcasts on the company Web site. Here are a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing. What other ideas do you have?

1. Create an "Issues" section for your site, with each page dedicated to a podcast conversation between two employees around a critical business issue. Invite customer comments and publish them on the page. (This would work quite well on a blog.)

2. In the Bio section, include a short podcast from each employee being profiled, perhaps done in the form of an interview. What a great way to personalize your business and reach out to customers!

3. Archive a list of customer testimonials. Think how effective testimonials are in written form  -- imagine the power of hearing an endorsement.

4. Link to complex terms in your site's content, and use a podcast to explain them. You see this now in written form when you hover over anchor text; again, using a podcast adds power. People have different learning styles, but many prefer verbal instruction to written.

5. For sites with a "Just for Fun" section or lighthearted tone, how about a podcast Joke of the Day? Again, verbal delivery trumps written for eliciting a strong emotional response.

Although much has been written about promoting a business online, one thing that has impacted businesses today way more than mere web presence is the "new" power of the online customer. All the positive influences of having a state-of-the-art web site, miles of thought-provoking blog entries and virtual reams of up-to-date newsletters may be easily written off by a flick of a button when you encounter a negative customer feedback or review. For almost every industry you will find sites dedicated to reviewing its products/services; sometimes even a customer's own personal blog is capable of broadcasting personal feedback in a way that could reach hundreds or thousands of people.  

This is certainly not a new phenomenon, but the popularity of myspace sites and other social-networking portals have redefined the term "word of mouth". Case in point - the Steak and Shake episode as outlined in Liz Fuller's post Crisis Case Study: Steak and Shake Refuses Service to Deaf Mom   - an awful incident of bad service becomes a post in a blog and as you can see the rest is history --

The next day, she (Karen Putz) itemized over 80 blogs that had picked up her story.  The story was also picked up that night by ABC News and Fox News.  Today, approximately three weeks after it happened there are almost 1000 hits on Google when typing in the search words, "Steak and Shake" and "Deaf Mom" and worse yet  "this story appears in positions #3 through #9 on the front page of Google when searching on the terms "Steak and Shake".

So what is a company supposed to do in this instance?  Shel Holtz gives a primer on Crisis Communication Fundamentals  that might help you outline actions that need to be taken in case of negative PR hits such as that of the Steak and Shake incident. Liz Fuller also addresses crisis management in her post When A Crisis Hits, Where Do You Want To Be?  where she has this to say about crisis management-

 
The best case scenario is where your business already has established a blog. Using the existing blog to manage the crisis is a natural extension of the blog's reach to your customers.

The coin does flip both ways, the "power" of mass communication that some consumers/customers have may be pretty devastating when turned against you, but on the other hand, the positive influences of good word of mouth can certainly turn the tide in your favor as well. Understanding the online sphere that your business "lives" in and where your customer finds information is one step towards keeping a finger on your companies' identity and reputation.

(Image courtesy of FreeFoto)

Paul Gillin's recent book, The New Influencers, is a must read for journalists, as well as public relations and marketing professionals. In it, he describes how social media is transforming the ways in which marketers engage with the market. For folks who have grown up in the Internet era, much of what Paul explains may be common knowledge. However, for people accustomed to old-style "command-and-control" marketing and traditional media etiquette, the book will be quite a revelation.

Today, effective marketing means interaction and even collaboration between sellers and buyers. Today, positive user reviews carry more weight than slick corporate advertising. Today, "blog swarms" may move the market faster and more drastically than a story in the New York Times.  Marketers need to be aware of these trends. Otherwise, they will be apt to spend too much marketing money in the wrong places and not enough in the right ones.

Gillin correctly points out that many of these new developments are in reality taking us back to an earlier time, when the world was smaller and people were more connected. Blogs, podcasts, and social networking sites are more like town squares than 30 Rock; bloggers and podcasters are more like Revolutionary-era pamphleteers than talking heads on the network news.

A career journalist, Gillin acknowledges there will always be a place for traditional media and marketing. What's important is to understand that the dynamics of persuasion are changing. With change comes challenge. The challenge for marketers is to continue refining traditional approaches while at the same time diving into the chaotic new world of social networks.

It's that time of the year again, a time to take a moment, look back at the past year with fondness and welcome the new one with an open mind and renewed zeal. There is nothing quite like starting the New Year with a couple of resolutions to get you ahead this 2008. Here are some for you to think about, but remember, much like a personal resolution, yours depend on what you think your business is capable of doing, as well as what needs "improvement" in the first place.

- Get really serious about optimizing your website. "Train" yourself on the basics - maybe starting with the Best of Whoast's Blogs or hire someone to get me up to par. Small Business Computing has an article on   "How to Hire a Good SEO Expert"

-  Content, Content, Content  -- Improve your site's content quality - cut the "fat" out and make certain that your content truly represents your business and your core capabilities while reflecting how your company addresses your customer's needs. DirectNews' article on  "Substantial" content needed for SEO gives a good suggestion:

He suggested websites consider options such as encouraging user-generated content or hiring writers ... Dedicated writers producing copy for a website can be "tedious and manual" but works well for SEO, Mr Enge continued.

"Sites rich in content draw a wealth of inbound links. Great content will draw the links with little or no additional effort on your part to seek them out," he added.

-  Tie your SEO efforts to your marketing plan. This should be the year that your marketing campaign intrinsically include search engine marketing not as an afterthought, but as a main component. From the beginning of your marketing plan, include SEO or SEM strategy and save time backtracking in the implementation stage.
 
- Begin social networking your way into your customer's lives. Leveraging Social Networking Sites to Generate Business by Michael Jones talks about social networking and how it helps businesses get results.

WebProNews has more resolutions of their own that you should check out in An SEO Checklist for the New Year.

Happy New Year!

 

LinkedIn is the premiere social network for professionals. I've been a member for about a year now, and while I haven't discovered all LinkedIn's possibilities by a long shot, these are the things I have found enormously helpful.

1. Reconnecting with old colleagues. LinkedIn tells you which (current and) former colleagues are in the network and when new ones sign in.

2. Reconnecting with old classmates. Works the same as with colleagues, drilled down by years of attendance for your convenience.

3. Job search. Lots of quality job postings, PLUS, you can see who in your own network is hiring. A fantastic tool for employers and job seekers.

4. Establishing credentials. You can recommend members and be recommended by them. You can display your recommendations on your profile - very helpful indeed! (Your personal profile is similar to a resume, only more robust.)

5. Getting answers. LinkedIn recently added an Answers feature which I really like. Members ask business related questions and  members respond. Questions are broken down into categories for convenient browsing.  I've stumbled across several questions I had myself, and was able to read 10, 20, 0r 30 replies from experts in the given field. Quite powerful. I've also answered a several questions and received "Best Answer" recognition, which helps establish credentials.

7. Making new contacts. That's the whole point, right? Your contacts can introduce you to their contacts - an ideal way to meet peers, potential employers, and potential clients. In the LinkedIn world, it's hard to contact someone without that personal connection, making LinkedIn introductions high quality.

It's easy to forget that online social networking still remains at its core, a relationship building activity, a way to increase or keep tabs on your social circle. That being said, just like networking in the "real" world, there are  pitfalls and opportunities aplenty when networking in the "virtual" world.

About.com has a pretty straightforward list of online networking sites for the business entrepreneur in their post Online Business Networking. One link included in this post is particularly important - Networking on the Net -Professionalism , Ethics, and Courtesy on the Net. Some tips may seem like common sense, but unfortunately a lot of people still need to be reminded that just because they are online doesn't mean that courtesy stops in the virtual world.

Michael Jones' Leveraging Social Networking Sites to Generate Business talks about his experience with online social networking and how it would work for the entrepreneur. Here he says:

Often, the key to using a business network successfully involves the creation of your personal friends -- or business connections -- group. The registration process is similar across the various social networking websites but LinkedIn boasts one of the simplest methods of inviting and maintaining your social network. By simply uploading an exported file from your contact manager, LinkedIn can immediately tell which friends of yours are members of the service. This method of contact maintenance and connection group development makes LinkedIn a breeze to start with, immediately enabling you to gain access to your contacts, without having to laboriously enter emails to discover if associates are already there.

Much like in-person networking, virtual networking takes work and practice as well - Susan Roane runs through some of the do's and don'ts in her post  Business Networking: How to Work the "Virtual" Room.
 
Let me end with an important thought - whether virtual or real networking- it's important that your entire organization or team is together with you in this effort. Ivan Misner tackles the opportunity of networking in his article Teach Your Employees To Network! 

 

That conversation reminded me how critically important it is to teach your employees to network!  Many business people simply don't do this one simple thing which could dramatically boost their networking efforts.  It doesn't matter how much you may know about networking, or how well you network to promote your business, you never know what you could be missing out on if your employees were trained to network for you.

 

Now that we have you thinking more about social networking ... Do you think that Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace are "it" for social networking? Think again. Things are never quite that simple in the internet world - if you have an interest, you have a network - check out Social Networking GOD: 350+ Social Networking sites and you'll get the idea.

Here is one that might be of interest to the small home-based business, the ApSense Social Networking For Home Business. Here is what work-at-home business blog says about Apsense:

Please remember that when you join  Apsense you're joining a community of business people. They don't all want to buy from you right now. They're trying to make money.  So use your connections there to share ideas and sometime in the future you might get your top MLM distributor or a great business partner there. But unless you're selling services businesses can use to sell more, they may not be hot CUSTOMERS right away.

In the post - How To Make Social Networking Work For You  Judy Mottl interviews the president of The Living Textbook (a solutions provider that works with school districts, state education departments and educational service agencies to develop educational materials) and this is what he has to say about social networking -

The president of The Living Textbook, , believes it's one of the best tools a business has at its fingertips today... "I see social networking really as an evolution of communication and a desire to share and dialog around subject matters in a deeper person-to-person way. It also enables a forum of people to come together in a way in which they feel more connected to a marketplace," he says.

The social networking weblog recommends a white paper called Social Networking for Business.
 According to their review -

The main things you're going to learn by reading this document are how to build business relationships using social networking, why social medial is becoming more important than the traditional way of doing things, how to make the new social networking service for your business become a success.

It is  always good to check out your industry's social networking landscape before forging ahead, with the right tools and network you will be able to leverage this semi-new dynamic relationship building tool to your advantage.

Much has been said about social networks, their quick growth and gradual integration into a dynamic new form of  relationship building and marketing. But what does the future hold for social networking? This is a question that holds weight not only in the US, but globally. According to ZD NetAsia's article Analyst: Social networking faces uncertain future:

Growth in the membership of social-networking sites varies dramatically by region, according to the analyst, which predicts Asia Pacific will account for 35 percent of global social networking users by the end of this year, followed by EMEA (28 percent), North America (25 percent), and the Caribbean and Latin America (12 percent).

What this means for the small business is that global reach of your company's services or message is possible through the use of social networking sites (barring language issues). But much like any other technology, some tapering is expected to happen within the next 5 years. According to pcworld's  "Social Networking to Taper Off in Five Years"

According to market tracker Datamonitor, global active memberships in social networking sites will reach 230 million at the end of 2007. The firm expects revenues from social networking services to reach US$965 million this year, growing to $2.4 billion by 2012...But the firm cautions social networking companies and investors not to get giddy with the growth and popularity of the services. Although players would like to be in on the next Google or Yahoo, exuberance must be tempered with memories of the Internet bubble bursting at the beginning of this decade.

For the meantime, companies are still finding benefits with engaging in online social networking - the Guardian Unlimited's Social networking 'a boost to PR'  says:

 
The popularity of sites such as Facebook and MySpace is driving growth in public relations as companies tap into the power of recommendation, according to WPP advertising boss Sir Martin Sorrell."It is unusual for it to be so strong at this stage in the cycle and the reasoning behind it is to do with social networking and the web," said Sir Martin. "Social networking seems to underline the importance of editorial publicity. Social networking is really recommendation between people about the things that they are interested in and they like... this has stimulated people's attention."

So who is the biggest and best site so far? Seeking Alpha's "Social Networking Sites: Blogger is Biggest, Facebook Growing Fastest" analyzes the latest comScore results:

According to internet research firm comScore, Blogger had the largest number of unique visitors of all social-networking sites in September, but Facebook grew the fastest. Yahoo's Geocities and Yahoo! Groups are struggling, but its Flickr.com service grew almost 100% year-over-year. Blogger is gaining market share from Typepad (Six Apart) in the blog space, and Wordpress.com is now significantly larger than Typepad

Check out Google's Zeitgeist 2007's Social Networking Panel Discussion which includes the CEO of LinkedIn . The panel talks about the art of the social start specifically for the start-up entrepreneur and the social network marketer. 

 

The numbers are hard to ignore. Comscore, an internet information provider, has this to say about social networking giants MySpace and facebook in their article on Measuring Social Networking Sites.

Social networking behemoth MySpace.com attracted more than 114 million global visitors age 15 and older in June 2007, representing a 72-percent increase versus year ago.  Facebook.com experienced even stronger growth during that same time frame, jumping 270 percent to 52.2 million visitors.  Bebo.com (up 172 percent to 18.2 million visitors) and Tagged.com (up 774 percent to 13.2 million visitors) also increased by orders of magnitude.

And then this from Comscore's "More than Half of MySpace Visitors are Now Age 35 or Older, as the Site's Demographic Composition Continues to Shift"
 
Visitors to MySpace.com and Friendster.com generally skew older, with people age 25 and older comprising 68 and 71 percent of their user bases, respectively.  Meanwhile, Xanga.com has a younger user profile, with 20 percent of its users in the 12-17 age range, about twice as high as that age segment's representation within the total Internet audience.  Not surprisingly, Facebook.com, which began as a social networking site for college students, also draws a younger audience.  More than one-third (34 percent) of visitors to Facebook.com are 18-24 years old, approximately three times the representation of that age segment in the general Internet population.

Here is a good example of how social networking sites serve as a business generating tool for a specific industry--in this case- apparel retail, as seen in cnn.com's article "Social Networking Sites Represent an Attractive Venue for Advertising Apparel Products"
 

More than 95 percent of heavy social networkers visited retail sites in August, compared to 80 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience. These heavy social networkers exhibited a particularly high tendency to visit the more leisure-oriented retail categories, including those featuring entertainment (music, tickets, books and movies), fashion (apparel, jewelry/luxury goods/accessories), and retail technology (consumer electronics, computer software and hardware).

What this means to small business owners is that social networking sites are no longer simply the realm of companies targeting students or teens. Growth in all the major social networking sites reflects an increased usage among an expanding and diverse market demographic.

 
Where should you start? Like anything else, after doing your homework. In some cases it might simply mean setting up a page, and start tapping into your immediate network found in that particular site. Unlike a full blown website, a social networking site is a way for people to actually connect and learn more about you while keeping it "intimate"  by restricting you to the people you "know" or people who know people you know ... like a massive six degrees to Kevin Bacon game but with you being Kevin Bacon. On the other hand these sites also open the door for you to create a whole network based on an interest or a hobby- one MySpace page is dedicated to the green ipod nano http://www.myspace.com/greennano. Although this page was not created by Apple, it does still receive its share of "friends".

Here is what you should be asking yourself before you venture forth.

1. Where are your customers/vendors/competitors? You want to be where the largest number of your constituency or target market are.
   
2. Do you have the time to manage and update your page/network?
   
3. If you are using the site as a way to increase business (rather than a personal networking tool) you should make sure that your "image" remains professional - i.e. no killing zombies or poking fun at people on facebook. It is unfortunate but for now there is not a way for you to separate your "persona's" in such a way that people would see a different you if they were a different categorized contact (i.e. business vs. old classmate).
   
   

Additionaly, Cristopher Allen's Review of LinkedIn, tribe.net, and friendster is hard to beat with its level of detail and depth.
http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2003/12/evaluating_soci.html