March 2, 2011 | Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association | Westlake Village, CA – I look forward to speaking to the Southern California Chapter of the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association (HBA) on the topic “I’m on LinkedIn: Now What? -Using Social Media to Open Doors & Close Deals.” Event Details: Neal Schaffer, social media expert and award winning, best-selling author is recognized as a leader in helping businesses and professionals embrace and strategically leverage the potential of social media. This is not a canned PowerPoint presentation of what you “should” be doing on LinkedIn; it’s a live, intimate presentation delivered through a dining …
read moreFeburary 17, 2011 | Amherst College Career Center | Amherst, MA – I’m proud to be back at my alma mater, Amherst College, for a discussion with current college students on the importance of social media and professional networking in their job search and personal branding. Social media is still not a discipline taught in most colleges, yet most college students are well-versed in social networking and the technology and are even active participants in the social media campaigns of many consumer brands. From a career and professional branding perspective, however, understanding the potential dangers as well as opportunities that …
read moreFeburary 15, 2011 | Princeton Alumni Global NetNight | Costa Mesa, CA – I’m honored to be invited by the Princeton Club of Orange County, California to speak on LinkedIn and social networking at their Global NetNight. This event, which is being held simultaneously by Princeton University alumni groups around the world, features a Structured Networking session for in-person and online contact building. Whether you are a job seeker or an employed business professional, if you want to understand and truly embrace the potential of the social web and social networking for your career growth, you won’t want to miss …
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Everyone who knows me knows that I am one of the biggest evangelists for LinkedIn. While others turn to Twitter and Facebook, I keep reminding businesses that LinkedIn should be your hub for B2B social media marketing. And while the world is going crazy about Branchout, the Facebook application for professional networking, I find immense value in new tools such as LinkedIn Signal. But as a trusted networking platform for professionals, I find that LI is falling behind its social media counterparts in one important area: Privacy Settings. Here are 3 specific scenarios in which I believe it is in …
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One of the amazing things about Twitter, when compared to a LinkedIn or a Facebook, is that it’s core functionality is so simple yet complemented with complexity by hundreds if not thousands of useful 3rd party apps because of its open architecture and growing ecosystem. Where you don’t really need any external tools to maximize your presence on LinkedIn or even Facebook for that matter, using external apps on the realtime platform for tweets can not only help save you time, it can also help you unearth critical business intelligence and allow you to truly maximize your presence for whatever …
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One thing that every social media consulting client asks me about is how to find out who the “Influencers” are in their particular industry. My answer, of course, is that every consumer who is active on social media could potentially be an influencer, and thus truly “accurate” measurement is impossible. Think about it: Someone with 10 followers could tweet something out that gets ReTweeted by someone with 100 followers, and 1 of those 100 followers is someone who works for an industry publication, who then breaks the story to the public, and so on. I think you get the picture. …
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I had a chance to be on a CEO Trust social media panel last night with Joe Meyer, the CEO of HopStop. Embarrassing as it is to say, I wasn’t familiar with HopStop because they haven’t rolled out their service in Southern California (coming soon, L.A.!), and also because I rarely have a chance to take public transportation in the US or Canada (or Europe, where HopStop is also growing). But if you live in a major metropolitan area with a robust public transportation system, I’m assuming that you already use HopStop (and if you haven’t then you should!) because it provides a …
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There have been famous cases reported of those who lost their job because of a tweet or even have a viral negative campaign spread about their company from a tweet. Now your tweets may show up as evidence as part of a defamation case in the court of law. It has always been rumored, but never confirmed by anyone of course, that law enforcement agencies forced Facebook to open up their platform so that public investigators would get access to more information. Whether this is true or not we may never know, but my first eye-opener was when I was …
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Blogs are awesome. I assume you agree with this because you’re reading my blog as well. A lot of you may have started becoming avid readers and to follow blogs, like myself, with the advent of social media. In the last two years I have seen some social media blogs become famous while others, despite still publishing great content, haven’t gotten the recognition that they deserve. I always engage in debates with other bloggers as to why some get more popular than others, but I’ll leave that topic for another blog post… If you’re looking for new voices to follow …
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As we head into 2011, it’s best to take a look back at the top 25 social media marketing blog posts of 2010 and see what we can glean to help us in the new year. Social media is fascinating in that the way we utilize these sites, and the functionality of these sites, is always changing. Therefore, as social media marketers, we always need to be staying ahead of the curve of not only the latest changes in the world of social media, but also what the thought leaders are saying about social media marketing. The algorithm I used …
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January 17, 2011 | Breakthrough Business Strategies Radio | Internet Radio – I’m looking forward to being on Michele Price‘s Breakthrough Business Strategies Radio to discuss everything LinkedIn. The Breakthrough Business Strategies Radio is a popular weekly broadcast over the Internet that has featured famous business authors such as Tony Hsieh of Zappos, author of “Flip the Funnel” Joseph Jaffe, and author of “UnMarketing” Scott Stratten. The broadcast gives listeners the chance to ask the experts questions in advance as well as tweet them out during the live broadcast. Michele herself is no newbie to social media and is a …
read moreJanuary 17, 2011 | USC Marshall Alumni Association of Orange County | Irvine, CA – I’ll be giving an encore performance of my speech on how professionals can utilize social media both for business as well as career management to the prestigious alumni association for the USC Marshall Business School here in Orange County, California. This meeting will unfortunately not be open to the public and is only for those on the Board of Directors of this association. In addition to the topics of social media for business and professional networking, I will also be looking at the topic of …
read moreJanuary 20, 2011 | Irvine Chamber of Commerce | Webinar – Irvine, California is known for being one of the safest cities to live in, has a public school system that is renowned nationally, is host to the University of California, Irvine, and is also an excellent city for business which houses the headquarters of many internationally known companies. Irvine also has an excellent Chamber of Commerce that, among other things, has a program specifically to foster “micropreneurs” providing FREE weekly webinars. Though the webinars are structured to help out local entrepreneurs, the webinars are free to join for …
read moreJanuary 20, 2011 | Orange County Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) | Costa Mesa, CA – I’m proud to be sharing the stage at the Orange County PRSA monthly lunch with fellow #ConnectOC co-founder Ted Nguyen and Orange County social media strategist Rebecca Rose Markarian to discuss the past, present, and future of social media in an interactive panel discussion over lunch. We hope to cover a wide range of social media-related topics and provide analysis and insight into what PR professionals need to understand about social media heading into 2011. Come prepared with your questions and join in …
read moreFeburary 2, 2011 | CBS Social Media | Hollywood, CA – I’ll be one of the speakers at this all-day event put on by CBS Radio on using social media to market and grow your business. “Social: The New Media. Energize. Strategize. Monetize.” will look at Streamlining operations with social media Building growth strategies Building customer loyalty Going beyond Facebook & Twitter Measuring your results The event will feature a number of Los Angeles social media speakers as well as provide local food truck faves for lunch and a networking cocktail party. Please visit the CBS Social Media site for …
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