While LinkedIn is at present the most popular social media network for professionals with approximately 135 million users, Facebook’s base of 800 million users seems to offer some potential competition for professional networking. There are already several networking-related applications on Facebook, but none seem to be as powerful as BranchOut for helping you expand your professional network building. I get asked a lot about BranchOut and whether or not it give LinkedIn any serious competition or not, so I thought this was a good time to introduce this to my readers as well as give my opinion for those of you that …
read moreAs we begin to close out this amazing year of growth (ubiquity?) of social media in 2011, it is time to take a look back and try to grasp at the true significance social media plays in our daily lives. Years ago, the masses were silent. As I often present in my speeches, up until just a little more than two decades ago mass communication was one way, and information was only served through television, radio and print. Today, with the vastness of the Internet and the rise of mobile technology, the masses have suddenly found themselves with virtual megaphones …
read moreThis is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Waatp.com. All opinions are 100% mine. With so much public information about us out there in social media and on the web, do you ever start to wonder what others can find out about you? On the other hand, if you are doing social recruiting or looking to do business with or even get back in touch with someone, wouldn’t you like to take advantage of the public information that exists out there so that you can do due diligence in a background check or have a higher chance …
read moreWhenever I speak to a large group or consult with a client on social media, I have a tendency to overwhelm my audience with the so many things that they could be using it for. That leads to a growing fear for those that aren’t active in social media that it will become a total time suck. On the other hand, for those that start to get active and see its professional and personal benefits, they can’t seem to find enough time to cover all of their online bases. Which leads to the question that I am often asked: How …
read moreSocial media and your privacy is an intriguing topic that we should all be concerned about. On the one hand, Pete Cashmore of Mashable has already rightfully declared some time ago that Privacy is Dead. On the other hand, there are those who are actually still afraid to join a social networking site because of privacy concerns. It is these people that I want to address in this blog post. This week I got this question from my reader: I have always used alias names and blind emails everywhere online to protect my personal info from ID Theft. Because I …
read moreWhat is a Poken? To be honest, I first encountered Poken on a business trip to Japan in December of 2009 and assumed the technology was Japanese because of its “cute” factor. At first I didn’t really understand exactly what it was until I saw it in action before my own eyes. In essence, similar to the iPhone Bump application, Poken allows you to wirelessly exchange your contact information and social profiles with those that you meet instead of exchanging business cards. Their corporate homepage has an excellent overview of how Poken works. A detailed description of how it works …
read moreImage by @Photo . via Flickr If you’ve followed my Windmill Networking blog for awhile or read my LinkedIn book, you’ll know that I’m a huge fan of the LinkedIn Events Application. Seriously. I wrote an April Fools’s post back in 2009 complaining why Events wasn’t considered an application with a blog post rhetorically entitled, “What are LinkedIn Applications?” I was the first one to ask “What Happened to LinkedIn Events?” when they mysteriously disappeared for a day in October of 2009. So you can say that I have a personal relationship with Events, and when all of the “social …
read moreImage by annapmagistra via Flickr LinkedIn is a very interesting social networking site. Many users say they only want to connect with people in their closed network, but unless that network is big enough, the benefits of using LinkedIn to find and be found become minimal. On the other hand, I find many users who don’t care about acquiring LinkedIn connections often talk about how many they have as an indication of how active they are on the site. So how many LinkedIn connections should you have? I recently shot a video at a keynote speech on social media in …
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