If you’ve been reading my blog and following my tweets, you’ll know that I am a huge evangelizer of StumbleUpon for marketing and professional use. I consume my media a little different than other people. I’m not an RSS person. I know the blogs and websites that I find resourceful and will visit them. I search for the latest conversations on Twitter to see what people are talking about. And I use StumbleUpon to help me find new sources of relevant information that I might be interested in but might never have found otherwise. Let me explain it another way: …
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While everyone was talking about the new Facebook Places application last week, I wanted to wait until I had a chance to actually experiment with it myself and report firsthand back to you on my analysis. A little bit of historical perspective can’t hurt any analysis either: A few days in social media seems like a few months in real life. Now that a few days have passed and I’ve had a chance to take the Places application out for a test spin, I realize what Facebook is trying to do: Become the default social aggregator of your information at …
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Social 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 …
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Yesterday I wrote about how to sell social media to your marketing department, and as a follow-up to that question, I received another email from the same person indicating a big reason why internally their marketing department still doesn’t want to move forward: “After more in-depth discussions it became apparent that the real concern of our marketing department is protecting our “brand name” while employee’s use social media to, essentially further their own careers and successes. I hadn’t looked at it from that perspective but it does present some challenges.” The fear of how one’s employees will use sites such …
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I am returning to my roots of how I started blogging on today’s post by answering questions provided by you, my blog reader and member of my extended social network. Below is a summary of the question that I recently received: I was wondering if you had any quick tidbits of advice for how to sell the benefits of using social media to ones own marketing department. As you know there are many who feel uncomfortable with Facebook and Twitter and feel that it is only used for play. I handle HR for a staffing agency and our recruiters and …
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Let’s face it: Social media in 2010, and the way we utilize it as professionals and businesses on a daily basis, is constantly changing. It is impossible for any single person to keep up with everything these days, which is why it is important to be seeking out additional points of view, case studies for reference, and the latest statistics. But where do you start seeking out this information? Instead of pressing that Google Search button for everything, why not start frequenting some top websites where definitive blog posts are being published by thought leaders in the industry? This question …
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Hopefully after reading my blog post on 6 Great Reasons to Become a Business Exchange User you have registered on the professional networking site and are already actively sharing and reacting to content as well as making new industry contacts. Today I want to discuss one of the valuable aspects of Business Exchange, and that is the ability to quickly find new and targeted news and information for business. I believe showing you how to curate social media content in Business Exchange will best illustrate this point. And if you’re not a Business Exchange user yet, this will hopefully show …
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LinkedIn, like any other social media channel, is a social networking platform. This means that people are networking with each other while revealing who they are and what they do. LinkedIn reminds you to do this when you log in by making sure your profile is 100% complete. Part of getting to 100% completion is uploading your picture, and here’s all that you need to know about why you should upload your photograph, sizing tips for a successful upload, and what could happen to your photograph if you’re not careful. That’s right: Your profile photograph could be forcibly removed. Read …
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If you’ve been following my blog, you already know that I won a free ticket to fly to Toronto thanks to Virgin America’s #VXToronto Twitter campaign. I’ll write about the “Virgin” experience later. Right now I want to share with you all what I learned on this trip. I’ve had many people ask me, “Was the trip worth it?” My answer, of course, is “Of course!” Because what I was doing in Toronto is what I do in social media everyday: meet new people, have interesting conversations, share information, and learn a lot of new things, things that help advance …
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Today’s guest blog post about social media strategy for local marketing utilizing Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare comes from someone I met Windmill Networking on My Blog Guest, AJ Wilcox. I asked AJ to write about the intersection of local Internet marketing and social media strategy, and he surpassed my expectations with this excellent blog post. AJ is the SEO Team Lead over at OrangeSoda, a local Internet marketing firm. He has been in love with Internet marketing for over 3 years, and has overseen over 2,000 SEO accounts. He is married with a 1 year old son and enjoys cars …
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