Have you heard of Business Exchange? It is an information-centric social networking site that is run by Bloomberg and sits on the same URL together with Business Week magazine. As you can already guess, it is a site that is extremely focused on business and the news. After reading a great blog post on Business Exchange by Larry Brauner, I have been experimenting with the site seeing how it fits into my daily social media routine. I am now at the point where the value of being on the site has become apparent, and now I want to share the …
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How often do you look at your LinkedIn Network Statistics? You can access them directly from navigating over to “Contacts” and then selecting Network Statistics. Everybody loves to look at these statistics as this is where you start to see the power of your network. If you were curious as to what the numbers of a LinkedIn power user like myself are, these are the latest statistics for my network: This post is not about my network, though: It’s about the whole mechanism of these statistics. I have seen my total numbers drop on occasion. In fact, I distinctly remember …
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Image via Wikipedia If you are one of the 400+ million people on Facebook, you have probably already figured out a way to deal with filtering out the many potential notifications that you could be receiving. Going to the “Account Settings” page under your personal profile leads you to a complex screen like the one pictured below: If you keep going down the list, you will notice that you have full control over the notifications that you receive from Facebook to your email inbox. I felt like I was in full control over these emails until I started receiving a …
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If you looked at 10 different LinkedIn profiles, you might see 10 different ways in which people have entered their details. For a social networking platform that is trying to standardize the way people depict themselves with their “xxx% profile completeness” status that appears when you edit your profile, the results have been surprisingly across the board. I am still amazed when I find professionals, and even active job seekers, without “complete” profiles. Remember, LinkedIn profile completeness is not just about increasing chances that your business will get new leads from LinkedIn or that you will find a job on …
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I just came back from a visit to Japan, where i was impressed with the growth of Twitter in the mainstream of Japanese society. No, not everyone is using the realtime social networking platform, but considering that Japan is a society that both does its social networking primarily on the cellphone and are avid readers of the latest information through the plethora of printed magazine and newspapers that exist, the stage was set for Twitter to be successful in Japan. And the numbers are already showing that the growth is impressive. The interesting aspect is that its growth seems to …
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Following up on my “Top 15 Social Media Books of 2009” blog post as well as my recent review of “A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization by Deltina Hay,” I want to cover another book which I thought was one of the best social media-related books of 2009: “The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web” by Tamar Weinberg.
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LinkedIn is slowly evolving their functionality to become more like a true Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software package. While it will be hard for LinkedIn to compete with SalesForce.com, the recent addition of the Profile Organizer as well as the more recent My Connections (also called Connections Beta) have made it significantly easier for businesses and professionals to organize their social networks on LinkedIn. Have you started using the new LinkedIn Tags feature to start organizing your network?
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Are you a Foursquare user yet? If not, you should be. If you believe in the power of Windmill Networking and being able to physically meet contacts in your LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter networks, Foursquare helps facilitate this in real-time at a physical location. iPhone, Android and Blackberry users should be especially keen on joining and utilizing the real-time-real-location social networking platform because of the phone applications that exists for these popular smartphone platforms. Foursquare is a simple way to “check in” to a location and to broadcast to the world that you are there. Other users can then see …
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The inspiration for this blog post comes from someone I consider to be a true thought leader in social media, someone who I had a chance to finally meet in person recently: Jeremiah Owyang. He wrote a blog post back in 2008 entitled “Stop Fondling the Hammer, and Focus on the House,” and I didn’t even read this obscure post until my friend who has taught me a great deal about social media, Roderick (@Fogfish), recently mentioned in a Twitter Direct Message that he “was fondling the hammer too much” and followed that with a link to Jeremiah’s blog post. …
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I am amazed by how many small businesses do not utilize social media to the maximum. Think about it: social media, like the internet two decades ago, allows any business to compete with larger, more established entities. Come on, what are you waiting for? What further amazes me is how few small businesses maximize their presence on LinkedIn and instead just follow the trend of Facebook and Twitter. Why would a niche B2B company establish a Facebook Fan Page when their potential customers may not be social on Facebook yet are already used to networking on LinkedIn? I’m confused. That’s …
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