LinkedIn just announced their earnings last week for the first time since going public, and it was good to see that their membership (now at 115 million members) and website traffic (#11 in the U.S., #13 in the world) continue to grow. When I wrote my first LinkedIn book back in early 2009, LI was at 40 million users and had not yet established itself as the default social networking platform for professionals that it has become. Beyond mere networking, however, in 2011 there is now a compelling case to be made for us to rethink how we view LinkedIn …
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As an open networker with lots of social media connections, I get asked several social media-related questions from different people globally on any given day. Recently, I have been frequently asked about how to start a social media consulting business and develop initial clients. I am happy to mentor a new generation of social media-savvy business consultants, and I plan to be blogging about this more in the future, as I believe the subject can aid not only social media consultants, but also educate any consultant, entrepreneur, or small business owner on how to better utilize social media to launch …
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It’s not easy being a social media consultant these days. Between the bashing of some social media “experts” and the viral what the **** is my social media strategy blog, you’d think that every social media “guru” is a quack. I thought it was about time to clear the air and stick up for my profession and the need for our existence, and I am glad to see that Shannon Paul just did something similar by writing an excellent blog post on why we still need real social media strategists. Yes, there are professionals with years of successful sales, marketing, …
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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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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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You have a role in sales and business development. You’ve had a LinkedIn Profile for awhile but haven’t done anything with it. Are you aware to the full extent of how valuable a sales prospecting tool LinkedIn is? LinkedIn is a huge database of 50+ million professionals which includes an executive from every Fortune 500 company and has a demographic with an average household income of $100,000+. Are you truly maximizing your presence there? Here are 7 simple strategies to help you build out your LinkedIn pipeline:
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