Image 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 …
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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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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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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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As a social media book author, I often get asked by others what social media books I recommend. Just a few months ago I wrote a blog post entitled “Top 15 Social Media Books of 2009” which should give you some idea of my recommendations. I would like to go one step further and start providing more in-depth reviews of selected social media books that I recently read or re-read. I will begin this by reviewing a book that I recommended as one of the top 15 of 2009: “A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization” by …
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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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Yesterday, I issued a press release talking about how my LinkedIn book, “Windmill Networking: Understanding, Leveraging & Maximizing LinkedIn” won and Honorable Mention for Best Non-Fiction Book of 2009. To say that I am happy about this is an understatement: as someone who risked all credibility with publishers by going the self-published route, it is extremely satisfying. But social media is about you, not about me, so I want to share in the victory by offering you some free social media books. What do you need to do? Just participate! Keep reading for details
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In 2010, the landscape for jobseekers continues to change as the world around us changes. As social media begins to envelop almost every part of a corporate organization, and as more corporate employees are required to use it as part of their professional jobs, the impact it has on the jobseeker is tremendous. However, most companies are still trying to figure out how to use social media, and initial planning usually starts with the social media marketing strategy. What hints for the jobseeker might social media strategies that businesses implement have? A lot.
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It all started with a secret social media event that was actually held for the publication of my LinkedIn book: the “Hush-Hush Surprise — Networking Mixer, Charity Event & Book Release Party.” 157 people came out for a networking event to celebrate, well, networking! I stood amidst a crowd of people, many of whom I knew, but all of them I met purely through engaging in social media itself. It was at this event that Christine Weijland, Sales & E-Commerce Manager of Hilton Orange County Costa Mesa met Debbie Miller, Information Systems Coordinator for the Costa Mesa Conference & Visitor …
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O.K., I am going to admit that I first joined StumbleUpon as part of a strategy that the “SEO [Search Engine Optimization] Gurus” recommend to create backlinks to your blog content from social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit. The idea being that the more links you have from other sites, the higher your SEO will be. And, as anyone who has ever used StumbleUpon just for this reason will tell you, you quickly realize that you are just wasting your time because just by thumbing up your own blog posts you are not gaining any significant additional traffic to …
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