Brand and Capture

How to Promote Your Blog on LinkedIn and Still Wear a White Hat

The problem with LinkedIn discussions and blog posts

For some time now I have been barking at LinkedIn about their decision to merge "News" items with "Discussions" in Groups. I'm sure the purpose was to make the user experience simpler and to encourage discussions. The net effect was to create confusion and angst. People who wished to post their blog updates to a relevant Group were forced to post them as a Discussion. Group participants (and many Managers) saw this as a sudden and overwhelming infusion of spam into their favorite discussion forums. Members were encouraged to flag these "commercial" posts as inappropriate and in some cases kick the offenders out of the group altogether.

The "fix" by LinkedIn

Well, finally LinkedIn has done something about it. Now there is a new tab called "Promotions" in most Groups, and if you share your blog to LinkedIn, you will often find that a Manager has moved it there. Fine. We'll play by the rules - at least we have a place to share our content. Oh by the way, this content can (and should) be helpful and informative, so it really doesn't necessarily deserve to be treated as a "promotion" or "spam", but it seems the purists will have their way. One more note to Group Managers and Members, let's not be totally hypocritical here. Your Groups and Events and many of your Discussions and Questions and Answers, in fact your membership in LinkedIn itself, are all designed to promote your personal brand and/or your company's status. Now suddenly, you're saying that's wrong. Hmmm.

My strategy for sharing on LinkedIn

OK, enough venting - here's my recommended procedure for sharing your blog posts (and other content) on LinkedIn:

1. When you use a LinkedIn Share button, by all means post it as a personal LinkedIn update and to relevant individual connections who will benefit from it.
2. DON'T use the Post to Groups option. This will automatically create a discussion and you will incur the wrath of the Troglodytes.
3. Instead, go to each group and post it as a new Promotion, -OR-
4. Post it as part of a discussion, i.e. post the central theme of your blog post as a question or comment and include the link to your blog post in the comments you make.

Now that we're all agreeing to play nice, let's see how well this works. Do we still get visitors to our blogs from LinkedIn? If so, no worries. If the tap gets shut off, then we have real data to go complain to LinkedIn about.

Please share your experiences with LinkedIn Group Promotions here. If necessary, I will volunteer to become an even more public advocate on the side of bloggers in LinkedIn.

Bloggers, there is a group that welcomes you and your posts! Please join us at the Cleveland Inbound Marketing Group on LinkedIn. You don't have to be from Cleveland, and your posts are welcome as discussions. Please try to stick to the main topics - inbound marketing, social media, blogging, SEO, and lead generation. I hope to see you there!

Thanks for your support! Comments welcome as always.

Photo credit: Superfantastic

Go On a Social Media Safari!

Please keep your hands and feet inside the 'Rover. We'll be seeing some of the best known residents of the Internhetti Plain today, so keep your cameras ready for these social media denizens.

Tweetah

This predator has a serious need for speed. Clocked at over 100 tweets per day, with bursts of 140 characters, the Tweetah overwhelms its prey with raw speed, volume and stealth. Tweetahs are loners with few real friends but many admirers. Occasionally they get together just to size each other up or maybe race. Profiles and updates are short and to the point. Typically they're doing many things at once. Don't blink, or you're likely to miss one of these fine natural sports cars.

Fabion

Fabions live in packs, or "prides". They live, love, hunt and share photos together. They are rarely seen by themselves. The female Fabion dominates, while the male is often seen napping. Fabions get personal with their profiles, but don't get too close, they covet their privacy like no other social media species. Often playful, sometimes wistful, the Fabion is a creature of community, but don't let their looks deceive you. Get a little too close to the family, and you'll be sorry, very sorry.

Lhino

The Lhino is all business. You rarely see one smile or do something silly. They're loners like the Tweetah, but much slower. With an in-depth profile and plenty of time to prove a point, Lhino's aren't worried about predators. They're happy to sit back, ask and answer a few questions. They're looking for opportunities but are willing to wait for a good one. Lhino's have been around the block, and they're willing to offer lots of sage advice. You don't see many photos of these guys. They certainly don't upload them. And videos? Please. They don't make friends easily, but when they do, the friendships last. Are Lhino's dangerous? Only if your profile is fake or you bother them with too much self-promotion. Send one of these guys an unsolicited e-mail at your own peril!

Youbra

The Youbra is the flashiest creature on the Plain. There's no mistaking their style and high profile. It's all about impact with a Youbra. You typically only see one for about 90 seconds, but when you do, you're likely to tell all of your friends about it. Youbras are most popular with younger visitors to the Park due to their prominent stripes and likeness to conventional (small) horses. Occasionally a Youbra will catch the attention of adults, however, especially when they do something silly, like stupid human tricks.

We hope you've enjoyed your safari. Maybe you can identify some of your own wild animal traits among the citizens of the social media plain.

Think Before You Set Up Your LinkedIn-Twitter Integration

Beware when you set up LinkedIn/Twitter integration

In my excitement to set up this new feature of LinkedIn, I set up my account to receive all of my Twitter tweets. Since I usually tweet more than 20 times a day, my poor LinkedIn connections were inundated with all of those updates in a single day. What's the problem? LinkedIn users aren't accustomed to the high-volume flow of information that comes from Twitter, so it's a bit like trying to force a fire hose spray through a pin hole. So here's what you should do if you're going to use LinkedIn and Twitter together:

Go to your LinkedIn settings and scroll down to Twitter Settings (under your Profile Settings). Under "Share your tweets in your LinkedIn status" select "Share only tweets that contain #in" and save your settings.

What that will do is allow you to selectively share tweets that you think are appropriate and relevant to your LinkedIn connections, just by adding a #in hashtag to your tweet. Otherwise, your tweets will continue to flow to your Twitter and/or Facebook followers as usual.

My apologies to my LinkedIn connections that I "hosed down" yesterday!

Big Developments in Social Media This Week

In case you missed it, there were several big developments this week in Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Here's the scoop.

Twitter and LinkedIn

Finally, LinkedIn got some new wheels by adding a Twitter integration feature. Now you can add fresh content to your LinkedIn Network Updates directly from Twitter and you can tweet your LinkedIn Profile status updates from LinkedIn. Right now these integration features are only within Twitter itself, but you can expect them in your favorite Twitter client soon.

Twitter Lists

At the beginning of November, Twitter rolled out its Lists function that enables you to group your favorite Tweeters in one or more groups. You can group your Twitter friends by any topic that makes sense, label your List accordingly and decide whether or not to make your list publicly accessible. Visitors to your Twitter profile can see your public lists and follow their members with a single click. Again these functions are not yet available in the more popular Twitter clients, such as TweetDeck, Seesmic and Tweetie, but you can expect some movement in that direction soon.

Facebook Ads

Now you can place a Facebook Ad, advertise it to your company (fan page) fans and select an option that sends the ad to all of their Facebook friends. This expands your potential reach exponentially.

Twitter ReTweet Getting a Facelift

Twitter is in the process of building in its own retweet function to reduce tweet redundancy and confusion and make tweets more "attributable" to their originator and less so to the RT'ers. Some of you are seeing an advanced version for testing. It will be interesting to see how the user community "digests" this new feature.

What do you think about these social media changes? Are big players heading in the right direction?

 

Locking Out the Social Media Blackhats

Yesterday was just the latest incident of some idiots spamming a Twitter stream with pornography. I'm sure there were thousands of incidents like this one. My question is why? I'll expand on that question and recommend some ways of getting rid of these irritants.

It happens all the time, in social media sites, in e-mail, on your phone, on buildings and bridges. Some idiot thinks it's worth his time and effort to spam the rest of us or worse, create something truly offensive. Why? To hurt or annoy everyone tuned in? To make a statement of some kind? The kind of person who would resort to spam and pornography is either:

1. Evil - in this case we just need to find these people and send them to prison or worse (where available).
2. Bored - in this case we just need to keep frustrating them so they'll go play elsewhere.
3. Stupid - same treatment as bored.
4. Ignorant - maybe there's a shred of hope here, but I doubt it.

Is there anything we can do to lock out these perp's? Yes there is, and yesterday's exercise was a great example of people rising up to can the spammers.

1. Report them - if you're on Twitter, send their tweet to @spam. Yesterday's perp's were rapidly kicked out of Twitter thanks to angry recipients who did the right thing.
2. If you use Twitter by itself and you receive spammy or pornish followers, block them. Then report them to @spam.
3. If you use Tweetdeck and you receive spammy or pornish tweets, you can block them and report them at the same time. Here's some more good advice for Twitter.
4. Facebook is also a spammer haven. There are lots of different types of Facebook spam. Here's a good discussion. For specific advice on blocking Facebook spam, try the official Facebook help page on spam and attacks.
5. I have not seen much, if any, spam on LinkedIn, but I'm sure it's out there. If you go to the Help section and search on "spam" there are quite a few answers.

Bottom line - don't let these bozos get away with it. Be proactive. If we can't get a handle on spam and porno ourselves, our social networking sites will need to be even more regulated and monitored. It's up to us. 

 

Social Media Monitoring - Are You Hot, Hot, Hot?

I'm sure you've heard us marketers barking about social media monitoring, but what's it all about? The standard line is something like "people are already talking about you online, so you might as well join the conversation". Well, maybe that's true and maybe not. Let's find out. Let's take our social media temperature.

First let's go to SocialMention (www.socialmention.com) and see what a popular brand looks like. Type "starbucks" into the search box and click the search button. Here's what I got today.

 

Here's how Social Mention describes its service: "It allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web's social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc." Editor's note: Best of all, it's free!

In a familiar, Google-like search results page you can see all of the instances of your brand being talked about across the social media spectrum. Charts on the left-hand side show you the top people and keywords as well as some interesting metrics about how people "feel" about your brand and how "powerful" your brand is:

• Strength: "phrase mentions within the last 24 hours divided by total possible mentions".
• Sentiment: "the ratio of mentions that are generally positive to those that are generally negative".
• Passion: "a measure of the likelihood that individuals talking about your brand will do so repeatedly".
• Reach: "the number of unique authors referencing your brand divided by the total number of mentions".

Of course, they won't tell us how exactly how they figure out the positive and negative, but it most likely has to do with certain keywords related to sentiment, like "I love Starbucks coffee" or its converse.

Pretty cool, huh?

OK, now you try it

Search on your company brand or your personal social media identity, anything that might by found in a blog, microblog, web page or social media bookmark.

Once your results come up, filter by the "results" pulldown on "Last Day". Now you know how much "buzz" has been created in the past 24 hours. What's your social media temperature?

HOT

Like Starbucks. Hundreds of mentions in a single day.

MEDIUM

10 - 100 mentions. More typical of companies that are active in social media but may not have such a well-known brand.

COLD

0 - 10 mentions. Needs work. Good news if you're trying to keep your activities secret. Bad news if you're trying to spread the word about your brand. If the latter is the case, try inbound marketing and work it every day.

How does your website stack up against your competitors?

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Take Your Blog to the Next Level With Social Media Marketing

If you're already blogging and promoting your blog via the main social networking and social bookmarking sites, you're well on your way towards building a strong readership. How do you take your blog to the next level? How do you become a well-known blog that people subscribe to and comment on frequently? Here are some next-level strategies.

1. Go Deep, Go Wide - don't just promote your blog on a few social networking and bookmarking sites. Go for lots of them. Here's a good list. 
2. Comment Like Crazy -find lots of good blogs in your area of interest and subscribe to their RSS feeds. Monitor the new posts every day. Read the ones that interest you the most, tweet them and comment on them. You will receive inbound links that help your Google ranking and you will attract other readers and commenters to your blog.
3. Timing is Everything - publish and promote during prime time. If you are in the eastern U.S., for example, publish between 11 AM and 12PM so you will reach the west coast when they are getting to work and you still have a shot at the folks in Europe before bed time.
4. Mix it Up - don't blog about the same thing every day, keep it fresh with new topics and ideas. Some days be helpful, other days "preachy", and still others downright ornery. Keep them guessing.
5. Stick to the Facts - it's ok to express your opinion, but people are more likely to subscribe if you do your homework. Reference your sources and explain why you feel the way you do. We all hear way to much pontificating.
6. Leverage Relationships - build relationships with other bloggers through social media, comments and get-togethers. Reference their blogs in yours. Ask if you can guest blog on their blogs and offer an exchange. Some folks even build blog alliances to co-promote each other.
7. Don't Forget the Keywords - your blog should be a catalyst for SEO success. Social media promotion will help get you lots of inbound links and drive up your ranking, but adding important keywords to your blog title, headings, image "alt" tags and meta keywords will take you even higher.
8. Finally, there's no substitute for quality. Check your spelling and grammar before you publish. A well-written blog goes a long way. An interesting, well-written blog is gold.
   

How does your website stack up against your competitors?

Click here for a free report.

Facebook – The Great Debate: Professional vs. Personal?

 

A little over a year ago, I succumbed to the hype and became a member of Facebook.  Fast-forward one year --- am now a Facebook-aholic.  I’ve reconnected with old friends, distant relatives are now up-to-date on all of my doings, and my travel photos are getting a second glance.  I have utilized Events, Groups, and Fan Pages for non-profits that I volunteer for, and helped a number of friends on Facebook by answering their many technical questions.

So, where do you draw the line on whom to accept or invite as a Facebook “friend”?   We have all experienced having a co-worker send us a friend request.   And what do you do when a Twitter follower that you recently connected with, asks to be your friend?   For me, this was an individual that I was flattered to make acquaintance with, but does he want to hear about my weekend plans or see photos of my dog?

Here are a few guidelines to consider for Professional vs. Personal Networking on Facebook:

1.  Do you eat, sleep, and breathe your work?  

Then dive right in and accept/invite everyone as your friend.  Go ahead and mix your work and personal friends together, because, let’s face it - you probably don’t have many personal friends anyway if all you do is talk about work.

2.  Are you passionate about your work and professional branding, but live for the weekend?

A healthy mix of personal and professional networking is the ticket for you.  Try using Linked In as your digital Rolodex and networking catalyst, and Twitter for expressing your professional flair and interests.  Then, reserve Facebook strictly for friends and family to share your photos, jokes, sports smack-talk, and political opinions.

3.   Do you like to shout out your every thought from the rooftop, all of the time?

You can find yourself without a job if you post inappropriate photos, violate workplace confidentiality, or even complain about a boss or co-worker.   Anyone with minimal common sense should understand this, but it never ceases to amaze me what some people write in their Facebook status updates.  If you cannot refrain from emotionally expressing yourself to the masses, better not include any professional contacts on your Facebook, ever.  Twitter is probably not right for you either.  Put up a profile on Linked In and stick to business conversations.

Remember, there are no rules.  Take your time and do what you are comfortable with.  If you still can’t decide how to separate Professional vs. Personal Networking on Facebook, ask yourself a.) Would your Facebook friends de-friend you if you posted your Tweets as your status updates? b.) Would your Tweeps un-follow you if you tweeted your Facebook status updates? 

Transparency is important in business relationships, but it stops at “Who’s coming to the reunion?  Woot!”

Inbound Marketing Transformers

Six months ago we started on a journey into Inbound Marketing and blogged about it in our Inbound Marketing Journal. We discovered that Inbound Marketing not only helped us sell our own services, but it came up time after time in discussions with our clients. Everyone wanted to know how they could transform their web sites into sales and marketing machines that powered their businesses. We knew the answer was Inbound Marketing, with its unique blend of content creation (blogs, videos, webinars...), social media engagement and web analytics. Every client was interested and no one had a clue how to get started.

The next step for us, transforming ourselves into an Inbound Marketing Agency, was an easy decision but difficult to do in practice. There's a lot to think about and much to prepare. We first became proficient ourselves in content marketing and social media promotion. We put our experiences and advice for small businesses into a free whitepaper download called Inbound Marketer's Handbook, which became an instant hit and helped us work with our clients. Much thought went into developing an Inbound Marketing Strategy and figuring out how to deliver services such as blog writing, social media engagement and measurement of results. There were many technologies available, but few of them seemed to work together in an easy way.

Our services offering began to gel when we took the Hubspot 7 day trial for prospective partners. We liked Hubspot for all of the services we now provide, and learned how to use it through their Hubspot Partner program and by transforming our own website into a Hubspot-powered site. Now we are putting all we have learned into practice with our clients and looking forward to reporting many success stories down the road. We are looking forward to those transformations as well.

Transitioning to Inbound Marketing from traditional print advertising

If you are like many smart marketing leaders, you accept the fact that marketing methods and strategies have changed greatly over the past few years. If you haven’t already started incorporating Inbound Marketing techniques using social media, you know you need to – and you know you need to do it soon or you’ll be behind in your industry.

SEO, blog writing, blog publishing, Twitter, Face Book, LinkedIn, social media engagement, just to name a few - it’s a lot to take in, it can be overwhelming, and if you’re like me, you are already burning the candle at both ends and working more hours each week than you would like to admit. Spend less time with your family and friends, spend less time with your hobbies, have less private time with yourself, that can’t be the answer, what’s going to give?

Are you going to magically find a way to create more hours in the day? The truthful answer is – not likely. You can only wear so many capes at one time. So here are a few ways to make the transition into Inbound Marketing world a little less dramatic than throwing yourself off a cliff.

1. Set a goal of dedicating 4 hours per week.
2. There is no #2 for right now, focus on #1.

This is the same advice we share with our clients to get started. Don’t say, “I’m just too busy right now”. Here’s why – it is cost-effective, it is good for branding, and it builds long-term benefits that won’t fade away after the next clever print campaign ends. Don’t stop doing what you’re doing with print. Don’t throw yourself off a cliff. Relax, and just focus on #1 and #2 for now. The details will come to you when you actually start planning and sticking to a schedule of 4 hours/week.

Considering the traditional 40-hour workweek. That’s 10% of your time. What if adjusting your time management strategy by 10% resulted in an increase of 30% in sales? What if, in addition to increasing your sales by 30%, you also significantly lowered other costs associated with customer support or R & D?

Follow the steps (#1 & #2 above) and you’re sure to get excited and all of a sudden it will click and you’ll see how those 4 hours can change your entire approach to your current marketing strategies, your marketing budget, your ROI and your bottom line.

The other choice, is to keep thinking about it, talking about it, dreaming that there will be a better day when you actually will start doing it. That approach comes with the risk of stringing it out forever.