By default, when you connect with someone on LinkedIn, your connections become visible to them. This should set off alarm bells for most people. Think about it: You connect with employees, customers, prospects, and partners. And sometimes you connect with people who would use this information against you: Recruiters, former employees, and competitors. Even if someone is not in this latter category today, will that be true tomorrow?

I highly recommend turning off connection visibility. It will not in any way impede  the valuable “people search”, “introduction”, or other functions of LinkedIn. Here’s how:

1) When signed-in to your account, you should see a settings option like this in the upper right area of you screen: Read the rest of this entry »

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Have you noticed these things called Quick Response codes (or more commonly, QR codes) like the one to the left? Suddenly they’re everywhere. I see them on the front page of our local newspaper, on the sides of buildings, in magazine ads, on T-shirts, on bottles of wine, and even on people’s bodies as tattoos, some of them apparently permanent (a little scary; as Jimmy Buffett says, “It’s a permanent reminder of a temporary feeling.”).

What are these QR codes for? In short, they bridge people from the real world to your on-line presence. If social media is a conversation, what better way to engage folks?

Last week, a woman handed me her business card. On the front was a QR code. Scanning it with my iPhone took me to a landing page on her company’s website. Now that’s how to take a prospect to the next level!

This is not new technology. QR codes were invented by Toyota in 1994 and have been popular in Japan for some time. Here’s how they work: First, get a Smartphone, either an iPhone (my preference) or an Android. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I discovered a social media measurement service called www.Klout.com. That’s as in: “Who’s got clout?” My question is, do you have clout? Do you need it? How do you get it?

Greatly simplifying, Klout measures a person’s influence based on how many friends they have on Facebook and how many followers they have on Twitter. I’m not saying that those are bad measures of influence. In fact, if in business I’m deciding whom to influence, I want to influence the influencers. Klout is a valuable tool.

Still, as a social media professional, I’ve made two radical decisions regarding business social networking.

1. I don’t try to be everywhere or to be all things to all people. Businesses have limited resources; do one thing well, rather than five things poorly. For business social networking, I use only LinkedIn, not Facebook, not Plaxo, not Spoke, not Ryze, not … anything else.
2. I connect with (or follow) only people that I actually know. And respect. As a result, even though I was one of the first 99,000 members of LinkedIn, and 99,900,000 members have followed, today I have fewer than eight hundred connections. But they’re real connections. When I ask them for something, I usually get it. And when they ask me for something, I’m happy to assist.

Social networking is a lot like real life. When you invest in your relationships, they pay dividends. Yes, it’s a little counterintuitive but I say go for quality over quantity.

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Many people (as in 200,000,000) are familiar with blogging, one of the earliest forms of social media. But did you know that you can use a blog platform, WordPress, to build your entire website? Check out my website, www.WeSocialize.biz, as an example (you probably already have).

In addition to a tab labeled “Blog” where I add these posts once or twice a month. You’ll also see a raft of other pages: “Home”, “About”, “Speaking”, etc. All of these are pages are also powered by WordPress.

There’s a big advantage when powering your website with WordPress: You can change it in under 60 seconds without knowing HTML, CSS, Java, and the like. Imagine, your cost and cycle-time for changes collapsing to zero. Yes, if you can edit Microsoft Word, you can run a WordPress-based website. In fact, there’s even a button on the WordPress toolbar called “Paste from Word”. If you’ve got content in Word, you can publish it to your website with just a couple of clicks. How cool is that?

The trick to getting started is selecting a WordPress “template”. There are thousands of free templates and countless more for sale at modest prices (often around $30). Or you can hire a designer to create one for you as I did.

Once you have your template, log into your WordPress account, click “Pages” to access your list of web pages (e.g., “Home”, “About”, etc.) and then select the one that you want to edit. Read the rest of this entry »

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If you run a business in this social media world, you ignore the social conversation at your peril. What our peers tell us is five times more convincing than what you tell us. (Who measures this stuff?)

I don’t know if anyone knows who coined the term “word of mouth” but we’ve always understood its power. In this social media revolution, author Erik Qualman says we’re now in a “world of mouth”.

Last night, when my wife and I arrived at the Hilton in downtown Miami, we were completely unfamiliar with the neighborhood and we were hungry. Read the rest of this entry »

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When I was young, the one super power I deeply desired was extra sensory perception — ESP. I wanted to know what people were thinking. Now, thanks to Twitter and other social media services, I’ve acquired an ability that very closely approximates it.

It took the Twitter team three years to figure out that this version of ESP is the most interesting thing they created. As a result, they’ve redesigned their home page to focus on it. When you go to site without signing in, there it is: The most popular topic this minute… this day… this week. As I write, I’m certain that Tiger Woods is praying for the next big event to knock him out of public consciousness, at least until the start of golf season. And David Letterman is so thankful that Tiger Woods came along.

Twitter search is ESP because 50 million times a day, people share their thoughts in 140 characters or less. Read the rest of this entry »

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Nobody wants to be sold to. Instead, they want to buy from us if we solve their problems. In order to truly understand a prospective customer’s problems, we’ve got to talk to them. Well, not talk “to” them, but talk “with” them… openly.

Side note: One of my favorite sales rules: “Remember, you have two ears and one mouth; spend twice as much time listening as talking.” (Frankly, 10-to-1 would be even better but how much of this behavior can you really expect from extroverts?)

The goal of the conversation is to discover your prospect’s “pain”. Before they will share that, you will have to establish rapport. With rapport, you have the opportunity to build trust. With trust, you have the opportunity to make a sale.

Social media helps you establish rapport in so many ways; just pick you favorite.

Rapport building idea #1:

Before meeting with any new prospect, review their LinkedIn profile to identify potential connection points. Look for a shared college, hobby, sport, past employer, industry association, professional acquaintance, or almost anything else (avoiding, say, shared former spouses and the like). Read the rest of this entry »

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I’m writing this post for the first time directly on my iPad. I’m using this device in places I’ve never used a computer before: On my sofa reading The Wall Street Journal, in my bed streaming NetFlix movies, and presently propped comfortably on my Southwest Airlines tray table flying from the ‘Burgh to the windy city (an allusion to Chicago politicians more than the weather, although tonight 65,000-foot cumulonimbus clouds delayed us for hours).

You don’t have to be a social media expert to know that Southwest is an entertaining airline. Many of their flight attendants are comedians, singers, and rappers (see YouTube for the best safety briefing ever; note to the FAA – it’s something people actually listen to). They’re not at all like United. Ten million people know that “United breaks guitars”.

So to the point of this column: Since buying my iPad, I’ve been increasingly frustrated by having to turn it off until reaching 10,000 feet. What a dumb rule! Since I no longer buy USAToday, The Wall Street Journal, or The New York Times in paper form, every time I fly I’m bored out of my mind for 10 minutes during both takeoff and landing.

If an iPhone or iPad could bring down a jetliner, the terrorists would have already won, right? Who’s the spineless bureaucrat responsible for his policy?

I’ve been contemplating using Twitter or Facebook to start a revolution to demand a policy change. We the people make the rules. We need our iPads 24 x 7. Are you with me? Read the rest of this entry »