Are you being ‘used’ for your connections on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is an amazing tool and the site that professionals rely on to keep in touch with their connections and maintain that connection throughout your career. It is often frustrating to try and get in touch with someone only to find that they have moved companies and you no longer have their updated details or new phone number.

With LinkedIn you can maintain the connection easily, staying in touch as each of you move roles and progress across companies, email address and phone number.

Used correctly, LinkedIn is very powerful.

Some connections use the LinkedIn Openlink Network, available to premium subscribers.

This enables connections to connect with and send messages to anyone in their network.

Others might append LION to their display name to indicate that they are a LinkedIn Open Networker and open to connecting.

But LinkedIn is also ruthlessly used by people who use you to mine your connections and get connected to your own business contacts, partners and customers. This can put your own LinkedIn connections at risk – especially if you maintain good relationships with your clients and partners on LinkedIn.

You could lose competitive advantage, and run the risk of losing business, simply by adding a new contact to your LinkedIn network.

You might receive a message to connect in LinkedIn like this. The messages might be from someone you didn’t know and they might say:

“Hi Eileen, We’re both connected to [CONNECTION NAME] and she mentioned that you would be a great person to connect with. I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.
Kind regards [NEW CONNECTION NAME]

If you look at their profile you might find that they work in a similar role or geographical area to you. Their website says that they work with different customers, but they blog about moving into working with the sort of clients that you actually have.

By connecting with the new connection, you might find that they are connecting with all of your hard-won LinkedIn contacts with the aim of doing business with them.

LinkedIn makes it easy to to this by publishing your connections to your contacts by default.  You can turn this setting off in your profile so that no one can see your other connections unless you have mutual connections.

The setting is in the Profile tab of your settings and is accessed by clicking the “Select who can see your connections” link. Change the drop down list box to “Only you”. if you want to protect your connections from being spammed by people they do not know.

If you want to protect your LinkedIn connections and customers, maintain the business relationships you have the consider changing the privacy of your connections and make sure that your customers stay loyal to you – no matter what social network they use…

Image Credit: pasukaru76

Eileen is a social social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

LinkedIn announces invite only LinkedIn Contacts

LinkedIn is moving even closer to becoming your one stop shop for managing your business relationships. It has been adding features to contacts for some time now with tags and notes fields so you can use LinkedIn as a CRM tool.

Now with its introduction of LinkedIn contacts you can bring all of your contacts together from your address books, emails and calendars.

Not only that, but you can remind yourself of the last contact you had with your connection before you go to meet them. Currently this facility is in beta in the connections Notes field, but this re-vamp brings threads together in one UI.

You can now organise your contacts by their job titles, and sources – as well as managing your saved connections.

Existing contact information — such as tagged and location specific information are still there and there is an option to de-duplicate address book imports with the ‘potential merges’ tab.

When a connection is highlighted, there is the option to see all related information about the contact.

You can see your recent conversations with the contact, any meeting that you arranged – as well as notes about the connection.

You can set reminders about meetings, document how you met the connection – important when you’re managing hundreds of connections and tag the contact from one new tabbed interface.

Information about your connections now appears on your contacts page.  You can now see recommendations, job changes, birthdays and other opportunities to get in touch with your connections.

Register your interest at LinkedIn to be added to the waitlist

Eileen is a social social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

50 billion devices with Cisco’s Internet of Things

50 billion things on the Internet by 2020? That’s a huge amount of ‘things’. This Infographic from Cisco opens up a mind-blowing set of possibilities.  Even cows can be connected to the Internet.  IPv6 brings a huge amount of possibilities into our home and working lives. You never know, we’ll have talking socks and RFID trash next  

This is well worth sharing again…

Eileen is a social social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

LinkedIn moves closer to becoming the professional site we rely on

LinkedIn has repositioned itself as a go to site for business professionals. It acquired slideshare last year and has incorporated some of its features into its company pages. You can now drive extra engagement with page followers by attaching files such as presentations, pdf’s and white papers and adding them to company page updates.

LinkedIn is the top social media site for business executives according to a survey reported by Forbes and LinkedIn wants to make sure that it stays that way. It has recently introduced features  such as LinkedIn Today

Users can also follow their favourite influencers.  LinkedIn has identified thought leaders in its network and you can now follow them – just like you can follow companies. The program is now closed but you can apply to be considered a thought leader and might just be included in its list.

We use social media for a variety of reasons – and those reasons are different to the reasons we use Facebook for.  Hubspot has a nice infographic showing the differences between personal social networks  and business social networks and their different needs. In summary these differences are:

Personal Social Network	Professional Social Networks
Distraction, Having fun	Aspiration, Achievement
Spending time	Investing time
socialising, staying in touch	Maintaining Identity, searching for opportunities, make useful contacts
Find content that suits personal interests	Get updates on Brands
Get entertainment updates	Read up on current affairs

LinkedIn is also testing sponsored content – similar to Facebook’s sponsored stories which will be filtering down to our mobile devices in 2013.  The new UI is certainly much better than its old interface.  The ability to manage connections ands use LinkedIn as a CRM tool for notes and details as well as using Tags for good CRM.

LinkedIn is becoming a very credible business tool that professionals use extensively. And with its income up 66 per cent in Q4 2012 it is a tool that more and more of us will come to rely on absolutely.

Eileen is a social social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

Your Facebook status is not as private as you thought it was

Do you REALLY trust all your friends on your Facebook feed?  Recently Facebook has added a share link to status updates. Here’s an update I posted earlier on Facebook.

You can see that it is really easy to share this text only post further.  Much further than you wanted it to if you have only sent the post to a limited number of friends in the first place.

From the help text these are the levels of sharing you can do:

• Sharing with a broad audience: Use the share menu that’s located at the top of your homepage and timeline to let others know what’s on your mind. You can update your status and share photos, videos, links and other application content. Things you share will appear as posts on your timeline, and can appear in your news feed. To control whether or not specific people have the option to view your stories, you can change the privacy settings for each piece of content you post.
• Sharing with a small group of friends: Use the Groups feature to share content with a select group of people, like family members, your soccer team or your book club.
• Sharing with an individual: You can use the share menu at the top of a friend’s timeline to write or share something on his or her timeline. Friends of your friend will also be able to view your post. If you’d like to share something privately, you can always send someone a private message.

But sharing status updates that were never originally meant to be shared with a broader audience seems wrong. Having the ability to control whether that status update can be shared

This means that anyone who reads your Facebook status update can share it with, not only their friends, but make the status update public. Anyone else can then share this further.

The Facebook privacy page does not mention that status updates that you originally thought were just for your Facebook friends, now can be shared with anyone outside of your friends and their friends.

So be careful what you put on Facebook.  It might be reaching a much greater audience than you ever intended it to…

Using LinkedIn company pages to extend your reach.

More and more of my client work involves LinkedIn nowadays. Lots of LinkedIn users use LinkedIn to advance their career. Now companies are really starting to see the value of LinkedIn for three reasons.

Customer connections and customer relationship management

Finding new clients and partners

Elevating their own personal brand so that they stand out in the crowded jobs market.

But companies are using LinkedIn too to make better connections with their customers. Maersk Line and LinkedIn have been talking about the benefits that Maersk Line gets from LinkedIn.

Maersk uses its LinkedIn company page to really connect with its customers.

The page has over 32,000 followers and updates its page daily.

Most of its updates have comments – all have likes by the community. Its products and services page has recommendations for almost every service Maersk offers. 

As it says on its Maersk social blog – every recommendation of its products and services extends its reach of the network. 

I suspect its structured groups will increase its reach and engagement further.

There are almost 3 million company pages on LinkedIn – some large organisations such as IBM, Deloitte and Shell. Small organisations have a great presence too. Almost 200,000 company pages have been created for UK organisations.

The UK small businesses seem to have embraced LinkedIn pages too. Over 82,000 UK based businesses with less than 10 people have company pages. That is 45.8 per cent of the total number of pages.

And 40 of these small businesses with 1-10 staff have over 1000 followers of their page.

Contrast this with US based businesses. There are over 742,000 businesses in the US that have LinkedIn pages. 318,550 are from businesses with less than 10 employees. That’s 42.9 per cent compared with 45.8 per cent of firms in the UK.

Three companies in the US with only 1-10 employees have over 5000 followers. One is a valid small business (not a government organisation) too:

And the most followed company on LinkedIn? Worley Parsons. Headquartered in Australia it has over 53.5 million followers. The company keeps its users engaged by its mix of social updates, career information and news.

LinkedIn has several ways to increase your reach, stay top of mind in across industry. Adding valid credible comments to companies you follow means that other followers will get the chance to see your profile, connect with you and start up a conversation with you.  Just like groups, company pages give you exposure well outside of your  first degree connections.

It is worth looking at engaging with companies if you want to really extend your reach and connect across the industry.  all you have to do is click ‘Follow’

Eileen is a social social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

Online Social Media principles– Coca-Cola style

I like the transparency of Coca – Cola in its social media conversations online. It published its social media principles for online behaviour last year – but its worth having a look at why these principles work so well.

Coca-Cola works around its shared values which it uses throughout the organisation:

LEADERSHIP : The courage to shape a better future;
COLLABORATION : Leveraging our collective genius;
INTEGRITY : Being real;
ACCOUNTABILITY : Recognizing that if it is to be, it’s up to me;
PASSION : Showing commitment in heart and mind;
DIVERSITY : Being as inclusive as our brands; and
QUALITY : Ensuring what we do, we do well.

And in its social media activities, these values are articulated and summarised as:

Transparency in every social media engagement. The Company does not condone manipulating the social media flow by creating "fake" destinations and posts designed to mislead followers and control a conversation. We also require bloggers and social media influencers to disclose to their readers when we’re associating with them, whether by providing them with product samples or hosting them at Company events, and we need to monitor whether they are complying with this requirement.

Protection of our consumers’ privacy. This means that we should be conscientious regarding any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that we collect, including how we collect, store, use, or share that PII, all of which should be done pursuant to applicable Privacy Policies, laws and IT policies.

Respect of copyrights, trademarks, rights of publicity, and other third-party rights in the online social media space, including with regard to user-generated content (UGC). How exactly you do this may depend on your particular situation, so work with your cross-functional teams to make informed, appropriate decisions.

Responsibility in our use of technology. We will not use or align the Company with any organizations or Web sites that deploy the use of excessive tracking software, adware, malware or spyware.

Utilization of best practices, listening to the online community, and compliance with applicable regulations to ensure that these Online Social Media Principles remain current and reflect the most up-to-date and appropriate standards of behaviour.

These values, whilst similar to other companies that have an online presence show clearly and with transparency  — how the brand interacts with its customers.  The company uses social media successfully as an advertising tool and demonstrates its commitments to its customers by publishing its  online shows just how much it wants to follow its own guidelines and make a success.

If only other companies would do the same…

Eileen is a social social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

7 tips for small businesses to improve Facebook Page engagement

There are now 15 million small and medium business pages on Facebook business. It is a great way for small businesses to connect with local customers  — but many struggle to get any real engagement with their fans.

Most Facebook pages are community or cause pages, followed by local businesses and musicians. But pages are not updating or getting engagement with their fans.

Source: Recommendly report

Recommend.ly reports that there is a low level of engagement and indeed a low level of fans clicking like on the page. 73.3 per cent of pages have less than 1000 fans and 99 per cent have less than 100,000 fans.

Source: Recommendly

SMB page owners also do not update their pages with 83.3 per cent updating their page less than 5 times per month and 79.3 per cent making no updates at all. The challenge is – if you do not update your page, then your fans will not see your update. Facebook shows updates to about 15 per cent of your fans so you need to update regularly to make sure that your post is seen.

Interestingly enough, businesses with category names such as Restaurant or Spa are more active in posting on Facebook and make more than 5 posts per month. Even so, over 50 per cent of local businesses do not have a cover picture for their page.

So what can small businesses do to improve engagement?  These 7 tips might help

• Use the promoted posts feature. 500,000 pages are now using promoted posts according to Dan Levy
• Post regularly. Politicians post over 100 updates per month according to the report.
• Take advantage of Facebook’s new look coming soon with a greater focus on photos. Share photos and upload videos which are more likely to be seen by your customers. Join the waiting list for early access to the new news feed too
• Use the scheduled post feature and post regular updates – even at times when you are busy.  Your readers will see scheduled posts, images and videos in their feeds
• Add a cover image. 63.9 per cent of all pages do not have a cover image.
• Ask questions
• If you are a politician, Actor/director or Spa, post visual content. You will get a much higher engagement rate on your page.

The most important thing is to keep going. If you despair of getting no responses and no interaction, don’t worry. Each post you make will be seen by some of your fans. you will remain in their mind, even subconsciously and they will be more likely to remember you compared to someone that does  not update their page at all.

So treat your page as a live feed advertisement of your brand. Keep it active, keep it visual.

and most importantly – keep it going…

Eileen is a social social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

How to use LinkedIn for CRM: Notes and details

When you were tagging your LinkedIn connections, you might have seen some other links on your connection information. LinkedIn provides a handy way to track conversations with your connections and add other useful information

Usually these fields are blank where the connection has not filled in many LinkedIn details on their profile. Some of your connections might have more comprehensive information.

Click on the edit details link to see other information that you can add about the contact:

I can add a selection of phone numbers, web sites, social sites, spouse and manager information. I can add my own custom fields, birthdays and contact notes.

This extra information might just help you when you are trying to work out where and when you met someone. you can look up details such as what you talked about, who their spouse is  — and when their birthday is.

The downside at the moment is that these fields are not exported into the CSV file to upload into your contacts manager – nor are they recognised by the outlook social connector to populate your contacts in Outlook. Perhaps someone at Microsoft might want to create a skunk works project to make this happen? 

The LinkedIn notes feature gives you yet another reason to transfer all of that business card information into LinkedIn’s contact details and throw those dead business cards away 

Eileen is a social social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

TV interview on home working v’s office: Face to face time is ace time

I  was invited to go on TV the other day.My blog post for ZDNet about yahoo’s no home working rule generated a lot of comments. I agreed with Yahoo’s decision to change the working condition for its 200 home workers and get them to come into the office.

I’ve worked from home regularly over the years – but I’ve never had to work entirely from home.  Some of my friends at HP are classed as home workers who never go into the office and they tell me they find it lonely and isolating.

I was asked to talk to Canada AM, which is Canadian Television Network (CTV’s) national morning show. I went into London for the interview – with 1/2mb at best, doing the interview over Skype would have been so painful.

Marci Len was the host for the piece, sitting in Toronto with Nitin Kawale, President of Cisco in Canada.

CTV have a studio in London with a TV camera to talk to the show. The camera was in a side room. I sat on a chair with my feet resting on a step stool. The backdrop of London was behind me. Unlike normal video conferencing I had no video feed into the room. My TV debut was a surreal experience.

Sitting in the dark staring into a camera with no visual clues as to what was happening at the other end made for a really strange interview. Normally I can tell by watching body language, when it is appropriate to interject.  I could not see Marci’s nods and smiles. I had only an audio feed. I had to wait for direct questions to be asked.

I could not interrupt, my body language was hidden from view when Nitin spoke and the fact that i was not actually in the room in Toronto meant that i had much less opportunity to talk and contribute to the conversation.

In fact this experience gave me much less opportunity to virtually interact than web conferences usually do.  I felt out of the loop, isolated and out of touch with the discussion  — exactly the feelings that permanent remote workers feel without the experience of face time in the office.

I was not drawn into the conversation as much – in fact Nitin, in the studio got over twice the opportunity to state his views than I did. The lack of face to face connections made things incredibly difficult to really engage. This type of interview was so much harder than any telephone conference I’ve ever done – more so because it was on. TV.

Would I do another TV interview? Of course.  Would I prefer an ‘in studio introduction?’ heck yeah. But if I had to do another interview without any visual feedback at all, I’d make sure that I treated it just like a telephone call – and get the extra few sentences in that I really wanted to say!

Oh well, next time…

Eileen is a social social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.