Recently in marketing Category

Since I wrote this article for the Sunday Business Post supplement and it's currently not available online I thought I might as well republish the unedited version. (The edited version might make more sense!)

Here it is...

Every time you open a newspaper of magazine these days there seems to be articles encouraging you to use various "social networking" websites to improve your business and your life. Personally I think a lot of it is hype, but I still think most of them can be useful tools.

One of the first "social networking" sites I joined was LinkedIn. LinkedIn has been around for several years, but I've noticed a lot more interest being shown in it in over the last year.
So what is it?
In many respects LinkedIn is "the" business networking site.
While Bebo may be aimed at a younger crowd, Linkedin is designed for working professionals.

So why should you use Linkedin?

That depends on you, but whether you are happily employed, running your own business or looking for that next challenge meeting new people with similar interests is always a good move.
Over the last couple of years I've used LinkedIn several times to arrange meetings with industry partners in advance of conferences. I've got back in touch with people I went to school with and even managed to track down people I worked with over 15 years ago. I've also been able to use Linkedin to build up a network of contacts that are happy to lend a hand when you ask them. (Just remember it is a two way street!) A lot of people I know on LinkedIn use it for getting recommendations, so being on there obviously increases your chances of being recommended!

Unlike Facebook, for example with its annoying vampires and ghouls, the site is focussed on building relationships between business contacts. It may not be as "exciting" and "interactive" as Facebook, but it maintains its focus.

A basic LinkedIn account doesn't cost anything. If you choose to upgrade to one of the paid options you can get a lot more information about who has been viewing your profile and you also get access to more tools that allow you to contact other users directly. With the free option you can get basic information about who has been looking at your profile, while a paid membership gives you full details. If, like me, you aren't using LinkedIn to actively find sales leads, then you probably don't need the paid options.

So what kind of things can you put on there?

The key thing with LinkedIn is your profile. Everything else takes a back seat. If you want a lot of privacy then it probably isn't the place for you! Sure, you don't have to share sensitive information, but in order to use the site effectively you need to have a complete profile.

People do business with other people. While it is obvious that very big brands have their own attractions it's also clear to me at least that I base a lot of decisions on the personality of my contact. I don't need to like a sales person but if I do it certainly helps. And this personal aspect is central to the site.

You're actively encouraged to maintain as complete a profile as possible and to keep your profile up to date. I've seen quite a few people use their LinkedIn profile as an alternative to a CV. Not only does it show all the usual skills and experience but it will also show what other people think of this person. So you get the CV and the references all in one place and putting a photo on your profile helps. You can easily link to your profile in your email signature or put one of the little buttons on your website or blog.

While member profiles on a lot of sites are distinctly lacking in clear information most LinkedIn profiles are comprehensive and clear. If someone asks to "connect" with me on LinkedIn I can easily find out who they are and decide if I want to interact with them. Your profile page is a lot more than just a business card. You can provide as much professional information as possible and also include information about your interests. The more detail you provide the more likely you are to be found by people either looking for you or looking for someone like you. You can also provide links to your external websites and RSS feed (eg. Your business or personal blog) while also sharing your personal interests.

So how can you use it?
If you are looking for a job you can browse current job openings. If you're looking to make a sale then you need to be careful how you approach things. The gentle indirect approach is usually best. So you could, for example, join one of the many industry groups or invest some time in answering questions from other LinkedIn members on the site. In either case by building up a network of contacts and getting yourself "known" you increase your visibility and thus your chance of either getting hired or making that sale. If you are looking for a personal contact in a faceless corporation then you might be able to leverage your existing relationships. Think of it as being akin to the six  degrees of separation. If I don't know someone directly chances are someone in my extended network might. A contact today might be a sales lead tomorrow. In my own experience it has helped when choosing providers for a whole range of services, such as mobile phones and even coffee!

You can also use the groups feature within LinkedIn to find people who share common interests and the group discussion boards are a great way to swap ideas and opinions on relevant topics. You can see which groups a person is in via the little badges that get displayed on their profile. The key thing each and every time is that you aren't distracted with irrelevant rubbish, which can be major problem with a lot of other social networking sites.
There are a few applications you can choose to use which will do things like pull in blog posts from your contacts or friends' Amazon reading lists, but they are totally unobtrusive.

Giving and receiving recommendations is one of the more powerful tools. I am always happy to recommend people and services that I've had a good personal experience with. Doing this via LinkedIn makes it public and also helps other people to gauge how "valued" you and your contacts are. If I make a recommnedation for a product or a service then I have to feel confident that it will deliver, because if it doesn't it will reflect badly on me. So, I won't leave a recommendation on someone's profile unless I've had direct experience of them or their services. Most people on LinkedIn won't either.

Personally I find the service to be very useful and depending on how you use it you may find it incredibly helpful too. Since it won't cost you anything other than a bit of time to setup a profile there's nothing to lose.

I don't watch a lot of television partially because I hate the interruptions of adverts breaks.

Now if the ads on TV were anything like this I probably would start watching a lot more TV:

I send and receive a lot of email (I've mentioned this more than once in the past).

In order for an email to catch my attention it needs to be engaging at some level. It doesn't need to be an artistic masterpiece, but something clear and engaging.

Yet again today I got an email which was the exact opposite of this...

To start with the subject line was a disaster. Starting the subject line with a colon looks odd and when you couple that with a total disregard for proper capitalisation it springs out at me for all the wrong reasons.

What about the content?

Weird coloured text doesn't add anything.

As for the content... a totally uninspiring mish-mash of buzzwords that doesn't even read like coherent English.

Now if they'd actually taken  few minutes to read over the email before they hit send then maybe they'd have realise the error of their ways...

Well maybe they wouldn't have ...

If you're going to send out a mass email check before you send it.

I'm an individual - maybe you can't do a proper personalised email to ME, but sending to "colleagues" is just silly. If you want me to feel like a number, then you've won. Thanks. You've just made my Monday!

Spammers annoy the life out of me.

Lazy and ignorant they always seem to find some way of "explaining" their (mis)behaviour

Bido, who are relaunching this week, thought it would be a great idea to spam the entire membership of DNForum

Grr!

The internet is a weird and wonderful place.

This evening let's look at the "weird" and possibly even "bizarre".

As regulars readers probably know, I run several websites apart from my day job (I really should put "day" in inverted commas, as it's never really been 9 to 5), including IWF, which is a discussion forum for Irish internet professionals.

Users of the forum discuss topics that they're interested in and, naturally, link to websites they've come across.

(Last time I checked there weren't any laws against linking to websites, but maybe I was mistaken... I'm just not so sure anymore.)

Maybe I don't know anything about how the internet works, or anything about internet marketing or SEO, but I heard this rumour, now it was just a rumour, that links to websites were quite important. Maybe I just misheard it.

In any case I received an email earlier this evening from the owner of a website that someone had linked to demanding that the link be removed as it was against their linking policy and breached their copyright terms (I'm not linking to them directly, as that would be against their rules)

Am I alone in thinking that this is decidedly odd for a company that sells online marketing and SEO services?

UPDATE: The link I provided earlier was redirected to another person's website, so I have removed it.

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I hate spam.

It's a tactic used by lazy uninventive scumbags.

I don't like politicians that much and consider most of them to be seriously overpaid.


So when I got hit with a spam from the Irish Green Party today to my personal email address I saw red.


Here's the spam itself (screenshot with personal details removed):





I love the way they wanted to "be sure" that I got their unsolicited junk.

I am not interested in the Green Party. I have never expressed any interest in them. I have not asked to be added to any of their mailing lists, so why the hell are they sending me this rubbish?

Funnily enough the contact details on their website include one for data protection - its' as if they were expecting a backlash from their spamming:




Well done Green Party - any chance of ever getting a vote from me is gone!

Morons!

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• eircom Golden Spider Awards spamming again

If you're going to spend money on PPC advertising you really need to make sure that your website is working for you:




The site I decided to check obviously won't deliver anything for me:




What a waste of advertising spend!

And of course this isn't an isolated incident - if you spend enough time looking for products and services online you will find hundreds of these scenarios!

Trying to get sites to display identically across multiple browsers and multiple operating systems is awkward. This site probably doesn't display particularly well on all browsers, but I'm not a professional web designer / developer, so you'll have to excuse me. It's also not a corporate / business website trying to sell products or services to the public.

Screenclick, however, is a business website.

Earlier this evening I decided to visit it on my Mac using Firefox. Apart from the really annoying splash page, which doesn't do anything useful, the main page does not load correctly in Firefox 3 on the Mac:


Now if you open the same page in Safari you seem something totally different:
Why?

Seemingly somebody decided to use Microsoft's Silverlight, but didn't bother to do a simple plugin check that would either prompt the user to install the plugin or gracefully degrade.

I won't be able to view their site on my Linux desktop either, as Silverlight isn't available for Linux (there is a port, but last time I checked there wasn't a native Debian / Ubuntu version available)

UPDATE: I've now moved to my Ubuntu Linux desktop and this is what I get:

The wonderfully helpful splash page (do they honestly expect me to continue browsing after seeing that?)



and the inner page (for some odd reason it's actually telling me that I need Silverlight now, whereas it wasn't on my Mac!)

I wasn't overly impressed with the article in this Sunday's edition of Computers in Business which harped on about yet another death knell for blogs.

You can read my reaction over on the company blog