Networking – Do we still need face-to-face?

Nowadays, we have many different ways of getting in touch with each other and meeting new people. The social media takeover means we can keep up with what our peers are doing at the touch of a button but face-to-face networking is a valuable skill, and not many people still have it. Networking and marketing go hand in hand, and it’s all about tailoring it to your business. You need to choose events that work for you. Here are some quick tips about improving your face-to-face networking.

1.       To eat, or not to eat?

Many people don’t think about this, but eating poses more of a problem than you’d guess. Can you hold a flowing conversation whilst eating? Maybe you find it distracting. Different meetings have different catering – some are canapés and others are three course meals! Bear this in mind. Go for valued networking and connect with the most people, not for a meal.

2.       Formal or Informal?

There’s a wide range of formality in networking. Some are so informal there’s little structure at all, it’s up to you to talk to people and start conversation. Formal meetings often have seating plans and timetabled 30 second introductions from the attendees. If you’re a people person, and can start conversations easily, maybe there’s less need for formal networking. Go where you’re comfortable.

3.       Industry Specific?

It’s always worth being strategic with your networking. You’ll get more out of it if you go to a meeting relevant to you. If you work with businesses within a specific market sector, then go out – be proactive! Find out where they network and join them. Chartered institutes or associations are great places to start. If your clients are across a range of sectors, find out what they have in common. Is it business size, or target market? Find out where they network, and see them. There’s no downside to getting to know your client’s industry a bit better.

What does Naymz tell us about you?

Dianne

So people can follow you on Twitter, view your Linkedin profile, stay as your friend on Facebook, find out what you like to read by viewing your Delicious bookmarks, now what will Naymz tell us about you?

Naymz is a recent competitor to LinkedIn. Oh no, not another business network I hear you say, who needs another one, but it just might depend on what you “need”.

Naymz has about a million users.  It is much smaller than LinkedIn (at 55 million). It was launched to the public in June 2006.

There are two levels of joining:

• Basic (Free to join)
• Premium (which costs $4.95 per month)

Lets deal with the free Basic level .  You will need to set up your profile giving as much information about yourself as you  wish, create a password which you will need to use to login each time you use Naymz. 

Quoting from the site directly, with Naymz you can:

Online Professional Branding
Build your online professional brand by creating a profile page and publishing it on the web. We will optimise your profile so that its visible in the search engines, like Google and Yahoo. ………. ………………. ………………..

Exchange
Share ideas, questions, opportunities and statuses in real-time with your network and the whole Naymz community. Engage in discussion and help others in your network find solutions to specific problems. 

Connection Builder
Extend your network to meet new, reputable professionals who you can benefit from meeting and vice-versa. No introduction fees required and no limits on communication. You set your own communication settings.

RepScore Ecosystem
Invite your clients, colleagues and friends to vouch for your honesty, integrity and credibility through anonymous assessments. You’ve worked hard over the years to establish a good name and reputation, so we combine all feedback and publish a RepScore to your profile for the world to see.

Content Aggregation
Are you publishing your knowledge and expertise across the web in blogs and social networking sites? Link your blog to your Naymz account and syndicate your expertise to the Naymz community. You can also collect links to all of your online personae in one easy-to-find place. It’s like the table of contents to your online identity. 

Reputation Monitor
Keep an eye on what is being said about you online across various sources such as blogs, news sites, social networks and other online content with our real-time monitoring tool.

Job Board
Search for jobs by keyword and location, or let us suggest jobs based on your profile information. Looking to hire? We will let you post your jobs for $40 for 30 days and syndicate across our partner networks.

People Finder
Looking for old colleagues or classmates? Search more than 1 million professionals across 100s of countries. Also, if you’re a recruiter you can do quick searches for prospective hires for free!

Profile Analytics and Alerts
We guarantee that once you set up your profile, it will be found by recruiters, protential clients, colleagues and friends. When that happens we’ll provide you with some insight into when and how your profile was found.

Activity Feeds
Want to keep tabs on your professional contacts? With activity feeds we’ll provide you with updates when a contact updates their profile, posts an Exchange, updates their blog, etc. It’s a great way to stay in tune with the activities of those in your professional network.

Custom Profile Themes
Select one of several custom profile themes that matches your personal style and character and publish it to your business card section of the profile page.

Some of the best things about naymz.com is the fact that it allows you connect to anyone on the network without any restrictions.  It allows you to do micro-blogging (much like Twitter), have a reputation score for your niche (your Repscore is based on a system of points).  Members earn points by filling in profile details and connecting with other members.  Members with high point scores get benefits that include free Google ads – sponsored links.  It allows you to bring all your social media and networking profiles together all in one place.

Naymz philosophy is “A good professional reputation is the key to effectively networking with other professionals.”

Worth giving it a go? Let us know how you get on?

It’s not good to make your website flashy

Alice

I saw a question on LinkedIn that asked how to optimise a website’s homepage that consisted purely of Flash. Flash is a programme that provides animation with images and graphics for websites, and you probably have come across many examples (I did the other day with a digital marketing firm) where you are greeted with a little ‘show’ of moving graphics that are supposedly meant to be impressive.

This particular website showed a graphic of a computer with a running newsroll describing in a totally unnecessarily cryptic message about how impressive their business was and why you should use their services. The other pages had graphics that moved if you moused over them, but were not immediately understandable with what they represented, and unless you bothered to use your mouse it was unlikely you would have an inclination to progress further.

Luckily someone else had already answered with the correct response to that LinkedIn question – don’t use Flash! – so I was able to confirm he was, in my opinion, quite right.

For starters, Flash, since it only uses images, is not picked up by the search engines. Internet spiders are programmed to only search for words, so will not be able to understand pictures unless they have a ‘alt tag’ attached to them which describes them, an attribute which is also useful for the deaf.

Therefore, since there weren’t any words on that index page that weren’t hidden within a graphic, it was unable to be optimised. OK, you could do the relevant keyword research and populate the meta tags appropriately, but if they were unable to correspond with words on the page associated with them, especially various H-tags, their impact would be severely impeded.

Another problem is that some Flash programmes take time to upload before they can run, which results in a variety of ‘wait’ messages while the process happens. Some websites provide ‘skip’ buttons, but if this is the case, why did they bother with Flash in the first place?

It is becoming a well known fact that the average time a new visitor spends on a website, before they decide whether it is the right one for them, is less than 3 seconds. If after a few seconds you are still waiting for the Flash presentation to start, you can guarantee the majority of visitors won’t bother waiting around.

And the whole point of a homepage of a website is to establish that this is the correct website for the visitor. Not only should they immediately recognise the subject or business type, but it should be made as easy as possible, with recognisable links or click buttons, to progress further into the site.

Not everybody has the inclination or time to waste fathoming out what to do next, it should be instantaneous! Websites are now mediums for finding facts and, more appropriately for Web2.0, interacting with the website’s owners, so the process should be inviting, encouraging, enthusiastic and obvious!

And that means being ‘Flashy’ with your website is, as well as being pretentious, sooo last century!

Is being the fastest the best?

Alice

It is commonplace to hear that an event had received a large audience because it has been publicised on Twitter. This does, of course, depend on how many followers the Twitterer had, what time of day the tweet was sent, how many times, and what it said. And the viral element: how many times it was retweeted, which, in turn, depends on the Twitter accounts it was retweeted by, and who read it…

Social networking is notoriously fast. To those who aren’t old fogies like me, it seems incomprehensible how slow we were 20 years ago, without email, mobile phones or even the internet. Publicising an event would have taken planning, forethought and a considerable amount of legwork: getting flyers printed, distributed and posted up on show; invites sent out to likely friends, relying on the Word of Mouth (a factor now replaced by Word of Mouse); booking done via telephone, in person at a box office or even by post (heavens, not snail mail!).

Of course there are (slightly) slower versions today: texting and status updates on social media do require a bit of a time delay before you get an answer, which should allow you plenty of time to think of something suitable say (if possible). Go a step slower and blogging encourages comments on its posts which, depending on whether they are moderated or not, can become flowing conversations where necessary.

Email newsletters and similar campaigns are maybe the slowest, but booking online via clicking on a link that will direct you immediately to a Paypal or similar shopping cart certainly cuts down the lengthy procedure of finding a box office, and stimulates a more immediate response that eliminates the chance of being forgotten, overlooked or displaced by another event.

But then these slower options do allow more room for information about the event, a phenomenon that is certainly more difficult if restricted to 140 characters (SMS as well as Twitter) or the quick-fire responses on status updates on Facebook, (certainly, as in the case of my daughter, with several open all at once!). Posting up details of the event on a blog, forum, Facebook fanpage or as a discussion on a LinkedIn group will allow a bit more perpetuity than the ‘here, now gone’ scenario of Twitter, so subject to a continuous timeline forever superseding what has gone before.

LinkedIn: Use the power of Answers

Alice

At the end of your navigation links in your LinkedIn profile is a tab called ‘More’. At the top of the drop-down menu that appears when you mouse over it, is the option ‘Answers’. I often wonder why it is tucked away like this when it is, in my mind, an integral part of effective use of LinkedIn.

The Questions and Answers section of LinkedIn is an almost forgotten area that could make or break your expertise status. There is a myriad of different subject matter, easily one for every kind of profession, that provides two purposes: to ask a question (for inquiry, research, information or whatever) and to answer those questions (therefore spreading your expertise in your chosen subject).

The quality and substance of the questions vary (as so does the answers), but social media users today have developed skills in skimming through the unnecessary stuff to focus on the worth-while. This also reflects the methods of asking and answering questions, with certain skills developed to make your response stand out above the rest; a trait that is necessary with today’s noisy internet usage.

‘Answers Home’ shows the most recently submitted questions in no particular order or subject matter. There are some LinkedIn users who make a habit of answering any question that appeals to them, whereas others will prefer to concentrate on their areas of expertise.

‘Advanced Answers Search’ focuses your attention on the subjects you would most like to concentrate on. The category mechanisms provides access to your preference, but sometimes going down a different route will lead you to unexpected subjects that might be of interest. Once you have chosen your subject matter, LinkedIn remembers so you don’t have to do it all over again.

For easy access to relevant questions you might want to answer, you can set up Google Alerts for the questions within your chosen criteria, and these appear as a cookie on your Google homepage or within your RSS feed reader page. Now you can keep track of all questions as they are asked, and be one of the first to answer, or watch them while the discussions develop.

Go to ‘Answer Questions’ and you’ll see that questions are either open (available for answering) or closed (there is usually a time limit on questions which you can extend if necessary). The ‘Expert’ tab shows the most promiscuous answerers, but there is no reason why you can’t become one yourself! If your answer is approved by the questioner it will either be marked as ‘Good’ or, if you’re lucky, ‘Best Answer’. Whatever alocade you receive  will be listed on your profile page in the right sidebar, and ‘Best Answer’ for each subject will be shown in your signature when you answer a question.

And if you have a question to ask, the ‘Ask a Question’ tab provides easy to use fields and menus to publish your question. It is great fun waiting for the answers, which will be emailed to you when they are submitted. Sometimes they are not what you expected, but all are enjoyable to read. When your question has closed, then is the time to select those that are ‘Good’ and finally your ‘Best Answer’, a respected and polite way of saying thank-you, though some questioners have emailed me personally to request more information as well as expressing their gratitude.

LinkedIn Groups for interaction, publicity and knowledge

Alice

A great feature of LinkedIn is the groups. There are literally thousands to choose from, in a similar myriad of subjects, levels and sociability.

Locate them through the ‘Groups’ link at the top of your profile page, and you will automatically go to the list of groups you have joined. These vary from open to closed groups, depending on the whims of the administrators, and subgroups can be created out of a parent group, especially if it has grown too big or commands splitting up to cover further aspects of the group’s subject.

To join a group, either click on ‘Groups You May Like’ where a selection of groups that marry up to the keywords you have provided on your profile page (another reason to complete your profile as fully as you can) will be offered to you, or you could search out relevant groups via their categories (alumni, corporate, conference, networking, non-profit, professional or other) and in whatever language you prefer (LinkedIn is, of course, international).

Choosing a category will concentrate the selection, and the search field above that will focus it further. The more succinct you are with your keywords, the better the results. The groups are listed with the most popular (or with the most members) at the top, and closed groups show a little locked sign before the title, which means you will have to be accepted by the administrators before you can contribute.

Once you’ve entered a group, you will see a status update field for you to add in your own contribution (a comment, discussion, question, link to blog post, article or newsletter issue, or whatever you want to share) with the other entries listed below. There is a moving gallery of the latest discussions entered by members, and a discussion hierarchy can be allocated by the administrators for extra promotion.

You will also get email notifications of new discussions whenever they are entered, and when you have contributed to a particular discussion and others have commented so you can follow the conversation and reply if necessary. Discussions thrive on interaction, and some provide a lot of knowledge on particular subjects that I have found to be very useful.

You can check out the other members of the group to see if they are worth connecting with, or to read their profiles if their contributions was particularly noteworthy.  There are other links to publicise promotions and a job board to find new recruits or better employment! The ‘Search’ link allows you to view all the discussions made on the group to backtrack a particular subject or find a comment that is useful to you. And the ‘More’ tab reveals ‘Updates’, ‘My Activity’, ‘My Settings’, ‘Subgroups’ and ‘Group Profile’.

If you are so inclined, you could start your own group. It is very easy to create one, and much enjoyment, knowledge, interaction and opportunities could be obtained through accomplishing such an activity.

Do some Christmas giving via LinkedIn

Alice

‘Tis the season to give and take, and this should not be confined to presents under the Christmas tree! Business thrives on giving and taking, especially within social media, and really this sort of altruism shouldn’t be limited to the last days of December!

The title mentions LinkedIn, so how do you give and take in this form of social media?

A major part of the LinkedIn profile is the ‘Recommendations’ area under ‘Experience’. This is where past and present clients who have been pleased or impressed with your business activities can leave you a testimonial or recommendation, and this listing will show prospective clients or employees how satisfied the givers are with what you have done for them, and if you’re lucky they may even state the project successes amongst the other nice things.

And if you’re vain, you do have the opportunity to ‘edit’ the testimonial, but then that would defeat the object! I think you should accept praise or criticism in whatever form it is presented to you, even if it doesn’t quite meet your expectations or match your desired patterns or forecasts. People see you in their own way, and this can be quite enlightening – after all, as every marketer knows, feedback in any form is good and should be valued and acted upon.

It’s always pleasant to receive presents (albeit recommendations), so why not give one back in return? Summaries of the recommendations you give to others are listed in your sidebar of your profile, a nice touch to show off your altruism that always looks good to whoever reads up about you.

So why not send someone a testimonial or recommendation today (big hint from us at Appletree!) so we can send one back to you too!

Use LinkedIn effectively – starting with your profile

Alice

The social networking site for business has to be LinkedIn. Anyone in business should have a profile that is properly completed and updated. Failure to do so is like submitting your CV with gaps and omissions, which would certainly not impress a prospective client or employer – since it is both these targets you should be presenting to.

Let’s examine a profile. Apart from your name (and it is you that the LinkedIn profile should be about, not your company) there should be picture of you. Any decent head and shoulders photo will do, so that your profile visitor can see what you look like.

Under your name is a brief description of your profession/job, which acts as your signature throughout your LinkedIn activities. This short phrase could be regularly revised to see what response it brings.

Next comes the status update, where you can write your latest comments and provide accompanying links that you would like to share with your LinkedIn community, and on Twitter if appropriate.  It will default to your latest activity, such as your blog feed, if you don’t update it regularly.

The next area resembles your CV, which should be fully completed to list your current and past positions and your latest education status. It extends to show how many people have recommended you, how many connections you have, links to your websites and blogs (which can be optimised), a link to your Twitter profile and your LinkedIn URL (which can be personalised).

Below that is a summary of what you do in your current role.  This is something that should be carefully constructed, consistently updated, and written with your prospective client or employer, not to mention search engine optimisation, in mind.

LinkedIn also provides applications that allow you to show your latest presentations and feed your blog posts and tweets into your profile. All this activity shows your online proficiency outside of LinkedIn, plus extra exposure to your business and expertise status.

Don’t forget to fully complete the experience area. Here you can describe in detail about your present and past positions, which should be regularly revised. Attached are links to ask for recommendations, which are listed below prominently showing what others say about you, your business and your effectiveness in performing within your industry.

If you are members of any groups, these will be listed with the latest connection at the top. It is all very well being a member of a group without some sort of contribution, which is listed in your activities section in the right column.

As well as listing your latest activities in LinkedIn (your updates, new connections, blog post feeds, plus any questions you have asked or answered and groups you have contributed to), the right column also lists any groups you share with others, recommendations you have given recently, and other profiles that the viewer has also visited.

A particular section is revealed once you become an expert in an Answers section (I am privileged to have given a best answer in graphic design, search marketing and blogging).

You can see examples of all this in my LinkedIn profile, built up over a number of years. There is no reason why you cannot have something similar, it just requires time and effort to update and improve it.

How does social networking link together?

Alice

The beauty of social networking is that it has been designed to link up to each other. Nothing has been left out on a limb, as that would be social suicide. Even competitors such as Facebook and LinkedIn carefully eye each other over the wall, but they contain the same kinds of applications (even if they look different) to link up to Twitter and blogs.

The most important element you need is a RSS feed. Most blogs automatically give you one incorporated into the theme or template, and it usually is URL/feed. This enables you to subscribe your blog to social networking sites, resulting in whenever you publish a post it automatically gets fed into your social networking profiles.

In LinkedIn this appears as a headline link and the first paragraph, the same format with a thumbnail of your blog’s homepage is provided in Facebook, whereas due to space constraints only the title and the tinyurl of your blog post appears in Twitter. And there are now applications which enable readers to share the blog post in social networking sites, such as Tweetmeme and the share-save links to the social sharing networks so often found at the bottom of blog posts (see the bottom of this post!).

Sharing isn’t confined to the ‘big three’ mentioned above, there are social sharing websites such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Tumblr, Delicious and about what seems a hundred more! These are primarily voting media, thriving on members sharing good blog posts with their friends, and recommending them to others, all driving traffic and ultimately the search engine spiders to index these blogs. The result is large peaks in the visitors stats and a lot of ‘retweeting’ and sharing on the social networking sites.

Linking and sharing are extremely valuable pursuits in social networking circles. Links are like portals for the search engines to enter and leave your sites, as well as satisfying human curiosity, so owning and creating new ones should be paramount to search engine optimisation for your blog and your status in social networking.

Links also benefit from being associated with up-to-date keywords, which again are associated with the search engines as that is what people are looking for at this moment in time, resulting in a prominence that is vital towards staying ahead of the game.

How would a blog work in the 19th century?

Alice

Blogging is definitely a 21st century phenomenon. So why am I thinking of it in Victorian terms?

Quite some time ago I posted a question on LinkedIn asking how would a Victorian gentleman view blogging. The responses were as varied as they were interesting, some even replying as if they were Victorian gentlemen themselves! Apart from the florid language and lengthy time taken to describe things, it was a good insight to break down blogging into its most basic format, to view it without all the bells and whistles that adorn this platform that could also confuse the true reason why to blog.

The internet was viewed as the telegraph, and therefore a blog is somewhere to publish your news through the telegraph system to reach a much wider gathering than through letter alone. Of course, sending a letter to The Times would certainly reach many readers, and the Victorians were compulsive letter writers (as well as reading them), but a blog could resemble an inclusive Gentleman’s Club through which you could submit your thoughts and musings, ideas and innovations, gripes and grumbles, retorts and responses, to both a private and public audience.

This opportunity to broadcast yourself as a source of authority, where readers will take your opinions as fact, would be much less expensive than writing and printing a series of pamphlets. These might be in danger of not reaching their intended audience, be wasted in their distribution, and be limited in their extent of circulation, and certainly could not enable their recipients to respond immediately through the same medium.

Your letters would reach their recipients much quicker than the usual method of postage, without the initial cost of paper, envelope and a stamp. And if you wanted to change your mind or add more to your message, this could be possible even after distribution. Replies may even be instantaneous, resulting in an immediate response of your own, thus adding to the conversation which could elaborate further on the subject matter.

And it would be worth while reading other gentlemen’s letters on their similar methods of communication, just to keep in the know, monitor what your competitors are doing, and steal a march on other exciting projects by acting first. Every time you reply to these letters, your signature will allow other readers of these missives to find out who you are and read what you have written, thus extending your expertise in the subject and your presence in the community.

And there is also somewhere where you can leave your visiting card for interested persons to access, find out more about you, and even take the opportunity to visit you, either at your Club or in person. You would only have to distribute one visiting card, as it would be able to be seen by a great many more persons than leaving it on the table in a Club or another social meeting place in the hope that it might get noticed.

What other elements of a Victorian business man’s life might be improved if he had this wonderful innovation they call a ‘blog’?