But I like Bobbi and there was food involved, so I agreed.  Unbeknownst to me, this group had just launched and only had a hand full of members.   And my hesitation seemed justified.  A large part of the group was about recruiting –Will you join?  Who do you know? Who can you refer? Ugh.

So, I had to think why I would join this group.  OK, so I like Bobbi but not enough in itself to justify joining.  (Sorry sweetie, love you!)

My reasons –

• Something Different – I have been in business 8 years, my clients come from the same places and I only tend to market when I am done with the current projects.  Typical small business dilemma – we are too busy to network until we are not too busy, then we are scrounging around for the next project.  BNI would ensure at the very least there would be an ongoing networking effort.
• Get Out of the House – Many small business owners work from home and don’t get to interact with any co-workers.  It gets a little stir crazy.  As Coach Sharna Fey  noted – “This allows me to get dressed and talk to adults.”
• Business Karma – BNI calls it the “Giver’s Gain” concept but I like to think of it as Business Karma.  You are helping a group of like-minded business owners grow their business.
• Power Groups – As business owners, we naturally have a referral base within our industries.   Our clients come to us for Web Development and eCommerce solutions.  These same clients need copy, PR, photography, graphic design.  I can go to my Power Team and know I am referring my clients to quality service providers.

I joined and it has been a great experience.  I have gotten new business, developed strategic relationships with other service providers and eaten lots of food!

To learn more about BNI 3.0 check out the BNI 3.0 Fan Page on Facebook.  If you like to join us as a guest – feel free to drop me a note mike@understandingecommerce.com

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There are two kinds of social media networks : In-house and commercial. An in-house network is designed ‘in-house’ especially for use of members and supporters of that specific nonprofit or organization. A commercial site is site built and owned organization or enterprise. Facebook and Twitter commercial networks are the most heavily used by nonprofits, and not coincidentally, two of the most well-liked social networking sites on the web.

Non profit use of Facebook in association with web site is growing. Facebook is the commercial networking website most used by charities. 86% of non profits responding to the Non profit Social Network Survey, carried out by the Non-profitable Technology Network, use Facebook for fund-raising, awareness and pushing visitors to their own web sites. New non-profit making organizations are signing up each day, which is basically bad news to those previously using Facebook. It is reported that group and fan pages have actually seen a cut back in member numbers during the last year. Still as a marketing platform Facebook supplies access to 400 million members worldwide and has made a specific resource page to help nonprofit making organizations use the site.

Twitter is the social networking site with the largest increases in non-profit users. The average number of fans grew from 286 in 2009 to 1,792 supporters in 2010, that an increase of 627%. Sixty percent of non-profit making organizations from the same survey were using Twitter, many in association with Facebook to extend their support base.

So what is it precisely that non-profits hope to get out of using the internet?

• Twitter, Facebook and Weblogs help to open nonprofit making organizations up, showing the public what is needed to carry out the work they do and their necessity for support.

• Sociable Networks and professional Networks can help smaller connect with other charities in their industry.

• Promotion of events and campaigns.

• Fund raising and sustaining donor connection.

• Discovering volunteers, employees, and supporters from overseas and in various sectors of the community.

Non-profits which appear to be the most pleased with their results of using social media and websites are also the nonprofit making organizations which commit the most resources, time and staff. This shows that in spite of the assumption that the web is easy fundraising, some talents and resources are needed to employ social media and the internet. It seems that planning a web page and making a facebook page isn’t really enough to supply good web marketing. 84.9% of survey respondents to the Non-profitable Social Network Survey reported employing only of a full time staff member to web and social selling.

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When it comes to using social media websites for recruiting – what we call social recruiting – how far is too far? Beyond learning the hard way what works and what doesn’t, there are some best practices emerging to help recruiters know when they’ve pushed the proverbial envelope too far. And hiring professionals are discovering a new line of recruiting applications and tools built into applicant tracking software to help them rise above the same old hashtag to better identify, connect with and place viable candidates.

For all their good intentions, many folks using social media in their recruiting efforts are running into the same issues. Here are the top three:

 Spamming job posts. Want to make your social recruiting efforts ineffective? Spamming people with your job opportunities is a surefire way to do just that. The key to social recruiting is to be social and engaging. Share industry news and articles of interest, exchange personal messages, etc.

• Prying rather than researching. Some positions require a flawless social media presence. For the rest, you shouldn’t be digging too deeply into their profiles. Screening should be focused on general impressions of candidates to see if they would fit within your company culture.

• Penalizing candidates for level of access. It’s not unusual for candidates to deny recruiters access to their Facebook profile, inviting them to connect via LinkedIn instead. Many people use Facebook for personal, rather than professional networking – especially in Generation Y. Don’t write off candidates for showing a bit of backbone and managing their public image – it’s hardly something to penalize.

Lessons Learned from the Trenches

Some people are experiencing more success in social recruiting than others, and have picked up a few tricks worth sharing. Carolyn Betts, CEO of Betts Recruiting, is one such person, and was recently featured in a New York Times article, for leveraging social media to grow her recruiting success. She and I chatted last week, and she shared some lessons she’s learned from the trenches.

• Focus on strategy. You won’t be able to make the most of social media if you’re going into it blindly. You need to have a plan for how you want to accomplish your goals. Betts suggests starting with one social media site, familiarizing yourself with it, then growing your presence gradually.
• Have realistic expectations. When you consider the industry you’re in and the position you’re hiring for, are your deal-breakers realistic? You need to determine upfront how much weight you are giving a candidate’s social media presence.
• Leverage the right apps and tools. Many successful social recruiters know that to make the most of your social recruiting efforts, you need to leverage the right tools. Why go it alone when there are applications with built-in best practices for recruiting more effectively?

Software Expanding Recruiters’ Reach

Human resources software is growing to help recruiters make use of social media in their hiring strategy. But before recruiters can fully harness these helpful tools, they must determine whether or not they are in the right social media playground.

According to JobVite, approximately 85 percent of U.S. companies used LinkedIn for recruiting last year, though only 30 percent of active job seekers are on LinkedIn. As such, many recruiters are finding LinkedIn a bit overcrowded. Where are the candidates? The large majority of them are on Facebook.

Because the data recruiters are looking for is a little harder to find on Facebook, however, many miss the sourcing opportunity this vast network provides. Fortunately, there are third-party software developers devising methods to put actionable candidate information into the hands of recruiters quickly and efficiently. Some of these recruiting solutions – like BeKnown and TalentBin – are standalone applications that leverage recruiters’ networks. Others – like Bullhorn Reach – are applications designed specifically for automating social recruiting.

For further reading, check out this original article at: http://blog.softwareadvice.com/articles/hr/social-recruiting-how-far-is-too-far-010271/

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LinkedIn has established itself as the largest professional network in the world, boasting of more than 100 million users and more than 200 million profiled organizations. A majority of companies already acknowledge LinkedIn as the top professional and company directory and one of the market’s very best recruiting and employment search platforms, but what is not as well known is that LinkedIn is one of the best resource sites people turn to for answers to critical business questions. LinkedIn users search for answers to key business questions in group discussions and LinkedIn Answers or through Expert Advice InMails.

Unlike most resource sites, most people today locate LinkedIn pages through its internal search function. The LinkedIn internal search function is optimized differently than that of Google and this affects the way it comes up with outcomes. LinkedIn identifies keyword results based mostly on a personalized relevance algorithm that prioritizes professionals, companies and LinkedIn Q&A discussions based mostly on relevance to the searcher, which is defined as the nearness to the searcher (i.e. degree or number of connections to a company), and the number of recommendations.

To improve the visibility and LinkedIn search rankings of your professional profile, organization, groups or discussions, you can perform the following:

1. Enhance Your Description Layout: In your personal, company or group profile, be sure to order information based on the order of importance because LinkedIn’s search algorithm will crawl down each LinkedIn page from top to bottom to pinpoint pertinent search results. By having the most appropriate keywords at the top of your page, you will optimize your search ranking.
2. Solicit Recommendations: Both organizations and individuals can improve their profile rankings by obtaining recommendations.
3. Grow Your Network: By building personal connections, business followers and group members, you will raise your proximity score rankings, as 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree associations all add to the proximity score.
4. Keyword Choice: Similar to Google, it is best to target long tail keywords. You can actually use Google Adwords to help you determine the very best keyword strings.
5. Boost the URL: Customize your professional profile url to boost its search efficiency. The default urls assigned by LinkedIn are randomly generated with numbers and do not boost the urls for keyword relevance. To update your LinkedIn profile, go to edit profile and locate and update the url section of your profile with an appropriate url name. Doing so will increase your profile’s search ranking on Google and boost your all round visibility.
6. Regular Q&A Activity: Taking part in Q&A activity is an excellent way to increase your profile ranking and also develop recommendations. This can aid your personal profile rankings and also improve the rankings of the groups and organizations that you belong to as well.

LinkedIn is turning out to be among the the most important resource, facts and Q&A sites for professionals, so you can boost your personal brand and enhance the impact of your company’s influence marketing and brand-building initiatives by improving your LinkedIn search rankings. LinkedIn profiles, groups and Q&A also have high Google Search rankings, so raising your presence on LinkedIn will also aid in building your personal and/or company brands.

If you are interested in learning more about how to incorporate LinkedIn into your social media business and marketing strategy, you should read my preceding posts on how to use Twitter for customer service and how to make use of Facebook as a sales tool.

Brandon works with the portfolio companies to develop business strategies and optimize market and product positioning by means of market research, market intelligence, and customer and marketing analytics.

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One of my greatest pet peeves is having my LinkedIn stream taken up by two to three people’s  tweets (My peers at OpenView Venture Partners will confirm this…I complain about it often). LinkedIn gives you the option to link your accounts, but this decision shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Here are my top three factors why you SHOULDN’T link Twitter and LinkedIn:

• You tweet a lot, about various kinds of topics: That’s not a bad thing! Twitter is a wonderful online platform for sharing information, links and opinions on a large variety of topics. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is much more professionally focused. Though your Twitter followers may get a chuckle out of your Lady GaGa Grammy joke, LinkedIn is really not the best platform for that content.

• You frequently tweet views that may be the opposite to those your company would like you expressing: So you just tweeted “That lunch at McDonalds just made me so sick–Why is their food so gross?!”… harmless enough, yes? Not so if McDonalds just happens to be one of your biggest clients and you are linked to one of their leaders on LinkedIn. Why is it okay to tweet that but it isn’t OK to post it on LinkedIn? Well, I’d say that you shouldn’t have tweeted it in the first place, still LinkedIn can magnify your reach to an audience that knows you and your company better. Not good!

• You re-tweet a great deal: Re-tweeting on Twitter, good. Re-tweeting on LinkedIn? Talk about annoying, not only is my LinkedIn stream overflowing with your tweets…but they don’t even belong to you! Re-tweeting is splendid on Twitter, but LinkedIn doesn’t lend itself to that kind of update.

If you have the three criteria below, I feel it is okay to link your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts:

1. You only tweet a maximum of once a day
2. You only tweet about topics related to your niche
3. You never tweet, ever

Get the point? If you want SOME of your tweets to appear in your LinkedIn stream, you can modify your settings so that when you include the hashtag “#in” your tweet will automatically be posted on LinkedIn. This is the best alternative for those who tweet a lot, but not only about work.

At the expansion stage, it is important to be as professional as often as possible and this is a simple way to avoid annoying your business connections while still being able to update your LinkedIn status with relevant information. If your LinkedIn stream isn’t important, people will begin to ignore your updates–that isn’t helpful when one of your most important goals is geared at driving website traffic! No one said B2B social media was easy; it involves time and patience!

What do you think about linking social accounts?

Corey O’Loughlin is a Marketing Analyst at OpenView Labs and is responsible for marketing initiatives for both OpenView as well as the portfolio companies.

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Do you feel like your Facebook sales and marketing strategy is not working and you’re wasting  time with it? If so, you are not alone. quite a few companies gripe that they have developed company profile pages on Facebook and routinely post updates, but have not noticed this hard work convert into sales. A few companies have put up Facebook storefronts as well, but these efforts have likewise yielded limited success.

So what should companies do to better leverage Facebook as a sales tool? For one, Facebook shouldn’t be considered as an annex of your web page, so don’t treat it like one. If you intend to convert your company’s Facebook profile into a powerful sales tool, then you really need to create a reason for people to check out your page on a regular basis and provide a distinct sales experience on your Facebook page compared to what you do on your website. If your social media sales and marketing strategy are correctly carried out, your consumers will self select into the sales process that they prefer. This will serve as a new gateway to new clients and supply more frequent contact with your existing consumers.

There are a good many of ways to generate traffic on your Facebook page. One great way to do this is to offer an exclusive daily deal on your page. One more way is to host a competition that in some way relates to your products or services. For example, uTest, a software testing company, often holds bug catching contests and several luxury clothing companies hold fashion contests. You can likewise create interesting surveys, active discussion boards or videos to entice visitors. The key to driving website traffic and generating lasting traffic is to frequently hold events and add fresh content, so that your customers will make it a habit to visit your profile page. Also, make certain to advertise this new marketing channel via your website and your targeted customer email marketing promotions.

Making the sales experience different from the one you provide on your website can be as simple as providing an exclusive daily deal. However, the most successful tactics are those that make use of the community and therefore make shopping a community experience. For example, eBay hosts a Group Gift platform on its company page that facilitates group gift purchases. The way it works is a person establishes a group gift and then asks their friends to help buy the gift. This is a creative sales method as it leverages a person’s network to create a new customer type. This model can be used by almost any retail company. So now you know how to make Facebook a more effective sales tool for your company.

Brandon Hickie assists OpenView’s portfolio with research initiatives.

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The upheaval in various social media sites over the past few years has altered the online marketing strategy plans and budgets of quite a few businesses and created a change in their marketing focus to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Myspace, digg, Stumbleupon, Ning, etc.. For expansion stage software businesses, this shift has been important because it’s cost-efficient, it affords greater reach, and you can get your users to perform a large chunk of your work by convincing them to talk about your product on social media before it’s even in the market!

Social media is still a new thing to quite a few marketing managers. So, before you launch a Facebook page or initiate a Twitter discussion, be strategic, and do research in advance to find out more about your customer on every social media platform.

• Twitter and Facebook users don’t have huge gender skews. Myspace, on the other hand, posseses the biggest gender divide. Myspace is female heavy with 64% female users and only 36% male.

• When it comes to earnings, Twitter has the largest division of wealthy users. 27% of Twitter users earn $75k or more. Facebook is slightly lower at 23%. In contrast, 63% of Myspace users earn $50k or less.

• 37% of Facebook users are 45 years or older, so Facebook has the largest population of older users compared to the 45 or older Twitter and Myspace populations of 28% and 24% respectively.

• Twitter has the maximum proportion of users with a secondary education; 37% at least have a bachelors’ degree.

The above statistics will give you an idea about the general demographics of the users you might be targeting through the use of a social media marketing strategy. It is crucial for organizations and management teams to be cognizant of this so they can create a good profile of their target customer. According to the above numbers, for instance, if your product is geared toward older people, Facebook presents a better alternative for you. However, let’s say your target audience is graphic designers; you may want to spread out your social media advertising to sites such as StumbleUpon. So remember to keep your target audience in mind when making use of social media marketing.

One essential component of social media marketing is to understand and use the affinity score. The affinity score estimates how many more times you are likely to impact an audience who visits a specific site or searches for specific keywords versus an audience on the web overall. It ranks Twitter and Facebook users based on their affinity toward keywords and provides you insight into better targeted social advertising and your product’s social performance. It is built using metrics that range from clicks on the “like” buttons to posts on Twitter. In its analysis of the natural language of the millions of status updates every day, the system identifies customer attitude, objective and action. For example, an affinity of 0 means no awareness; 1-33 means some recall; 33-66 means good awareness; 66-99 means a strong purchase intent and an affinity of 100 means purchased/converted.

So, do your thorough research on customer demographics and their use of social media and analyze their affinity scores as one of several ways to improve your social media marketing.

Faria Rahman is a Market Research Analyst, responsible for carrying out marketing research assignments for OpenView Labs.

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One of the broadly used social social networking websites, Facebook, provides an option to connect with your friends, preferred pals and businesses, but by adding pages to your profile, you can present which you treatment about and propose; you can add pictures, and additionally possess walls exactly where fans can submit on. It has an choice to possess functions also. bingocams online bingo spelen bingocam

Groups are wee bit unique than webpages. You can set join permissions so which it’s both open up to any individual or closed. It also has an administrator to manage, approve applicants or invite other people to be part of it organization team.

Because of its security and privateness configurations, groups may be compared to golf equipment of offline world. Admins can invite associates to connect via Facebook e-mail, and any general public group can be arrived at via Fb search.

Facebook Groups vs Facebook Pages

Personal Vs. Corporate

Fb Groups are produced for far more personal engagements due to safety showcases and measurement limitations. Administrators reasonable the teams. On the various hand, Pages do not present the leaders of admin, and are considered as a person, simply enjoy any corporate entity.

The sociable networking website, Fb, considers groups as an extension to your personal actions. When you share a thing as group admin, it is affixed to your personal profile while Webpages can develop articles which has been derived from the Web page itself.

Updates Vs. Electronic mail

Groups possess a limitation to send e-mail blasts solely underneath 5,000 associates while Page admin can send revisions to followers via web page which seems in the “Revisions” part of fans’ inboxes. For that reason, no limit as far as the number of fans of the Web page is concerned.

Consumer Management

Teams, having permission settings choice readily available, provides far more management at the time of who gets to participate. Admin has rights to restrict geregreger his organization team. In situation of a Page, the restrictions can be posed by certain ages and locations only. That can make teams just prefer a non-public club.

Applications

Webpages can be a lot more customized by internet hosting programs and to show a lot more written content. No such choice is accessible in Groups.

Promotions

One can acquire Ads to encourage both groups or webpages. But Webpages can consider advantage from fan links in between a Web page and a precise user.

Entire, Groups are great to organize on personal stage and for smaller scale interactions. Pages are better for businesses, makers, videos, bands, or celebs to work together with followers or prospects without having connecting them to a personal account. Wanting at the targets and objectives, you may determine either a Web page or a Organization team.

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SEO in truth is the big talk on the internet today, the eminence to receive natural, honestly free visitors and convert the traffic into product sales with virtually no overhead costs . This might sound harsh but with internet business software achievable these days it is getting much, much light.

My friend and I were at a conference the other day where the important focus  was social bookmarking tools as a massive part of search engine optimization manner towards heightening the business’s online earnings . Marketing drove home the point that it’s vital to not just save your homepage but every single webpage, video, blog post and any content site you’ve distributed to . All of this forms a link building tactic that today’s web businesses have to use to remain vying .

Consequently when you start getting your confirmation messages that your articles or blog posts have been approved you will want to social bookmark the links right away . This tactic you will be able to get hundreds of article websites publishing your content material with backlinks pointing to your web presence . With adequate significant content and a short length of time your search engine optimization ranking will propagate and your web income will extend with them .

If you are believing that it’s a lot of work to bookmark these links to all these internet sites, you are absolutely right, it is extremely time intensive work ! For this reason it’s needed to employ the right programs to accomplish most of the hard work for you . There are numerous social bookmarking services out there to elect from.

If you’re studying setting up an web business how you market your business is decisive to your success . Taking advantage of web business software and making the most of your websites must be a part of your business plan to be profitable online . There’s a lot more cost-free info on the web if you are contemplating learning more web marketing strategies .

If you want your web presence to be a success, you must optimize your web site for the search engines like Google, and this implies on-page optimization but also off-page optimization, which includes link building. Social bookmarking tools are a fantastic way to create quality inbound links to your own web pages, but also to other pages that link back to your website, so the search engines list them and find out about the backlinks. There are of course a few other ways to create inbound links to your site and make sure that the links are found by the search engines, but social bookmarking websites seem to be the best solution to date.

Social network marketing must be used to develop your business. Internet marketing is really a vast arena and social networking has rapidly followed in its footsteps. These social websites are well established and they all operate in slightly different ways. However it is not essential to excel at each and every business social network. The conceivable web marketer needs to recognize which web sites may be useful

Setting up yourself as a brand may take some time. However once you are determined in just one business network it’s quite manageable to transfer this to another program. So much of the hard work is only needed for the very first time.

There’s a lot of technological know-how associated with this kind of marketing but it must not keep you away from this lucrative advertising medium. There are many internet resources which make it quite easy to work in social networking. Social networking software makes it really simple to deal with the different interfaces as well as the capability to combine your various profiles. By doing this it’s possible to connect directly to the audience.

Social networking is not usual affiliate marketing and advertising. Unlike affiliate marketing it will be demanded to define why the targeted person wants your services or products. A landing web page which presents a quick description is indeed best.

It is additionally rigid to tread that thin line between spam and progressing a social networking audience. If you are getting in touch with men and women genuinely to produce an income then you’re mailing out spam. This is a very worthless scheme to go about marketing and advertising. Assure you let the various followers learn what you are trying to do prior to mailing the offer. Even just a basic explanation of what’s going on can go a long way.

Be entirely honest about what you’re promoting or selling. A dingle bad promotion can entirely kill your name and also you will lose your entire social media audience. Instead of having to say sorry afterwards. This will shelter the online marketers from blame when problems take place and your audience will be ready the next time you’ve a sale or action.

It may be quite useful to merge a business social network with article blogging and marketing. Try to create inbound links back to your landing webpages and get maximum exposure for the products. There are numerous article web directories that allow article submission. Merely make sure that each and every article is special. Running a blog is also quite common as this makes it simple to turn you or your product into its own brand. As with everything it is important to make certain your brand shines.

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