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If you have been on several “social media” platforms as a firm or individual for some time but feel that you’re barely scratching the surface, this guide will help you boost your results significantly because: its goal is to help you develop B2B relationships more efficiently, instead of “selling” yourself and it shows you how to use B2B-oriented platforms in concert to increase leverage. If you would like some background on the profound distinction between “selling” yourself and focusing on relationship, “Social Business Disruption of B2B Sales & Marketing” crystallizes it in 8 minutes. Continue reading B2B Executive’s How-to Guide to Social Business

For years, now, I have beseeched all the executives and “knowledge workers” I know (that’s thousands) to blog, so please consider this as part of that campaign—with benefits (because this is a how-to post). Here’s why: In the Knowledge Economy’s pervasive digital networks, you are invisible unless you come across people’s screens regularly. And, while you are invisible, your potential business partners are seeing people who do flit across their screens. If you aren’t there, you are in a bloody ocean that gets smaller every year. Don’t go in, the water is not fine. Please understand that I’m stating this as a simple fact. I’m sure you’ve read books like The Long Tail, which describe how we are all publishers now, that is, those of us who decide to use the free tools at our disposal.
Blogging is 21st century thought leadership, which is table stakes in the Knowledge Economy. Your thoughts represent and “scale” you, so they help you to connect with people with whom you can collaborate to do meaningful things. Moreover, blogging software is the ideal heart of your social business ecosystem because blogs’ content is much easier to find than websites’. In addition, all blogging platforms are cloud-based and have RSS feeds for republishing, so it’s super easy and efficient for you to re-share your blog posts elsewhere—on LinkedIn, for example—automatically.
By the way, this post applies equally to individual executives and firms. It’s especially poignant to B2Bs.
Continue reading Three-Step Executive’s Guide to Blogging

How to attract and maintain the attention of Connections you care most about
Old habits die hard, and so it is with the ingrained assumption that “content sells.” Yes, having a current LinkedIn Profile replete with keyword combinations relevant to your High Interest Connections is very important, but it’s back seat to giving your Connections personal attention. Here I’ll address your protest that “I don’t have time!” by sharing some ultra-efficient processes for interacting on LinkedIn. Read on if you want to outperform 99% of other LinkedIn members. Continue reading Triple the Value of Your LinkedIn Network by Interacting

How firms can increase quality of recruits and sales leads while cutting costs

Social networks can help organizations, whether commercial, nonprofit or government, to significantly improve their efficiency in business processes like recruiting, sales and service. This is what we call “Enterprise Process Innovation” because, by using social networks to create and nurture relationships with alumni, your employees can diminish the time required to accomplish tasks within these processes. It’s well known that most alumni, former employees, move to firms that are related to your business (adjacent in the value chain) or complementary in some way. Yes, some move to competitors, but they are usually in the minority. Social networks, by significantly reducing the cost of having relevant, quality conversations, make robust employee-alumni networks actionable as never before.
All organizations (I’ll use “firm” to denote for profit, government and nonprofit) have business processes that benefit from relevant insight and introductions from other people: insight about the situation of the prospect, where the best sources of new recruits, etc. Alumni 2.0 is an evolutionary approach to transforming firms’ relationships with employees. The legacy employment model is utilitarian: firms hire when they need skills and fire when business drops. End of story. Some firms make half-hearted attempts with sub-par email newsletters, but these don’t even begin to tap the potential of vibrant employee-alumni networks.
Here I will lay out an incremental, three-stage model that starts simply, pays dividends quickly and evolves to support more complex business processes over time.

The launch of Google’s new social network has poignant significance for executives—in predictable and surprising ways. Google+ is exceptionally significant because it is an exciting new social venue with the potential to disrupt, but even more important, it can teach us about how the ecosystem works and how organizations can learn to use it to garner support for things they care about. Here I’ll outline my first impressions and give general guidance for executives to take advantage of Google+’s potential. Continue reading Why Google+ Should Be on Executives’ Radar

In Five Tips for Smarter Social Networking in their Big Shift Harvard Business Review blog, John Hagel III and John Seely Brown offer solid advice for executives who want to get traction with social networks, some of which might surprise you. It’s valuable for executives from individual and company perspectives. Here’s the post, and here’s my response, which builds and extends some of their points:
John2, thanks for very solid advice all around. However, I totally agree with @cole, to be most productive as an individual or an enterprise, you must have an explicit strategy. An enterprise is an orchestra, so defining key goals and techniques, without dictating, is critical for success. This includes giving guidance and space for employees to pursue their personal branding, by resonating with the enterprise.
Continue reading Five Tips for Social Networking, with John Hagel & John Seely Brown

In Allfacebook, Nick O’Neill presents a chart that compares the first six years’ revenue for Yahoo!, Google and Facebook. Even though some of these exercises are coffee-cooler talk without much substance, this one afforded the opportunity to think about how Facebook and Google add value.
According to BusinessInsider’s interpretation, neither Google nor Facebook emphasized revenue in the early years and hockey-sticked later. Here’s the article, and here are my thoughts on all three players:
Continue reading Comparing Launch-to-Year6 Revenue: Google, Facebook, Yahoo

Shannon Clark, on his Slow Brand blog, presents the idea of a LinkedIn Connect, which would enable users to authenticate and share certain approved information from their LinkedIn presence on third-party sites. He writes, “Why isn’t LinkedIn looking to be the Identity layer for not just a few applications running inside of LinkedIn or a very small handful of LinkedIn Partners, but instead to offer a strong, business focused identity layer for 1000′s of business applications across the Internet?” Great question that merited some cycles.
Here’s the post, with my thoughts below. A good thread with some technical discussion, but understandable for non-techies, too.
Continue reading You Know Facebook Connect, but why not LinkedIn Connect?

To fully appreciate how “touch” applies to LinkedIn interaction, imagine yourself as a human brain. Through the centuries, you have evolved, and one of your key survival mechanisms is discerning how much of the truth someone is sharing with you. Hence, you rely on nonverbal communication, which is much more difficult to fake because people are less aware of it than they are of their words. [...]
Pioneers will move first and seize the advantage, putting themselves in the (digital) room, and you will not be there. Therefore, delaying adoption to remain in the realm of the known may be comfortable, but risk increases each quarter because clients are adopting social networks and changing their expectations of their professional services providers. [...]
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Executive’s Guide on Twitter
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