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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

Facebook recently released a new control for Pages that acts like blogs’ pre-moderation setting: when a Page admin activates it, Likes’ (Fans’) “organic” posts will not appear on the Page’s Wall until an admin specifically approves them. Read on for how to decide whether to use this control with your Pages as well as my interpretation of how the new control helps to reveal Facebook’s emerging business strategy to maximize the impact of its IPO. Continue reading Analysis: Facebook Pages’ New Pre-Moderation Control

Everyone wants to know the secret sauce, how to build vibrant communities in digital social venues. Here is a question to a community manager to whom I responded recently in a gated enterprise forum. The question was, “What are some effective ways to improve circle count and follower engagement on google+?” Read on for some general pointers and references for further reading. Continue reading Quick Notes: How to Build a Vibrant Google+ Page

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.

Facebook Pages and Groups are rapidly becoming like websites or phone numbers—overwhelmingly banal. Last year, it was still novel for many companies and governments to launch Pages or Groups, but 2010-2011 is proving to be the inflection point: people merely expect Facebook presence because every organization has one. In step with this, the competition for Fans’ (now “Likes”) attention on Facebook is high and will continue to get higher. That said, as difficult as it is, launching and growing a powerful Facebook presence is eminently doable with the right strategy and execution. Here I will share some of my notes with a current engagement for how to grow a quality Fan base by building and leveraging a network around your presence. By the Way, Pages and Groups share similarities but they are distinct in their functionality. This post will focus mostly on Pages, but many of its techniques will work with Groups as well. Continue reading Four Steps to Building Facebook Presence, Network-Style

How Commercial and Government Firms Are Using Facebook (More at NotaBene) my delicious.com
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. [...]
Approach this as a relationship building activity, there are no magic bullets, and most of these tactics will take some time to show results. If you want readers, you need to focus on building relationships with them by showing that you are relevant to them and by showing that you care about things in which they are interested. [...]
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Executive’s Guide on Twitter
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