March 21, 2013 3 Comments

A daily hello on LinkedIn

Here’s a simple, powerful tactic you should add to your daily social media tasks:

Say hello to any first degree connection on LinkedIn that visits your profile.

You’ll find them in this section:

Welcome! | LinkedIn

And then just say hello by sending a message.

Profile Stats | LinkedIn

My only suggestion on what to say is don’t pitch unless you know the person well and you’re already in the process of doing business with them. Instead, just say hello.

Messages | LinkedIn

The catch is that you have to do this regularly. The easiest way to remember to do it is to set a calendar reminder daily for it.

Calendar

Do this daily, and you’ll deepen the connection to your social networks and make them much more valuable to you than a largely faceless group of people that you only see reported as a number of connections. Unless you have a wildly popular profile, once a day should cover everyone and anyone who stops by. Of course, if you see someone who’s a second degree that you know, offer to connect with them while you’re doing your daily hello.

Why is this important? Unlike other networks, where checking out your profile page might just be to see what you’ve shared recently or what embarrassing photos you’ve been in, LinkedIn profiles have a specific purpose: to highlight your professional experiences. As such, someone visiting your profile on LinkedIn probably has a different intent than, say, someone visiting your profile on Facebook. By saying a simple hello, you’re opening the door to conversation that they might be hesitant to have – after all, chances are they don’t want to be seen as a stalker following you. Assuage that fear with a friendly hello, and see where the conversation takes you.

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March 4, 2013 5 Comments

How to make shareable Facebook lists

Robert Scoble mentioned on Facebook yesterday:

Robert Scoble

I’ve set up lists for myself, but wanted to dig into how to publish mine, so I did some poking around. Here’s a step-by-step for making your own lists. First, scroll down, down, down to the bottom left of the FB interface and find the non-intuitively named Interests:

Facebook

Hit up Add Interests and choose Create List:

Add Interests

Now go through and pick 5-10 news sources (people or pages) that you want to add to your list. For fun, I made a public list around Blizzard’s game franchises, Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo:

Add Interests

Choose Public for the permissions and name it something obvious:

Add Interests

Your list is done. Easy, right? Two additional things to do. First, look at the List Suggestions box to see if you missed any obvious news sources that are related to your list:

Warcraft News

And then, of course, share it.

Note that while Facebook Pages cannot create shareable lists, they can be part of them (add to Interest Lists), so if you’ve got a page you want to promote, an easy marketing hack is to bundle it with similar pages in a list that is shared off your personal profile. You could, for example, make a list called Boston Area Social Media Folks, and then promote and share the public URL to that list.

How else can you use this? If you’ve got a list of employees at a competitor, you can always make a list to keep tabs on what your competitor is doing via the public updates of those employees and share that among your team members (be sure, obviously, to mark it Friends only in permissions). You could publish a select list of your own employees or pages if you wanted to keep the world up to date on what you were up to. Of course, you can and should keep an eye on the lists other people are sharing, too:

Add Interests

It’s a free way to do some Facebook-centric social media monitoring. Give it a try!

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February 26, 2013 2 Comments

What will kill email?

Greg Hyer asked an interesting question in the Marketing Over Coffee LinkedIn group: what will kill email?

The short answer is: nothing. The slightly longer answer is that anything based in an open standard is likely to be around for a very, very long time. Back in the day – and I’m talking 1995 here – the dominant form of public file sharing and discussion was Usenet, based on the open NNTP protocol. Usenet was notoriously difficult to use, from getting a desktop client set up to finding newsgroups that you wanted to participate in. When the World Wide Web and its HTTP protocol crashed onto the scene, Usenet began its long, slow decline into relative obscurity.

End of story, right? Not quite. Usenet is still around today. Google Groups is probably the best known interface for it, but there are plenty of others, and there are still plenty of users active on Usenet, with over 110,000 still active groups. Why hasn’t Usenet gone away, when there are so many easier and better ways to get at the same information? Because the NNTP protocol is an open standard, and because it provides some basic utility, it’s still around.

The protocols that make up email – IMAP, POP3, SMTP – are equally open standards. Anyone can get a cheap piece of hardware set up with Sendmail or Postfix and have themselves a fully standards-compliant mail server up and running as fast as you can build it. There’s no one you need to buy software from or get approval from – you just build it, connect it to the Internet, configure your DNS records, and you’re in business.

This is why email will likely never die, at least not for a very, very long time. You can’t set up your own Twitter server. You can’t set up your own Facebook server. In fact, of all of the major social networks, the only one that promised any kind of protocol-based service with independent ownership was Google Wave, and that was killed off in just three years by Google after it failed to gain any kind of traction.

For social marketers, this is why we’ll be on the conveyor belt of “shiny new networks” that rise up, blossom, and then die, but will not have a stable platform. Each company in the social space is unwilling to open its code for independent implementations because their business models require exclusivity of ownership. As a result, the rapid birth-death cycles of popular social networks will continue, from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook today. On the bright side, it means that for many of us in the digital marketing space, we’ll have continued opportunities to find and seize early mover advantages from nascent networks as they catch on.

Referral Traffic - Google Analytics

Be ahead of the curve: watch the referrers in your Google Analytics carefully. Look for new referring sites and check them out, perhaps on a monthly basis, to see what’s sending new audiences to you. The next big hit might be in there already.

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