Conferences – Large or Small

New Faceted Search on LinkedIn

Intuitive, precision, dynamic search with less complicated queries-that’s what the new faceted search feature offers! You’ll find the new filters on the left of the people search page in LinkedIn. The filter fields available are unique to your search. Powerful! With faceted search, you may drill down by relationship (Connection Level) , Industry, Company, Group,  School and more.

Check out this product feature announcement from LinkedIn onYoutube.

5 Social Media Success Tips

1. Set goals, create a social media plan for your business and stick to it.  For example, if you want to reach a fan base of 500 on Facebook, determine to be only about that goal when you login to Facebook during business hours. If you aren’t strategic in your use of Facebook, it can easily become a time waster.

2. In your status updates on all networks, answer this question: What information does my business audience need from me today?

3.  Relate to people on the networks as if you are seeing them in person. Ask questions. Reply to comments or messages. Engage in conversation. Then, and only then will you see the value of social media.

4. Develop systems for growing your networks.  Example: Invite all the decision makers you are working with into your LinkedIn network. Invite contacts from informal networking events into your Facebook network. Or, determine to invite 10 people from your business association memberships into your personal network each month.  Having a system will ensure incremental growth of the right audience over time.

5. Don’t be afraid to experiment with new functionality. Social media tools are still evolving. Everyone is learning.  You’ll get the most from these tools when you get comfortable with them.  You don’t have to think about how to use the phone and email for business. Eventually, you’ll feel that way about social media.  Dive in the deep end and have fun with it.

Twitterfeed.com Configuration Problems?

Today, I was preparing to demonstrate how to set up http://www.Twitterfeed.com and realized my feed wasn’t functioning properly.

My blog URL (which works fine as an RSS feed in Facebook apps) wasn’t working for Twitterfeed. It seems a title tag was missing from the code of my new Wordpress theme.  I utilized the tool Feed Validator http://feedvalidator.org/ to identify the problem.

A more common problem is finding the RSS feed URL.  With some applications, your standard URL will work as your RSS feed URL. If not, find your RSS feed URL like this:

• Open your blog in a browser as shown below.
• Left click the RSS feed icon as shown in image below.
• Select from the RSS feeds available.

There are different families of RSS feeds available. I have these two RSS options on my blog. Both work with twitterfeed.com.

http://www.michellecullison.com/feed/

http://www.michellecullison.com/feed/atom/

If you have a Wordpress blog, you can also feed your blog posts into twitter using the wordpress plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-poster/faq/.

Automation eases the pain of social media time drain.  Setting this up or hiring someone to do it, is well worth the investment.

Extending your blog to the active twitter sphere is a good business decision.

Contact me to hire my team to help you get started.

How to Un-Fan a Page on Facebook

On Facebook, you can become a fan of a business page. However, you may want to bow out at a later date. Here’s how:

• Visit the business page.
• Scroll down to the bottom of the left hand column.
• You will see a link that says: Remove me from fans. See figure 1 below.

Figure 1-Screenshot from facebook fan page

To learn more about social media, sign up for social media bootcamp!

Adding Twitter to Facebook, MySpace and more…

If you want to integrate your Twitter profile into your Facebook Profile, MySpace profile or other web space, visit this page offered by Twitter, http://twitter.com/widgets, select Facebook (or your choice) and follow the instructions.

Getting your social sites integrated with each other is one way to build your following in multiple locations so you will be ready to build relationships and build your business in 2009!