What Am I Going to Do About LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is the business card of social media. It's that professional component that presents a side of you not seen on the Facebooks, Myspaces and Twitters of the SM world. It's the buttoned up, creased pants and polished shoes of professionals on any level of job seeking (including those who 'aren't').


My pet project gets lots of attention from the media. I get lots of b-roll footage exposure as well as my one appearance on national news. It's cool, I'm having fun and I'm building a name for myself above and beyond any of my collective paying gigs. So of course, I'm keeping my volunteering adventures current on LinkedIn. So as a result, folks known and unknown are coming out of the woodwork. It's a challenge for me to decide just what I'm going to do with the random "Link" requests from folks I don't actually know. I keep my contacts limited to to known people who I know personally and respect professionally. I do have two people who I have not met personally, but know they are well-known professionals that enhance my network.
To keep my credibility, I keep the people I don't really know to a minimum. I tend to avoid "collectors" and "LIONS" since they can turn predatory on thier contacts (more about this - another post for another day). Definition: LIONs on LinkedIn are people with 500+ contacts. LIONs don't care if they actually know the person, they just want to create a large network.

So I'm bogged down - do I don't I 'Link' with them? I'm also bogged down by this post. Maybe I'll revisit it and come back to edit it in the future. People always seem to get stuck in the details so I'm going to throw this one up on the Blog - I've been writing it on and off for 4 days. It's time to set it out there and let it just be. Now I can move on and keep this blog going.

Social Media Rant: Mashable & The Juggernauts

When you go to the Mashable site you are automatically bombarded with three lines of linked up options of Social Media and its tool packs. Full of overwhelming options, one can go to Lists, Channels, or you can get more Mashable-specific infomation in a nondescript gray bar beneath the Lists and Channels. Good grief all this text and I haven't even hit the fold! Let's overwhelm the noobs who are following the Chris Brogans, MarketingProfs and Pistachios -a sampling of the many juggernauts of the Twitterverse. The poor unsuspecting noob follows one of these folks or another juggernaut and chased a few tweets down the rabbit hole into the Dashboard of the Social Media God, Mashable!

(pardon the graphic -

I'm NOT a graphic artist and have nothing but MS paint to edit screenshots)

So I'm complaining a bit. I guess I have a right. I love Social Media as much as the Juggernaut quartet mentioned above. I'm probably 80% (if we could measure skills with numbers) as capable of playing around with social media as they are. The problem is, I'm not earning money off of it. I guess I'm still a hobbyist with the art. (BTW - I will JUMP at the opportunity to take my Social Media Skills to a funky cubicle lined Boston-area office for a paycheck. I come packed with enthusiasm, skills, Masters in Marketing and a little bit of fearlessness - who wouldn't want to work with me!) So these juggernauts are earning money learning, evangelizing and churning through new social media tools like the latest and greatest eatery in the Back Bay.

Ok, so what's my problem with them? Well it's nothing, but it's what they are doing to social media. They are making it intimidating for the Noobs - and I'm sorry, I guess so am I - who wants to be called a Noob! The juggernauts are making social media intimidating for the new users.

I'm volunteering as a Social Media Integrator for a local grassroots project. I think I struck fear in half of the team when I uttered the word "ning" (Ning is a fun, flexible platform in which users can create their own social media groups around a hobby or passion in their lives.) I've shelved Ning at the project because folks are still getting used to Twitter. I realized then that there's a need for someone like me in Social Media. Someone who can break it down so that a new user can dig around my blog and find out how to use social media. Let's take a step backwards with Social Media and make it fun again. Let's help the later adopters figure these things out without feeling foolish or intimidated by what they don't know yet.

I have been on Twitter for well over a year now - maybe even 18 months or so! People are coming up to me and asking me all sorts of questions. When I tell them I've been on Twitter so long, no fail, they tell me "You were on it before it was cool". Oh jeeze! I guess I found this technology fun a little sooner than everyone else. I think there were 200k users when I started my love affair with Twitter. It was a slower pace and it wasn't intimidating at all. I slowly worked my way up to power-user and have three accounts - my @LilMissSocMedia account being the newest of them. I've found tools to enhance my experience at my pace. That's what I hope to do for the rest of the users that come to me for Social Media advice....break it off in small bits for them and let them build their "nest" one social media tool at a time!

Grrrrrrr, Social Media on the Fritz

Ok, I'm not a diva...well maybe I'm a bit of one. However, I'm not being unreasonable about this gripe! Whenever I go to enter a gadget on my blog, I click to edit the layout and try to edit the gadgets, I get my Dashboard to embed in my layout editor! UGH, How can I be Little Miss Social Media if I can't even get my Twitter feed into my blog!

Dear blogger, please get on this pronto!

Facebook, take a lesson from LinkedIn

So everyone is in an uproar about the new facebook. Too many posts in the live feed, I can't find my stuff. I get it, they seemed to have rushed this roll out and are taking their sweet time ironing out the kinks.

One thing I just don't 'get' is why they didn't steal a great idea from LinkedIn and optimize it - the "roll over" profile feature. They have plenty of options and could even do some cool things with it if they implemented it. You could roll over the picture of someone's head and see their status updates*, their "Information" as posted under their photo on their profile, their most recent photos or videos added.
*When the status update pops up, it could be on the person who's not your friend, but replies to one of your friend's comments. That way it won't be redundant when you scroll over a friends head and see the post on your feed pop up as the content.

I do like the heads next to the comment piece. I have two "friend" with the exact same name and I can only tell them apart from their networks. Now with the photos in the feed, I can tell my brother from my former banker. (Yes, that's who they really are in my world).

I've been a big fan of the roll over feature on LinkedIn and when it saves me from clicking on a profile of someone who I have no common networking interests, it's even better for me. I'm a big fan of both pieces of social media and treat them appropriately with their respective "categories". I also know there is a potential overlap when a coworker becomes a facebook friend and when a friend becomes a valuable member to my network. I could go on, but it seems like I'm getting into another post now.

Never Tweet: I'm Brushing My Teeth

I'll get into how I came up with this blog in a later post. Yay me, another blog up to 8 of my own and one as a contributor!
So I'm a social media junkie and I'm getting a lot of "tweet cred" (aka what I call my ability to explain social media to people to people who have yet to try it out). I am an unemployed marketer and I am volunteering as the Social Media Integrator on a local project. As a result I have gained 700 legit followers in 3 weeks and I'm teaching other slower adopters the intricacies of tweeting and twitter use in general.

Today I was talking with a woman who is hesitant to join twitter because of the openness of it. She asked me what she's supposed to do with it commenting it was weird for her to post "I'm going to brush my teeth". That conversation stayed with me for a few hours and it inspired this blog which is going to be completely dedicated to my social media use, experimentation, advice and whatnot.

I told this woman, don't comment on anything you are uncomfortable with. And if you are uncomfortable, use Twitter's secure function where you can protect your updates and only allow people you know to follow you. I also told her to never tweet that she's brushing her teeth unless it is completely relevant to a compelling storyline. Did she have a bizarre tooth accident and as a result her emergency dentist told her to not brush her teeth for a week? If not, then brushing your teeth is feeble content that will bore away your followers. So now what do you do with it? You tweet from twitter things you want the entire world to know!

I further explained it in the context of the real world, if you accidentally stub your toe - hard - in Manhattan at 8:45AM on a Wednesday and you exclaim "Ouch" 10+ people are within earshot and you don't care that they know you stubbed your toe. It's a natural broadcast, it's harmless and some of the people that heard you may be concerned and ask if you're okay. In the Twitterverse, doing something similar is creation of meaningful and relevant content. It's safe information to share and you're learning to share.

I also told her to use twittter.com as her tweet-central. She can try Tweetdeck or go for something so fancy and beta-y as Nambu when she's comfortable with the basics. I forgot to tell her she can block irrelevant followers - that will be tweet lesson 2. Other advice for twitter Noobs - follow a few famous people. When you sign up, they give a bunch to you - sign up for them all and unfollow at a later date if you wish. Don't follow too many people or you'll get overwhelmed and an occasional eyeful when someone from an adult industry weasels their way into your followed list. And finally, Never EVER tweet that I'm going to brush my teeth (unless it's meaningful content - and it's likely not going to be!)

Take aways from this in a nice little set of bullets:

1. Keep it simple to start, try new options when you're more comfortable


2. Get familiar with the options a site offers to make you comfortable such as twitter's secure updates


3. Don't expect an avid follower base over night or even over a month


4. If you think your post is boring, it probably is


5. Stay tuned, twitter usage is a multi-part blogatorial


6. Never Tweet: I'm brushing my teeth