Almost on a daily basis, I come across opportunities to refer business to someone. Sometimes I’m asked for a resource, like if I know someone who can design business cards. Sometimes a possible connection just pops in my head, like if a person I come in contact with mentions something that reminds me of someone else or of an opportunity that might interest him or her. Other times, though, I miss the opportunity to make a referral simply because no one comes to mind right away. Yet, if I gave it some thought or asked some of my existing contacts, I’m sure I could easily find a resource to fill the need.

As a business owner, maximizing these opportunities is really important for several reasons:

1. It solidifies your place in the customer’s mind as a go-to resource, as someone who can always help solve problems and find solutions,
2. It reinforces relationships you’re building by showing your willingness to help those around you, and
3. It opens the door for reciprocal referrals between you and other service providers to which you regularly send business.

But how do you make sure you’re ready to act the minute an opportunity presents itself (or at least not very long afterward)?

Step 1: Have Tools in Place to Support You

There are tons of CRM and contact management applications available to help you manage an ever-growing database of connections. Highrise is my favorite; I like the simplicity and ease-of-use of 37Signals tools.

Of course, even the best tool won’t help you if you don’t populate it with data, and this can be the most intimidating part of starting to use contact management software. My recommendation is to ease into it. Start from today and add new contacts you come in contact with. To get existing contacts into the program, try adding a few each day until you have everyone set up. There are ways to import contacts from other programs, too. Just be sure to go through all applications and places where you currently keep information about contacts, including your email and social networking accounts, past blog entries (for example, if you interviewed someone for your site or they provided a guest post), and anywhere else you might find a long-lost resource.

The most important thing, though, is to be sure and tag each person in every way you might search for him or her. For example, you might tag a virtual assistant as VA, virtual assistant, web designer, website designer, etc., depending on that particular virtual assistant’s expertise and skill set.

Step 2: Get to Know the People in Your Network

Learn what your network does. Learn what they need. Recently, someone asked if I knew of anyone who did a particular type of web design. At the time, no one came to mind, but then just a week later, I met another person who fitted the bill. I did an email introduction, which will hopefully lead to shared referrals between the two of them.

Pay attention to the little details about people, even things like hobbies and past work experience. If someone is an avid reader, for instance, you might need a book recommendation one day, or maybe you’ll read a great book that you can pass along to that person. As you discover these little tidbits, enter them (again, as tags) in the person’s contact record.

Not only does paying attention to the “little things” help you along the way as a business owner, but it also deepens your relationships and builds your credibility.

Step 3: Keep Your Network Top of Mind.

Always be thinking of the people around you. How can you help them? How can you help not just your clients and followers, but also fellow business owners? Every connection, every referral and every introduction strengthens your network and your business. People will come to trust and depend on you for quality recommendations and resources to help them in their lives and businesses.

Step 4: Show Initiative

Show people you can help them. When someone asks for a web designer and that’s out of your area of expertise, go to your contact management software and search for “web designer” and see who shows up. Nothing will impress a customer more than you going the extra mile for him or her and sending over a list of quality web designers.

By developing a strong and comprehensive list of resources, it becomes even easier to take better care of your customers and clients, as well as all the relationships in your network, and of course, there’s something to be said for good karma and paying it forward.

What tips do you have for maintaining a better “little black book”?

Photo by Flickr user vince42, licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Social Media in the Enterprise

Privacy and social networking is something that we’ve discussed at length here on WWD; I particularly liked Dawn’s comments in “Private or Personal in Social Media?” Unlike Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg I don’t believe that the “age of privacy” is over, but there’s no doubting that the more of your “stuff” that you share online, the less control you have over your privacy. Perhaps social networks will evolve to give us reliable, granular, context-sensitive privacy controls, such as those that ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick argues for. But until they do, we all need to be careful about who we share our stuff with, and where we share it.

Do you think that privacy and social networking are fundamentally incompatible?

Photo by Flickr user rpongsaj, licensed under CC BY 2.0

For several weeks, I tweeted the same type of content I always have — just more often. On average, I tweet about once an hour, for seven to ten hours each week day. I noticed that the active, high quality Twitter users that I follow tend to tweet at least three times per hour, so I decided to emulate their process and also tweet two or three times per hour.

The result? I saw no noticeable change in the number of mentions, @replies or retweets (RT) of my posts during and after the experiment. I normally receive an average of five to eight mentions per day and that’s how much I saw during the experiment, too, even when I doubled or tripled my tweets.

Since the experiment, I’ve returned to my pre-experiment tweet average. Since upping my tweet quantity didn’t appear to have any value, there’s no reason to bombard my followers with more tweets.

I asked people on Twitter why they thought the experiment hadn’t made an impact. Many people responded that it’s the quality of posts, rather than the quantity, that makes all the  difference, and there were also some responses that suggested I should have also tried changing when I posted, rather than sticking to my usual schedule.

For me, this provides some evidence that quantity doesn’t matter much in social media, although I still don’t believe there are any hard-and-fast rules.

Have you tried a similar experiment? Did you get different results?

Focusing only on traffic numbers, instead of the concentrating  on sharing content and building relationships will send you down the path to burnout. Here at WebWorkerDaily, we have multiple writers contributing  to help keep the content fresh. But for one-person blogs, blogging daily works for some and not for others.

If I had been blogging daily since the day I wrote my first blog entry back in 2000, I would have quit long ago. I know this because I’ve been burned out by blogging many times — and I’ve never blogged more than a few times a week.

It’s natural for bloggers to want many people to stop by, read and comment. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there is something wrong with pressuring yourself to churn out content daily like a machine for the sake of traffic when blogging is just one of many things you do. If you do that, you’ll sacrifice quality and your mental state.

So how do you decide how often to blog ? What’s the magic formula? There’s no definitive approach to figuring this out. Instead, take time to ponder these questions to help you find what will work for your blog.

• Review your business goals. Increasing blog readership is a worthy goal, but how does the blog support your business’ goals? If your web site itself is the income generator, then you’ll need frequent fresh content. If the blog is for promoting you as an expert in your field, which in turns supports your consulting business, then you probably don’t need to blog daily.
• Know your audience. What jobs do your readers have? How much of their time do they have for reading blogs? How active are they on blogs and social media? What industry do your readers come from? Are they reading during the workday or after hours?
• Identify your contributors. Is your publication a a one-person blog or a group blog? Group blogs cut the chances of burnout.
• Look at the length of your posts. Some people with large followings write 1,000+ word posts; these people tend to publish less often. Readers may better tolerate daily posts when they’re shorter: 200-400 words. Some bloggers mix it up with longer posts on a weekly basis, with shorter posts filling in the other days.
• Check web site stats. After adjusting your blogging frequency, check to see if the stats have changed. Remember that while a change could be associated just with the frequency or posting, it could also be because the content quality or level of blog promotion changed.

If social media teaches us one thing, it’s this: There are no rules. This doesn’t mean all those “golden rules” and “commandments” are off the mark; these give folks an idea of what works. But blogging endlessly blinded to your goals gets you nowhere. Stay on the path and steer clear of burnout by knowing your goals and audience.

What other factors help you decide how often to blog?

Photo by stock.xchng user Jorge Vicente.

Preparing to Start a New Group

Before you start creating the group in LinkedIn, brainstorm the topics you want your group to be about and do a little research. Search for those topics in  the Groups Directory to see what already exists. If the group that you want to create already exists, don’t give up hope just yet. Take a closer look at those groups to see if they’re active and have a decent number of members. Plenty of people start groups without following through.

If your topic does have active groups, look for a gap. Can you narrow the topic? Combine it with another topic? A little mind mapping may help find a unique twist on your topic.

Picking a name for your group is important. You could name the group after your brand, but doing this may turn away potential members who don’t use your brand yet are very interested in your topic. Browse the group names on offer. Would you want to be a member? Remember that LinkedIn lists the groups you’ve joined in your profile unless you turn off the visibility setting. As you think about a name and topic for your group, consider whether members would want to have the name showing in their profile.

Creating and Promoting Your Group

By this point, you have your name, topic and purpose of the group figured out. While writing the description of the group, include the keywords that will help people find your group. Before promoting, list the group on the Groups Directory and add content such as tips, links to valuable articles related to your topic and upcoming webinars and events. Posting some content to the group before promoting it is a good idea, as it gives people a taste of what to expect if they join the group.

Once you have posed some content to the group, you’re ready to start promoting it. Mention your group to all of your social media and marketing resources. Put it in your email signature. Add it to your web site and blog. Tweet about it. Post information about the group in your LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Buzz and other social media status updates. When promoting the group, let prospective members know what they will get out of it. You could write a blog post about the group outlining what’s in it for the reader.

Maintaining Your Group

As the group owner, you can send emails to group members. These emails have a high deliverability rate because most email services recognize LinkedIn’s email address, which lowers the rate of ending up in the spam folder. Take care in balancing how many email messages you send to the group. I’ve left some groups and changed my settings for others because they sent too many messages that overwhelmed me more than they helped me.

You may want to assign the “group manager” role to colleagues to help out in maintaining the group. Group managers have the same administrative access as the group owner, which includes managing membership and discussion. The only actions the manager cannot do is transfer ownership and close the group.

“Group moderators” have the ability to police and delete group content, manage RSS feeds and feature a discussion. Moderators cannot control invitations and requests to join the group, or make changes to settings. Group members join the group and control their own settings on how other group members and the owners can contact them, and how to receive notifications from the group.

Groups can have subgroups, which can be useful for some businesses. For example, the GigaOM Network could create a group page and each publication (WebWorkerDaily, jkOnTheRun, etc.) could be a subgroup.

Think of a group as providing valuable information just like in a blog or email newsletter. The best and most successful blogs, email newsletters and groups focus more on providing value and less on promotion.

How does your business or brand use LinkedIn?

Related GigaOM Pro Research: Social Media in the Enterprise

Personally, I’m not sure I’ll get a lot out of Buzz in Gmail — all of my friends use Facebook and Twitter for online interaction (I’m not sure how many of them even have a Gmail account), while most of my professional social networking goes on Twitter and LinkedIn. However, over on GigaOM Pro (sub. req’d), Liz makes a very good point: Buzz’s true value is for enterprise customers of Google Apps.

Here at WebWorkerDaily we’ve used a variety of corporate collaboration and social networking tools to co-ordinate our efforts on the site, some more successfully than others, but even the best apps never feel truly integrated with the tool that we’ve always relied on most to communicate with each other: email. I find that having to use a separate tool (or tools) for collaboration, document sharing and and status updates feels redundant, especially as you then get email notifications from those tools in your inbox. As we already use Google Apps to manage our email, if Buzz can provide the functionality that we’ve relied on other apps for in the past and is truly integrated into the inbox in a logical way, switching from our current tools is going to be a no-brainer — and I suspect that will be true of many other web working companies, too.

Does Buzz have the potential to replace your current set of collaboration tools?

My feelings about location-based social networks like Foursquare, Gowalla, BrightKite and the like have been mixed. I’ve avoided them to date because of that knee-jerk “it’s too creepy” reaction that one gets when thinking of letting others — especially strangers — know one’s exact location. Maybe it’s because, frankly, many women I know (myself included) have been stalked.

But lately, because of Fourquare, I’ve been looking at location-based social networks in a different way. I recently wrote about Foursquare on my personal blog and concluded that the benefits far outweighed the drawbacks.

Here’ s my take on the benefits of location-based social networks like Foursquare from a work standpoint:

1. Connecting. With business travel, particularly to conferences, I find that I often don’t even know some of my friends and colleagues are in the vicinity. Foursquare notices that appear from friends on the network allow serendipitous discovery and can lead to impromptu meet-ups that can prove fruitful for work.
2. Socializing. A few years ago, Twitter took SXSW by storm, with attendees utilizing the microblogging system to track people down. I’m wondering if Foursquare will be this year’s Twitter at SXSW, or maybe it is already over in those more techie circles and everyone has moved on to the next app. Personally, I’m looking forward to seeing when someone I know is at a nearby cafe or restaurant. I’m assuming it would then be socially acceptable to just show up and say “hi,” since they’ve publicly announced their location.
3. Discovering. Gone are the days of being on a business trip and having to rely on the concierge for restaurant suggestions or the wait staff for meal recommendations. I’m already enjoying the Foursquare tips that show up for establishments nearby. I’ve also used Around Me on recent trips, but Foursquare’s recommendations of friends popping up when I’m in a new area is far more compelling than simple listings.
4. Promoting. What is really interesting about an application like Foursquare is how local businesses can leverage it to attract more customers. The concept that Foursquare members can get discounts and perks from businesses by becoming “mayor” or frequenting a place often is genius.

In an age of marketing when consumers are digesting information in new ways, taking advantage of hybrid applications that combine online and offline elements is smart business. For example, Yelp’s Monocle mode augmented reality feature is dramatically changing the ways we think of “online,” “offline” and “location.”

While privacy and safety issues still exist with any GPS-enabled application that lets you broadcast your stats to your friends or the world, I think we are going to location-based apps continue to become more mainstream. And I, for one, am eager to see where else this can take us, and how it will affect the way we network and work.

How do you feel about location-based social networks, and how do you leverage them for your work?

Related GigaOM Pro Research: “Call it Real-Time, Squared, or NewNet, The Web Is Changing“

Building conversations anywhere in the world of social media develops relationships, grows brand recognition and expands expertise. The formula for starting and building a community around your topic calls for a heap of passion, a large scoop of planning and a big bowl of promotion – the three P’s.

Passion

In “Man v. Food,” a Travel Channel TV show, Adam Richman ends every episode by taking on an eating challenge. It could be eating the fieriest food or a ginormous dish that can feed five people. In one episode, he faced an ice cream tower known as the Kitchen Sink Sundae, a two-gallon sundae with eight giant scoops of ice cream. He had to eat the whole thing within an hour.

You could almost feel Richman’s pain past the halfway point with his droopy eyes, slumped body and bowed head. The taste became too much for him that he ordered French fries to cut the sweetness. In the end, the man with passion for food won the challenge. Of course, he has lost a few battles with food, but that doesn’t stop him from trying again and again.

The groups and chats that flourish online have leaders behind them who show similar passion for their topic. Picking a topic to discuss, just because you think that’s what people want or because it’s a moneymaker will lead to burnout and boredom. Working with a topic means constantly staying on top of it, talking about it, researching it and living with it for hours, days and months. Without passion, the fire will never truly catch, but with it you can develop a thriving conversation. For example, Wine Library TV’s Gary Vaynerchuck oozes passion; people see it right away on his show, in his talks and in his book, “Crush It!“

Planning

The creators of the Kitchen Sink Sundae thought ahead by creating the sundae and setting boundaries with two rules: The challenger must eat everything within one hour. Without those boundaries, challengers could easily win by slowly eating the whole thing throughout the day.

The restaurant behind the sundae most likely added this to their menu to challenge people, promote the restaurant and to be a “purple cow.” “Hey, have you heard about the bottomless sundae at San Francisco Creamery?” makes for great word-of-mouth promotion.

You need similar planning in order to build successful conversations in social media. How does the topic fit in with your business goals? How will you benefit from the topic? Setting boundaries keeps the discussion tight and on track. Discussions without boundaries lose control and interest.

Promotion

San Francisco Creamery extended the life of the Kitchen Sink Sundae promotion with a new contest. It gives you a chance to win free ice cream for a year if you finish the sundae within 30 minutes. Unless challengers can finish the sundae, they’ll have pay for the $39.95 ice cream.

Conversations allow you to share your passion with others. But without promotion, no one will show up to share that passion with you. Hard selling makes many people uncomfortable, so focus on their needs. If they stop by your community, what will they get out of it? Use that to promote your topic. Promote it in the right places such as on social media profiles, in your email signature and via any colleagues who are willing to help spread it through their networks.

These three steps can work for many areas of social media. You can apply the three P’s to a blog, a Twitter chat, a Facebook page, a LinkedIn group, or wherever your community waits for you and your passion.

What ingredients make up your conversations around your passion?

Photo credit: Swamibu

Peeking into another person’s social media approach can give you ideas on how to adjust yours to get the biggest bang. So in this post, I’m going to share my social media process. While social media is my primary marketing tool, plenty of others spend more hours social networking than I do and for different reasons. For me, social media keeps my name out there, so people remember I’m here and available for hire. Based on these two requirements, I do social networking activities at least a couple of hours a day five times a week, which comprises a mix of the following:

• Doing social networking at the same time every day. When I make something a habit, it becomes easier to stick with it and do it on a regular basis. I always start my mornings with social media and reviewing emails. I do another check around lunch and sometimes in the evenings. This schedule ensures I cover a variety of time zones. If all your clients are local or within the same country, you may only need to sign on once or twice a day.
• Posting tweets spread throughout the day with a scheduling application. There’s some controversy surrounding automated tweets. But there’s a difference between just saying something without mentioning anyone and replying. My scheduled tweets come from responding to other people’s tweets. It doesn’t have to be an instant reply because most of us watch for mentions of our names. Rather than having a whole bunch of live tweets at 7:00 am, noon and evening, I schedule them.
• Joining the right Twitter chats. I also join several Twitter chats every week, which run for an hour on average. Chats give me an opportunity to get to know people better and have some intelligent discussion. I select the chats to attend based on the topic and theme. Some chats have a different theme (announced in advance) every time. If a chat interferes with something else, I skip it. You can also multitask while chatting.
• Reviewing Facebook updates once a day. Unless you change the settings, most of us receive updates when we post new Facebook statuses and people reply. So responding immediately isn’t important unless it’s related to an event. Once or twice a day, I review the feed on my home page and reply as needed. Since Facebook is less noisy than Twitter, it’s easy to see a few hours’ worth of updates in one sitting. If I write a tweet that would also suit my Facebook audience, I send it to Facebook by adding the “#fb” hashtag using the Selective Tweets application. I don’t send every Twitter update to Facebook because it’s a different kind of audience and it annoys some people. I obviously like and use Twitter, but I don’t like reading constant tweets in Facebook.
• Updating my LinkedIn status a few times a week. Rather than checking LinkedIn daily, I just send tweets that contain the hashtag “#in” to update my LinkedIn status. You can turn on this feature in LinkedIn. I also visit LinkedIn about once a week to review updates and questions and answers.
• Writing at least two blog entries per week. This keeps my site fresh while sharing free information, expertise and personality. It’s my home on the Internet.
• Reading other people’s blogs. I browse blogs through links in Twitter or by checking people’s Twitter bios. This makes it easy to read a diversity of blogs. With many knowledgeable people out there, I like to mix it up and meet more people. I do this a few times a week. If my schedule is tight, I cut the blog hopping and commenting.

Before figuring out your process for social media, you might want to figure out how much time you should spend on social networking. Also, be aware of your clients’ preferences to make sure you go to the places where you’re likely to find them.

Notice I mentioned Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs while omitting video networks like YouTube. But this mix of tools might not always be the same. Social media isn’t going away soon, but the players might change. Besides, you might work in an industry or profession that has a social network worth joining, or video networking is a big thing with you.

How do you make the most of social networking?

Photo credit: Mario Alberto Magallanes Trejo

The Social Networking Time Factors

So what factors affect your decision in figuring out how much time to devote to social media? Ask yourself these questions.

1. Do you use social media for personal uses, business uses or both?
2. Do you work for yourself or someone else?
3. What is social networking’s role in your marketing activities?
4. What are your current paid activities?
5. Are you earning enough money?
6. Do you have enough work?
7. Where do you find your potential clients?
8. What is your business and personal schedule like?
9. Can you make social media pay?
10. How much free information can you give way?

I spend about two hours a weekday on average doing social networking, and it’s my number one marketing activity.

How to Determine the “Right” Amount of Time for You

You’ll need to record the amount of time you spend on a few things. Plenty of time tracking applications exist for phones, online and desktop use. If you don’t use one yet, do a little research to find one that fits your needs, or just rely on pen and paper.

Track:

1. Time spent on paid work.
2. Time spent on unpaid work-related activities (like social media), broken out by activity.
3. Personal time.

Do this for a week or two. Tracking your time spent on projects is important, but the point of this activity is to see where your time goes for paid, unpaid and personal activities. Don’t break out your time on spent on paid work for the purposes of this exercise. Your result could look like this:

The breakout of your unpaid work-related time could look like this:

What you do with the data depends on the answers to the time factor questions above. For example, if you answered “No” to “Are you earning enough money?” and “Do you have enough paid work?”, you either need to cut down on personal and unpaid time, or spend more time marketing to bring in more work.

Have you seen a pattern in where you find your clients? For me, most come from word-of-mouth recommendations. Social networking supports that by keeping my name out there, so if you find most of your clients this way and need more work you might consider increasing your social media time.

Obviously, the longer you track your time, the better understanding you have of your typical schedule. The more you know, the more you can tweak your schedule to devote your time to go where you need it most. You might consider doing a review of your time spent on a quarterly basis to verify that you have a good balance of all your activities and they’re related to your goals. Be flexible and let your schedule be your guide.

How do you figure out how much time to spend on social networking?

Photo credit: Patrick Nijhuis

Here are some simple ways to display a lifestream of all of your social networking activity in one place. Some solutions involve using a third-party service, while others require the use of a free plugin or widget for your blog.

Lifestream Plugin For WordPress Blogs

I really like this simple but powerful free Lifestream plugin for self-hosted WordPress* blogs. It lets you display all of your activity on many social networks all on one page.

All you have to do is install and enable the plugin, then you just add the social networks you want to display via the lifestream settings page.

The final step is to create a new page and enter a one word line of code: [lifestream], which displays the lifestream on your site.

*Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Friendfeed Widgets and Badges If you use Friendfeed (now owned by Facebook) then you can use some of its cool tools to embed all of your social networking streams on your web site. There are a couple of different ways to do this.

You can use the “Real-time” widget in your sidebar to display a real-time feed of all your streams.

Or you can also use a smaller “Status” widget that only displays the latest activity:

UnHub

Another way to share your all of your brand’s activity is through a third-party service such as UnHub. With UnHub, you just pick and choose which feeds you want to share on what it calls the “Personal Profile Bar.” One of the biggest downsides to this method is that you can only access it via a URL which comes in the following structure:  http://unhub.com/YourName

The other big difference with UnHub is that all of your streams are segmented by service, and not displayed all together in chronological order, as with the Lifestream method.

Social Networking Aggregation

No matter which method you choose to share your activity on social networks, the great thing about all of them is their simplicity. What I like best about these solutions is that you can set them up and forget about them for the most part; they don’t require maintenance.

I think it makes sense to centralize your brand in one place, namely your web site or blog. It’s also a good move for personal blogs and web sites too, making it easy for friends to keep up with what you’re up to.

Let us know what you think of these options and share any others in the comments.

1. Use the name you’re known by. Perhaps your name is Robert, but most people know you as Rob or Bob. Or, for women, perhaps you worked under a maiden name for years. Use the name that most people know you by professionally. Cover all your bases by using your main name in your basic information and mention any other names elsewhere such as in the “Professional Headline” field, or in your recommendations.
2. Upload a professional photo. It’s worth the price to use a professional photographer.
3. Create an effective Professional Headline. Add a “Professional Headline” in the “Edit My Profile” page. This is a short bio that sums up what you do. Mine says, “Content Maven aka writer and editor behind meryl.net.”
4. Pick the industry that best represents what you do. Alternatively, you could use your clients’ industry if they all come from the same one.
5. Enter details for current and past positions. Highlight the activities that represent what you do or want to do by mentioning them first.
6. Write a summary that highlights your most important business information. Keep your summary clear and to the point. Remember you can list details under “Current Position.” The point of a summary is to give people instant information on what you do. I’ve looked at various summaries, and there’s no right or wrong way to do it. I used to have a bulleted list, but switched to a short paragraph. When I come across long paragraphs in the summary, I find them hard to read and follow. The shorter ones hold my attention and get the point across fast.
7. List your web sites and blog. Rather than using the name of your web site and blog, use keywords that describe what you do. For example, I use “Writer for hire and blog” instead of “meryl’s notes,” the name of the blog.
8. Add your Twitter ID. If you haven’t already, add your Twitter name.
9. Request recommendations. It’s OK to ask people to recommend you, but make sure you ask the right people.
10. Write recommendations. Writing recommendations can lead to receiving recommendations.
11. Add applications to enhance your profile. If you have a blog, feed your blog entries into your LinkedIn account with one of LinkedIn’s applications. You can also turn LinkedIn into an online document collaboration platform.
12. Send selected Twitter tweets to LinkedIn. While you can connect your Twitter account to your LinedIn profile, many of us tweet too often or tweet about things that would be irrelevant to our LinkedIn contacts. Instead, select just the tweets you want to show up in your LinkedIn profile by adding the hashtag “#in” to the tweet. You can turn on this feature in Twitter Settings.
13. Select what to display in your public profile. People not connected to you can only see what you allow them to see by setting your Public Profile options. The more you reveal, the easier it is for people to know if they have the right person. Here, you can also set up your Public Profile URL, which shows up as to http://www.linkedin.com/in/yourname.
    

    LinkedIn Settings

14. Review your settings. Though I’ve been on LinkedIn for a long time, I still run into new features and settings. Settings cover everything from profile views and email notifications to personal information and privacy settings. You can provide advice on how people should contact you on the Contact Settings page. Mine says, “Email is the best way to reach me.”

What tips do you have for creating an effective LinkedIn profile?

• What are your business objectives?
• Who is your audience (target market)?
• What do you hope this communication will help your company achieve?
• How will you measure your efforts?

Once you think through the business basics, the next steps are identifying the right tools to reach the right audience(s) in the right ways, and then determining what your company is going to do once you stick start participating in social networks, on blogs, and in other online communities.

Editorial Calendars for Blogs

My company uses what we refer to as “editorial calendars” for social media engagement, but that term is a bit of a misnomer. The term “editorial calendar” implies that social media communications is then based solely around “editorial” content like magazine articles. Social media editorial calendars are not about planning all of your tweets, status updates on Facebook, etc., but you do need to create some kind of framework that fits into an overall plan for engagement.

For blogs, we always develop an actual editorial calendar that is similar to a magazine editorial calendar. That calendar, however, should never lock the blogger or bloggers into publishing specific posts on specific dates without any flexibility. Blog editorial calendars should be considered strategic planning tools as well as resources for content ideas when there isn’t something topical or time-sensitive that needs to be posted.

Social Media Calendars

You shouldn’t be tweeting and updating entirely in a vacuum. For my company, our social media calendars start with a blog editorial calendar as a starting point. From those specific topics and post references, we then branch out, looking for other people’s tweets or posts that we can reference that are relevant to our client’s focus, objectives, and brand.

To utilize social media tools effectively and properly, you must absolutely generate spontaneous communications in direct response to what others are saying or to what is happening in that moment. Be yourself. Be conversational. Be engaged.

Then, at regular intervals, circle back to your objectives; the audience you want to attract and connect with; and the actions you’d like to drive through your outreach. Are you on track? If you are using social media to encourage others to give you feedback, to take a poll, to refer a friend to your site, to hire you, to purchase a product, whatever your goal or goals may be — is it working? If not, what are you doing wrong?

Social Media Planning

Maybe this sounds a little too formulaic to you. Maybe you see social media as being all about organic conversation. Well, yes, that is exactly what it is, but organic conversation doesn’t work for companies that are trying to achieve specific business objectives. That doesn’t mean that companies shouldn’t be in social networks and online communities if they do things in appropriate, valuable and thoughtful ways.

So be smart about it. Don’t deny that you are a business with business objectives. Be transparent about it. There’s a place for everyone in the playground as long as everyone places nicely. And if you stick to a plan — with a lot of common sense, generosity and kindness thrown in — your company can foster new levels of consumer loyalty from genuine engagement, while still achieving measurable business goals.

How do you plan out your company communications through social media?

To draw the line between personal and business use, I assign a Limited Profile setting to business contacts to control what they can see in my profile, and bear in mind Nancy’s advice about using social media: “What you get from me online is 100 percent me…but you don’t get 100 percent of me.” When I do anything in Facebook, I remember that a prospect or client might see it, even if they shouldn’t have access to it. You just never know what spills over.

Let’s get to work on creating an effective profile for business and personal use.

1. Use your full name. Mine says “Meryl Kaplan Evans” because some people knew me before I married and I used that name in my earlier writing gigs. If you’ve used other names, try to fit them in somewhere logical, such as your “Info” tab.
2. Fill out your profile as completely as possible. The profile has four sections: “Basic,” “Personal,” “Contact” and “Education and Work.” Fill out the information as completely as you can, but think about a potential client reading the details. Do you want the client to know that about you?
3. Choose the right profile photo. If you have a professional photo, use that. If not, pick a photo that captures you wearing the clothes that fit your style or what you would wear for a typical business meeting. Don’t try to be too dressy or too casual. You can post other photos of yourself under the “Photos” tab and assign privacy settings on a per-album basis.


Profile Info

4. Link to your blog. Facebook has several Applications that can import your blog entries into Facebook. I use Networked Blogs. It’s a great way to find readers of your blog’s content. My local friends never read my blog until I connected it to Facebook.
5. Think twice about linking to Twitter. Originally, I had all my Twitter tweets feeding into Facebook status updates. But then I took it out and now only send relevant tweets to Facebook using Selective Tweets. All I need to do is add the hashtag “#fb” to a tweet and Facebook posts it on my wall. People who don’t use any other social media application (like Mom and long-time friends) will feel confused and overwhelmed by your tweets especially if you use Twitter on a daily basis.
6. Put your most important business information on your profile home page. This is the paragraph that appears below your profile photo. What is the most important thing you want potential clients to know about you? What do they get out of working with you? Mention your industry, client type or other information to give people a hint. (See #6 in Profile Info screenshot, above)
   

   Privacy Settings for Profile

7. Use appropriate privacy settings for your profile information. Some people have their profile settings so high that when someone searches for them, they only see a name. Well, you might not be the only one with that name in the world, which makes it harder for people to tell if they have the right person. I open my profile photos and “Education and Work” to everyone. This helps searchers know if they have the right person while letting them know what I do.
8. Take advantage of privacy settings to limit access on a per-user basis. If I don’t know someone very well or only on a professional level, I give them a “Limited Profile” assignment. Those with this assignment can only see the parts of my profile that I open to them. You can also control who can view each photo album. For more personal photo albums, I customized the privacy settings to “My friends except for those on the Limited Profile list.” (See Privacy Settings screenshot.)

Still not sold on Facebook for business? We list 32 ways to use Facebook for business. You can also check out our tips for making a Facebook page for your business.

What tips do you have for a business Facebook profile?

I act quite differently in my car than I do when I meet strangers in a store. I’m much more likely to be aggressive while driving, whereas in a store, I’m generally very courteous and tend to go out of my way to hold doors open for people, and that sort of thing.

It’s strange, really. I’m “in a rush” when I’m on the road and don’t have time for niceties, but after parking my car and walking into a store five minutes later, I can take the time to be polite. It made me wonder if medium influences behavior.

I was talking recently with another entrepreneur about how people can be rude and even intentionally hurtful when posting comments online. We wondered if those same people would act differently in person. We agreed that the Internet has a tendency to evoke rudeness where it otherwise wouldn’t exist. For example, I came across a Twitter reply a few days ago that, while not necessarily overtly rude, seemed snippy and maybe a little arrogant. It gave me a bad first impression of the company and its team, something that is now hard for them to repair.

All of these instances made me realize how important it is to be polite and courteous in every environment. A simple tweet or blog comment might very well damage a reputation that you’ve worked hard to establish, when all that was really needed was a little consideration for another person.

How observant are you about how you behave in different environments? If you knew your customers could see you, would you act the same?

Image from Flickr by Jacob Bøtter

A good bio shares your experience, builds your credibility, makes a first impression and displays your personality. Having a great Twitter bio is important as it can make or break a person’s decision whether to follow you or not.

Not only do you need to pay attention to what your bio says about you, but also the other fields in your profile including “Web” and “Location.” The Twitter bio may be small, but it’s powerful. Here is a checklist to ensure you your bio passes muster.

Does your bio include relevant keywords? Do you want people to find you by your career, company, industry, location? Why are you using Twitter? Who are the people you want to connect with? Use these to figure out what keywords to use.

The keywords for me include “writer,” “editor” and “games” (I do game reviews.) I built my bio around those and added a personal touch at the end: “Content maven aka writer, editor and bookwormette who plays with words and games (www.thegamezen.com) in between PTA work and refereeing the kids.” Yes, I snuck in a URL, even though it’s not clickable.

Does your bio cover what you do? People who use Twitter for networking and business tend to follow people based on what they do and their topics of interest. The “what you do” part can also get you on people’s lists. For instance, I have lists for writers, marketers, PR peeps and so on; and it’s the bios that helped me with building my Twitter lists.

What do you have under “Location”? While many of us can work with people all over the world, our locations can lead to surprising opportunities. In fact, I had lunch with someone I met in Twitter. Within just a few tweets, we found out that we live within a mile of each other! Again, this can get you on location-based Twitter lists like mine, which covers Dallas-Fort Worth.

Have you seen nonsense numbers for location such as UT: 12.345678, -234.5678? This comes from Twitter applications like Ubertwitter, but these mean nothing to most people. (FYI: you can enter these coordinates in Google Maps to find the person’s location.) Originally, I had “Plano, Texas” and changed it to “Plano, Texas, north of Dallas” so those searching for “Dallas” will find me.

What does your web link look like? This might seem like a strange question, but some people put in short URLs (tinyurl, bit.ly, ow.ly, is.gd, etc.) in this field. Most of us have learned the hard way not to trust this. Twitter doesn’t shorten the links in this field, so don’t use a shortened URL link. It reeks of spam. “Hidden URLs are usually spam sites or MLM marketing,” tweets Suzanne (aka ZeroCattle.)

Where does your web link go? There’s no one single obvious answer. Often I want to go straight to a person’s blog, if they have one. Sometimes I just want to read more about the person. Some people create a landing page specifically for Twitter, which is where my link goes. However, I wonder if pointing to my blog would be a better idea.

Suzanne suggests linking to your business’ web site or to a profile on a social network site, if you don’t have your own site. While it’s easy to set up your own site, not everyone has the need for one especially those in corporate careers. Peggy Dolane (aka FreeRangeMom) likes to see a person’s web link take her where she can learn more about them or their passions.

Don’t worry too much about having the perfect bio. Many of us have tweaked our bios over time while becoming more comfortable and familiar with Twitter. Even my own is probably version 3.3. Remember, be yourself. That’s what makes you stand out.

What do you look for in a Twitter profile?