Your Marketing Gal

Why You Should Be On LinkedIn

I do love LInkedIn. You can list events. You can assume (without the makes an ____ out of you and me) the heavy hitters, influencers have LinkedIn profiles. Here's a great Article about LinkedIn. Let me know what you think.

LinkedIn: the secret to the online business network's success

With 50 million members, including Richard Branson and Alan Sugar, LinkedIn's success story quietly rivals that of Facebook

 

By Andrew Keen is @ajkeen on Twitter
Published: 12:05PM BST 22 Oct 2009

In spite of its clunky interface, credible business people can no longer afford to avoid LinkedIn.For all the continual media frenzy over Facebook and Twitter, the most remarkable social networking story of all may well be LinkedIn, the global social network for business professionals founded by serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur Reid Hoffman in December 2002.

Last week, a bullish LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner announced its 50 millionth member, stressing that while it took sixteen months for the social network to get its first million members, the most recent million only took 12 days. While the LinkedIn 50 million may pale in comparison with the Facebook 300 million army, its achievement is quite remarkable when one considers that there are only around 360 million white collar professional people in the entire world (at least according to the latest International Department of Labor numbers).

So over 10% of the world’s professionals are already on LinkedIn. And with the social network now signing up a new member every second of every hour of every day, it shouldn’t be too long before the other 90% of the world’s business professionals eventually wind up in the LinkedIn universe.

Read More...

via www.telegraph.co.uk

Networking for a Great Cause Happy Hour Fundraiser for Food Bank Rockies

Did you know that $1 buys four meals for people through Food Bank of the Rockies? Join the Denver Entrepreneurs at Slattery's Irish Pub, located at the Landmark Center for some hobnobbing and networking for a great cause on Wednesday, November 18th from 5pm to 8pm. Enjoy yummy appetizers (get there early) kindly  donated by Slattery's, 2 for 1 premium well drinks, house wines and selected beers (5 to 7) for our charity, Food Bank of the Rockies.

You can buy 40 meals for others through Food Bank Rockies at this networking meeting with your $10 donation. Bring plenty of cards, a smile and your entrepreneurial or friendly spirit. Please help make this a real success. All are welcome - you do not have to be a member of the Denver Entrepreneurs to attend. I'll track your name through your donation at the fund set up specifically for this event. 

Our goal: We can raise enough money to provide one meal for 3,000 people - now that's a lot of meals. Bring friends and please RSVP by November 11. Slattery's would like a head count to provide their usual excellent service.

To make this event even more fun than the usual happy hour share your business cards, pick up more business cards, shake more hands, we'll be holding a low-keyed, short, fun networking event with prizes.

Want to donate a prize? Please let me know. Here' our Denver Entrepreneur Meetup page if you'd like more info about this dynamic group of folks.

Visit our donation page at Food Bank Rockies to make your $10 (or more) donation. Can't make it but would still like to donate?  Please visit  http://bit.ly/FoodBankRockies and thank you for your generosity - no donation is too small. If you have any questions, please contact me, Jo Guerra at 303.632.2928 or socialjo1@gmail.com.

Slattery's Irish Pub, 5364 Greenwood Village Blvd, Englewood, CO 80111, 303.741.2115. 

See my previous post on how $1 buys $10 worth of food at Food Bank of the Rockies.

Thank you so much!

Twitter How to: 10 Tips to Tweet Your Way to Jobs

So what is the big deal about Twitter? There are so many headline stories about Twitter. Some say it will be gone tomorrow and don't waste your time. Yet it keeps growing dramatically and companies are using it to "tweet" their jobs. When I recently signed up to blog with Jobing.com in Denver, I found out they have two people devoted to social media which I know includes Twitter. So just how do you tweet your way to a job? Here are ten tips to use Twitter in your job search.

1. Just go to www.Twitter.com and choose your screen name of up to 15 characters. If you are "branding" yourself, you can choose your name if it is available. Or choose a title that describes what you do. You can always change your screen name.

2. Upload a professional looking head shot that you use in all your social networking sites. This also shows consistency in your brand and helps people recognize you.

3. Although this should be your lowest priority (but hey it's fun), you can choose a free background at http://www.twitterbackgrounds.com and you'll have a big choice. I chose one that matches the colors of my website. Remember to keep it professional.

4. Put your job pitch in your Twitter bio. You have 160 characters to write your elevator pitch. Make those characters count. Cut out unnecessary words.

5. You have one link so make it a good one. Use it to direct people to your LinkedIn profile or your resume. A good place to create your online resume is www.VisualCV.com. Plus you can download your LinkedIn profile right into Visual CV so you have a great start to your online resume. This used to be a free service but the last I heard, they were going to start charging users.

6. Tweet about your jobs, your aspirations, your interviews, etc. Keep it all positive - no one wants to read about your negative experiences. It's okay to occasionally tweet a link to your resume.

6. Which brings us to to the next topic of the Twitter dictionary: the @ which is a mention, RT (retweet) which is used to show that you are tweeting content that has been posted by another user and DM is a Direct Message. So if you see an @ before your Twitter screen name like @joguerra (my screen name), someone is mentioning me or sending me a message that everyone can see. DM is a direct message between me and another Twitter user and is actually D joguerra. So a D then space and the screen name. When people RT or retweet your posts, thank them. It's the social media thing to do.

7. Show you are an expert in your field by tweeting interesting comments, article links, blog links in your industry. Use Google alerts at http://www.google.com/alerts to look for interesting articles and "tweet" the link with a comment. Use keywords in your industry to set up and receive alerts via email or add it as a "feed" to your reader. If you don't understand the feed, don't worry. Just have an email sent.

8. Look at hashtags (#) in your industry. Hashtags are a powerful, simple tool for tracking topics, live events or breaking news. Go to http://hashtags.org/ and enter #jobs. You'll see a list come up with all type of jobs. This will give you an idea of how to search. When you click on the results, you will be taken to another page that shows all the jobs relating to the hashtag with links to the actual job.

9. Use Twitter search to find information on jobs. Go to http://search.twitter.com and enter keywords with your industry, zip, city, job titles, etc.

10. And lastly, you can get lost in cyberspace as you find interesting links to articles as well as a lot of unnecessary junk. So limit your time on Twitter. It is very helpful for finding a job, but can also be a big time bandit.

I could go on with pages of information as there is so much more to Twitter. If you have any tips, please post them.

What are Facebook Friends for? Why Sharing Information Of Course!

Love being on Facebook - it's one of my favorite social network. I did notice that I did not seem to be receiving as many posts. And I just found out from one of my Facebook friends that Facebook decided who my favorite 250 friends are. Yes, Facebook, as we've all heard, changed their design recently and decided to pick your top 250 friends unless you change your settings. You will only see the feeds for these 250 friends.

Want to change this? It's easy. Just click on your home page. You'll see two choices at the top with one highlighted to "Live Feed" and the other link is "View News Feed" that is not highlighted. Click on "View News Feed" and scroll to the bottom of the page and click on "edit options". "View News Feed" will not be highlighted but the screen will change just a little.

On the new screen you will see the number 250. Change it to the number of friends you'd like to see feeds for or 5,000 which is the maximum friends Facebook allows. I changed it to show all my Facebook friends. You can still hide them individually should you decide you don't want to see their feeds. Share this post with all your friends and let them know.

Update: Whenever you get back on Facebook, remember to toggle between the Live Feed and the News Feed.

LinkedIn: 50 Million Professionals Worldwide

I love LinkedIn. Yes, it's not as interactive as Facebook or Twitter. But you can network, join groups. find power partners, post and share events, etc. Plus it really is the premier business social network. Do you have a completed profile? If you do, you are 40 times more likely to receive opportunities. So congratulations, Jeff Weiner and thanks for all your company does. This is from the official LinkedIn blog.

LinkedIn: 50 million professionals worldwide

Jeff Weiner October 14th, 2009

As of early this morning, LinkedIn has 50 million users worldwide and we’re growing that figure at roughly one new member per second.  When LinkedIn launched in 2003, it took 477 days — almost a year and four months — to reach our first million members. This last million took only 12 days.

Where are these 50 million users? LinkedIn has been global since inception — about half of our total membership is international.  There are now 11 million users in Europe alone. India is currently our fastest-growing country with almost 3 million users, while the Netherlands has the highest rate of adoption per capita outside the U.S., at 30%.

While 50 million is an important milestone, we’re even more excited about how our members are using the site.  Around the globe, people turn to LinkedIn to create and manage their professional identities online. They reconnect with former colleagues and develop new relationships, enabling them to create and collaborate with a network of trusted individuals. Every day professionals use LinkedIn to define themselves —and their businesses — to the world.

We’re proud to have reached this latest milestone, and we very much appreciate our members’ use of LinkedIn.  However, in the context of our mission – to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful – we’re just getting started.

via blog.linkedin.com

Why You Should Not Rely on URL Shorteners

Oops just when we thought we were safe to rely on URL shorteners. I use bit.ly often to know where traffic to my blog is coming from. They are quite handy. So, which one do you use?

From Entrepreneur Magazine

Thanks to Twitter's rising popularity--and its finite, 140-character message length limit--free URL shortening services have been all the rage recently. But they should not become a critical part of your company's infrastructure.Why not? Because there's no guarantee they're going to work. Most of today's short URL services are run by small, modestly funded startups that could easily shut them down--or change the way they work. Both have recently happened.

1. Nambu announced plans to shut down the tr.im URL shortener this past weekend. "tr.im did well for what it was, but, alas, it was not enough. We simply cannot find a way to justify continuing to work on it, or pay its network costs, which are not inconsequential," the company said.
   This means that any tr.im URLs out there on the web will break. Translation: "Same as writing a million post-it notes w/ invisible ink," The New York Time's Nick Bilton notes on Twitter. Anyone who cares about the visitors coming from those sources will need to replace those links.
2. Digg recently changed the way its digg.com URL shortener worked. Instead of sending viewers to the website that had been shortened, it started sending people to a page on digg.com that had a link to the target URL. This means that anyone using the Digg URL shortener--as we had on our Twitter account for a few days, for instance--would be forcing its readers through a middle man. Hardly elegant or ideal.
   
   And this doesn't even take other problems like downtime into account.

The best solution for normal web "consumers" is to keep using short URLs the way you do now--this is not a big deal for most people. But be aware that they should only be used for short-term, non-mission-critical uses, and that they shouldn't be seen as a permanent URL replacement. (Don't bake them into documents or web links unless absolutely necessary.)

For businesses that use short URLs for commercial purposes, like newsletters or huge Twitter presences, you may want to invest in creating a custom short URL for your company's links.

Flickr, TechCrunch and other web publishers have done this recently, either using in-house solutions or a third-party like awe.sm. This could help if public URL shorteners go down or go away.

But, same risk here, though reduced--that the third-party short URL provider could go out of business. So make sure you can move your account and data elsewhere, if necessary.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/technology/newsandtrends/article203708.html

via www.entrepreneur.com

MediaPost Publications Is Social Media Turning Us Into Whiner Nation? 10/14/2009

This article asks such a great question: are we turning into whiners? Is that all we do: vent on our social network or blogs before we think of the ramifications?

MediaPost Publications Is Social Media Turning Us Into Whiner Nation?

This morning, I was sifting through Tweetdeck, looking for column ideas, when I came across a link to this site, which calls itself HSBC Reviews. (Thanks, @iboy.) 

Ha! I said. That reminds me of that column idea I had the other day -- about whether social media is turning us into Whiner Nation. Or Whiner World, for that matter -- and whether big, consumer-facing businesses have even the slightest idea of how to synthesize the "information" provided to them by all of these newly empowered whiners.

The answer to the first question is "yes." And to the second? No.

What got me first thinking about Whiner Nation was not even my experience with a certain car dealership, which I wrote a column about several months ago. In that instance, I suffered Twitter remorse for tweeting negatively about them. Had they committed a potentially fatal omission in servicing our car? Yes. But did I find social media tools to be too easy an avenue to vent my frustration? You betcha. At another time, in another world, I would've vented to a friend, one-on-one, over the telephone -- in addition, of course, to trying to rectify the problem directly with the dealer, which I eventually did. In that instance, I realized that the urge to use social media to vent can be the itch that won't go away. That doesn't mean we should scratch it.

What actually got me thinking about Whiner Nation was another bad customer experience I've had recently, with an institution with which my family has done a lot of business. Having suffered the psychological ravages of Twitter remorse over the car dealership, this time I'll keep it between us and them.

However, it occurred to me that the default for a fair number of people is becoming to complain about our mistreatment from Big Business in public. [Read more]

Failure is the New Success - What Have You Failed At?

Haven't we all experienced failures? How do you deal with them? Do you bounce back or hide? It seems that at times it is hard to get up after experiencing bad times. But it's the best thing to do. Shouldn't you believe in yourself always? Enjoy this article I found on MediaPost by Kaila Colbin.

MediaPost Publications More Lessons From The School Of Failure 10/13/2009

Just as my "Failure is the New Success" column was coming out last week, I had a conversation with my friend Richard. "Your name came up recently," he told me. "We were talking about failure so of course it reminded me of you."

Yes, he is a friend. And, no, this would not ordinarily seem a kind thing to say. But Richard was referring to a little story I had told him about how I first met my business partner, Melissa.

See, back in the day, I had a company that distributed large format digital printing supplies: all the raw materials that go into making billboards and bus graphics and the like. I was 23 years old; 95% of my business was to a single customer -- who, by the way, also owned 80% of my company. When his company went bust, so did mine.

I immediately jumped back in the fire, this time with an Internet education company. We wrote books, produced a series of videos, and traveled around the country on a bus tour to teach kids and parents how to use the Internet in a fun, safe and educational way. Our content was great. Our show was a hit. We got on CNN and in Entrepreneur magazine. But we had no business model at all, and shut the doors in late 2001.

For the next five or six years, I licked my wounds and collected a paycheck. I didn't want to be in charge. I didn't want to be responsible for whether or not someone else's family got to eat dinner that night. I just wanted to go to work, do my job, make a little money, and sleep at night.

Then one day I happened to attend a talk by the new CEO of a local company. Melissa was addressing the Women in Technology group at a luncheon. There were around 20 of us, seated in a big square, and she started by going around the room and asking for everyone's 10-second bio.

"I'm Kaila," I said. "I've started two companies and they both went under."

Melissa's reaction was immediate and uncompromising: "You need to start another company immediately, before you're too scared to go back and before you forget everything you learned. You'll make mistakes, but at least you won't make those mistakes. And call me for a cup of coffee."

I will forever be grateful to her for that flash-of-light, catalyst moment. We are now business partners in one company. She is on the advisory board of another company of mine. She'll be a bridesmaid at my New Zealand (as opposed to the one I just held in the States) wedding. And this profound and rich relationship came from her ability to see my failure as something to be cherished.

As MySpace struggles under Facebook's relentless onslaught, as Twitter finally prepares to monetize through deals with the godfathers of search, as our online landscape shifts and morphs and transforms, as you make the everyday decisions that affect your business and your customers and your livelihood, I hope you can have the perspective to know that you might not get it right. I hope you then have the perspective to immediately regroup, reassess, and recommit. These three actions turn failure into a launchpad instead of a resting place.

Regroup, reassess, and recommit. Then call me for a cup of coffee. I look forward to hearing about your mistakes.

via www.mediapost.com

How $1 Equals $10 at Food Bank of the Rockies

Friday, October 2, Food Bank of the Rockies had their 2009 Agency Conference – an event designed for the agencies that receive food from the Food Bank and distribute it to the end client. Janie Gianotsos, Director of Marketing, and I presented a Social Media for Nonprofits seminar. I thought I had gone there to teach nonprofits how to use social media in their fund-raising and publicity efforts. Instead I learned so much.

One of the speakers, John Arnold, Executive Director at Feeding America West Michigan presented a most passionate speech: Charity Food Programs That Can End Hunger In America. He even had proof from some of the counties that his program support, have ended hunger. So many statistics and facts were included in his presentation of how things have changed positively over the years as they started studying and doing things differently.

A year ago, I felt so fortunate that I was able to connect a marketing firm and a local food pantry together for a food drive. The drive was so successful, they gathered enough cans to last four months – or so I thought it was so successful. I wish I had listened to Mr. Arnold’s speech before this because if there had been some way to collect cash donations instead of food donations, the food pantry could have had 10 times what they collected – that could have been 40 months or over three years worth!

If you donate money versus canned goods, food pantries are able to buy so much more, according to Mr. Arnold. Let’s say that a person buys $5 worth of canned foods at a grocery store and donates it. If they had given $5 as a cash or credit card donation to Food Bank of the Rockies or the nonprofits they distribute food to, they could have used this $5 donation to purchase up to $50 worth of food from their suppliers including the same grocery stores that the person had bought the canned food from. What an amazing thing. 

Donating a grocery bag like this could result in 10 grocery bags if you donated cash instead.

Mr. Arnold did realize that people feel good about bringing a tangible item for a food drive and suggested everyone rinsing the cans and putting the money in them instead. There has to be a creative way – how about envelopes or recycles boxes with a picture of cans? And he is not saying that food drives should end. He is educating people how cash goes so much further. Same thing that the great folks at Denver Food Bank of the Rockies say.

So, yes, I was honored and happy to teach Social Media 101 with Janie Gianotsos and I hope that the nonprofits we presented to are able to incorporate some of the social media marketing techniques we suggested: blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc., into their marketing efforts. But I also feel so good about learning so much on how to really help food pantries. The next time I think of taking cans to a drive, I’ll take cash instead.

Visit Food Bank of the Rockies for more information. You can also visit their donation page to help this wonderful organization.

Social Media Workshops: Work LinkedIn The Right Way!

Your Marketing Gal is conducting two social media networking workshops in Denver this month. They are targeted for job seekers, but anyone is welcome to attend. LinkedIn is the premier social business network. If you have a complete profile, you are 40 times more likely to receive opportunities. Plus according to the recent “Social Media Revolution” video, up to 80% of employers are looking for candidates through LinkedIn. Don’t miss these great opportunities to learn all about this social media site.

If you’ve got a pretty good LinkedIn profile and just want to know how to make the most of LinkedIn in your job search, attend this information packed one hour class: Social Media Workshop: Advanced LinkedIn - Work It The Right Way! on Friday, October 16 from 10am to 11am at Panera Bread, 7739 Wadsworth Blvd., Arvada, CO 80003. It’s only $10 but class size is limited. Find more details and RSVP at Your Marketing Gal.

Want to learn everything there is to know about LinkedIn from basics to advanced? Then register for this two-part interactive computer class: Social Media Computer Workshop: How Does LinkedIn Work? Class will be on two Saturdays, October 31 & November 7 from 9am to 11:30am at Colorado Free University and is $66 for non-members and $54 for members. Visit Your Marketing Gal for details and registering information. 

Please check back to view upcoming workshops. Custom social media classes can be developed for you or your business. Please email or call 303.632.2928 to discuss your needs or visit www.YourMarketingGal.com.