Blog

Change

How do you adapt to change?  Do you handle it in stride? Do you accept it with good cheer and look at it as a potential for growth or as a nuisance?

Being in the marketing field has given me a chance to experience change at a rapid pace.  As we all know Facebook can change on a dime and not give notice about the changes. Twitter is undergoing some major renovations.  LinkedIn keeps adding new features.  Google + came onto the scene.  They are, sometimes, good and sometimes not so good. But, the community speaks.

Social media is ever evolving, growing, changing, ebbing and flowing.  I have noticed that the more things change the more they stay the same. Old becomes new – just like the hip- hugger pants of the 70’s are now called low-rise.   If you concentrate your efforts on the basics and add a few new methods, you will be fine.  The big change is – if you are not using digital media as a part of your overall marketing package, you will fall behind.

Overall, if you are incorporating a blog, a Facebook page, and a company page on LinkedIn, you should find a broader reach with your marketing efforts.  Using social media in your package allows you to reach the marketplace where the marketplace looks – on-line.  Gone are the days of people purchasing items based solely on what they see in advertisements.  Today, people purchase on the recommendations of peers with whom they can obtain opinions in a matter of seconds.  Review sites are now common i.e., Yelp, Insiderpages, Viewpoints or citysquares.

Peer review sites are the best way to find out the scoop.  You must remember that people will find a way to post a negative review much more quickly than they will post a glowing positive offering.  Here is a perfect example of that – over 11million views of a video about an airline breaking a singer’s guitar – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo. To overcome this you must “change” with the tide and use social media to address customer service concerns and provide positive testimonials to buffer any negative comments.

What changes are you experiencing with your marketing goals?

Thankfulness

November is a month when we look at those things for which we are thankful.

Several years ago, I was able to take a long weekend to visit some friends and family out of state.  As busy as my daily life is, I normally don’t have the time to read things for pleasure. So for this trip, I had heard about a book written by Deborah Norville that I thought I could read for pleasure and perhaps gain some benefits as well.  Her book Thank You Power – Making the Science of Gratitude Work for You shares real life stories and the way people overcame challenges and were thankful for the experience to make them grow.

Several of her points included:

  1. Make a point to say thank you to someone today.
  2. Daily, or at least weekly, list three things for which you are grateful, include the why and who if possible.
  3. Write a gratitude letter to someone.  It lets you say thank you to someone overdue to hear it.
  4. Focus on things of beauty and share it.  How often can the mundane enhance your life?
  5. Accentuate the positive.  When you are feeling down, take a few minutes to list the positives in your life.
  6. Envision the life you’d like. Find a blessing in something bad.  Focus on how you can turn a bad situation around.
  7. Do something for someone else – no thanks expected or accepted. (Remember the movie about paying it forward?)
  8. Embrace your enemy.  Look around – what is right with your world?
  9. When you look at the positives in your life, it makes you more resilient against the negatives.

While I enjoyed the stories associated with each of these points, I also thought about the things in my life associated with each of them.  I would like to share a few of the things for which I am most thankful in this season of giving thanks:

  • The skills and talents that I enjoy each day in which I get to express my creativity;
  • The era of technology that allows me to travel to see friends who live hundreds of miles away in the matter of hours or talk to them in seconds wirelessly.
  • The senses I use to see glorious colors of the sun rising or setting in the sky; hear the birds chirping or wind chimes ringing; taste the spicy flavor of my favorite meal; smell the fresh mown hay or a turkey roasting; feel softness of the fur on my pets.
  • And most of all, my husband, family and friends who love me and support me when I am feeling good or bad.

LinkedIn for Non-Profits

In the past few months, I have been providing presentations on LinkedIn to Not-for-Profits.

Personally, I think LinkedIn is one of the best professional social networking tools and if you aren’t using it to build your professional network, you could very well be left behind.

I wanted to post two links to my presentations so that you could see the power of the network. Unfortunately, I have not recorded the audio for these presentations yet, but if you would like me to bring this presentation to your organization, please contact me.

Powerpoint – to access this file go to my LinkedIn profile – scroll down my profile to find the Box.net files.  Inside of the LinkedIn workshop folder is the file LinkedIn slides 11-14 MS03.pdf.  You can download the pdf version of the slides.

Prezi – to see the presentation in action go to this link.

Don’t get thrown in LinkedIn Jail

When you send an invitation to a new connection in LinkedIn, do you use the generic invitation?  Please don’t!

OK, raise your left hand and place your right hand on your heart.  Read the following out load:

I promise to never ever, ever, ever, use the generic invitation to connect from LinkedIn.

What I teach in my workshops is this:

When you invite someone to connect, you don’t know when the next time they will be on LinkedIn.  You don’t know who they interact with or how many people they meet in a given day or week.  Help the person out by reminding them of where and when you met, how you might be able to assist them and THEN ask them to connect with you.

If you don’t know the person but want to connect with them, tell them why so they don’t think you are stalking them.

By doing those two things, you cut down your chances of being reported as spam, thus keeping you out of LinkedIn jail.

So will you, or won’t you?

LinkedIn adds a “Classmates” feature

LinkedIn added a new feature to help you find the classmates from your college or university.  I couldn’t find the feature in LinkedIn.  I had to click on this link www.linkedin.com/classmates from the LinkedIn blog article I read. (http://blog.linkedin.com/2011/10/19/linkedin-classmates/)

I logged out and logged back in and still cannot find where LinkedIn has updated the menu bar to include this feature.

The feature runs by the college(s) in your profile and the years you enter.  Once the scan is complete, you get a listing of where they work, what they do and the towns where they reside.  A list of the contacts shows up and shows you what degree of connection they are.

I can see this being useful if you went to a school where you might remember some of your classmates, or graduated in the near recent past so that you might still be in touch with some of them.  For me, I went to a university that served a large commuter population so many years ago that it doesn’t appear to be a significant benefit to me.  I might change my mind as I investigate the connections further.