Social Media Content Marketing

If your career path has taken extreme detours, will an accurate and honest LinkedIn profile actually hurt your career instead of help it? As much as people like those "3 Reasons Why.." and "The Top 10 Ways..." articles, this is not one of them. This is about only one topic. One message in fact that I received from an old friend the other day regarding LinkedIn. He reads my articles and posed what I thought was a rather interesting challenge: "You seem to have this whole LinkedIn thing figured out," he said. "But I don't. In fact, I think being on LinkedIn is actually hurting my career -- not helping it. I'm actually planning on deleting my account. I'm going to call you tomorrow and want to see if you can convince me otherwise." Challenge accepted. I see articles every week on LinkedIn about improving or enhancing your profile, to generate leads, to increase your network, to get hired, to avoid getting fired, but t...

You've probably read a lot about it in the news this week, so let me finally address the event:  I am about to hit the 500+ connections milestone on LinkedIn, and frankly the business world is abuzz about it. At least that's what LinkedIn would have me to believe. The business networking site has done a great job at making a name for itself as an Internet standard, mentioned routinely in the same breath with the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Now, any article you read usually offers the LinkedIn share button, but being an aggregated news source is just a caveat of the business professional powerhouse that it has become. But LinkedIn has achieved much more than being the online Rolodex replacement that it had set out to be when it was first founded.But it's done so by redefining its own rules.  I don't remember when I joined LinkedIn, but it was early on, and earlier then most anybody I know. Being an early adopter is part of the job description for an Int...

As I pointed out in Part One , social media marketing is still figuring itself out, so finding the right person to be your social media manager is no easy task. Simply charging the youngest person in the company to handle such an increasingly vital and visual role just does not make sense. Just consider how today I walked into my local Verizon store to ask some questions for my elderly parents. "Hi. Do you have phones designed specifically for senior citizens?," I asked the young Verizon employee. "Is this for you?," she replied. I paused for a few moments until the Frankenstein veins on the side of my head stopped throbbing, then replied: "What's your cancellation policy?" What we've all learned very quickly is that social media is akin to preparing blow fish, or the Japanese sushi known as "fugu". Prepared correctly and you'll be treated to one of the most delicious meals you have ever had. Prepar...

One of the challenges all organizations face today concerning its social media campaign is not so much how to to do it, but selecting the right manager to run it? Tapping the right person, persons, or company to lead the social media charge is unlike filling spots in other departments. So some of the tried and true processes you've used for years are about to backfire and can do damage quickly. At this point, whether you run your own business or are the CEO of a multinational, you know a little about social media. Maybe even a lot. And if you're like most leaders, you really don't want to know more about it, but you know it makes good business sense that you do . Your job is to make sure the person in charge knows it inside and out. The problem is that the medium, its tools and its best practices, changes pretty much daily. Keep in mind that social media employees are not only doing their job, they are schooling themselves on how to do their job. The changes are con...