However, whenever I conduct social media training sessions for groups of professionals, the platform that they always request we spend the time most time on is LinkedIn. It is the platform that they’re the most familiar with and trust the most. They can clearly understand the benefits of putting time into LinkedIn. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and the other social networks require more convincing for them to grasp the value that they can extract, besides any personal value such as staying connected with family and friends.

Have you kept your LinkedIn profile updated? When was the last time you provided a recommendation for someone? Are you taking time to explore Groups and Answers?

If you’re like me then you could be spending more time within the LinkedIn ecosystem using it more effectively, reaping benefits and building your foundation prior to needing your network. As with many things in life, what you get out of LinkedIn will only be as good as what you put in. So, here are 8 tips to get more out of LinkedIn that you can start doing today. Heck, you might even get a few extra sales out of using LinkedIn.  They may seem like basic tips but sometimes refreshers are good to remind us to keep up with the basics.

8 Tips to Get More Out of LinkedIn

1. Fill out your profile completely including customizing your URL with your name. It’ll only take 4 minutes to optimize it.
2. Connect with colleagues, friends, and others in your profession and areas of expertise/practice.
3. Find relevant Groups to join and begin participating in them.
4. Post relevant, helpful information via status update such as industry news and important updates.
5. Search Answers for questions relevant to your industry and your areas of expertise. Provide thoughtful and helpful answers to show expertise in subject matter.
6. Follow companies to receive regular updates on their status.
7. Search on general terms and industries to find new industry peers to connect to.
8. Write recommendations for colleagues and others in your network. Also, ask for recommendations, where applicable.  Need some tips on writing a good LinkedIn recommendation? Here are a few.

If you’re looking for even more tips on maximizing the potential of LinkedIn, I’d go grab a copy of Lewis Howes‘ book, LinkedWorking (affiliate link).

Do you find LinkedIn to be valuable? What other tips would you add to this list?

Oh yeah, and if we’re not connected, come find me over on LinkedIn (http://linkedin.com/in/justinlevy). Use this email address: linkedin [at] justinrlevy [dot] com.

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Photo Credit: mariosundar

It was a fun, short interview about the issues that the restaurant faced when I jumped in as a partner to help my best friend. We discuss some of the specific actions that we took and how that helped lead us to becoming the #1 steakhouse in the Pioneer Valley.

If you can’t see the video, you can watch it over on PepsiCo’s YouTube channel.

If we managed to peak your interest and you wanted to read more about what we’ve down as a small business to build our community and increase sales at the restaurant using social media, you can find more here and here.

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Have you ever taken the time to break down time and realize how valuable time really is, even down to a millisecond? This Tungle video, produced by my friend Scott Stratten, breaks down time by providing powerful examples that will cause you to look at time in a new light after watching it.

If you can’t view this video, you can watch it over here.

A powerful underlying concept, eh? “Stop wasting time on things you can’t control, and focus on the things you can.”

Now, if I didn’t tell you earlier that the video was created for Tungle or if you didn’t watch the last couple seconds of the video, you would’ve thought it was just a motivational and inspirational video. One of thousands available across the internet.

But, go deeper than that and realize what Tungle and Scott Stratten have done by publishing this video. They have created emotionally compelling content based around the subject of time, the very issue that Tungle helps us to manage.

If you’ve never heard of Tungle, they are:

“…a calendar accelerator that let’s you easily schedule meetings and share with people inside or outside your business, even if you use different calendars. Tungle is not a calendar – it integrates with your current calendar, giving you the flexibility and control to connect, collaborate and get more done.”

Instead of a video about how to use their service, Tungle has created a video that illicit emotion thus causing you to want to share the video with your social graph. Think you’d have the same feeling if it was a video about how great Tungle is and how much time their tool will save you? Probably not.

The 71 videos that Tungle currently has uploaded to their YouTube channel, they have received a total of 83,428 views. Of those 83,000+ views, the above video has 25,132 views or 30% of all views and it has only been live for 2 weeks, as of this writing.

Looking for the underlying lesson here? Find ways to create compelling content that don’t just pimp your product. Tell a story, illicit emotion and give your community a reason to share your content.

Oh, and if you haven’t tried Tungle yet, go try it because not only does the tool rock, they’re team is pretty awesome, too. I f you want some more info about Tungle, I interviewed Tungle’s CEO Marc Gingras earlier this year.

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We were interested by some of the data including the prediction that social media will drive more business value than SEO by 2013 and that over the next 3 years Google and Facebook will decline in importance while something new (and currently unknown) will emerge as the most important website or service.

Want to see what else these experts had to say? Here is the complete ebook as a presentation. If you want your own copy, you can download it.

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Two main documents will usually provide you with the needed information to begin to form this basis: the organization’s social media policies/guidelines and their social media strategy.  The first step is finding out if they even have either of those 2 documents.  The next step is exploring the documents to find out what their constraints are, why they’re getting involved with social media and how they hope to benefit from it.

While there are an abundance of social media policies floating around online (check out Coca-Cola’s, for example), it becomes harder to find published social media strategies.  That’s why I was surprised and excited to find that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had published the Chairman’s 2010 social media strategy.  You can check out the full social media strategy below.

Don’t know who the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Chairman is?  Wikipedia defines the Joint Chiefs of Staff as “a group of military leaders in the United States armed forces who advise the civilian government of the United States.”  The Joint Chiefs of Staff are the Chiefs of each of the four military branches and are overseen by the Chairman who is appointed by the President of the United States and is, by law, the highest ranking military officer and principal military advisor to the President.

Now that we’ve had our short history lesson, did you know that the Chairman, Admiral Mullen, is actually active on multiple social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube?  Not only is Admiral Mullen and his staff active on a variety of social networks, but their involvement is being guided by, according to their strategy, four main goals:

1. ENGAGE – Begin engaging in interactive conversations with our followers and post more personalized content about the Chairman.
2. ALIGN – Align the content creation process for social media with Chairman’s Top 3 Priorities, assimilate social media content creation into existing Join Staff processes and products, and involve the entire public affairs shop, speech writers, editors, CAG, and Aides.
3. DRIVE – Use social media content to get in front of events, trips, and testimony to lead the discussion and focus questions.
4. EXPAND – Continue to grow the Chairman’s online audience and identify new social media platforms to engage from.

For each of these categories they have identified a list of objectives and, where appropriate, a list of goals to achieve.  One of the objectives that caught my eye was under their goal of providing “social media business cards at all events as a source of more information.”

I think it’s great to not only know that the Joint Chiefs of Staff have a social media strategy but that they have published it online for all of us to peruse, share and discuss.

What say you about their strategy?

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The policy encompasses a total of 20 points that are broken out into 3 key areas:

• 5 Core Values of the Company in the Online Social Media Community
• 5 Expectations for Associates’ Personal Behavior in Online Social Media
• 10 Expectations for Online Spokespeople

Adam Brown, the head of social media at Coca-Cola, explains the framework for these new guidelines in an interview with Andy Sernovitz.  If you can’t view this video, you can grab it over on YouTube.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you want to read Coca-Cola’s new social media policy, you can either read it below or grab it over on Scribd.
Coca-Cola Company’s Online Social Media Principles

At New Marketing Labs I recently had someone from a small to medium company contact me and asked if we could review their social media policy. While we didn’t end up working with the company, their social media policy was 41 pages and 3 slide decks. I think my buddy C.C. Chapman summarized it the best after he tweeted out the link to Conrad Lisco’s post about Coca-Cola’s new policies:

For Coca-Cola, this new policy was updating an older set of guidelines that they had already in place.  But, over the course of 2010 we’ll continue to see more brands adopting social media policies.  What I found really interesting is how Adam talked about that it was a combination of several teams that came together to boil their social media policy into a 3 page document meant to serve as a set of 5 commitments from the company and 15 guidelines.

Has your company adopted a social media policy yet?  What are your thoughts on Coca-Cola’s new policies?

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In general, restaurants have a few main ways that they typically market their business: You can run ads in the local newspapers, buy radio spots, have television commercials produced, and grab prime billboard locations.  All of these marketing tools will help gain a restaurant visibility and exposure.  They’re part of most restaurants’ marketing toolboxes.  But, these marketing tools don’t help when an increasing number of eyeballs are turning to Google as their primary source of information.

When my best friend and now-partner, Joseph Gionfriddo, purchased Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse, the extent of the restaurant’s web presence consisted of, essentially, just a copy of the menu.  Joe was spending most of the marketing budget on local newspapers and radio spots.  The restaurant was struggling to survive even though the food that Joe prepared was some of the best I, and everyone else that came through Caminito’s doors, had ever tried.

Recognizing an opportunity to lower our marketing budget and use the web as the primary tool to drive more bodies through the front door, I approached Joe with the offer of a partnership.  My primary responsibility: create the strongest presence, both offline and online, for Caminito, in as short of time as possible.

We immediately sketched out a 12-month strategic marketing plan that included:

• A complete revamp of the website.
• Developing an online presence through social networks, a blog, and a video blog.
• Creating a listening station that allowed us to monitor for conversations across the web about us, our restaurant, our competition and our industry.

Since many of these tactics provide for solid SEO, as part of our goals, it helped us to gain several thousand links in Google and other major search engines.  As our online presence became stronger and we developed a more engaged community, we began to rank for prime keywords that we targeted as being important for our restaurant to drive business through search results.

Our take: if prospective customers ran searches for restaurants in the area while making a decision of where to dine and our restaurant dominated the front page of Google, they would be more likely to visit Caminito.  Though we had made the decision to decrease our traditional marketing spend by approximately 80% we still continued to run local newspaper and some radio spots.  Since not all of our customers use the Internet to do their research, it was important to us to continue to use these avenues to reach our customers.  We also contacted each of the newspapers, other print publications, radio and associations to negotiate for digital advertising options, linkbacks on their websites, logo, bio and/or menu publishing.

The first month of this strategy being in play we saw a sales increase of 20% as compared to the same month the previous year.  Over the past almost two years we have maintained an increase in sales every single month as compared to the same month the previous year.  Additionally, we have finished each year approximately 20-25% up in sales as compared to previous years.

As time has continued, we have tweaked our strategic marketing plan but still maintain the above tactics.  This has helped to continue to create conversations, both online and offline.  To measure the continued increase in online conversations we use a combination of Google Alerts and Twitter Search.  While this does create some duplication, it ensures that we never miss any conversations happening around us, our brand, our competition, or our industry.  We monitor offline conversations through anecdotal interactions we have with our community and inferred through the continued increase in new customers and increased sales.

To further guide decision-making we also measure everything from the number of comments we receive on a blog post, to the number of hits on a video, the total number of subscribers, where those subscribers come from, how and where our blog and video posts are shared, who shares them, the level of engagement we have, the number of conversations that are started and tons more.  The challenge is keeping up with all of this data flowing in and bringing it all together to analyze our overall online impact.

As a result of the measurement systems we have in place the impact of online and offline conversations is clear to us.  Online conversations help to further our online brand, increase conversations, improve search rank for evolving prime keywords, demonstrate and expertise in the food industry, create new opportunities, and increase sales.  The offline conversations translate to word of mouth marketing that helps to drive increase and repeat sales.

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We have advertised on political talk shows, and with that comes some degree of risk associated with the content.  On occasion, a radio host will make outrageous or inflammatory comments that incite a political group.  Typically the “group” uses the outrageous comments to promote their agenda, and so the mud slinging begins.

Like many companies today, we use social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to listen and engage with customers and the broader community.  Several months back something new happened, our web conferencing product became part of a trending topic on Twitter, but not in a positive way.

We started seeing tweets about our brand with comments such as “boycott”, not something you want to wake up to on a Monday.  Because of the sheer volume of noise around the controversy we decided to suspend our media.  Giving us the opportunity to gather our thoughts and determine next steps.

We decided that instead of using traditional PR tactics to address the controversy, we would release a single tweet from our branded Twitter account, and then listen.  The tweet had no links, and it read something to the effect, “…we have suspended our media and we will re-evaluate…”.  As expected, the tweet was picked up quickly.  Over the next few weeks, we fielded some tweets from our personal and branded Twitter accounts, and eventually the controversy subsided.  Even though we carefully crafted our first tweet response, all the subsequent tweets weren’t scripted.  Therefore, we didn’t come across as cold and unsympathetic.  The communication was genuine and honest, and the community responded positively.

I am not suggesting that using a single tweet to manage adversity is always the best solution.  In some cases, public outreach via a press release with relevant links is needed.  However, in this case we felt the best solution was to speak to the community in the same voice and using the same tool from which it originated.  Speaking for myself, the lesson learned pertained to honesty and transparency, and the power of the tools on the social web.

So what does this have to do with workshifting?  The method we used to resolve the conflict didn’t require us to higher a PR firm, a consultant or use an expensive press release distribution tool.  The free tools are available to workshifters of any size.  The tools are not the exclusive domain of large, well funded companies.

So if you’re starting a company founded upon workshifting, you have the ability to use the social media tools with the same level of scale and effectiveness as a large company can, and in many cases even better.

Have you used the tools to manage adversity?  I’d love to hear your stories.

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Photo by: Matt Hamm

The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory

Want some more explanation?  David Plouffe was the campaign manager and chief architect of the Obama presidential campaign.  Over the course of 2 years the campaign raised more than $750 million, had a staff of almost 6,000 people and an army of volunteers that totaled into the millions.  The Audacity to Win (Amazon affiliate link) takes you closer than any other account of the Obama campaign has.  There are many business, marketing, community development and time management takeaways in addition to the granular level detail of what it takes to run a presidential campaign.

As usual, I shot a quick video with my thoughts on the book.  If you can’t view the video, check it out over on my YouTube channel.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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I highly encourage you to take the 20 minutes to watch/listen to the entire presentation.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m curious to know your thoughts.  What did you think of this presentation?  Did it get you thinking of how you could do your business a little differently?  How are you using these tools that we call social media?

Note: This a post as part of the series of presentations  from the Inbound Marketing Summit that was held at Gillette Stadium on October 7-8, 2009.  You can check out all videos on the Inbound Marketing Summit Blip.tv channel.  Content from all over the interwebs are being aggregated over on Delicious.  All posts on this blog will be tagged ims09 for aggregation purposes.

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