Think of Social Networking on LinkedIn as like owning your own electronic newspaper. Your own electronic niche ‘newspaper’. A paper where you do all the jobs.

As the Distribution Manager, you decide who you want to receive your newspaper. You also control which distribution media you choose to get your paper to it’s readers—but it’s all the same words, just on different media (with social networking the media is endless: LinkedIn, Twitter, blogging, YouTube, Spoke, Plaxo, and another page full of names!). As the Editor, you have the final say in what your audience gets to read, listen to or watch. As the Journalist, you do the research and decide what stories you will write. And the Editor can of course hire other journalists (writers). Continue reading “Social Networking in Business: not just what you did this weekend” »

One of the things that drives me up the wall with Social Networking on Linkedin  is people connecting with people they have nothing in common with, just to get raw numbers of followers up. Unless you’re a Social Networking counsultant, open ended connections won’t do anything for you. Conversion rates are almost zero.

Too many people are connecting for connections sake and this shows that they don’t know what they’re doing. Continue reading “Social Networking: Beware over-adding Connections!” »

Recently I found an interesting article discussing the pitfalls of buying an audience and their potential  conversion rates and immediately thought about The Tragedy of the Commons. The analogy applies on many levels for B2B and B2C marketing out on the internet.

Communities like LinkedIn  are currently being hit by this, despite the spam being fairly obvious to spot, it is still cluttering up the networks. It’s debasing the currency we use to evaluate worth (such as follower counts, or active postings). Continue reading “The Tragedy of the Commons” »