LinkedIn was actually launched back in 2003, but had a slow following until the recent popularity of social media sites for business.  With more than 46 million users worldwide, LinkedIn is most frequently used as a way of networking with business colleagues and potential employers and employees.  In the past it was considered bad form to use social sites such as MySpace or Facebook for business purposes.  I’d say there’s been a shift there, wouldn’t you agree?  If you have yet to be so bold: Go here to add your LinkedIn profile (or, if you prefer, your resume) to your Facebook page: http://apps.facebook.com/my-resume.

The main idea of LinkedIn is/was to connect business professionals with other business pros that they trust, have worked with or know personally. These connections are carefully maintained by the site to avoid spammers and friend gatherers by asking questions before making a connection with another person. It also helps connect your “6 degrees of separation” by joining groups of other like-minded professionals that you can network with.

LinkedIn for Business

But what about LinkedIn’s use for businesses?  Well, the big dogs have been on board for awhile now.  More than 40% of Fortune 100 companies pay to use the site to find talent among its 46 million members.  But it’s not just about finding talent, although let’s not ignore that completely.  Did you know that you have the opportunity to showcase your business on LinkedIn as well?  Yep, it’s true. The 46 million and growing members of this network can read all about you, your company, and the potentially mindblowing things that you can do for them, their business, their friend’s business…you get the point.  Go here to get started: and Select “Add a Company”.   Or you can go look at ours, here.  You can also pay for premium profiles and those are custom quotes apparently.

There are a lot of ways to use LinkedIn for business and, for the sake of brevity and not reinventing the wheel, here’s a fantastic article by Meryl Evan of Webworkerdaily called: 33 Ways to Use LinkedIn for Business.

Growth & Innovation - Look Out:

There is a “buzz” growing around LinkedIn.  I’m actually writing this because clients keep asking about it and figured it was time I looked into it a little deeper.  Speaking of “buzz”, this is cool:  LinkedIn has what called a Company Buzz application, which allows members to track what is said about a company on Twitter. The application is a filter for Twitter conversations based on search terms and can be customized by members, allowing them to see who is talking about a specific company and products.  The application shows Tweets, trends and top keywords.  Very nice way to track and consolidate what is being said about your biz.

As for growth, these number are just out today:  In Europe the network  just crossed the 11 million members barrier, which cements it’s position as the preferred professional online network in Europe and the rest of the world. Globally, a new professional signs up for LinkedIn every second. LinkedIn currently gets a million new members every two weeks. LinkedIn is a global network, operating in 200 countries and across 170 industries. The’’ve launched local language sites in France, Germany and Spain and there are more in the pipeline.

 

You may want to think about checking it out.

Anyway, the one’s I have made recently have not been malled by the YouTube police yet, but I also post on Vimeo just to be safe.  Here’s a video from a Consulting Challenge Conference that I attended in Las Vegas this past weekend.  Special thanks once again to Maria Gudelis with Wildhorse Performance Marketing and to all of the wonderful people that I’ve connected with over the past month.  What a group!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Anyway, in my “delving”, I ran across this video about Facebook Datacenters that is just so awesome that I had to share it.  I’ve actually watched it many times and I don’t generally do that.  Here are a few stats that are well over 6 months old so feel free to multiply them by some obscene number to get the current rates:

The company’s data centers store more than 40 billion photos, and users upload 40 million new photos each day – about 2,000 photos every second. Not surprisingly, the racks are packed. The facility is using a raised-floor design, with no containment but generous spacing between racks.  Facebook appears to be spending $20 million to $25 million a year for the data center space that houses its servers, according to an analysis of the company’s data center infrastructure.  Here’s the very cool video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, my 11-year old son and I were discussing social media last week because: a) he gets it, and b) it’s something I do that I can talk about with him that doesn’t make his eyes roll back in his head with boredom or indifference.  Specifically, we were talking about Twitter and Facebook and how Facebook has now overtaken MySpace as the #1 social networking site worldwide.  It was at this point that my son looked at me very seriously and said, “Mom, you should really stay away from MySpace.  I heard it’s gotten very ’porny’.”  After I stopped laughing, we had a long discussion about the word “porny” and concluded that it is indeed a word or, if it wasn’t one before, we are declaring it to be one now.

That has stuck with me all week because, well it’s hilarious but also because there’s so much truth to it.  I actually started noticing a lot of things on Twitter that just kind of flew by in the past, such as usernames with “xxx” in them and some provocative tweets and avatars.  Now I’m not naive, and I know that adult content is not new to internet marketing but I decided to do a little research on the social media angle.  As much as I could stomach anyway and still put a few useful facts out there.  Here’s what I found:

In large part, this is not being talked about in articles, blogs,or forums.  Or if it is, it’s on page 132 of Google search results.  I spent some time on this and there are quite a few articles out there discussing porn on MySpace but I really could find nothing within the last 12 months.  There was a recent article by Erick Qualman on Search Engine Watch titled 15 Social Media Maxims for Marketers in which he states that “Social media has overtaken pornography as the number one online activity, according to Hitwise data.”  Could it be that people are just getting their porn ON social media sites?  I do know that Facebook has member listing tags (FBML) for ages: 18-plus and 21-plus, that were perhaps set up to help with Facebook’s payment system but can also be used to target audiences for more ahem-”adult” content.

Google owns YouTube so we’d expect YouTube to be pretty squeaky clean, right? Well, I think they try.  YouTube has some very strict terms of use (a few a surprise to me).   Children under the age of 13 are prohibited from using YouTube at all!  (My son will be thrilled).  20 hours worth of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute so, in large part, the rules against adult content are policed by the YouTube community who report said seedy videos,  which are apparently then swiftly removed.    However, that doesn’t stop LINKS to porn from being placed on YouTube.  In fact, a search on YouTube for “mini bucking bulls” (which are popular now…I know nothing about these things) will bring up a long list of links to porn sites.

Twitter is growing so rapidly that there are dozens of stories relating to the website and it’s uses daily, but only a few have touched on the growing “porn” element.  It’s really two-fold here.  First and foremost, many Twitter users are ticked that adult content is even being allowed to sully their Tweetdeck at all.  Second, and actually a little more important in my opinion, is the fact that Twitter accounts are being hacked by porn accounts who then spam unsuspecting followers with some surprising tweets.  This has happened multiple times in the last few months.    As nude photos and explicit messages bounce around Twitterspace, annoyed users are apt to Unfollow or just leave altogether and this is not a good prospect for an application with such networking and marketing promise.

Is there a solution here?  Well, having never successfully run a global social networking site myself, I have no idea.  It appears that the self-policing action that YouTube has in place works to an extent.  Did you know that they only have 70 employees?  It goes along with the whole Google concept of handing design and  ownership over to the users.  In the mean time, I don’t leave my social media accounts unattended or on autopilot.  That’s a mistake that I think far too many people are making these days.  Really, how is that being “social”?

Oh yeah, and I have a new word:  “porny”.  Ha!

Aside from that, I’d love comments, suggestions, corrections on my logic.   Thanks for reading!

SEO in general is usually thought to involve a lot of link-building campaigns, which in turn moves a site up in the rankings with the search engines.  Now, consider a hot “Tweet” of something from your website that is being flung all over the web faster than the speed of light and that’s some serious exposure for you, your brand, product, whatever.   

Before you click off this page and start tweeting like crazy, let me point out one other thing.  The links submitted by Twitter users are “no follow” links.  In essence, Twitter is telling Google and some of the other serach engines to ignore the links.  Do they listen?  For the most part, yes.  Only Ask.com actually follows these links so you can be a superstar in their eyes if you’re feeling the Twitter love.  

According to compete.com, Ask.com owns about 2.5% of the search engine market share. The same source shows that in November 2008 there were 255 million search queries on Ask.com. This is peanuts compared to 7235 million on Google, but can you seriously disregard a source of such traffic? Ask.com is a potential gate for visitors that could convert into customers.  I’d say we have some SEO value right here.

Moving on.  What about the squished url’s?  You know, from tinyURL and bit.ly that redirect Twitter users to the “real” URL through a permanent 301 redirect.   The answer is that the search engines do not index these either as they are coming out of Twitter, ie – “no follow”.

So, Twitter is a waste of time and resources from an SEO standpoint, right?  WRONG!   SEO is not just about external link building, and even that is not a lost cause here.  Offsite SEO, participating and promoting on Twitter, will bring visitors to your website that don’t give a flip that the tinyURL link was a “no follow” link.  (Who knows what that means anyway?)  These visitors will impact your on-site numbers such as number of unique visitors, page views, time on site, etc. which also matter to the search engines.   And about those external links?  Once you get people to your site, make sure that you have great content that they are going to want to bookmark and send out to: StumbleUpon, Digg, Facebook, TWITTER ….get it?

In short, there is some very serious SEO value in Twitter that is just waiting to be tapped.  There are quite a few saavy marketers out there who have already figured this out and are reaping the rewards.  If you can drive traffic to your site with this tool, you’ll be ahead of the game from an SEO standpoint.

Gartner Inc., a leading IT Research Firm, issued a report recently that highlights the various means that companies are adopting Twitter for business use. Although Twitter was originally meant for communication among individuals, a number of establishments have begun to actively participate on the platform. Even So, not all companies are using Twitter in the same way. Some are tweeting, some are just listening, and some really savvy organizations are doing both.

Before any company employees start tweeting, it would be a good idea to remind them that the same rules that apply to other web participation (like blogging, for example) also hold to Twitter. “As Twitter is a public forum, employees should understand the limits of what is acceptable and desirable,” says Jeffrey Mann, research vice president at Gartner. “If organizations have not defined a public Web participation policy, they should do so as quickly as possible.”

Based on Garnter’s research, they have narrowed down the four different ways that organizations are using Twitter today: direct, indirect, internal, and signaling. Here’s what those mean:

Direct
Some organizations are using Twitter as a marketing or public relations channel, much like an extension to their corporate blogs. They will post about corporate achievements and pass on links that take people back to corporate web pages, press releases, and other promotional sites.

This method probably appears to be the simplest way to get started, but organizations need to be aware that using Twitter like this could actually hinder their image in the Twitter community. A whole bundle of self-serving, self-promotional tweets can actually damage their reputation – Twitter folks look for a personal touch.

Gartner also warns that responding to comments can be risky when traveling this path, but, while that’s accurate to a point, when done right responding on Twitter can be of great benefit to the organization. To see some examples of brands that “get” how to tweet and respond, check out what Ford does, or Starbucks, or Dell.

Here are a couple of resources to help your organization get acquainted with how other businesses do this:

16 Examples of Huge Brands Using Twitter for Business
 40 of the Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them

Indirect
The second method some companies use on Twitter is to let their employees tweet instead. As the employees use Twitter to enhance their own personal reputations, the company’s reputation is also elevated by proxy. If this one is difficult for you to picture, then maybe a good example to exhibit the power of the indirect method is in reverse: imagine what negative tweets about the company would look like. Take the example of the Yahoo employee who twittered throughout the layoffs, for example. How do you consider that made Yahoo look at the time?

Now that you understand how employee tweets can impact the company negatively, understand that the reverse is also true. Employees twittering away with exhilaration about their work, developments in their industry, new products, or other intriguing tidbits, even if unconnected to the company itself, can promote positive feelings for whichever company they (indirectly) represent.

Another positive reason for having employees tweet instead of the organization itself is if the organization desires to be viewed as employing influential leaders. This list of Forrester analysts on Twitter offers a key example.

Internal
Some companies use Twitter internally to share thoughts or communicate about what projects they’re working on. If this information is secret in nature, employees either need to protect their updates or even better, not utilize Twitter at all. Gartner doesn’t recommend using Twitter or any other consumer microblogging service in this way as there’s no assurance of security.

If, however, your organization wishes to use microblogging at the office, there are tools designed for businesses that let you do just this. Yammer and present.ly are two of the lead selections for a Twitter-like platform for the workplace.

Inbound Signaling
Some companies aren’t as much Twitter players as they are Twitter “listeners.” Employing search tools like search.twitter.com or desktop applications like TweetDeck are easy ways to keep track of what’s being said about the company, its product names, or even the industry as a whole. Intelligent companies are tuning in to these micro-conversations to get early warnings of troubles and to collect feedback on product issues or ideas.

Recently, Microsoft’s PR agency released their Twitter trend-tracking service to the public. Named Twendz, this tool goes beyond simple Twitter searches to also track sentiment, also.

Conclusion
If your company is toying with jumping into the Twitter foray (and who isn’t these days?), it’s best not to do so blindly. Gartner’s breakdown of the four ways companies utilize Twitter is a good starting point, but, in reality, formulating a strategy is much more involved than the examples listed above. You can follow up on the ideas in this article by reading  then subscribing to her blog for more insights. You can also contact Gartner directly for access to the full report.