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Still on the fence about whether or not to jump into the social media scene for business networking purposes? Nielson Claritas has just released an analysis of consumer behavior offering the conclusion that those using social networks like Facebook, Myspace or LinkedIn are more affluent and more urban than average. The numbers of site visitors are growing by the quarter. Depth of engagement also is increasing. The online panel from which Nielson culled its results numbers more than 200,000. Facebook and Linkedin pulled in the highest scale user. Check out the blurb at Nielsonwire.

I am not going to judge the veracity of these results as I do not nearly enough information about the testing and demographics of the study. Nonetheless, even if the numbers represent an approximation, I humbly suggest that your on-line audiences in these venues may well be interested in focused engagement regarding quality services.

Hat tip to Resource Shelf

Beautiful Legal Card Designs from Business Card Designs

The business card. It has served such a multitude of functions over time. It is both an announcement and a reminder of your presence in a profession. The design of the card “clothes” you with a certain style. From the staid Times New Roman font on slightly textured creme stock to wild and funky holographic designs, the card says as much about you as your attire.

Now you can show the world your tech-savvy nature using virtual cards. Like everything else, technology has touched the modern business card and there are all sorts of new ways to announce yourself and remind your audience about your sphere of influence. There are different tools depending upon your own preferred methods of communication.

Of course, most people are familiar with the vCard, a file format standard for electronic business cards. vCards are most frequently attached to e-mail messages, but can be exchanged in other ways. Short for Versitcard, vCards were  first developed as long ago as 1995. vCards offer the means for incorporating the sender’s information into your electronic contacts list and are still widely used today.

But why stop at the primitive vCard? There are scores of new ways to capture this information. The iPhone offers many free apps for keeping and transmitting business card information, including SnapDat, beamMe, FreeContact, myCard Free, BeezCard Lite, Handshake, Fliq, and Dub. Check out this article by Jennifer Van Grove at Mashable describing and comparing the various apps and offering screenshots. There are paid apps with increased functionality as well. Newcomer iBCard will allow you to transfer a very real looking business card via the iPhone’s bluetooth connection or email.

Contxts affords the ability to share business card information via SMS text messages. Cool! TxtID provides a similar service.

DubMeNow has a virtual business card app for iPhone and Blackberry with added support for LinkedIn.

Or you can create and maintain an on-line business card and virtual Rolodex with web applications such as SpartX. With Retaggr, you can create an embeddable card with links to all of your on-line outposts.

You can expand your web information presence with such personal streaming sites as OnePage, Google Profiles or Chi.mp. These options really serve as outposts for aggregating your on-line presence and do not really offer true business card functionality, such as the ability to store the virtual cards of others. However, if you are most interested in maintaining a single spot for all of your on-line activity where you can direct interested contacts, these sites are the way to go.

You can even Tweet your business card using twtBizCard – to send, you just need to add #twtbizcard to a @reply!

Do you like to email your card, a la vCard, but want for something a bit more up to date? Try DropCard or WeaveMet – combining the power and ease of both email and SMS for a monthly fee.

Since business cards are as ubiquitous as cell phones, why not combine the two to create an instant virtual card network? MyNameIsE does just that. Taken from their site:

E enables you to collect your accounts – on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and every other network of your choice – in one spot, and share them in real life by using any mobile phone or Connector.

You decide which profiles you share: E allows you to make an online ‘business card’ for every occasion. This way, you’ll be able to share business info with business contacts, and private info with private contacts.

When you exchange your card via this service, you will automatically connect with your contact via all the chosen social networking sites as well. You can create different cards for different contexts, and set the desired connections accordingly. Use the phones’ internet connections or a proprietary device called, obviously enough, the Connector, to exchange information. Changes to contact information get pushed straight to your existing contacts automatically. This service looks absolutely fascinating to me and clearly seeks to push the business card into the future!

Bottom line? If you want to look modern and all techno-geeky like, consider some of these great electronic options to connect your card to the world!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Make Your Own Business Cards (thoughtmechanics.com)
• Cardxc: not an alternative to Business Cards? (thenextweb.com)
• BeamME Pitch uses your iPhone to beam a sales pitch (venturebeat.com)

Webinars provide professionals with yet another means of communicating their expertise and offering information – the life-blood of the on-line world -  to an internet audience. LLRX has a good overview of the webinar experience penned by Wells Anderson called Marketing Yourself with Webinars. For those unfamiliar, a webinar is a hybrid concoction: one part teleconference and one part on-screen slide presentations via Powerpoint or another slidesharing service. Attendees sign up, access through a webinar conference number and can simultaneously hear the conference via phone and view the slides via the computer.

There are many good reasons for using webinars to promote your brand and business and Mr. Anderson highlights them well in the article. For me, a webinar reminds your webinar audience, as well as those who view promotion of the webinar, of your professional web presence, setting you in the role of educator and expert and offering proof of your web-savvy nature.

Anderson advises using subscription service GoToMeeting from Citrix Online for webinar hosting, promising a straight-forward and easy-to-use experience. I found their product GoToWebinar.  Creating your webinar should be no different than the process of creating a live seminar presentation.

But the key to a successful webinar is proper promotion. Use existing contacts, your blog and services like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other venues offering a broader audience for your presentation promotion.

If you are committed to marketing your practice using modern on-line methods, webinars are a great addition to your Web 2.0 strategy and branding. Use them at regular intervals to sharpen your own presentation technique and remind the Web why you are the go-to guy or gal in your particular field.

Check out a video review of GoToWebinar above for more information about webinars in general and this product in particular.

Oh me oh my. So much to write about today and not enough time or space. So, for now, I am going to limit my rantings to updating my earlier blog about LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook and the social networking phenomenon.

Google has just announced plans to implement a service called “Friend Connect” to permit people to employ applications from their usual social networking haunts, like Facebook or Plaxo, while visiting other sites and, ultimately, across the Web. This announcement is hot on the heels of similar announcements by Facebook and MySpace pledging to permit members to utilize their personal profiles and applications on other websites. Google’s Director of Engineering David Glazer indicates that “[a]t the heart of Google’s service is the use of Open Social which will allow third parties to build and develop applications for the site.” Thus, by using Friend Connect, any website owner should be able to add code to his or her site to get a social interface feature without complicated programming. The former “walled garden” approach of the social networking sites, which encouraged interaction only between members of the individual sites, is crumbling and making way for a new social order permitting “socializing” across websites and the entire Internet. As David Glazer adds: “[s]ocial networking is going mainstream. It used to be proprietary, but now it’s going to be open and baked into the infrastructure of the net, not just one site or one source,…”

Damn straight its getting mainstream. Just check out who is maintaining a presence on the big three. Even hackers, the “ethical” ones anyway, have their very own social network, called, what else, House of Hackers.  For an up and coming social networking site that combines wiki’s with passionate discourse under “niche” communities, check out Wetpaint. And here is a top ten list of social networking sites for women. Ladies only, please!

But all is not an electronic bed of roses for the users of social networking sites. For a cautionary message with a legal bent aimed at social networking site users, check out this video at Findlaw.com. In the same vein as those oft-repeated warnings to business users to avoid including anything on these sites that one may not want a prospective employer or client to view, the applicable laws mandate that site users employ the same precautions against defamatory and/or infringing material generally applicable to traditional media in connection with on-line postings. These common sense limitations aside, however, the clear direction of the Internet and the Web 2.0 revolution is the organizing, simplifying and socializing of the vast information repository that has grown in the cyberspace soil. Wallflowers, beware. The future is NOW!

for more visit http://advantageadvocates.com

 With all due apologies to Linda Richman, I thought I might take a stab at the social networking site LinkedIn, suss out its value to the business professional as source for networking, and ascertain whether it really is “MySpace for Grownups.”

As described in the Wikipedia entry for “LinkedIn”:

LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003[1] mainly used for professional networking. As of December 2007, its site traffic was 3.2 million visitors per month, growing at an annual growth rate of about 485%.[2] As of May 2008, it had more than 22 million registered users,[3] spanning 150 industries.

It is described as a business social networking site: you sign up as a member for free, fill out information about yourself relevant to your networking aspirations and seek to make contacts with other LinkedIn members. You can search for other members based on various criteria and invite them to join your own network, building a virtual database of contact details. You also can access second and third degree contacts – persons known to your first level contacts – via your first level contacts. Theoretically, this web of contacts is intended to generate jobs and business opportunities. Employers and corporate members can list jobs and search unconnected members for likely candidates. This is where the site’s profit margin comes from: recruiters or businesses that wish to be able to mine the profiles of members outside the contact network pay for the privilege. For the rest of us, LinkedIn represents a “gated access approach”, intended to provide members with a sense of security regarding their information and the quality of contacts. There is also a forum called LinkedIn Answers which permits members to pose questions to the community for general discussion. LinkedIn Groups allows you to join a group based on your school, your industry or your profession.

For the mobile user, LinkedIn started a stripped down mobile version in February, 2008.

The value of LinkedIn and comparisons to the wildly popular social networking sites MySpace and Facebook are not new topics. Over a year ago, Seamus McCauley wrote in his blog “Virtual Economics” that the problem with LinkedIn is that it doesn’t do anything. “You sign up, you find some colleagues, you link to them and then…nothing.” Umair, in the blog BubbleEdge Generation, claims the real problem with LinkedIn is that there is no meaningful opportunity for interaction: LinkedIn is too clean compared to the “ugly, nasty, digital ghetto” of MySpace. In other words, LinkedIn apparently has sacrificed open dialog for gated security. The commenters on these blogs do not necessarily agree with these conclusions, describing circumstances in which LinkedIn has provided them with real value. Facebook, which also has the “gate” of requiring an email upon sign up, appears to bridge the MySpace and LinkedIn models.

There does appear to be some utility in LinkedIn, however, as its growing popularity attests to. The following chart, from simplyhired.com shows an increase in jobs secured through LinkedIn, although the other sites, which have an overall numbers advantage, have shown a similar increase during the same period.

 

LinkedIn also is favored among Internet marketers. The Nonlinear Creations Internet Marketing blog contains a recent entry concerning the marketing effectiveness of LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook and two other social networking sites. Using its own website as the “bait”, NLC noted that approximately 18% of its web traffic comes from social networking sites. By far, visits from LinkedIn created the highest average time per visit and the most pages visited. As a result, LinkedIn, as well as Facebook, outperformed site visitors utilizing other channels. NLC also noted that the LinkedIn visitors tended to convert more readily into prospects than visitors from other social networking sites. NLC concludes:

If your company is in the B2B space, consider taking the time to understand and exploit LinkedIn. It offers a very real, very tangible return on the effort.

Apparently, even Facebook thinks that LinkedIn’s business networking model has value, given its recent addition of a networking function known as “friend grouping” by professional contacts. In light of the above-mentioned complaints regarding the “sterility” of LinkedIn’s interaction possibilities, a Facebook model with more opportunity for relationship development combined with business contact organization might prove formidable.

In any event, from the perspective of “it can’t possibly hurt to get more exposure”, these online networking tools likely will gain more utility and favor as more people join and avail themselves of the professional benefits. Consider adding your profile and exploring the features – one never knows where “the Social” might lead.