The value of recommendations and testimonials cannot be underestimated or taken for granted. Recommendations are similar to testimonials of your good name, good product(s), or expertise. Recommendations enhance your credibility as an expert similar to how quality content, quality presentation of that content and frequency of content enhances your page rank and authority status for your website. Recommendations also raise your credibility.

Recommendations in LinkedIn are social proof. They tell a LinkedIn candidate that the person is qualified or recognized as a valued colleague that has or will add value to your business. As you interact with connections, you become more familiar with their areas of expertise and perhaps are able to use this knowledge in your business execution. Once you can recommend a connection, you proceed with some expectation that they will reciprocate. However, do not expect that all people that you recommend will in turn write a recommendation for you. As you proceed in building your connections, keep in mind that your connections are the source for your recommendation and focus on those contacts that have the potential for directly (or indirectly) enhance your business or expertise. After all, one of your goals in LinkedIn is becoming a recognized expert in your field. A good place to find contacts that will give you outstanding recommendations are your satisfied customers. Go through your customer base and connect with everyone who has purchased your products; multiple sales recipients are better.

The best way to ask for recommendations is not to ask, i.e., the best recommendations most often come from a good recommendation that you have written for someone. Recommendations are the next step of engagement after you connect with someone on LinkedIn. It is a quid pro quo of sorts, but don’t write a recommendation for someone just to get a reciprocal recommendation. Be sure that you can personally vouch for them. As such, be very clear about what you’re recommending. Don’t forget your keywords when you are writing recommendations!! Search engines love keywords!

As you evaluate your LinkedIn strategy, make sure you include a profile of your ideal connection and how you can get a recommendation from them. Make sure that your have clear goals and objectives. A good review for being successful using LinkedIn can be found in Wayne Breitbarth’s best seller, The Power Formula for LinkedIn Success or by purchasing the replay of Joan Stewart’s webinar, Your LinkedIn Power Formula

This is a very easy, but important tool to use when using Facebook as a marketing tool. Not only should you regularily post updates to your fan page, but also send updates to your fans. The updates can be an extended version of your status updates. This has a two-fold outcome.

1. It allows you to keep your fans abreast of news other than through the newsfeed
2. Any unread updates will also show up on their profile on the top right corner

This allows others to see the updates as well and perhaps become a fan of your page.

Here are the easy instructions on how to do this…..

1. Go to your fan page
2. Click on “edit page”
3. On the left-hand side you will see a number of administrative tasks
4. Click on “Marketing”

This will then open another task page in which you can choose to market your page.

5. Click on “Send an Update”.

Once you have done that, it is up to you if you would like to target a specific audience or share it will all of your fans.

The Crossroads: Social or Media?

As social networking has soared to become the largest voluntary behavior this side of teeth brushing, the money guys have shown up on the scene – right on cue. By all accounts, social media is a gold rush, with companies and consultants of all sizes and descriptions jockeying for a piece of a pie estimated to be $1.6 billion in the U.S. alone.

So we’re faced with a dilemma: do we want to focus on the social, or focus on the media? By my reckoning, from a business perspective we’re tilting toward the latter.

Thus, I’ve identified the 5 Dangerous Realities of Social Media for Business.

1. We’re Strategizing Wrong

Every time I hear the words “twitter strategy” I want to smack someone in the head. By definition, Twitter is not a strategy. It is a tactic, to be incorporated into a much broader social media strategy that in turn serves the overall company objectives.

We have to stop wrapping ourselves around the axle about the tools. They will change. They always do. How’s your Second Life Strategy working out?

The key is to develop sound, tools-agnostic programs that focus on how your company can “be” social, not how it should “do” social.

2. We’re Integrating Wrong

Social media is an ingredient, not an entree. Adding social media frosting to the cake you already own should be first objective. And let’s stop putting the cool cart before the uncool horse. Why are you worrying about your Facebook page if your email program is inadequate?

Even in the best case scenario, social media marketing alone isn’t going to create legions of customers out of thin air. Especially because the majority of people that interact with companies on the social Web are already familiar with those companies. Social participation is almost entirely opt-in. Thus, you are mostly preaching to the choir. That doesn’t invalidate social media marketing, it just positions it largely as a loyalty, retention, and lead nurturing vehicle, rather than as a pile of magic beans.

Social media is the great tiebreaker in the sport of modern business.

3. We’re Executing Wrong

The difference between helping and selling is just two letters, but they are incredibly important letters. Recognize that you earn the right to promote in social media by being helpful first.

This necessitates that companies focus less on crafting cheeky and concise outbound bon mots, and focus more on responding to customers and prospects with speed and authenticity. Answer the social telephone first, and then worry about making cold calls.

There’s plenty of business out there on the social Web for companies to capitalize upon. But it doesn’t often come from firing off your 140-character press release every four hours. Instead, business comes from having your antenna up, and finding opportunities to inform, delight, educate, and entertain.

The Opportunity Economy is very real, but you have to embrace the paradoxical notion that social media results are often accrued over the long haul, as you engage with prospects and current customers a few at a time.

4. We’re Staffing Wrong

To have enough antenna up to find and capitalize on all of the real-time opportunities presented by the social Web (see this month’s nominees for NOW Revolutionary of the month for amazing case studies), you need to get many more people in your company involved socially.

It’s not just about marketing. It’s about social business design, baking social elements into the daily life of all corners of your organization. (Great post by Olivier Blanchard on the difference between these approaches).

In most companies today, social is a job. Somebody(ies) is the social media person, centralizing and managing listening, responding, analyzing and other tasks. That will change as companies recognize social’s importance and the need to have more antenna up than one person or a few people can provide.

You know what else used to be a job? Typing. Watch Mad Men. There was a whole room of women that just typed. Every day. But now, typing is a skill. History will repeat. Social media needs to be a skill, not a job.

5. We’re Measuring Wrong

Social is incredibly measurable. We showcase more than 25 viable success metrics in my book The NOW Revolution. But the problem is we’re too often focused on numbers that simply aggregate. They don’t measure behavior, or any type of financial reward.

Why do we do this? Why do we pay attention to things like Facebook fans and Twitter followers when they don’t measure behavior? We need to focus on activating people in social, not just collecting them. That means a newfound emphasis on calls to action, integrated metrics, correlation studies, and smart attribution.

Work Harder

As I look at the 5 Dangerous Realities of Social Media for Business, I see a common thread. All of these contemporary (and hopefully temporary) shortcomings – Strategy, Integration, Execution, Staffing, Measurement all have the same root cause.

Quite simply, we’re just not working hard enough at social. In every respect, doing it well is substantially more involved than doing it poorly. And for now many companies are either unwilling to make that level of commitment, or uncertain as to its payback potential.

Nobody promised social media would be easy, just that it would be awesome.

Are you ready to put the effort into making it about social, not media?

You can read the original post by Jay Baer’s blog Convince and Convert.

Just when you start feeling comfortable with the latest round of changes to Facebook, along comes another series of new features that can throw you into a tailspin. Like me.

For example, I voluntarily converted to the new format rather than waiting until later this month when everyone will be forced to convert. But that places an ugly photo ribbon right at the top of my fan page.

That’s prime real estate, darn it! Most of the photo ribbons I’ve seen on other people’s pages include a series of five unrelated photos that show fan page owners posing with people they’ve met at events. The photos are usually poorly cropped, too dark, or so small that people looking at the page can’t identify who’s in the photo.

Nor do they care.

But I’ve figured out a way to manipulate that photo ribbon so I use it to promote my business and bring visitors to my website, blog, Twitter profile and even product pages–without being obnoxious.

You can check it out by going to http://www.facebook.com/SerenityVAServices

While you’re there, click on the Like button at the top of the page. Then click on each of the five photos and see what happens.

Knowing how to use the photo ribbon to help your visitors and to promote–and understanding what you can do with all the other new Facebook features–will give you incredible power that you never knew you had.

Three years ago, when I was a guest on  the webinar “11 Ways to Avoid Missed Opportunities on Facebook,” with Joan Stewart, The Publicity Hound and we  walked participants through Facebook and demonstrated how to use the site to attract friends and fans, join the conversation, find your target audience and make people love you.

But that was three years ago. So much has changed on Facebook that some of the strategies we recommended back then can actually waste hours of your precious time due to the numerous changes on Facebook.

I’ve fielded so many questions about Facebook’s new look and navigation that Joan and I are hosting a webinar at 4 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, March 15. It’s called “12 More Ways to Avoid Missed Opportunities on the New & Improved Facebook.”

If you participated three years ago, or you’re confused by any aspect of Facebook, you owe it to yourself to take this crash course to learn about the new tools and how to use them to promote your expertise.

We’re even going to be sharing a cool new tool I discovered that will help you find other people’s fan pages where you can post helpful content to their walls, talk directly to their thousands of fans, and get a link back to your own fan page–without spamming.

Register here, even if the time is inconvenient for you because I’m recording it, and Joan will send you the replay link and all the handouts.

Privacy Matters

Facebook seems unable to stem the user privacy spill. Matters seemed to grow more serious this week when the WSJ reported that apps (including Farmville) were accessing user data even if the users had requested the strictest privacy settings. Three of the top ten apps were transmitting data on the user’s friends to outside companies. The blog Ars Technica provided a rundown of the latest problems and what they mean. Facebook also had to temporarily disable LOLapps last week, after the apps were found to be sending internal Facebook user IDs to third parties.

Facebook’s privacy situation has reached the point where several blogs are wondering if the current Facebook business model is even compatible with current user privacy expectations. The blog 10 Golden Rules wrote that Facebook privacy is becoming an oxymoron and Mark Evans suggested that Facebook should just give up on privacy altogether; anything that goes onto Facebook should be regarded as fully public. A Google engineer has developed a Chrome plug-in that blocks all 3rd party access to Facebook data but another Google development demonstrated how the privacy line was still being drawn – Google had to discontinue the practice of using StreetView cars to collect Wi-Fi network data.

( This posting was originally done by http://www.whosbloggingwhat.com/ on October 21, 2010.

I can across a business page on Facebook today that is quite nice. Not only aesthetically, but also from a business standpoint.

I get quite a few emails from artist, songwriters and other internet business owners on who to use Facebook to promote their businesses.

The list is too long, but there is a short list of some of many tools on the internet in which to promote you business.

1. Facebook Events
2. Facebook pages
3. Online event calendars
   • Yelp.com, Upcoming.org, gary’s guide.org (just to name a few)
4. Press release services such as ExpertClick.com
5. ArtistData.com

What stood out to me about this page, is that they included their menu. A fantastic idea and a great way in which to promote your restaurant. Chef’s, foodie and others, this is a shining example on how to get it done….brava!

If you are looking for more ways to promote your product or services, look no more.

You can purchase a copy of a webinar that was earlier this week featuring Joan Stewart, 50+ Places Online to Promote Your Live or Virtual Events to Reach Your Target Market & Pull Sell-out Crowds

We recently had the honor of participating in the new tips booklet produced by Paulette Ensign of Tips Products International.

This was an esteemed group of social media experts and how they were able to use social media to their advantage. Here are just a few of the tips they shared from “Tips from a Collection of Experts”.

Susan Chodakiewitz of Booksicals. 

• Invite visitors to participate in some aspect of your product. It can be to help name a character in your book or the location for the setting of the book.

Dr. Debra Condren author of Ambition Is Not A Dirty Word

• Take the pressure off. Hire a Virtual Assistant with social media expertise.

JoAnn R. Corley-Speaker, Author, Coach

• Use a company Facebook page to indirectly advertise. Have the page show pictures, videos, and audios of customers talking about and/or using your products or services.

Jan Wallen-Selling Your Expertise LLC

• Differentiate yourself. Write your profile like a story. Tell people why you and your company are the best ones to hire so they contact you.

These are just a few excepts from the booklet. To download your free copy, you can go to http://www.serenityva.com/tipsbooklet.htm

If you’re active on Twitter, you’ve probably seen at least one reference on your own profile page to Twitter lists.

They’re a powerful way to categorize Twitter users according to their area of expertise, or the topics of their tweets and then, once the list is created, let anyone see it. They save valuable time because when you create a list, every tweet from every person on that list feeds into that particular list. You don’t have to drink from a firehose on Twitter to be able to find the tweets from people who have a particular expertise.

But don’t be fooled into thinking that that’s the only way to use Twitter lists. They’re powerful tools that can help you do valuable research, track down experts in a particular niche, find people in your target market, spy on your competitors, find journalists who cover your industry, and so much more.

They’re also an excellent way to determine how other people perceive your expertise and your brand. Here’s what I mean.

Go to your Twitter Home or Profile page and look under your photo on the upper right side. You’ll see the number of people you’re following, the number of people who are following you, and the number of lists you’re on. Click on “Listed.”

Instantly, you can look down the list and see which Twitter users have put you on one of their lists, and you can see the names of their lists. For example, I’m on a number of Twitter lists. When I click on “Listed,” a window opens and I can see that many of the lists include the words “virtual assistant”, “VAs” and “social media.”

If you aren’t on many lists, or you haven’t created your own lists yet, that’s OK. Joan Stewart, aka, The Publicity Hound is hosting a webinar  at 3 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, Aug. 26, called “How to Use Twitter Lists & Directories to Generate Publicity and Build Your Brand.” If the time is inconvenient for you, sign up anyway because she is recording it. You’ll get a link where you can watch the streaming video, or download the video.

I currently manage and maintain several business pages for clients on Facebook.

Over the past couple of years they have seen an increase in sales and interest in their services as well.

When using this tool it is important to remember that Facebook is just that, a tool. It is one of many, but I have found it to be extraordinarily useful.

Here are just a few ways in which you can use your business page to promote:

1. Post items to your status updates that pertain to your area of expertise using keywords in the content.

2. Set up Google Alerts to find content to share with your fans. This can be from blogs and other websites.

3. Use the Events function to create events that you are hosting or promoting.

4. If you have a blog, import your blog into your “Notes” on your business page and you will have ready-made content every time you post a new entry to your blog.

5. If you know Facebook Markup Language (Facebook’s version of HTML) or know of someone that does, add your newsletter sign up box to your page. You can even add your products as well. See side bar at http://www.facebook.com/TheMusiciansGuidetoBrides

6. Create a music library of your music and share with your fans.

7. Post your videos to your page. If you are a musician, post your music videos. If you are an artist, post videos of the creation of your art.

8. Post photos and lots of them. They are a great way of showing you at your gigs, book signings or gallery openings.

There are many ways in which to use Facebook to promote. For more ideas on missed opportunities on Facebook, go to Serenity Virtual Assistant Services to receive your free tutorial on how to create a Facebook profile or purchase the CD  or transcript of “11 Ways to Avoid Missed Opportunities on Facebook”.

I received a call this morning from one of my clients, Anne Roos of Celtic Harp Music. She mentioned a radio broadcast from NPR that she had listened to. It aired on June 9, 2010.

The subject matter was very compelling and brought to light the issue of what happens to all of my email accounts, social media accounts and my clients accounts if I should happen to die.

Most of us don’t like to think of these things, at least, I don’t. It is not in the forefront of my thoughts. It is important though.

As a VA I have many clients that I have personal and financial information to. If something should happen to me, it’s important that there is something in place so that information remains private.

We back-up our computers, our websites, emails and blogs, but what about our social networking and financial information. Do our clients have something in place so if the worst happens, it is taken care of?

Anne spoke to me of setting something up on her end that would give me permission to close her social media accounts if that would happen.

What if you become sick? Debilitating sick? Would you like the word to get out that you are unable to do your job? It could end your business. Scary thought.

In today’s world of internet marketing and social media our private lives have become not so private. How do we protect the very thing that is private?

I would encourage you to talk to your clients, friends and family. You never know when the worst will happen.