Professional social network LinkedIn has opened up access to a new developer platform today that should bring LinkedIn content, buttons, Twitter-esque “profile summaries” and more to websites throughout the Web.

The platform, though, isn’t just for developers. LinkedIn is offering an entire suite of plugins to bring all of this content to your website. Even better, it’s making it as easy as the click of a button and it could offer some serious competition to Facebook’s Open Graph on sites that cater to the career-minded.

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"With this release, we're including a powerful set of new plugins; to further help bring professional identity & insights into your application," writes the company on its blog. "For example, you can show your visitors who they know in a professional context with the Member Profile plugin, and display rich personalized insights about companies featured on your site with the Company Insider plugin."

On top of buttons for sharing websites and recommending products, LinkedIn is offering a set of plugins to display profile summaries, full profiles, company profiles and “company insider.” This last plugin shows customized information about a company including who, in the logged-in person’s network, works there, a list of new hires and job changes, and even the ability to follow such news. That’s the other big offering – a LinkedIn login that supports OAuth 2.0.

The ease with which these features can be implemented will likely be the most exciting point for many non-developers. The plugins take a couple lines of code that can be copied and pasted into a site’s code. All you need to do to get a plugin is go to LinkedIn’s plugin gallery (as seen below), click on the “Get It” button and paste the code into the site.

Beyond ease of implementation, LinkedIn says that it has also “make significant infrastructure improvements to the platform itself,” improving the JavaScript load-time and adding SSL and more robust OAuth support.

With the ability to easily add functionality like hovercard-esque LinkedIn profile summaries and company profiles, we’d be surprised if we didn’t start seeing more LinkedIn content around the Web. Just as TechCrunch displays information about the companies mentioned in its article pulled from CrunchBase, other blogs and sites could now display LinkedIn information, which has the advantage of being fully interactive with the viewer’s LinkedIn profile. While someone may not want to login to certain sites using their Facebook identity, this and the potential interaction with LinkedIn data and social graph could boost LinkedIn’s presence on the Web drastically.

What do you think? Will the lure of profile summaries, company information and customized company profiles get you to second guess your login of choice on some sites? And how many sites will abandon Facebook to bring in the LinkedIn social graph instead?

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LinkedIn has launched LinkedIn Today, a new social news product for business professionals.

At a press event Thursday at its headquarters in Mountain View, California, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and SVP of product Deep Nishar discussed the company’s new product strategy and revealed a few new products.

Weiner says that the company has three central goals as part of its quest to deliver value to its membership. First, LinkedIn wants to be the professional profile of record. Second, the company wants to be the primary source for professional insights. Finally, LinkedIn wants to be ubiquitous in the workplace.

SVP of product Nishar then took the stage to explain that vast amounts of business information pass through LinkedIn’s servers, things like profile views, connections, polls, sharing stats and more. The challenge is finding a way to synthesize and deliver this information in a way that gives its users actionable business data.

To start the event, the business network demoed two previously launched products: LinkedIn Skills and LinkedIn InMaps.

LinkedIn Today

Nishar says that products like Skills and InMaps provide its users unparalleled business insights, but that users have to dig into these products for the relevant data and insights. The company wants to take things a step further by delivering that data to its users’ fingertips.

LinkedIn says that two of its products fit into this model: the already-launched LinkedIn Signal and the new LinkedIn Today product.

LinkedIn Today is a professional news product that aggregates and delivers a personalized news experience to each user. Product manager Liz Walker says that it chooses stories based on what stories a user’s network is sharing.

It’s similar to apps like Paper.li in terms of design and functionality. Today provides different lenses for checking out top news in not just a user’s network, but in entire industries. For example, users can check out the hot stories in marketing and advertising, private equity or politics. The company says it’s a quick way for busy business users to get the top stories of the day.

LinkedIn also released a mobile version of LinkedIn Today that gives users the ability to check top stories within their network on the fly.

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That’s the service that Backupify offers, the ability to archive your information from a number of key online services, including Flickr, Google Apps, Twitter, and Facebook. And the company announces today that it’s added the professional network LinkedIn to that list.

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The automated service will give users an independent archiving solution for their professional network profiles. This data will include connections to and recommendations from clients and coworkers. As LinkedIn continues to grow (having just filed for an IPO last month), it makes sense that Backupify would add it to their offerings.

As Backupify’s CEO Rob May argues, “Without a backup for this important information, users are vulnerable to data loss, and more importantly, being overlooked by potential business partners, customers and hiring managers.”

Backupify works by pulling the data from LinkedIn and the other service providers it supports through their APIs. The information is stored on Amazon S3, and you can log into your Backupify account to search your archives and download your data.

There are several pricing tiers for Backupify, depending on the number of accounts and the file storage size. And based on whether you opt for a free or premium account, your information is backed up weekly or nightly.

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Adam Kleinberg is co-founder and CEO at Traction, an interactive agency that aligns psychology with technology to create ideas that work. Look for Traction’s LinkedIn page and free toolkit. Catch him tweeting at @adamkleinberg and blogging at tractionco.com/blog.

Boasting 90 million users, LinkedIn is one of the social media titans. For business professionals, it has become an essential tool for staying connected to their business network.

But for companies, there’s been little reason to pay attention to their presence there. LinkedIn has been about individuals, not organizations. LinkedIn Companies existed, but offered little in the way of functionality. That has now changed.

In November, LinkedIn quietly introduced an upgrade to LinkedIn Companies that makes it both a critical and powerful tool for managing your company’s digital presence (especially if you market B2B).

Here’s a primer to help you plan and make the most of some of the powerful new features on LinkedIn Companies.

The Basics

The basic features have not changed since previous iterations of LinkedIn Companies. (In fact, if I have one criticism of the new version it’s the utter lack of integration between the new features and old. The new ones all live under one tab.) You can upload a logo, add a paragraph describing your business, list contacts and attach their profiles. There’s a decent chance someone at your company has already done this. Other legacy features include the ability to post job listings.

LinkedIn also automatically displays the profiles of employees and new hires. This can be a great tool for business development pros because they can quickly discover the people with the “right” job titles at companies they are targeting.

Unfortunately, LinkedIn does this by keyword association, so there is a significant degree of inaccuracy in the profiles listed. Of the forty-four “employees” listed for my agency, at least ten are from other companies with similar names. Allowing administrative control over this would be nice.

Products & Services

The biggest new feature of LinkedIn Companies is the addition of the Products & Services tab. Your company can list each of its products or services, upload a 100 x 80 pixel icon and description of each, and create a bullet list of attributes. Pretty standard, right?

This is where we begin to have fun and start to build a really powerful marketing tool. The first thing you’ll notice when you visit a souped-up page is the “carousel.” Through a simple admin tool, you can upload three whopping 640 x 220 banners (JPEG, GIF or PNG, no Flash) that rotate on the page and link to specific URLs that you designate. Obviously, these can be landing pages set up to generate leads. You can also go with a softer sell — my agency put up ads driving toward case studies in our website portfolio.

The impact of these is substantial and the fact that LinkedIn allows you to create links that take users away from their website (and advertising revenue) is to be applauded.

YouTube Videos

You can now also embed a YouTube video on the Overview page and each of the individual Products & Services pages you create. When done well, video is a powerful tool to convey your message to customers. This is a huge opportunity to engage people in a contextually relevant manner. You can use a different video on every page and embedding them is as simple as copying and pasting a URL from YouTube.

Recommendations

Probably the most important new feature is the ability to solicit recommendations from your customers for each of your products or services. This works just like the Recommendations feature does on an individual LinkedIn profile. You’ll want to take the time to edit the default message when asking for an endorsement.

This will soon become a vital reference checkpoint that people use before doing business with your company. According to Forrester Research (in Groundswell), 83% of us say we are at least somewhat influenced by word-of-mouth. While the highly edited “Success Stories” on your website may comprehensively cover the breadth of benefits and messages you want to convey, their impact is no match for a three sentence endorsement attached to the personal profile of an enthusiastic customer.

LinkedIn has elected to give you administrative approval over which testimonials go on your profile. Users are savvy and will recognize this, so don’t think Recommendations can replace actually having good products and services. Google is only a click away.

Audiences

This is where LinkedIn Companies gets powerful. LinkedIn allows you to completely customize how you present your products and services to distinct audience segments.

If your ears just perked up, you may work for a company with a diverse customer base or product offering. Or maybe you’re a marketer who knows that creating content that is relevant to your target is essential for provoking engagement, inciting response and maximizing ROI.

Either way, you’re probably realizing that this is not something you’re going to do in one afternoon. You’re going to want to be strategic in your approach and thoughtful about the content you create.

Taking advantage of Audiences may take strategic planning, but it won’t take technical acumen. LinkedIn lets you easily “Create an audience segment,” select its attributes (job title, seniority, company size, industry, location, etc.) with a few clicks and then edit a clone of your base company profile.

Offers and Campaigns

Each product or service (for each audience segment) also has a placeholder for a unique offer associated with it. For example, you can easily create an offer for a free white paper or a free coupon for your tasty and delicious consumer packaged good.

Once you’ve got your products and services all set up, you can create targeted Campaigns to drive traffic to your profile. LinkedIn has a self-service tool with simple filtering options to find the right audience. Self-service is a good thing because it means you don’t have to be a big company with a big budget to start generating traffic, leads and revenue.

The system works a lot like Google AdWords. You can create multiple versions of your campaign — up to fifteen of them — to see what works best. You can set a daily budget and a maximum bid for either clicks or CPMs (cost per thousand views). And you can set campaigns to run indefinitely or until a specific date.

Analytics

Lastly, it wouldn’t be digital if you couldn’t measure it. LinkedIn has some nice charts that allow you to view your performance in terms of page views, visitors, clicks on various types of content visits by industry and followers.

What I really like is that LinkedIn compares your performance in each of these categories with similar companies, so you have a contextually relevant benchmark. I don’t like that I can’t export any of these charts to Excel or embed them in a dashboard. But hey, a guy can dream, right?

Overall, I think LinkedIn Companies could become as important to brands as websites or Facebook Pages. It’s worth taking the time to do them well to harness the power these new features can provide.

More Business Resources from Mashable:

- 10 Online Strategies for Your Next Product Launch
- What to Look For When Hiring a Community Manager
- 8 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Get More Out of Twitter
- 5 Masterminds Redefining Social Media Marketing
- 24 Professional Events & Organizations for Social Media Strategists

Image courtesy of Flickr, nan palmero

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iPhone and iPad development studio Taptivate is about to release its latest app for the iPhone and iPod touch, “Friends.” Friends is an app that is designed to streamline the way you keep up with your friends, family members and colleagues across social networks.

Taptivate is no stranger to creating apps that plug into social networks — some of its other apps include Formspring client Spring and the official Digg iPhone app — but Friends is unique in that it takes in data from multiple social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.

The Taptivate team provided us with a beta build of Friends, giving us a chance to take a look at the app to see what it’s all about.

Check out this promo video to get a feel for the app:

The app automatically organizes your iPhone contacts with Facebook. This is convenient because it offers you easy access to all your Facebook contacts, while also merging their information with any related address book entries.

Unfortunately, at this point, the app doesn’t equally consolidate LinkedIn and Twitter contacts — but you can still find them and get various info on those friends. You can also view streams of either all your contacts from assorted networks and individual streams, or you can pick and choose groups of contacts you want to keep up with and follow.

Friends also makes it easy to sort content by type — photos, videos and posts. The app also works with photo attachment services to make previewing images and videos easy and you can also directly visit a URL and view it without leaving the app. You can even view “Places” to see recent checkins from your friends, alongside a Google map. Friends supports Instapaper, and you can choose a “Read Later” option for links or posts you find interesting.

The app can also be used to update your status across your social networks. You can selectively update or post to every network you are signed onto. Each network section acts as its own little app of sorts. When viewing a tweet, you can retweet, reply or favorite. When viewing a Facebook status message, you can “like,” comment or view comments.

The app is still in development, but we think it shows tons of promise. The interface is gorgeous, the app is easy to figure out, and the grouping options make sense. We also appreciate that Friends doesn’t corrupt your own address book on the iPhone or iPod touch. And you can even make calls with the app, which is pretty handy.

These days, social mobile apps are a dime a dozen. Finding the right mix of an app that can consolidate multiple channels, while also making the management of those streams easier, is a pretty tough task. From what we’ve seen, Friends is up to the challenge.

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Check out these screenshots to see Friends in action.

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How do you manage your social networks on your mobile device? Let us know.

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Seesmic has just updated its Seesmic Web app to include support for Facebook and LinkedIn.

The new version also includes a refined interface and a faster backend. Like HootSuite and Brizzly, Seesmic Web is a tool you can use to manage and monitor your social networks all from within the web browser. The service already offers support for Foursquare, Google Buzz and Ping.fm.

Just go to the Settings section of Seesmic Web and grant access to Facebook and LinkedIn. Now each of those networks can be viewed within their own columns in your Seesmic Web window.

When you create a status update, you can choose to publish it to any or all of your connected networks; just click on the network icon to select or deselect. You can also attach a photo, link and your location.

What’s nice about the Facebook integration is that you can directly Like an item from your News Feed and also reply in-line, just as you can with Twitter. The Twitter portion of Seesmic web now supports in-line retweets and easy reply access, as well.

The LinkedIn integration isn’t quite as robust, but you can still see your incoming stream from your LinkedIn lists and post messages directly to the network.

For Seesmic Web users who use Google Chrome, there is a new desktop notifications option that will show a pop-up on your screen every time you receive a mention or direct message on Twitter. That’s super handy and something that, coupled with Google Chrome as an SSB, could make Seesmic Web a viable replacement for stand-alone social networking clients.

We’re glad to see that Seesmic Web now encompasses more of the native functions of the services it supports. What do you think of the new features?

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LinkedIn already syncs status updates with Twitter, but now the business social network is taking its Twitter integration to the next level to help users better track and follow their connections.

LinkedIn’s Tweets application, which the company announced has over one million users, has gotten a major upgrade. It is now divided into four parts: Overview, Connections, My Tweets and Settings. The overview tab shows you a basic outline of what your friends are tweeting, which people you are following and even suggests LinkedIn connections that you can follow. Of course, you can also update your Twitter status right from LinkedIn.

Connections is one of the more interesting parts of the updated Tweets application. It shows all of your connections that also use Twitter and whether you follow them. If you don’t, you have the option to add them to your Twitter stream right from LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has also launched Twitter List integration. You can now save your LinkedIn connections as a dynamic Twitter List. It will even update the list when you add new connections to your LinkedIn profile.

The business social network has made a big bet on Twitter as a source of growth. While LinkedIn has more than 65 million users, growth has stagnated, according to Compete. Deeper integration with Twitter should be good for its growth, but we do wonder if Facebook integration could be in the works, or if the social networks compete too much for the same users for that to happen.

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LinkedIn has just released some major upgrades to its link-sharing capabilities, including the addition of image and article excerpts, link re-sharing and a new short URL: lnkd.in.

In total, there are eight new features related to sharing links and articles on LinkedIn, many of which you’ll be familiar with if you’re a Facebook user. The biggest changes center around status updates. Now when you copy and paste links into the status update box and click “attach a link,” it will automatically pull an image and an article excerpt, just like the Facebook Publisher:

That’s not the only addition, though: You now have the ability to delete and edit posts. You also have control over who sees your shared links by selecting which connections or groups you’d like to receive your status updates or shared links.

The business social network has also introduced re-sharing — it’s exactly like the “Share” button you’ll find on Facebook posts with links. Just click the “Share” button and you can re-share a link you find on LinkedIn with the rest of your network. There’s even attribution, which will credit the person who originally shared the link:

LinkedIn is repositioning itself as a hub for sharing articles and information with your business contacts. The new sharing features take a ton of obvious cues from Facebook and its share infrastructure. It is even launching lnkd.in today, which ties directly in with its Twitter integration.

The big question we have is this: Are LinkedIn users really link sharers? Will people choose to share articles with their LinkedIn networks instead of on their Twitter or Facebook feeds? Can LinkedIn truly become a hub for information-sharing? We’ll find out soon enough.

Explanation of LinkedIn’s New Sharing Features

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BlackBerry users, LinkedIn has finally arrived: The business social network has just launched LinkedIn for BlackBerry, version 1.0.

The new LinkedIn BlackBerry app is now available for download online and will be available shortly at the BlackBerry App World store. The app not only provides you with access to your connections, invitations and messages, but its deep integration with BlackBerry Mail, Contacts and Calendar also allows you to integrate contacts, get LinkedIn mail in your inbox and much more.

Here are the details, along with a boatload of exclusive screenshots of LinkedIn for BlackBerry that we’ve obtained:

BlackBerry for LinkedIn: The Overview

LinkedIn’s new BlackBerry app is not as feature-rich as LinkedIn for iPhone, simply due to the limitations of the software and hardware. In fact, you’re going to need a BlackBerry Tour, Curve or Bold with BlackBerry OS v4.3 or later in order to run this bad boy.

Still, for a BlackBerry app, it does everything you’d want a LinkedIn app to do and then some. The app is divided into six key modules: Network Updates, Search, Connections, Invitations, Messages and Reconnect.

Each of these features is self-explanatory, which is why I’m going to let the screenshots do most of the talking. Jump down below to learn about some of the app’s other features.

1. Network Updates: This module provides access to your friends’ status updates and allows you to update your own.

2. Search: Search focuses on both finding your connections and any of LinkedIn’s 60 million+ members.

3. Connections: Browse and check out your connections — simple as that.

4. Invitations: This one’s self-explanatory.

5. Messages: Not only do you get access to your messages, but it has another killer feature — integration with BlackBerry Mail. Whenever you receive a LinkedIn message, it’ll appear in your inbox just like any of your other messages.

6. Reconnect: The final module provides suggestions for new people to add to your connections.

LinkedIn Has a Few More Tricks Up Its Sleeve

In addition to the six modules, LinkedIn has also gone ahead and integrated the app with three of BlackBerry’s native apps: Contacts, Messages and Calendar.

1. Contacts: Take your LinkedIn connections and drop them directly into your BlackBerry contacts. This gives you quick access to the LinkedIn profiles of your business associates.

2. Messages: LinkedIn messages appear directly in your BlackBerry Inbox as if they were e-mails.

3. Calendar: If an attendee of an event on your calendar has a LinkedIn profile, you can quickly pull it up.

Clearly, the company invested a lot of time and energy to make sure it got this app right. The integrations with native BlackBerry features seem to be its greatest strength, especially the BlackBerry Inbox integration. Business users who rely on LinkedIn to look up prospective leads, employees or customers will now have a powerful tool in their hands.

BlackBerry users, what do you think of the app? Are you going to download it? Let us know in the comments.

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Coming in the wake of Buzz, Microsoft is being very careful to tout it’s concern for your privacy concerns, as well as take a very step-by-step approach to rolling out the new features.

The LinkedIn plug-in works with Outlook 2010, 2007 and 2003. As opposed to Buzz, users have full control over whether or not to use the service. They not only have to opt-in, they need to download and install the beta version of Outlook, the social connector extension and the LinkedIn plug-in. By the time you’re finished, we couldn’t imagine you could have ended up there by accident.

Even then, the social connector is a read-only service at the moment, meaning you cannot yet update your services from within Outlook. We’re sure that the ability to update from within Outlook will come, but as we said, Microsoft seems to be rolling out these features very carefully, so as not to have the same privacy concerns with its primarily enterprise user base.

As for privacy, Microsoft had the following to say:

Finally, its important to mention that with multiple professional and social networks available for the Outlook Social Connector, the design of the OSC is such that your privacy and permissions settings on each of the networks you use are represented and respected within this experience. For example, if your profile photo and job title are publicly listed on a given network, then OSC users will see your photo and job title when receiving an e-mail from you (if they use that same network). Similarly, if you choose to restrict profile access on a given network, the OSC will respect that privacy. The goal of the OSC is not to create another social network or set of privacy settings for you to manage, but rather to bring the networks you already value and use to the Outlook experience.

While this means that users don’t have to worry about tweaking yet another layer of privacy settings, they need to be aware of the settings they already have in place, as the OSC will import and use information from the included social networks.

For now, only the LinkedIn plug-in is available, and the only information on when Facebook and Myspace will be available is “later this year”. Microsoft did, however, offer a preview of what the new feature would look like.

While privacy concerns are huge for Microsoft’s customers, we have to wonder, like many others, about another concern – whether or not businesses really want social networks appearing in the company inbox.

As Will Kennedy, a corporate vice president for the Office group, was quoted as saying in the AP article on today’s announcement, “We don’t want this to sort of be the next great time waster in the workplace.”

Perhaps this roll-out is like slowly heating the water so the frog doesn’t jump out – if you get everyone acquainted with LinkedIn first, they won’t run away when Facebook and Myspace come around.

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The bureau is pushing for ISPs to keep a two-year backlog of “origin and destination information,” emphasizing that it was looking to keep logs of routing, not content.

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No details are currently available on the exact information the FBI is calling for, as much of the report comes from CNet’s Declan McCullagh, who attended the meeting on Thursday where “law enforcement representatives spoke”. McCullagh quotes Greg Motta, chief of FBI’s digital evidence section, as saying that issues of privacy and technical feasibility have shaped the request.

“The question at least for the bureau has been about non-content transactional data to be preserved: transmission records, non-content records…addressing, routing, signaling of the communication,” Motta said. Director Mueller recognizes, he added “there’s going to be a balance of what industry can bear…He recommends origin and destination information for non-content data.”

While the emphasis is being placed on “routing” information and not “content”, a lot of content can be gleaned from these connections.

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LinkedIn will soon roll out a nifty new contact browsing interface that should make things a bit easier for workplace social butterflies who have a lot of people to keep track of.

The update adds a panel that you can use to browse contacts by their companies, industries or locations. You can also find folks based on various tags that you define (for example, “recruiters” or “classmates”) and recent activity. The interface has a search field where you can narrow things down by entering names or other information that might appear in a contact’s profile.

Browse down to a specific person and a mini profile will appear in the far right panel, where you’ll find contact information, a photo, current position and number of connections. You can also add or remove tags for that contact while viewing the mini profile.

LinkedIn just recently launched major redesigns for both its website and its iPhone app. Combine those changes, this new panel, and the faceted search feature and you’ve got some powerful tools for finding what and who you need among your professional contacts.

We’d love to see these sorts of features in more sites, especially Facebook, which has some big flaws in both its search interface and results. This is one area where Facebook could learn a lot from LinkedIn.

Here’s a pic of the new search panel interface.

Tags: business-apps, linkedin, News, social networking

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One of our favorite tools for the powerhouse Twitter user — HootSuite — just got even better. In a massive update, the free web service has added support for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter Lists.

As if that wasn’t cool enough, you can also schedule LinkedIn or Facebook status updates the same way you can schedule tweets. It also looks like a HootSuite app for the iPhone is on the way.

To add in a LinkedIn or Facebook account to your profile, just click on Settings and then the “Add Social Network” button. HootSuite uses the OAuth Facebook Connect and LinkedIn connect buttons to hook everything up.

Your Facebook or LinkedIn accounts can now show up in separate column in HootSuite. Just like you can update multiple Twitter accounts, you can update multiple Facebook profiles. Whether support for Facebook Fan Pages will be coming is unclear right now, but the Facebook updates also include the ability to add-in line comments on your friends status messages.

With Twitter Lists, you can add (or create) a new list as a separate column in HootSuite. You can choose from both your own lists and lists that you have subscribed to.

All in all, this is a solid update to an already solid product. HootSuite is especially good if you manage a number of Twitter accounts or want to get some better tracking data on your short-URLs. Adding support for multiple services natively (as opposed to the previous integration which was limited to just Ping.fm), HootSuite has really made it clear that it’s trying to be an all-in-one social media tool.

What do you think of the new HootSuite features and of HootSuite in general? Let us know!

Tags: facebook, hootsuite, linkedin, twitter, Twitter Lists

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Wait a minute…the two social media companies with some of the most valuable, interesting data on the web made a deal and what do we get? Spammy Twitter streams clouding up our LinkedIn feeds and an occasional uptight Tweet on Twitter that was born inside LinkedIn? We’re still waiting for the meaty announcements everyone says are coming someday soon – that Twitter and LinkedIn are open for business.

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I don’t mean to be too grouchy, but this looks like just one more sweetheart Silicon Valley deal that has limited imagination and represents a lost opportunity for the kind of innovation everyone expects these kinds of companies to drive.

But is business just about broadcasting your marketing message? What about the listening part of doing business, thoughtful analysis, responding to actionable information and market conditions? Conversations with your customers and business partners?

Twitter is arguably better for listening than it is for broadcast and conversion of marketing messages. This kind of cross-posting deal falls short of the huge potential latent in the data both of these companies control and instead appeals to the craven broadcast-model of marketing. Challenging that broadcast-model is where many people believe social media derives its meaning.

What could this look like? It could look like an option to view the employer and job title of anyone you see on Twitter or through a 3rd party Twitter interface. It could look like Twitter opening up its fire hose for unfettered 3rd party analysis and development – then you’d see social graph and content analysis done that gave a big boost to the User Experience on LinkedIn. (“This LinkedIn user has been conversing with friends on Twitter who were talking about ‘mobile,’ ‘Wisconsin’ and ‘gaming’ over the last 2 weeks.”)

Whatever the case may be, both occupational data (LinkedIn) and social messaging data (Twitter) are rich green fields for mashups and analysis – but these two companies are holding back the tide of innovation by refusing to offer a clear path to their data by outside partners.

LinkedIn partners with next to no one. Only large, established organizations like Business Week, the New York Times and now Twitter get access to LinkedIn data. Other services all around the web will tell you stories about reaching out to LinkedIn for API access and getting the cold shoulder.

We wrote about this concern three weeks ago (“LinkedIn Hits 50 Million Users; Still a Roach Motel“) and the company told us then and today that big changes are coming to its API soon. That’s great. That’s something to look forward to, if cautiously. We’re years into the LinkedIn Platform today and there’s only a select few partners doing anything there so far.

Likewise, Twitter is fabulously open with its data in some ways (on a per-item basis) – but it’s leaving a substantial number of outside developers frustrated because they can’t get their hands on the full feed of Twitter data (the fire hose) to analyze. Startup companies that do appear to have relationships with Twitter tell us things like “We won’t describe our relationship with Twitter to you and neither will anyone else who has one.” That’s charming. It’s unclear whether anyone but Google and Bing have access to all the Twitter data.

Twitter investor and real-time web guru John Borthwick told us in another conversation today that he believes Twitter is just in its early days as a company, that there’s nothing mysterious going on. “I’m hoping there will be a click-thru EULA [End User Licensing Agreement] to the firehose [someday],” he wrote. (Emphasis added.)

That sounds good.

So everybody’s working on the wide-open web that so many of us want to see? Standards and APIs and open platforms to facilitate a new era of innovation are right around the corner?

Sounds great. For now though what we get is a little cross-network message broadcasting. Hopefully it’s just the beginning.

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Sharlyn Lauby is the president of Internal Talent Management (ITM) which specializes in employee training and human resources consulting. She authors a blog at hrbartender.com.

LinkedIn, which recently reached the 50 million user milestone, has long been considered the social networking site for professionals. If you’re in business, it is basically expected that you have a profile there.

But with the more mainstream platforms like Twitter and Facebook being used for business purposes, some professionals are neglecting their LinkedIn profiles. While LinkedIn is certainly not as dynamic as other social media sites, it still provides a lot of value — if you use it correctly. So whether you’re new to LinkedIn or a veteran, here are some of the things you should consider incorporating into your LinkedIn strategy.

1. Include a Photo Avatar

Some media reports claim that because organizations can use any criteria they want to make hiring decisions, photo avatars provide companies with information they may not have otherwise known about you based on a resume alone and could actually hurt you more than help. But, not including a photo with a social networking profile flies in the face of conventional wisdom when your goal is to build relationships and community.

Eric B. Meyer, an associate in the labor and employment group of Dilworth Paxson LLP, reminds us that when using a professional networking site such as LinkedIn, “don’t give a potential employer an easy excuse to remove you from consideration. Use a professional headshot and scrap the picture of you doing a keg-stand.”

He adds that “an employer may not discriminate when selecting one job applicant over another. For example, an employer may not base a hiring decision on such things as race, religion, gender, and national origin. Although actually proving an employer made a discriminatory hiring decision may be difficult.” Businesses who engage in hiring discrimination are the exception, not the rule. Just remember, by using an avatar, you will be providing information about yourself a prospective employer may not have otherwise obtained on its own.

2. Build Your Network of Connections

While we might be inclined to say quality is better than quantity, it could be possible that the number of connections you have says something about you. Greg Koutsis, corporate and international channel recruiter for Aplicor LLC, says, “if someone has 20-50+ connections then I know they probably check LinkedIn at least once a week. If someone has 1-19 then I realize they probably either haven’t begun to pop the hood and look inside or gotten past the initial threshold of their friends, family and past colleagues. They might be a great prospect for me to reach out to but this might not be the best use of my time. This combined with the profile they have listed lets me realize quickly if I am wasting my time with someone who has no interest or trust in LinkedIn.”

So you might say to yourself, if small numbers in the connection department signal you’re a novice, do large numbers mean you’ll connect with just about anyone? Koutsis says not necessarily. “I do not believe there’s a maximum number of connections that makes someone look like they will just connect with anyone. LinkedIn only shows 500 then adds the + sign after the 500 so you never really do know how many more than 500 connections someone has until you connect with them.”

3. Use Status Updates to Your Advantage

Once you complete your profile, there aren’t a lot of places to make regular updates in LinkedIn. The one space where you can keep your connections informed is the status updates section.

Lori Burke, director of human resources at Neighborhood America, explains that updates are not only an interesting read, but very valuable. “I’ve found new networking groups I may not have thought about [via status updates]. Additionally, it allows me to learn what others are involved with or in, who they may be connected to, etc. In total, it widens the scope of knowledge for me.”

4. Seek Meaningful Recommendations

A terrific feature of LinkedIn is the ability to provide recommendations. This is a place for your connections to comment about your work. Recommendations can be thought of as beefed up thank you cards. Instead of telling one person how you feel, you’re telling the world that person does good work.

It’s important to get good solid recommendations and Meyer offers some thoughts on how to do that. First, “think about who knows you best. It could be a co-worker or manager. It could also be a client or customer for whom you just did an incredible job on a huge project. If you seek a recommendation from a client or customer, be polite and remember to thank the person who gives you the recommendation.”

Then, “If you are going to seek a recommendation from a co-worker or manager, keep a few things in mind. Many employers have written policies against giving out anything other than neutral job references to current and former employees. These policies generally focus on giving recommendations, as opposed to seeking them. Still, as a courtesy to the person in your company from whom you seek a recommendation, just be sensitive to your company’s neutral reference policy.”

5. Optimize Your Profile

Your LinkedIn profile should not just be an online version of your resume, optimizing for search engines is key. The format of your LinkedIn profile might depend on whether you are currently employed and whether or not you are seeking new opportunities, says Koutsis. “If you are looking for a new position then you might want your profile to look more like a resume, but maybe not so much if I am currently employed.”

Burke doesn’t mind if the full content of the resume is on the profile as it can be helpful when searching for candidates. However, it is a bonus “when I find networkers who have added more content than you might find in a resume, such as a link to their portfolio.”

When filling out your profile, you should think about your goals for the type of networking you hope to get done. Also, since LinkedIn has the ability to search any word in the content, both Burke and Koutsis suggest listing all relevant keywords at the bottom of your profile if you want to be found easier.

6. Use Groups to Expand Your Reach

Groups are a beneficial networking tool and a great way to expand your network. Koutsis says that he doesn’t look at what groups a person belongs to when he’s searching for candidates but he does find potential resources using the groups function.

However, Meyer reminds us it’s possible to be viewed in a negative light based upon group membership. “For some time now, many employers are going beyond simply running a criminal background check in order to vet job applicants. Employers may be Googling candidates, checking out their public postings on Facebook, reviewing tweets on Twitter, and scrutinizing LinkedIn profiles. In a down economy — as in any economy, really — employers want to fill job openings with the best possible candidates.”

Today’s rule of thumb should be that anything you post in an online profile may as well be listed on your resume or bio. If you belong to a LinkedIn group that is inconsistent with the business image you wish to portray, then that could be a challenge for you. Meyer shared with me the example of belonging to a group called “The Deer Hunters” while applying for a position with an animal rights group (let’s just say, good luck with that).

7. Consider Whether to Link Your Profiles

Burke believes that accounts should be kept separate. “I believe that this strategy allows me to keep my professional personae separate from my personal. Case in point was the one time I posted a social media article to both applications. My Facebook family and friends found the information of little value to them and I believe the same may be true in reverse. However, I will post general information about me (i.e., speaking engagements) with both networks. In essence, it depends on the content,” she says.

On the other hand, Lance Haun, vice president of outreach at MeritBuilder, explains that LinkedIn is “a snapshot of your life at the time you updated your profile so including Twitter, Facebook, or a blog helps to add living context to your profile.” With the lines between work and life being blurred, posting something business related at 1:00 PM and a picture of a cat at 1:00 AM helps “bring the picture of a person together completely.”

In the end, Koutsis asks, “if people see no reason after viewing your profile to connect with you, then why did you reach out to them in the first place?” The most important thing we can do is create a complete and compelling profile. Because the bottom line is the value proposition you propose when you try to connect with someone on LinkedIn.

More business resources from Mashable:

- 5 Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Business
- Top 5 Business Blogging Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
- 10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Entrepreneurs
- 6 Must-Follow Steps for Selling in Any Economy
- 5 Easy Social Media Wins for Your Small Business

Tags: business, linkedin, Lists, trending

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Business social network LinkedIn, fresh off its milestone of 50+ million users, is now getting a makeover, and it definitely changes the way you use the social media website.

In a detailed blog post, the company announced that it has begun a limited test of its new design. It features a newer, longer top-level navigation bar, the removal of the dreaded left-hand navigation bar, and a cleaner overall look.

Screenshots

The best way to describe the new layout though is to place the old design and the new one side-by-side. First, here is the homepage as it currently exists:

Now, here is the new design for the homepage, courtesy of LinkedIn:

You’ll notice immediately that the emphasis is on the top navigation, that the main content has been pushed to the left hand side of the screen, and that each of the top menu items have a deeper web of subcategories under them (just look at the options under “Groups” as an example).

One more comparison. This is a profile page currently:

And here is the new one:

You’ll notice that content has been moved up the page (this is very important – it requires less scrolling and thus less chance of people bouncing off of the page) and a far stronger focus on the profile and its content.

The key to this entire design it seems is the removal of the left hand navigation bar, which we are fans of. It distracted users away from the important information on the page. While the design is still being tested and iterated upon, more and more users should be seeing this layout relatively soon.

Let us know what you think of it in the comments.

Tags: linkedin, trending

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What’s New: Navigation Improvements, Lots of Whitespace

One of the main new features of the revamped LinkedIn is the global navigation bar at the top of the page which links to all the site’s features including profile, contacts, groups, jobs, your inbox, and more. Click on any of these items and a drop-down menu will appear providing you with further options. This gives the most important navigational aspect to the site a more modern look than it had before when each section was displayed in clickable tabs of different shades of blue.

The company also touts how the new look and feel also makes room for more page content with less scrolling needed in order to see everything on the page. This is also true to some extent. However, on your homepage where network updates and group updates are featured, the amount of scrolling depends on the size of your network and how active the network members are. For example, under the “group updates” section, updates for the past seven days were posted followed by a section that included updates from the prior week. That actually led to quite a bit of scrolling to see them all. It’s not necessarily a bad feature, though. After all, LinkedIn isn’t the sort of site we’re logging into on a daily basis so it’s nice to be able to catch up when we’re there… even if that means the homepage screen extends downward forever.

Also new on the homepage are moveable, collapsible sidebar modules which can display things like who’s been viewing your profile, events, job listings, applications you’ve added, and more.

Cleaner Look Highlights Ads

One downside of the site’s “cleaner” look is how much more noticeable the ads are now. Of course, to LinkedIn this may be an upside. Although the ad placements are no different than before, the new look makes them really stand out. Since everything is now black or blue text on a white background, the full-colored ad at the top of the screen is the first thing to draw your eye upon login. There’s also a text link ad directly below the global navigation that demands your attention. It’s in the exact place where a company message would normally appear and the font used is a darker, bolder blue than anything else on the site. Both of these elements are somewhat distracting, but we suppose there’s nothing that you can really do about ads. Still, we wish that the network had taken a page from Facebook’s book when it came to ad placement – when you log into Facebook, the first thing you notice is the content and the updates, not the ads.

LinkedIn says the updated design was based on years of data from usability research but what you’re seeing now isn’t necessarily the final product. They’re still iterating and, based on user feedback about the new look, they may make some additional changes in this and other areas.

Still Needs Improvement: the LinkedIn Inbox

One thing that still hasn’t improved, sadly, is the LinkedIn inbox. Although the homepage view of the inbox provides a handy “take action” button which lets you quickly accept, reject, or archive requests, the full inbox view still forces you to click each message to accept or reject requests – there are no bulk actions you can take from the inbox screen besides archiving or marking messages as read or unread. Even worse, after accepting or rejecting a request, the message remains in your inbox until you manually archive it, necessitating quite a bit of additional work if you’ve let those invites pile up.

What Do You Think?

Are you impressed with the new look for LinkedIn? Or did you prefer the old tabbed interface better? LinkedIn obviously hopes that by simplifying the navigation and site elements which help to better engage users that they will spend more time exploring and interacting with the various site elements. Do you think that will be the case? Or do the underlying features of LinkedIn need improvement as well?

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Ross Kimbarovsky is the co-founder of crowdSPRING, a community of 43,000+ graphic designers that helps small businesses from around the world with graphic design needs. You can follow Ross on Twitter @rosskimbarovsky and @crowdSPRING.

Capacity – especially to plan and execute effective marketing strategies – is a big challenge for every small business. In this post, I’ll offer 10 suggestions for how small businesses can supercharge their marketing efforts by leveraging social media. For each suggestion, I will discuss a basic strategy – for those who simply want to get their toes wet, as well as an advanced strategy – for those who want to spend a bit more time and go a bit deeper in their social media marketing efforts. These tips are based on my experience leveraging social media marketing for my company, crowdSPRING.

I suggest you begin by outlining clear goals for your social media marketing efforts and figuring out how you’ll measure success. Once you’ve outlined your goals, let’s look at 10 great ways you can begin to leverage social media for your marketing efforts.

1. Facebook

Facebook offers exceptional, low cost marketing opportunities for small business. Facebook now has over 300 million users, and while that seems like an outrageous number for small businesses to be targeting, Facebook offers a very powerful platform on which to build a presence. If you’re not already active on Facebook; you should get started right away.

Basic Strategy: If you haven’t signed up for Facebook yet, you absolutely should as soon as possible. Once you’ve signed up, you should also consider securing your company’s username. Be aware, however, that if you reserve your company name for your personal account, you won’t be able to use it for your Business Fan Page (more on those in the Advanced Strategy), so you may want to create a Page before registering your company’s name. Fan Pages have special rules regarding usernames, which you can read here.

You should do one other thing: search for your competitors and evaluate their Facebook presence. What types of Pages have they built? How many fans or “friends” do they have? Spend 15 minutes (per competitor) looking at their posts, photos and/or videos to understand how they’re using Facebook.

Advanced Strategy: You may already have a personal Facebook account, but how do you extend that presence for your business? You have several options. You can register a Business Account – which is designed for a very simple presence on Facebook. There are many limitations on such accounts (read the FAQ here), however, so you’ll most likely prefer to have a Business Fan Page. A Business Fan Page lets you create a page where customers or fans of your business can register as a “fan” — expanding the presence of your business (because your updates will also flow to their pages). You might also want to consider running hyper-local ads on Facebook.

2. Twitter

Twitter has grown tremendously over the past year. For some small businesses, it offers an incredible marketing platform. BusinessWeek’s recent profile of 20 ways businesses use Twitter might give you some ideas about how you can leverage Twitter for your business.

Basic Strategy: If you haven’t signed up on Twitter yet, you should sign up today and reserve an account in the name of your business. While you might ultimately tweet in your own name, you’ll want to have the option to tweet from a business account. More importantly, you don’t want your competitors to register your business name. Twitter has put together a simple guide to help you understand what Twitter can do for business. You can also check out Mashable’s Twitter Guide.

Next, you should spend 15-30 minutes on Twitter’s homepage, doing basic searches to become familiar with the type of content available on the service. For example, if you are operating a small gift basket business, do some searches for various terms and phrases such as “gift basket,” “gifts,” “gift basket business,” etc. You should also search for the names of your competitors to see whether they’re on Twitter and if they are, how they’re using it. And don’t forget to search for your small business name – your customers may already be talking about you! Once you become comfortable with the content that’s already available and how your competitors are using Twitter, you can begin thinking about a strategy for how you’ll leverage Twitter for your business.

Advanced Strategy: To truly leverage Twitter, you’ll want to learn and use a few more advanced tools. This includes desktop and mobile Twitter clients like TweetDeck, Seesmic, and Tweetie. Desktop clients give you more flexibility and more control over your Twitter strategy than you’ll have on the Twitter website. Among other things, you’ll be able to pre-define searches (so that you can monitor certain keywords, including your business name) and group people you follow so that you can minimize the noise and focus on the real content. You might also consider using a web tool like Twitterfall, which will allow you to define (and color-code) various custom searches that you can review from time to time, and also to follow trending topics. For example, I use Twitterfall to identify helpful graphic design and industrial design resources to share with the crowdSPRING community.

3. Company Blog

Although there’s more attention focused today on social networks than on company blogs, blogs continue to offer great value for small businesses.

Basic Strategy: At a minimum, you should consider reserving a domain name for your blog – if you don’t already have a custom domain for your business. If you’re comfortable enough to set up your own blog, that’s generally the best way to proceed – although this requires a bit more technical knowledge (many hosting providers offer a 1 step easy setup for blogs that will automatically install WordPress for you). You can also setup a blog directly at WordPress.com (it’s easier to do, but you don’t have full control over everything that you would on your own site).

One easy alternative is to set up a simple blog at Posterous – a place to post stories, photos, videos, MP3s, and files. There are pluses and minuses to all of these options – you should take some time to compare them and do what makes sense for your business. I caution you only about spreading yourself too thin.

Advanced Strategy: Now that you’ve decided to start or improve your small business blog, how do you build an audience for it? It all starts with great content. Decide on a focus for your blog, and write awesome content that people will enjoy. For example, some months ago at my company, we decided that we wanted to write more about small business issues, so we’ve been writing original posts focusing on issues affecting small businesses. Think about your expertise and more importantly, think about the things that you’re interested in writing about. A blog requires a long term investment of time (and resources), and you don’t want to be stuck writing about things that bore you.

You’ll also want to consider how you can make it easier for your readers to help promote your content. For example, install helpful plug-ins, such as a TweetMeme button, which makes it easy for people to retweet your posts on Twitter. Don’t be afraid to experiment with plugins to add to the functionality of your blog, but keep it simple. You want to keep the blog focused, and easy for your readers to use.

4. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a business oriented social network for professionals, and it’s huge, with nearly 50 million users from over 200 countries.

Basic Strategy: Once again, you’ll want to at least reserve your business name (or your personal name) so that others can’t use it. Similar to the way you might start exploring Facebook and Twitter, you should look around on LinkedIn to see how your competitors are using the service. You might also look up your customers and connect with them.

Advanced Strategy: LinkedIn has some powerful features that most people don’t use. For example, you can encourage your customers, clients or vendors to give you a “recommendation” on your profile. Recommendations are useful because they’ll make you and your business more credible with new customers. If you’re a roofer, for example, ask your customers to recommend you after a successful job. You’ll find such recommendations useful – particularly since your LinkedIn profile will come up high in search engine results. I recommend that you read Chris Brogan’s post from last year discussing the elements of a good LinkedIn recommendation.

Another strategy involves the many subject matter groups on LinkedIn. Find some groups that have a connection to your small business and become involved in the conversations. Answer questions when you can, and help to establish yourself as knowledgeable about specific topics related to your business. There are many small business and general marketing groups that will be very useful resources for you, and if there isn’t a group that interests you, consider starting one.

5. Participate On Other Blogs

It might seem counter-intuitive for you to spend your valuable time by participating in discussions on other people’s blogs, but the payoff can be very valuable. Remember that it takes time to build a reputation and establish your credibility, and you can’t always expect everyone to come to you. Sometimes, you have to go out and build your own credibility and reputation.

Basic Strategy: Identify 2-3 blogs in your industry, or those that focus on small business, and get into the habit of regularly reading the content and participating in the discussions. Whenever you can, try to add value by sharing a personal story about what has/has not worked for you. Get to know the writers – they’ll be valuable contacts for you. One strategy for identifying good blogs is to use Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop, which is a directory of popular blogs across many different subject areas. For example, for blogs focused on crafts, you might follow this page on Alltop. If you want to participate in blogs focusing on small business issues, you might start at Technorati’s list of the Top 100 Small Business blogs.

Advanced Strategy: Once you’ve spent some time on other blogs and have participated in discussions, you’ll find that you’ve built a level of credibility and trust, based on your participation. You should consider reaching out to the blog owners and asking whether they’d allow you to guest post an article on their blog (kind of like this post). This is a nice way for you to get in front of a bigger audience, and many blog owners will invite guests to post from time to time. Agree on a topic in advance and provide a draft of your post sufficiently in advance of the publication date to give them an opportunity to review.

Alternatively, ask if they would consider guest posting on your blog. Since you’re looking to attract more readers (and more potential customers), either option works well for that purpose. Don’t worry so much about going after the A-list blogs right away. There are many excellent blogs and it might take a bit of time to build your reputation to such a level that you’ll have opportunities to post in the top blogs. That doesn’t mean you should wait, though – make opportunities for yourself and offer to guest write whenever you can find a new audience. I recommend you read How To Guest Post To Promote Your Blog from blogging expert Darren Rowse.

6. Mobile Social Networks and other Local Strategies

Yelp publishes millions of reviews about local businesses. Foursquare is a combination city-guide, friend finder and competitive game. It allows users to “check in” by cell phone at a local venue and announce this via other social networks such as Twitter.

Basic Strategy: Yelp, Foursquare, and other mobile social networks can be powerful marketing channels for small businesses. You should at the very least register accounts on the popular services and get to know them. If you have a restaurant or a retail store, for example, you’ll want to get to know Yelp pretty well. You can set up a business account on Yelp (no cost), which will let you answer questions about your business, track how many Yelp users view your business page, add information about your business, and announce special promotions. Similarly, you’ll want to sign up with Foursquare to take advantage of local advertising opportunities. Using Foursquare, you’ll be able to push promotions to potential customers who’re in the vicinity of your business.

You should also consider other local strategies. For example, you can add your business to Google Maps, or update your listing to include additional details. You can do the same on Bing.

Advanced Strategy: If you believe that your business can truly benefit from a presence on Yelp, Foursquare, or similar networks, you’ll want to do more than just register accounts with those services. For example, Yelp allows you to include a website URL for your business. Nearly all sites will let you upload photos to your profile, and photos will make your profile more trustworthy.

You can also proactively use Yelp and other similar services to promote your business. Ask your customers, friends and family who have used your services for a review on Yelp. You can encourage reviews by running promotions or discounts – offering free appetizers, for example, to a customer who will write a review about their meal at your restaurant (or to one who already wrote a review), or a small discount to a customer who hires you for carpentry work and mentions that they found you through Yelp.

Similarly, you can find ways to promote your business using Foursquare and similar networks. If you have a TV display in your store connected to a computer, you can display the people who are checking in. You can offer specials or discounts to the person who visits your location the most (this is similar to frequent buyer cards that many businesses have used for years).

Don’t forget to also consider how you can improve your use of other basic local strategies. For example, many small business websites are optimized for specific keywords or subject areas, but are rarely optimized for local searches. If you have a gift basket business, you’ll want to be sure that users searching for gift baskets in your geographic area will find you.

7. Comments and Conversations About Your Company

Whether or not you are a party to the conversations, people will talk about your company. How do you monitor and, when appropriate, join those discussions?

Basic Strategy: There are five simple steps you can take today to begin paying attention to conversations about your business.

First, set up Google Alerts. Google Alerts are free email updates from Google search results about any topic you’re interested in tracking. For example, I track, among other alerts, the names of our competitors, the name of our company, and certain other terms I believe are important to my business. Anytime Google adds something to its index that mentions my company or the other terms I’m tracking, I receive an immediate email notification with a link to that item. Alerts can be set up for web, blog, news, video, or groups searches.

Second, review the results in your web analytics data. At my company, we use Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that provides detailed and very useful information about your website traffic and the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. When we run social media campaigns, we’ll often attach tracking tags to those campaigns so that we can properly monitor them in Google Analytics. This is important because without such data it will be nearly impossible for you to evaluate the success of your social media marketing efforts. But analytics are important for another reason: they’ll tell you which sites are sending traffic to your site.

Third, search Facebook. In August, Facebook rolled out a real-time search engine (the search box is on the top right of any Facebook page). One effective way to take advantage of Facebook search is to search for your company’s name to see who is talking about your company and what they’re saying. In several months, you’ll be able to search Facebook updates directly from Bing, which will be integrating Facebook public updates into Bing’s search results.

Fourth, search Twitter. You currently can search Twitter for real-time results (if you’re not logged in, just go to Twitter’s homepage). One easy way to monitor conversations about your company is to search for your company’s name. You can also currently do this on Bing, which is indexing Twitter updates. Very soon, you’ll also be able to search Twitter updates (and other social media content) via Google’s Social Search (Social Search was rolled out to Google Labs recently, as an experimental product). You can also use Twitter clients like TweetDeck or Seesmic to save searches and monitor in real-time whenever someone uses a specific word or phrase in a tweet.

Finally, take advantage of services that will, similar to Google Alerts, push data to you. I use and like BackType, which is a real-time search engine that indexes online conversations in thousands of blogs and social networks. I use BackType primarily to keep up with conversations in blogs. Every day, I receive emails from BackType with links to comments that include the keywords I’m monitoring. Without these alerts, I would be unable to monitor so many blogs, and my ability to respond to posts about my company would be very limited.

Advanced Strategy: If you’re having trouble keeping track of your various search strategies, you should consolidate your efforts and leverage one of the many applications that will help you monitor the social web. I have not personally used these services, but they appear to be held in high esteem by knowledgeable people who have. For example, truVOICE provides keyword monitoring of the social web with an emphasis on blogs and forums, while Radian6 pulls in a lot of information from the social web, analyzes it, and provides consumer sentiment ratings for your brand. A good resource to learn about paid social media monitoring tools is Mashable’s post Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For.

In addition to monitoring, you’ll need to decide how, when, and where you’ll engage in conversations. It’ll be very difficult for you to engage in conversations everywhere, so you should spend some time learning the various networks and deciding where you should focus your efforts. Looking at your website analytics data — if you own an online business — will help a great deal because it’ll help you to better understand where your traffic is coming from. If much of your traffic originates from Twitter and Facebook, for example, you’ll want to spend more time on those services.

8. Multimedia

Multimedia (video, photos, audio) is a bit more complicated for many small businesses to execute, but can provide excellent social media marketing opportunities.

Basic Strategy: YouTube has been constantly evolving and adding features that make it an attractive social site for small businesses. Although you don’t have to produce videos to participate on YouTube, you should consider whether simple videos can help your marketing efforts. For example, if you’re already posting videos to your blog, you can upload them to YouTube to reach a broader audience, and embed the video content in your blog posts. YouTube has also been adding more comprehensive activity updates for its users and has made pretty powerful analytics tools available so that you can evaluate the effectiveness of your video content.

Similarly, you could start a Flickr account for your business and post photos of your customers or your products (or both). Flickr offers a place where people can share photos with others, but also has discussion groups, many focused on local markets, that offer additional opportunities for you to market your business. You can also consider setting up your own Internet radio talk show using BlogTalkRadio, which is another way to use multimedia to speak directly to your customers. Get creative with it — own a restaurant? Start a call-in show for people to ask cooking questions. Are you a piano teacher? Perhaps you could start a show to talk about classical music.

Advanced Strategy: Advanced strategies using multimedia are complicated and typically benefit from using experienced consultants. One effective way to leverage video, for example, is to create content that has the potential to become viral. While I don’t believe you can set out to make a viral video (an incredible amount of luck is typically involved), there are a number of things you can typically do to build awareness about your small business using viral video (these strategies are beyond the scope of this post). Once you’ve created good content, you’ll want to distribute it using as many social networks as you can.

When you consider how you can leverage social networks, think about whether each network provides an audience or a technology solution (or both). For example, YouTube provides both a huge audience and a solution for uploading video files. Flickr can also provide both an audience and a technology solution, but not for every business. While your customers might not be on Flickr, you can still use Flickr as a place to store and tag your photos, and then distribute those photos to other social networks where you prefer to invest more time and effort.

9. Maintain Brand Consistency

We’ve discussed only a small handful of social networks. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of others, and new ones spring up every day. That means that your customers will have many different ways to find you. But they won’t find you if your brand is scattered across social networks using different usernames and profiles. Let’s review some strategies for making sure that your brand is consistent across social networks.

Basic Strategy: Usernames and user profiles are already showing up in search results. Do a search for your company’s name on Google right now — if you also have a Twitter account with the same name, odds are pretty good that the Twitter account will appear very high in the search results. This means that having a consistent username across the various social networks is very important. At a minimum, if you haven’t registered your company name on the major networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), you should do that today. For many small businesses, their user accounts on social networks will be the highest ranked pages in search results.

You should also evaluate your email and web presence strategies. For example, are you using a Gmail email address when you can very easily be using a custom email address with your company name as your domain? Compare: restaurantname@gmail.com with john@restaurantname.com — which looks more professional? Similarly, are you hosting your blog at WordPress.com instead of on your own custom domain? Little details can make a difference.

Advanced Strategy: Things get a bit more complicated when you consider that there are many different social networks, and it’s tough to predict which of them will become popular and which will fail. Use a service such as namechk or KnowEm to see whether your username is available on dozens of popular social networks and if it’s not, to see which username could be registered across all social networks.

Maintaining name consistency is important, but isn’t enough by itself. You’ll also want to make sure that your brand speaks with a common “voice” across the social networks. This may be easier said than done. Social networks differ in significant ways from one another and present unique challenges for interacting with customers and potential customers on those networks.

Speaking with a common “voice” doesn’t mean that only one person should execute your company’s social media marketing strategy, but it does mean that everyone who speaks on behalf of your company in social media reflects your brand in a consistent way. I recommend you read Shel Israel’s recently published book “Twitterville,” for excellent tips and stories focusing on how large and small businesses can develop a consistent voice in social media.

10. Leverage Combinations of Social Media Tools

One of the best ways for small businesses to leverage social media marketing is to use various social networks in combination with each other.

Basic Strategy: At a minimum, you should do several things today to cross-market across the various social networks you’re most likely already using. Here are three suggestions:

First, connect your Twitter account to Facebook so that your tweets will appear in your public updates on Facebook. This will let you leverage your time on Twitter to also update your Facebook fans.

Second, connect your LinkedIn profile to your WordPress blog. LinkedIn allows you to publish, in your profile, synopses of the most recent blog posts on your blog. This application will automatically update your LinkedIn profile with your most recent blog posts.

Third, integrate Twitter tools into your blog. I like and use the TweetMeme retweet button on my blogs to make it easier for users to tweet about the blog posts. I also use the ShareThis tool to enable readers to quickly share content on multiple social networks.

Advanced Strategy: Advanced strategies require careful planning/execution and appropriate tools. In nearly all cases, your goal is to maximize the value of your content. For example, if you’re posting videos on YouTube or Vimeo, you can blog about those videos on your company’s blog. Then, you can tweet about the blog posts on Twitter (which I assume is integrated with your Facebook account). This way, you’ve taken one piece of content and found a way to leverage it across multiple social networks.

You’ll also want to consider ways that you can optimize the distribution to multiple social networks at the same time. Leverage tools to help you do this. For example, Ping.fm lets you update multiple social networks all in one go. Keep in mind that not all social networks will make sense for every business. Learn which networks are best for your business and find ways to leverage combinations of those networks to make your marketing more effective.

Conclusion

Social media marketing can be a phenomenal marketing channel for small businesses. I hope that the strategies I’ve outlined above provide a starting point for you to explore how you can leverage social media marketing for your small business.

And if you have additional resources to share or other helpful advice that’s worked for your small business (or thoughts about things to avoid), please take a minute and leave a comment. We’d love to hear from you.

More business resources from Mashable:

- 5 Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Business
- Top 5 Business Blogging Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
- 10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Entrepreneurs
- 6 Must-Follow Steps for Selling in Any Economy
- 5 Easy Social Media Wins for Your Small Business

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, studiovision

Tags: business, List, Lists, small business, social media

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Last week, I shared with you the first in a series of videos sponsored by UPS in the style of their “whiteboard” TV commercials. The idea is to take social media concepts and explain them in 1-2 minutes, giving businesses an idea of how they can seize the opportunities created by the medium.

In the second installment, we look at selecting the right social media tools for your business, whether it’s for improving communication internally, or finding a better way to manage your consumer facing social media presence on Twitter and Facebook.

There are literally hundreds of tools to choose from in this space, so, I tried to select a few that we’ve reviewed and fill big needs (for example, CoTweet, Involver, and Socialtext are featured). If you’d like more information about this topic, these resources might also be useful:

10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Entrepreneurs

5 Easy Social Media Wins for Your Small Business

35+ Examples of Corporate Social Media in Action

10 of the Best Social Media Tools for PR Professionals and Journalists

Without further ado, here’s this week’s video on Internal/External Social Networking:

Tags: small business, social networking

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