LinkedIn Today: The next big social tool?

LinkedIn announced the launch of LinkedIn Today last week, their new daily digital newspaper. It's still too soon to say for sure, but I predict this will quickly become one of the major tools for social media marketing.

In a nutshell, LinkedIn Today is a cross between a news aggregator and a social bookmarking site. It brings you the top daily stories from selected categories (and recommends new categories based on user profiles); more importantly for our purposes, it draws those stories from articles shared by your contacts.

Suppose you connect with me on LinkedIn. If I share an interesting article about QR codes it will show up on your LinkedIn Today page. Since I work in the construction and marketing industries, it could also show up on the page of anyone interested in those industries. If they read the article and share it with their contacts, it will spread even further. And if, several iterations down the line, someone wants to know who originally posted this article, they can view its history and all the conversations happening about it.

Which means you want articles about your company and products appearing there. Best way to make that happen? Get active on LinkedIn yourself, and be sure you have a "Share on LinkedIn" button on all your posts, articles, and webpages.

Social bookmarking sites, such as Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon, never really caught on for business use. The content on those sites tends to be decidedly NSFW (Not Safe For Work), so they never built a critical mass of professional users. LinkedIn, by contrast, is starting with that critical mass. Architects are already gathering to discuss the latest building products and get their questions answered, which means they are very likely to share interesting articles, and read those shared by their contacts.

I will be experimenting with the system in the coming days and share my observations. When you start using it, let me know about your experiences, and share any interesting lessons learned.

5 Tips for Branding Your RSS Feed

I had a disturbing realization last night: I no longer know where most of the blog posts I read come from. As readers of this site will know, I am a huge fan of RSS feeds. I think RSS readers are one of the true heroes of the internet, and I have spent a lot of time customizing the feeds I get, frequency of updates, and display order so I get most of my news now in a very personalized, very useful format.

As I realized last night, it's possible I may have been too successful in setting my reader up. My realization was prompted by my wife mentioning a post I sent her from a particular blog. I remembered the post and I remembered sending it to her, but I had no idea I had read that blog that day. I read something and liked it enough to share it, and didn't know who wrote it.

Thinking about what had happened, I realized the problem was a lack of branding. Most of the feeds display within the reader, so I rarely visit an external site, and stripped of all the original website's branding. So how can you keep company branding in a post that will be stripped down to plain text? Here are five tips:

1. Continue offering full-text posts. Many blogs solve the problem by providing just the title and maybe a teaser via RSS feed, forcing you to visit their site for the body of the post. For sites that are ad-supported or have server limitations (as ours currently does) this makes sense. For most sites, though, I recommend against doing this. Posts have a much higher read-rate when readers do not need to go to another website, especially mobile users.

2. Include a distinctive signature. This is probably the easiest fix. Many successful bloggers have developed a distinctive sign-off line, signature, or logo (it has to be in the body of the post) that gets used at the bottom of every post. If I enjoyed a post enough to read all the way through it, I know who wrote it.

3. Use branded language. Got a particular turn of phrase you like? A good company slogan? Use them. More importantly, be consistent in the way you discuss your company and products. Do you sell "bricks" or "masonry"? Do you use post-industrial or pre-consumer recycled content? Hopefully you are already doing this in your marketing literature - if not, send me an email - and it's important to continue across your entire online presence.

4. Format post titles. I always know when I am reading one of the Gizmodo blogs because the posts show up like this recent post from Lifehacker: The Best Photography Apps for Your Android [Android]. The bracket tag at the end of the post sometimes gets silly, but it is a consistent element that I have learned to recognize.

5. Link to other pages on your site. When possible, link to previous posts or other resources on your website that pertain to the topic you are discussing. ReadWriteWeb is very good at this. Even ignoring any SEO benefits (see what I did there?) the links might provide, they serve a valuable purpose because when I click on one, it creates one of two effects: either I realize I am reading one of your posts, or I assume you are enough of an expert that some other blog is linking to your site. Either result is beneficial to you. Don't overdo it though; that gets tacky.

Most people probably do not subscribe to so many RSS feeds - yet - that individual blogs get lost in the tide. The people that do, though, are some of your biggest assets in a social media campaign. It is vital that they can identify the posts that come from you.

Should you write less?

This is not a question typically asked by publicists. It's definitely not a question encouraged by current SEO theories, or the advertising mindset that conflates number of impressions with success of the campaign.

And yet, I find myself asking this question recently.

A few months ago I went a bit wild adding new podcasts and RSS feeds to my daily feeds, mostly focused on the wider marketing and advertising industry. I found a number of "experts" who impressed me with both the information and entertainment value of their offerings, and quickly became a loyal listener.

But now, four months later, I've unsubscribed from almost all of them. Why?

It gets back to the "Quantity vs. Quality" debate that rules most social media strategy sessions. Should we flood the network with our message, getting our name out there as many times as possible, or should we focus on saying the right things at the right time in the right places?

These podcasters and bloggers have grown to the point that to support their growth they adhere to a very high-frequency posting schedule, with daily blog posts and weekly new podcast episodes. That's great when I'm looking for a source of entertainment, but I subscribed to get useful information. If I only get that once a week, why bother tuning in the other six days?

I see the same problem with 24-hour news stations. They have to fill 24 hours every day, even on a day with only 10 hours of newsworthy events. This leads to lots of repetition, opinion pieces being passed off as "news", manufactured controversies, and "me too" attempts to keep up with the other networks' "breaking news".

B2B audiences appreciate the more focused messages. I like the advice on writing elevator pitches: "Think water fountain, not fire hose". For publicity I might refine that a step farther: "Think laser beam, not forest fire."

5 Essential Social Media Tools for Manufacturers

With so many social media options available, the biggest challenge in starting a campaign is deciding which systems not to use. Most successful social media campaigns will be multichannel, but starting with too many platforms is overwhelming. For most companies it will work best to start with a small, focused campaign, and gradually grow to include new networks and technology. With that in mind, here are five tools I consider essential for a successful social media launch:

1. Photo Sharing: A recent study by Architect magazine found that most architects begin the design process by searching images online to find inspiration. I consider a good online photo gallery the most important, and most overlooked, part of your online presence. The big players right now are Flickr and Picasa. Photos should be clearly named and tagged to enhance searchability.  
2. Video Sharing: First the web was about linked documents; text. As bandwidth increased it became about graphics. Now the big thing is video; more importantly, it's mobile video. Estimates suggest over 200,000 new videos are posted on YouTube per day, and that number is growing. Installation videos, project case studies, and video product announcements are all great material for video. The goal should not be to create the next big viral video, but to provide useful, searchable video information.  
3. Blog: A major contributor to improved SEO, a forum for getting your message out, and a place to demonstrate your industry expertise; a successful blog is all of these. The topic of your blog is essential; if  it feels like an advertisement or a collection of links and fluff, no one will subscribe. But pick a topic that gets to the core of your message, and provide content that helps your audience do their jobs better, and you can build a community that sees every update, reads them, comments, and comes to you for more information.
4. E-newsletter: It may seem archaic given the range of media now available, but email is still one of the most widely used internet technology. Constant Contact estimates that 90% of internet users use email (personally, I wonder about that other 10%). As I've discussed before, creating a newsletter can be very simple; use the most popular posts from your blog, add in important news and upcoming events, and be sure to include links to the rest of your social media activities. Pick a regular update schedule and stick to it, and be a firm believer in opt-in marketing.
5. Wikipedia: Have you searched for your product category on Wikipedia? Does the page exist? If so, is your product properly represented? Remember that anyone can edit Wikipedia, so add your information if it's not there. Play fair, though. Wikipedia's community of editors will zap you if you don't, and the backlash can be worse for your reputation than missing information would have been. Read Wikipedia's guidelines, and when in doubt ask the community for help.

Conspicuous by their absence from this list are all the major social networking platforms. These networks can be very powerful tools for developing customer relationships with your brand, but for most buliding product manufacturers and reps providing useful content will be more valuable and beneficial than building a list of friends. Once you have developed content, however, use these tools to spread your message across the net.

Which social media tools are most valuable for your company?

Maintaining Situational Awareness with RSS

RSS feeds are the unappreciated heroes of the internet. They are awesome time saving and information gathering tools, properly used. RSS feeds can consolidate all the information from your social networks, important blogs, newspapers, and trade magazines in a single place: your own custom internet portal.

bongoboy at the CSI blog has a great post about the importance of RSS feeds in maintaining situation awareness.

"Situational Awareness means, in it’s simplest form, that you know which way is up… and up is very, very important in the aviation world, as the opposite of up is down and down has the potential to end badly. Very badly.

In the construction world, the absence of current situational awareness can simply mean that one doesn’t take the time to keep up with the constant change that is taking place in our industry, but in this litigious age simply claiming ignorance of modern materials and techniques is not a defense, especially considering how simple it is to have that information delivered to your computer each and every morning for you to peruse and enjoy with your morning coffee."

He points out the value of RSS from both sides: they are a great way to distribute information and to keep you informed. Both are valuable to a manufacturer. Encourage current clients and new prospects to subscribe and you get free, instantaneous, opt-in distribution at the click of a button. Find and subscribe to useful and interesting blogs, including your clients', and you get a one-stop information center. (It takes me a bit more than the 15 minutes bongoboy claims to read my blogs each morning, but then I probably subscribe to more comics than he does.)

The hardest part, as it is everywhere on the net, is weeding out the garbage from the gems. As bongoboy points out:

"Does it have potential to push a load of useless information across your desktop? Of course it does, but if you’re smart enough to be reading up on technology like this and you’ve come across this article, then you have the required gray matter to glance over a feed article for a second or two, make a snap judgement and toss it out if it doesn’t make the cut. If the feed continually sends you content that you feel is garbage, unsubscribe...this is a free country."