Ross Furlong of blogstar.co.uk, recently posted a great infographic about business blogging in one of the LinkedIn groups that I follow. With the post, he asked a good question: are corporate blogs an inward facing vanity project or a marketing powerhouse for customer engagement?

*Original infographic posted here: http://www.blogstar.co.uk/our-blog/

Why Do Businesses Blog?
In answer to his question, I reflected on the stats concerning “why” a business blogs. Seventy percent of the responders said that they blog to share expertise, in comparison to the 52% who said that they blog to attract new customers. While sharing expertise is a definite draw for people to read your blog, if this is your ultimate goal for blogging, you haven’t yet internalized the purpose of a corporate blog.
While sharing expertise is what we are doing when we write for … Read More »

Use social media and digital media channels to reach me – don’t leave a voicemail

My LinkedIn profile is only 85% complete and sadly, it’s going to stay that way for as long as I can foresee.  Why?  Because I don’t have any recommendations on LinkedIn.

Now before you start feeling sorry for me – like I’m some kind of friendless Schmuck who no ones likes, realize that this is largely self-inflicted.  You see, I don’t really WANT any recommendations on LinkedIn because honestly, I just don’t see the point.

Now LinkedIn claims that “Users with complete profiles are 40 times more likely to receive opportunities through LinkedIn”.  In order to get “complete profile” status, you have to have, not one, not two, but  THREE recommendations!  So, I guess I’ll be missing out on all those “LinkedIn Opportunities”…whatever that means!  In MBA speak, I would … Read More »

There has been some talk going around the Internet about Google working with a new web search. Of course, this makes most entrepreneurs and web programmers nervous as all the hard work they have been doing for years to get secure organic search rankings may come undone with a flip of a switch. This is what they had to say on Google’s official site on crawling and indexing:

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results.“

I want to … Read More »

By now most of us have heard the term “Social Media Marketing”. Some of us are probably even using it, hopefully a good amount effectively. But there are still some that say that it’s just not that important or not that big. But the sheer numbers may surprise you.

Twitter grew 3,000 percent in April of 2009. Facebook hosted 61.2 million visitors in March. LinkedIn counts 20 million users worldwide.

With a potential marketing channel that big, it’s no wonder both big and small business owners are looking to unlock the secrets of social media as another way to get the word out about their businesses.  Because many of these social media accounts (and potential clients) are free, this adds to the appeal.  It can be relatively cheap to start a social media campaign, so it’s a way for a company … Read More »

If you were fortunate enough to attend 2.Ohio yesterday at the Hilton Polaris, you had the pleasure of hearing from Reid Hoffman (Founder of LinkedIn), Judy Estrin (author of Closing the Innovation Gap, former CTO of Cisco and current CEO of JLabs) and Mike Nelson, (Professor at Georgetown and volunteer for the Obama campaign).

If that’s not enough IT talent for you, mingling with the audience, before and after the event, were Brian Behlendorf (important figure in the open source movement and primary developer of the Apache Web Server) and Craig Newmark (Founder of Craigslist)!

In true IT startup fashion, the 2.Ohio event went from conception to reality in just 4 weeks. The organizers, Angela Siefer and Ben Blanquera, relied heavily on the Social Media and … Read More »

This Friday (10/10) at 5:30 pm, there is a very cool event taking place at the Columbus Hilton-Polaris.  Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) and Judy Estrin (author of Closing the Innovation Gap:Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy and former CTO of Cisco) will be speaking at a 2.0 technology event in Columbus (2.Ohio) both about technology & Innovation and also in support of Senator Obama.

While Reid and Judy are here to support their chosen candidate they are also here to share their perspectives regarding innovation, business and social networks with the Columbus community.  Whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, or some other party affiliation this is a great chance to dialogue with some amazing national thought leaders.

If you are in the Columbus area and wish to attend, please visit http://newtech.meetup.com/136/calendar/8824043/ to register.

If you are unable to … Read More »