These are the questions floating around business networking conversations these days. Newbies to social networking are nervous because Twitter is an unknown territory— a very strange one at that!  Who speaks in 140 character snippets? It takes some getting used to.  At first glance, it makes no sense. A glimpse at a home page on Twitter shows fragmented, one-sided conversations happening now. You may wonder, “How can this be useful?” But, with all the success stories on Twitter, many are considering a move to this unique new communication platform. How about you?

To get started, create a personal profile and connect with a few trusted people that you know in real life. Practice on each other.  Post some updates to your profile. Ask a friend to @ message you. To @message is to reply publicly to a tweet (a status update on Twitter.) To reply privately or send a message privately is DM or Direct Message. Send your trusted friends a DM – a direct message (the Twitter version of email). Get your feet wet with this new tool. Don’t be afraid. Remember that EVERYONE is fairly new to this and even the “experts” will make a “mistake” every now and then.

When you sign up on Twitter, try to secure your first and last name as your username. This will help you establish your personal brand and build your personal online reputation. And, it is cheap (free) insurance to protect you from someone who may want to masquerade as you on Twitter. (If you have a business name, go ahead and create an account for your business also to secure the username even though you may not be ready to use it.  Getting started personally will familiarize you with the tools so that you can better understand how to use this tool for your greater business purposes.

Like most things in life, experience is the BEST teacher. Join the Twitter crowd today.

Feel free to post Twitter questions as comments to this post on my blog. Or, better yet, Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mcullison and send me a DM!

1. Add a Profile Picture
2. Fill out the Information Page with your professional image in mind
3. Upload photos that depict the professional but likeable you. Add video too if you have it!
4. Install Applications such as: My LinkedIn Profile
Beware of adding too many meaningless apps so your message isn’t lost in the noise.
5. Create Valuable Status Updates
What’s important? To your clients? To your industry?
6. If you have a blog, feed the posts to your wall.
7. Add Business Contacts
8. Join Groups that reflect your real life business associations
9. Join Groups that are relate to your business but are new to you
10. Invite Group Members to become friends

On LinkedIn individuals create profiles that are like dynamic resumes. From the profile an individual creates connections with other individuals. There are 4 main components-data areas-on LinkedIn: People, Jobs, Answers, and Companies. In addition, there are Groups that people can join and Applications that can extend the capabilities of LinkedIn. LinkedIn has become an interactive, professional environment that enables individuals to share information and best practices, to collaborate to solve problems, to conduct research, develop joint ventures and extend business development opportunities.

How you use LinkedIn will depend on factors such as your role (Owner, Manager, Sales, HR), your industry (retail, professional services, entertainment, manufacturing) your needs (statistics, access to decision makers, feedback from a target niche, expertise of others) and your goals (acquire new clients, gather information for presentations, hire qualified employees, raise venture capital, get publicity, explore foreign markets). The most important element needed for effective use of social networking sites is a well-defined strategy.

To begin developing your social networking strategy:

• Review your business goals. (1 month, 3 month, 6 month, 1 year)
Tip: If you haven’t written them down for 2009, do it now.
• Determine what kind of business relationships are needed to meet those goals: breadth, a large audience of acquaintances or depth, a small but trusted network of people you know. It can be both but you will need to be intentional in your interactions.
• Determine the types of people you need in your network to achieve your goals. (For example: corporate decision makers, experts in an industry, prospects in your target niche, 30-50 year olds in your geographic location, etc.)
• Determine the kind of data needed to achieve your goals.
The data you need may be found in the Answers section of LinkedIn, Groups or in the myriad of new applications available for installation.

Use the information you compiled from the above activity to drive the actions you take on LinkedIn and other social networking sites.

To get a better understanding of the value of social networking, take the concept offline. Envision yourself at an on-going business card exchange or trade association meeting that allows you to come and go at your leisure. The attendees are from all over the world and from all industries. Some people know each other and some don’t. You can ask for introductions. You can take charge and introduce yourself to new people or invest in relationships you already have. Social networking sites provide exactly this scenario online. Opportunities abound for those who invest in people by developing connections on LinkedIn and other social sites. Get started today by creating profile on LinkedIn.com.

Want to learn more?
Sign up for the Boot camp on June 5th? If your not local, look for the online boot camp in mid-June.

This morning I downloaded the product, Xobni, an add-on to Outlook. At the end of the installation of the add-on software, the Finish dialog box wasn’t just wasted space. Xobni took advantage of an opportunity to connect with their target market! They filled the wasted space with an friendly picture of the xobin team along with the message “Thanks for installing!”  Kudos to the xobni marketing team!

Where is the wasted space in your business processes? Examine all of your customer communications and look for ways to connect and utilize print or electronic pieces that are usually boring but could be used to make a connection.

Consider these possibilities:

• Invoices
• Receipts
• Auto-responders
• Envelopes
• Email signatures
• Form letters

As you look at your communications, ask these questions:

• Is our mission expressed?
• If not, how can it be incorporated cleanly?
• How memorable are we?
• How can we add valuable info in small spaces that are usually wasted?
• How can we build goodwill in what is typically wasted space?
• Are we likeable-as a company?

Any new ideas on making the most of wasted space on standard (dare I say–boring) communications?

Post your thoughts. I’d love to hear from you!

A. An online game like whist

B. Scamming users of Twitter

C. Hoping the T will arrive

D. A Wii-based online dance craze.

Answer: B. Scamming users of Twitter

Like me, you’ve probably heard of phishing scams-the emails that imitate messages from banks or other online accounts-and invite you to login. When you do, you are actually logging into a fake site allowing hackers to obtain your login/password combination and access your real account. Well, twishing is just like that-except it is used exclusively to gain access to twitter accounts. You can avoid the problem by not clicking on suspicious links in tweets or in email. If you do click on a link, carefully examining the URL of the page you land on. For example, if someone tweets or emails a website link to you, make sure you look before you login when you land on what looks like twitter.com. Check the URL, if it says this: http://twitterblog.access-logins.com/login or anything other than http://www.twitter.com, don’t login.

Have you been twished? How about phished? Share your story.

Getting your social sites integrated with each other is one way to build your following in multiple locations so you will be ready to build relationships and build your business in 2009!

Twittscoop is a tool designed to keep you informed! Twitscoop creates a tag cloud of the words that are currently being tweeted more than other words. You can display twittscoop results on your blog, like this:

To complete a LinkedIn profile, users must add the following information:

• Current employment position
• Two past employment positions
• Education info
• Profile summary
• Profile photo 
• Specialties Info
• At least three recommendations

I checked out the company link on the audio player and discovered http://www.odiogo.com/.

I’ve installed the plugin for Wordpress and this post will be first test for converting my blog posts to audio so that my blog readers can choose to read or listen to my post!

Amazingly, the plugin and RSS Feed service is FREE! You can’t beat that for convenient podcasting!

Here’s how:

• Click on the ‘Edit Your Profile’link found on the left hand side of the home page.
• Click on the ‘Promote your Profile’ link found in the ‘Public Profile’ box.
• Choose a logo button and copy the HTML code provided next to it.
• Paste the code on to your blog, message board or website.