photo by *yasuhiro

The internet continually offers up all sorts of cool things – some of them are just entertaining (like the picture above) but a lot of them are world class educational resources, tools and ideas that most of us wouldn’t have seen 10 or even 5 years ago.

If you’d like to make your web browsing more productive, I’d strongly recommend using a tool like Delicious (I wrote about Delicious here) not only as a way to save and reference the cool stuff you find, but it can also help you find new things that other people find valuable.

Today I wanted to share a presentation on Social Media that I thought was outstanding!

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I had a great opportunity to speak on a distinguished panel last week for a Business and Economic Summit put on by the New Landings Job Club here in Kansas City (and before you ask, I don’t know why I was on the distinguished panel either…). 

This wasn’t just any panel discussion, not only were there 10 9+1 sharp panelists – there were 400+ in attendance and focused for 2+ hours!

The purpose of the discussion was to talk about what’s going on in Kansas city with jobs, the economy and what job seekers should be doing and looking for as they work to get into their next opportunity.

There was a lot of great discussion (it was primarily a Q&A format) and I believe the job seekers got a lot of great ideas and good advice…what was interesting to me was how much of that great information and advice also applied to business owners.

We talked about the importance of stalking (done the right way), relationships, professionalism…lots of great points – here are the highlights that I took away:

(photo by Jesse757)

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photo by photos8.com

A lot of people are looking at Social Media marketing as some kind of ‘silver bullet’ for their marketing woes.  As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, there’s good news and bad news when it comes to marketing for Business to Business opportunities.  The bad news is that Social Media is no more of silver bullet for small B2B business owners than any other single marketing tactic that’s out there.  The good news is it can be a very effective tool for helping you get found or established – especially when it’s used in conjunction with other marketing ideas.

In Part 1 we talked about using new media tools as a great way to establish expertise by creating content.  Today we’ll look at couple of other ideas that might be a better fit if you’re not into publishing as much.

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photo by Tiago Daniel

Wouldn’t it be great to have an almost sure-fire winner when it comes to marketing your business or yourself?  With all of the hype and discussion about Social Media, some people are assuming that they’ve found the answer.

In fact, I’ve had several people ask me if Social Media really was the end-all be-all silver bullet that everyone is making it out to be.

The answer obviously is NO!

However the answer to whether or not business owners and professionals should be participating in Social Media is a resounding YES!

The better question is what should you be doing and how can someone who’s an independent professional or selling Business to Business really use these tools in a meaningful way?  This is the first post in a short series to give you some ideas on how to use these tools.  Here’s the link if you’re interested in seeing the second post in the Silver Bullet series.

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Just like everyone loves a puppy – everyone loves new functionality on applications they are already using (and you are already using LinkedIn aren’t you?).

I actively use Twitter, I reluctantly use Facebook and I’m constantly trying out a lot of the other social media and social network platforms, but I will admit I’ve got a strong bias for LinkedIn as the best place to start (and spend a lot of your valuable time) when it comes to using Social Media for your business.  It’s a great extension of the real world networking you already do (you are networking aren’t you?).

Beyond being professional, easy to use with lots of powerful features, LinkedIn has done a great job of consistently adding new functions and features.  Here’s 3 of the latest additions I thought were interesting.

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