Home Depot’s Social Media Community Manager, Tia Robinson, shares how they created an authentic voice and connection with their customers through their online How-To Community.
A few LinkedIn facts
LinkedIn is an ever increasing Professional Network. Currently at 135+ Million users (Jan 2012), the platform is used by professionals around the world, including job seekers, human resource departments, sales, business development and professionals of every sort. LinkedIn is one of the world’s most ideal professional business tools online today. The following are resources for everything on LinkedIn you would need for research, resources, “How To’s”, strategies, insights and much more.
| Founded | May 5, 2003 |
| Company Overview | LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with more than 100 million members in over 200 countries and territories. The LinkedIn website launched in 2003 and currently counts executives from all Fortune 500 companies as members. |
| Mission | Connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. |
| Contact Information |
Phone Number: 650-687-3600
How to reach a live person: Press 1 when recording begins
Email: customerservice@linkedin.com
Hours of Operation: Mon-Fri: 9am-6pm PST
|
Company Background (Source: http://press.linkedin.com/about)
- LinkedIn started out in the living room of co-founder Reid Hoffman in 2002.
- The site officially launched on May 5, 2003. At the end of the first month in operation, LinkedIn had a total of 4,500 members in the network.
- As of September 30, 2011, professionals are signing up to join LinkedIn at a rate that is faster than two new members per second.
- The company is publicly held and has a diversified business model with revenues coming from hiring solutions, marketing solutions and premium subscriptions.
LinkedIn Facts (Source: http://press.linkedin.com/about)
- As of November 3, 2011, LinkedIn operates the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with more than 135 million members in over 200 countries and territories.
- Fifty-nine percent of LinkedIn members are currently located outside of the United States.
- There were nearly two billion people searches on LinkedIn in 2010. Based on third quarter 2011 metrics, LinkedIn members are on pace to do more than four billion searches on the LinkedIn platform in 2011.
- Headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., LinkedIn also has U.S. offices in Chicago, New York, Omaha and San Francisco. International LinkedIn offices are located in Amsterdam, Bangalore, Delhi, Dublin, London, Melbourne, Milan, Mumbai, Munich, Paris, São Paulo, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto.
- The company’s management team is comprised of seasoned executives from companies like Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, TiVo, PayPal and Electronic Arts. The CEO of LinkedIn is Jeff Weiner.
- LinkedIn is currently available in fourteen languages: English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean,Malay, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.
- As of September 30, 2011 (the end of the third quarter), LinkedIn has 1,797 full-time employees located all around the globe. LinkedIn started off 2011 with about 1,000 full-time employees located all around the globe, up from around 500 at the beginning of 2010.
Is Facebook overstating it’s number of monthly active users
On the first page of Facebook’s prospectus for its sale of stock to the public, it pegs the number of its “monthly active users” at a whopping 845 million people. The social networking site arrives at an even more astounding number when it comes to “daily active users”: 483 million people.
Those are some huge numbers. If it is hard to believe that so many people are clicking on facebook.com every day, that’s because well, they aren’t, exactly. Those eye-popping numbers should have an asterisk next to them.
Superbowl, Toyota learns the hard way that social media and spam do not mix
Twitter is a great platform to get people stoked about anything, if done right. You can promote potato chips like @popchips does, and it could turn into a huge following for your brand and have fun doing it.
Or, you can do it completely wrong and annoy the hell out of people by spamming them on Twitter. Toyota opted for the second choice, spam people.
The Coca-Cola Company: Social Media Monitoring on a Global Scale
The Coca-Cola Company’s Digital Manager of Communications, Natalie Johnson, shared how they monitored conversations about their brand on a global scale across the web.
Marketers Value Social Media for Both Branding and Customer Acquisition
As marketers include social media as part of their overall strategy, 97% agree that it provides benefits and value to their business.
In a survey of more than 700 marketers worldwide, 88% of respondents told Wildfire Interactive, a social media marketing software company, that social media helps grow brand awareness. Social media also benefited marketers by allowing them to engage in dialogue (85%) and increase sales and partnerships (58%). An additional 41% of marketers said it helped reduce costs.
Social Media ROI Metrics Still Chaotic
Brand marketers continue to struggle with determining return on investment for social media campaigns. Eighty-eight percent admit to gaining positive ROI on campaigns, but a study released Wednesday from Wildfire, a social media platform company, shows that the metrics remain all over the map.
While inconsistencies make it difficult to create and follow industry standards, Wildfire CEO Victoria Ransom said 75% of survey participants said they still plan to increase their social media budgets this year.
Gaining positive ROI is great, but what do marketers measure?
4 Common LinkedIn Profile Mistakes
With the new year comes the time to clean up our desks, desktops, files… and start the year on the right foot.
In the digital era and the social media era, we need to add a few tasks to start the year on the right foot. It’s time to take another look at our social media profiles, clean them up, bring them up to date, optimize them and get them ready to work harder for us.
Let’s start with LinkedIn. With an exponential user growth, I see the same mistakes over and over again, let’s start with some basic mistakes I see over and over again:
1-Professional headline:
Your professional headline is your brand, it appears next or under your name everywhere your name appears, in searches, groups… With your name, it’s the first thing users read when they come across your name, make it count. Your professional headline will determine if someone will merely glance at your name or want to click on it and read your profile. It’s who you are, what you want to be.
By default, LinkedIn will put in your last job title, is that who you are, what you want to be? Will that entice potential business partners or employers to take a closer look at your profile?
Take as much time as you need, craft a headline people will remember and entice them to want to know more about you, tell them how you can help them
2-Profile picture:
Social media is a very public space. Chances are, if you are on LinkedIn, you want to be seen and found, you want to network.
Would you go to a networking event with a mask on your face? Probably not, then why are you doing it on LinkedIn?
Posting a professional photograph has a number of advantages.
- Potential contacts do not like incomplete profiles, incomplete profiles send a message that you have something to hide
- A photo helps potential contact remember you
- A photo helps identify you are who you say you are
- A photo builds trust
3-Public profile
Your “Public profile” is actually a misnomer, it’s your public URL. Think of LinkedIn as a personal website. Each website comes with a URL (Unique resource Locator), a unique address that identify them and allows users to find them on the web.
Your “Public profile” as LinkedIn calls it is your personal URL, the address to your personal profile, a link you can add to your resume, marketing material, business card.
Just as any website address, your URL should be short and memorable.
Why short? The shorter and the easier to remember, the less contacts and potential contacts will make mistakes (typos) when they search for you and the more likely they are to find your profile. A short URL is easy to remember, it’s easy to add to your marketing material
By default, a LinkedIn public profile link looks like this: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/first-lastname/24/9a5/766 Try to remember that one, spell it to a potential contact and have that contact type it without mistake.
LinkedIn allows you to chose a custom (also called vanity) URL, the URL looks like this: http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/yourname*.
Which one would you rather spell, print or type?
4-Websites
By default, LinkedIn adds “My website”, “My Blog” “Other” as the links to your websites or internet properties. LinkedIn also offers ways to customize the links. Use that opportunity to rename them, use your website name, your blog name. LinkedIn profiles are extremely well optimized for search engines, if you search your name, chances are, your LinkedIn profile will come at the top of the search.
As a bonus, renaming the links with the name of your website or blog will give them a lift in searches (SEO effect)
10 Things To Know About Liability In The Social Media World
With the explosion of websites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, in-house counsel should give careful consideration to the unique problems social media presents, how it affects the workplace, and how to address employees’ and third parties’ social media usage.
As with the rise of the Internet and blogs, existing employee and intellectual property issues play out in the social media world in sometimes surprising ways, creating new challenges and problems for in-house counsel. Social media has the capability to dramatically increase these problems and challenges by providing a much larger, well-connected audience. The following are some specific, brief considerations that in-house counsel should analyze and address with company employees.
1. Secrets are gone in a flash (or click).
2. Employee posts in social media may be protected speech.
3. Employee posts may subject the company to liability.
4. Employee posts may prompt federal administrative action.
5. Social media provides an exponentially bigger, real-time audience for traditional employee-relations problems.
6. Using social media as a recruiting tool can backfire.
7. Registering user names is a cost-effective, protective measure.
8. Implementing social media policies is becoming a best practice
9. The best defense is a good offense.
10. Social media adds litigation considerations.
Are You Afflicted With Social Media Proliferation?
Between Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube and other platforms, the average enterprise-class company has 178 corporate-owned social media accounts.
That’s according to a new report from Altimeter Group, which surveyed 140 companies with more than 1,000 employees. Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at Altimeter and the lead author of that report, says 178 are way too many, particularly because such accounts often lose steam after a while and go dormant.
“It’s just a poor customer experience, because it’s been abandoned,” he says.
It’s time to take a hard look at your company’s social media presence and pare down its accounts. A new Altimeter report offers an eight-point resource checklist to help.