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If you walk into a business event with a thousand people and you stand in a corner the entire night not engaging with anyone, the event is useless to you. Same with social media platforms. You only get the value back that you put into the participation. The input on my concern about Linkedin’s future has created a massive response in the past week. More than 30 comments in my Linkedin post a nd a couple hundred direct messages and emails. All of the input is consistent. While comments range from power users who say the will continue to be power users, to those that say they are leaving Linkedin altogether, but the consistently say that the level of SPAM is increasing, which makes the platform more difficult to use. So today I’d like to talk about techniques to eliminate the SPAM and make Linkedin useful for you. If you walk into a business event with a thousand people and you stand in a corner the entire night not engaging with anyone, the event is useless to you. Same with social med...

This is a real problem that could damage the effectiveness of Linkedin and maybe they should start thinking about what to do about it. Last week I published an audio interview with IdaRose Sylvester about her doubts about the value of Linkedin . She echoed some of the concerns that I expressed although I'm not about to give up on the platform as yet. She introduced me to Todd Herschberg, a former Linkedin Open Networker (LION), who she said might have had a different perspective. Not quite. In fact he agrees with her more than me. In this 20-minute interview, we got even deeper into the problems of Linkedin which focus primarily on spam and fake profiles that are proliferating on the platform. This is a real problem that could damage the effectiveness of Linkedin and maybe they should start thinking about what to do about it.  Here's the interview.   Related articles Linkedin Ads? LinkedIn Is Not Facebook, But It Clearly Wants To Be And It's Turning Away Users I...

The rising SPAM flow in Linkedin is causing some of the more valuable members to flee to other platforms. A couple of weeks ago I provided my input on the benefits and weaknesses of Linkedin and promised insights from others. The first to respond was IdaRose Sylvester of Silicon Valley Link. IdaRose is an incredible international networker, an angel investor, former analyst and business consultant and is exactly the kind of person you would expect to be a power user of Linkedin... but she is not. And for good reason.  As I mentioned in my post, the rising SPAM flow in Linkedin is causing some of the more valuable members to flee to other platforms. We recorded the interview. Check it out.   Related articles Is Linkedin a valuable business tool or a spam bucket? One man's view of the state of Linkedin LinkedIn Promises Less Email Spam

We are starting a new series today discussing Linkedin , looking at where it is as a social network , its strengths and weaknesses and how to best use it as a business and individual. Linkedin continues to grow in popularity as a business tool for finding talent, business networking and B2B marketing . The bad news is that it looks like it’s hitting a plateau. At the end of 2012, Linkedin was growing at almost 100 percent quarter to quarter. That boosted its stock stratospherically and with good reason. As of the end of last quarter that growth had slowed to less than 35 percent and continues to drop. That growth decline looks like it began with the steady introduction of marketing tools, specifically lead generation, near the end of 2012 and took a major plunge with the launch of their expanded marketing platform in February. I’ve been hearing about the rapid expansion of spam in Linkedin f or several months (We plan a live discussion of the topic of Linkedin spam soon, so watch ...

A couple of months ago I published the results of a survey we did about trusted communications and discovered that corporations, in electronics B2B industries, are more trusted than journalism. That ignited something of a firestorm in my inboxes, both pro and con.  The conversation evolved into a proposed panel discussion that we concluded this morning, involving Lou Hoffman of The Hoffman Agency , tech journalist John Blyler , and Bernard Murphy of Atrenta . We think it's worth a listen.   Related articles Journalism at a crossroads and corporations are a valid direction

Don Tuite formally announced his retirement on April 17 in Electronic Design magazine and it is a bitter sweet moment. Don and I converse regularly on social media and we both live in Redwood City so he's not leaving my life at the moment, but I remember when he first came to Electronic Design after many years as a working engineer.  We had a couple of phone conversations about clients and stories he was working on when we both discovered that we were in the same town. From then on, Don had an open invitation to come down, have coffee, walk in our nearby park, and even take one of our team on a flight in his private plane (which she called the thrill of a lifetime since she had always wanted to become a private pilot). The conversations about technology, politics and social change is what I really enjoyed about Don's visits and calls. We never stayed on the subject very long. Once we got the business done it was on to other topics. It was the discussion of how media was ...

I've written on this subject before but it bears some repeating. Explaining what you do, who you are and how you do what you do is not as important as being able to explain why you exist as a company. That seems fairly simple but I find very few companies that can do that well, if at all. Of course you know why your company exists. You've been eating, sleeping and bathing in the reason for a long time. To you it is fairly obvious now. The problem is, you are not explaining well enough it to the market. Before anyone will care about the who, what and how, you have to explain the why in terms they understand. We've been working with several companies dealing with this issue. They are not seeing the sales or leads they expected from their program. They blame the sales automation program, or the marketing department or "the stupid customers." In reality, when you take a look at their content, they are ready to work with people who have already bought their product or ...

A couple of weeks ago I was tooting our horn about winning a Customer Experience Recognition Award (CERA) at Information Development World (IDW), but a new video interview popped up last week from the conference that I thought rated another blow of the horn.   I'm being interviewed by Al Martine, Director of Operations & Business Development at TechWhirl and the manager of the awards program.  We talk about the unusual nature of the program at first, but then we get into why the project that won the award is important. There is a serious impediment to growth across all organizations that comes from the legendary "but we've never done it that way" crowd, but also from the attitude of "this is how we've always done it" crowd. They aren't always the same group of people.  The team at the Cultivate the Call  had to overcome both in bringing the program to life.  That took some guts. Here's the interview.  ...

Last week I had a brief but productive conversation with Jill Rowley about content and social selling and she said something very profound.  She pointed out that her driving force, social selling, is still in its “1.0 stage” and remains largely undefined and that content marketing , which should be entering the 2.0 stage still remains largely undefined.  that is problematic for her because sharing good content is crucial to success in social selling. That’s why I was extremely excited when I received an invitation to be an official participant, as an influencer, at Information Development World coming to San Jose, October 22-24, organized by Content Rules and the Content Wrangler .  This is the first big step toward making content development a serious profession. I have an ongoing battle with both marketers and journalists about what constitutes content development.  Both consider it to be just another arm of marketing.  In truth, that is what much of...

Last week I had the distinct pleasure of discovering Jill Rowley, who is known by many people as a #socialselling guru.  Until I listened to her on the #FridayHangout (another weekly event I am growing addicted to) I had never heard of her.  By the time the 45-minute session was over I came to a new appreciation of smart people in sales.  There were many high points of the discussion, but when she said, “Sales people need to stop selling and start serving” their customers,” I actually stood up from my chair and shouted “YES!” while pumping my fist in the air. The bulk of the conversation was around the need of sales professionals to be communication hubs for customers, not just a person pushing a product.  This philosophy has made her an in-demand thought leader in new media and a very unpopular employee .  That’s to be expected especially since the more established a company is, the less likely they know how to communicate in the 21st Century. Jil...

I'm going to save you thousands of dollars on a common marketing practice. And you probably won't like what I have to tell you. I'm going to save you thousands of dollars on a common marketing practice. And you probably won't like what I have to tell you. If you are like most companies, especially young start ups, there comes a moment that you believe you need to let your customer base know about your latest business deal, technology breakthrough, or product update that is industry leading and the quote says your “CEO is pleased to announce it”. The only problem; you spent your entire marketing budget on a trade show booth and brochures, so you don't have the money to put on a real marketing program to reach your customer base. That's the moment that you decide to put out a press release. My 20 years of experience writing and distributing press releases tells me this is what you can expect: It will take weeks to get it ready to go, and you will spend 90 percent...

Five years ago I threw out a statement in a blog about how Facebook gets content, that caused a bit of a stir.  I said, “ Advertising doesn't work the way you think it does.”  No one commented on the focus of the post, just on that statement.  They didn’t like it.  They were mostly advertising people and a few B2B marketers .  A few things have happened in 2014 that makes me want to restate my position (not change it) and get a little deeper. Advertising does not work the way you think it does, especially in the 21st Century .   In the “Facebook Fraud” video, by Derek Muller of the science blog Veritasium, Muller makes the claim that pretty much all the business engagement you get from Facebook is bogus.  For the most part, he’s right because most people use Facebook as though it were a magic marketing box.  They believe that all they have to do is plug in pictures and content about their product and services and the world will be be...

For about 5 years I’ve been following a half dozen surveys about the investment in social media.  All of them say the same thing: Spending on social marketing is up and continues to rise.   Integration of social marketing into the overall program is lacking. (According to the 2013 Duke University CMO Survey , only 3.4 percent of B2B companies claiming their social media activity is integrated into their current programs.)  Less than 30 percent of marketing executives actually ask for, much less use the data gathered from their social marketing effort. Marketing executives are finding it difficult to quantify the results But one study I found this month brought up something very interesting that demonstrate why the final three bullets are problematic.  The customer focus is completely off. Engage Sciences, a company providing social analytics services, discovered that most companies put 75 Most effort focused on new customers percent of their resources developing...

Content creation is a big problem for modern corporations.  Not only is it hard to find people inside of the company walls to create it, making it effective is almost impossible.  Sure you can publish something that gets lots of views, but most of those views go to spider bots, not human beings and when you look at the time spent by actual people, finding them spending more than a minute on your site is like finding gold in the kitchen sink.  But there are ways to fix that. For the next couple of weeks we'll be sharing some approaches that will increase the involvement (also known as engagement) of your audience.  Some of these (like today's) may seem counterintuitive, but in the way the 21st century media works, it is crucial to learn how to create content engagingly.  Today's tip is: Pursue brevity Online content tends to be interruptible even when it is great content.  You have about 10 seconds to grab their attention until the next ema...

Media houses assume they are still trusted and that their move to “communities” filled with sponsor-developed content has not hurt that position. That assumption is misplaced. It’s time to wrap up this series on truth and trust in content.  Over the past few posts I’ve talked about how truth appears differently to people, based on their personal perspective, and to report truth you need to view it from multiple angles.  I’ve also showed how modern media lacks the resources to gather that information adequately and how corporations, once dedicated to limiting that access through their marketing, now find it in their best interest to increase the flow of trusted information.   Let me set the table. Content marketing is not SEO . Tara Meehan’s post in iMedia Connection demonstrated how companies measure social on SEO metrics of clicks and unique visitors in the form of likes and followers, neither of which has the value they did 5 years ago.  This decreased value ...