LinkedIn just announced the release of a new tool designed to help people visualize their network. It’s called InMaps and here’s a brief excerpt from their announcement:
LinkedIn's new InMaps help people visualize their networks. Click here to see Jamie Turner's color-coded connections.
“InMaps is a great way to understand the relationships between you and your entire set of LinkedIn connections. With it you can better leverage your professional network to help pass along job opportunities, seek professional advice, gather insights, and more.
Here’s how it works: your map is color-coded to represent different affiliations or groups from your professional career, such as your previous employer, college classmates, or industries you’ve worked in. In my InMap, my LinkedIn colleagues are blue, while my former colleagues at Yahoo Analytics are pink and other at Yahoo are green and my Carnegie Mellon classmates are orange and tangerine.
Bigger names represent people who are the most connected within that specific cluster or group. When you click on a contact within a circle you’ll see their profile pop up on the right, as well as lines highlighting how they’re connected to your connections.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Your map is actually a view into how your professional world has been created over time. To get a sense of how that’s true, label each cluster (color) and explore your connections to see who are the major bridges on your map. You can use those insights to measure your own impact or influence, or create opportunities for someone else. So, you might see two distinct groups that you could introduce to become one. Or, you might leverage one person to connect them to someone else. See an area that doesn’t look like it is representative of your professional world? Fix it by adding the necessary connections.”
I took a spin through the InMap process and it’s neat device to visualize where your key connections have been made. It’s also a great way to see where you can strengthen your connections.
To see my InMap, just click Jamie Turner’s InMap and it’ll take you to a graphic outlining all my connections. You’ll also see a link so you can create your own InMap.
At this week’s Integrated Marketing Summit in Denver, Colorado, I had the opportunity to sit down with Mike O’Neil and Lori Ruff, the authors of “Rock the World with Your Online Presence.” Both Mike and Lori speak and travel relentlessly teaching others how to supercharge their online presence.
I had the opportunity to read through their book on my flight back from Denver and came across a chapter that outlined some of the applications LinkedIn has made available on their platform. If you’re interested in supercharging your LinkedIn profile, you’ll want to incorporate some of these applications into your individual profiles or into any of the groups you manage.
LinkedIn Events: If you find yourself involved with a lot of events, LinkedIn events is for you. It gives you the option to promote or advertise events to other LinkedIn users. “The product is still in development,” say Mike and Lori in their book. “But you should learn to use it now, so that as upgrades are made, you’ll be able to incorporate them into your regular routine more easily.”
SlideShare: This is one of the more popular applications that LinkedIn provides. If you haven’t checked out SlideShare, but sure to take a spin through the site. If you’re trying to position yourself as a though leader, you’ll want to upload your presentations to SlideShare so that people can see your thinking and incorporate your data into their own work (giving you credit where it’s due, of course). SlideShare also has a plug-in for Facebook.
Google Presentation: This is similar to SlideShare, Box and Huddle. According to Mike and Lori, “this application does not have the awesome Google power one might expect. However, there is one thing that it does have above and beyond all the rest: You can actually create a presentation in your LinkedIn account and insert video within it.”
Tripit: This application is designed mostly for business travelers. It lets you enter your travel schedule with a great level of detail (which requires you to visit the TripIt site directly). With this application, you can add connections and share travel information with them. This is really valuable when you want to keep abreast of the itineraries of business associates, or when you want to make plans to meet some of the connections you’ve made on LinkedIn as you travel to other cities.
Company BUZZ: This is a tool that lets you see what other people are saying about you, your company or your brand online. It grabs the information from the Twitter world and plunks it right down for you to check it out. In some ways, it’s similar to Google Alerts or TweetDeck.
Box.Net: You can use this application to share and collaborate on documents or PDFs. If you have a white paper, a brochure or some other document that you want to share, people can easily click on the document and download it right from within your LinkedIn profile or account.
Huddle Workspaces: This is an application that’s highly collaborative, just like Box.Net. They provide 1GB of space in the free package, which is more than enough room for most visitors. It also allows online editing of files, so you don’t have to have the standard word processing or spreadsheet applications on your computer.
WordPress: This is the world’s #1 blogging platform. If you have a WordPress blog and you’d like to incorporate it into your LInkedIn account, you can do so using this application. I use this application so that the 60 Second Marketer blog shows up on my personal LinkedIn page.
BlogLink Powered by TypePad: WordPress may the the world’s #1 platform, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other platforms, too. BlogLink supports TypePad, Moveable Type, Vox, Blogger, LiveJournal and many more.
ReadingLIst by Amazon: This is one of the more popular applications on LinkedIn. You can use it to put lists of books you’re reading (or simply recommending) to others. You can use it to promote business books that would be relevant to your business connections. Or you can use it to promote non-business books you’re reading, which helps give people a sense of who you are outside of the business world.
LinkedIn Polls: This can be a fun tool you can use to find out what people in your industry are thinking about and concerned about. When people come to your profile and answer the poll question, they can see the results of the poll. “The poll can stay up as long as you like,” say Mike and Lori, “although it’s good housekeeping to change it every couple of months at the least.”
Tweets: Are you interested in including your Tweets in your LinkedIn profile? Then Tweets is for you. The interface is pretty straightforward, providing a snapshot of the Tweets of our followers or the Tweets of your main Twitter account. From both of these tabs, you can update your Twitter status.
SAP Community Bio: Huh? What’s this doing in here? It seems as though it’s an application that belongs on the island of misfit toys. That’s not a slam against SAP, which provides some amazing enterprise solution software. It’s just that this application — which caters to SAP developers, analysts, consultants and administrators — would appeal to a very narrow audience, unlike the other applications.
That sums up the 13 LinkedIn applications you can use to become a LinkedIn rock star. If you’re interested in taking a deep dive into LinkedIn, be sure to buy Mike and Lori’s book, “Rock the World with Your Online Presence.”
Posted by Jamie Turner, Chief Content Officer, the 60 Second Marketer, the online magazine of BKV Digital and Direct Response. Click here to download a free chapter from Jamie’s book “How to Make Money with Social Media” which will be published by the Financial Times Press this fall.
By now, you’re probably already very familiar with all the great ways you can use LinkedIn for business. But if you’re like me, sometimes you could use a little reminder.
Click here to visit the LInkedIn Learning Center. It's a great way to learn more about using LinkedIn for business.
That’s why I was pleasantly surprised the other day when LinkedIn sent me an email reminding me of some of the great ways to use LinkedIn to generate leads.
Here’s what they told me:
Search for Leads
Look up and find high quality leads using Advanced Search. You can search by company, title, location and more to find exactly who you’re looking for. View Profiles
Research contacts by viewing profiles. Educate yourself by viewing backgrounds, shared contacts, and even their connections to help you find more leads. Follow Companies
Get the inside track by following companies of interest. Stay informed on the latest developments and business opportunities for companies you’re targeting. Join Groups
Engage in industry specific discussions by creating or joining a group. Post questions, start conversations, get answers and engage with prospective clients and customers. Help Leads Find You
Sometimes the easiest way to find new leads is to be found. Make sure your status is up to date and be sought after for your insights, thoughts and opinions.
Of course, one of the best places to learn more about LinkedIn is at the LinkedIn Learning Center. They answer just about any question you’d want to ask there.
As LinkedIn evolves, they’ll keep coming up with new and innovative ways to use it. But for now, these tips will keep most of us busy for quite some time.
Posted by Jamie Turner, Chief Content Officer, the 60 Second Marketer, the online magazine of BKV Digital and Direct Response
Recently, The 60 Second Marketer conducted a free webinar on Social Media. In the webinar, we discussed several of the new tools, tips and techniques people are using to help promote their products and/or services.
There are hundreds of different Social Media tools available, so it’s easy to get confused by all of them. One of the key concepts we discussed was how to categorize these tools so that they’re simpler and easier to use and understand.
There are three primary categories of Social Media — tools that help you network, tools that help you promote and tools that help you share content.
Here’s a quick rundown of what we consider to be the top 13 Social Media tools broken down by category:
Networking tools — These are tools that help you connect with customers and prospects:
• MySpace: Think of MySpace as a social media tool that’s a little like a music festival. There’s a lot of energy, a lot of passion and, unfortunately, a lot of noise. It’s great if you’re targeting the youth market.
• Twitter: Think of Twitter as a cocktail party. There are a lot of different conversations going on and you can move from one conversation to another conversation.
• Facebook: Facebook is like a pub. It’s a great place to meet people on a more casual basis and have relaxed, off-the-record conversations with the people you meet there.
• LinkedIn: Think of LinedIn as a trade show. It’s a little more professional than Facebook and you’ll want to meet and connect with people there in a more businesslike manner.
Promotion Tools — These are tools that help you promote content about your product or service:
• Flickr: A great place to upload photos of your most recent company parties, conventions or product launches. Not the most important tool in the world, but worth checking out.
• Podcasting: Don’t make the mistake of doing a podcast that just regurgitates your press releases. Make your podasts fun, interesting and relevant. Don’t waste your time if you’re just going to have the CEO ramble on about your latest new product launch.
• YouTube: What can we say about YouTube that you don’t already know?
• HowCast: Ahhhhh, here’s something that’s interesting. HowCast feeds “How To” videos to a growing community. Perfect if your product requires a video tutorial.
• TubeMogul: Do you have videos you want to share with the world? Then go to Tubemogul, where you can upload your video once and let them send it out to YouTube, MySpace, Vidder and a gazillion other video sharing services.
Sharing tools — These are tools that help you share content that would be helpful to your prospects or customers:
• Google: You already know about Google, but did you know about Google Alerts? Just plug in a keyword and Google will send you an email a day that lists when that keyword was discussed in a blog. Perfect if you’re interested in staying on-top of things. Also great if you’re a big brand and you want to respond to negative comments about your product or service.
• Blogs: We’re going to do an entire webinar on blogs and blogging in the coming weeks, but for now, remember this — don’t do one unless you can write something relevant at least 4 times a week.
• Article Marketer: Do you have articles that you’d like published around the web? Then check out Article Marketer. We haven’t officially used it, but at first glance, it looks like a very useful tool.
• Digg, Del.icio.us and other bookmarking tools: As you know, these tools allow you to tag articles and other content that you think might be useful for others. We’ve found that it’s best not to abuse these tools or to try to milk them. That’s just abusing the system.
Are there important tools that we’ve missed? Which tools do you use? Share your thoughts and comments on them with our readers!
The 60 Second Marketer is a free online magazine brought to you by BKV Interactive and Direct Response. We try to provide quick updates on the newest tools, tips and techniques in marketing. We also try to accomplish that with a dose of humor or levity. As it turns out, we're pretty good at providing tools, tips and techniques, but we're not actually all that funny. Which would explain why people don't call us "funny" as much as they call us "laughable." Bummer. Our offices, for those of you who are interested, are located in Atlanta (404-233-0332) and Kansas City (913-648-8333). We also have offices on Bora Bora, but they don't have the phones installed yet.
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