I want to tell you about a great Social Network, Pinterest, that is starting to get a lot of traction. In fact, Time Magazine named Pinterest one of the five best social media sites of 2011, along with Klout and Google-Plus. I can see why. It is downright addicting.

Pinterest is kind of a cross between the words Pin and Interest because what you do is “pin”  images of your favorite foods, clothes, places, designs, and everything else, to online boards that you create. When you find something of interest in a blog post, you can “pin” it to one of your boards. If you see something you like on Pinterest, that someone else has pinned, you can “repin” it.

Pinterest came into it’s own in the midwest by women planning weddings and doing crafts. They would use it to make wish lists of beautiful things. It spread from there. This past summer more men jumped in giving it a dose of Testosterone!

When you pin something, it is strongly encouraged that you find and credit the original source. I just heard from one of my peeps who writes a food blog that her peanut butter and jelly french toast photo was pinned on Pinterest and it resulted in her traffic zooming to over 6,000 hits in just one day.

Because it is newish, and does not have as big a community as a Facebook or You Tube, you have a much better chance of something going viral and bringing traffic to your site. It is also a great way for you to communicate your ideas to a designer. Whether organizing a wedding, renovation, or a website brand and design, share your Pinterest boards with your professional to easily communicate your look, feel, and ideas without the messy miscommunication words can have when translating design ideas.

You have to be careful when you go on Pinterest. Last Sunday, when I should have been writing the Just a Digital Minute, I got on Pinterest and two hours flew by. I had the feeling that someone needed to stop me. “Step away from the computer, Judi.”

The images that are presented to you when you go to Pinterest are somewhat determined by the people you follow.You can start by following me and other people you may know but don’t stop there. Check out the boards of people who pins you like and you will most likely find you love everything they do.  But do it at your own risk, and don’t say I didn’t warn you!

The tip today solves a terribly annoying problem, how to input the information from all those business cards into your contact on your phone/computer. Business cards are still the most practical way of exchanging contact information in real life and yet we want that information to be available at our finger tips from our phones and computers. After a networking event, most of us have a hard time making ourselves enter in all the data from the cards we collected, much less, follow up with people we have met.

There is now a fantastic and fun solution. CardMunch is a free iPhone app (Blackberry and Android versions to be coming soon) that will process your business cards in a matter of minutes. Just hold your phone over a card. When you see the card information come into focus, tap the screen and it will take a photo of the card and send it to be transcribed, right into your contact list. You will see the the image of the card photo as well as all of the relevant contact information in the appropriate fields in your contact list.

How does it get it right? Instead of using an optical scanning service, CardMunch uses a real humans to transcribe each business card and verify the accuracy of the transcription before returning them to your mobile phone as a contact. You can imagine that process sounds a bit spendy and in fact, Card Munch use to cost 2.99 for the app and 25 cents for each entered card, but a year ago, in a genius move, LinkedIn bought CardMunch and now offers it at no charge. This brilliant acquisition also allows us to have instant easy access to our contacts’ full LinkedIn profile information. And do you want some icing on that cake? With a tap of a button you can send the contact an e-mail or an invitation to connect via LinkedIn. How great is that?

The other night I was at a party and some friends were complaining about some Facebook apps that post things on yours and your friend’s Facebook sites without your exact permission. It is enough to drive a person crazy. But not to worry. You can take care of it through your privacy settings so that you don’t annoy everyone.

Log-in to your Facebook account and go to your profile. There is a blue bar at the top of the page. Your profile photo and name is on the right hand side of the bar and to the left of that you will see the word home. Click “Home” to get a drop-down menu and select “Privacy Settings”.

One of the selections on the page is called “Apps and Websites” If you select the option to “Edit Settings” you can control what gets shared by your games and apps.

Find the option, “Apps You Use” and select “Edit Settings”. This will show all of the apps you have installed over your years of being on Facebook.

First, you may want to go through rather long list and remove any apps or games you no longer use. Now is the time to get rid of Farmville. Just click the x by the app or game and verify that you want to remove it. Gone!

Then you can go through and change settings on the other offenders. Take Spotify, for example. If you do not want Spotify to notify people of the songs that you are listening to, select “Edit” and when your selections come up, change “Who can see posts and activity from this app on Facebook?” to “Only Me”

Another thing that you want to look at is the setting that says, This app can: One of the choices is: “Post to Facebook as me”. This setting allows the app permission to post status messages, notes, photos and videos on your behalf, unless you remove that ability from the app by clicking “Remove” next to that option.

Now don’t go all crazy with this. There are some apps that you want to give permission to post for you. I use Hootsuite to post status updates and if I remove that option for Hootsuite to post for me, I would not get my status updates published.

I hope you just take a minute and clean up your privacy settings. It doesn’t take long and it can get rid of those pesky irritating issues you have been putting up with for too long.

Most of you know, I am a big proponent for getting yourself a WordPress website. If you have a business, it is essential to have a place of your own, where people can find out exactly what you do and why they should work with you. If you don’t have a job, but are looking, then it can be a great way to set yourself apart from your competition and showcase who you are and what you do in a way a resume can never do. But if you haven’t got a web presence yet or, if you do, but want to have another place online to put your profile out there so that you or your business comes up in a Google search, check out About dot me.

About.me lets you quickly build simple and visually elegant splash pages that point visitors to your content from around the web. It is an easy and free way to have a web presence, where people can find you or your business and where to connect with you on various social media sites. If you already have a website, it is still a nice thing to have because it can come up in a Google search and connect with a link back to your website. Take a look at my About.me profile and then give it a try yourself.

About.me provides an easy interface with several templates and examples to help you with ideas. Upload a background and a photo, write your bio, add your social media sites and you are good to go. I’d love to see what you come up with!

The new Timeline feature in facebook is now available. I had heard that come mid-December, facebook was just going to make the change whether we wanted it or not. But, this morning my profile was sporting the same old look. I decided that it was time to take matters into my own hands and go ahead and change to the new Timeline before the change was thrust upon me. I have to say It is pretty cool! I love being able to scroll to a different year and see what I was up to then. It is like a scrapbook of my life. But this tip is on how to add a cover photo. Oh and by the way, you will have seven days to work on your new Timeline before it goes public so that you can set the privacy or take things off. I liked mine ok as it was so I went ahead and hit make public now.

The first thing you will be asked to do when you enable your Timeline is to choose a cover photo. This is the large photo that will appear at the top of your Timeline page. According to facebook,

 

“We’ve found that people have a better experience viewing your timeline when they see a cover that is as unique and individualized as you are…. An easy way to ensure your cover image is unique, is to choose an image from your life, like a photo from a wedding, day at the beach, or birthday party. If you want to use a photo to show solidarity or express support for a cause or organization, you can still post a status or a photo and feature it on your timeline.”

Your Cover should be at least 720 pixels wide. If it’s any narrower, you’ll be asked to select a different image. I used a photo 750 wide by 315 tall. You will have to carefully selct this photo so that it crops well to this short wide dimension. Your original profile picture will be still be there but it will be resized to 125px by 125px.

I chose a family photo of myself with my five sisters. Facebook asks that you not use the cover for “commercial” purposes and there is some question as to what that means. I think it is fine if you have something coming up that you want to announce that it makes sense to utilize this space. I do really hate to see someone’s profile/timeline look like a business Page. My preference is to use your personal facebook timeline/profile to let people get to know you better and I don’t mind an occasional biz thing coming to my updates but I want to hear about who and what else they have going on.

What do you think about the business/personal facebook conundrum?

I have to admit that I am not the most diligent LinkedIn user I know. That title would have to go to my friend, Dorothéa Bozicolona-Volpe, and yes she is as exotic as her name implies. Dorothéa has been giving some great advice on the importance of LinkedIn to young people who are in the job market. Her advice is also applicable to all of us.

If you aren’t on LinkedIn please get yourself an account today. Fill out your profile completely to include adding your current and past positions with the care you would take developing your resume. Be sure to add a head shot that is attractive and professional. It needs to make you look attractive. By that I do not mean a glamor shot, I mean a head shot that looks like someone that you would want to have a chat with. Smile.

You should then go through your contacts and start adding connections. I currently have 462 LinkedIn connections which according the LinkedIn, links me to over 4,312,936 professionals. That is astounding.

What I have not been so great about is  leveraging these connections by asking people to write recommendations for me. I have only eight. According to Dorothéa getting recommendations while they are hot is one of the most important parts of using LinkedIn. People trust that these recommendations are are real so they hold more weight than a testimonial you put on your website.

Dorothéa’s brilliant advice is to make a habit of asking for a LinkedIn recommendation immediately after you have done work for someone or are leaving a job. She suggests that you go so far as to write up a couple of paragraphs for the person about what you did for them and what they said to you about what you did.

Ask for the recommendation in person if possible, and then followup with an email which includes the link to LinkedIn and your sample write up. Tell the person that you have provided a little write up, as a time saver for them and they are welcomed to use all or none of it. Doing this will increase the likelihood of them completing the task.

Getting in a habit of doing this at the beginning of your career will help you to develop a most valuable network. And if you are so inclined, I’d love a LinkedIn recommendation from you!

Today, this is a twofer. I want to take a minute or two to find out more about you and what your biggest challenges are and….

I also want to demonstrate how you can make a survey yourself using Polldaddy.  Before you take my survey I am going to demonstrate several ways of getting your Polldaddy survey to your peeps. But, please only take the survey once!

The first sharing option,  good for placing in an e-mail or to your social media update is to post a link. Or… by golly, Polldaddy even provided me with a QR code that is readable with any QR scanner!

And you can take the survey right here on my website where you will find I have embedded it into this post.

How You Can Make Your Own Polldaddy Survey

Polldaddy is a great application to use to get data on a myriad of subjects in a variety formats. The free version allows you to make surveys of up to ten questions and you can receive up to 200 responses per month. The free version should be good for most of us which is a good thing since the upgrade version that gives you long surveys and a gajillion responses is $200.00 per year.

So lets just get started with a free account by navigating to Polldaddy. After creating your account, it will give you the opportunity to go to your Dashboard and Create a New… whatever.

You have a choice of creating a survey, poll, quiz or rating scale. If you choose survey, it will ask you to give your survey a title.  And then it will go to a screen where you select from a variety of style formats that your survey when completed can be presented. If you choose one that you don’t like you can easily change the format or create your own from scratch or by using one that is provided to you, as a base for your own CSS.

Next you are ready to select your questions. You can ask for the usual name, address, phone number and demographic info. You can ask people to upload files or to give you their web address in a hyperlinkable fashion. You can create multiple choice questions where people can choose one or many items that you list. It also give you the ability to add a series of questions with a likert scale rating, you know that one, the five point scale, the from ‘never’ to ‘always’ type of thing.

When you are finished asking the questions, you can choose how and where you would like to post the the survey for your respondents. As I showed above, Polldaddy gives you a lot of choice as to how to share your survey with others.

After you have enough surveys or enough time has elapsed (you have your choice about this too!) you can go to the results section of Polldaddy to get your survey results in several formats. It will give you the ability to see each respondents data or to see it aggregated.

It’s pretty easy. I promise.

Dan Greenfield of Listen Interactive put on an event called the Social Media Makeover Forum as a part for Digital Atlanta week. I was on one of three panels that gave one of  three local Atlanta Companies the opportunity to get  some pointers from what has been referred to as “some of the savviest social media gurus out there”. I am very honored to have been chosen to be in this group which included others from such companies as UPS, CBeyond, Arby’s, ING, Turner Entertainment, Fifth Group, Network Solutions and Constant Contact. 

The panel I was on included:

Shashi Bellamkonda (@shashib) – Director of Social Media, Network Solution
Michael Erickson ( @FifthGrouper) – Director of Marketing, Fifth Group Restaurants
Lanelle Henderson - Regional Development Director, Constant Contact

The company that is the focus of our panel is a local online Real Estate Brokerage, ClickScape, started three years ago by President and co founder, David Lightburn( @D-Lite). Here is what David said about the reasons he applied to have a Social Media Makeover.

Company Profile:

Clickscape: Real Agents, Real Results, Real Savings. Buy a home with Clickscape and we’ll share our commission with you. 
Clickscape is an Atlanta-based real estate brokerage focused on better real estate search and service. As a company of Realtors, we work for our buyer-clients to protect their interests and investment while getting them the best deal possible. Our in-house agents are called Client Advocates and are committed to providing excellent customer service. Our Advocates are salaried employees—not salespeople hungry for a commission. In fact, we share the commission we receive from the seller with you so that we stay focused on representing your best interests and not on pressuring you to buy a particular property.

What David Lightburn Says:

We generate fresh content through our blog and disperse it through Facebook and Twitter. We tweet out and post cool and interesting real estate related news from other sites and bloggers. Our biggest challenges are personally engaging our audience on a one-on-one basis as well as building up our fans and followers. We’ve been using social media since the inception of the company, but have been pushing hard over the past 12 months or so to grow our social media presence through more consistency, but we have seen very little growth in our Twitter Followers and our Facebook Fans. I’m not sure what else we could be doing to increase our reach. Also, we haven’t had any new business (that I am aware of) come through social media engagement. I am optimistic that we can be successful through social media because we have a very interesting subject matter and put out quality content, but I’m very frustrated with our inability to get anyone to notice as of yet. I’m not sure what we are doing wrong!

In summary,  David says he wants: A social media strategy that will help us grow our audience and personally engage with users on a one-on-one basis to generate both business and general awareness of our company.

The following questions will be posed to the panel by Listen Interactive founder/owner,  Dan Greenfield. My notes are below each item.

Brand Building  – How can Clickscape better communicate their mission and use technology to change the way people buy and sell homes? How can they convince buyers and sellers that they have a better way of doing real estate?

Although I have a background in Real Estate Development,  I found it difficult to see exactly what the difference in this agency was than other companies that all have online search capabilities. They hide their unique selling proposition on an interior page. I think the best statement is the following:

No Contract, No Obligation, No Cost.

This needs to be front and center on the first page of their website, and then it needs to be explained.  Us — Them. When you go to their site it should be very clear that they are not your Old School Real Estate Company. Many of their prospects would be people who have little or no experience with Real estate Agents before so their message needs to be more than we are not them, since these people have not experienced the other type of agent. They appear to be making an effort to educate their visitors that there are a lot of bad real estate agents with their clever Horror Story campaign. However, it is still unclear how exactly they are not going to end up doing the same types of things.

Reputation Management – How can Clickscape use social media to build trust and change people’s negative perceptions of real estate agents — who according to David –are ranked with lawyers and used car salesmen when it comes to trustworthiness?

Building Know Like and Trust online is a process that is easier accomplished with a face on the company’s Social Media. Michael Erickson does this very well for Fifth Group by tweeting as @5thGrouper. He is interacting with people both professionally and personally on twitter and it is easy to “Know Like and Trust”  him which then transfer to the company he represents.

Each company must deal with the issue of how they present a human face to their Social Media presence.

Authenticity vs. Promotion – How does Clickscape promote their products while building trust/deeper connection and maintaining the integrity of their brand and their authenticity?

Currently, nearly all of the outgoing messages from ClickScape on Twitter and Facebook and even the blog are about them or presenting information which they are doing a fairly good job at. What they are missing is the interaction component which is a tough jump for companies to make since it seems as if it is not “business-like”. What I mean is that the majority  of their Tweets should be about other people including interactions that don’t seem to be at related to their brand. I suggest that they either start or get active on a Real Estate Tweet Chat and develop a presence as an accessable expert  “go to” company in the business.

Another idea is to have a question an answer format for their blog where people send in their questions and they answer them in a short, fun video letting your companies personality, knowledge and trust show through.

Increase Awareness and Engagement – How can Clickscape generate greater interaction and integrate the pieces of their strategy to form better online connections with prospects?

1.  To get more followers you can use a program such as Tweepi. It allows you to find other Twitter users even your competitors, and see into their list of  people that they follow and that follow them. It then allows you to see characteristics of each of those people and choose whether to follow them or not.Go through this process and follow about 250 people each week. Thirty to fifty percent of the people you follow will then follow you back. Give them a couple of weeks and you can then go in and unfollow the ones that did not follow you back.
2. A great way to get more exposure and targeted Twitter followers is to become a regular participant of one or more Twitter Chats. I am a regular on #BlogChat which meets on Twitter at 9 PM EST on Sunday nights.  I am sure there must be some Real Estate chats and if not you can start one.

Measurability – How do you measure the impact of Clickscape’s social media activity and track where leads are coming from? How do better measure ROI?

Their worry about the  main measurement of whether business is coming in through their Social Media efforts is misplaced at this stage of  the growth of their business. Even for SEO you have to get any eyeballs on the site, and have people linking to their content and sharing their content. Their first effort should be on creating great ad frequest content for their blog which shows who they are and what they are about by the types of posts they write. In the old days we told people who we are now we show them through our writing on our websites/blogs. While they are building up their blog content, which will continue to generate visitors with each post having the ability to come up in a Google search, they need to be generating more followers to their site and their social media platforms.

I recommend you sign up for a free account on Klout  which will give you one metric for the measurement of network reach.  Sprout Social is another site which will give you some heavy weight tools for a reasonable price integrating all of your social sites.

The event was well attended and everyone of the companies and the attendees got a great deal for being a part of the Social Media Makeover Forum. I believe Dan is going to make it a regular happening here in Atlanta!

If you are a Facebook power-user, you will certainly want to jump on this. Now you can use a new Social Backup service, from SOS Online Backup, to backup all of your Facebook data. If you’re like most Facebook users, you have updated, uploaded, and shared important media and content. Should anything happen to the security of your Facebook account, you will want to have a backup.

The new app, from SOS Online Backup, allows you to back up your data right from Facebook. The backup is free up to 5GB, and you can choose to backup all or just some of your data to include wall posts, messages, information about your friends, and your photo albums.

It is perfect for users who are primarily concerned about the availability of uploaded photos that may no longer exist on their desktops. You can also use SOS Social Backup to restore your profile from a previous version, which is useful in the event your account is compromised and then recovered, as well as see what your profile looked like during a backup point.

Users of SOS Social Backup can also convert friends information into .vcf Outlook contact files. There is one catch to this. Your friends have to have selected the privacy setting on their e-mail information that allows their friends to download their contact information. This was a feature Facebook added this summer, but people are unlikely to even know about this setting, much less have selected it. So too bad if you want to add your friends to your contact list. Facebook has us over a barrel, but is making it seem like it is up to your friends.

According to SOS Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Ken Shaw, backup services for Gmail and Twitter will be available from SOS Social Backup soon.

I have been asked to be on a panel of “experts”  who will provide a Social Media Makeover for an Atlanta business  this fall.   The SMB Social Media Makeover Forum  will be part of Digital Atlanta 2011  – a week long (November 7-11) calendar of events that will focus on the digital and social media scene in Atlanta. Last year’s inaugural celebration attracted more than 3,000 people including business owners, entrepreneurs and professionals from various industries, non-profits and educational institutions. Organizers expect an even bigger turnout this year.

Dan Greenfield of Listen Interactive  has put together this makeover event which will take place on November 8th.  To start building some buzz for the event, Dan has asked his panel of experts the following questions.  I thought I would share my answers to these three questions with you.

1. What is the biggest lesson you have learned from doing social media?
2. What do you think is the most common social media mistake that most newbies commit?
3. What is your best makeover tip for a small company (with limited funds) looking to get more fans on Facebook or followers on Twitter?

What is the biggest lesson you have learned from doing social media?

I have learned the power these tools offer.  We are living in an amazing time where each and every business has the ability to get their message, products, services, out to people who are seeking them locally or worldwide, even on a very small budget. What is possible today is unprecedented in that before, small businesses were limited by not being able to afford the amount of advertising, PR, or Tradeshow presence needed to reach even a fraction of their niche. Using social media in conjunction with a content management website has allowed me to develop a strong reputation and following that has translated into finding my “right” clients and having as much business as I want. My simple strategy has been to use my WordPress website with a blog as the hub of my marketing efforts. I am consistent in adding frequent free, informative content to my website and interacting with people there. I then use e-mail marketing, Twitter and Facebook as well as strategic off line activities to  engage with people and build a community. My website is structured to appeal to my “right” clients. I give them the information they need and if they need me to help them I have clearly defined my services so that people who visit my website feel like they know me, and know what I do and whether they are a fit to work with me. When these tools are used strategically, in conjunction with each other magic can happen.

What do you think is the most common social media mistake that most newbies commit?

The most common mistake is the “all about us”  syndrome. In order to really grown your brand with Social Media you must engage with people in a way that does not feel salesy. I believe a 80/20 rule is helpful.  80% about interacting with others; tweeting and retweet their posts and tweets, responding to people’s questions about your brand, making comments on their blogs, taking part in Twitter chats and generally participating in a personal way with your interactions online. This builds up a great deal of good will and you develop a strong following of online friends who are big supporters and they will return the favor when you post important info that you want to be shared.

What is your best makeover tip for a small company (with limited funds) looking to get more fans on Facebook or followers on Twitter?

Twitter Tip:

On Twitter, I would first make sure I had a great bio and start posting interesting information and connecting with people I knew were on Twitter and knew me. Next,  I would use Tweepi  to look up people that are friends or competitors in your niche who are very active on Twitter. I would then look at the list of their followers or the people they follow. I would follow a couple of hundred of those people. 40% may follow you back.  I would wait a couple of weeks and use Tweepi to clean out people that did not follow you back since Twiiter won’t let you get your ratio of the number of people you follow to the number of people that follow you back get too far out of balance. Keep this up for a month or two as you are also continuing to have good information and connections with your twitter followers. People are more likely to follow you back when they see you are for real and are tweeting about things they are interesting in and not spamming or pushing out automated tweets.

Facebook Tip,

This is definitely a “Do As I Say Not As I Do” tip. As a small business,  I have to juggle my various social media and marketing activities within the time available and also be able to get my client work done.  In order to decide where to spend your limited time,  assess where you will get the biggest bang for your buck,  time wise and concentrate your efforts there.  In my case, Twitter has been the place that I  have found effective in creating relationships with people that are gatekeepers and referral sources for me. A lot of my clients are new to Social Media so may not yet be on twitter but neither are they on Facebook pages.  If Facebook is more pertinent to your niche then I you may want to take following advice.

Instead of automating your Facebook Page entries using an RSS feed, I suggest adding your posts  to your Facebook Page by hand. Write something  personal to introduce each post from your blog and add other posts that are not on your blog.  People are much more willing to engage with your content when it has that personal touch.  To get more likes, comments and interaction on your page, ask for and answer questions, hold a contest, invite interaction in some clever way pertinent to your brand or niche.

Your Turn

How would you answer these three questions? I would love to hear your favorite makeover tips.