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What's new in LinkedIn: Twitter & Templates

Twitter Feed

If you haven't checked your LinkedIn profile or updated it in awhile, you may want to click on the "Edit Profile" link and see the new "Twitter" field.  This allows you to have a link to your Twitter home page on your profile.  You can also update you LinkedIn status with all Twitter messages or just those that you flag with the hashtag "#in".  Cool, huh!

Group & Subgroup Goodies

If you are managing a group in LinkedIn and you have grown a decent sized group, you may want to form some subgroups.  This works great for chapters or special interest groups within your main group.  Just check the menu options under "Manage" in your main group. 

Message Templates

Templates are a great way to automate your own custom messages to to group members, those you decline and those who apply for group membership. Here is a screen shot of the Manage Message Template area:

EBay sponsors free Wi-Fi on Delta Flights

Now you can fly high and stay in touch, and for a limited time you can do it for free courtesy of eBay. Enjoy free Wi-Fi Internet access on one of over 1,000 daily Delta flights using your laptop or PDA from November 24-30.

In-flight Internet access will be available across on Delta's domestic fleet of more than 300 aircraft in 2009 through their relationship with Gogo® In-flight Internet Access. To see which aircraft are currently supported, learn more.

Google Sponsors Free Wi-Fi at 47 Airports in US

You may have heard about Boingo’s recent partnership with Google to provide complimentary Wi-Fi access through January 15, 2010, in 47 airports across the US, including 26 Boingo locations.

If you find yourself in a participating airport and would like to capitalize on Google’s generosity, please be sure to visit the login web page directly and follow the instructions. If you click “Login” on the Boingo software from one of these hotspots, you will bypass this complimentary offer.

Here is a list of participating airports:

Microsoft gives free copies of Windows 7

Through its Community Connections program, Microsoft is giving 2 Free not-for-resale copies of Windows 7 to associations that host a Windows 7 event for their members as well as providing $125 towards the cost of the event expenses.  More info at www.mscommunityconnections.com or 1-888-834-8564.

Social Media Presentation

I recently gave a presentation on Social Media entitled "Rowing Harder with a Little Help from your Social Network", relating the fact that in today's economy we need a network to help ease the pain of working harder.  This was presented at the National Society of Professional Engineers Conference to the SSEC group in St. Louis, MO, July 2009.  A few have asked me to share the presentation slides, so here they are.

Rowing Harder Social Media NSPE

H1N1 Flu Virus (Swine Flu) and Suggestions for Associaton Events

Due to the nature of associations and the number of public events that we hold on a regular basis, here are some suggested guidelines to follow:

1. Encourage members and guests who may be ill to stay home.
2. Request that members and guests who have family members who are ill to stay home.
3. Consider asking your venue operators to add hand sanitizers to all restrooms.
4. Request that your venue operators have Restrooms and all "Touch Points" (rails, doors etc) sanitized multiple times each day.
5. For large gatherings, consider having a health care professional on site and/or on standby. 
6. All participants at events should be encouraged to take routine precautions, washing hands frequently, not sharing food or drink, covering their mouths with a tissue when coughing or sneezing, and immediately disposing of the tissue.

If you have any questions or concerns, please consult with your public health officials or visit the Centers for Disease Control website at http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu

Some organizations are giving out logo'd bottles or applicators filled with hand sanitizer. 

Suspicious about LinkedIn Weakening Intellectual Properties

LinkedIn has a beta feature called "Company Profile".  This facilitates building out a company profile with some similarity to a personal profile.  If you find a company or organization name on LinkedIn, even your own, that doesn't have an official profile it may already be hyperlinked to a page that is somewhat pre-populated based on the personal profiles of that company's employees.

Only company employees with an email address at the company domain can complete the profile.  I brought this to the attention of one of my association clients and prompted them to complete their profile.  After all, it is complimentary and undoubtedly a good community building strategy.  Not having a presence probably says more about an organization than having one.

Suspicion?

The response I got was quite interesting, similar to my last post about opening a Twitter account, but not the same organization.  Here is the response, verbatim but with names removed [] to protect the innocent:

First I think [legal counsel] needs to have a chat with some of our younger (translate: younger than any of us) [members] to make certain we really understand the issues so that we don't open [association] to liability or worse, end up weakening our intellectual properties.  [They] may come back to sound the "all clear" but I have a suspicion there's more to it than first meets the eye.

So it is not surprising that I couldn't find this person on LinkedIn.

We're looking at starting a Twitter Account Next Quarter

I recently asked a very well respected thought leader in the CRM space if they had a Twitter account, as I wanted to follow them.  At first blush I found their response quite astonishing: "No, we don't have a Twitter account, but we're looking at setting one up in the next quarter."  Well guess what, your preferred Twitter handle could be taken in the 30 seconds it took you to tell me that!

I wholeheartedly support developing a strategic approach to social media while at the same time I would admonish those whose speed to adopt could be considered Jurassic.  What I'm really hearing is "No, I don't really have a social media strategy and I'm struggling to get it all figured out."  That I have empathy for.  Social media tools are coming at us with blazing speed and it is already hard enough to manage all of the messages coming through email and RSS channels without monitoring keywords on Twitter, being friendly on Facebook and nurturing our network and groups on LinkedIn. 

Gotta run, I just got poked!

Slideshare and one Company's Sharing Policy

I've been watching the changes in the way individuals and companies have become less reluctant to share and publish content in the public domain.  While there is a growing trend to publish content, there are still some people who are hanging onto their corporate firewalls for dear life with the great fear that someone is going to get their "stuff" for free.

I recently experienced this as I was producing SMEI's Social Media Road Show.  We invited all of the thought leaders presenting to share their PowerPoint presentations on Slideshare.  The Slideshare site offers free hosting of files and is especially good at converting your PowerPoint into a flash file that you can embed as a presentation on your website.  In today's social media sharing world, getting your content into the conversation is as easy as that.

Most of the presenters were quite willing to share their material.  Some even have there own Slideshare accounts and provided us with access.  One presenter in particular responded "For proprietary reasons we don’t publish our presentations or hand out copies during the presentation.  We typically are on the cutting edge of Internet marketing, advertising, and public relations technologies and don’t want competitors to gain easy access to what we’re doing and how we’re doing it."  While I may have bought that argument a few years ago, trends and ROI on content publishing indicate that things have changed and that if a company is truly on the cutting edge today, they are going to be publishing a lot of content.  Maybe not their trade secrets, but there are compelling reasons why they may want to rethink their strategy. 

For example and education, I'll share one of the presentations here by Paul Dunay:

SMEI: Leveraging New Media

7 Thought Leaders on Social Media Marketing in 7 Minutes

Onsite interviews from the SMEI Social Media Road Show in Vancouver on March 26, 2009.