Attention is a Currency

LinkedIn created a brilliant eBook with my favourite illustrator. @gapingvoid (Hugh Macleod) creates the most amazing messages through his illustrations. Read more about him and @gapingvoid here: http://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/team-members/hugh-macleod/

Each week I will share one of the articles and illustrations from the eBook and give you my opinion, insight and meaning of the words and illustrations.

Let's do the first one, which is actually the cover and a very important one.

The sentence I'd like to examine a bit closer is;

“Why now is the time to invest in digital experiences that matter.” 

Well, my consideration here is about ensuring that we start examining our digital time spent by ensuring that we only receive information and data we actually need.

And for marketers, which I can include myself in, we should be ensuring that we know our target audience (avatars) and share with them relevant information and data that will expand their knowledge, plus improve and speed up their decision making process.

Hence the ’matter’.

Now it's your turn. I'd love to hear your views and opinion about that sentence.

To assist you further you may wish to download a couple of eBooks via:
http://www.stayingaliveuk.com/33socialtips

http://www.stayingaliveuk.com/storytelling-ebook

Or share all your comments via Twitter @stayingaliveuk

Image credits: @gapingvoid and @linkedin

Did you know you could sync your Calendar with LinkedIn's App? (iOS Tutorial)

Prepare, review and follow up on all your meetings using the LinkedIn app, even though you might not even be connected yet.

The LinkedIn app, released in the Autumn of 2015, has received a fairly significant update that has gone almost unnoticed.

If you have appointments in your calendar with either 1st or 2nd level connections and you have their email address in your Calendar, LinkedIn will locate them for you and serve up reminder cards in your 'My Network' tab. Note: The email must be a match on their LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn members often add their personal email as their primary not their business one. If you are in that camp you may wish to amend that.

Here are some text instructions for enabling the feature, which is very simple indeed. Below that there are some screen shots to accompany each action.  I have also recorded a video to walk you through it step by step.

1. Tap the Me tab in the navigation bar of the app.
2. Tap the Settings icon.
3. Tap Sync Calendar.
4. Tap Sync your calendar to confirm. 
5. To remove calendar sources, follow the above steps and switch the sync calendar toggle to the left.
6. There are also some real live examples of actual appointments from my calendar (or diary in the UK!), 'prep for your meeting tomorrow', 'prep for today's meeting' and 'you met with [connection's name and yesterday's date]. The last one prompts you to send a follow up email as well.

http://stayingaliveuk.com - Short tutorial on how to sync your calendar with the new LinkedIn Mobile App and receive network updates about upcoming and past appointments. Connect, engage and learn with me 😎 LinkedIn: http://styin.me/LinkedInvite LinkedIn Company Page: http://styin.me/linkedin-companypage Twitter: http://twitter.com/stayingaliveuk Facebook: http://facebook.com/stayingaliveuk Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stayingaliveuk Snapchat: http://styin.me/add-sauk-on-snapchat Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/linkedin-student

If you have any questions or queries reach out and I will be happy to answer them.

Twitter: @stayingaliveuk

Is LinkedIn on your Job Description?

You own your LinkedIn page, it is not owned by your employer,  even though you might use it whilst at work. 

However your employer must encourage you to use your LinkedIn every single day.

Why?

Because you are helping your employer to get noticed. And if you are helping your employer to get noticed, they may benefit from social exposure and word of mouth recommendation, which in turn means more sales and job security for you and your colleagues.

Most LinkedIn profiles are left to gather dust, showing poor profile photos, badly written headlines and summaries and a sparse experience section. As well as an incongruent list of skills and insignificant educational achievements. 

That’s why employers MUST add LinkedIn to your job description and train you to create a great profile and to use it each and every single day.

My mantra is ’LinkedIn 20-minutes per day’. Even before you open your email.

But what do you do there every single day? Well here are 7 things you can be doing in your 20-minutes per day.

1. Grow your connections. The more connections you have the easier it will be to connect with potential buyers of your employer’s products and services. Connecting to colleagues is a must, so is past fellow students, teachers, professors and yes even family, including your Mum (Mom) and Dad.
2. Send personal invitations, not the standard ‘LinkedIn’ boiler plate invitation. It really sucks when you do that. You are basically saying, I don’t really care about you, but I want to connect with you.
3. Send personalised thank you emails for those who have taken the time to click the accept button. It’s just polite to do so.
4. Share an update, which could be an interesting article you’ve read on Pulse (LinkedIn’s news channel) or a simple status update about your efforts at your employer. Be mindful and careful about posting unauthorised company news though.
5. Read your home newsfeed and like, comment or share interesting posts by your connections.
6. Make sure you join industry and client groups on LinkedIn. Be actively discussing, commenting and liking. Avoid posting your company blog or news, boring!
7. Write recommendations for your colleagues, suppliers and clients. Also endorse their listed skills.

A lot of people commute to work by train. You can do these 20-minute activities on your mobile. LinkedIn’s mobile app has been getting better and is still improving and soon most of us will be more active on the LinkedIn app compared to the desktop.

And remember you don’t have to do all these activities every single day. You can just do a few each day, the important thing is consistency and making sure you form a habit. After all you have a habit of reading your emails each day and often first thing each day, maybe even before you get out of bed. You might as well make it a LinkedIn habit each and every day. 

Just 20-minutes per day!

And in case you are totally maxed out during the day, I am sure you have 20-minutes in the evening, when the kids have gone to bed and you are watching mindless TV.

So here’s the 20-day challenge for you. 

Let’s see if you can spend just 20-minutes per day on your LinkedIn for the next 20-days, so that you can start to form a habit.

And whilst you’re at it, share this article with your colleagues and the HR department. Let’s get them all thinking about this and consider including LinkedIn on everyone’s job description.

As an interim step you can ask your boss to add it to your objectives for the next 6 months, so you can both evaluate your performance for this. You know what they say; ’What gets measured, gets done’.

Let’s see which employers have the courage to add LinkedIn to job descriptions. And I’m not just talking about Sales and Marketing Professionals, I mean every single person in the company including the cleaner.

Wishing you massive success with your 20-day challenge and do let me know how you’ve got on.

@stayingaliveuk

Do you have questions about Social Selling and LinkedIn? - *Updated Weekly*

Top left: Brynne, Top right: Michael, Bottom left Ted, Bottom right Bob

We (Michael de Groot, Bob Woods, Brynne Tillman and Ted Prodromou) hold a weekly Blab on the subject of Social Selling and LinkedIn. You can join us and get your questions answered. To join the Blab you will need a Twitter account.

Just visit SocialSellingWednesday.com to subscribe to the next upcoming episode.

Takes place weekly at 8am PST, 11am EST, 4pm BST (3pm GMT), 5pm CET

In the meantime you can always catch the previous episodes below as a YouTube video replay or a Mixcloud audio podcast.

For more in-depth discussion and free information;

1. Follow our showcase page on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/social-selling-wednesday
2. Join and contribute on our Slack Community Channel: https://slofile.com/slack/socialsellingtips
3. Ask to join our Social Selling Discussion Forum.

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Social Selling Wednesday Replay Playlist on YouTube

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Social Selling Wednesday Replay Podcast on MixCloud

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Is Email Enhancing or Destroying Your Reputation?

Email was invented in 1971 and became popular during the late 90's. We've been using it seriously for 20+ years. Some of you reading this will remember how amazing it was when we all started using it. Remember your first email address? Mine was with Yahoo! Millennials will snigger at this, I know they will, some haven't even got an email address!

And although we've had enormous change with email, most of us are still basically using it for the same purpose. To send messages, share files, photos and opinions. 

And of course with all new inventions email soon became a method for spammers to hack servers and send us all emails promoting goods and services we weren't looking for. (SPAM) 

And then there is the ’Email Newsletter’. If by chance you shared your email address on a website or purchased some goods online your email address could be added to a list. The owner of the list could then keep you informed of their news, which often included promoting their goods and services too. You may have even wanted those newsletters, but now they are a pest!

Over time newsletter clients, like Constant Contact, Mailchimp and others started to emerge and provided some rules around uploading email addresses. One of those rules would be obtaining authorisation from the email owner before adding them to a list. However as long as you tick the box that confirms you have authorisation, they allow you to upload your list. And then you can legitimately email (SPAM) your contacts.

Let’s not forget Data Protection in Europe.  The Data Protection Directive (officially Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data) is a European Union directive and was adopted in 1995. It regulates the processing of personal data within the European Union. In essence it means when you hold personal data, like an email address, you must have obtained it with the owners permission and provide any recipient of your email newsletter the opportunity to unsubscribe.

Nowadays the best process for obtaining authorisation for using someone’s email address is using a double opt-in process. That means the email owner has to confirm authorisation and knows without a doubt that they are being added to an email list. This is by far the best process in my view. BUT many don’t bother with this process.

With the creation of LinkedIn, it means that your connections have access to your email address. They can download your email address to add to their email list whether they have your authorisation or not and then start to email you their newsletters (SPAM). 

I've been unsubscribing from newsletters for over 4 years and receive very few unsolicited emails these days. However I still receive around 4-6 newsletters I never signed up for per month. Plus the instances of poor practices in those emails, where you are unable to unsubscribe seems to occur more often. I send those senders a polite email to ask how I got added and ask to be unsubscribed. Below is the text of a recent (March 2016) email I sent to the sender of an unsolicited email I received.

You really need to be considering your ‘Email Newsletter Strategy’. Are you really adding value to your readers or are you promoting, selling, funnelling and spamming?

Now let’s discuss the ‘email signature’. Have you got one? How much detail do you think should be in your email signature and do you really believe that the receiver needs all that detail? The chances are that the receiver is already known to you, you’re probably already connected on Social Media somewhere and they more than likely have your business card. Here are some of the crazy things I see in email signatures:

1. Email address. Why? They have just received your email with your email address on it, why on earth do they need it in your email signature as well?
2. Website address. If you using a business email address then they will already know the domain address of your website, after all it’s in your email address. And if it’s personal email then you won’t need to share a website address do you? And small businesses who still use a free personal email address should really examine what they are doing to their Brand.
3. All your Social Media channels. Do you really think they have time to click through to all those URL’s and connect or follow you there? If they were so interested in you, they would take the time to search for you on those channels anyway and may have already done so before they even get an email from you. The chances are that you’ve also already done this and at least have connected with them on LinkedIn. It’s totally redundant and just lengthens the email message.
4. Logos and Images. And although Broadband speed has increased and  mobile internet is getting faster, attaching images to your email is totally impractical. Branding I hear you say? Rubbish! Have you seen how your Brand gets destroyed when you start emailing back and forth and all those images get removed, scrunched and destroyed in some way. The email thread is a mess, more scrolling required to discover the real text that has to be read and with all those missing image links, additional contact information the important text can easily be missed, often resulting in quotes like ‘I never saw that message’. I’m not surprised, it was hidden in between unnecessary promotional nonsense.
5. Street address. Seriously? You’re kidding right? Why would they need that in an email? You are emailing each other, not sending each other postcards. If you do have to visit you almost always look up their website and find out directions and jump on to Google Maps.
6. Disclaimer. Thank you 80’s  and 90’s lawyers! They all scared the s..t out of us, because we weren’t sending letters any longer and it was entirely possible that your email could end up arriving somewhere else and then you’ve said something so awful that they could take you to court. OMG! The disclaimer is often 3 times longer than your actual email message. And you really think it protects you? The receiver has nothing better to do then read your disclaimer every time they receive an email from you? (Raising my eyes to heaven)
7. Environmental Statement about printing. How many folks actually spend time printing emails out, apart from lawyers? Enough said.

If this sparked any interest, you can read this thought-provoking article by Kevin Zawacki @kevinzawacki on Slate.com http://slate.me/1REJekw

This is 2016 and none of the above is needed any longer. Let’s use email as it was intended. Keep it basic, short and to the point. and Don’t copy the world to ‘cover your a..’.

Reduce your email signature to your mobile number and one keyword for search. After all you don’t have a massive email signature on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube etc. The world is changing, please join me in spreading the word about email signatures and get them reduced to just two bits of information.

Email won’t exist forever, certainly unlikely in larger organisation. There are now other products on the market who make internal communication more productive and simpler. Email is likely going to be reinvented by Social Media and Messaging apps like Slack, Asana, Trello, Yammer and others? I’m looking forward to it, because it could signal the end of email as we know it. Yippee, no more spamming!

So let’s ask the question again. ‘Is Email Enhancing or Destroying Your Reputation?’

Answers on a postcard please! Just kidding, comments below please or via email if you wish, michael@guess the domain.com? No seriously, I need you to guess the domain. For starters it's easy if you did some research and secondly, I would like to avoid the spiders adding me to a list.

@stayingaliveuk

Does LinkedIn Help confuse you?

They say Robots are the future, but maybe they have already arrived at LinkedIn?

Well, I can confirm most definitely, I am totally and utterly confused with LinkedIn's Help. For years now I have received responses to my queries where the support team at LinkedIn, haven’t really got a clue what I am talking about.

Maybe it is me and the way I ask my questions is not clear enough?

I don’t know about you, but I find that all I seem to receive is a bunch of ‘template’ responses to try and close my ticket as soon as possible. In fact LinkedIn Help already closes the ticket, when they deem that my question has been answered satisfactorily by them. Most times I have to reopen the ticket to send a follow up response or question.

This brings me nicely on to my latest example, ‘The Reminder’.

This feature was introduced when LinkedIn had a major upgrade, released maybe a couple of years ago.

It allows any member to schedule a reminder on a connection’s profile. The reminder can be set for 1 day, 1 week, 1 month or recurring. A strange way of setting reminders by the way, normally you would specify a specific date. Anyway that’s the way it was set and is still the way it exists.

The 'Reminder' feature appears under the 'Relationship' tab, just under the Profile Header.

When this new feature was introduced, LinkedIn then also started to email us all a daily digest of our connection’s major activity, like a job change, a work anniversary and their birthday. If by any chance you had set a reminder, this would also arrive in the same email. Thereby listing all your reminders and you could take action on those. A great way to be reminded about your reminders don't you think?

In the past 12 months LinkedIn have changed their policy on the volume of email, because of some public criticism they had received.

I agree there was just far too much. However this has meant that they have done away with the 'Daily Digest' email, but you are still able to see your connection’s major activity under the ‘connections’ section and engage with your connection’s activity by sending them an email message, like or comment on their activity. You get daily new notifications on your mobile app too, although you can only message your connections to congratulate them, like and commenting at time of writing is not available on mobile. I won't bore you with the ’Connected app’ that was retired recently, which was created specifically for this purpose. 

Anyway, it now means that ‘The Reminder’ notification via email is missing in action. You no longer receive an email, because the ‘Daily Digest’ has been retired and it also doesn’t receive a flag, which would have been the most sensible thing to do, but it does appear under your ‘connections’ section (desktop), although you may have to keep expanding by clicking the ‘see more people to contact’ tab underneath the 9 cards that will show up.

Anyway I did know about the failure of this, but decided when I saw a forum thread on the subject to investigate further and ask LinkedIn Help the question about reminders.

Below is a screenshot of the thread of my email conversation exchange with them. In conclusion the reminder feature is no longer very useful, unless you are disciplined enough to view your connections page on a daily basis, just to check for reminders. 🙄

You’ll see from the email thread that support completely gets the wrong meaning of my question to begin with. Why? Answer: ’Template responses’. 

Conclusion:
1.  The ’Reminder’ feature will probably be retired very soon. 
2.  LinkedIn Help agents are robots 🤖?

Wishing you success with LinkedIn's features. Just remember that one day those features may be rendered useless or retired, you just never know. Whether you are a paying premium member or not, it doesn't matter.

@stayingaliveuk 😎👍

Did you know LinkedIn has been removing features for years?

If you have been an active LinkedIn user for a number of years you might remember that LinkedIn removes features on a regular basis from their platform. At least one per year I would say.

Who remembers ‘Events’, ‘Polls’, ‘Reading Lists’ and many more retired features? And then there are features that just stop working without any warning, like 'Reminders', but that's another story altogether.

Share your favourite ones!

The reason sited always is that features are removed because they are not being used as much by members and therefore are retired to the internet abyss.

Below is an image of an email confirming their latest such action.

This particular feature, saving a profile to your contacts, which is being retired at the end of February 2016 is a handy little shortcut when you are searching for individuals that you wish to connect to.

You can (for now) save them to your contacts by clicking the star underneath the profile header or you can click the dropdown on search results and save them that way.  Especially handy when you have saved a favourite search for Lead Generation. See the images below on how this is allowed to be done currently. But not for long.

Maybe I’m a little suspicious.

I am a premium member and recently my premium account got a fantastic free upgrade. ‘Sales Navigator’.  A brilliant and very useful tool for Lead Generation and Social Selling. Really I mean it, it’s great and very useful. So now I don’t actually need to save anyone that I find on search to my contacts, I just add them to Sales Navigator and I am able to do much more with those profiles in Sales Navigator compared to the regular LinkedIn.

But there are lots of folks that are not on premium and have no intention of upgrading, but still would like to do some interesting stuff,  like saving and tagging people on LinkedIn without having Sales Navigator. 

Could this action by LinkedIn just be a ploy to promote Sales Navigator to us all?

I know, I know, actually not many of you realised you could do this anyway. I agree it isn’t very obvious at all and no-one actually advises you that you can do this, apart from LinkedIn Trainers.  And this is the reason, I guess, why LinkedIn are retiring it.

So my question to many of you is, ‘if you had known about this feature would you have used it or not?’

Be honest because this is like my straw poll to see what responses I get and maybe just maybe we can ask LinkedIn to reverse their decision. Now to help me,  please share this with your own network on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Answer just 2 questions below.

I really appreciate your help with this.

Success!

@stayingaliveuk

Image credit: @gapingvoid

Are You Interested in Trust?

Maybe you are or maybe you aren’t. One thing’s for sure every relationship is built on a solid foundation of trust. If trust doesn't exist, a relationship can't exist. But what are the constituents of trust? I believe there are 3 main principles for trust to develop in your relationships. I've called it the 'Triad of Trust'.

1. Give more than you receive.

The principle here is about giving of yourself and searching for ways you can give support without expecting anything in return.

Nobody can force you to do this, it has to be the life force within you that decides that you will step out of your ego and give of yourself. I have witnessed many example of folks who really don’t get this right. Giving without expecting anything in return is really a tough concept for most to grasp. 

For just a few seconds think about your current relationships, your relationship with your line manager, your spouse, your kids, your parents and even your clients. Do you give consistently without expecting anything? We’re usually looking for some sort of payback, something that will make us feel good instead of focussing on making the other person feel great.

Putting this in the context of Marketing means that we must avoid too much self-promotion and instead share stories (or information) that will assist others and inspire them. 

Whenever I have a new connection on LinkedIn, I ask each connection who they wish to get in front of, i.e. what leads they may be looking for. I record those details on their LinkedIn profile. You'd be surprised how many actually don't bother answering, because they may be suspicious and believe I might have a different motive for the question. I guess it's human nature to be suspicious. Basically they don't trust me yet.

2. Listen generously.

Listening is the hardest skill for us to master because as soon as we hear someone speak we begin to formulate a response. This also happens with all types of mobile digital communication.

Who doesn't struggle with listening? Be honest, you can't wait to say something when you are listening (and thinking) when someone is speaking to you. My challenge to you is to hold back until you believe the speaker has completely finished. You’ll know when they have finished, because they’ll ask you a question. 

For example, I'm sure you've experienced attending a networking meeting. Imagine you meet someone for the first time there and often the first question will be, ’So what do you do?’. Instead of reeling off your rehearsed response, pause and say, ’Actually why don't you go first?’. 

This puts you in a state of listening straight away. And instead of waiting for them to finish and then jump into your own blabber, ask them a few questions. Listen out to truly understand and ask even further questions to understand at an even deeper level. It actually doesn't matter if you don't get your chance to say what you do. Understanding someone else’s story is much more important and they will remember you for it. 

The term listening generously I learnt from a client in the USA, http://winningdynamics.com, who I produced a Whiteboard Animation for. Be well worth watching, as the message is brilliant.

3. Share your knowledge willingly.

Our knowledge is precious and worth something. However, sharing your knowledge willingly with others builds trust. After all, you too learnt your knowledge from someone else.

We arrived on this planet with no knowledge and relied on our family, our teachers and all the different people we met in our lives to teach us what we know today. Therefore we actually learnt most of what we know from others. Just think about it. It's only with this knowledge that we've been able to potentially shape it into new knowledge that we create ourselves and then sell or share with others. Just like I'm doing right here.

But you don't have to sell all your knowledge do you?

You must give most of it away. You don't own it and our job is to pass it on. After all, your knowledge is only temporary, you can't take it with you when you depart this planet. You might as well start sharing it now.

I would love to learn from you how you ’Give, Listen and Share’ in your world. Feel free to share your comments below, so everyone can benefit from your experience and advice.

@stayingaliveuk

Are Your Suffering from 'Social Deafness'?

How many social networks do you belong to? The average person has five social network accounts and spends around 1 hour and 40 minutes browsing these networks every day, accounting for 28pc of the total time spent on the internet.

Probably a combination of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube and substituting with LinkedIn, Tumblr and Google+ (other Social Networks are available). However, most will be struggling to stay on top of them all.

It’s just too time consuming these days.

’Social Deafness’ is a phenomena that I'm describing as the reduction in our ability to take in all the social messages and content being pushed out on your social networks.

Before social media came along, our lives were already quite busy and we didn't ask for these networks to occupy our lives, but as these networks have grown and expanded it has become common place in the modern digital world for us to belong to many of them. Furthermore with the expansion of mobile computing, it’s become super easy to engage with your preferred networks through apps and on the web whilst on the move.

Much has been said about our addiction to these networks, but the addiction is not necessarily with our connections but more about what we as individuals can get out of these networks. When our connections, like, share, retweet, comment and repost, we feel loved. That feeling of love releases dopamine in the brain, which is highly addictive. We're then looking for the next hit, the next bit of engagement. I'm sure you have seen this play out on Facebook when your friends post comments that have left you wondering what's wrong with them. Comments like ’I'm feeling very annoyed’. Having no clue what they're annoyed about it causes you to ask the question and giving them some desired attention (love). Whether you think it's appropriate or not, this is current reality with social networks.

We're all looking for attention (love).

As we become more used to all the social media noise that's going on across social networks, we actually start tuning-out and developing what I call ’Social-Deafness'. It's just an abbreviation I’ve coined for describing how you are starting to ignore social media (network) noise. Even those cries for help are starting to be ignored, as we intuitively know that folks are in fact seeking attention. We all know the saying:

‘The girl (or boy) who cried WOLF’.

By the way it's not their fault, they are just copying what others are doing in their networks, noticing the attention others are getting and hoping for the same. Plus of course the networks keep emailing us telling us that we're missing out and really should be going back to our networks. Just try for 5 days to avoid one of your favourite networks and they will be in touch with you for sure.

They play on our instinct and a condition called FOMO = ‘Fear of missing out’.

When this ’Social-Deafness’ spreads across global social networks, it makes the job of marketing to us so much tougher for big brands and even Micro Enterprises. It’s much harder to get noticed and develop sustainable engagement.

This is why more and more folks are spending more and even more time publishing content to these networks hoping that something will stick and develop some sort of engagement at ’scale’ (a fashionable and trendy term used by LinkedIn management a lot!).

The only way to develop a sustainable engagement strategy is by bringing people on board one person at a time. The execution of that in reality is more time consuming and not always guaranteed, but the potential results are easier and more predictable.

The challenge is to build trust in your network over a sustained period of time, which will potentially support a level of conditioning in your connections’ brain to believe that they already know you. A feeling of trust that makes them think you've already met and they know so much about you already. This potentially (note there's no guarantee) means that when you contact them by email or even by phone they believe they are communicating with a long standing acquaintance.

This method is actually no different to what advertisers use by repeating their adverts regularly to you. Even if you think you're not paying that much attention to adverts they all go into your brain and over time you brain has been conditioned with a product or service. Ever come home from the supermarket with a product you didn't need it, had never bought previously and then wondered why you bought it?  Now you know what I mean.

Do you believe that you are suffering from ’Social Deafness’?

Have you managed to build trust with your connections on social networks and how did you make that happen?

Would love to know your perspective and your experience.

@stayingaliveuk - ’Share Your Story’

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Will Social Selling create a global economic revival?

You will probably get bored of hearing that people do business with people they know, like and trust! Actually I believe a better sequence would be trust, know and like, because by using social channels and especially LinkedIn we have the perfect opportunity to build trust first. I know it doesn’t roll of the tongue as well, but in my humble opinion it has to come first each and every time.

But how can you build that trust? 

By being active and by being interesting and interested. With 400 million (and counting) professionals on LinkedIn it really has become super easy to find the exact and relevant contact (buyer) for you to get in front of.

And most still get it completely wrong, because most of what I see and experience on social media and especially LinkedIn are promotional posts (adverts) and impersonal invitations to connect. 

Definitely not ’interesting’ and not ’interested’.

If we have a desire to see global economic revival on the planet then you need to start changing your behaviour on social media, especially LinkedIn and take a few minutes out of your busy day to think through and formulate a detailed strategy.

Here are just 3 quick things you can adopt to move in the right direction and set the right intention.

1. Decide specifically and in incredible detail your ideal buyer (client). Identify the industry sector, the location, their seniority, their age, personal ambitions (assumed), interests, skills, sports team and anything else that will assist you to narrow down a shortlist of individuals. You have to become laser targeted. Being general is so from the previous century.
2. Develop search and alert criteria on google, twitter and LinkedIn to explore and potentially uncover the individuals that match up with your ’ideal buyer’ profile. Keep looking daily, weekly, monthly until you become totally absorbed with who that person is, so much so that you can understand and predict their behaviour. LinkedIn is totally the best network to do much of this on, especially now with their Sales Navigator tool. It has never been a better time right now to access data for your research.
3. Develop and curate appropriate and great content that will be super interesting to your ‘ideal buyer’. Over time you will develop a reputation for sharing great and ‘interesting’ content and your network will start to realise and appreciate that you are the person they are interested in learning from.

In addition LinkedIn have just released the ’Social Selling Index’ for every English speaking LinkedIn member. Have a look at my index below. You can see that this is a great measurement tool to help you and your teams drive forward and develop ’trust’ on LinkedIn. A better title would probably be the ’trust’ index.

Go ahead and grab your index via https://www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi

I have also shared below details of how the index is calculated, which confirms that by being active and developing the right strategy you will develop more trust. Trust leads to interest, interest leads to a conversation, a conversation leads to a meeting and a meeting leads to business.

"Taken from LinkedIn's Sales Navigator support section as at August 2015"

Just imagine if LinkedIn professionals focussed on getting their index higher they automatically will be seen more, develop more trusting relationships on LinkedIn, gain greater exposure and develop more opportunities.

Now just think for a moment, if just 1% of the 400 million LinkedIn members adopted a great professional approach for developing their network, do you think this would make a difference to the economic prosperity of individuals around the world?

By you and I changing the way we behave on social channels, especially on LinkedIn, I believe we would collectively have a major impact on the global economy. Not just by developing better and closer relationships with our networks but also by growing our enterprises, whether we are micro, small, medium or a large enterprise. 

Now it's your turn.  Please share below what your views are on Social Selling, Trust and the Global Economy. I'd love to hear your stories.

In Social Selling, Building Trust Starts before You Connect

Learn how thorough research and honest communication can build trust with buyers, with these social selling tips from Staying Alive UK’s Michael de Groot.

This blogpost was first published by LinkedIn Sales Solutions on the 13th August 2015 and is part of a blogpost series to promote the eBook '33 Social Selling Success Tips', which was curated and published by Michael de Groot (that's me!) in 2014 and re-purposed by LinkedIn.

 http://sales.linkedin.com/blog/in-social-selling-building-trust-starts-before-you-connect/

The first person who said “patience is a virtue” probably wasn’t in sales. For salespeople, patience can be costly. Waiting to respond to a trigger event or failing to follow up to a prospect’s question can cost the sale. There’s an understandable desire for hustle, whether you’re a sales leader or a sales manager.

But we must be careful that a lack of patience doesn’t make us take shortcuts that lose potential buyers. One part of the sales process you should never rush is the research phase before you reach out to a prospect for the first time. Thorough research arms you with the information you need to make a connection request that builds trust.

People buy from people they know, like, and trust. Before they get to know you and come to like you, buyers will be evaluating whether they can trust you. Here are two steps you can take to build trust before you connect.

1.  Research

Do your research first on the individual and the company. Follow the company on LinkedIn and research any articles where your potential buyer could be mentioned or featured. Check industry news sites for mentions and of course LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator could do the heavy lifting for you in terms by finding relevant company news.

There are two very useful ways that you can keep track of your buyers without making it obvious to them. In Twitter, you can create a private list and add Twitter handles to your buyer list. You will be able to see what buyers are tweeting about to give you an insight to their interests and industry specific articles or opinions. In LinkedIn, you can save someone to your contacts without making a connection request. When you save them, add a tag that will let you filter your contacts for each account. This allows you to do more research on them and find commonalities in their profile, their tweets, or their shares.

2.  Be Direct

Once you have done your research and built a relevant, compelling case for making contact, then you can send a connection request.

For the best chance of a response, show your trustworthiness by being upfront about why you’re asking to connect. Let the prospect know what led you to reach out to them, and what you would like them to do next.

With a LinkedIn connection request, you will know 100% for sure whether or not your request is accepted. Your prospect will receive reminders from your invitation at least 3 times to either accept your connection request or click ignore. I would leave the request open for 3 weeks to see if they accept. If not, remove them from your connections database as a lost potential and focus your energy elsewhere.

In the fast-paced sales environment, it’s important to remind ourselves to slow down when we need to. Take the time to build trust with a prospect before you connect, and that time investment may pay off in a better sales relationship.

For more actionable social selling insights from experts in the profession, download 33 Social Selling Tips by Social Selling Thought Leaders.

Editor’s Note: In this series, we feature quick and tactical social selling tips from thought leaders in the profession. This installment features trust-building advice from social selling tips Michael de Groot, Social Selling Director for Staying Alive (UK) Ltd who collaborated with other social selling trainers and originally produced the social selling tips eBook.

Is Your Brand Loyal?

Whenever I hear ’business’ folks talk about ROI - (Return on Investment) in connection with Social Media, I laugh. Not because I don't respect their point or their need to see proof and sales results, but because we don't demand ROI on our relationships with our friends do we?

When you have a loyal buyer, they do become a loyal friend, you share knowledge and insights with them in order build that loyalty and after all it’s easier to keep a buyer rather than having to continually find new ones.

Therefore I believe that our opinion and execution of Social Media has to improve. 

Firstly we should rename it ‘Social Loyalty’.

‘Social’ has many meanings depending on whether you’re a Marxist or not.  Wikipedia definition, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social.

For me, very simply, it’s when individuals or groups of individuals co-exist together for their joint benefit. When we co-exist together with our buyers we are being ‘Social’. That co-existence can take place in person or nowadays to a large extend online, cue ‘Social Media’.

‘Loyalty’ has even more meanings, go and have a look, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalty.

And generally speaking most of us understand it to be that our buyers will repeat buy from us or at least give us the opportunity to bid first for a piece of work or consider buying from our website before looking at the competition. 

Usually loyal buyers will be prepared to wait for our products, e.g. Apple, or may even pay more for our products compared to cheaper alternatives, because their loyalty means more to them compared to price.

I call those folks ‘raving fans’. If you’re in business your objective should be to collect ‘raving fans’. 

In addition those loyal ‘Raving Fans' will shout about your products and services. They will tell their friends, business associates and connections. You better be amazing, because when things are not going so well, they will shout about it too.

Once we develop ‘Social Loyalty’ with our buyers, we will develop a predictable sales model. All of us have stats available somewhere that will indicate to us whether the sale was from a loyal buyer or a brand new one.

It’s possible therefore to create a ‘Loyal Buyer’ vs ‘New Buyer’ ratio to indicate the amount of sales we’re getting from those ‘Raving Fans’. I’m sure someone somewhere is already doing this and if you’re not, why not?

When we have this data only then we can understand ‘Social Media’ much better. Then there won’t be any need for ROI, just ‘ROL’ = ‘Return on Loyalty’.

Therefore when you witness your staff being active on ‘Social Media’ developing ‘Raving Fans’ you will realise that they are building loyalty amongst the ’Social’ community, which in turn will deliver repeat sales from the same buyers.

Now it’s your turn, share with us what you or your organisation is doing to create ‘Raving Fans’.

@stayingaliveuk - ‘Share Your Story’

Quick message from Staying Alive UK’s chief storyteller...

Are LinkedIn Missing Out?

LinkedIn - Communication - Vision!

Is LinkedIn missing out on communication? Yep BIG time!

About 3 years ago LinkedIn removed their event app with the usual statement saying that 'from time to time we review our services and adjust our offer to ensure the best experience for our customers' or something like this. Commendable I think?

It was quite a useful app I thought. I used it to invite customers to my external webinars or public training events. 

Now most of us use external apps like Eventbrite. 

Also at the time I was searching for a free webinar app and to my delight Google launched Google+ Hangout. 

The web conferencing web app is amazing and works like a dream. The only problem is that today still not that many business people are on Google+. This means I have to educate them on how to use G+ and then train them on how to use G+ Hangout. Time consuming and frustrating. It ways exactly the same when Skype came out many years ago. Nobody had heard of it and didn't know how to use it. Now potentially every business person has heard of Skype and uses it.

G+ Hangout also has a messaging facility, although not that great yet.

Within the last few weeks (April 2015), Facebook launched their dedicated messenger app for the browser. It was already well established as a separate app for mobile, despite some complaints from users in the early days when it moved away from the standard Facebook page. It works and it works well and looks great inside a browser.

I'm sure I don't have to mention all the array of other messenger apps on the market. Just have a look at the graphic below, where the number represents the number of active users in millions. Facebook with messenger and WhatsApp are pretty much dominating the space.

Graph from statista.com - April 2015

What happened to LinkedIn? All they've got is a very basic email service, which only in the past month (March 2015) allows you to attach a file. Fantastic! Not really, I was being sarcastic then in case you hadn't noticed!

Can you imagine how amazing it would be if you had the ability to instant message your connections? Alright, I appreciate that you'd be worried with spammy messages, but they could make it so that you have to invite people to your instant messenger list and request permission in exactly the same way as connection invites.

I guarantee you that the current younger generation when it grows up will demand such a service on LinkedIn otherwise they'll be doing it on Facebook instead. The younger generation believes that email is too slow, they don't use it. Instant responses are something they've got used to and want to experience this when they enter the world of work.

If we were able to instant message than surely the obvious extension of that would be video conference calls. The need for group web conferencing, being able to share and discuss in real-time all around the world and carry out training is absolutely essential nowadays.

It just leaves the facility for events. Like Google+ the event facility would give you the option to schedule online meetings with connections or audio/video conference calls. 

How cool would that be? This is one massive way to get more eyeballs on your site Jeff Weiner. 

Conclusion: LinkedIn is definitely missing out on the massive explosion of messaging and web meetings.

I look forward to the day when this will change, really looking forward to it!

@stayingaliveuk

What Does Your Logo Say About You?

I was massively obsessed in 2005 with having a logo for my new business. I didn't have a single client, not even the promise of one, but for some reason my priority was to create a logo. By the way there was no sign of Social Media yet, I didn’t even have a website and broadband hadn't been invented, I was still on dial-up or ISDN, I can't even remember!

For some odd reason I was totally consumed with needing a great logo, as this would get me noticed or so I thought. The fact was, I was only going to be using the logo on printed material, brochures, leaflets, handouts, which in the end cost me a fortune to print and the majority of those eventually ended up in recycling because I had overprinted so many to save on printing costs! As a consequence I am now very suspicious of printers.

I have also become a bit of a cynic when I see Micro-Businesses obsessed with their logos. Especially when I see individuals who are a one-person business use their logo as their Twitter profile image. I have seen thousands of examples. Just go and have a look inside the very popular #socialhours on Twitter every evening, where you can waste an hour of your time reading everyone’s adverts.

Are you a Micro-Business? A SoHo (Single office-home office)?

If you are then I want to see your face on social media not your logo. Your logo means nothing to me, it only means something to you! I know because I had the same disease. A logo makes you feel like you’re competing with the major brands. Absolutely not, you're not, you're competing with other Micro-Businesses who are after the same clients, but make themselves stand-out because they have their profile photo as themselves. A personal picture shows potential buyers that you are human and approachable. When there's just a logo they’ll feel you’re hiding something and are unapproachable.

It's not difficult, really it isn't.

If you're not convinced and still addicted to seeing your logo plastered everywhere, I suggest you ask your clients. What would they prefer to see on your Twitter, you or your logo?
Once you have changed your Twitter, go and consider where else are you overdosing on your logo?

Once you change this, I guarantee you that you will get more followers and more connections.
I've even stopped following anyone who has just a logo on their Twitter. That means I don't follow back many companies, as I'm only interested in people, not companies. Companies just advertise their stuff and I'm more interested in people and what they’re about. After all business is about people not about logos.

Should you have a logo? Sure you should, because in some places you will need one, but make sure it fits inside an icon square. Ideally the shape of an app icon. Like the one below. Yes that’s mine, newly designed a couple of years ago for the social network world. It only appears in just a few places, as overwhelmingly I have displayed my profile photo.

Now it's your turn

Let me know in the comments below what you think and whether you are now also recovering from your addiction to your logo?
 

@stayingaliveuk

Image credit: @gapingvoid

Did You Add Me to Your Mailing List?

One dysfunctional side-effect of the Internet are email lists and newsletters. I've already questioned whether the newsletter is on the way out in my ’Are You a Modern Seller’ blogpost. 

For over 2 years now I’ve been unsubscribing from newsletters and for the majority of those (95%), I’ve never ever asked to be added to their list. I'm not talking about spam mail. I'm talking about genuine newsletters and announcements, ranging from contacts I know or have met in the past to vaguely familiar people or companies and completely unknown companies.

How did they get my email address?

I know most lift it from my LinkedIn profile and that means they are a first level connection. From my website? Sure it's on there, so they can lift it from there too. From sign-up forms when I’ve downloaded research, white papers, interesting reports? Yep I'm guilty of that. Usually though I remember the ones where I've downloaded stuff and then I quickly unsubscribe from those when I receive the first promotional email.

How then should I get people on to my email list legitimately?

Using double opt-in or better still opt-out! It's the only way. You could have something that folks will be interested in downloading and on that web page you let them know that it will add them to an email list and state for what purpose. If you use the correct process, they will receive an opt-out email after completing the form. This means they can download the content and unsubscribe instantly, without ever receiving another email from you. Now this is real choice for the reader of your content. 

Will they remember you for this? Of course they will!

I highly recommend that you investigate what process you have in place for emailing folks and whether your process is filled with integrity.

1. Are you scraping email addresses from LinkedIn?
2. Are you collecting from websites?
3. Are you using something like Nimble to transfer addresses to Mailchimp?
4. Are you using external apps to transfer from your contact records to email clients?
5. Are you adding addresses from business cards?

Please think carefully about these and maybe other processes and practices in operation inside your business. How would you feel if you knew that your contacts or connections were doing this?

Any recipient of your newsletters or email announcements must have had the opportunity to choose whether they wanted to receive your email. And more importantly, at any time they should have the opportunity to unsubscribe.

I'm astounded that some people still use the bcc: method to send their email out to their contact list from Microsoft outlook or Apple mail.

Once you change your approach, you will feel better about your process and know that you are treating your contacts, connections and acquaintances with integrity and respect. 

I know for a fact that this is how you would like to be treated. 

@stayingaliveuk

Image credit: @gapingvoid

Are You Sharing Stories?

With the explosive growth in Social Media, there's a massive need by brands, businesses and individuals to acquire your attention, likes, comments and shares.

Almost everyone is wanting to be noticed and apart from brands and celebrities there's really no chance of any of us as individuals in business or in employment acquiring millions of followers (fans).

The only thing we can possibly hope for is some thought leader influence for a small group of connections via a few social channels.

So how do we get noticed when there are literally billions of social media posts being shot into cyberspace every single day.

Share Your Story...

Since we were small children we’ve enjoyed stories. Whether they were the stories our parents told us, the films we watch, the books we read, the TV programmes we enjoy or even the adverts we absorb.

It makes sense therefore that we spend more time sharing our story.

Let me explain further. 

We all have a tendency to over-promote what we do instead of thinking about how we can share our story with our audiences. 

As we all love stories, it means our audiences will be more interested in reading or watching them. And because stories are more memorable, they will live longer in our audiences brains. 

To prove the point, can you think, right now, about your favourite book, film, TV programme, advert and how many years back can you remember some of those? I am sure you were able to recall several. Maybe Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Star Trek, Only Fools and Horses, Fawlty Towers, Cadbury Flake advert, The Meerkat Advert and many more I’m sure.

How do you create interesting stories?

In simplistic terms?

1. Problem statement
2. Infusion of ongoing pain if problem not resolved
3. What could a possible solution be
4. The solution you offer for the problem
5. What life would be like without the problem

Where to share your stories?

1. LinkedIn - on your summary, plus extra media
2. YouTube - with video stories
3. Twitter - with a #hashtag
4. Pinterest and Instagram - with photos
5. Google+ with all of the above
6. Facebook - well if you have to.

Maybe you can use a specific #hashtag like #problemsolved or #problemsolver. Take your pick.

Share stories and get noticed. I still see too many adverts on social media. By all means do a few now and again, but keep it at a minimum. Instead share stories.

Feel free to add your own ‘client problem solved’ story in the comments. You never know who might read it!

@stayingaliveuk

Image Credit: @gapingvoid

Are You a Modern Seller?

2015, I hope, will be the year that Social Selling goes mainstream. With that I mean that no longer should we be calling it ’Social Selling’. I prefer us all to be talking about it as ’Modern Selling’. The fact is Sales has always been a Social activity and in some ways Sales Professionals can be confused by the term ’Social Selling’.

In some cases I have witnessed some really awful practices on Social Media, where bombarding folks with constant promotional material and ads are thought of as Social Selling.

Let's examine ’Modern Selling’ in a bit more detail. 

First of all what are some current practices that look like they are going to be killed off by ’Modern Selling’.

1. The Cold Call. Although this can be at times a useful method, it is definitely starting to drag everyone down. Who actually enjoys receiving a Cold Call these days? This most definitely will be dead and buried in B2B selling by the end of 2015, if not sooner.

2. The Cold Email. This is a tough one actually. Email is still such a fantastic tool to get in front of folks. It's on people’s phones and therefore it's quite tough to avoid, unless you have set up a super duper filtering system and who has time to figure those out? However I know that more and more people are hitting the delete button for email.

3. The Email Newsletter. This has been an annoying and nagging interruption for many years now. Who really wants to know about all your great achievements in the past week, month, plus reports on how great you are in the eyes of your latest customers? Nobody cares, really nobody does. I have been unsubscribing from newsletters for about 2 years now and still they continue to add me without asking my permission. I'm guilty too, because I have tried it and well failed, because I haven't felt comfortable about it and you do run out of ideas of what to say. I stopped. I do have downloadable content on my website and it’s completely optional if folks wish to be added to an email list and I state completely upfront that I don't send regular emails. Only now and again will I share some content that is in line with the content they've downloaded. Often that content has nothing to do with me, it's someone else’s content who are able to convey and support my own thoughts much better.

4. Brochures. Yes some folks are still keeping the printers employed by cutting down trees and distributing brochures to prospects and well anyone who will have them. It's time that these are thrashed, because your prospect will anyway. 

5. Features and Benefits. This is the biggest one to crack. I would love to see this one dead and buried. Sales professionals spend most of their time practicing these in order to memorise them when in front of prospects and clients. Marketing professionals also spend countless hours presenting these in many different formats, to convince buyers to make decisions based on how their products compare with others. It doesn't make any difference to your buyer. She wants to buy your product to solve a problem. You would be better off listing problems and solutions, so she can see her problem listed. 

What are the alternatives I hear you cry!

1. Personal Brand. You, whether employed, self-employed, freelance, consulting or any other process you identify yourself with and if you reading this, are already a ’Personal Brand’. This wasn't necessarily possible without Social Networks. Social Networks and by being on them, have allowed you to become a ’Personal Brand’. You HAVE to take this responsibility seriously and if you don't, the consequences can be very harsh. This is the starting point, without this recognition you will struggle to get recognition. You have to craft a great story about yourself and make this consistent across all the Social Networks you exist on. Whether these are personal or business networks. Social is Social, keep the story the same across all. Folks will check you out across all of them and if they aren't in synch you will come across as random.

2. Conversation. The ultimate aim for anyone in Sales or in Business is to have a conversation with a prospective buyer. Therefore your ideas, approach, strategy and intention should be about how you can have a conversation with your buyer. Your buyer won't be interested in you, the only thing on her mind is juggling and solving her problems. You are most likely an interruption to her day and as such you need to be able to convince her that time spent with you will be well spent! All your actions, communication, social posts, will be to support why a conversation with you will be interesting and more importantly a very worthwhile interruption to her day.

3. Engagement. This is the holy grail. We all would love to have our connections become potential prospects and at some stage they will have either liked, commented, shared and loved what we posted or have written. Instead of focussing on what you can ’get out’ of your connections, instead focus on what you can ’give’ to your connections. What free content can you share with them that will help them. Share their stories and updates with your network and help them to get more exposure. The route to engagement is trust. This is all you can shoot for to start to develop a relationship. Folks will do business with people they know, like and trust. Once you build trust, which can potentially be developed online, they can start to know you through a conversation, which can be done over the phone. The ’likeness’ can only happen when they start comparing your profile with theirs and get to know you a little better. Folks are always searching for ’likeness’ when meeting new people and if there are some areas of commonality, likeness can develop quite quickly.

4. Personality. Let your personality shine through at every opportunity. Avoid writing in the third person and reduce the amount of ’I’ statements. It actually isn't all about you. Share ’Why’ you do what you do, as this resonates so much better compared to only making statements about ’What’ you do. If you're able to share passionate insights about how you are helping folks this will also help viewers reach a better understanding about you.

5. Gratitude. Showing gratitude to new connections for accepting your invite or in response to their invitations is an essential part of the ’Modern Selling’ recipe. Furthermore when it comes to invites, I experience too many invites on LinkedIn that have the standard default text. Asking people to give up their time to look at your profile, read it and decide whether to accept your invitation is actually a big deal. Sending a basic and standard invite therefore is actually saying that you don't respect their time, but you do want them to accept your invitation. I also liken it to talking to someone with your back turned when you meet them for the first time. Something you would never do. You can also show gratitude by engaging with your connections’ posts by liking, commenting, re-sharing, retweeting and favouriting (Twitter). 

We are all learning how to do all of this much better. I still have masses to learn and all of our journeys on Social Media are still very very new.

Take it step by step and think about all your actions and interactions carefully and thoughtfully. When you take your ’Personal Brand’ seriously and you have respect for your connections, you can achieve great things.

@stayingaliveuk

Have You Got Content Sorted?

Social Selling experts say that one of the pillars of Social Selling is our ability to demonstrate that we are experts in our industry/sector and thought leaders in our own businesses. One way to show these attributes is to share insights.

Firstly what is meant with insights? Relevant content. Content our buyers are interested in reading and hopefully they'll remember you all the more for sharing it.

The trouble is where do you find those insights/relevant content?

Well, I'm here to share with you that I've pretty much got this part completely sorted. Well in my own mind I have, because I've spent hours refining this and in the process discovering that app developers haven’t made it that easy for us, as of course they aren’t active users of their own apps so there’s no joined-up thinking. 

Until finally the day that joined-up thinking occurred and I'm soooo delighted that those wonderful app developers out there have just made my life even more productive, even though they don’t even know it.

There are just two apps involved and in combination they are my winning formula and very easy to master. If you master this, you will be able to share relevant insights quickly, regularly and easily, with the minimal investment of time and effort.

The first one is Flipboard. Flipboard is an awesome article and news aggregator. And with its magazine style format, it's a dream to browse and flip through the articles. But there are some key things to do, to complete the perfect setup.

1. Connect all your social accounts in order to get the newsfeed from each of them flowing in your Flipboard. A tile represents a social stream or your selected stream inside Flipboard. Think of it as your individual social magazine.
2. Do you have twitter lists? Create a separate tile for those.
3. Have a favourite hashtag? Create a separate tile for as many as you like.
4. Do you follow key news accounts on Twitter? Like LinkedIn’s Pulse? Add another tile for them.
5. Create a tile for blogs you follow easy. Get the RSS feed and search for it inside Flipboard and create a separate tile for as many as you wish.
6. You can create literally dozens of tiles.
7. Complete the set-up in Flipboard.

The second one is Buffer. Buffer is the best social media sharing/scheduling app on the planet, really it is. Forget Hootsuite.

1. Download Buffer, free account up to 10 future posts. Paid account $10 per month up to 200 future posts. Go for the paid account, I did.
2. Connect all your accounts in there too.
3. Buffer will give you a free email address so you can literally email anything to your schedule (Buffer)
4. Once you have Buffer installed, I suggest that you learn how to use it properly.

Now with both apps installed and working, you can literally share any article from your Flipboard direct to your Buffer.

Click on the square and arrow icon bottom right, to reveal ‘More Options’ for sharing from your iPhone or iPad. Click on the 3 dots to show more sharing apps and the Buffer logo will be visible. Just select it, be ready to insert a title or message, select the accounts you are sharing to and press ‘Buffer’.

I know it sounds easy and my journey to achieve this has meant that I spent a few hours to learn how Buffer worked and how Flipboard operated.

If you want to have a super-easy, fast, time efficient way of sharing content, this is by far the best route.

I wish you success and let me know when you have mastered it.

Sorry this article is only for iPhone/iPad users.

Is Creating Content the Elephant on the Web?

Recently I joined a twitter chat #sshour (social selling hour) and the subject of content curation was being discussed. I too have been busy organising my content stream, selecting the articles I enjoy reading and sharing them on my preferred platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter. And I love scheduling them using Buffer.

And my reason for doing this? Thought leadership? Just sharing ‘stuff’, which my connections might like to read? Wanting more followers, likes and comments?

Does anyone really give a damn?

And what's our outcome? Is it more engagement with our buyers, receiving more enquiries for our products and services? Or is it ’FOMO’,  fear of missing out? Or ’FOBLO’, fear of being left out?

Social Media has a lot to answer for. It’s changing human behaviour across the planet. We never shared so many intimate details of our lives, so publicly. And as we are so obsessed with sharing content surely we are trying to look interesting, relevant and impressive to our connections and followers?

No wonder there are 630 million search results on google to my question ‘how often should I blog?’

I asked the question last year: ‘Do Social Networks Sell Drugs?’

I know it’s a great feeling when your article/blog or your shared post gets noticed by your followers. Ever time this happens somewhere deep inside of us we say, ‘Wow she/he loves me’.

And by just pushing out more and more content and posting regularly, are we hoping that we’ll get noticed by some big shot CEO who will approach us to come and do some consultancy or maybe even work for them? There's news there too for us. They aren't reading them.

I believe there are two tribes who do all the blogging and posting. Folks that are self-employed and are making it part of their own personal marketing strategy or folks that work for big business and their job is in marketing anyway.

Everyone in between either don’t really care or are just too busy at work to bother.

I’d love to hear your opinion. Are we overdoing it and heading for blogging/posting burnout?

Are You Afraid of Rejection on Social Networks?

You should be...

Many more social networkers are being more discerning in deciding who they connect with. I'm sure by now you've heard the saying: ’you’re network is your net worth’.

It’s more important for networkers to show off 'WHO' they are connected to, compared to 'HOW' many.

What's needed is some {old-fashioned} personal branding. If you're reading this then you're already a personal brand and you might not have realised it yet. It doesn't mean you have to be a Rock Star or some YouTube celebrity, although of course it would help. What's a personal brand? I'm not talking about celebrities, it's anyone these days, who has a profile on a social network, a blog or any other profile that resides on the web, like YOU! Personal branding 2.0 is alive and kicking. Anyone nowadays has a voice, whether, you Tweet, Facebook, Google Plus or LinkedIn, you and anyone else can share their inner feelings and thoughts about any national or any international affairs. Plus your opinion on companies, their customer service and their products and services, counts. Potentially you can cause massive damage to reputations of companies or individuals.

With this power also comes great responsibility.

I am assuming that your reputation matters to you and this means, you should take it seriously. Anyone with an internet connection can interrogate your presence on the web. And as you're probably reading this on LinkedIn, a search result of your LinkedIn profile will very likely appear on page 1 of Google when someone searches for your name.

In 1 keystroke any searcher can learn everything about you in a just a few seconds.

Doesn't this warrant a great presentation of your personal brand? It absolutely does. For the past few years we've all rushed to join the latest social network in 'fear of missing out' (#fomo) or ensuring that as a minimum we've got a profile in case someone happens to search for us there. And in that rush we have proliferated our profiles across these networks causing a huge amount of inconsistency. Here are just 4 items from my audit checklist for you to review and examine how you're doing with your own personal brand:

1. Do you have different profile photos on different networks? Most of us are still super critical of the way we appear on photographs. This means we scour our photo library picking out the best photo that we perceive will represent us in the best light. What happens is you may select a photo of yourself in business attire and place that on LinkedIn. You’ll find another one from your holidays maybe with family and friends in a T-shirt, crop yourself and place that on Facebook. Or maybe a family picture and use that on Google plus or Twitter. And when you are developing your personal brand this type of inconsistency completely confuses the viewer.
2. Are you using the company logo instead of a profile photo? If you are a big brand great, push your recognisable logo if need be. However if you are a small or micro business, using your logo is THE most impersonal thing you can do. And using a logo on your personal profile on LinkedIn is just plain silly and actual against LinkedIn's terms, which you agreed to, remember?
3. Do you write a different ’about’ section on each profile? It's one of the easiest errors we can make. To become a recognisable personal brand you need to have consistency as readers will scan your profile and at least pick up a few keywords from your ’about section’ with an opportunity to remember them. If they vary greatly it will lead to readers being confused and not remembering anything tangible from your ’about section’. I know the no. of words allowed also varies greatly, which means that brevity counts.
4. Are you using different header images across networks? Everyone has gone header crazy. Plus the sizes differ hugely. Furthermore how the header interacts with the profile photo and how it appears on mobile devices is another factor that complicates things further. Use your graphic designer to help you get the best look and resolution.

Take a few minutes and review your social networks and adjust them to be closer in line with each other. After all your personal brand is important to you, it's time to take it seriously.

@stayingaliveuk

ps. A great business friend, Richard Tubb @tubblog, asked me to review his media branding and this inspired me to write this article. Thanks Richard!