On Wednesday 28 April 2010, I delivered a presentation to the Adelaide Chapter of the Australian Human Resources Institute, entitled ‘10 Ways that HR Staff can get involved in Social Media‘:
Posts Tagged ‘linkedin’
Action List: Carry business cards
Thursday, January 29th, 2009
Although you might be an internet entrepreneur who lives much of his/her life online, it doesn’t mean that you won’t ever interact with people in the ‘real world’ (and I encourage you to get out there and speak to ‘real people’). When you do, it’s important that you have a good quality business card to hand over.
Business cards are relatively inexpensive and you won’t need thousands of them – in fact, I have about 7-8 boxes of old business cards from previous jobs in a storage box at home that I never got round to giving out…I’m sure you do too. It seems that a minimum print run is never below 500!
It’s important that your card is well designed, is in keeping with the online nature of your business (ie. not staid and boring, as many business cards are), and mirrors the graphical elements that make up your website. Remember that branding needs to be uniform throughout your collateral – business cards, website, email signatures, advertisements, flyers, etc.
What ever you do – don’t opt for a templated business card – get one custom designed (try elance for inexpensive designers). Templated business cards look tacky and unprofessional.
The card should contain all of the necessary contact details and your website URL. If it’s appropriate to your business, consider including your Instant Messaging ID (eg. Skype, ICQ or MSN Messenger), as well as the standard telephone, fax, email and postal details. You might even consider adding your IDs for other networking sites, such as LinkedIn or Twitter, if you do business via these channels.
For printing, I recommend using a local printer. There are services online that provide printed business cards – like Vistaprint – but it’s not possible to gauge the quality of the print job beforehand – again, business cards printed on poor quality card look unprofessional. If you deal with a local printer you can request proofs of the work before having the entire print run done. That said, Vistaprint and others are good for small print runs of promotional material (eg Christmas cards).
When receiving business cards from others, always make notes about the individual on the back of the card, so that you don’t forget who they are – particularly if you are attending a networking event and you are meeting lots of different people. If appropriate, send a follow up email several days after meeting the person. This can often be a great source of business leads. Store all contact details in Microsoft Outlook or an online Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, and try to link to the person on LinkedIn.
I use a combination of LinkedIn, Outlook and Interspire’s Email Marketer, instead of maintaining a physical card file of every business card I’ve ever collected.
Action List: Add your company to LinkedIn
Monday, January 5th, 2009
Popular professional networking website LinkedIn now provides a tool for adding your company details to the site. The tool is currently in beta.
There may be some search engine optimisation benefits by listing your company details on LinkedIn, as your website URL is listed on the company details page.
To add your company, use the following link:
Action List: Use Gravatars to build your online personality
Monday, January 19th, 2009As a netpreneur, it’s a good idea to subscribe to like-minded blogs and websites and to offer comments and suggestions to posts written by other authors. By posting well-written and useful tips and commentary, you can greatly bolster your credibility in a certain field – not to mention increase your search engine popularity through cross-linking with a thematically-similar website.
One way that you can set your comments apart from others on blogs and websites is by using Gravatars, or globally recognised avatars. A Gravatar is simply an image that follows you from blog to blog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. These normally take the form of a small portrait of the person adding the comment. Gravatars are associated with the author’s email address, so each time you enter your email address when posting to a website, your gravatar will also display (assuming that the blog has enabled their display).
Why would you use a gravatar? It allows readers to ‘put a face to a name’. An image of a commenter is instantly recognisable, particularly if you are a prolific commenter. In a world where time is short and web site pages are scanned, not read, the gravatar can provide a very important marker for indentification. Think of it as your own ‘pen pic’, similar to the portraits that appear next to regular columnists in the newspaper. And if you are a credible commentator, then it’s likely that your gravatar will prompt people to stop and read your comments (and hopefully visit your website).
It is recommended that you use the same gravatar image for all of your commenting and social media interaction – for example, your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and StumbleUpon images should all be the same. This serves to increase your brand recognition and the credence of your online personality on the web.
To set up a gravatar, visit: http://en.gravatar.com
Tags: blogging, blogs, brand, brand recognition, comments, facebook, gravatar, linkedin, online personality, search engine optimization, SEO, stumbleupon, twitter
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