LinkedIn — for a long time I gave it short shrift as a “social” network. I mean, I’ve written reams and reams on Facebook and Twitter, but about LinkedIn? Nada.

That’s changing for me. Why? First, because I work at an enterprise technology company, SocialFlow, and I’m starting to recognize the benefits of being able to target users not simply by what they click on or what they say they like, but on actual job title.

That’s a huge boon when you are helping to sell enterprise-ready technology. But I’m starting to realize that LinkedIn has a lot of other uses that businesses of all sizes can take advantage of.

So how should you work LinkedIn into your workflow? 

Make sure you have a company page

I recently watched a very helpful little webinar from LinkedIn about setting up a company page. There were a number of features I had no idea about — for instance, you can list products, as well as identify key members of your sales staff right on page. Another excellent feature is “recommendations” where you can get your customers to sing your praises. In the sales world all of these things are incredible assets!

Further reading: Here’s a nice LinkedIn marketing “hub” at Hubspot

Add “share on LinkedIn” to your sharing suite on site

For a long time, I’ve been a total stickler about keeping sharing buttons ultra simple. Facebook and Twitter, that’s all I need, I’ve often said to myself. But then I put a LinkedIn button on the SocialFlow blog. It’s amazing to see how that network dominates the shares on certain pieces of content. A vital way to take the temperature on how you’re connecting with your target market in business.

Invest time in the bells and whistles

You know how you have a progress bar that shows how far along you are in filling out your profile on LinkedIn? Well, it really behooves you to pay attention to that bar and try to move it up to the max. Fill out your profile, try to include keyword-rich phrases, and see what add-ons you can bring to the page. For instance, Behance Network offers a nice little widget that helps the visually adept post samples of creative work.

Schedule time to update your status or company status

I have my LinkedIn page synced to Twitter and my blog. Company pages still need to be attended to by hand. Still it’s worth it to keep yours fresh, so schedule a little time to update that LinkedIn status.

Entrepreneurship guru Danielle LaPorte is doing a series where she poses a “Burning Question” and folks can blog their answer. If you don’t know Danielle, I urge you to suscribe to her list, and, more importantly, to pre-order her book The Spark Kit. It’s an absolutely fabulous kick in the pants for creative people.

The prompt that grabbed my attention came through her email newsletter. What’s one dumb thing you used to believe in? she asked. She wrote about once believing in the concept of “the One” in a romantic sense. 

What I flashed on was my own naive belief that I’d fall in love with a job the way Danielle wrote about connecting with a soulmate. That if I tried a bunch of jobs that sounded interesting I would find “the One” and be pretty much set.

I actually did find “the One” (or so I thought) and found myself in a position where I was thoroughly challenged and in turn made lots of impact and inroads, inspired innovation and progress, created dramatic external dollar value in and instituted all kinds of new ideas.

For a brief moment in time, I was living the fulfillment of a dream: this job and I had really clicked. I figured that like in all great and lasting relationships, there would be good times and bad, but that it deserved my all. And if I worked hard, I’d get recognized and promoted.

The reality was completely different. It was an environment full of people who were absolutely panicked about change, petty politics, characters who sniveled and snitched to get their way, and of nepotism. It was an environment where people rewrote history and framed things in a way that sometimes completely astonished me. Suddenly life had smacked me in the face and said: don’t get so comfortable. 

That sounds like it’s a bitter and cynical lesson to have learned. But really it only is on the surface. Underneath that ugliness is a more important truth.

The truth is there is no “perfect” job that will love and fulfill you completely. All jobs, no matter how awesome, put you in precarious relation to circumstances beyond your control. There are always difficult people around. Politics abound. Times change. The economy goes busto. You are deemed, in the peculiar English way, “redundant.” You are an incredible carriage maker when someone comes up with the horseless carriage. You can’t control any of those circumstances.

What you can control is the way you apply your passion, the way you think about yourself, your identity in relation to a job, and how any particular job is not the sum total of your existence.

It doesn’t mean being any less proactive or creative in the job you’ve got. It doesn’t mean not loving the work, or not getting invested in it.

It just means that, at the end of the day, you recognize that you are in business for yourself. That you are your own best advocate. That if you don’t take ownership of your own narrative, someone else will. And the creativity and initiative that you apply to your work? It is yours — you should give it freely, spread it around, but it is your capital and you need to realize that you own it.

Some people would call it perspective, being wise enough to see beyond the edge of your desk. I like to think of it as approaching work, any work you do, with entrepreneurial mindset.

Entreuprenurs are defined by being flexible, and be sensing opportunity all around them. They adapt to brutal changing forces by sensing where they can find a niche. They know that nothing lasts forever, and there are great costs associated with getting too complacent about things.

Tomorrow, I’m going to something called the Re:Working Conference. I’m fascinated by the way the world of work is changing. How people communication (or don’t) at work. What possibilities exist in social networking to bring together hidden resources within organizations. I hope to learn something.

Taking ownership of your own professional destiny can be a tough road, but if there’s anything the last few years have taught us is that life is tough. Hopefully, radical changes to the composition of the working world are offering all of us new opportunity — if we can figure out how to grab it.

My friend Cheryl is a maven of audience-building. When she teaches her documentary students, she tells them, “build the audience first.”

Wait…what?

Once we said “build it and they will come,” but in the new age of personal branding and micro celebrity, it actually makes a lot of sense. You need to build a little tribe, as it were, and then launch your baby into the world. Then you’ve already got a grass-roots community built in for your efforts.

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to a woman about an idea for a startup that she had. She had a unique perspective and network already established. I asked her if she had considered extending that and building a little more of a digital profile for herself before she dug into the startup itself, with all of its attendant staffing and logistical difficulties. What about a blog, a place where you can define and carve out her expertise?

Launching a project that doesn’t have an audience yet is challenging, but not impossible. Consider the case of Kickstarter entry The Mystery of Marie Jocelyne. Writing in the Kickstarter blog, one of the filmmakers, Martha Shane says that: “Without a niche audience that the film can specifically appeal to, where, and how, do we find our supporters?”

But the process of developing a crowdfunding campaign has had a lot of positive impact on the film:

The wonderful thing is that doing this work for our campaign has helped us to tighten our vision for the movie and understand what we need to make the final film work. And that, I think, is the gift that Kickstarter has given us. Beyond providing a platform for us to raise money, it has forced us to learn how to talk about and promote the film in the most effective way possible.

I’m of two minds about Kickstarter. I listened to employee Cindy Au give a talk about the crowd-funding platform at the ArtsTech Meetup and have had this stat tattooed to my brain ever since: if you can make it to 30% of your goal, you have a 90% chance of sucess.

Ms. Au said it in the context of: you need to get your thing “kick-started” by your own network. And the stronger network you build, the better chance you have of doing that.

I’m not really sure that Kickstarter is the meritocratic utopia that it is portrayed to be. I think that the most successful projects belong to people who already boast a profile.

At the same time, good ideas can be surface on Kickstarter, within reason. Martha Shane’s blog post is an excellent illustration of that in action. I became one of the film’s backers, without even knowing the filmmakers, and I’m glad to say it recently met its goal.

I was watching an online video with a guru of self-publishing. “Your marketing begins when you first have the idea,” he said, explaining that he gets a book jacket made, a landing page put up, even before he’s written a word.

That’s incredible…and really smart.

Are you building your audience right now, in every way you can?

If not, here are some simple ideas you can try:

• Produce something of value and give it away for free.
• Build the email sign-ups
• Participate in Twitter chats
• Comment on other people’s blogs
• Become a expert on something on Quora

Related: 7 Digital Ways to Raise Funds for Your Nonprofit, Cause or Project

The Face Behind the Artisanal Ball Bearing that Keeps Your Plane in the Air?

Don’t Mock the Artisanal Pickle Maker, read the headline in this past Sunday’s New York Times magazine.

It tackled something that I’ve been mulling for quite a while. It’s all well and good to make novelty t-shirts or artisanal bitters, but with small, home-spun craft businesses proliferating, can they really, seriously stay afloat?The author of the Times piece says that there is hope in the surge in micro-scale businesses–and it’s because they say something important about the direction in which our economy is heading:

It’s tempting to look at craft businesses as simply a rejection of modern industrial capitalism. But the craft approach is actually something new — a happy refinement of the excesses of our industrial era plus a return to the vision laid out by capitalism’s godfather, Adam Smith. One of his central insights in “The Wealth of Nations” is the importance of specialization. When everyone does everything — sews their own clothes, harvests their own crops, bakes their own bread — each act becomes inefficient, because generalists are rarely as quick or able as specialists.

For most of human history, though, people needed to do a bit of everything to survive. The result was a profoundly inefficient economy that required almost everyone to work very hard just to create enough of the essentials for survival; even then, famines were still disturbingly common. Efficiency, Smith explained, comes when individuals focus on specific tasks. The miracle of the Industrial Revolution was that through specialization, humankind became far more productive.

The article goes onto point out how entrepreneurs are seizing micro-niches in very “business-y” contexts like precision metalwork and healthcare — and using their very artisanal specializations to make major bank and differentiate themselves.

So today…handmade suspenders, tomorrow… a handmade widget on a rocketship?

Stranger things have happened.

Yesterday at work, we were talking about how people engage with customer support. Some people use the phone, some people use Google and some people (though I don’t know any) use the manual. We were trying to better structure our support site, but we had to confront the simple truth that people access information differently. So our next question was naturally: how do we equip users with tools that help them filter better — match the need with the correct information more seamlessly? “It’s like being the Netflix of support,” I said. 

On the way home on the train I was reading the Sunday Times and there was a front page story a kidney donation “chain.” What initially drew me into the article was the dateline: Riverside, California, it said, which is the rather unremarkable Southern California region where I grew up. In the story, a man from Riverside decides to give up his kidney to a needy stranger, and unknowingly sets off a chain of events that potentially saved 30 lives.

What interested me most about the story was the role of an entrepreneur, Garet Hill, who’s daughter had once suffered from kidney disease. In the transplant cycle, there is a lot of inefficiency — say you get sick, and a relative wants to donate, but you are not a match. With sophisticated “matching” techniques and algorithms, one could create a “chain” in which people who need kidneys can be matched with living donors. In this case, the chain encompassed 17 hospitals in 11 states over four months and made good matches between 60 people.

It’s a great story of a businessman finding a pain point and applying technology to make a process more efficient. But it’s also an interesting reminder that “matching” technology — what we normally think about in the context of eHarmony and Netflix — can do more than root out affinities. It can actually save lives. Check out the article, it’s great! 

The other day, I was reading a long thread about pit bulls. Obviously, these pups suffer from a branding problem that gets magnified every time one of their members gets splashed across the news. The common thread of the mythos of pit bulls in the media is that there are dogs over here, and then there are pit bulls over there, pit bull being synonymous with scary, unpredictable monster. And if we fall into this type of reasoning, then it logically follows these monsters-not-dogs should be banned, banished, destroyed, right?

Do you buy it into it? I’m gonna be completely honest here. I used to. I was one of those people who tensed up a little bit when I saw a pittie. I never thought I would adopt one. Then I saw a pretty amazing documentary about the rehabbing of the Michael Vick dogs at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary (it’s an episode of Dogtown you can get on Netflix, Season 2, Episode 1). In it was an interesting segment about the former branding of the pit bull. They used to be called the “nanny dog” because they were of the sort you’d want to leave your kids with. They were synonymous with post-war Americana. The Little Rascals, anyone?

Further, when I watched the fearsome, specially bred killing machines Vick once owned, I was very surprised by how much like all other dogs they were. Obedient, loyal, eager to please. These were the worst, most horrible “killing machines” on the planet–and yet I could see they were actually a product of a process that used their universal doggy natures against them and toward a human objective of violence-as-sport, and also that they could be rehabilitated, managed, and live out a long, happy life.

I had come face-to-face with my own confirmation bias, which is a way of filtering information based on what I believed to be true about pit bulls. I only saw the scary things and I was surprised to learn that once upon a time, people all assumed the opposite.

Something I’ve been preoccupied with for a long time, when thinking and writing about the task of taking ownership of your own personal brand is how challenging it is to overcome other people’s confirmation biases. 

Who of us hasn’t been that pitbull, at the receiving end of a snap judgement?

There are so many insecure people out there who want to tell you who you are, what you can do, what your station is–whether you are man, dog, or *shudder* or monster.

Of course, sometimes it helps to get identified with a certain “type.” My friend Cheryl recently threw up her hands and said: “I’m not Miranda July. Everything I do isn’t instantly quirky or indie or vintage.”

As much as her personal brand supports a creative empire, even Miranda July suffers from being pigeonholed. She gets associated with a kind of twee-ness that I don’t think is always fair. You read her stuff and you’ll be surprised by the toughness and darkness in some places. But like the pit bull, she gets reduce to one thing only.

So what’s the answer?

Create a narrative line

Like my friend Cheryl says, sometimes it’s difficult to find the common thread between all we do. But even if your interests and talents are disparate, try to find the common thread between them. Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of writing and talking to people about the future of books — and I like to draw a connection between this and my background in film because the commonality between both worlds is stories.

Building a narrative you control is essential to not getting put in a box. Know who you are — so that someone tries to tell you who you are, you are armed with the truth of the matter.

More — here — about personal branding

Own your definition

I’ve been doing a program in my increasingly limited free time from Problogger called 30 Days to a Better Blog [affiliate link]. I really like it and one of the very first assignments was to write a “mission statement” for your blog. I don’t think I’ve necessarily arrived at a bullseye definition, but it was a completely worthwhile exercise–so much so that I went through it again when redeveloping my personal site.

More — here — about mission statements

Look harder

If you don’t want to be pigeonholed, make it a practice to not make snap judgements about others. Look beyond the surface, find out what that acquaintance or coworker you thought you knew is really about. Who knows? You might find an unexpected asset.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee

Those who pigeonhole others have a tendency to be rigid and insecure. They dislike uncertainty, chaos. Use that to your advantage. When they go left, you go right. If you keep ‘em guessing, you’re much less likely to get pigeonholed.

Then, when other people get hung up on titles, crane their necks to see if anyone “important” is in the room, obsess about protocol, wait for the official memo, you’ll have already left them far behind.

And, for the record, I’m totally team pit bull and team Miranda.

A few days ago I was reading a blog post by a new mom and native New Yorker who was planning to move to the suburbs. In it were a lot of the familiar complaints about what a hassle it is to live in New York, how many compromises it entails, and how it’s just “not worth it” if you’re not making the most of everything you can do.

While reading this post on my iPhone I was partaking in the happy hour special at the bar at James, which is basically one of the best grass-fed burgers in NYC (please don’t tell) at half price from 5:30 to 6:30. Sipping on a James’ Revenge, I was smack dab in the middle of a moment that makes me feel like the luckiest girl on the planet.

You see, I’m precisely where I should be. I’ve lived here for years, came here for college, and even as I change as a person, my feelings and romance for the city remain a bedrock. That, for me, is the definition of true love.

I was thinking about this while coming home late from work one night in a cab in the rain sometime in the fall. Whooshing down Seventh Avenue South, I was reminded of walking those same streets as an undergraduate, how much has changed, and how much has stayed the same.

So in honor of Valentine’s Day, I want to take you on a tour of my first true love, New York. It’s a tour that exists mostly in my head but represents actual physical places.

The hassle thing is totally true, but hassles come with the territory of loving a complex character wholeheartedly, tenaciously. Don’t you think? 

Verticality

When I came here, I was always looking up. All those lives pressed into tiny apartments, stacked on top of each other. The history, the verticality, that was what I thought I was in love with, and therefore I thought I’d always be a Manhattanite. But a film job took me to the church on the corner of Sterling and Sixth Avenue in Park Slope and I realized how beautiful Brooklyn was and a couple of years later I had the chance to live in a Brownstone right on that block. Less vertical but poetic just the same.

Biking Everywhere

I didn’t understand biking in the city until I was working on a film job in college and the Director of Photography handed me a key and said, use my bike and run over to Rafik and buy some gels. Of course I complied, only to find myself flying, floating down Broadway from a gasp-worthy vantage point.

Driving in the city gives me an anxiety attack, but not biking. I’m uber-confident, weaving in and out of lanes and holding my own even in crazy NYC traffic. When I found myself riding uphill the other day at night on the Manhattan Bridge, standing on the pedals, I laughed a little and thought, is this like when Juniper stands up on her hind legs to make herself look big?

Institutions

The Museum of Modern Art. The Museum of the Moving Image. The Guggenheim. The New Museum. NYC’s many cultural institutions take my breath away. Part of it was growing up on From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler, which is the story of two kids who run away from home and live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and solve mysteries. I mean, if you want to know the stirrings of my love for the city, start there. A classic. More about institutions. 

Prospect Park

Once we were turned down on a prospective dog adoption because our apartment was too small for two dogs. I’m pretty sure these people didn’t understand that 585 acres of Prospect Park is truly our backyard. More about Prospect Park.

Everything and nothing

Once I worked with a German film crew who wanted to shoot various neighborhoods of NYC as doubles for foreign locales. We shot Chinatown for Shanghai and the West Village for London and the were driving over the Manhattan Bridge when “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” came on the radio, and we all started singing along.

Juxtapositions

I was working on a job just outside the old Domino Sugar Factory and I was sitting there changing a roll of film and I noticed a woman in a polka dotted dress step out of a vintage Cadillac against the perfect blue sky. The skeletal remains of the old factory made the beauty of the unexpected tableau all the more stark. I realized that day that you could shoot and shoot and shoot and never be in the same place twice, because idiosyncratic things are always colliding here.

Sesame Street

New York loomed large over my childhood in Southern California. It had so many things that seemed completely foreign — wire mesh trashcans and stoops, things I’d never seen and would never have imagined if not for Sesame Street.

A few years ago, I lived in a crumbling brownstone with a bunch of other people, and I finally had my stoop:

Catcher in the Rye

Of course I loved it as a teenager, but I was thrilled to get a whole new perspective on the book when studying with Richard Locke at Columbia. Well worth a second read.

Commerce Street

My first time in NYC, I was in college, and wandering around the West Village trying to find a schoolmate’s parents’ place. I got completely turned around, walked past the intersection of West 12th and West 4th (how’d that happen, hey?), and found myself on Commerce Street. Oh my heart, my soul. I just looked around me and thought “this must be the place you were meant to be.”

The light

These are just a few of the illogical things that I think of when I think of how grateful I am to live here.

New York is always bigger than life, bigger than my imagination. And compared to that the actual square footage of my apartment doesn’t seem so important.

And growing up? Who needs that?

Been a little quiet round here, and I didn’t mean to go silent. I love blogging, being able to take interesting people that I meet and ideas that I encounter and turn them into posts.

It’s just it’s been pretty busy lately. First of all, we launched SocialFlow Optimized Publisher last week. So much went into that from my side, from crafting copy to planning advertising to launching a new website to engineering social promotions to coordinating creative from design to coding. Whew. But I’m happy to say we launched it.

I love the product, and I’d love for you to try it, too.

Secondly I’ve been working on a panel for Social Media Week called Literature Unbound, which hosts a really incredible group of visionaries who will be there to talk about the innovative spaces literature can occupy in the digital age. Super excited about this stuff.

A couple weeks back I did an interview for the Social Media Week website. It felt a little dorky, but it’s been fun to get feedback on it.

I am totally back to blogging, too, even if I’ve got to crunch the verbiage on the train on the way to work. Stay tuned, because there are more posts coming your way very very soon!

Social Media Week is nigh upon us and Susan Halligan and I have been busily preparing a knock-out panel on the future of books and “social reading.” In a prep session a couple weeks ago, we gathered together Jason Carey of Brooklyn Public Library, Stephen Duncombe of NYU, Richard Nash of Small Demons, Aziz Isham of Arcade Sunshine and Corey Menscher of Findings.com to come and chat about some of the topics we would hash out during the conversation.

I was slightly in awe to listen to this diverse group of individuals who are working in so many different parts of a very exciting frontier — we’ve got tech founders, developers, academics, thinkers and people who, of course who wear many hats. Susan and I kept shooting each other looks as our panelists chatted over everything from Apple’s new Author software, to the attention spans and digital reading habits of children. If this is anything like the panel is going to be, I think both of us were thinking, this will be amazing. 

I don’t think this conversation could come at a moment more ripe with possibilities–and pitfalls–for writers and readers. Just a scan of the past week or so’s headlines shows why:

Mashable published a story headlined: “Apple Will Own Your Work with iBooks Author” and ripples of dismay filtered through the blogosphere. Hope to get beyond the hysteria in a subsequent post but for now, let’s just say, no, Apple will not own your content and copyright so take a deep breath and read some better research and reasoned analysis such as this piece in Ars Technica.

Jonathan Franzen weighed in on the downsides of ebooks, remarking: “I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change.”

On the plus side, TechCrunch published a pretty good overview of key considerations for those who want to embrace the world of book creation and self-distribution, entitled “Why every entrepreneur should self-publish a book.”

All of the above are likely to be among the many subjects we cover during the panel on the morning of Tuesday, February 14th.

Hope you’ll join us!

I’ve written in the past about Facebook ads and how much of a boon they are for small businesses and nonprofits.

For instance, I created the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s first digital marketing program by purchasing ads that helped connect our diverse programming with appreciative audiences. These ads in turn put our programs in front of thousands of prospective ticket-buyers in the metro area who might not have otherwise heard of us.

One thing that I think is really important for a fledgling effort is building up a base of “fans” to consume and interact with the content you post. That’s why if you’re just getting started, I’d strongly suggest that you post an ad that asks for “likes.” You’ll find you can drive up your fan count really, really quickly with highly qualified individuals and prospects.

Now there’s even less reason to weigh the pros and cons of Facebook advertising — because the social network is giving away ad credit for FREE!

The Facebook Small Business Boost contest is great encouragement to get out there and start racking up the fans. If you have at least 50 fans and are based in the U.S., you qualify. Plus, if you are able to get 100 more fans during the duration of the contest, you win even more credit!

Here’s the gist, from Facebook:

What you need to participate:

1. A Facebook Page for your small business
2. Your business must be based in the US
3. Your page will need at least 50 likes^[?]

How It Works:

1. Get $50 in free ads if you have at least 50 likes on your Page
2. Get $100 more in free ads if you add 100 more likes to your Page before April 1, 2012
3. Win $10,000 more in free ads if you are one of the top 10 pages that gains the most new likes before April 1, 2012

I believe the adding 100 more likes goal is completely attainable — here are some tips on how to do it.

Some things I discovered while participating:

• Make sure you have at least the city and state of your business filled out on your profile page. I found that most of the pages I manage do not have this info filled out. This contest only applies to businesses in the U.S.
• Make sure you select your fan page from the drop-down of the ad creator (I accidentally selected an “app” I had made that was called Jellybean Boom, making for an unfriendly user experience for the first few days the ad ran). Then, the “like” button will appear with your ad, which is essential for racking up fans.
• Make the copy simple and engaging. For instance, if you run a catering business, you might put “click “like” if you love cupcakes.” That will rack you up new fans very, very quickly (with a hat-tip to Brian Moran).

Get out there and start advertising your business — it’s a powerful way to gain more visibility in 2012!