LINKEDIN is a social networking site that is especially geared for professionals. That is why LinkedIn is used by millions of professionals and businessmen around the globe. Companies usually direct their workers to create accounts over this free social networking site so they can immediately connect with prospective clients. But with so many professionals and entrepreneurs in the world competing for clients using the same platform (i.e. LinkedIn), one can feel clogged up if one joins LinkedIn for the first time. So here are a few tips on how to accelerate your business with the help of LinkedIn:

1. Find upcoming fund raising events in your area. The good news about LinkedIn is that it is localize. That means one can easily find out fundraising events in your area and immediately link your business page to the page set up by the fund raising organizers over LinkedIn. In that way, you can easily build your social network in the real world.

2. Use the groups feature to promote your cause. The good news is that despite it being a free website, LinkedIn spoonfeeds to its users. You can easily optimize your business site by using the groups feature in LinkedIn. You can either search for groups or create one so that prospective customers themselves will hunt down and search the products and services that you are offering.

3. Answer someone’s question. Don’t take it as spamming. And most importantly, don’t spam. Spam is a bad habit. Answer questions individually, not machine-generated ones. Obviously, the purpose of answering questions is to maximize your social network as more and more prospective customers can see the link of your website when you answer a particular question. And when you do answer a question, give your best shot and don’t blabber so that potential customers will be impressed.

According to Nielsen Online, social media’s growth keeps on increasing. This year 2009, it shows a massive growth in the social web. While, Twitter and Facebook also made a breaking record; in the US alone Twitter reached over 7 million unique visitors in the month of February while Facebook continues to grow compare to MySpace.

Here are the top pick social media trends for 2010 by David Armano, an active practitioner and thinker in the worlds of digital marketing, experience design, and the social web.

• Social media begins to look less social
• Corporations look to scale
• Social business becomes serious play
• Your company will have a social media policy (and it might actually be enforced)
• Mobile becomes a social media lifeline
• Sharing no longer means e-mail

These lists are just the few of those emerging development in social media web. Since social media was created to allow direct collaboration and interaction with peers in the world, let us all look forward for many trendy changes that will possibly happen.

In 2010 Presidential elections in the Philippines will be conducted so expect that huge percentage of politicians will embrace into social media web to attract voters just like what President Obama did.

Google voice has now been the latest fad not only on the computer industry but also to the telephone and mobile industry. With google voice you can be reach in ALL your phones either you got a phone in the office or house, or anywhere or even in your mobile phone by just using one single number. It is a feature that would give the user an easier way of managing phone calls. The new application named google voice teaches your phone new tricks.

Google vice features:

• Voice Mail transcripts. It may sound so simple but it is actually not. For it changes form to another. As you receive a voice mail the service will immediately transcribe or changes it into a text messages. Thus, you can read your voice mail.
• Inbox Google Mail transcription. As soon as you receive your voicemail you will be alerted by receiving an email on your google account. This email is already a text message of your voice mail. Thus you will get an idea of the message that you had receive.
• Voice Mail is transformed into a text message and thus send to your phone. So, you can actually read your voice mail.
• You can save voice mail as long as you like or you may even start some important ones.
• Or you may search through them easily like in an email messages.
• Personalized voice greeting can also be done. So you may say, “Be calling to you mom” or Out of the country to those you do not like to communicate.
• You can listen to your voice mail two ways either on the computer or the phone in no particular order.

Have you used and tried google voice already? Though it is only available in the US now; google users around the world is waiting for it to expand worldwide.

With microblogging becoming an easy social media tool to communicate people worldwide, a study conducted by a very refutable group showed an increasing trend as more and more travel websites were recorded to have rapid tweets every day.

It showed that at least 52 percent of users are now tweeting from four to 10 times each day. The study also reported government officials, managing directors, hotel owners and commercial directors now understand that using social media tools to promote products and services online is very effective.

The website owners belonging to the travel industry can easily forge connections to their clients worldwide because of the many techniques now using the worldwide web.

In fact, of the 90 twitter users who were included in the study and were personally interviewed by Andy Jarosz – a writer who owns the travel website 501 Places – reported that the twitter hubby has already started six months ago and it became a very addicting
habit.

Jarosz said the online travel community is now using the power of Twitter to communicate with friends, relatives and business associates, as well as to promote their products and services.

The exponential growth of Twitter in 2009, Jarosz said, was seen by the online travel community as a big boost to the travel business all over the world.

Jarosz survey was very reliable as those respondents were the business owners themselves such as overseas suppliers, tour operators in the UK areas, including half of the respondents working in travel business in paid roles.

The survey has also discovered that at least 62 percent of people who traveled internationally, have been traveling thrice or more annually. It also said that 60 percent have been using Twitter to connect with hoteliers, local suppliers and companies involve in travel business. Of this, at least 28.8 percent revealed they made reservations after contacting clients online via Twitter.
Based on conversations made on Twitter, the travel marketers online were able to make good persuasions and closed a travel package.

For the past 12 months since I have engaged in social media, I have had quite a few responses from various page and group requests that have made me ask myself if I did anything wrong or if ever I have offended anyone. Most unpleasant replies to group and fan page suggestions sounded annoyed and irritated and they don’t want to be connected with such groups nor do they want to be connected with me.

Just recently, a contact wrote on my Facebook wall that he’s annoyed with my fan page suggestions and said “Sorry, I have to un-friend ya.” I was startled why it was posted on my Wall and I, being cautious, deleted it immediately. I started thinking over and over again and asked myself, “Where did I go wrong?”

When I engage myself in something like social media, I make sure that I am on the right track so as not to violate the terms and conditions of social networks and not get banned from their sites; and not to be identified as someone who hounds social media and uses networks for shady purposes. That’s why I thought of brushing up on social media ethics so I will be constantly reminded of the dos and don’ts in social media.

The following is a list of basic social media ethics from this site and I have added some of my own thoughts:

1. Honesty: State only what you know to be true – and be clear about opinion or conjecture vs. fact. Honesty is still the best policy; only state facts.

2. Transparency: Be straightforward about who you are – and who you’re representing online. With social media (especially in social media marketing), it’s better to let people know who you really are and what company or product you represent.

3. Respect: Respect for yourself, your peers, and even your adversaries. In order to reap respect, it must be sowed first. If you don’t want others to disrespect you, don’t do anything not worthy of respect.

4. Privacy: Treat the intimate details of others as you would your own personal information. If you don’t want your private details to be divulged, better set limitations on what you share with the world and never share information about others that may put them and yourself at risk.

5. Relevance: Ensure that the content you’re posting is relevant to the audience and the venue where it’s being posted. This is self-explanatory. Don’t post information about tomatoes on potato groups and vice versa.

6. Responsibility: Take ownership of your online activities, the content you’ve created, and any missteps you’ve made along the way. Take responsibility with every action you make. If you have offended anybody, apologize.

The day that bleak message was posted on my Wall, I imagined the monitor eating me up. I was ashamed of that yet I knew I should not linger on that incident. I decided to do better, become more aware of social media ethics and make sure that I’ll enjoy social media networking without a guilty, unethical feeling.

Understanding your marketing strategies should start first in identifying these 2 channels, the so-called hottest marketing channels in marketing – and these are mobile marketing and social marketing channels.

Mobile marketing – this type of marketing usually focuses in using mobile devices to conduct a massive marketing campaign. The use of cellular phones are usually the best marketing tool you can make, in such a way that you can call all your clients anywhere in world and market your products. There is no limit in mobile marketing, so long as you can make a call or whatever communication mobile to propose or sell your products to prospective customers. Remember that many people are busy and they cannot respond to your marketing strategies such as answering your call or having an appointment, unless you have already set a schedule to the client that you are to meet and discuss business plans and collaborations in person.

Social marketing – This is also another form of marketing channel using various software and social networking websites to create your presence online. The most effective social networking sites today include Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin, etc. You will gain clear marketing tools such as developing a good and attractive business page on Facebook. You need to have a good profile in order for you to gain a network of friends, clients and prospects for your product lines. In Facebook, the service is free so that you can now find thousands of business pages created by businessmen and online entrepreneurs.
Social marketing simply means increasing your wide network of friends and future clients so that in the long run you can start marketing certain products you need to promote. There are also techniques to easily capture your target markets.
The power of mobile and social channels in marketing is really amazing. You only need to discover proven and effective techniques used by expert online marketers. Combining these marketing channels will help make a greater market.

StumbleUpon.com has just released a private beta for their own URL shortener called Su.pr.

Su.pr is a new beta site started by StumbleUpon that allows you to shorten URL’s with advanced stumbleupon features added to the post. Although it is in private beta, StumbleUpon is releasing key codes on their Twitter page. If you follow them and spend some time checking up, they post new codes every once in a while to join. If you take a look at the control panel it seems very straightforward. You can share your links on Twitter or Facebook, and also add a small message with your shortened URL. There are also live tracking from you links which include how many clicks, stumbles, and followers through the links.

If you are into online business, one of the main goal for working so hard is to drive traffic into your site. So here’s for you to try and see if it works.

Check it out yourself and see if there would be any changes in your traffic.

Google Wave is one of the most anticipated web apps of the year and has just made its debut. Google Wave has been dominated by news and excitement that you would have no time to read the thousands of articles being released on Google’s biggest product launch.

Here’s a guide to provide you an overview of what is a Google Wave:

- Google Wave is a real-time communication platform. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss how your day has been or share files.

- Google Wave has its key technologies such as:
a. Real-time collaboration – concurrency control technology lets all people on a wave edit rich media at the same time.

b. Natural language tools – server-based models provide contextual suggestions and spelling correction.

c. Extending Google Wave – Embed waves in other sites or add live social gadgets.

It’s a simple and effective tool for distributing a scarce resource, and is friendlier and easier too.

Have you tried it yet?

One of the most popular websites the StumbleUpon boasted its new features into updated and redesigned version. The newly updated version of StumbleUpon was established with various functions and features to make it more searchable, simpler and social improving. StumbleUpon has been designated as the world’s largest web discovery engine, which delivers over 450 million recommendations of users every month.

StumbleUpon’s new version highlights the following:

Searchable—with this new stumbleupon feature, it would help deliver the most personalized and significant search results. The search is available on every page that allows the users to look for their own favorites, exclusively through friend’s favorites and other favorites.

More social—this feature was updated for users to easily find the people they knew on StumbleUpon as well as meet other users which have similar interests with them. This feature also allows users to see the recommendations from other StumbleUpon users which can be seen in the search results since it would be highlighted.

Simpler—every StumbleUpon users can easily receive personalized recommendations directly from the StumbleUpon homepage, you can receive it from any computer and there is no need for you to register or there is no need for an installation required. It is also designed simpler to make it simple for the new users to begin stumbling.

I came across this article about Facebook’s recently deceased user profiles being ‘preserve’ (my term actually) by the Facebook social network site. They termed it as memorializing the recently deceased. This “memorializing” feature was inspired when Facebook was still on its early stage and was composed of a 40 man team. Imagine the bonding between these team mates and suddenly one of them died…according to the article I read, right after the team mate’s death the whole team met up and one of the talks came on the memorializing of such good friend through keeping his Facebook profile yet with some changes.

Here are the changes:

* You won’t find the friends name on the suggested names list when you suggest a certain application in the social network.
* Other one is the profile can not be accessed anymore and thus hidden to any search except when you are a confirmed friend.
* Confidential data is erased.
* The profile is protected by hackers through locking it in all log-ins.
* And of course only friends can visit and post on this “deceased friend” profile page.
* Memorializing a friend means telling each other of the good things the person has done when he was still alive.

But how about the ‘pranksters’ who will memorialize still the living friends?

ANSWER: Facebook staff will be asking proofs like a link to a news announcing the death of a person or perhaps a scanned legal documents that proves the person’s death.

I never thought of the impact of commemorating or memorializing a friend death (did I say this sentence right?) until a priest explain it to us. He says that human beings are indeed a sacred creature and has angels that guard us. As soon as we die, this angel will report all the good things that your friends will share with each other. That is why in some wake, ‘memorializing’ a recently deceased friend is important so that the deceased person angels has good things to say to the Heaven’s gate keeper and thus allow passage for the dead. Either this is true or not. This idea gives an explanation why there is such thing as memorializing.

Now my question: Will Facebook Save Your Soul when you die?

At this time of high-technology and fast paced era, sometimes memorializing a recently deceased, in a city wherein almost everybody is not a friend but a passing acquaintance is of no use. But this recently deceased person has families worldwide and FACEBOOK is there only connection. Thus, memorializing still happen but with a DIFFERENT MEDIUM- facebook page and walls.

Will this count?
Will the angels still go up there and tell the Heaven’s gatekeeper that hey, “so and so has made a good impact with other people”.

And the proof? Hey, heaven gate keeper look at the Facebook page maaaan!