In Part I, we discussed how balancing the time demands of work and creating engagement via social media for a volunteer professional association seems inevitably to lead to the inadvertent neglect of the association. In Part II, we discussed the importance of gaining a deeper understanding of multiple target audiences as a means of shaping your choice of messages and social media platforms. In Part III, we talked about taking stock of your existing content so as not to exhaust your limited time for original content creation.

An individual who keeps a blog or uses Twitter can do well enough without a marketing plan, but a professional organization cannot. Without a plan, it’s difficult to marshal a team of volunteers in any effective way toward a goal.

There’s nothing wrong with not having a goal if you enjoy wasting time, or if your only goal is an extremely low bar like “we’d like to show that we are minimally present on social media platforms.” But most organizations have greater aspirations. They want to get press coverage, they want to increase the number of members, they want to create a better community for and deliver value to their current members. To make strides toward these goals, it’s important to have a plan.

Anatomy of a Marketing Plan

The marketing plan need not be complex. A one-page overview will suffice so long as it includes a few essential elements:

• A rationale explaining the opportunity for using social media to promote the interests of the organization
• A diagram or description aligning the organization’s strategic goals with social media activities
• An inventory of the channels to be used
• An inventory of content sources
• A description of analytics tools that will measure progress
• A project plan identifying times for reviewing results and re-aligning with the plan

The final bullet points are crucial. Measurement is the only way to tell if you’re moving toward your goals and regular opportunities to review results and re-align efforts to the current or a new set of goals will make a huge difference. Your ability to execute a successful social media strategy is based firmly in the concept of the OODA loop.

For example, if one organizational goal (a common one) is to build more memberships, how would that goal relate to social media activities? If you’ve already done your homework about your target audiences, you’ll know what these targeted groups or tribes find interesting and what social media tools they like to use regularly. Armed with this knowledge and your goal, you know that you need to get them to trust you enough as someone who comprehends their needs to click on a link sending them to your website, where, presumably, they can become a paid member.

Easier said than done, right?

The plan makes a few assumptions. Trust is not a “one and done” event. It’s a process that occurs over time in asynchronous, non-sequential steps. The Harvard Business Review talks about this process as the demise of the traditional sales funnel, wherein customers move in and out of the awareness and consideration phases in more of a swirling or spiral motion than a clear progression toward the sale.

In this context, the steps we might measure toward the goal of growing memberships might look something like this:

As you may note from the diagram, most social media efforts that get measured tend to fall toward the top of the funnel at the Aware stage. These are clickstream analytics that are relatively easy to get at but which tell you little more than the fact that people are aware you exist.

Getting meaningful information about who is Engaged with your brand is a tougher data set to get information about and is frequently a manual process. Few professional organizations can afford a high end social media monitoring tool. If they can, then an approximation of sentiment (who likes, hates, or is neutral about your brand) is considerably easier to access. However, in most cases a few minutes each week and an Excel spreadsheet is a low tech way to start tracking engagement metrics that identify who is most likely to echo, amplify and interact with your brand messages for the organization.

The key to making the leap between awareness and engagement is the ability of the organization to be relevant and interesting to the target audience. Generally speaking, engagement has to happen before a professional organization can get its target user audience to consider the purchase of a membership. Otherwise, any assertion about the value of joining your organization falls flat without sending the critical signals that you understand, share and contribute to the audience you’re trying to reach.

The final step, getting someone to see enough value to buy a membership and join your organization, is usually the easiest step in the value chain to track. Your website’s e-commerce system should be able to provide detailed reports about who has joined and the monetary value of that conversion.

If you’re just getting started and are looking for some free (or nearly free) social media monitoring solutions, here are some options:

• HootSuite (a dashboard for scheduling posts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as well as analytics tracking)
• Technorati (for tracking blog mentions)
• Quantcast (for understanding demographics about your website visitors as well as traffic of competitors)
• Klout (for tracking influencers and other key statistics about your Twitter usage)
• Facebook Analytics (built into Facebook pages with more than 30 likes)
• Google Alerts (a way to monitor brand mentions and get results via email or your Google Reader)

One thing to keep in mind is that your social media program may be the Coolest Thing Ever, but if you are pointing potential new members to a website that doesn’t show a clear way to pay for a membership, your program will fail. As I’ve said previously, a social media plan cannot operate in a silo but needs to be integrated with the strategy and mission of your company, your marketing, and, in this case, your technology. Is your website usable? Have you tracked whether there is a high abandonment rate of your shopping cart?

I’d love to hear your stories and experiences in promoting your professional association. Please add your thoughts, ideas and questions to the comments.

In Part I, we discussed how balancing the time demands of work and creating engagement via social media for a volunteer professional association seems inevitably to lead to the inadvertent neglect of the association. In Part II, we discussed the importance of gaining a deeper understanding of multiple target audiences as a means of shaping your choice of messages and social media platforms.

Social media efforts are messy. Whether you’re a company, an association, or an individual, it’s more likely than not the case that you started out not with a carefully composed strategy but with experimentation.

So while an association may have now gone through the steps necessary to better understand its target audience online and can now answer questions about goals for that group such as attendance at association events or new membership, they often find themselves wondering about how to deal with a legacy presence. It’s equally important to spend some time thinking about the value of your legacy presence online.

What’s in your social media wallet?

What's in your social media wallet? It's probably a mess, so it's time to inventory your channels and content

Performing a full inventory of your social media legacy presence involves not only listing all of the various social media channels and accounts you’ve got but also fully assessing your content sources, both published and unpublished.

Particularly if you are part of a large regional, national or global association with lots of chapters and leadership layers, you may not even have an inkling of the true extent of your social media presence. For instance, the Society for Information Management has over 55 individual LinkedIn groups created by various chapters and offerings put on by the organization! As you might imagine, these groups ran the gamut from having an active group of contributors to being virtual ghost towns. Part of your social media strategy has to involve making some tough decisions about how to react to these groups. In the case of SIM, the decision was made to avoid creating animosity by asking chapter leaders to shut down individual groups. Instead, we elected to take two approaches:

1) We created a centralized LinkedIn group called SIM Connect that was built from the largest and most active user base of SIM members. Any SIM member from any SIM chapter was pre-approved to join the group and start contributing.

2) We made an effort to create more educational resources and support for chapter leaders to maintain and grow their social media engagement on whatever channels they happen to be using, be they LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter.

In addition, this assessment and inventory phase of your social media strategy is an ideal time to look at what competing associations are up to and decide if you’re positioned most effectively or if you are being threatened by associations providing similar content and value.

After tallying up the existing social media channels (a spreadsheet will do nicely for such an exercise), it’s time to roll up your sleeves and take on the more challenging work of starting an inventory of your content. I’d recommend beginning with your existing, published social media posts. It’s probably not necessary to record your individual tweets but any longer pieces your organization has put out online should be recorded. Why? In most cases, this content can be re-used or repurposed elsewhere, meaning in different channels. Many associations (and companies for that matter) invest considerable time and effort creating video assets on YouTube or Vimeo, but they didn’t share these excellent content resources on their Facebook page, LinkedIn, or even their blogs.

Beyond your published content, it’s worth taking time to review your content sources and make some determinations about their usefulness as online content. These might include:

• Chapter news
• Member updates and bios
• Email updates
• In-person educational events
• Online educational events (webinars)
• Foundation or charity partner content
• Partner site content
• Sponsor and exhibitor information

Taking this step to review your content, both existing and potential, is a critical part of being successful with social media, especially when you are strapped for time. And let’s face it, we are all strapped for time. You already have an existing arsenal of content and simply haven’t been thinking about it in terms of sharing it on your social media. Doubtless, some of this content will be unsuitable and some of it will require rework for the social media channel you’ve got in mind. But isn’t that a lot easier than the intimidating task of creating a brand new set of content from scratch?

In Part IV, I’ll talk about putting together a marketing plan and some free tools that you can use to track your ongoing social media efforts and interactions. What did you find when you performed a social media inventory? Talk about your unexpected discoveries in comments.

The North America Quest 2012 Quality Engineered Software & Testing Conference has ended but the new people and great ideas I picked up there will drive conversations for a long time to come. It was great to reconnect with longtime friends like David DeWitt of IIBA as well as make new ones too numerous to mention.

As I had promised the attendees from my session, I’m posting an embed of my presentation I gave at the event. Thanks for the wonderful questions, insights and discussion.

A special thanks to Nancy Kastl of CQAA, TAP Group and Kasln Group for making me a part of this first rate event.

Have you defined your professional association's audience?

In Part I, we discussed how balancing the time demands of work and creating engagement via social media for a volunteer professional association seems inevitably to lead to the inadvertent neglect of the association.

Despite these concerns, it is possible to deploy social media in a way that helps you to have a clearer focus, with goals, content ideas, measurement and a plan that can tame those feelings of being overwhelmed by the sheer immensity of all you could do. A clearly defined social media strategy will energize your association’s board and help you achieve the goals and promise that social media initially seemed to hold.

Get Started: Audience

It begins not with the setup of a series of social media channels, but with the definition of your audience. You may already have staked a claim on one or more social media outlets. I’ll get to them in due course. But any cogent social media strategy for your organization must begin with audience.

You may believe that you know your audience, but it’s commonly the case that the audience you’re reaching is not the segment you need in order to grow. To use an example from my personal experience, the Society for Information Management, composed of Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, IT directors and other technology executives or leaders has a core audience that could be demographically generalized as male, 50+ and affluent.

However, as this demographic ages, retires and allows membership in the professional association to lapse, it becomes increasingly clear that SIM, like so many other organizations, needs to keep its eyes firmly upon the prize of a younger demographic of technology professionals who are moving up through the managerial ranks. They may or may not yet be to the vaunted CIO level but they are tomorrow’s leaders and need to be convinced that the association is the best place for them to network and have access to the thought leadership they need to advance professionally.

Beyond Demographics

Age, affluence, education and geography represent the merest beginnings of understanding your audience. Far more importantly, you must spend time defining and understanding the behaviors of the various subgroups lurking beneath your demographic data. These behaviors, interests, preoccupations, hobbies and preferences will help to paint a much richer picture of the individuals who are attracted to your organization. The ability to engage your members or target members is completely dependent upon your understanding of these triggers.

In the case of SIM, there are clear behavioral triggers that have attracted members of the core demographic. The pressures upon technology executives are pretty unique and include such concerns as the importance of staying current (but not hands-on) with new technologies and technology trends, balancing the requirements of the business against budgets and the security needs of an enterprise, and the importance of getting or maintaining a seat in the executive suite as an innovator and enabler of the business (and not just a cost center). These concerns among others tend to bind technology executives together in ways that more hands-on technologists like programmers or database administrators, who more often operate at a more tactical get-it-done level, do not.

The core SIM demographic, therefore, is attracted to stories about cloud computing, BYOD (bring your own device) policies, the future state of the CIO, and innovation management leading practices.

Where the organization needs to set its eyes is upon those who will become the future leaders of their respective companies and who are desirable as future board members, in short, upon those will ensure the survival and propagation of the professional organization’s values. For SIM, that group is on its surface, the current middle management of Information Technology groups, the managers and directors who have emerged from doing hands-on work with technology and are now increasingly tasked with the more strategic concerns of building a world-class IT organization with top talent and which drives innovation and revenue for the company.

While these individuals share many of the same concerns as the core membership of SIM, they can find thought leadership about technology topics in an ever-increasing number of places. SIM as a professional organization needs to find ways to make its discussions of technology trends and innovations more visible, more insightful and more accessible than competing channels. What’s truly unique is that SIM can offer via social media a place for mentorship and experienced technology executives who can serve as models and sounding boards for their ideas. SIM’s social media outreach to these individuals is its ability to fuel professional growth not available anywhere else.

Next Steps: Where do they live online?

Answering key questions about your audiences and grouping them in meaningful ways will not only help you drive out their triggers for involvement in your professional organization, it will also tend to answer questions about where to engage them. For professionals in SIM, the answer to the question of where is LinkedIn groups, at least for the core membership that, when surveyed, indicated by far that they used LinkedIn for professional interactions and Facebook exclusively for personal or family interactions.

For the new target demographic of SIM, younger up-and-coming technology leaders certainly use LinkedIn as well, but they also tend to use a broader array of channels to interact, including Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Quora and Pinterest. Different groups like to be interacted with in sometimes greatly varying ways and your professional association will need to make decisions about where best to spend precious time online.

How carefully have you defined the audience you want to reach? What kinds of interactions do they crave? Where do they want to be? What kinds of things are they prone to share and talk about online?

In Part III of this series, we’ll move on to assessing your existing social media channels, including those of competitors and related groups.

As a board member of a professional volunteer association, the following situation may seem familiar to you.

Your association has been struggling. You’ve made strides when it comes to putting together a great monthly program that has relevant, interesting speakers, but month after month you find yourself stuck with lackluster attendance. You feel as if you’re only reaching a fraction of the potential members in your area and your membership renewals are lagging. You need better ways to connect your members, to build awareness of your group, and to grow your membership beyond its current ranks. All this to do, but you’ve got little marketing background (heck, this isn’t even your day job).

Enter social media! You’ve already got a sense that lots of people are using social media as individuals (social media reaches 80% of Internet users according to Nielsen), to promote a business, a hobby or, in our case, a professional organization.

Social media can seem like a superhero who can save the day but be careful of two-dimensional solutions without real substance or force.

Like some gaudily dressed superhero, social media can seem like a savior charging down like a blue bolt from the sky to rescue your chapter from a perilous predicament. With social media, you can create a LinkedIn group for your chapter, a Twitter channel, a YouTube channel, a Facebook page, blogs, Flicker feeds and podcasts! Suddenly, you are ready to publicize all of your content!

Will your professional association still exist in 5 years? The steps you take to create a lasting and engaging social media presence may make all the difference to the survival and growth of your association.

Social media seems to hold so much promise.

But who creates the content necessary to engage your audience? Who manages all of these channels on a daily basis, month after month, year after year? If your association is like most, you are dependent upon the good graces, energy and interest of volunteers. We seldom have the resources even to pay for an intern, let alone a more experienced social media community manager.

In Part II of this discussion, I’ll address these specific challenges and use the Social Solution Suite to demonstrate how to create a cogent social media plan suited to your organization’s needs.

Content for this and the following related blog entries has been drawn from work performed for the Society for Information Technology, the professional international organization for technology executives. If you’re a technology leader, you couldn’t have a better professional resource to help ensure your growth and understanding of technology trends that will impact the role of CIO’s, CIO’s and directors of IT. (Disclosure: I’m a board member.)

Social media manager? I don't know if it's the rose or the dog, but something doesn't smell right.

I just spent the day at The Art of Marketing conference in Chicago listening to a completely wonderful lineup of speakers whose ideas and approaches I respect immensely.

One of the speakers, Keith Ferrazzi, spoke early on about the difference between management and engagement and how it distinguishes very powerfully the difference between a fear-driven mentality (the reptilian brain) and one that is driven by chance-taking, creativity and higher brain functions. The notion got me turning around job titles in my head, since it’s not uncommon to see job posts for a social media manager. Indeed.com shows some healthy relative growth in demand for social media managers:

social media manager Job Trends

Social Media Manager jobs

Pulling away from the idea of a manager would be a healthy one, I think, though few businesses tend to think of a manager as a bad thing. It is only in the rarefied universe of communications professionals and academics that we debate the relative value of what’s in a name.

Should we call the role of a person expected to lead a company’s social media strategy and programs a social media marketer? Indeed ascribes considerably more job postings to this particular phrase:

social media marketer Job Trends

Social Media Marketer jobs

And yet, the notion of calling someone a marketer has its issues as well. In recent years, the marketer has been defined as someone who tends to push out information and not as someone who engages in two-way communication with prospects, customers, investors and so on.

What, then, do we call this person a social media engager? While it’s more accurately what the role should entail, it’s a silly, charmless sort of term that sounds like it originated from the George Bush Jr. era (I’m an engager, a doer!). I’m not fond of guru or maven or expert because these words aggrandize the individual and set up overblown expectations that few, if any, can live up to. And a social media professional sounds like a dodge. It’s also too vague. If I cannot tell you what it is I do, I claim to be a professional. The same goes for a social media specialist.

Sociologist would make sense if, alas, it were not already taken! Darn.

Looking to the software development world’s job titles, I might try to apply the terms architect or engineer to the social media role. Social media architect might stick for someone who builds strategies and plans but does not act upon them–as does strategist. A social media engineer might also be accused of a great deal of planning but not actually implementing the plans, though that is precisely what we understand a software engineer to do.

Social media coordinators show up in job ads pretty frequently, but a coordinator sounds like someone who directs traffic, or a dispatcher, not someone expected to participate actively. Similarly, a social media director implies someone who directs but does not get involved.

Finally, a social media assistant just leaves me scratching my head. Do I need someone to help me tweet? In a world where one-on-one interaction has never been more important to success, having an assistant just seems to be, well, counterintuitive.

So what’s in a name? Apparently, not enough. Those names that are typical to the business lexicon do not appropriately convey the essence of the job, which is to create interest and build that interest into loyalty and friendship toward a brand, and, yes, sales. Those names that may better convey the essence of the job are gawky, awkward things. Language fails us.

Some may argue that the ultimate fate of the social media anything is to be subsumed under the larger rubric of marketing or public relations job titles and perhaps that’s the case. If that comes to pass, then I guess it’s the problem of the marketers and the PR folks. Others may feel that an entirely new term should be coined, but I’ve never been much disposed toward splunge solutions….

Sadly, the term that, to me, most closely conveys the essence of the work sounds as high-falutin’ as guru or expert, even though its meaning is nowhere close. Consider the social media raconteur whose job, quite rightly, is to convey stories and anecdotes in interesting ways. And yet, even this term does not fully capture the emphasis on conversation, again suggesting the one-way communication of stories.

While a job title that goes in your Human Resources employee file is easy enough to dismiss, those of us in the field of communications realize the power in names and the sometimes not-so-subtle ways they can color attitudes and behaviors when they are ineptly or thoughtlessly applied. Perhaps it’s possible that the hard work of getting social media right for the business world has been made harder because of the inadequate names we’ve been giving what we do.

Or, maybe I’m just full of splunge.

What job titles has your organization used when it comes to naming the person who uses social media to foster and grow online relationships?

Methods used to access social networking by age group is just one of the many useful infographics you'll find in this free report on digital media consumers by Nielsen.

I typically call out one or more facts that strike me as interesting or particularly relevant when I review a new update or report, but this latest “State of the Media” update from Nielsen has so many interesting data points about digital users that it’s hard to settle on just one or two points.

Take, for example, some of these breathtaking statistics:

• 274 million Americans have Internet access, which is more than double the number who did in 2000
• Americans spent 81 billion minutes on social networks
• The majority of online social media/blog visitors are white, female and between the ages of 18 and 49 years old

The report also highlights interesting differences in usage based upon ethnicity and gender, showing dramatic differences, for instance, between white male users and African-American female users consumption of online video.

Finally, you’ll also find some useful and interesting global Internet usage statistics that may have an impact upon your digital marketing efforts.

As usual, you’ll have to register for the download, but the information is free and a great resource to inform your digital marketing efforts.

Have you found a useful bit of research? Tell us about it in the comments section.

The ability to cover the social media spectrum effectively is, for all intents and purposes, impossible. As of 2010, the amount of invention in the arena is staggering. In 2012, the invention has redoubled itself again:

More patents are issued each year but social network apps continue to proliferate. Source: AC Nielsen

When I started to use this new marketing, I realized that tools would never stop coming my way to provide solutions to my organization. Those who develop social media strategy can call on a plethora of spectrums, diagrams, rainbows and the like that are magic keys to help you find solutions to an effective marketing strategy for your business. They lead you to tools to do things quickly, efficiently and with no muss so you can engage your customer base.

In 2012, there is no question that the social media specialist, strategist or community manager is trailblazing the business brand into this new arena. When these fancy tools start to bore the customer or the client, your client will come and ask you, “What’s next”? Unless you are prepared to answer that question with full-on strategies, social media is reduced to a “Brave New World” that merely keeps companies mollified with shiny toys and repetitive messages. Such a world is tedious and pedestrian – even dangerous to your brand.

Among traditional and new marketing gurus, there is a growing belief that a backlash towards social media is on its way. It won’t be that social media tools stop working and it is not because they aren’t fantastic applications – it will be that there is nothing relevant to say with them, especially from a creative perspective. How many times can a brand new marketing associate post witty dialogue to their employers’ social media page that says “Fridays are the best day of the week!” or, 11 days earlier, “Like this if you are staying hydrated!” I have to say if those messages are coming from a Fortune 500’s social media footprint that I agree with the gurus.

Relevant Dialogue and a True Plan

With a lack of relevant dialogue and no true plan, how do you keep your social media presence healthy, strong… and hydrated? That’s where companies need to look for a plan that maintains your online marketing presence, and that plan comes from those who specialize in social media exclusively.

Your social media can only grow with the "hydration" from relevant, creative content.

I love the entire concept of how social media works. At its best, trusted sources keep me informed with instant and relevant information, making me look like a superstar to my clients. But being effective at using social media requires my entire business to be watered with healthy relationships, the energy of understanding and promoting brands and wielding the priceless tool of knowing what a client needs.  If I can’t do that, no amount of 10-word Facebook hydration will keep things fresh.

When you can become a relevant, trusted advisor, complimented with a strong social media plan, your social media (and business) garden will grow in exciting ways.

Bill O’Connor from AbilityLinks is a highly respected social media specialist, recruiter and disability information specialist who manages the social media presence for AbilityLinks itself as well as the IT Knowledge Abilities Network (ITKAN) in Chicago. 

While it may seem inconceivable that there are still companies holding off on, blocking, and forbidding their employees to participate on the most professional of the social networking sites, LinkedIn, I was reminded this week that they are still out there!

Considering that LinkedIn has been around since the early 2000s, the companies that have continued to be holdouts have had plenty of time to articulate reasons why they aren’t interested in participating in social networking. Those of us who spend our work day using social media to enrich our professional contacts and build our company brand may be quick to dismiss some of these reasons. Other reasons here clearly arise from a misunderstanding of the tools and human nature. Here are a few I’ve heard in the course of my consulting work:

• Our employees will waste too much time
• Our customers aren’t on social media
• Allowing our employees to use LinkedIn would put us at risk of data breaches, identity theft, lawsuits
• We cannot quantify a Return on Investment (ROI)

Even so, the same executives who object to using social media and cite these reasons still tend to wring their hands and wonder whether they are missing out on something. In fact, they feel almost certain that they must be missing out on something because everybody else they talk to seems to think that social networking is a good idea for business.

If you have found yourself in one of the organizations that has locked down LinkedIn, there are some definite approaches you can take to open the door. If you’re the insidious type, getting LinkedIn approved by the top brass is your best bet toward opening hearts and minds to becoming a more social business. Here are six great business cases to help you justify your organization’s use of LinkedIn:

1. LinkedIn can help to improve your business’s visibility

Whether your company realizes it or not, a few of your enterprising employees may have already set up a company profile on LinkedIn. Your decision to block the site and forbid its use on any of your company-owned equipment has only resulted in your total ignorance of one of your own brand imprints. Anyone who keys their personal social media profile to your business email domain can claim to be an authoritative representative of your company and therefore create, edit and update your company’s profile.

On a more positive note, LinkedIn is one of the first places that a prospect or potential investor is going to look to find information about your company. Every time a member of your sales team calls a prospect, the chances are that he or she is going to be looked up on LinkedIn. By setting up a company profile page that details your products or services, your open positions, recommendations and company videos, you can dramatically improve your organization’s visibility with a minimal effort. The return on investment can be tracked in terms of leads and candidate interviews generated, new investors identified, new sales and new hires.

2. LinkedIn can help your employees to be more efficient

Worry about whether one’s employees are wasting time on social media is one of the most frequently cited reasons why sites like LinkedIn get locked down (okay, Facebook gets locked down more often, but so does LinkedIn). But organizational leaders who react in this way tend to miss the other side of the coin. Social networks like LinkedIn can benefit the productivity of your employees in a number of ways, says Computerworld, including helping employees find information faster, improving market awareness and providing access to expert resources.

Furthermore, employees who feel empowered to use social media to benefit your business will be more likely to stay longer, lowering recruiting costs.

3. LinkedIn can help you identify new customers

If your sales team is not using LinkedIn to research and contact new prospects, they are cut off from one of the most powerful CRM systems out there. At the time this blog was written, LinkedIn boasts over 135 million registered users, many of whom are potential customers. Companies can further augment the efforts of their sales team by empowering their employees to spread the word via LinkedIn’s status update function, multiplying the reach of new product or service announcements.

Use LinkedIn status updates to spread the word about new products or services

4. LinkedIn can help you to manage your organization’s reputation

Every company, whether public or private, is concerned about public perception. During a crisis, LinkedIn can serve as a place to quickly disseminate information about your company’s side of whatever story may be affecting it.

5. LinkedIn can help you get more business from existing customers

To sustain and protect their revenues, most companies have multiple products or service lines. At the same time, most of a company’s customers tend to buy one or two products and may not be aware of additional offerings that could deepen and grow the relationship. A solid LinkedIn company profile and active employees who can help spread the word about new products or services can help change perceptions of longtime customers who may have pigeon-holed your organization.

6. LinkedIn can help you to watch your competitors

Do you know who your closest competitors are? On what do you base that information? Most organizations have only a vague idea of who their competitors are and what they are doing. That data is based almost solely upon anecdotal evidence, someone who may work for the competitor or a friend of a friend. LinkedIn is a rich source of information about your competitors, who works for them, what products they are working on, and what former employees may have to say about them. LinkedIn can show you who from your competitors is following information about your company and it can be a source of prospective hires that can be pursued by your recruiting organization.

If you are in an organization that has avoided adopting LinkedIn, I hope that this has provided you with some ammunition to make a case for its adoption. I’d also love to hear about how your organization finally made the case for LinkedIn adoption, especially if the justifications you used were different from what I provided here.

Courtesy of Copyblogger: an excellent thought about the difference between creating substantial blog content as opposed to 140 character “microblog” updates.

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