Many organizations are embedding the use of LinkedIn in key business processes.

Builddirect.com is the world’s largest online retailer of building supplies. According to CEO Jeff Booth:

“LinkedIn plays a vital role in our recruitment and business development activities… researching a potential candidate or business alliance on LinkedIn is almost always one of Builddirect.com’s first steps.”

Unfortunately, few people who join LinkedIn are realizing its full potential. Most still see it as a place to post your generic resume online. LinkedIn can be a powerful tool for building your network and gaining strategic business insights.

Following are 4 tips for maximizing your LinkedIn opportunities:

1. Have a complete profile. This means including a full work history indicating where you have worked, plus your specific contributions, successes and unique experiences. Additionally, make sure you are using LinkedIn apps such as Amazon Reading List, Google Presentations or Slideshare. These apps allow you to add PDF documents, or recent PowerPoint presentations you have delivered to showcase your talents.
2. Use LinkedIn Signal (http://Linkedin.com/signal). This allows you to quickly search your entire network for key phrases or topics. More importantly, the search extends past your 3rd level of connections, which exponentially increases your capacity to gather business intelligence and forge new connections that you wouldn’t be aware of otherwise.
3. Actively participate in and monitor the discussions of LinkedIn groups that your clients and prospects belong to. It will give real-time insight into their challenges and goals of their business, while providing an opportunity to build rapport and engage in a two-way discussion. In turn, it removes the chill from a cold call after you have chatted online over several occasions.
4. Prior to attending an event, meeting or presentation, review LinkedIn profiles of any key people. Quite often, you will discover common connections that can give you the right insights to close a deal, forge a new relationship or solidify an existing one.

There are literally dozens of other steps you can take to maximize your LinkedIn opportunities. While Facebook or Google+ may eventually evolve into dependable and effective business networking tools, LinkedIn is where it’s happening now… 24/7. For anyone who wants to build a stronger professional network, LinkedIn has the connections to get you there.

Shane Gibson is co-author of Sociable! and Guerrilla Social Media Marketing and Chief Social Officer of Socialized! Ltd. a Vancouver based social media agency. Connect with Shane on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/shanegibson.

Source: http://press.linkedin.com/about

“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” – Albert Einstein

This is not my typical post. It consists of more questions than answers and what I really want to know is how you feel about these images.

This is today’s 24H News frontpage. It seems that what makes the headlines is not food shortages at the food bank or that we have the most chronically destitute skid row on the planet. It’s about the fact that we have an abundance of crack users and not enough crack pipes. We have a systemic problem not just and addiction problem. Paraphrasing the Einstein quote above – the people and the thinking in the system that have allowed this social disease to propagate are very unlikely to be able to solve the problem.

8 Blocks away from Canada’s poorest postal code where hundreds of HIV infected drug users live in 3rd world conditions I snapped this picture. It’s from boxing day. Seems people waiting to get into the Future Shop Boxing Day Sale felt it was okay to pile their empty cups and garbage on top of two news stands instead of (gasp) holding onto them and disposing of them in an ethical way. My hypothesis: these consumer drones were so fixated to their big screen TV’s they couldn’t make the right decision in their trance. In addition to this… everyone else was doing it. (similar logic for the riots).

Lastly I think that this image sums it up. We should be reaching for this button more often than the “Easy Button.” Our thinking and level of personal responsibility on all fronts needs to be adjusted. What has to change? I think as we discard our garbage while we buy new “things” and hope that big brother will take care of all of our problems we will be doomed to propagate these social sicknesses and to a greater level. The solution isn’t more money from government or more “things” – it’s a new consciousness. What has to change on a individual level to make this happen?

- Shane Gibson – Chief Social Officer @ShaneGibson

Shane Gibson by Cathy Browne

Thanks to: Mark Smith, Meena Sandhu, Teri Conrad, Shane Gibson…I don’t know how you get that done. One of the reasons we became partners is your passion for this sphere and connecting.

Shane: I scheduled this as the buffer, in case George went over time. I want to talk about where Social Media Week came from and how it came here. Eric and Jeff talked about it. It’s really about people. An organization is just a group of people, and that’s what got it done. A bunch of organizations helped it all come together.

SMW founded in 2009 in New York and then it spread. They offered us some guidelines and it was really useful. My vision was that Vancouver was full of very talented social media people doing ROI driven things. And we have a habit of bringing out of town experts in to tell us how to do this when our neighbor is doing great. This isn’t about bringing in superstars from outside. This is about local superstars. Everyone looked at me and said, “you figure out what we’re going to talk about” and we put it out there and put it forward and all these people stepped forward and we got amazing supports. We can’t even name all the supporters, because we’d be here all night. We wanted to break down silos and this has been so much more successful than we dreamed. We’ve had over 3000 people registered. Our Core Chief Tweeter, Teri Conrad was trending briefly.

Thanking sponsors briefly:

CTV, the Sun, Board of Trade, The Province: gave massive resources and support. When they stepped up, a lot of other chips stepped up. Social media event, but when mainstream media came on board everyone else did too!

ING Direct and Meena Sandhu, UBC Continuing Studies, Amuse Consulting, Fasken Martineau, Marketwire, Yelp, SFU Woodwards, UrbanLifeMedia, Popchips.

Dye & Durham, webnames.ca, BuildDirect.com, Langara , MoenbyMedia. There’s about 25 other key people:

Thanks to Lorraine who has reached out to people who couldn’t be here today.

My girlfriend Rina who put up with me.

We’ve got two people here from Nokia: Tom Hall and the other is Cathy Garfield. Nokia is a global sponsor and if you tweet to NokiaCanada that something nice will happen!

And thanks again Cathy Browne for all your photography.

What we want next year I want to see 60 events next year, so step up. I think the really big theme for the next year is integration: it’s not us versus them or online vs offline. It’s about putting it all together seamlessly. It’s becoming increasingly mobile, realtime. What we can’t forget about is: it’s the people that count and the relationships that are absolutely vital.

Infographics have emerged as one of the most popular and shareable forms of social content. That’s the premise of what we’re talking about today. 973,000 Google results on “Infographics”. In four months it’s almost doubled. They make content easy to digest. I”m overwhelmed just trying to keep up, and I’m a pro at this. Make it easier for your customers and community to learn from you easily.

60-65% of us are visual learners. Cater to them.

Easy to share infographics. It’s a type of content that’s different and people are more encouraged to share them; cool, funky, fun.

Definitions: visual representation of information, data to simplify it. Data visualisation for example. Think back to boring powerpoints, and how they could really be improved. Idea art!

The Blog Tree

Types of infographics: Statistics, obviously. Concepts: illustrate thought leadership. Models are a great tool to use internally: describe service offering, different products, etc. Technically cartoons aren’t infographics, but it’s my presentation and I like them. Adding humour relays a message well. Straight up information eg the Blog Tree. Timelines as well.

How do you get started? Explore new ways to inform your audience and think about ways to add in a visual element to help people understand you better. Record your thoughts: doodle or whatever. Process and refine ideas; take all the inputs and output as an infographic. The hardest part is Implementation. Create and publish.

Remember:

Keep it simple, including keeping it up above the fold, think about how it prints out in context.

Tell a story. Think about your end goal when you’re deciding the story. Work backwards.

Make sharing easy. Licensing: use Creative Commons, etc, so that the image becomes branding collateral.

It’s more about your ideas than the software or the tactic. Ideas > Software. Use what works for you.

Just do it. Drop the “my precious” attitude. Done > perfect. You want your ideas to shine through, not your production values.

Workflow example: Visualizing the idea that a heavy investment in social media won’t solve your organizational issues.

Started with the idea of weak foundation. Then house of cards. This is proof I can’t draw! [img] I sketch it two dimensionaly because I cannot draw three dimensionaly. Then I go to Publisher and do it.

Infographic ROI: it helps if they add business value. The Content Grid V2 as an example. Awareness can be brought via infographics. Infographics create signals. Signals —-> Conversations.

Content Creation Options: DIY, in-house designer, outsourced to a pro, partner with arts students who are building portfolios.

Q do you copyright it?

I do my own copyright. There’s not a lot I can do about illegal use; I try to make it easy for people to use what I post. It’s clearly stated that they can use it. People still contact me and offer to buy it. If the info is proprietary don’t create infographics to share publicly. It depends on your comfort level.

Q have you dealt with distorted stats?

It’s a real issue, but I haven’t directly, no. Be honest about the information. If you’re using research, always cite to the source of the actual research report, as opposed to a place that referenced the report but doesn’t contain the actual report.

Q what’s the most successful infographic you’ve seen?

From a metrics POV I can only speak on my own stuff. What have you guys seen recently that stands out: The LinkedIn IPO was pretty amazing. Mint has put out a couple of things recently too. O6 has put out an infographic of the guy’s resume, mapping his experience and education and some cool stuff like productivity.

Q which of yours have you enjoyed most?

I like all the ones I’ve created. To me it’s more about the process of turning an idea into an infographic. The FB snakes and ladders game got lots of attention. David Armano is a huge influence and he’s with Edelman. LogicAndEmotion is his blog. Visuly is a website that is working towards helping you create visualizations. Fastcompany does an excellent infographic and National Geographic and USA Today.

Q if you make a great infographic, how do you leverage that?

It’s just like any other social media post. Make sure people can contact you, so embed your contact deets into the image. Figure out what the objective is. It’s primarily an awareness tool.

Q Has anyone done an infographic on the evolution of infographics?

You ultimately have to provide value. What Jeremiah Owyang said is, you’ve got to really connect other touchpoints through infographics.

Amielle Lake of Tagga Media, one of Vancouver’s best kept secrets, in that most of what they do is outside the city. Mobile marketing @Tagga

Mike Jagger of Provident Security and other amazing startups, a consummate entrepreneur. @providentmike

Jill Earthy CEO of Forum of Women Entrepreneurs here in Vancouver, and a social CEO. @Jearthy

George Moen is still tweeting, so that’s great. He’s the #2 most Followed CEO in Canada, and he’s sitting beside Jeff.

Jeff Booth, who has done a ton of great work with Rob Jones. @jeffbooth

Questions should be questions, not speeches.

As a social CEO what are the 1 or 2 key things to get ppl in your organization to embrace social media?

Internally it wasn’t too difficult at Taiga. It’s a great corporate culture builder: sharing photos. The other day someone faxed us an ad about buying a mobile phone, and we shared that on Twitter, etc. It has promoted sharing organically. I think even our office dogs have twitter accounts.

For Provident, we’re an old-skool business, 24/7. Our challenge is keeping everyone n the same page during a crisis. We were able to use our Blog internally as a reference for our team. We have worked hard to make the posts serve as the knowledge base for our team so when you’re answering the phone you all have consistent stories and practices. It gives the team confidence.

I’m still laughing aobut the Social CEO thing. I was graduating and I got a social award, not a math one. We represent over 400 small businesses and are always looking for additional tools to share what our members are up to. I was hesitant when Twitter started. We have so many great stories and we have to promote them and our offers as well. We have learned to engage and pass along resources and tools.

The one thing about being president is you don’t have to ask permission to do shit. [wild applause] I remember sitting with Nestle and they were flying this guy back to Switzerland to learn email, so we watched that and within six months we owned an internet company. Tech moves fast, but people don’t. If you know that, it’s a hell of a competitive advantage.

What he said. When you have influence at the top of the organization, you don’t have to convince a lot of people. They’ll come on board. We would pay a little bit on engagement. There was an incentive plan around engagement.

Q: what do you do when things go wrong?

When I started Tagga, I knew nothing about social. I was speaking at a conference, blogging was big, Twitter was nowhere, etc. One of the people in the audience wrote a scathing blog report about me and the company and overpromotion, etc. I realized the impact it has is when people start commenting on it. A bad message gets diluted quickly when there are counter-comments. It was a touchy moment, but it helped us to see that.

We did that when we had an issue with…well, I’ve become offended by something another company has done, eg Shaw, where I feel they were misleading and so on. I wrote a pretty angry post breaking out all the reasons their ads were wrong and why they were just liars. We got great feedback and all sorts of people shared it including Telus, wrote again and got a really nice letter from Shaw’s lawyers saying STOP but what was beautiful was what they said: You gotta stop using our logo (and I had). So I took the logo out and I posted the letter from the lawyer. Every time there’s a Shaw outage, we get tons of media. They’re pretty heavy-handed, but because we hadn’t said anything that wasn’t 100% true there was nothing they could do.

We do round tables with a panel of 6. We often get a  lot of media, and one of the panelists once was a high level PR person, and someone did a post taking something of what she said, took it out of context, and posted it. This person on the panel was beyond pissed. And she’s a PR person so that was interesting, but she came back at us, and it was all over Twitter and we lost our PR person because Twitter etc was 24 hours and we had to go back to the blogger and beg them to take down the blog post and the Tweets. We had to be on things 24 hours and interact and support our people. It was a great learning experience.

I had a riot. It doesn’t get any badder than that. And I’m suing 150 people [applause] . I think you got balls to do that to Shaw, they have good lawyers. I’ve only lost it once on social media and that was at the riots. I had seen this guy urinating in my store, talking about being pissed. What he didn’t know was I have a high def camera catching the action, FRONTAL.  I went “DUDE it looks like a penis, only smaller,” and it got picked up. Larry and Willy really loved it. It kind of cascaded. It became a media thing for 24 hours. When it goes out there, it is permanent.

I”m not gonna cross this guy, OR Mike. It hasn’t really happened to us; we’ve created an environment on our site where we put everything on our site, all feedback. I think it helps prevent that sort of thing. We plan for the day we do something wrong, and the hope here is that your advocates come to your rescue.

Q You circulate amongst other CEOs, and constantly interacting with orgs that just aren’t social. What’s the most common misconception that other CEOs have.

George: I talked to one guy who wanted to run all the tweets past his lawyer. It’s the fear of having the conversation in public. We come from the school of controlled media and this is all NOT about that. They’ve just gotta wrap their brain around it.

Jill: it’s fear. We are all marketers. It’s not just you, it’s your staff. Be a role model.

Jeff: it’s fear. But it’s secondary to “what tools? Which ones? what strategy” It’ll happen but it’ll take time.

Mike: it’s either they’re concerned nobody will read it or care, or if they do put it out that their competitors will read it. Fear nobody reads it and fear people will read it.

Amielle: I used to work in mining and ran into a guy in that industry and talked to him about mobile and social and he looked at me like I was from out of space. They have to connect with analysts and institutional investors and so on and the concept of reaching them on their phone and having instant engagement…I was blowing his mind. He flipped me his card and told me to talk to his “intern girl.”

We’re going to audience questions now.

@JaenyB Is it a good idea for CEOs who don’t get it to get online? Or maybe are there other people who should do that?

Jeff: introverts are still good on social media. If you’re not good at relationships, I don’t know how you can be a good CEO.

George: to lead a team, you have to have interpersonal skills. You will see CEOs stepping up or losing.

Mark Smiciklas How do you figure out what metrics are relevant?

Amielle: you can get tweets, likes, fans, but without a conversion plan it’s useless. Plan first, then track and see what’s working and adapt.

George: I disagree. ["That's why we have the panel"] There’s another element here. Social media is nothing more than a communication platform. I don’t care about the metrics in the beginning. All that stuff will show up. It’s networking without expectations at the beginning. of course you want results. I like what Steve Jobs does. He creates stuff, and people just show up. They do no customer research. If you get too ties up in analytics, it hinders the process.

Mike: it depends what you’re selling. We’re a trust-based business. We obsess about numbers. But for us, because we don’t sell anything online, we don’t care. The value of a blog post is better customer service. It’s different if you’re in ecommerce. It’s great if someone in Botswana likes my blog post, butwe guarantee five minute response west of Oak street. So concentrate on that.

Jeff: you used to be able to connect via TV to a captive audience. It’s harder today. How many tweets do I really see? it’s fragmenting. You have to find your meaning. Meaning Travels Well. That builds real fans that convert faster.

Heron Henredon CTV BC @CTVHeron How do you manage your day and how has being social changed your leadership style within the company?

Jill: I’m erratic and I’m still learning alot

Mike: it’s on my phone and it’s just what works with me. Depending on how many people you’re connected to, it’s entirely possible my brother is 90% of your stream. Our other brother is trying to get on a speed skating team. We all have diffrerent things that are appropriate to us. I don’t worry about “filling space” but do what I feel passionate about in the moment and it’s fun. For someone who doesn’t like that, it’s just a lot of work and a sick amount of time. The leadership style had a major change. Once I actually understood what Steve told me, I saw the benefit of it but bringing it into our team and building the wikis internally for everyone as touchstones, etc, it changed the whole company. The value of video alone is huge. It’s making our life easier and everyone sees it.

@TiffanyMChu Have you been able to track benefits to your corporate culture?

George Yes, I get feedback in realtime and employees know I’m very active in social media and you can see that made a big change. Shane kicked my ass on all social media stuff. “your customers are having a conversation without you” said Shane, and that is what made me get it. We measure our interaction and our results have improved over the last four quarters, becuase the president is watching. If the president is Following you, you tone it down a bit.

Jeff: for us, no. We’re on the same system as Mike is on. Completely transparent in management style, no difference from before.

Amielle: social media adds and element of energy to the corporate culture.

Mike: wikis changed the core culture of our company. Some personalities are great at interaction, some are more linear and process-based and it’s all improved everyone’s lives. We can see the positive impact we’re all having on each other and the company as a whole. The people who are most diligent on editing and fixing aren’t the ones generating the content in the first place. it’s all helpful.

Jill: my staff know where I am, what I’m doing and who I’m talking to. And vice versa. That helps with leadership.

Mark @AmuseEvents: what has being social brought that you didn’t even know it existed?

Amielle: When Twitter first became popular I went to blogger party and talked to a girl going to med school and her boyfriend who had thousands of followers she was talking about him like he was a hero, and I was like, but you’re ACTUALLY GOING TO SAVE LIVES and he’s your hero? There’s this misguided sense of celebrityship that I don’t know is totally warranted. I was hesitant about social media for that reason. They give themselves awards and they pay themselves lots, the celebrity-industrial complex. But I have learned things from Twitter that I couldn’t get from the Economist in the same length of time, and that’s been mind-blowing.

Mike: it accelerated our mainstream media exposure. We’re just a local company and got 700 news stories including the NYTimes. A lot of that comes from social media.

Jill: I agree with that. It extends our reach so much and you’re instant friends because you’re already connected.

George: we hugged! I’m working on the biggest deal of my life I can’t tell anyone about because of social media. I heard everybody gets a .tel here…Because of the riot and my accessibility through social media….i got deluged with contacts from journalists, and I put my cellphone on my .tel and that freaks people out. We were able to get a handle on that whole story because of social media and the accessibility and access. I don’t get that much incoming calls, but I don’t. It can really extend the brand of my company, being accessible. You’re an individual brand even if you’re a president. Even if you’re a president of one.

Jeff: I was named as one of the top 25 CEOs by Forbes, and that never would have happened without social media.