Tip: Participate in LinkedIn Questions and Other Social Sites

by Fashionmista aka That IT Girl, Spammy Scammers, and Katie James

Online participation gets you face-time. An easy way to do this is to drop into online forums and participate in them - as a seeker of knowledge and as a giver of your expertise. When you do this, be honest and give back.

Dropping into online forums at places like LinkedIn via their Questions can feel like a waste of time - especially if you are working for yourself. No one is paying you to read and learn, right? I often put off this sort of browsing, saving it until late at night when I really should not be staring at a brightly lit liquid crystal screen. BUT. It can pay off in several ways:

• You learn something that will help develop your business. While skipping around a forum, I learned about MailChimp, a great email newsletter company, which also exposed me to their blog, which is a gold mine of information for best practices in sending HTML based (aka pretty graphics) enewsletters.
• You make new friends who can be supportive and introduce you to new resources and opportunities. Kathy of Brooklyn Indie Market contacted me through my blog, and she is not only super supportive, but delivers gold nuggets whenever she can. I also found her friend (my friend now through her) a job with Kathlin Argiro thanks to the LWL Yahoo forum (that will now be on the new LWL website!!).
• Get press from a journalist who is seeking experts in exactly what you're so smart in. Beth, who is ever thinking of ways to publicize LWL members, showed me a blogging question in LinkedIn by a woman who was writing a piece for the New York Times. Luckily I was too busy to think too much, so I responded in my traditional detailed way, and it landed me a call from the writer for her piece. I need to get better at speaking in "quotable" snippets, so she didn't use me, but she did showcase sweetriot's blog (an LWL member, and I don't know if the LinkedIn question was the lead for this bit of publicity), but I did gain a press contact. PS: The NYT article on blogging and small business is great, by the way. Look for more from this author, as she interviewed many bloggers with different experiences and expertises.
• Link to blog posts from your own blog posts, especially when that blog displays linked blog post titles who are linking to them. Google's blog displays links to their posts, and here's a great post on their social network, OpenSocial, and how it relates to social networking.

So, a simple 10 minute investment in something online could lead to great things. You could easily do a bunch of 10 minute investments all day long, leading to hours of time, so it's up to you to pay attention to what is working and what isn't. And when you do this, be sure to fill out your profile and leave links of your website and blogs for people to check out - because they will!  But as always, be genuine, smart, and leave some work up to serendipity.

Do you have an example of a relationship or press piece that happened because you made a little drop in the online bucket? Please share!

Comments

[Judith George]

Always great information Katie! I know this isn't the the question you asked, but an issue I have, that I think others might have - is that sometimes it feels so hard to keep up with all the changes with new social networks and also what other services they have to offer (i.e. I couldn't find the forum on linked in and when you post a question - who sees it?) As a beginner in this social networking world how do I educate myself? For instance I had a hard time to quite understand the Google article i.e., what the "Google Gears" really does. And how will it help my experience on-line? Also what is an API? Sorry for the overload of "green" questions, but I think my lack of knowledge hinders my and perhaps others enthusiasm to get involved.

[Nichelle Blackwell]

Wow! Thanks Katie for all of that information, it is really helpful. In addition to the issues that Judith talks about, I have a hard time keeping track of the amount of time that I spend on blogs, myspace, linkedin, splendora, yelp not to mention keeping my blog up! It is exhausting...any suggestions???? I do really feel like there is value in all of these outlets and believe in the idea of planting the seeds to grow my business but....

[Christine Saunders]

Hi there! I also get overwhelmed by everything that is out there and how to focus on what will be my best return on my time. Sometimes even just getting the daily subscription emails gets annoying and I have to sort through those too!
You asked for examples of how drops in the online bucket turned into press...I've got a couple of great ones. I sent my press release on going green with my floral design biz to Amy Stewart who is a NY Times Best Selling author for her book on the flower industry. She blogged my press release and within a few hours I was being interviewed by Florists Review Magazine. Another one...I dropped a line to Danny Seo on his blog since he had an appearance in my neighborhood. I brought some eco-friendly flowers to his presentation which ended up being taken off of the stage by Mario Lopez. Somehow later that week it was all over the tabloids that Mario Lopez had stolen organic flowers! My name wasn't specifically mentioned, but it was fun to know the whole story and see celebrity gossip take on a life of its own!

[Christine Saunders]

Hi there! I also get overwhelmed by everything that is out there and how to focus on what will be my best return on my time. Sometimes even just getting the daily subscription emails gets annoying and I have to sort through those too!
You asked for examples of how drops in the online bucket turned into press...I've got a couple of great ones. I sent my press release on going green with my floral design biz to Amy Stewart who is a NY Times Best Selling author for her book on the flower industry. She blogged my press release and within a few hours I was being interviewed by Florists Review Magazine. Another one...I dropped a line to Danny Seo on his blog since he had an appearance in my neighborhood. I brought some eco-friendly flowers to his presentation which ended up being taken off of the stage by Mario Lopez. Somehow later that week it was all over the tabloids that Mario Lopez had stolen organic flowers! My name wasn't specifically mentioned, but it was fun to know the whole story and see celebrity gossip take on a life of its own!

[Katie]

Hi Ladies:
The overwhelmedness with time is a real issue. All I can tell you is, study your actions to see what is having the most benefit. Study your site stats to see if you are getting traffic referalls from the website you are putting time into, and if those are low, are you getting other things. Are you thinking of your new online friends that you met online through your blog or another when you have something you want to promote? I was skimming through a forum, and a girl had posted about a contest she was having on her blog. I visited her contest and participated by answering a question she posed. She had a lot of responses, but I guess she liked my response (although I didn't win) because suddenly she was commenting on my blog regularly. As a blogger, comments are like juicy quarters if you need quarters for laundry. We just love them! My other non-blogger friends don't comment on my blog - they email me their thoughts. So annoying! It looks like I don't have readers! I digress.

The way I do it is to be discriminatory with subjects of group emails and just hit delete, and I do try to have dedicated time to respond. This post, for example. I saw the responses, but I knew my response would be a bit long, so I held off responding until I had completed some other work first. Other times, I do skip around the forums or Facebook when I'm inbetween projects and need a break. Other times, my mind works better if I'm skipping around, so I let myself go, and potentially waste time, but normally gain knowledge to help my business and strengthen friendships. As for reading blogs, at the moment I am reading blogs on my iPhone when I'm walking my dog or in the car with my fiance. I'm sure he'd rather I talk to him, though. ;)

Judith: The Open Social is really for programmers to use and build from. If you have the dream of some magical function on your website, you could find a programmer (or me) to build it for you, and that might include using Open Social as a tool box.

API stands for "application programming interface" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface
If an online company offers an API, this means that they are offering their services to be customized into your website. Example: an enewsletter company like Mail Chimp or Vertical Response offers an API to be used on your website. This lets you (or your programmer who you paid to set this up) have the tools of Mail Chimp in your website. So, instead of having a Mail Chimp sign up button, you can have your own button that sends the data (names and emails) into your database instead of into a database at Mail Chimp. It just gives you their product for you to tweak and kind of make your own. So if you have an eshop, the Mail Chimp email tools could integrate into your back end, so if you want to send to customers, instead of downloading and uploading emails from your database into your account at Mail Chimp, Mail Chimp could be integrated into your shop's admin area. It can be a medium investment, so it's not for everyone.

[Katie]

Hi again:
This article may help you decide if and when you want to get involved with social networking:
http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/internet/page7935.cfm

But the best practice is to be aware of what you are trying, and drop it or enhance it depending on its performance for your business.

[Katy]

This is so interesting as I just now sat down to write up a discussion post on the Facebook page addressing this very issue. I run a women's online community and blog and we're actually looking for "experts" to share their knowledge with our membership.

I think that social networking and online communities can be a great way to reach out to a new audience. Just be sure to be careful how you go about posting. You want to blend in and not look like a spammer or drive by poster. We have a pretty strong policy regarding advertising and outside links on our site - we focus on being a part of a community.

The Women's Blog Advertising Network, named ConstantChatter one of their "bloggers of note." If you're interested in becoming a part of our blog and our community and reaching over 5000 women daily with your product or your message, you can contact me directly: katy (at) constantchatter(dot)com.