Marijean Oldham (Jaggers), a social media specialist and public relations professional, is president and CEO of Jaggers Communications LLC, a strategic communications firm based in Charlottesville, Va.
I don’t often address LinkedIn here on WTF? Friday, but some work today in the business network platform sent me to a profile that stopped me COLD.
Check this out:
Now, I’ve edited to protect the innocent idiot, but seriously, WTF? Did this woman employ her cat to complete her LinkedIn profile? Spelling, people. It’s not that hard. Note to Congressman ____________, check your employees’ LinkedIn profiles. Fire accordingly.
You have a Facebook PAGE for your business, right? Not a profile; please not a profile.
If you are a Facebook page administrator, and want to leave a comment on a post on your page’s wall, the only way you can post as YOU and not as the page, is to change a setting on the page.
Select, Use Facebook as Page, Go to Edit Page, choose Your Settings and deselect the option to always comment as the page. Note: you will have to be using Facebook as yourself (and not the page) to comment as yourself.
There you go — that’s it — now you are free to interact on your business’s page as yourself and not a company or brand.
If you’re new to LinkedIn, step back a bit and review an earlier social media assignment. Perhaps this one or this one. If you’ve been using LinkedIn for a while, casually or even strategically, you need to know about
a new, profile-enhancing feature on the platform.
You can now add sections to your profile to more easily clarify items like certifications or organizations to which you belong. Here’s a list of the section options offered by LinkedIn:
To add any of these items, log in to your LinkedIn account, select Profile, then edit Profile from the top menu. Scroll down past the main part of your profile and just after that you will see a green plus sign and the Add Sections option. Click on that and follow the instructions to add individual sections and enhance your profile.
Listen to the full interview with Coy Barefoot.
State of Social Media on Charlottesville Right Now
Nielsen has published its third quarter, 2011 report on social media usage in the United States. While may of the results are unsurprising to those of us working in media or communications, there are highlights from the report worth mentioning and worth the particular attention of certain industries.
The study, and the overall results are of interest to any marketer or business owner as they dramatically impact the way we do business, attract and keep customers. Some highlights to consider:
More women view video on social networks, but men watch longer.
If you’re using video in your marketing, how does this change the way you’re creating and sharing video? Are men or women your primary audience?
You can scoff at online games all you want; the figures speak for themselves. Internet users are spending more time playing social games than they are spending on e-mail.
If you’re a marketer or responsible for the marketing success of your business, paying attention to the significance of gaming is important. It may be more effective to gamify your content than continue sending e-mails to your customer base. What does that mean for your promotional structure? How do you make a game of your customer interaction? Have you ordered Domino’s Pizza online? Buy a pizza and experience what a successful social gaming promotional campaign looks like. (The pizza’s gotten a lot better recently, too.)
Another particular point of interest to marketers and business owners:
When compared to the average adult internet user, active adult social networkers are 47% more likely to be heavy spenders on shoes, clothing and accessories.
If this is what you sell, knowing who the social networkers are in your community is critical. We also know that social networkers are influential offline as well as on; creating value for this audience is important to your business as its revenue.
If your business is a late adopter, or still dabbling without a specific online strategy, get in this game now, before you’re left in the dust.
What highlights from the Nielsen report resonate the most for your business?
I met with a couple of bright young women today, eager to launch a new business and putting some early thought into social media strategy to support it. One of them expressed concern over committing a social media faux pas — or, as she called it, “social media suicide.”
I thought that was funny and said (truly, I’m not even making this up) that she’d just named the title of my next blog post. . . .
Here are five ways to avoid committing social media suicide:
It seems pretty dramatic, but social media users are a ruthless bunch. Paying attention is important. See: Five Ways to Avoid a Social Media Spanking.
