I’m really beginning to like Sarah Evans (@PRSarahEvans).  She is always interesting and has great information to share.  Here’s something I read on her blog just recently. 

The social ask is when you ask someone to fan, like, follow you on social media.  What do you think?  Is it time for us to stop asking people to get on board with us and just let them make up their mind without the push?  I’m not saying that we should stop putting links or buttons on our various sites to give people a way to find us.  Sarah isn’t saying that either.  But it seems that by now people know what to do once they get to your site.  Won’t they like you if they really like you?

Let’s talk about it in the comments section below. (Opps, I think that I just made a social ask.) Well, you know what to do.

I describe LinkedIn as the sleeper social site sensation of the year.  Wasn’t it just last year that we were all speculating about how LinkedIn works beyond just connections?  This year, we just saw that some people see its value.  The company’s first IPO offering started at just $45 a share but raised dramatically on the first day.  No doubt, this is because many people see that there is value in using LinkedIn to build business relationships even if they haven’t figured out exactly how to use it.

For business-to-business professionals, LinkedIn is the definitive social space where you must have a presence or else risk online extinction.  With 10.3 billion people using Google to find whatever they need, your presence is required. The business buyers and decision makers of today are looking for you to help them solve their business problems by offering your company’s unique perspective and solutions.  Think of Google as your new business card.  

What is LinkedIn?

Surprisingly, I still run into many people who ask this question.  LinkedIn is a social media site for entrepreneurs and professionals launched in 2003.  It is a widely recognized business-networking site worldwide.  

LinkedIn is unique and very different from the other social media sites.  It is all business all the time.  You will not find games to play and you can only connect to people whom you know or to whom your connections introduce you. Connecting to someone on LinkedIn equates to giving out your business card along with some information about your company.  However, online you can keep the conversation going longer and more regularly.  LinkedIn is a tool to help you do that.

LinkedIn Demographics

• More than 100 members in over 200 countries and territories
• Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are members
• 73 of the Fortune 100 companies use LinkedIn’s hiring solutions
• More than 2 million companies have a LinkedIn company page
• The mojority of the members are very influential and affluent

How can LinkedIn Answers help me connect to decision makers?

LinkedIn Answers is an opportunity for you to go beyond your profile by participating in discussions that other members would find helpful.  You can ask or answer a question.  It is a way for you to introduce yourself to other members without feeling awkward or being pushy.

Why should you invest the time to ask or answer questions?

While there are many reasons why answering questions is important, the most coveted reason is Google.  Google indexes questions and answers.  This means when someone searches on a term related to your question or answer it could show up on the first page of Google.  There is, of course, no guarantee that this will happen but the possibility is very high. 

Remember, Google is your new business card.  When you give someone a card, you do not know if it really goes into the person’s active contact list or if it finds a home in the bottom drawer.  Does that keep you from giving them out?  No!  So think of using LinkedIn Answers in the same manner.  You never know when someone will start to see the answers you give as a possible solution to their business problems.   At this point you are one step closer to gaining a new client.

Another reason to invest the time is the This Week’s Expert leaderboard that appears when one goes to the LinkedIn Answers tab.  A person becomes an expert by answering any question that the asker then marks as the best one.  For giving the best-recognized answer, you get a point.  The ten people who have the most points are listed on the LinkedIn Answers tab main page.  Can you say free advertising?  Even when you don’t have enough points to land on the main page, you still get credit on your mini profile of the questions you answer which shows the categories where you have earned expert status.

How can LinkedIn Answers help me generate leads?

It’s true.  You can find people to network with who are ready to buy your product or services.  Here are three ways to do this effectively.

1.  Give clear, honest, good thought out answers.  When you do this, you are establishing that you know what you are talking about.  People will be attracted to you and want to connect with you because you are knowledgeable and helpful.

2.  Ask compelling questions.  This can create actual conversations with other members.    Conversations create something magical.  Ok, it is not magic. However, it creates a type of familiarity that might influence a potential buyer’s decision to pick up the phone and call you when they are ready to solve their business problem.

3.  Never network alone when you can help it.  When you are networking in person locally, invite a LinkedIn connection to join you.  Do you travel for your company?  Try to evaluate whether you have a potential customer in the city where you will be then meet with them before you leave for lunch or coffee.  No selling! Just concentrate on putting a human face on your business at first. 

This is nothing more than Selling 101 for B2B professionals.  But with the addition of LinkedIn Answers as a part of your networking strategy, you are able to connect farther and faster than you can on foot.  It’s true that you can and should use other traditional methods such as cold-calling or print/tv/radio, etc.  However, these methods have very serious limits when compared to using social networking.  Combining them with social networking increases the opportunity to widen the net and catch more prospects.

For many B2B professionals, LinkedIn Answers is still an enigma.  What do you find the most mysterious or confusing about using LinkedIn Answers?  Let’s discuss it in the comment section below.   

flickr creative commons attribution: juliocrockett

I love to read!  The only thing I love better than reading is sharing.  So, who else better to share the content that I find interesting about social media than with you, my dear reader. 

Here are a few articles I found interesting:

Social Media and Home Improvement:  This is an article about Home Depot’s development of a new social media customer service representative.  In addition to their regular duties, this employee will spend 3 days a week creating how to videos and answering customer questions through social media.  Could this be a hit?

You can learn something from a grandmother:  I’m a grandmother so this article from Social Media Today caught my eye.  It’s true that many of the ideas about relationship building with social media are just plain old stuff your grandmother taught you.

Ways to use LinkedIn to build business:  Using LinkedIn has gone from what is it to how do I use it effectively.  This article gives 16 great ways to develop your LinkedIn prescence.

Sharing is caring.  What have you been reading lately that you’d like to share? 

People ofter ask me what is the best way to get liked on Fan Page.  Most of the time I find that new social media users tend to believe that is just a matter of exporting a list or just converting their friends from the personal profile to the fan page.  If only it was that simple.

Getting liked in a way that makes sense is acutally a lot of manual labor. You must get found on facebook by people who want to follow your page and who want to contribute to the conversation there.  Who knows where they will come from.  Your job is to give people the opportunity to find the link to your fan page in many places online and offline.

I read this terrific article with great information about getting more likes on Fan Page.  It’s called 15 Ways to Get “Liked” on Facebook.  The article has some great suggestions about how to do this. 

The only additonal information I would add is:

Way #1 – The article mentions the corporate website but don’t forget that your blog is your corporate website.  Most blogging platforms offer a way for you to add the button through a plugin or widget.

Way #2 – Don’t make adding icons hard.  You can simply go to the web and download a typical social site icon as a jpeg.  Add it to your site then hyperlink it to your fan page.

Way #9 – A fan gate is a fancy way of saying a landing page or reveal page.  There is an easy to use site that offers a free fan gate page.  Try out  iFrame from Wildfire.

Can you think of any other ways to get liked?

Well, just when we all think that social media is getting to a manageble level it happens again.  Another social networking platform, Facebook, adds a few new features that make you go, hmmm…  Now, I do like what LinkedIn changed, but I’m not sure exactly what FB is going for.

First, they have changed the way people join fan pages.  Now, we can only like each other because apparently, according to FB, fan was too strong of a word.  Also, on the fan page you now see your personal FB friends along with the people who “like” you.  The thing that I loved about facebook’s personal profile and fan page was the separation.  I liked having people who only want to see pictures of my granddaughter separated from the other people who want to talk about social media.  It’s down right frustrating, I tell you.  I’m almost afraid to teach my next social media class because while I’m explaining a feature of some social networking site it might change that very hour. 

Second, Facebook is now introducing another level of networking (I guess that’s what it is) called community pages.  So what’s the difference between community page, fan page, personal profile and group?  I don’t believe anyone know yets.  If someone does then like the Bush’s Beans dog, they ain’t talking.  For now what is known is that individuals can create a community page.  I think that the page will be owned by the one who creates it at first but once it reaches a certain number of people who like it then the community takes over and it becomes more like a wiki.  If you understand that, please explain it to me!  LOL!

So the question again becomes should people/organizations go ahead and create a community page to have first in advantage or just wait to see what happens.  How will people use the community pages?  What will having these well liked community pages do for fan pages.  Will it make fan pages obsolete?  The world is waiting for an answer. 

Here’s my biggest question:  Are the big drug manufacturers working on a pill to combat social networking chageitsis?  I might need a perscription.  In the meantime, I guess margaritas will have to be enough.