Today, I needed to craft some rules for a LinkedIn Group. Here they are shown below.

A primary source is these tips in a Downloadable Template from Patrick O'Keefe.

The group, Atlanta Soccer Friends, is on LinkedIn.

Marketing is all about pushing the company messages out to target audiences through a variety of channels, which can include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. However, social media is about engaging in conversations with your target audience, something that push marketers aren’t that skilled at. Try promoting your business on Twitter and Facebook, and you will lose followers. Social media is not specifically for lead generation (marketing) but more for raising brand awareness and thought leadership (PR).

Business Blogging, Blog Content, Blogger Relations, Blog Marketing, & Guest Blogging

Update: I promised an update on Business Blogging, Blog Content, Blogger Relations, Blog Marketing, & Guest Blogging.

It’s important to know when the highest percentage of your audience is eavesdropping on your social networks—so that when you share content you’ll get maximum exposure and achieve optimum results. This data is courtesy of KISSmetrics, an analytics provider for web-based businesses. I’ve provided data on e-mail marketing and blogging, too.

Smart executives hire public relations firms that have experience and expertise in their target markets, such as MediaFirst has expertise in the open source Drupal content management system, telecommunications, manufacturing, health care, IT, retail, and supply chain/logistics/transportation/warehousing.

PR can accelerate an exit strategy if executives are looking for that. Last year, we had 4 clients acquired by much bigger firms. We call that a success!

Here’s how PR can be used to accelerate an exit strategy:

Social Media builds awareness and engages with prospects and customers, but just engaging on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, etc. is often not enough to sell your products and services.

Social media is about having conversations – but in order to sell from your social media accounts, your conversations must be worth having. And when you converse, use ways that generate questions that your products and services give answers to.

Collaborating is the frontier of business opportunity today.  The

right, well-executed alliance drives new global competitiveness.

Partnership opportunities represent tens of millions in net, new

revenues for successful expansion and growth.  However, alliances

established with great fanfare frequently lack critical success

factors, such as clear goals, defined methodology, proper staffing,

Note: Recent announcement ... http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-foaf/

Remember when you were a child and you sat in a circle and one person whispered something into the ear of the child next to them and this continued around the circle until the message came back to the original speaker? Was the message ever the same? Rarely!

This is what happens sometimes when we issue a press release. Journalists may trim your press release to a few sentences. With twitter, well-intentioned followers will reinterpret your release into less than 140 characters, potentially causing the message to be garbled and lose its full meaning.

Expert Communities, Such As SelfGrowth.com, Let You Reach Out To A Wider Audience

Social media is fast becoming a leading outlet for savvy marketers to capitalize on their brand. By some estimates, social networking now accounts for 11 percent of all time spent online in the US. Between December 2008 and December 2009, total visits to the top 10 social networking sites increased 63 percent. Nearly one in 10 Internet visits ends up at a social network; nearly one in four page views is on a social networking site.

So, what exactly is engagement? No, we aren’t talking about when your significant other gets down on one knee and asks for your hand in marriage. We are talking about web engagement – the interaction of people with online channels.

Engagement comes in many forms today, through commenting to a blog post, to retweeting an interesting tweet, to connecting through a social network, to interacting to an online forum, and more.

There are a number of different ways people interact online. These people can be classified as:

When Search Engine Optimization (SEO) became a hot topic in the early 2000’s, it was very easy to write a press release with targeted keywords and end up at the top of the Google listings for those keywords.

Today, this doesn’t happen.

Internal Closed Loop Processes to Support Sales and Lead Nurturing

A Sales Support/Marketing group that is identifying potential leads, creating relationships and moving prospects through the buying cycle to lead status is paving the way for your Sales group to focus on closing well qualified leads.

Marketing and Sales are two sides of the same coin. So why don’t they work well together?

The simple answer is the communication between the two and processes set up to facilitate that communication are often lacking.

According to a recent MarketingSherpa study, 80% of B2B vendors either claim to have lead nurturing programs in place, or regard them as a key priority. But only 20% claim to be satisfied with the outcome of their programs. Why such a huge gap between theory and practice?

With all this socializing going on, the challenge of coordinating and integrating messages across multiple social networks platforms has become top-of-mind. Businesses, large and small, are using social media platforms – but for very different reasons.