Today I received a twitter follow from someone who wasn’t using their real name, didn’t have a real picture, no about information and no link to more information and had their tweets protected. I felt a beat cheated and proceeded to tweet:

Not a fan of people who don’t use their real names and then protect their tweets.

A couple of Retweets let me know I wasn’t alone, but one person responded wanting to know more, and we went back and forth. I know this person in real life and they have two different accounts, and everyone who knows this person knows that they use this specific twitter handle. It’s similar to a couple of years ago when I used to use Staples quite a bit as a handle on things like Flickr, twitter etc.

Anyway, I thought I should unpack my tweet and frustration a bit. It all comes down to how you use social media.

Although there’s a lot of overlap between how I use facebook, linkedin and twitter in my head they’re quite clear divisions. Facebook is people I’ve met in real life, people who might like to see the latest picture of my daughter, mostly people I’ve shared a drink or two or twenty with at some point in my life, or people who knew me when and wouldn’t mind staying in touch.

Linkedin is mostly used for people I’ve worked with or would like to work with. It’s people that I’ve exchanged professional emails with or met at a conference. I’ll accept requests from friends but won’t add friends unless there’s a likelihood that we’ll be able to help eachother out professionally in some circumstances.

Twitter is the hardest to explain, because it kind of falls between the two. I use twitter to share and distribute to and with people who I either have a connection with or might have some kind of connection with in some way either socially, personally or professionally. I use it to share a bit of my personal life (like what I’m watching and sharing opinions on the Apprentice or the X-factor) but mostly about professional stuff – like information sharing, data, interesting commentary and editorials. On occasion I’ll use it to broadcast what I’m doing or where I’m going, but that to me is a secondary use case.

This is why I get frustrated by people who don’t use their name, have a picture or any information about who they are, protecting their tweets and then following me. If I don’t know you and you’re not giving me any information on what you’re interests are / what kind of stuff you’re likely to be sharing, I can’t make a decision on whether it would be in my best interests to follow you. If you’re using your real name at least I can do a quick search and find out more about you and see the kind of stuff you’re likely to tweet.

Not sure if I’m right or wrong on this, just feel a bit annoyed when I don’t know anything about someone who’s following me and they don’t give me any information to find out. Thoughts?

Founders can adapt, by committing to find a mentor, realise their weaknesses and bring in senior management who can plug their gaps and give them really good guidance. Think this has worked a fair bit for Mark Zuckerburg, Mark has a great board, including people like Marc Andreesen, he’s brought in some great leadership (eg. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, is a legend). It works for Facebook, Mark might be the face and he might be the subject of films, but I would bet that Sheryl and the other senior managers are able to secure the right partnerships and help the company scale effectively.

On the flip side founders can bring in people and then hand off responsibility when it grows beyond their capabilities. Regardless of how the handovers have happened at Twitter, Ev knows that Dick is a better front man for the company as it scales beyond Ev’s capabilities and putting Costolo in place is a great strategy as the company grows on to the next level.

This all goes back to self-awareness. Are you a Jack Dorsey, an ideas guy who can establish a product? An Ev Williams, who can help scale and grow a company? A Dick Costolo who can take a really big company and really grow it into a potential 9-figure exit or even an IPO? Or are you a Mark (or for that matter a Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and a few other special leaders), who can take the company from idea to real scale at a point where the world is coming into contact with your company everywhere? Knowing if you can and want to adapt as the company grows is really important and ultimately will help dictate the level of success the company will have.

Here’s the thing, all websites either sell something or match up parties. Dating websites sell their audiences but they differ in how wide or deep they want those audiences to be engaged. I think the spectrum goes from a site like plentyoffish.com at the low end, dead easy, low bells and whistles really simple and you get what the tin tells you plenty of fish. On the other end you have a site like okcupid which markets itself as a matchmaker asking deeper questions to help you find your match. I’m not in the market for dating websites (thankfully being married to the greatest wife ever means I don’t have to visit sites like these) but even I was interested in OK Cupid’s blog post on the real stuff white people like. I had come across this post just before my conversation with Josh so it helped me see the common line between dating websites and the rest of the web. The question is; are you a plenty of fish or an Ok Cupid? Or rather are you a for the masses or a for the value site.

Let’s look at social networks, Facebook is a for the masses, everyone’s on it and it’s connections are madness, Linkedin is a value where there’s deeper engagement. Question and answer sites, Yahoo! Answers is a for the masses, Quora is a value rich model. Other social networks like Twitter, and Q&A sites like Mahalo, fall inbetween.

Knowing which end of the spectrum you want to be can help you dictate content and marketing strategy. Questions like should you invest more in SEO or in Buzz and PR can be answered by know what kind of dating site you are.
It’s an interesting concept and I wonder what others think.

Your Linkedin profile is not like a CV or resume – I’m going to use CV as its fewer letters and I’m lazy. A CV should be more specific, when I looked for a job I would have different CVs for different industries, if I was looking at banking roles I had finance things highlighted and with more detail, if I was looking for consulting gigs I had consulting type roles and accomplishments highlighted. My internet company CV was specifically peppered with my technical and product capabilities.

A Linkedin profile should be updated constantly, should have your recent wins and metrics. The focus should be on getting people who’ve worked with you to recommend you – thanks to everyone who’s recommended me on my profile btw! The reason is that you never know who or why someone’s looking at your profile. It could be a recruiter but it could also be a potential partner, customer, or some other relationship that will grow out of Linkedin. You should have some recommendations from colleagues, managers, suppliers and customers if possible. This covers you regardless of who’s looking at your Linkedin profile. Before I had the landing page for AdAvengers.com ready I had “stealth mode” as the company I worked for, when it was ready I changed it. I’ve already got a recommendation on the latest role and it’s for my contracting work not for the work that I’m hoping Ad Avengers will end up doing. Doesn’t matter, what matters is that people see your doing something – anything – of value for someone – anyone!

If you’re lucky you’ll spend most of your time employed rather than looking for a new gig. Your Linkedin profile is like a Google search for you or like your twitter account, i.e. organic and alive. It should reflect the person you are and not focus on a specific role. Think of it as a funnel, your profile is a tool to get people to find out more about you, to ask someone they know about you, or to ask you if you’re interested in a role or opportunity and that’s when you focus on the specifics about the role and your fit for it (in your CV), not when you’re doing your Linkedin profile.

So here are some of my basic’s for a successful Linkedin profile:

• reflect your character, think of three words you want someone to think of when they read your profile and then write your copy
• ask for specific recommendations from people you’ve done work for, and who worked with you on work you’re proud of
• recommend people, people you really like and would want to work with / for/ or have working for you again
• use metrics when you can – from budgets to impact
• Highlight brands that you worked for – if you worked for a big brand, lucky you, if you worked for brands that aren’t so big outline what they did and if they had big brands as clients
• join groups and participate wherever you can – you never know when a connection might be made
• If you’re on twitter then connect your Linkedin profile – at least highlight it in your profile and send the occasional post to both Linkedin and twitter (Tweetdeck is great for this)
• Be careful of highlighting your credentials in your profile title, I get pretty annoyed with people who have Firstname, Lastname, MBA in their profile,  imagine how someone who thinks MBA’s are useless would feel about that (and believe it or not there are people who feel this way)
• Make a significant amount of content available to all, so anyone looking at your profile can get a decent understanding of you without clicking the “View full profile” link
• update frequently – don’t wait till you’re actually looking for a job, you might miss a customer / supplier / partner

Funny enough, Seth Godin has a great blog post today about what kind of story you tell about yourself, your Linkedin page should tell a story about you.

I’m sure they all have the same CVs from 2001-2003 where PHP, MySQL, HTML, XHTML, CSS were sprinkled across the document. Things change, I’ve changed A LOT over the past 7 years, but yet people are still reaching out for me for jobs that I’m not interested in. Surely recruiters are wasting a lot of time when a couple of simple things using social media could save them a lot of energy and help them find the right person for the right job.

Here are some tips for recruiters that you think could really benefit from using social media better – please feel free to email them, not sure if they’re all up to speed with search/twitter/facebook etc.

Linkedin
If you haven’t updated your profile on Linkedin you’re missing out.

If you’re looking for an employee and you’re not using Linkedin you’re missing out even more. It costs peanuts (relative to agencies and head hunters) to go on Linkedin and be able to access the many many many users who might fit the profile you’re looking for.

Plus you can see how people they work with feel about them. I’ve been lucky enough to work with some really great people over the years and it always makes me feel great when I get a recommendation on Linkedin and I’m always generous about recommending people I really enjoyed working with too. That information can be really valuable to people looking for people to fill in their teams.

The best part is that Linkedin shows you how you’re connected. So instead of going through interviews and interviews, examinations etc and then asking for a reference with turns out to say “Run away” you can get the reference done quickly before even engaging. As well you can get an introduction. An introduction from someone I know means a lot more to me than a cold call email and I’m sure I’m not alone.

Everything else

Linkedin should be the majority of the recruitment time spent on digital media but it’s not the only tool you should use. Engaging with blogs, writing a blog and commenting on thought leadership pieces can be a great use of resources as well. This will help you identify who the leaders are in the market place and who you should get working with you.

Twitter is great for this too, microblogging enables you to engage with potential employees like never before. And here’s the great part you get to build a relationship with people. So a call after a tweet is a lot warmer than before. Looking at follower counts, retweets helps you figure out whether someone’s worth the effort, and once you engage with people the right people for the right jobs will come to you.

I know there’s a lot of concern over the new Facebook privacy stuff, but I honestly think recruiters and employers should take advantage of this, being able to “like” or recommend posts enables companies to find the people who are interested and engage with potential employees in a way that hasn’t been possible before.

That’s just the start, I honestly believe that social media for recruitment is being under utilised and recruiters should do more to engage and build communities to make their lives easier. If for no other reason than I really don’t want another email asking me if I’m available for a PHP developer role!

Let me explain. I hear of a new artist, let’s call her Lady Gaga Queen Mo Mo for interest sake. She get’s a couple of plays on MTV but I’m never home to watch her videos so I don’t really get to know Queen Momo ‘s songs. I don’t really listen to the radio, I prefer listening to on my PC and discovery through radio and video doesn’t happen as much as it used to for me personally. I discover music through services like Hype Machine and Spotify. Lucky for me Queen Momo has a lot of music on Hype Machine and on Spotify, I listen to a bunch of tracks and quickly become a fan. I check out her videos for her songs like Mobile Phone and her duet with Kelly Roland called Voice mail and I like her so much so that when she’s in town I buy tickets for me and the Bee for £50 each to see her when she’s in town. Not only that but I share music of her’s that I’m listening to on Twitter and Facebook and lead to three other people discovering her, one buys a CD, one goes to see her in concert and one downloads her album on iTunes.

So Queen Momo didn’t make a lot out of all the different streams or videos that I listened to or watched, but she made 100 quid directly from me when I went to see her in concert and a whole lot more from my sharing my interest in her. Just me, one customer. She also made more out of me as I then went on to buy her next album so the Bee could have it on her iPod. Here’s the thing though, would I have discovered her and become a fan had I not listened to her on Spotify and Hype Machine, maybe but probably not.

Okay so the “hypothetical example” is over and it’s actually pretty close to what the Independent’s written about Spotify and Lady Gaga. But, while it’s easy to track payments from one service and say it doesn’t contribute fairly as the Independent and various unions have done with the Lady Gaga example. What this doesn’t track is how many users discovered Lady Gaga or listened to Lady Gaga on Spotify or worse yet on file sharing sites in the UK and then went and saw her at the O2 or actually bought her CD. Studies have shown that users who use filesharing sites actually buy more music than people who don’t.

The point is that just because we can’t clearly attribute contribution from different channels doesn’t mean they don’t contribute positively to an artists overall income. File sharing and Spotify need to be treated as the new form of brand advertising in that they help artists (brands) build a reputation that then leads to sales. Shutting down or trying poorly scripted laws to protect the industries is as harmful as saying to artists radio or posters promoting your music is illegal.

People forget that social media allows and moves people to share information and content easily. An ad that is actual a social interaction can be shared with a network fare more than a search query.

Let’s look at an example; I do a search for Virgin America, because I’m looking for a flight from NYC to San Francisco and I’m using twitter because I want to see if anyone’s had any experience on Virgin America flights, I see a “Promoted tweet” from Virgin America saying something like – “20% off of flights between Boulder and Las Vegas from us for the next 24 hours” now I’m not flying from Boulder to Vegas, but that’s a tweet I would send on (or ReTweet) to my network. All of a sudden that one promoted tweet impression has turned into nearly 1000 impressions as it goes to my network.

Let’s say I see a starbucks tweet that says that on the 15th you can bring in a mug and get a free coffee, if I bookmark that, or favourite it, that means that Starbucks has a richer bit of information and knows that I’m interested in their brand and their promotion.

Don’t get me wrong, this is assuming that brands are serious about social media and are actively engaging with the community. Brands need to offer real value and give something of benefits to the audience. The brands that pay attention and give people serious value are the ones who will be able to have their messages amplified.

For the brands who do it right, social is going to be huge for traffic acquisition because of the ability to amplify a message. That’s what all the pundits are missing in their analysis of promoted tweets. The ability to interact with the tweet and send it on to my network is huge. In the same way that building an application for facebook for a brand get’s into the news feed and gets users commenting and interacting with the brand in an amplified way.

Social media does acquisition and engagement in a way that search can’t. And that’s why I totally believe that social media will only get bigger and better as a source of costumers for companies that are smart enough to use it well.

Leave it to those crazy French Canadians to try an experiment like getting all your news from social media for five days (coverage from the Guardian and The Toronto Star). The problem with this experiment is that Social media as a tool depends on your connections. More so today than ever before, who you friend and follow is really important to how successful you’ll be using social media for anything.

Recently, Facebook launched customised news channels, where you can friend and follow CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times and other outlets, as well as individual contributors like Katie Couric and CNBC’s Nicole Lapin.

If you’re following CNN, the Guardian, BBC news and other news outlets on Twitter I think you’re likely to be pretty informed. But it all depends on who you follow! If you’re not connected, not following, not friending then don’t rely on the medium for your news.

The same goes with any task oriented participation through social media. If you want to get a job through twitter, follow people in HR, conduct searches for words like “job” “hiring” etc. Use Linkedin for the job hunt and you should be okay using just social media for leads (I’d never just use any one medium for a task like this, but that doesn’t change the fact that you could do it pretty successfully).

The lesson is social media can be good for almost anything, but if you don’t participate and commit, it’s likely to be good for nothing. It’s a tool, and like any tool it’s only as good as the person wielding it.

First the obvious, the continued explosion of social media – This whole post is a great excuse to highlight the fact that Rage Against the Machine is the Xmas number one in the UK. A purely grassroots social media campaign got the song – which is over 15 years old – to the top spot. Regardless of what you think of the song, you gotta love the fact that a Facebook and Twitter campaign toppled the machine (get it, rage against the…) that is the x-factor. People trump marketing dollars in this instance. I think more and more companies are going to spend less and get more mavens, influencers on board to promote goods and services, 2010 is the year where marketing dollars seriously move from the traditional to the emerging social channels. An example is the news today that the Economist is going to try and acquire over 500K in facebook fans and 750K in twitter users.

Secondly the less obvious but pretty transparent and related to the first, the continued explosion of local – small is the new big. Being small, being nimble, being flexible is going to win. Big brands are going to lose more and more market share to the little guy. As Gary Vaynerchuk likes to say, “small town rules”, where the internet allows smaller companies to compete. More small guys are going to leverage social and other channels to acquire costumers at the expense of the big guys.

Thirdly, the wild/out there, based on a hunch – Newspapers will fold their print publications. I’d like to see a couple of major newspapers move from a mix of print and online to being purely online. Physical newspapers are costly, not only in manufacturing but also in terms of distribution and other costs. I think we’re going to see some news brands move to less copies (if not none) and more online news distribution as their major means of revenues.

Fourthly, I think we’ll see the return of the IPO. Linkedin or Facebook are my bet for this one. I think one of these companies will get going on their move to an IPO in 2010.

Lastly, the big dream, I believe there will be a lot of good happening in 2010. I think we’ll get closer on the climate change exchange, maybe not a legally binding agreement, but there will be a serious agreement on climate control. I think politics will move in the right direction. I think the US President Obama will have a much better second year than his first. I think he’s inherited and had to deal with some serious challenges and we’re going to see 2010 where the US, and it’s administration, gets over the crap from 2009 and starts really performing.

Not sure which of these predictions will come true and which ones are going to fall flat, but I would totally trade all four of the first ones for the last. Any out there have any predictions for 2010?

“Whilst free traffic (as opposed to paid-for Adwords) is highly desirable – and we certainly do well from it ourselves – you should never rely on it as your primary source of new business.”

I couldn’t agree more. Not just because algorithms may change and the pipe you’re relying on may break as Duane writes, but also there’s just so many more ways to drive traffic and raise awareness today.

Let’s put SEM aside for one moment and talk about natural low cost digital traffic drivers. With Twitter, facebook, Linkedin, digg and other networks driving more and more traffic there’s no excuse for having SEO as you’re only digital marketing channel let alone on and offline marketing channels.
Don’t get me wrong, I do think SEO is important, and not just from a Google perspective. Naming pages appropriately, having simple readable code, good linking strategy, and making sure pages can be read by the search gods can also lead to users having a better experience.

But we’re seeing a shift from search to recommendations with Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and digg as other potential good traffic drivers. There’s others too. Have a solid interaction plan, interact with the other blogs with other great readers and leverage their audience. Don’t be a troll or a jackass but add value outside of your site and lead people to your content for more value.

It’s not just about executing a varied digital marketing plan it’s also about measuring, measuring, measuring! The great thing about digital is that there’s great tracking and analytics available so you can see which channels are really converting and which ones aren’t. I can check on my analytics tool and see that Twitter and Facebook are great drivers of traffic to my blog, I can also see that avc.com also drives a lot of users – and disqus as well. So I know what’s working when and how well, there’s no doubt that this can’t work for businesses as well.