Top Five LinkedIn New Year's Resolutions for 2012

"Make 2012 the year you learn how to make LinkedIn really work for you and your business," says Jennifer Bishop, one of LinkedIn Australia's top influencers.

As 2011 draws to a close and we move into relax and reflect mode, we'll consider what worked, what didn't and what is just unknown.

"For professionals who have engaged with LinkedIn to build their network and grow their business, there are often dual feelings of enthusiasm and uncertainty," says Bishop. "This lack of knowledge of how Linkedin can impact your brand reputation, findability on Google and business development, has left many aspects of this incredible business tool untapped.

"Here are 5 ways you can resolve to improve your LinkedIn presence and activity for productive networking, lead generation and branding in 2012."

1. Review and update LinkedIn Group membership and activity settings
"Cull them, cut out those that have lots of spam and that you do not get value from. Search "LinkedIn group statistics" and look for groups that have grown in 2011, that contain your target market/prospects either geographically or industry wise. Also look for groups with good spam moderation. As LinkedIn becomes more crowded only the groups with good spam moderation will continue to thrive and grow."

Bishop advises,"Change your group activity settings, I suggest you opt for a weekly group update from most groups and perhaps choose two or three to get daily updates from.This puts you in control of the number of emails received."

2. Get blogging and Integrate your blog content into your LinkedIn profile
Research from Hubspot (http://hubspot.com) consistently illustrates that Inbound Marketing (creating valuable content for customers and prospects) is more effective and costs less than traditional outbound marketing (advertising etc.) "Try and rethink your marketing budget for 2012: do some tests on leads acquired from blogging (content creation) versus leads acquired by advertising. Then measure the ROI."

"You can integrate wordpress.com directly into your LinkedIn professional and company profiles. Because of LinkedIn's massive SEO power, and its twitter integration via Signal, your blog articles are more likely to be found here than just via your own company brand (unless you happen to be Coke)," says Bishop

3. Take advantage of your LinkedIn Company Profile
Your company profile is linked to your professional profile. Its also extremely well found via Google. "If you're aren't already using the Company Profile option you're limiting yourSEO", she emphasises.

The Company Profile Pages, allow business owners or designated administrators (employees), to create content for particular products or services and tailor product/services to segmented audiences. The layout allows companies to create a range of content offerings including video, white paper URL's, as well as targetted landing pages for lead capture. LinkedIn members visiting Company Pages can also post recommendations and reviews of products or services.

"Therefore ensure your company page shows job vacancies, key corporate messages, video, landing page links and of course "all" of your company employees. All these lovely backlinks add massive SEO traction."

4. Start using LinkedIn Company Updates, they are SEO gems
"Your LinkedIn company profile updates are able to be seen by your entire LinkedIn network - they are also searchable via Google so go get your company updates working for brand awareness and engagement."

For companies interested in how LinkedIn can assist with their search engine optimisation this is a huge plus. Given that Social is SEO and SEO is social, for B-to-B firms wanting to drive organic SEO, Company updates, up the "ante". Now, company updates can be linked with your company Twitter account, so updates appear to followers, your network and on Twitter.

5. Use the Export Contacts function to preserve your LinkedIn contacts
"If you are a recruiter, involved in HR, management consulting or any other profession that relies on your LinkedIn network, it’s a good idea to backup your LinkedIn contacts regularly to a CSV file/excel or your own internal CRM system. If you have a large number of contacts I suggest giving each contact an ID number so similar names do not cause confusion."

This means if LinkedIn goes down for maintenance or goodness forbid has technical issues, you still have a backup of your contacts/network. As relationships can be central to many businesses and add to a brands value on the balance sheet this can be critical for many businesses.

Source from : Newsmaker.com

Continue Reading

GoDaddy CEO : 'We’re Not Cynical Folks'

In an interview with Mashable shortly after GoDaddy announced its withdrawal of support for the Stop Online Piracy Act, new company CEO Warren Adelman said that the web hosting and domain registration service was acting purely in the best interest of its customers and would now “let others carry the ball forward” as the fiercely contested piece of legislation continues to make its way through Congress.

“After digesting what was being said online and looking at how we got involved in the process, we came to the conclusion that it wasn’t ready in its current state and that we’d step back and let others provide leadership,” Adelman said.

Adelman indicated that the vociferous public outcry this week against the House Judicial Committee’s list of supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and against GoDaddy in particular was the main factor in the company’s reversal.

“We were seeing and hearing customers and tech leaders many of which are our customers talking and writing about this so we did something that was easy to do: made changes to address their needs,” Adelman said.

Adelman, who took over from Bob Parsons as GoDaddy CEO last Friday, also said that, “having been in this position of CEO for exactly one week allows you to look at the issue in a different light than someone who would have been more deeply involved in this legislation.”

If passed, SOPA would broadly enhance the powers of companies and the U.S. Justice Department to effectively censor websites they deem to infringe on copyright holders. Debate over the issue has been heated, with many Internet lovers calling it draconian legislation that would drastically and negatively reshape the web’s infrastructure.

Many were surprised to see GoDaddy officially get behind the legislation and hundreds of customers moved or threatened to move their business elsewhere as a result.

Following GoDaddy’s reversal earlier Friday, many online commentators inevitably derided the move as simply a calculated business move. But Adelman insisted that was not the case.

“We’re not cynical folks,” he said. “To be honest, this company built its whole business around a core value of customer before everything else.”

Pressed for further clarification on Friday, a GoDaddy spokesperson simply reiterated that the “we have withdrawn our support of SOPA,” but would not say whether the company would take an active stance against the bill in its current form something major sites and services such as Tumblr, Firefox and Reddit have done.

Adelman said that he was optimistic GoDaddy’s retraction of support for SOPA would quell the migration away from his company. The retaliatory movement by consumers picked up steam on Thursday and into Friday morning.

“The reason people have been with GoDaddy historically and the reason they’ll stay with comes down to three things: great customer service, great prices and a wide array of products,” he said. “We’re giving people who are concerned a new view on this position and hope we won’t continue to see those dilemmas, because we’ve been pretty honest and we’ve listened to them.”

What do you think? Is GoDaddy off the hook in your mind? Let us know in the comments.

Source from : Mashable.Com

Continue Reading

LinkedIn Open Source IndexTank Search Engine

LinkedIn has open sourced software obtained in October with its acquisition of the IndexTank search engine software provider.

"We are looking forward to seeing IndexTank thrive as an open source project," said LinkedIn director of engineering, and former CEO of IndexTank, Diego Basch.

At the time of the acquisition, LinkedIn indicated that it was interested in using the IndexTank's software, a well as the company's engineers, to improve the search functions for its own website. IndexTank has implemented search systems at other web companies such as Reddit, Automattic's WordPress site, BitTorrent and TaskRabbit.

With this release, LinkedIn is joining its fellow web service companies in releasing source code of programs. Earlier this week Twitter released its TextSecure mobile encryption technology as well as the Storm streaming analysis engine, both technologies it acquired in company purchases. eBay publicly launched its web programming language, Ql.io, earlier this month. Also released as open source, LiveJournal's memecached data caching software, Facebook's Scribe log aggregation tool, and Google's SPDY HTTP replacement have all enjoyed widespread usage in the web-services community.

IndexTank has three components. One is the full-text search and indexing engine, called IndexEngine. IndexEngine can evaluate results in terms of user-generated inputs, such as the sharing or rating of a document. The package also includes an API (application programming interface), for interacting with IndexEngine through Java, Python, PHP and other languages. Another optional part of the package is Nebulizer, a framework for managing multiple indexes and offering them as services.

LinkedIn has also released a number of other search-related technologies as open source as well. Bobo is a Java-based extension to Apache Lucene that can search semi-structured data. Zoie is a real-time search engine built on Lucene. And Cleo is a library for text form autocomplete services.

IndexEngine and its associated software has been released under the Apache 2.0 license, and is available at GitHub.

Source from : Computer World UK

Continue Reading

Mark Zuckerberg Christmas Vacation in Vietnam

Owner and founder of the world's largest social networking Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly was in Vietnam.

This news is obtained from a close friend of Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan who writes a status on Facebook that says they have landed at Noi Bai airport, Vietnam on Thursday (22/11/2011).

Based on a media report in Vietnam, Tuoitrenews, Zuckerberg is currently staying at a five star hotel in the city of Hanoi.

According to Director of Facebook Vietnam, Huynh Kim Tuoc, her boss came to Vietnam rather than to conduct business meetings. Zuckerberg came to Hanoi for a vacation in order for Christmas.

In Hanoi, Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan spent time wandering the city of Hanoi and had stopped to buy expensive cell phones Vertu brand.

During this holiday, the pair is still accompanied by his personal guards to keep the invasion of his fans.

Currently no information until when Zuckerberg was in the capital of Vietnam. However, the visa has, Zuckerberg could vacation in Hanoi until December 30 this.

Continue Reading