LinkedIn can be used for a variety of different reasons. For example, it can be used to post your résumé, network, promote your business, and conduct research.  A perk to having an account with LinkedIn, however, is trying to win new business.  Ann Handley, offers some tips for how companies might use LinkedIn to gain new clientele.

• Target Searches:  Keywords that are most important about your business.
• Track:  Who looks at your profile? Find out, then send them an agency portfolio.
• Research:  Find new companies that might be interested in a new agency!
• Set up a Company Page:  Give your company some presence.
• Discern Patterns:  Recognize who is connected in your industry and make sure they see your brand.
• Participate in LinkedIn Groups:  Find groups in your target market and engage in conversation.

How are you currently using LinkedIn?  Let us know if you think these tips are helpful… ABCey Events will be sure to try them out!

Social media experts are always debating strategies for marketing content to reach the widest possible audience. No matter how skillfully you navigate the social and technical landscape, there is no substitute for authenticity and substance. We often use social media to broaden our exposure online and try to reach out to customers that way as opposed to traditional sales techniques. Sujan Patel’s article on unwritten rules of social media. Here are some of the article highlights.

1. Know the Limits of Self-Promotion: In some environments, self-promotion is expressly forbidden, and you should always rely on someone else, preferably with an established social media presence, to introduce your content to the community. In settings where it is permissible to promote yourself, always do so in moderation. Pay careful attention to the balance between self-serving contributions, and contributing to the community as a whole.
2. Take the High Road: Taking the high road means always keeping yourself above the fray. Never let yourself get dragged down into any conflicts that will reflect negatively on your brand.

3. It’s What You Know AND Who You Know: Most social media platforms have a friending or following feature built in. You may be tempted to make as many connections as you can, in the hopes this will get your content promoted, but this is not always the best strategy.

4. Crafting a Clickable Submission: Just like the three most important things about real estate are location, location, and location, social media has a similar focus on content, content, and yes, content. Even with your entire, reasonably-sized network providing seed votes, bad content will not last on the front page; you must be able to compete with breaking news stories and links from some of the most popular sites on the internet.

5. Do Your Homework and Understand the Algorithms: You don’t need a degree in computer science to understand the basics of popularity algorithms, but you will need to put some effort into studying them.

As a member of any online community and a representative of your brand, (either your business or your personal brand) your primary responsibility is to look out for yourself and make sure that you are always cognizant of the rules, both written, and unwritten. Gain credibility as an event planner or other business person by doing your social media correctly. What other rules do you follow?

As event planners, it is crucial when conceiving an event to focus on the social/socializing opportunities for the attendees before, during and after the event. This element is important in order to increase the ROI, both for you as the event planner for promotional reasons, as well as for your attendees in the interest of networking. Social media has created various creative options to engage your event-goers, and here are just some of the ways from the blog, Go Big Event,  to accomplish maximum socialization.

1. Generate hype around the event before it begins. The best way to do this is by creating event pages on Facebook and Linkedin. Also, a good trick is to create a prize incentive, which you can give out to a random attendee that joins. And always use Twitter to market any prizes, event pages, etc., and be sure to create a hashtag to keep track of comments about the event.
2. Another stellar way to engage with guests before the event is by asking for input on speakers they would like to hear, food they would want to eat, or any other recommendations. You can make this possible through the poll features of Linkedin or Facebook.
3. During the event, encourage guests to tweet and to use the hashtag you created. This way, they can again interact with each other, and it also gives you an opportunity to gauge how they feel about the event. If you are taking questions at the event, ask the attendees to tweet in questions to the hashtag. A good trick to engage the attendees is by uploading pictures or videos at the event to start discussions.
4. After the event, you can again use Facebook or Linkedin to start a discussion to generate feedback about the event, asking the attendees how it could have been improved, what they enjoyed about it, etc.

What other ways have you increased the social opportunities of events you’ve planned? Have you found other, more effective ways to engage your attendees? Let us know what you have found works best for you and your events!

As many of us know, social media plays a major role for many businesses in today’s tech savvy industries. But how do we know if these social media resources are successful in providing our “followers” with the information they’re seeking?

According to the philosophies listed in this article, if people are making note of your postings (replying, retweeting, etc.), and you don’t make a point of engaging with them, you are practicing bad business. Because of the time, money, and resources spent on your social media, you need to be measuring how effective they are for your specific company. Find out what works, and what doesn’t! The article lists the following six areas to examine.

1. Business Metrics: There are tools linking social media with business outcomes (new leads, new email subscribers, social, search and email factors and trends). By tracking things such as the number of ideas that have been submitted or the amount of feedback you had received, look how your social media is affecting things.

2. Share of Voice and Sentiment: This simply compares conversations about your brand compared to competitors in your market. Suggestions on doing so include using a monitoring program keeping track of your brands conversation and those of the competitors for a measured amount of time. Keeping track of the positive and negative feedback allows for areas to improve upon. Its good to keep track of these over time, in order to see the effectiveness and make smarter future decisions.

3. Awareness: Building the awareness should be a main goal for your company.

• Amount of site visits
• Number of brand searches

• Video and content views

4.Engagement: How often do people interact with you and your content?

• Likes
• Blog comments
• Retweets
• Email opens and complaints

5. Influence: The likelihood that you’re inspiring action.

• Likelihood that twitter links are retweeted or commented on
• Likelihood that facebook posts will be commented on and liked
• Likelihood that content will be shared

6. Popularity: The number of people subscribed to your content. Many focus on the quality not the quantity, but the article suggests that more followers leads to more opportunities.

• Number of email subscribers
• Number of followers on twitter
• Number of members of a LinkedIn group
• Number of people who like your facebook page

We at ABCey found this article to be helpful in the process of figuring out how to improve the outcome of your social media. How does your business measure which trends are effective and which ones are not?

The full article can be read here!

We all get those obnoxious e-mails and click that link that turns out to be, at best, a dead end. Enter Blekko, a private beta search engine where one can use slashtags to specify what they are looking for. The slashtags are a feature original to Blekko, and one that should drastically improve search results. For example, when searching for “Ping” on the Apple website, simple search “Apple /Ping” to better focus your results. The goal is to create a more specific search without it being in the main bar. You can also note the most popular slashtags being used in other searches, and create your own public(or private) slashtags.

How does this reduce spam? With a more specific search, you are more likely to find that one link you are looking for. There is also a spam button below each link. Similar to the one used in your email. You can mark any link you don’t like as spam, and it will never show up for you again. This opportunity not only provides sanity for frustrated searchers who always seem to click the same link, but also encourages searchers to come back. It is personal enough that people will think of it as their own search. Programmers have also promised that should enough people mark a website as spam, the site will be investigated, and if necessary, removed.

While the launch date is TBA, users can be assured that this will be the search engine of the future. Developers have been working on it for almost three years and raised over 24 million to help fund their work in progress. Mashable was allowed a debut of the site, and was thoroughly impressed, and TechCrunch believes it to be more user friendly than Google’s specific searches. Who knows, could this be the search engine that finally give Google a run for its money?

Will you use Blekko when it launches? Do you think it could finally give Google the competition it needs?

For all you iPhone users in the event industry, here is a list of handy apps you should add to your event planning tool belt:

• AccuWeather- AccuWeather offers a GPS application to provide worldwide forecasting to “weatherproof” your event.

• Evernote- Create an electronic ideas scrapbook containing notes, photos and voice memos using Evernote, accessible at any time from your iPhone, computer, or the web.

• Foursquare- Keep tabs on your clients’ locations using the geolocation social networking site, and explore your city in new ways with the Foursquare application.

• Skype- The Skype download connects you to contacts anywhere in the world, which is perfect for destination events or long distance clients.

• LinkedIn – LinkedIn for iPhone allows users to access and share their professional profile with clients at the touch of a button, and connect with over 70 million professionals worldwide.

• Twitterific- Twitterific lets you update clients about the event planning process, and allows easy access to your business and social networks.

• Facebook- To keep track of and check in with clients and staff, Facebook quickly connects you to all of your networks.

• Alarm Clock- Though it seems simple, every event planner knows the importance of being on time, so ensure your punctuality with the Alarm Clock application.

How have these apps contributed to your event planning? Are there any other downloads every event planner should use?

“A day to celebrate the revolution of media becoming social. Celebrate Social Media Day with Mashable by attending or organizing a meetup near you June 30th. Connect with your social media community!”

Mashable is hosting the first worldwide celebration for Social Media Day today, June 30th. As of now, Mashable has over 350+ social media day meetups planned around the world! Who doesn’t use social media these days??

Here are some social media facts that I discovered on Socialnomics:

1. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
2. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
3. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia (note that Facebook is now creeping up – recently announced 300 million users)
4. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
5. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
6. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
7. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
8. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
9. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the  population of Ireland, Norway, or Panama.  Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.
10. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
11. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
12. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
13. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
14. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
15. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
16. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
17. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
18. Only 14% trust advertisements
19. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
20. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone

Clearly social media is becoming a huge part of all of our lives! I use Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, our blog and many other websites to help gain online visibility for my event planning company. Social media has become the best way to non-invasively spread the word about what you’re doing, so I will very happily celebrate this day. Afterall, It has saved me from dreadful sales calls.

Jed Singer, the coordinator of the Social Media Day celebration in Philadelphia said, “I just love how social media tethers everyone together, and brings people closer in the real world. It’s amazing how far we’ve come from forums and message boards, to blogging, uploading video, microblogging, geolocating,” he said. “The fact that anyone can instantly publish anything to the web has really changed the world.”

Want to participate??

• Meetup Everywhere Mashable: Sign up to attend or organize your own event on the Meetup Everywhere Mashable.
• RSVP to the Facebook Event: RSVP and upload photos from your meetup to Mashable’s Facebook event page.
• Upload to Flickr: Upload photos to Flickr and tag them with #smday.
• Follow @mashSMday: Follow @mashSMday on Twitter for updates and developments on the celebration.
• Tweet: Use the #smday hashtag on Twitter. With so many participating, it will be a trending topic on Twitter on June 30.

There will be prizes for those that tweet or post the event on FB! How has social media helped you??

We’ve all heard of Facebook, MySpace, Linked In, and Twitter.  Maybe you have an account on one or the other, or even all four.  You, with millions of other users, are along the ride of being available 24/7 to have friends, family members, and other networks to see your information, profile, and pictures.  Now being able to share posts on your daily life exercises and thoughts, we- as a social networking obsessed world- are now officially spend 82% more time on these sites compared to the amount of time we put just a year earlier.

So much time that some of us are putting in the number of hours equivalent to a full-time job – a full-time job that doesn’t take a break on weekends. If the average person spends around five and a half hours a day, seven days a week, that leads one to a little shy of forty hours. Didn’t think you spent that much time each week, did you?

And it’s not just the United States that is infatuated with social networking. Australia, Switzerland, Brazil, Japan, Italy, Spain, and the entire U.K is shortly behind us. In Fact, the US may have the most people belonging to these groups, but Australians have the lead for times-per-day visits. Around the globe, people are interested in having people follow them and have people interested in what they are doing; all day, everyday.  Are we in a self-obsessed world, or just a world that loves to communicate with each other? With social networking up by 82% from last year, how much longer will it be before all of our time is spent on the computer?

In the recent post by Twitter’s CEO, Evan Williams, he tweets: “Across all metrics that matter, yesterday was Twitter’s highest-usage day ever. (And today will be bigger.)” All well and good, but this raises the question:  why the concern? Why the defiance? Twitter’s doing all right… isn’t it?

Doing a bit of sleuthing, we uncovered the following social media trends over the past year:

Facebook’s number of visits, as perhaps expected, are on an upward trajectory. But Twitter and LinkedIn are a different story: the number of visits are completely flatling.  The website Compete allows comparison between various sites. Go to Compete‘s website > click the green “try it for free” link > create a login. Once thats done you can click on the link “compare sites” and fill in the boxes with sites you want to compare statistically. We put in Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and clicked the one year link to see the data over the past 12 months.  This is what we saw:

What do you think are the reasons for this?  Are LinkedIn and Twitter simply trends that have passed their prime?  And what allows Facebook to be eternally popular – the increase in services, the changing interfaces, or simply the wider market?  Let us know your thoughts!

Sometimes I feel as though we get so caught up in the rapidly growing twitter that we forget about one of the best online networking sites: LinkedIn. It has proven sustainability and is an amazing way to grow your professional network. While not as zippy or hip as twitter, LinkedIn has all the basics you need. I recently read a blog post about what’s going to be the next big thing for online networking and it made me think… what about using the ones that already exist to their fullest potential. In this blog post I will talk about ways I have used LinkedIn… as well as ways that other successful entrepreneurs suggest it be used.

ABCey’s Favorite Things About LinkedIn

140 Characters +
First off, there is something to be said for a sentence or paragraph longer than 140 characters. Don’t get me wrong, twitter is a great way to spread information fast, but two of my favorite things about LinkedIn are the discussion groups and recommendations. The discussion groups allow you to pose questions directly to others in your field and receive answers. You can read other discussion threads for inspiration or connect with those in your area. It leaves endless possibilities. Another thing I love about LinkedIn is the ability to write recommendations. There is nothing that speaks to your character and work ethic more than a recommendation from a past employer. It really allows people to get to know you more than a one line bio.

Search Field
The search field on LinkedIn has really helped me to connect with the exact people I want to connect with. For example, you can search not only by company but by job title, allowing you to quickly find the relevant person in the company to your needs. Unlike a twitter account, CEO’s are on LinkedIn.

Guy Kawasaki’s Favorite Things About LinkedIn
{This is a shortened version of his blog post, which you can find here}

LinkedIn Can Help You:
1. Increase Visibility
2. Improve Connectability
3. Improve your Google PageRank.
4. Enhance your search engine results.
5. Perform blind, “reverse,” and company reference checks.
6. Increase the relevancy of your job search.
7. Make your interview go smoother.
8. Gauge the health of a company.
9. Gauge the health of an industry.
10. Track startups.
11. Ask for advice.

Mashable’s Favorite Things About LinkedIn
{This is a shortened version of an article- find the full version here}
Quick Lookup Look up who you are having that next business meeting with. You’ll be able to break the ice right away.

1. Q&A – Post questions to others in your industry.
2. Recommendations – Have clients or co-workers post recommendations, which future employers and clients can view to gauge your skill and level of trustworthiness.
3. Background checks – Look up potential new hires or freelancers. This should be right up there in an HR manager’s toolbelt.
4. See what your competition is up to
5. Introductions – Use people you already know to help make introductions. It’s a great way to get in the door with a company you need to contact.
6. Open Networking – Go out and become a LION! You are an open networker.