The verdict is out – LinkedIn is probably the unchallenged competitor as far as trying to get a new job is concerned. You could also use this site to build a lot of laser-focused business leads to your business. Basically, you could use LinkedIn for any of your purposes, but a certain amount of diligence may be required on your part.

Twitter is a social network used by millions of people, and thousands more are signing up every day to send short messages to groups of friends. But where’s the user manual for Twitter? Where do new Twitter users go to learn about Tweeting, retweets, hashtags and customizing your Twitter profile? Where do you go if you want to know all about building a community on Twitter, or using Twitter for business? How can you find advanced tools for using Twitter on your phone or your desktop? To answer all these questions and more, Mashable has assembled The Twitter Guide Book, a complete collection of resources for mastering Twitter. Happy Tweeting!

Oh, and here it is

http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/

What are the key challenges that an enterprise faces today in this social media age?
In my assessment, companies still lack a cohesive social media strategy, which is a great challenge. As a matter of fact, social media can not be done in isolation and you can not have community on the side. Community and social media content has to be a central part of an integrated strategy. Most enterprises look at social media as an after-thought to their overall go-to-market strategy.

At the end of the 90s, businesses needed enterprise grade vendors who understood web as a space. Today there’s a similar need for experienced vendors who can manage, govern, and publish end-to-end solution for enterprise social media. But solutions are just that – bits of code that connect the tools with your web presence. And for anyone working for a large enterprise, one question always comes to mind, so How about those legacy systems?

The advantage of solutions provided by companies like Vignette is that they can work with any legacy system. Even companies without a content management system can use it because it can be deployed as a standalone system. They provide more than website content management , they provide widgets and gadgets that are used to share content beyond a single destination and they are connecting around products. The integration of  content happens around and within the community, be it external or internal to the community.

What does deployment, cost, & support look like?
The solution can be pricey, at $50k in the Vignette example; with support coming in at 20% annualized cost. So let’s face it, it’s not an easy sell when executive leadership continues to consider Social Media as a luxury, an unknown and “unquantifiable” on the balance sheet.

That being said, companies like Vignette are using their enterprise solutions to create real-world case studies and proving efficiency gains and revenue growth that can be measured and tied closely back to the sales channel. They drink their own Kool-Aid, utilizing social media tools that it advocates for training and support and they use wikis for training documentation on the product, and they are making it easier to update and provide training to their customers. Proof by practice.

I was recently asked by some friends at HP how I viewed the the use of social tools between them and others that participate in the space. I told them the greatest challenge HP faces is connecting through their channel all the way to the customer. They don’t want to intercept customers and move them away from the channel partner, but the customer in a social media world, is demanding to be asked what they want in products and services, and they want to have access to the people who shape them. Dell is a great example of opening the communication channel from an R&D standpoint, but in the latter part of the Idea Central implementation they lost steam because they proved again that they just don’t really care.

But that’s my opinion.

Many folks ask how to go about creating social media for their company. As a service to the industry, find here an open source version of a draft social media content development process.

This process is general enough to guide development of specific initiatives. It does not recommend blogging or video, per say. Rather the process allows content creation to move towards the market’s needs, and within the company’s resources. There are 14 steps in all: Read the rest of this entry »

Between “friend requests,” “pokes,” “tweets,” RSS feeds and the constant barrage of text messages and email blasts that invade our attention every second of every day, it’s easy to lose sight of whether we are the dog wagging the tail, or whether the digital tail is wagging the dog.

In Stephen Covey’s “First Things First” (1994), he speaks of moving beyond “urgency addiction” and focusing on “quadrant two” management. What is “quadrant two” management, you ask? Take a look at this graphic:

Most of us spend the majority of our time in Quadrant 3 (Urgent but Not Important) activities. Much of the growth of the social networking phenomenon can be attributed to either these or Quadrant 4 (Not Urgent and Not Important) types of activities. I get it. I love playing Guitar Hero with my daughter but I’m not sure I am becoming a better person as a result.

Character builds and growth occurs when we act “on purpose” and with a purpose by focusing on Quadrant 2 activities that are Important but Not Urgent.

Take a moment to reflect on how you spend your time online and who you share your online time with. If used with a purpose, Social Networking can be a great way to bring people together to build true, trusted relationships; they allow us to empower each other to focus on the values, principles and actions that matter and make a difference.

Social Collaboration, when done right, is a Quadrant 2 activity. It can make important things happen. It can build your business, grow friendships and increase your sphere by orders of magnitude. But, when done wrong it simply wastes your time.

Like it or not, the Internet is changing, and it is changing fast. This change, however, is in our favor. In favor, that is, of individuals, small businesses, authors, and small presses. Web 2.0 and Social Media are here to stay, and are likely the beginning infrastructure of a fresh, new Internet. So, if you are not using these tools and technologies yet, you may want to ask yourself why. More >

Facebook Pages are a powerful way to reach a mass audience and their friends. Sometimes, however, you’ll want to limit who sees what. Here are three tools to help:

(1) Age Restrictions for Pages: You can restrict your Page to users over age 13, 17, 18, 19, or 21, or the legal drinking age where they live. On your Page’s edit page, scroll down to “Settings” at the bottom.

(2) Targeted Messaging: When you send a message to fans, you can target it by geography, gender, and age. For example, a musician can promote a concert to fans in the area. When sending an update, check the “Target this update” box.

(3) New FBML Tags: If you use FBML (http://new.new.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=4949752878), you can restrict content by country and age. For example, if you have licensed content for U.S. and Canada users only, you can to restrict it to those countries, and show alternative content to other users. More details are on the Facebook Developers Blog: http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=150.

I seem to have created a little controversy, in Twitter, to some of the comments of the above post.  I wanted to take the time to make it clear that I do not mean to say that Twitter has no SEO value.

Indeed, syndicated links can provide some ‘link juice’ which can be seen as a potential SEO advantage.  For those of you unaware with this concept, the idea of syndication is that RSS feeds (which do not have the ‘nofollow’ tag) can in fact be used to provide some RSS value to the links you post in Twitter.

I have made an effort over the past couple days to find a single URL that has been indexed as a result of a single syndicated RSS feed.  So while some people, as I have said before have had some varying amount of results providing direct SEO value from Twitter, it proves to be an inefficient venue.

This means that syndication of Twitter is not a widely developed idea.  It might be a great idea for someone to develop a chatter application, but even then we are limited to the potential hope that this will be picked up by the search engines.  In short, it seems like a lot of effort to propagate a link, and resources are probably better utilized if your goal is SEO.

Hope for the future?  Absolutely.  One potential, most likely move, is Twitter will begin to use bit.ly exclusively for their URL shortening services.  For those who are not aware of this relationship, bit.ly is a product of Summize, which has been purchased by Twitter.

This as I understand will have some serious SEO chops. Bit.ly analyzes all shortened URLs through Open Calais (developed by some friends of mine at a company I used to work for), and making this data available in public RSS feeds.  As Thomson Reuters, and Bit.ly, look to find other ways of presenting this content and creating toolkits for development teams through Open Calais, the possibilities could be mind-boggling.

There is a serious future for it.

That said, Twitter remains primarily a way of building your relationships online.  As an SEO tool it remains pretty inefficient.  Would I say not to use it?  Never.  Twitter is a valuable marketing tool, and its influences will grow over time.  There is no doubt about that fact in my mind.

However, I would, as a seasoned Product Manager, suggest tempering value vs. effort when pitching it as an SEO application in your organization or to a potential client.  I believe that you risk creating expectations, or potentially creating a project where effort exceeds the return.

An overwhelming majority (93%) of online Americans say companies should have a social-media presence, and 85% believe these companies also should be interacting with consumers through social media, according to research from Cone.

See the full article here.

“…does Twitter have any SEO value?”

This question came to George via Twitter last night about the value of using Twitter as a part of your SEO strategy.  Twitter is a great social networking tool to create relationships with your ‘followers’ about the activities of your business.

From a structural standpoint, Twitter creates a “nofollow” tag advising Search Engines to ignore all posted links.  While it is not primarily an influential SEO tool, it is an invaluable SMO (Social Media Optimization) tool.

Twitter and other social media tools, like Twitter, are primarily extensions for your branding and awareness strategy, which will allow you to manage your credibility as a source for influencing the generation of SEO opportunities.

From a traffic perspective, many bloggers and businesses are using Twitter as an incremental source of traffic and link juice with varying degrees of success.  Twitter’s primary benefit is the ability to create a viral marketing tool delivered to a willing audience.

Take, as an example, @ricksanchezcnn.  In July Rick Schanchez of CNN began to use Twitter as a means to communicate with and market to his viewers.  As a result he has claimed to have seen a rise in his ratings as a result of the interactivity between himself and his viewers via Twitter.

Rick Sanchez has been able to convert his Twitter activity to an increased audience.  If you follow Mr. Sanchez, you will notice that his posts are not just questions about news items.  Often times you will find him posting about his family time, or impressions of something he just saw on TV.

Social Media tools allow you to put a personality behind your brand, learn more about your customers through interaction.  When thinking about Twitter as a source of traffic, think about how your personality builds the type of goodwill and awareness into business.

It is telling how the further we stray from the corner store, Social Media has inserted those concepts and values that made the corner store the engine that drove our commercial decisions.

In short, Twitter is not an SEO tool. Twitter is one of the great online PR and marketing tools that can be used to build your brand and client base through “word of mouth” and personality.