Monthly Archives: December 2012

28 Dec 2012

Mike Ellsworth Enterprise Social Media, LinkedIn How-to, Social Computing, Social Media beginner, enterprise social media, relationship, social computing, social media, social networking

Developing Relationships on LinkedIn

In our previous post, Using LinkedIn Toolbars, we talked about ways to invite people to your LinkedIn network. In this post, we take a look at a how to use the LinkedIn timeline to attract the attention of your connections.

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Developing Relationships

OK, you know how to find people and invite them to connect. Obviously that’s a big first step, but unfortunately, many people stop there (especially LIONs). You need to do more than collect connections like charms on a bracelet of lives in a video game.

The real key to using any social network is building and nurturing relationships. In order to do this, you need to stay involved with your network. A good way to do this is to watch your contacts’ status.

Your homepage features a timeline that shows you the various updates and activities your LinkedIn connections are engaging in. You should visit your page every day to keep tabs on what your connections are doing. It needn’t take long to do so. Just bring up LinkedIn, scan your timeline for interesting activity, and decide if any of it is worthy of a quick comment.

The timeline shows activities in several categories:

Updates — When a connection changes his or her status, the new status will appear here. Select More Updates to see the entire list of changes. Watch for these changes and note what your contacts are working on. If it’s interesting or relevant you can either “Like” it, comment on it, or reply privately. This is a great way to quickly touch the people you know and build and maintain your relationship.
Company Updates — When a connection starts following a company, this fact is noted in this section. You can click to see the company’s profile, and then follow them yourself. You can also see who else is following the organization. You may be interested in connecting with them as well.
Profile Updates — When a connection updates their profile, that activity shows up here. You can Like or comment on this activity. It’s a good idea to view the profile to stay in touch.
Application Updates — LinkedIn lets you link to content managed by external applications from your profile, including the following:

LinkedIn App	Description
My Travel	by TripIt, Inc. — See where your LinkedIn network is traveling and when you will be in the same city as your colleagues. Share your upcoming trips, current location, and travel stats with your network.
Legal Updates	by JD Supra — under development.
Portfolio Display	by Behance — Any of your Behance content you’ve uploaded using the Portfolio Display application can be linked to the Summary section of your profile
SlideShare Presentations	by SlideShare Inc — SlideShare is the best way to share presentations on LinkedIn! You can upload & display your own presentations, check out presentations from your colleagues, and find experts within your network.
Lawyer Ratings	by LexisNexis — A next generation Ratings application from LexisNexis®Martindale-Hubbell^® is under development
WordPress	by Automatic — If you self-host your WordPress site, you can enable auto posting to LinkedIn through the Jetpack plugin from Automatic.If your site is on WordPress.com, simply enable the Publicize setting for LinkedIn from your WordPress.com Dashboard..
Box.net Files	by Box.net — Displaying and sharing a file from Box in your new LinkedIn profile is easy. In order to display a specific file, all you need to do is paste the file’s direct link in the LinkedIn professional gallery. Simply preview the file as you normally would in Box, select File Options – Share – Get Link to File and then click on Direct Link to generate the URL. Paste it directly in the LinkedIn professional gallery.

We recommend at a minimum adding WordPress so you can link your blog to LinkedIn and SlideShare Presentations, to feature uploaded presentations on your profile.

When your connections post something using an application, that fact is noted and you can Like or Comment on it.

Recently Connected — Follow the connection activity of your contacts. You may find a contact in common that you may want to connect to also.
Group Updates — You can easily follow recent activity in your groups from your home page.

One of your goals on LinkedIn is to show up in your connections’ timelines on a regular basis. You can do this by changing your status by typing in the “Share an Update” box:

You can also trigger timeline updates by changing your professional headline or your experience. You don’t need to make visible changes. Just adding a space or deleting and re-adding a word will do.

Never Can Say Goodbye

When we train on LinkedIn, one of the most common questions we get is “How do you drop a contact?”

It’s pretty easy. Click Connections; select the connection; then select Remove. The connection is not notified that you have dropped them, but, of course, they may notice you’re no longer in their list of connections.

Next up: Create a LinkedIn Group

Using LinkedIn Toolbars is the 96th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 270. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

“Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

“Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances

[1] LinkedIn Toolbars: bit.ly/cIIp0G

21 Dec 2012

Mike Ellsworth Enterprise Social Media, Social Computing, Social Media

Using LinkedIn Toolbars

In our previous post, Inviting People to your LinkedIn Network, we talked about ways to invite people to your LinkedIn network. In this post, we take a look at a how to use LinkedIn toolbars, a power tool in your kit.

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Power Tool: LinkedIn Toolbars

Chances are you’re not always going to have LinkedIn open in a browser on your computer. But if you use Microsoft Outlook for email, or either Microsoft Internet Explorer or Firefox as your Web browser, you can install LinkedIn toolbars[1] that give you instant access to LinkedIn features. LinkedIn also offers:

Email Signature tool — Enables you to customize the emails you send in Outlook, Outlook Express, and Thunderbird
Mac Search Widget — Enables you to search LinkedIn from your Mac Dashboard
LinkedIn Button for Google Toolbar — Adds LinkedIn search to your Google Toolbar

Figure 29 — LinkedIn Toolbars

The browser toolbar installs the JobsInsider function which pulls up a side panel when you view a job listing on many company and third party job sites. JobsInsider analyzes the contents of the job listing to find the employer’s name and then determines how many inside connections you have to the job. The side panel lists people in your network who work at the company and enables you to view their profiles.

Figure 30 — LinkedIn JobsInsider Shows People in Your Network

Next up: Developing Relationships on LinkedIn

Using LinkedIn Toolbars is the 95th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 270. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

[1] LinkedIn Toolbars: bit.ly/cIIp0G

Inviting People to your LinkedIn Network

19 Dec 2012

Mike Ellsworth Enterprise Social Media, Social Computing, Social Media

Inviting People to your LinkedIn Network

In our previous post, Finding People to Invite to your LinkedIn Network – Search Titles, we talked about using the advanced search on LinkedIn to find contacts. In this post, we take a look at ways to invite people to your LinkedIn network.

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Inviting People: Send InMail

InMail is a way to send a message internal to LinkedIn. You can message anyone on LinkedIn, not just those in your network. Sending InMail generally means upgrading your account. You can buy InMails for $10 apiece, or get three InMails a month with the Business premium account, 10 with the Business Plus account, and 25 with the Executive account. The various LinkedIn recruiting accounts offer more InMails.

Inviting People: Fellow Group Members

A far easier way to contact random people on LinkedIn is to join LinkedIn Groups. As we discussed earlier in this chapter, there are all sorts of groups on LinkedIn — hundreds of thousands of them. You can join 50 at a time, and you can message group members publicly by replying to their posts in the group discussions, or privately. The hitch here is that the group member must first post a discussion topic or comment on one.

If your target person is shy and doesn’t post, go to the Members tab for the group, which enables you to invite any group member to connect or even send them a private message.

Search Companies

If you’re more interested in finding companies, LinkedIn has a comprehensive company search.

Figure 28 — LinkedIn Company Search Example

A simple search for the keyword “accounting software” finds more than 3,300 organizations. You can filter the results by industry, location, country, postal code, degree of connectedness to you, company size, and whether they’re hiring.

Next up: Using LinkedIn Toolbars

Inviting People to your LinkedIn Network is the 94th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 269. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

17 Dec 2012

Mike Ellsworth Enterprise Social Media, Social Computing, Social Media

Finding People to Invite to your LinkedIn Network – Search Titles

In our previous post, Finding People to Invite to your LinkedIn Network – Alumni, we talked about finding people to join your LinkedIn network. In this post, we take a look at using the advanced search on LinkedIn to find contacts.

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Search Titles

Using LinkedIn’s advanced search, you can zero in on relevant members you might want to connect with. As we discussed previously, some of the most interesting and powerful search fields are reserved for use by premium members — those who pay money to belong to LinkedIn.

But take a look at the search form and we think you’ll agree; it’s still pretty powerful.

Figure 27 — LinkedIn Advanced Search Page

The various grayed-out areas are only available to premium accounts. You can still search by industry, language, location, title, company, and school. Of course, if you want to use Google as your search engine, as we demonstrated in the opening section of this chapter, you may be able to get at some of the premium attributes.

Here’s a more-advanced example of a Google search of LinkedIn:

site:www.linkedin.com -inurl:answers -inurl:jobs -inurl:companies -inurl:directory YOUR KEYWORDS HERE

Let’s take a look at this example bit by bit:

Site: — Use this keyword to restrict Google’s search to a particular site, in this case, LinkedIn
–inurl: — This keyword, combined with the minus sign, excludes pages with certain keywords in the URL. In this case, we don’t want to see results from the LinkedIn Answers section, the Jobs section, the company pages or company directory. If you do want to see answers in a specific section, change the minus sign to a plus sign.
Keywords — put your keywords, using plus, minus, quotes, or AND or OR to further qualify the search

For example, this search:

site:www.linkedin.com -inurl:answers -inurl:jobs -inurl:companies -inurl:directory “project manager”

finds 17 million project managers on LinkedIn. That’s far better than the 100 search results the free LinkedIn account limits you to.

Once you find these folks, check out their profiles, and either use the connection request techniques we’ve already discussed, or use the two additional ones below.

Next up: Inviting people to your LinkedIn Network

Finding People to Invite to your LinkedIn Network – Search Titles is the 93rd in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 267. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Finding People to Invite to your LinkedIn Network – Alumni

14 Dec 2012

Mike Ellsworth Enterprise Social Media, Social Computing, Social Media

Finding People to Invite to your LinkedIn Network – Alumni

In our previous post, Three Degrees of LinkedIn, we talked about the layers of your network on LinkedIn. In this post, we take a look at finding people to join your LinkedIn network.

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Finding People to Invite

There are probably lots of interesting people beyond your LinkedIn network that might want to consider linking to — friends you haven’t met yet. You can use various features and techniques to find those kindred souls.

One effective technique is to check out the the list of fellow classmates or alumni that LinkedIn provides under the Contacts selection on the navigation bar.

LinkedIn Contacts school listing

Select the school you attended to see other LinkedIn members who also went there. If you don’t see schools in this section, add them to your profile.

When you select a school, LinkedIn displays all kinds of information about fellow attendees who are on LinkedIn, as in this following figure.

Alumni Listing on LinkedIn

You can see the geographic distribution of alumni, the total number on LinkedIn and then a listing of those in your network, starting with your first degree contacts. LinkedIn also lets you search LinkedIn Groups to see if there’s an alumni group for you to join.

So even if you don’t know or remember the folks in these lists, you might consider sending them a connection request, saying something like, “We both went to XYZ U at the same time, but I don’t think we knew each other. I thought maybe you’d like to connect and talk about old times.”

It’s even better if you visit their profile first and mention some other common interests in your note. Also, since the member is new, they are less likely to IDK you.

Next up: Finding People to Invite to your LinkedIn Network – Search Titles

Finding People to Invite to your LinkedIn Network – Alumni is the 92nd in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 264. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

13 Dec 2012

Mike Ellsworth B2B, Social Computing, Social Media, Uncategorized enterprise social media, social computing, social media, social networking

The End of Publishing?

Internet theorist Clay Shirky, in an interview on the blog Findings, said recently:

Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done.

Wow. A whole industry dismissed with a wave of the hand, just like that.

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Can it be true? Can society dispense completely with the services provided by the publishing industry?

The trends are mixed on the answer. Yes, textbooks are going to iPads, but they’re still published by publishers. Self-publishing (like our book series, Be a Person) is on the rise and actually eclipsed regular publishing in 2008, according to Bowker, the folks who run Books in Print. There are 18 self-published titles in a yearly Top 100 for 2011 (not a single self-published book was in the Top 100 for 2010).

Also according to Bowker, between 2002 and 2009, the total number of books published in the US rose from 247,777 in 2002 to a projected 1,052,803 in 2009.

Fewer of these books are being sold, however. The value of US book sales increased only 11 percent from $25.5 billion in 1995 ($35.78 billion in 2008 dollars) to roughly $40 billion in 2008. The pace of publishing is, in fact, accelerating, according to Worldometers, with 403,185 books published so far in 2012 for a projected annual publishing total of 1.2 million books.

There are rays of light in all the gloomy stats about publishing: e-books. According to yet another study by Bowker,

Nearly 30 percent of respondents in the February 2012 survey reported an increase in dollars spent on books in all formats since they began acquiring e-books, while nearly 50 percent reported an overall increase in the volume of titles purchased in any format. [ . . . ] Some publishers are reporting that even when overall revenue has declined, profitability—particularly for e-books—has increased.

So what about ebooks? Recently, Amazon listed more than 1.3 million Kindle titles on its site. According to an Association of American Publishers survey, eBook sales of $128.8 million for January 2012 represented 25.5% of the total trade market (basically everything except textbooks). Adult e-book sales rose 49.4% in January, to $99.5 million, from reporting companies, more than triple mass market paperback sales.

Ebooks from publishers are experiencing phenomenal growth, eclipsing paperback sales. But self-publishers of all types are starting to hit the big time.

Where exactly is traditional publishing going? We can say one thing for sure, it’s not dead yet. Clay Shirky has a habit, though, of being a little out ahead of the curve, so the jury is still out on his obituary for the publishing industry. Like many industries (music, TV, travel) it will be utterly changed by digital.

Some of the services publishing delivers have value, even in a post-paper world: editing (including helping an author realize his/her vision), book design (even indie darling J. A. Konrath uses an ebook designer), promotion, and distribution.

If you don’t think there’s a need for promotion and distribution in the digital world, take a look at the experience of the rock band Radiohead, who self-released their last album, King of Limbs. Front man Thom Yorke said that it was almost like the album didn’t exist, even though the band made lots of money by releasing it themselves. One of their only albums not to sell over a million copies, Yorke was certain it hadn’t connected with the band’s audience.

It remains to be seen whether the brave new world only contains books that have been self-published electronically, or no books at all.

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code WXG8ABP2

What Others Are Saying

12 Dec 2012

Mike Ellsworth Enterprise Social Media, Social Computing, Social Media beginner, enterprise social media, social computing, social media, social networking

Three Degrees of LinkedIn

In our previous post, Types of Direct Connection Requests on LinkedIn, we talked about the various types of connection requests on LinkedIn. In this post, we take a look at the three degrees, or tiers, of your LinkedIn network.

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Three Degrees of LinkedIn

You’ve probably heard of the trivia game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. The game is based on a concept that originated in scholarly analyses of offline social networks called six degrees of separation. The hypothesis behind the concept and the game is that every person in the world is no more than six friend-of-a-friend jumps away from any other. A landmark study by famed psychologist Stanley Milgram actually determined that people in the United States were no more than three degrees of separation away from one another.[1]

There’s no telling if Milgram’s theories gave birth to LinkedIn’s three-tiered networking policy, but regardless, that’s how the site defines the size of your network.

People you are directly connected to are your First Degree network. When you visit their profiles or see them listed in a search, their names are followed by a 1^st icon.

Your First Degree contacts obviously also have connections. These secondary connections are your Second Degree network, denoted by a 2^nd icon. You can connect to these Second Degree folks by passing a connection request through one of your First Degree connections. That First Degree connection can decide whether or not to pass on the request, and you’ll be none the wiser. If the request is passed on, the Second Degree contact is free to accept or reject the request just as if it had come from any other source. Obviously the number of people in your Second Degree network is larger than your First Degree population.

The Second Degree connections have connections themselves, and this is the limit of your addressable network: your Third Degree network. Just as with the Second Degree connections, you can pass a connection request along to a Third Degree by first passing it to a First Degree contact, who must decide to pass it to the Second Degree connection, who similarly must decide to pass it to the Third Degree connection. Confused yet?

When you add up all the people in your First, Second, and Third Degree networks, you have your total addressable network. Depending on the number of contacts each member in your addressable network has, you might be surprised at how many people you can be potentially connected to. (See our rock star encounter in our previous post Alternative to Being a LION.)

We recommend that when you want to contact someone you don’t know at all that you use the method of passing your request through your network described here. It’s like the difference between cold calling someone and getting introduced — being passed through a presumably trusted member of the target person’s network implies a similar endorsement, and will be more likely to help you avoid getting IDKed. However, be aware that some have put the likelihood of getting introduced by a Second Degree contact at lower than 80 percent, and the likelihood for Third Degree contacts is vanishingly small.

Next up: Finding People to Invite to your LinkedIn Network

Three Degrees of LinkedIn is the 91st in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 264. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

[1] Milgram’s Small World experiment: bit.ly/crdJBb

Types of Direct Connection Requests on LinkedIn

11 Dec 2012

Mike Ellsworth Enterprise Social Media, Social Computing, Social Media beginner, enterprise social media, social computing, social media, social networking

Types of Direct Connection Requests on LinkedIn

In our previous post, Adding Connections on LinkedIn – Invites, we talked about how to how to invite someone to connect on LinkedIn. In this post, we take a look at the various types of connection requests on LinkedIn.

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Finding LinkedIn Connections

When you first signed up with LinkedIn, it asked you if you wanted to upload your contacts from your email. This is a good idea to do, even if you don’t immediately want to send invites out to the list. LinkedIn uses the list to remind you from time to time to think about connecting with folks you know.

Other than using a list, the best way to directly add connections is to click the friendly green Add Connections link at the top right of most LinkedIn pages:

When you do this, you’ll see a form with a tab that allows you to search for connections on popular email services like Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo, import your contacts from Outlook or other email clients, or send invitations to people whose email addresses you know.

This is just one of the options you have for making connections, and one you should use judiciously.

An alternate way to get to this menu is to select Contacts from the navigation bar and then select Add Connections.

LinkedIn Add Connections from nav

You used to be able to search and add LinkedIn members from the Add Connections page, but LinkedIn changed that with its 2012 redesign. Now you must use the Advanced People Search function to find former colleagues and classmates to connect with.

Select Advanced from beside the search field in the navigation bar. The Advanced Search page has lots of options for finding people.

One thing you might want to do is to invite people who have worked at the same organizations as you have.

Remember when you were filling out your profile, and we told you to include all your previous jobs? Here’s one place where this pays off. Type the name of the company where you used to work in the Company field and select the Search button.

LinkedIn shows you LinkedIn members who also work or worked at the places you did. You can easily take a look at the lists and invite former colleagues to connect.

You may also want to directly invite members who attended the same schools as you did.

The Advanced Search page offers many other ways to filter lists of people LinkedIn thinks you might know, based on connections of your connections, places they worked, and schools they attended.

But what do those little numbers after the potential contacts’ names mean? They indicate the degree of separation away from you, part of the three degrees of LinkedIn, which we discuss in the next section.

As you can see from the screenshot, you can search by current and past company as well as schools and many other attributes. Notice that many of the filters are grayed out. You need to upgrade to a paid account to use these features.

Next up: The Three Degrees of LinkedIn

Types of Direct Connection Requests on LinkedIn is the 90th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 263. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

11 Dec 2012

Mike Ellsworth Enterprise Social Media, Social Advertising, Social Computing, Social Media enterprise social media, social computing, social media, social media marketing, social media messaging, social networking

Infinite Touches—Finding Social Media Brand Evangelists

In the previous post in this series, Scaling Social Media with Infinite Touches, we talked about brand evangelists (don’t call them ambassadors) and a bit about our Infinite Touches™ process. Let’s take a look at how you can find brand evangelists.

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Finding Social Media Brand Evangelists

As we’ve seen in this series of posts, social media can scale by creating a web of relationships mediated by your most fanatical fans. And that’s great because research shows that people really listen to friends when making buying decisions.

In a June 2010 Harris Interactive poll, 71 percent claimed reviews from family members or friends exert a “great deal” or “fair amount” of influence.^[1] Similarly, a Nielsen study found 90 percent of consumers surveyed noted that they trust recommendations from people they know, while 70 percent trusted consumer opinions posted online.^[2]

The stats about evangelists are even better: They write more than twice as many posts about brands and forward between two and three times more of other people’s online communications. They are also are 50 percent more likely to create a post that influences a purchase. ^[3] Wow!

Preferred Source of Product Information – Nielsen

So if you want to multiply your business’ social media efforts, forget about Facebook page likes or numbers of Twitter followers or even numbers of pins on Pinterest and focus on the people your company delights. Figure out how to enable them to spread the joy and you’ll be able to scale social media no matter how big you become.

To do this, you need to not only reach your loyal fans, but you must deputize them and enable them to find and develop other loyal fans, whom you need to enable to find even more fans, and on and on. How are you going to find your brand evangelists? You can start by doing the following:

Google “I love [your product, organization]” — If you’ve got the nerve, and want to know your enemy, also Google “I hate [your product, organization]”
Google Blog Search your product, organization — You can use Google Blog Search^[4] or other blog monitoring tools
Search Twitter and Facebook — Twitter’s search has gotten a lot better. Facebook search is OK.
Set up Google Alerts and Twitter Alerts — Google Alerts^[5] can send you daily updates based on your keywords. You can set up and save a keyword search on Twitter but you’ll need to manually run it. You can set up automated alerts using TweetBeep.^[6]
Use Sentiment Analysis — Tools like the free Social Mention or Salesforce.com’s expensive Radian6 can help find people who are saying nice things about you

This last technique – sentiment analysis – involves automated determination of the meaning of social media posts. The best we can say about this evolving field is that it can be interesting, if not definitive. This video of a presentation by Kate Niederhoffer, ex-Nielsen BuzzMetrics and principal of Knowable Research is a good introduction to the concepts and limitations of sentiment analysis. It’s long, but well-worth watching.

Sentiment Driven Behaviors; Sentiment Driven Decisions (Kate Niederhoffer, Knowable Research) from Seth Grimes on Vimeo.

However you do it, the first step in assembling an Infinite Touches network of brand evangelists is to find some likely candidates. We talk about how to activate this network in the next post.

Next up: Infinite Touches—Activating Social Media Brand Evangelists

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code WXG8ABP2

What Others Are Saying

[1] Harris Interactive’s Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Tweets: bit.ly/HRurjY

[2] Nielsen’s Global Advertising: Consumers Trust Real Friends and Virtual Strangers the Most: bit.ly/s1oxsS

[3] Social Media Examiner’s 9 Reasons Your Company Should Use Brand Advocates: New Research: bit.ly/IZelVm

[4] Google Blog Search: bit.ly/dy7s5O

[5] Google Alerts: bit.ly/3fbcHD

[6] TweetBeep: bit.ly/dduOQK

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