Confession: Apparently I’ve been being a bad boy on LinkedIn. Though there’s no rules committee for how to use social media, there are cultural expectations. Chris Brogan and several others have convinced me that there is a better way to use LinkedIn.

The big three of social media for me are: Twitter, my blog, and someplace to house video. I have a presence on about 50 different social media platforms, but my big three get most of my attention. My Twitter stream is tied to nearly all the rest. Not every tweet goes to LinkedIn, but a lot of them do.

So far, LinkedIn has not been a destination site for me. It’s a closed system that doesn’t make sharing outside the system easy, so I don’t go there often, but I do send information there often.

It seems there are many who do see LinkedIn as a destination site—a very special destination site. Here are the special attributes of LinkedIn:

• LinkedIn is a unique cultural setting: Viveka von Rosen, who is LinkedInExpert on Twitter, says “LinkedIn is a different social media culture.” LinkedIn users tend to be professionals who are serious about business connections. If social media were school levels, LinkedIn would be grad school. (I’ll let you decide what’s high school, grammar school and kindergarten.)
• LinkedIn users have fairly well-defined expectations: Kammy Burleson, who is ynotweb on Twitter, values LinkedIn’s “low noice-to-signal ratio,” and suggests LinkedIn users expect to find only job/work/career related content there. Facebook may be more about friends (maybe Facebook isn’t a school level; maybe it’s recess, but with an overbearing school marm), and Twitter may be about everything under the sun and beyond, but LinkedIn is BUSINESS!
• LinkedIn users can easily mute someone: Chris Brogan notes that not only is it easy to mute someone on LinkedIn, it’s quite easy to leave them muted FOREVER. So, if you ever want to be noticed on LinkedIn, it’s probably best to avoid the things that get you muted.

So what are the lessons for me?

1. I’ll seriously throttle back my Tweets-to-LinkedIn ratio. Now I probably post about 15 to 20 tweets a day to LinkedIn; tomorrow, maybe just 1 or 2.
2. I’ll ponder the biggest “aha” a little longer—the cultural distinctions between social media platform. It seems like Facebook is the playground where already-known friends hang out together; Twitter is the world bazaar; and LinkedIn is for getting work done.

Craig McGill sums it up well, “make sure tweets that go to LinkedIn are relevant to worklife and aren’t personal.”

What do you think?

Wondering how to put Facebook to work building connections with prospects and customers? You can use unused photos from your catalog photo shoot to give catalog recipients behind-the-scenes access. When you do, you use the power of social media to help customers experience your “who we are” story for themselves. You make it possible for them to personalize your story and make it their own. Encourage comments. More importantly, ACKNOWLEDGE comments.

from DHC's August 2010 catalog

Here’s an example of a direct mail company integrating social media with a printed catalog to give customers greater access to how-things-work at the company. They’re leveraging an asset that would have been discarded in the past (extra photos from a photo shoot) to create a new opportunity for customers to understand them better. DHC is effective in shining the spotlight on others—a solid Spitball Marketing principle hard at work.

What do you do when Google doesn’t have what you’re looking for? (Okay, Google probably DOES have it, but you just don’t know how to ask the right question.) That’s the question a friend asked me just yesterday. Whenever I need something, the first thing I think of is Twitter (you’re shocked, right?)

A few minutes ago I attempted to add a background image to my WordPress site. I use the beautiful theme Thesis, so I started my search for info at the home page for Thesis. Found the instructions; followed them; graphic showed up, but not where I wanted it.

Turned to Google for my second info search. Problem was, I only knew enough about my question to be dangerous. My Google query was “CSS position declaration top left.” Google returned plenty of results; most were way, way over my head.

After about 20 minutes of mind-pounding reading and experimenting with CSS code, I turned to Old Faithful: Twitter. Here’s my Twitter query: Here are the responses that started coming in within 15 minutes:

It’s amazing who’s on Twitter and how generous they are with their help. Twitter connects bright people together. Together they add immense value to one’s online experience.

[B2B Magazine just published a study about Twitter use. They found that those who invested more time, effort, and money into Twitter not only enjoyed Twitter more, but actually got new customers, too! Here's my post on B2BBloggers.com: B2B Twitter Research Uncovers "Secret" to Success.]

Connect with these friends on Twitter: Namnum, Kristof, and Chris.

With Facebook marching toward 500,000,000 users, it looks like social influence is gaining power. What business people are looking for are ways to tap into that power and generate positive word of mouth conversations around their brands and products. The good news is, it’s fairly simple to create buzz.

Last week I was in London once again. This time, I stayed in a hotel way off the tourist trail and 1.5 miles or more away from the closest tube station. Most of the restaurants and shoppes nearby closed up by the time I made it back to the hotel each night (and it wasn’t THAT late!).

One night I returned to my hotel room, opened the cupboard where the in-room coffee supplies were stored, and searched for a packet of decaf coffee. There was none. So, I walked down three flights of stairs and to the front desk. “Do you have any decaf coffee?” I asked. “Let me check,” the attendant replied. “No, it looks like we’re out of decaf, but please wait for just a moment,” he continued.

He walked around the desk and out the front door. A few minutes later he returned carrying a jar of Nescafe decaf coffee. When he handed it to me, I said, “Did you just go to the store and buy this for me?” He said, “Yes. We’re out of decaf.”

Want positive word of mouth? Do the unexpected; expect nothing in return

You may be thinking, “That’s no big deal.” Well, the week before I stayed in the gorgeous, brand new, contemporary Radisson BLU in Bristol. The floors are marble, the main dinning room first rate, and the late night bar well-appointed. They even had free Wi-Fi and wired high-speed Internet! But, they had no decaf in the room either.

When I went to the front desk at the Radisson BLU and asked, “Do y’all have any decaf coffee,” the well-trained and smartly dressed attendent said, “Let me check” and then returned empty-handed and said, “I’m sorry. We’re out of decaf coffee.”

The Radisson BLU employee, no doubt, was perfectly within the bounds of “the procedures,” followed protocol, and was really out of decaf coffee. He was professional, courteous, and made an effort to take care of me. He wasn’t remarkable. He did nothing that would have made him the subject of a blog post (not that that is a goal, by the way), except as a contrast to someone who was remarkable.

The remarkable attendent was at the Pasha Hotel at 158 Camberswell Road in London, England. His name is Levent Aksoy.

What did Levent do at the Pasha Hotel that created the opportunity for positive word of mouth conversation?

• He did the unexpected.
• He expected nothing.

He didn’t reference a policy or procedure book before acting. Instead of worshiping policy, his heart was tuned into purpose. His INSTINCT was to solve his customer’s problem and he acted immediately on it.

So, if you really want to stimulate positive word of mouth conversations about you,

1. Do the unexpected.
2. Expect nothing in return.

You probably won’t find this in your employee handbook.

Monitoring social media is probably the next-big-thing. The London bootcamp on the topic brought together a full conference center theatre of remarkable people from across Europe (and from North America, too, since Nathan Gilliatt and I were there).

In true social media conference tradition, we lost Wi-Fi and Internet access not too long after the conference began. Some were a tad disappointed (and some of us were nearly lost), but most seem to take it in stride. The conference organizer, Luke Brynley Jones and Our Social Times, worked diligently to get things restored. Late in the day we discovered there had been a fire in one of BT’s major hubs that took both Internet access and cellular service offline for the day.

Based on what I heard from the presenters and the audience, here’s my prediction for next year’s social media gatherings.

The speakers had rich content and freely engaged with the audience on stage and off. The big content take away for me was the solid description of three genres of monitoring:

1. free tools
2. do-it-yourself tools
3. tools with human intelligence added

Two classic responses to audience questions:

• When asked why a free tool didn’t offer a certain feature, Marshall Sponder answered, “Well, it’s because…well…you get what you pay for.”
• To a frustration-wrapped question regarding pricing, Nathan Gilliatt said, “Pricing is a black art.”

The bottom line: if you want to DO something with social media, you should be monitoring. There are tools and people available to help you gather, categorize, and make sense of the data. Figure out what you want to accomplish and then find them.

After attending a variety of social media conferences in the United States and Europe over the past two years, I’ll venture both a prediction for next year’s conferences and proffer suggestions for them.

My first official international keynote. LikeMinds 2009 in Exeter, England. Photo by Britt Warg @britt_w

Prediction: Next year’s conferences will focus almost exclusively on case studies. Top presenters will be the storytellers with quantitative and qualitative stories to tell. Theorists and evangelists will be turned away (some will be tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail).

Proffered suggestions: Here are my wild ideas for speakers, attendees, and organizers.

If you’re a speaker:

• do NOT throw your name in the conference speakers candidate pool if you do not have a supply of STORIES chock full of these details.
  -short description of the company, product/service, and market landscape
  -detailed, specific definition of the challenge (problem statement)
  -details concerning the impact of the challenge on the company
  -decision making process the company went through to define the problem
  -decision making process the company pursued as they sought a solutiondefinition of the solution
  -description of the details involved to implement the solution
  -narrative regarding the implementation of the solution
  -narrative of the problems encountered implementing the solution
  -statistics describing the problem before and after the solution
  -your thoughts on the next steps for the company
  -the universal application of the problem, solution, results
• do expect highly informed audience participants who will press you regarding the problem, solution, it’s execution, and it’s results.
• do not expect fawning audiences; that’s so 2009.

If you’re a participant:

• don’t wait until the conference to go to the conference.
• do invest time before each conference to fully understand
  -exactly what the conference promises to deliver
  -who else will be there (speakers, fellow audience attendees and exhibitors)
• do start connecting with conference players well before the conference; you’ll be amazed what you’ll learn by interacting with presenters before the conference; connecting before the conference will significantly enhance your own ultimate conference take-aways.
• do take responsibility for your own conference experience. While conference organizers and presenters will invest a ton of themselves into your experience, the quality and value of your experience is up to you.

If you’re an organizer:

• do plan on having massive bandwidth
• do take the initiative to not only get people to the conference, but to also connect everyone well in advance of the conference (and after the conference, too)
• do determine your Twitter hashtag in advance and start using it, and make sure everyone knows about it, long before the conference (and after, too). It’ll help people connect with one another before, during and after the event.

The topic of social media conferences probably warrants a full book-length treatise. For now I can summarize by saying, conferences are about, in order of priority, connections, content, and conversations. It’s in your best interest to take the initiative to ensure all three happen for you.

BUG IN DISQUS: I have not closed the comments but Disqus, my commenting plug-in, apparently has a bug in their upgrade. I’m working on getting the comments open again and am very sorry for the challenge. I cherish your comments.

Eric Fletcher posted a tweet saying, “World traveller @treypennington…” At first, I was a tad embarrassed, then I embraced his reference. This IS an incredible time and I am grateful for the amazing adventure life is. I’m even more thankful for the fuel powering this adventure.

No doubt most of us think of places when we hear “world traveler,” as in Big Ben or the London Eye in London or the Eiffel Tower, River Seine, or Notre Dame in Paris. All are fantastic places and places I’ve been able to see this year. Still, there’s something else that makes those places so memorable…

London is a romantic, history-rich place with ample venues for catching up with Gemma, Caroline, Luke, Dickie, Eric, Drew, Gabrielle and many other friends. Paris is home to Loic, Thibault, Maxim, and Michelle. Devon is home territory for Scott, Andrew, John, and a whole host of people who are friends.

My journeys abroad take me face-to-face with friends—friends I met and got to know first on social media (primarily Twitter). The fuel for my “world travels” is the people of social media.

Social media opens doors to new friends all over the place. To experience the true hidden treasure in social media, it’s vital to take advantage of opportunities to get face-to-face. Social media can fuel the initial connections and the ongoing connections; face-to-face adds immeasurable richness to the experience.

Social media not only opens the doors to new friends, it also paves the road to opportunities usually limited to folks called celebrities. For instance, because of connections and interactions facilitated by social media, I’ll spend time with Seth Godin in New York and with Zig Ziglar in Orlando…all this month and then again with Chris Brogan in Memphis next month.

Why am I sharing this with you? Because I’m a celebrity or an important person? Hardly. The point is, I’m an average person who’s having an extraordinary experience because of new friends all around the world. The tools that connected me with those friends are readily available to you. That means you have what you need to discover the open doors to whatever adventure you want.

Those of us who enjoy what can be accomplished through social media often spend a lot of time actually talking about the media. The media is fascinating. The adventure begins, though, not with the media, but with people it connects you with.

My adventure, and joy in life, is finding new friends, being with them long enough to catch a vision of their hidden treasure, help them see it and then encourage them and help them grasp it to do something.

Your adventure is probably something entirely different. You, for instance, may want to get people to consume resources with minimal impact on the environment: there are brilliant people doing unbelievably cool things around your adventure…they just probably aren’t hanging out at your local coffee shop or pub. They probably are hanging out online…and sharing what they’re learning (check out what Norway is doing about storing the CO2 deep under the sea, for instance).

Whatever your dream adventure is, there are probably whole communities of people already gathering online to talk about it. Why not jump in online and watch for your opportunity to get face-to-face with them?

While TED is all about “ideas worth sharing,” LikeMinds was a place for people worth meeting. Here are just a few video snapshots of some incredibly fun people to know (fun means perspective, joy, generosity, friend).

Christian Payne at Exeter Cathedral

Christian Payne, known quite affectionately as @documentally, always has a blast of perspective and insight. Guaranteed to put a smile on your face and probably make you think a little more deeply, too. I shot this inside Charter House, part of the Exeter Cathedral.

AJ Pape at Southgate Hotel

AJ Pape boldly challenges your thinking AND encourages you to make your thinking audible so others can share in the process too. We were at the “before party,” at Southgate Hotel, the night before LikeMinds 2010.

Yann Gourvennec right before LikeMinds 2010 gets underway

Yann Gourvennec, of Orange Business Services, is ready to take in the LikeMinds conference—he has the ubiquitous Moleskin, netbook, Kodak Zi8, and even a plastic pen. We’re on the upper level inside the Exeter Conference Center just a few minutes before Scott Gould would take the stage to kick off the conference. For a full interview with Yann Gourvennec recorded at Bovey Castle following the LikeMinds Summit, see B2BBloggers.com

Greetings from Chris Brogan

Chris Brogan was just a ton of fun. (I wish my congressman was more like Chris. The world would be a better place if ALL our leaders followed in Chris’s footsteps. More about Chris later.) We were in the “green room” waiting for our time on the program (we were last). Chris was the final keynote of the day; I was the moderator for the final panel of the day. The crowd responded as at a rock concert when Chris took the stage. I think they were ready to go to the after party when I took the stage. The after party was good.

Faye Gould talking about Scott Gould

Faye Gould, wife of Scott Gould the cofounder of LikeMinds, shortly after we kicked off the 2010 event.

Glenn Le Santo talks about the Twitter party

Glenn Le Santo is a content creator who knows how to discover and develop a story. He’s also quite the adventurer. I’d love to go off through undiscovered country with Glenn and Christian. We’d have a blast.

Maz Nadjm and Trust Agents

Maz shows us page 155 of Chris Brogan’s first book, Trust Agents, where Chris mentions Maz’s work at Sky.

Chris Brogan in the green room

After a very long journey, Chris Brogan is still fun to be around. Here he recounts how Apple & AT&T drop the ball (actually, dropped the call) while Chris was closing a $300,000 deal.

How to turn that cell phone ringer off

Christian Payne shows Daren Forsyth how to silence his cell phone so it won’t make a lot of noise again during a keynote presentation.

There’s more to come from LikeMinds 2010.

Bet you heard the economy stinks, right? Bet you actually might even FEEL something that sure feels like a stinky economy. As of this moment, Edelman Digital has 30 job openings. How do I know this? I heard it directly from Rick Murray, President of Edelman Digital.

Rick says Edelman is always on the lookout for people who are naturally curious, not self-absorbed, and are willing to boldly be creative. Since July 2009, Rick’s division has added 50 new employees and he says he needs 30 more right now.

You can hear our conversation about Edelman’s cultural transformation to embrace social media, what tools have their attention at the moment, where they see social media heading and what’ll be required for companies to leverage it, and, most importantly, his exact words on what it takes to grab one of those 30 job openings at Edelman in the USA (he says they have even more openings outside the US).

Rick Murray: Twitter | Web

UPDATE: Just heard from Rick (2/23/2010 11:00pm). He clarified that Edelman has 30 job openings in DIGITAL right now PLUS more openings in PR. If you needed a bright spot on the economic horizon, take a look at Edelman, be bold, put your serious/fun game face on, and do something to show your personality (and your track record of results). Now is the time to launch.

“There are four Americans pursuing every one job opening out there,” NPR on February 19, 2010. If that’s true, 75% of all job seekers are probably going to be disappointed.

MissDestructo is colorful in every sense of the word. Her boldness and genuine friendliness enabled her to land the deal she wanted, even if it did take nine months.

When I suggested to my friend, Amber, known as MissDestructo on Twitter/Web, that these are terrible times, she said, “No, this is the time of opportunity!” She’s not just whistling Dixie or mustering up some positive affirmation to drown out reality either. She’s living it. After over nine months of struggling to find work, make ends meet, and just make it in general, she finally achieved that wild thing she’d been dreaming—working with Bruce’s Yams.

Her experience is both a road map and an inspiration for everyone who’s struggling to survive the current economic mess. Inside the mess there’s tremendous opportunity. Anyone who’s willing to

• be bold
• be determined
• be friendly
• be helpful
• be consistent
• be patient
• be ready

can do what she did.

Here’s her story in her own words in a 30-minute interview with her.

As you listen to her story, listen for the role passion, proactivity, fans, and technology played in landing MissDestructo her dream job.

If you’re looking for work (whether you’re paid through payroll or through accounts payable), you can leverage the same tools and tactics MissDestructo employed. Now is the time to start. Hear the admonition of an African proverb: “It’s best to dig your well before you’re thirsty.”

MissDestructo: Twitter | Blog | ITweetNaked | Bruce’s Yams | Bruce’s Yams Was Here

Photo shoot MissDestructo talked me into: Trey Pennington and Olivier Blanchard in SKIRTS!

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