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Kohort: The allure of a ‘stealth’ startup.

A tweet from Erin Bury yesterday:

I was intrigued. Clicked the link, and was greeted with this:

A ‘new frontier’? Sounds bold, adventurous even. Yes, I believe I will indeed stake my claim, though I don’t even know what Kohort will be. No one really does, since they’re still in ‘stealth mode’. Even the interview they gave Tech Crunch is slim on details, save the fact that it will be ‘social media related’ somehow. But the investors must be excited about it for good reason. $3 million isn’t exactly chump change. That’s all the incentive I need to hand over my email address and reserve ‘jonbarrick’.

There’s something inherently alluring about this kind of approach to gain exposure and attract early adopters. The uncertainty of what it is, the simplicity of the sign-up page, the large sums of money being handed over. They all combine to provide the kind of intrigue needed to get people to say “Yes, I want to get in on the ground floor of this.”

Whatever Kohort ends up being, I’m going to give it a shot. The promise of being one of the first to get setup on what could be the ‘next big thing’ is hard to ignore. After all, if you could go back in time to when Twitter first went public, wouldn’t you be one of the first to sign up for it? I sure would.

Hi Jon, I saw your post on Networking Tips for College Students- it was really informative. I run the College Blog at myedu.com (an education application site) and would love to feature that post (or a new one). Let me know if you’re interested – [email protected] Thanks!

Thanks for the compliments Angela!

I’d love to see my post shared on your college blog. All I ask is that you do a link back to my blog as the original source. When it’s posted on your blog, please send me a message with a link to it, I’d love to see it and possibly answer any comments or questions that may be posted on it.

Also, I would be happy to contribute content as a guest blogger if you have a particular issue you’d like my perspective on. Simply let me know and I’ll put my thoughts together.

I am quite involved in my old college as the chair of their Business program Advisory Committee, and am planning on teaching a Marketing Strategies course for them this fall, so as you can see I’m happy to do anything I can to help out the next generation of business professionals.

Thanks again, I look forward to talking with you again soon!

– Jonathan

Getting a Head Start Through LinkedIn: Networking Tips for College Students


I recently had an opportunity to speak to a group of up-and-coming marketing interns at the local college who are going through the same course of study that I completed ‘back in the day’. As I sat on the discussion panel with two other marketing-program alumni, talking about what is expected of interns during their work terms and offering advice and tips to help them get the most from their experiences, it struck me that one thing that must be mentioned to this group was LinkedIn. After all, LinkedIn is a crucial tool that allows professionals to network, share ideas, learn, and build their reputation as well as seek out career opportunities of all types.

So, when my next turn to speak came around, I brought up the topic of LinkedIn, and asked for a show of hands for any who knew what it was. Out of a group of 25 or 30 students, only two hands rose in the air. TWO. That’s less than 10% of the group that were aware of the biggest professional social network in existence. I was simply astounded.

Suffice to say, I promptly unleashed a large batch of reasons why they should get their LinkedIn profile up and running as soon as they got back home. The benefits for students to get themselves setup on LinkedIn are just as numerous as the benefits for any professional out in the world today. Here’s a few of the key ones that I feel students can start to realize almost immediately:

1 – Always keep your experience and references complete and up-to-date.

Your LinkedIn profile is like a resume on steroids. It is constantly evolving, and allows you to incorporate much more information than what is feasible in hard-copy form, such as things like Twitter accounts and links to blogs. While we’re not quite at a point where you can strictly direct people to your online profile, I can easily see resumes created in Word or Acrobat to go the way of the dinosaur in the near future. After all, why shuffle around files or attachments when a simple web link can accomplish the same thing, and much more? But in the meantime, maintaining a LinkedIn profile allows you to easily pull out applicable experience and information for the job you’re looking for, and put together a targeted application in virtually no time.

2 – Engage in discussions and learn more from industry professionals.

Want a job at Nike? How about Coke? Or one of the major agencies? Find their reps profiles on LinkedIn and see what groups they belong to. Join those groups and start asking questions and participating in discussions. Hearing about the latest trends and industry effects allows you to take the core concepts and ideas that are in the curriculum and textbooks and apply them to the current state of things in the real world. The business battlefield is now changing faster than ever, and talking to the soldiers who are out fighting in the trenches right now will be crucial in developing an effective career strategy.

3 – Build up your network.

Though they may only be fellow students right now, they’ll all be professionals in your field someday, so making meaningful connections with the superstars in your class can have major benefits in the long run. Also, any teachers or professors that you have a good relationship with can be a great source of referrals and references for you. Connecting with them on a professional level is a huge plus. In addition, if you go to any seminars, shows, or events where prominent businesspeople are present, make sure to connect with them if you can. Let them know that you’re a rising star, and that they should be paying attention to you. Lastly, don’t forget to connect with any professionals you meet or work with at any internships or work placements. If you do a good job with them and keep in touch, they can be excellent contacts to be called on in the future.

4 – Learn proper modern business communications early.

You can’t act the same way in business as you do at the college bar on Friday night. The sooner students learn this, the better off they’ll be by not posting incriminating or embarrassing things that can deep-six their careers before they even begin. The professionals you’ll find on LinkedIn networks have no time for joking around or unprofessional behaviour, so it’s a great way to get conditioned for how to communicate in a business environment. Respect everyone’s opinion. Proper spelling and grammar are important. Don’t let texting become your default communication style. How you talk to your buds on Facebook doesn’t jive very well with the Fortune 500.

5 – Begin forging your personal brand.

Every individual is their own brand, and LinkedIn is an excellent tool for letting the world know who you are, and what you’re all about. Your specialties will come to light through your experiences, and you will probably find that it will help you discover where your real aptitudes are, and assist you in enhancing them. Your ever-expanding LinkedIn presence helps develop your reputation as a professional in your field, and eventually as an expert. The earlier you start, the sooner you’ll reap the benefits.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. LinkedIn’s benefits also stretch in to your overall web presence, and the job postings on LinkedIn are proving to be far more valuable than those on traditional job posting sites. It allows you to connect directly with individuals at certain organizations that are of interest to you. Finding that ‘dream job’ may still be hard, but with LinkedIn you have a greater number of paths available to you that you can use to find your way to your career utopia.

When you first start out, you’ll want to make sure that your LinkedIn profile is complete, and follows the best-practices used by successful LinkedIn users. Here’s a few quick tips to help you get your profile setup in a good way:

Use a professional looking picture. No beach pics, bar pics, party pics, baby pics, or anything else other than you looking like you are a smart, savvy, intelligent person. First impressions are huge.

Make your headline about YOU, not your current job. Anyone can look at your profile and see where you work and what your title is. Your headline should talk about what YOU, as a professional, are all about.

Shorten your public profile URL to http://linkedin.com/in/yournamehere. Here’s a link to the instructions on how to do this. Having a custom URL makes it easier to share your link, and is also a piece of your personal brand.

Personalize your network requests. When you ask someone to connect with you, make sure to include a personalized message with your request. Professionals find it extremely frustrating to get a generic LinkedIn request that tells nothing of how you might actually know the person. Let them know who you are, how they know you, and why you are connecting.

I hope that these tips are found to be helpful. I sure wish that I had a tool like LinkedIn back when i was going through college. Even though I’ve since connected with a great deal of people I would have back then anyway, I can’t help but wonder where life would have taken me if I’d had this amazing tool at my disposal. Just one of those ‘what if’ things that I’ll always be curious about, I suppose.

Outsourcing Intimacy – Making the Case for Internal Social Media

Are you farming out your social media activities? You may want to reconsider.

Do a search for ‘social media agency’ and you’ll get more than a few results. 23 million in fact. There are an awful lot of people out there clamouring to handle your social media presence for you, and they make a pretty strong case as to why you should let them.

Having an effective presence in social media is time consuming, and internal marketing departments are typically already stretched pretty thin covering traditional marketing efforts. Hiring an agency to handle your social media activities would seem like an ideal solution. It’s quick, easy, and gets the job done for a nominal fee. But be aware that there are a number of factors that make an equally strong case for handling social media from inside your company.

The first is quite simple: Someone connecting with your business will want to connect with YOU, not someone sitting at a desk at an agency, far removed from your business. For example I know that for myself personally, if I want to ask someone at Apple a question, I sure don’t want to talk with their ad agency. I want the same experience online that I would be able to obtain if I walked in to an Apple store and sat down at the Genius Bar.

Another reason to keep social media internal? The people working at agencies just don’t share your passion for your product or the industry that your business serves. But what’s most important is they don’t share the same passion for your customers. They can’t, otherwise they’d be in your business and that would make them your competitor. It’s not to say they’re not capable marketing people. It’s just that they’re coming at your customers from a very different angle than you are, so they can’t possibly understand them the same way you do. What ultimately makes your customers WANT to connect with your business is the experience they had with your business, not the experience they had with your ad.

Need an example of a worst case scenario?

Just look at the recent snafu that Chrysler ran in to. An employee at the agency they had hired to manage their social media not only made a grievous error in judgement by posting a rogue tweet with the ‘f-word’ in it, but the obscenity was directed at the driving ability of the entire city of Detroit. DETROIT. Motor City, the birthplace of the American automotive industry. Think that someone who actually works at Chrysler would have made that same mistake? Possibly, but I really doubt it.

Now, I certainly don’t want to give the impression that Agency = Bad, because that’s really not the case. They excel at certain tasks, and one of those tasks can be training you and your people on how social media works. They can train you on the right language to use, the importance of replying and acknowledging your community’s activity, and they can show you the methods and tools to use in order to be successful. They can show you how, but they can’t do it for you.

Ideally the agency you choose should support you in your efforts, as a guiding hand through the complexities of social media. Providing advice, education, and suggestions on what to try next. But the conversations? Those should be yours to have.

Social media is the most intimate way a business can maintain a relationship with its customers. We’ve never had the ability to connect so easily, on an ongoing basis, with customers and businesses as we have today. Does it really make sense for your business to outsource that intimacy? Every company should be asking that question and choosing the path that’s right for them, and for their customers.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

mhandy1:

If you watch this video Gary is literally talking a different language than the interviewer… its no longer about something replacing something else! I think the tools are (somewhat) set. The ways in which the tools themselves are going to be used is changing. 

gary:

I had the great privilege of being on MSNBC’s Morning Joe this morning, Watch. What do you think?

(Source: http://download.macromedia.com/)

Apprehensive about using Foursquare? Don’t be, and here’s why.

Location-based social media is huge, but what if you’re one of those people who just doesn’t want to share where you are all the time? Well, fear not! You can still have fun AND stay private.

I first heard about Foursquare early last year, but I didn’t really give it much thought as something that was ‘for me’. At the time, I couldn’t wrap my head around the whole issue of privacy, and why people would be so willing and eager to broadcast their exact whereabouts all the time. I guess I thought of all the same apprehensions that most of the naysayers have about it: “Open invitation to stalking/robbers/perverts, etc”. But like most things that generate a fear-based response, this was just due to my not really not understanding how it actually works.

When I went to the UnGeeked Toronto conference last fall, Katie Felten gave a fascinating presentation/discussion on Foursquare, and answered a lot of questions about what it’s capable of, how it works, and why Foursquare users love it so much. Katie’s discussion removed some of my negative assumptions, and I recognized that Foursquare did have it’s benefits, but ultimately I still wasn’t ready to give it a shot myself.

Then the other day, I had a simple, obvious realization: What if you just don’t add any friends? Foursquare will only broadcast your location if you specifically tell it to, and even then only to those people that you have added as friends. That’s the beauty of these new tools. They can be as social as you want them to be. There’s no requirement saying that you HAVE to add every one of your Facebook friends, your Twitter followers, or everyone in your address book as soon as you create your account. You don’t need to add anyone unless you choose to. Your Foursquare experience can be completely private, if you want it to be.

So, if you want the benefits of Foursquare, including deals and discounts at all kinds of local businesses, you can do so without anyone knowing where you are or where you’ve been. Create your account, skip the step where you add friends, and when you check-in just stay ‘off the grid’ (Foursquare slang for toggling the ‘share with friends’ switch off when you check-in). Just reap the benefits, and have fun while doing so.

So, I created an account, and began exploring it personally. I was immediately impressed by the quality of the ‘specials’ that were available in my local area. 10% off at a local clothing store, free song download at Old Navy, 15% off purchases at American Eagle, free appetizer at local restaurant, 40% off bicycle service at Mountain Equipment Co-op, etc. And all you need to do to earn these discounts is check-in at those locations. You don’t need to share any other information other than show your server/cashier your phone proving that you’ve checked in.

Not only that, but even without any friends added, you can also begin collecting Foursquare badges. These are simply fun little virtual badges you collect for doing certain things such as visiting lots of coffee shops, checking in at 10 different places, going to a gym, etc. They just add a tiny little incentive to get out and explore a bit more of your town.

Now, I’m sure that the Foursquare advocates out there will likely comment that it’s more ‘fun’ when you add your friends, and that a little friendly competition can help you get out there and experience all kinds of new things, and they’re probably right. But for those people out there who like the idea of scoring rewards for loyalty, or for being in the right place at the right time, but don’t want to lose their sense of privacy, there’s no reason that they can’t use Foursquare in their own way.

Your experience with location-based social media can be what you want it to be, and doesn’t have to be what other people tell you it should be. If you eventually get to the point where you feel like adding a few friends and maybe sharing a bit more, then great! If not, that’s great too. As long as you’re having fun with these new tools, that’s really all that matters.

4 Simple Tips for Integrating Print & Social Media – Making it Easy

by Jonathan Barrick

When it comes to listing your social media contact info on your brochure, do you simply say ‘Find us on Facebook’? You’d better hope your customers are very patient while they comb through 500 million users.

image

We see Facebook and Twitter icons and logos all over the place now. They are very nearly as common place in advertising as phone numbers and email addresses, but what I’ve noticed is that a large number of companies stop short with JUST the logo of the Social Media site that they participate in. Unfortunately, this doesn’t do anything to help the user actually find you on those sites. Since the search functions on Social Media sites can pull up dozens of suggestions for any business name or search term, simply putting the logo of the site somewhere on your brochure can be counter-productive.

Businesses must realize that by doing this, they’re essentially saying “If you go on this site of 500 million users, I’m in there somewhere.” Not to mention the added level of complexity that exists if your business is a single location in a chain. What if there are 5 or 6 different stores from the same chain on Facebook? How easy is it for your users to identify which one is yours? What if corporate head office is listed there, too?

You can see the problem that this presents when you take the time and effort to connect with your customers, but you don’t go those last few steps to ensure that it’s really you that they find when they go looking. Luckily, there are a few simple things you can do to make yourself easier to connect with.

1 – Use a custom URL, and minimize it.

Most social networking sites, like Facebook and LinkedIn, will allow you to customize your URL so that you can shorten it and make it easier to fit on to brochures and business cards. For example, you can easily go from something like this page I found:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ford-Dealership/109108405778479

to a much cleaner example from another page:

http://www.facebook.com/ford.sales

Another tip to minimize the text is to simply remove the ‘http://’ from the URL, since we are all so used to seeing web addresses, it’s hardly a stretch to realize that ‘facebook.com/ford.sales’ should be typed in to the URL bar of a web browser.

To create a customized URL on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/username/

With Twitter, you can follow two ways of approaching this. You can either list your Twitter username: in my case @j_barrick, or your direct URL to your tweets: http://twitter.com/j_barrick. Again, you can use the simplistic: twitter.com/j_barrick and make the URL even cleaner and still make no mistake of which Twitter user is the real deal.

2 – Stick with only your top sites.

You may be tempted to list every single location online where your users can find you, but once you get past Facebook and Twitter, the widespread user base drops off dramatically. You might have a Flickr page, or Tumblr blog, or Myspace page, or several others from the myriad collection of social media sites, but that doesn’t mean you should stuff your materials full of every possible site. As a general rule of thumb, just list the few key sites that you’re most active on, or that you have the largest community. Again, this is all about making it easy on the reader.

3 – Don’t forget your main web address.

Unless you’ve got a VERY specific reason for doing this, don’t leave your regular www. web address off of any of your materials. I’ve seen several instances of companies running ads that are designed solely to drive traffic to their Facebook pages, but unless you’re running a completely dedicated campaign with Facebook traffic as your ultimate objective, this may not be the best course of action.

After all, your website should be the main hub of all your activity. Users should be able to go anywhere you are online from your website, so that would be where you’d list all the ‘other’ locations we talked about back in Tip #2, so don’t miss out on an opportunity to  get people to visit your main online home. It can encourage them to check out more of you in other locations.

4 – Avoid ‘stylized’ logos. Stick with the instantly recognizable ones.

If you have picked up a magazine or newspaper in the last 12 months, then you know what the Twitter logo looks like. Same for Facebook. The simple, clean but easily identifiable ‘T’ and ‘F’ icon logos in the official colours are unquestionable about what they represent. But if you start to incorporate ‘fancier’ ones, (maybe they look like stamps, or buttons, or shiny metal), then you run a much greater risk of the general populace not recognizing them.

Example:

Use logos like this: image not like this: image in print materials.

The goal here is to ultimately drive people to see what you’re doing on these sites. If they can’t make that immediate association to the social media site brands that they are familiar with, they will be less likely to make that effort.

Bonus Tip: Business Cards

Your business card had better already have your company web address on it, but why not add your Facebook or Twitter URL as well? It’s simply one more way for your users to connect with you, which is the entire purpose of the business card to begin with! This info belongs on your cards, so the next time you print a batch, make that addition.

So overall, I think you can see that simply throwing an icon on your print materials doesn’t really accomplish anything other than ‘Yeah, we’re on Twitter’. If you really want to encourage people to check you out, then you need to make it as easy as possible. You would never put ‘Find us on the Web!‘ without listing your web address, so why do that with your Social Media?

End Note: There is another technology being introduced that intends to do a better job of integrating print and web, and that is the QR code. I haven’t touched on that in this article for two reasons: 1 – It’s a bit more advanced in terms of it’s usage and how to integrate it in to your business goals, and this article was intended as the ‘basics’ of putting SM contact info in to print, and 2 – it is still in the early adoption stage, and until every person has a smartphone, and everyone has taken the time to download a QR code reader app for their smartphone, QR codes will continue to be a very specialized way to reach a unique target market. In summary, not enough people know what they are or have the understanding and technology to utilize them effectively.