Well, our concerns were not needed, as it was an overwhelming success with nearly 100 entries and over 14,000 votes. This community was uniquely linked, as contestants gathered these voters and the voters helped increase the contestants’ chances. Plus, the contestants were uniquely linked, as they all were trying to find a job for the summer.

While Pat Gotham eventually won the internship, based on the interest in the project, it was clear the community needed a place so that they could connect with past contestants and their voting network. In response, we have launched the New York Intern Project LinkedIn group. This is for contestants, voters, teachers, students, career PR professionals and recent graduates just entering the fields of marketing, PR and social media. It will be a place to discuss the PR field, how to go about finding a job and offer ways to connect with like-minded, ambitious and motivated people. Please feel free to join, and offer any insights you may have.

And to get an idea of how the NYIP project even helped those who didn’t win, here are finalists Lindsay and Amanda talking about why the contest was worth entering.

Lindsay Discusses the New York Intern Project:

Amanda Discusses the New York Intern Project:

But as someone who works with social media, I couldn’t help wonder how this principle could impact my day job? It turns out many people have had the same thought before writing how this should impact your Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn pages. Some of the posts concluded that this means 20 percent of your posts should be about you or the company, while 80 percent should add value to readers (which I’m not sure is a perfect adaptation of the theory, or even true). Another take is that 20 percent of tweeters produce 80 percent of the results (It’s way less than 20 percent in actuality).

While that’s a fine conclusion, it isn’t very helpful to pull analysis from when posting on social media sites. But this principle may be able to improve your social media presence more than your life. Why? When Koch talks about improving your life with this principle, he talks about taking a self-analysis, and really analyzing what you waste time on. But that’s heavily influenced by the opinions you have of yourself. In social media, however, you can access hard stats to analyze every tweet or Facebook post. Meaning you can find the top-20 percent!

By tracking your posts with Bit.ly or even a paid tracking service, you can keep analysis of each individual tweet or Facebook post. You can then see how each tweet performed and respond accordingly. You will probably find that 10-20 percent of your tweets create 80-90 percent of your interactions, clicks and new followers.

What do you do with all this information?

So unlike life, social media provides a way to track this 80/20 rule. Of course, most social media managers already do some form of tracking. But finding a way to add a principle that has impacted other parts of economics and business, could provide a quick way to figure out the most effective strategy when doing outreach on social media venues. This gives your social media manager, strategist or marketing department tools to evaluate and study what exactly connects with target customers. These can then be analyzed and reproduced more efficiently.

Taking it a step further, this level of analysis can be accomplished on all social media platforms, creating one solid message throughout the company, utilizing more effective content. This provides a cohesive message that will attract the most users. It’s definitely something to keep in mind.

Campaigns, Campaigns, Campaigns

This also shows the importance of campaigns, as opposed to picking platforms and posting. A campaign has a cohesive message, and if it’s developed through social media analysis, then that campaign can have an effective message that connects with users on every platform. And the campaign will assure all the tweets, posts and Facebook messages work together, which means your company can capture all of the impact, as opposed to only 80 percent (or worse, 20 percent).

But many of these new plugins have added features that give users similar capabilities that Twitter and Facebook have offered for some time. While none of these new plugins reinvent the wheel, companies should look to implement some of these tools because LinkedIn is a network built around professionals. And these new capabilities allow companies to better leverage their customers’ networks for business purposes.

B2B businesses, in particular, should be excited by these plugins, since there are fewer ways to reach potential customers (i.e other companies) through Twitter or Facebook. So while these are simply LinkedIn versions of other tools offered on Twitter and Facebook, they give companies more value. Meaning: Make sure your company uses these three plugins!

Recommendation

Now companies have the ability to add a “Recommendation” plugin to their company website. It’s similar to the Facebook “Like” button, but instead of linking to a person’s Facebook page, it goes to the person’s more “professional” (usually) network on LinkedIn. The number of recommendations that the product or service has received can be on the page, which means potential customers can see unsolicited, third-party recommendations on your website. Definitely something you want potential customers to see.

Right now, it only states that a person recommends the product. Hopefully, down the line, LinkedIn will add an additional level of customization offering customers a chance to state why they recommend products. Still, it adds a way for customers to learn from each other, and it’s restricted to positive reviews, which allows you to keep upset customers from filling up your LinkedIn page or company website.

LinkedIn Login

We see many companies that host white papers or case studies on their sites for professionals to use and get information about products. But often to get this information, someone needs to fill an information page that states the person’s name, company, number, etc. It can take a little while to fill out the form, driving potential leads away.

But now LinkedIn has added the capability so people can sign-in via their LinkedIn account. Similar to Facebook Direct, a person signs into the LinkedIn account, which allows the company to see the person who is using the site. “You can then use that information to register them for your own site, identify them in a blog comment, or otherwise use this to streamline their experience,” according to the LinkedIn explanation. “This provides you with increased registrations with minimal work.”

It’s a way to decrease the time needed to login in for readers/potential customers, but still keep all the information needed for generating leads. I could easily see this becoming the go-to login tool for businesses.

“Share” Button

One feature that popped out to me immediately was the Share button. This is really a tool that follows in the same vein as Facebook and Twitter, offering a way to share articles or blog posts to your LinkedIn network. This adds further ways for people to target stories for their various networks. Now, if you read an article that would appeal to your professional network, you can target the material to your contacts on LinkedIn.

This can come in handy, if your company has a blog. Assuring that the right people notice the posts can drive further traffic to the blog, leading to more business leads.

***

The great thing about all these plugins is that they can be added with minimal work. And it’s a quick way to increase company visibility and gain traction with customers on LinkedIn.

Social media tools and technology can help to cultivate a community or provide online locations where communities can exist and grow. The execution of social media strategy can achieve deeper levels of success and engagement due to the presence of a community. Conversely, social media effectiveness can be limited by its non-existence.

Myth: If you build it they will come.

Truth: Creating an engaging community through a website, a blog, a Twitter profile, a Facebook page, or private customer facing online social network takes time, resources, and most importantly, commitment. It means first establishing how these online spaces and communities fit into a larger marketing, PR, and/or customer service strategy and align with the target audience.

No matter why type of platform you are looking to use to connect with your customers, clients or employees it’s important to start with the development of a solid foundation.  There are key foundational elements the can help you to build this foundation as well as enable your community to engage with your product, service, brand or organization:

• Content: What will your content consist of? This of course will be linked to your broader and more detailed communications marketing strategy, but content is always your starting point. Your content should resonate with both your audience and your overarching messaging objectives.
• Measurement: It’s important to identify your engagement goals and establish a means of measurement. This will help you to stay more focused on the measurable goals of your social media channels as well as enable you to revise your approach as necessary.

  Radian6 offers great ideas on how to measure community impact and effectively define community success, “How you measure community impact largely depends on how you want to define what a “successful” community means for your business.”

• Guidelines: Developing user or community guidelines can be incredibly valuable and help promote engagement. Users need to know how they can participate, what are the rules and expectations, and where they can access support to assist them to do this.
• Boundaries: Organizations need to assess their own expectations, policies, and legal needs that might impact what is and isn’t allowed. A posted Terms of Use or a legal disclaimer can help notify the community of content restrictions and moderating.
• Moderation: Moderation of comments or other community content is important for several reasons. It shows your investment and commitment to the community, and it enables you to keep conversations focused and relevant to your readers.

Utilizing an online community, whether Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare or a blog, as part of your communication marketing and/or customer service strategy can be powerful. To help you maximize that potential remember to develop a solid engagement foundation.

Taking the time to execute content, measurement, and engagement in a strategic and thorough way can help your organization build a engaged community that welcomes participation, promotes loyalty, and generates value while enabling you to effectively manage potential challenges and hurdles that might develop along the way.

Being able to engage with customers, prospective customers, peers, and business leaders is an opportunity that should be nurtured and allocated the appropriate amount of commitment and time.

What foundational elements do you find are important? What tips do you have for organizations when creating an online presence and cultivating community engagement?

(Image courtesy of katiedee47, Flickr)

An internship in any industry is vital to getting a foot in the door and a leg up on your competition with respect to obtaining a job. It helps determine if this field is the right one for the student or job-seeker, as well as provide the necessary introductory training for the intern to learn the basic skills of said profession.

In public relations, an internship is often the key to a successful career in the field as it encompasses most of the duties a person finds in an entry-level position, and not just administrative tasks. From learning how to use media-centric databases, performing client research, preparing clip reports, coordinating and working special events and helping with social media projects among other tasks, interns really get a taste of the many skills and communication methods that are required to become a solid PR practitioner.

Additionally, a public relations internship can help an applicant determine if he or she wants to work on the agency or in-house side of the industry. As my colleague Regina wrote in an earlier post, positions on either side can be very rewarding depending if you have the right skill set and personality to match the position. An internship is very useful in helping students and job-seekers navigate the waters of in-house and agency life and determine what side is the right fit for them.

Most importantly, public relations internships provide interns with skills that contribute to their overall professional success and not just within the industry. A few examples include:  learning the fine art of networking through helping with and staffing special events; becoming well versed in social media platforms, such as LinkedIn and Twitter, that can help their job prospects; and enhancing their written communication skills through press release, pitch and letter writing.

I know my media relations internship in college certainly paved the way for me to become a strong PR practitioner. Let me know how your internship helped you in the comments section below.

Image Credit to TeachersPodcast.org

1. Follow folks who are going to be interested in what you have to say. (For the non-rock stars among us, there is a direct correlation between the number of people you follow and how many follow you.)
2. Say something interesting – have a point of view – provide great content – have an expected topic list. (Don’t go off about unrelated items or Seinfeld-like observations – provide value in every tweet.)
3. Interact with other folks – retweet (RT) good material, ask questions, thank people for following and RTing you. (According to @skydiver, a RT is the highest compliment on Twitter!)
4. Promote your Twitter handle – add it to your signature, your bio, website, Linkedin and other profiles, promote in newsletters etc.
5. List yourself in Directories – like Wefollow or Twellow – that allow you to tag yourself so that interested parties can find you.
6. Tweet live from events and use #hashtags. Folks at the event who are following it, will see your tweets and may follow you.
7. Join groups and participate in chats in your area of interest. For example, a PR person might join #journchat a scheduled conversation every Monday night between PR folks, journalists and bloggers.
8. Cross-pollinate – post your blog posts on Twitter, update your status on LinkedIn/Facebook (when relevant for that audience) through Twitter
9. Find your friends – use the Twitter tools to scan your contacts for Twitter users.

On a closing note, Twitter should be about quality, not quantity. If you have a few dozen followers that you are engaged and conversing with, that’s much more impressive than thousands of Twitter bots who’ll never help you succeed in life or business.

If you want to chat with me on Twitter, you can find me here – @sandrafathi.

Happy tweeting!

I also understand why the management teams of social networking sites want to expand their footprints. The economics of online communities are still mired in metrics like churn. Unable to capture the long-term attention of their core users, these sites constantly invent new carrots to dangle before prospective members to entice them into the circle. Oh, you like status updates, Mr. Twitter User? We have them, too!

Instead of rolling at our eyes of this cynical product development cycle, in which we don’t actually get new features but become a part of a pissing contest among these sites, we gobble them up. And then we — I’m talking to you, social media gurus — use the duplicate functionality to blast out the same status updates to those we are connected to on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. As my friends from South Africa say: Shame.

Have you looked at your LinkedIn RSS updates recently? What used to be a great source for monitoring your business contacts’ connections has become a crowded, noisy bar of sometimes-pithy inspirational messages, quotes, and even notes like “going to bed now.” Yes, this is partially LinkedIn’s fault. Every few weeks I fill out a trouble ticket requesting better RSS subscription options. So far, it’s still one big dumb light switch that turns them on or off.

But — paying attention, social media gurus? — any Web-savvy businessperson worth their retainer should know this fact and make the choice to adjust their social networking habits accordingly. Not only should you understand what makes each site unique, in terms of functionality, value, vibe, and community, you should also examine where your personal social networks overlap. Chances are, if I’m connected to you on LinkedIn, I’m probably following you on Twitter as well. That means if you’re Ping.fm’ing or hashtagging your tweets for cross-posting, I’m getting your status updates twice.

What’s more, your updates are polluting the stream of the actual valuable LinkedIn information I desire, diminishing the value I get out of being a part of that community. (The reverse would also be incredibly annoying: what if every time I connected with someone on LinkedIn, I sent the update to my Twitter stream? Even worse than Foursquare, right?)

So, instead of using bad functionality just because it exists, and just because you haven’t taken the time to evaluate what it means, check yourself. What is LinkedIn for? Business connections. What is Twitter for? Status updates. Yes, these venn diagrams overlap. The point is, proceed wisely. The status update shakeout is coming. Will you be unfriended?

Here’s another way of putting it. Peanut butter and jelly are both delicious. But if Smuckers’ ambitious plans for 2010 involved unseating Jif by breaking into the peanut butter market, wouldn’t you be a tad suspicious? You wouldn’t? Ah, well, there’s a word for someone like you.

• Have a voice and stay on message (themes)
• Be authentic, honest & ethical
• Get ready for a long-term commitment
• Provide value, not noise
• Aim for quality, not quantity
• Share & play nice in the social media sandbox
• Bring online relationships offline
• Measure, tweak, repeat

To learn more, read the full article here.

1. Clean Up Your Online Image – First and foremost, make sure that your online image is Google-ready. Most hiring managers will Google a job candidate at some point in the hiring process – sometimes before an interview. Google yourself and find out what happens. Is your LinkedIn profile up to date? Has your personal blog been dormant for months? Do photos from a night of over indulging in Cancun come up in search results? Take a good inventory of how you appear online and prepare the groundwork. Make sure that content that a potential employer can access is appropriate. Use privacy settings whenever possible. Untag yourself in photos if you can’t remove them from the public eye. Ask people to recommend you on sites that allow reviews such as LinkedIn and Guru.com. Create new ‘favorable’ content to hit the top of the search results (see next tip).

2. Make Yourself ‘Findable’ – If you don’t have an online presence, you need one. Social media is a great way to quickly create an online reputation for yourself and build out your resume and profile. Most of the tools are free. Create a LinkedIn profile, a Facebook page, join Twitter and any relevant professional networks or communities in your field. Even adding your name to a directory or commenting on a high profile blog can create new content for a prospect employer to find when searching for information on you. You can create a YouTube video of yourself (but make sure it’s industry/job appropriate) or a a full website resume.

3. Be an Expert – In addition to looking for job opportunities, you should be looking for opportunities to put your skills into action. Consider starting a blog, or at least, a guest blog to highlight your field of knowledge. Create an online portfolio of your work with a Flickr account. If you are a marketer, answer questions on LinkedIn pertaining to marketing (this also puts your name  and business smarts in front of all of your connections.) Participate in message boards and forums that are frequented by prospective employers and be a helpful presence – answer questions, post articles, start discussions, etc. Focus your ‘tweets’ on Twitter to build a following in your field. Share your ideas, best practices, relevant articles and other information that ‘prove’ you are in the know and have up to date skills to share. Post PowerPoint presentations on SlideShare to show off your handiwork.

4. Join the Group – Groups on LinkedIn, Facebook and other platforms offer more opportunities to connect with potential employers and colleagues. When you join a group on LinkedIn, you are often able to direct message members. This can be a direct line of communication to a hiring manager or executive at the firm of your desire.When appropriate, you can also post message to the entire group to help in your job search. In addition to groups, a single connection may be your gateway to the right job opportunity. Leverage individual connections to facilitate introductions to hiring managers.

5. Actively Listen – Don’t just rely on the traditional job boards to find your next position. Set up RSS feeds and Google Alerts to notify you when new jobs have been posted in your field. Check out non-traditional job boards. For example, LinkedIn also has job boards inside group settings where only group members can post job opportunities. If you ‘fan’ a company on Facebook, you might be the first to find out about job openings. Seek out and follow recruiters (professional recruiters and internal hiring managers) on Twitter. Many often post job opportunities on Twitter first before sending out mass communications to their network. In addition, responding via Twitter may separate you from the ‘death by inbox’ syndrome that plunges many resumes into the email abyss.

6. Turn Online Connections Into Offline Connections – Social media offers us opportunities to expand our Dunbar Number (theoretical number of sustainable social relationships that one person can maintain) from 150 to hundreds of thousands. However, when it comes to getting a job, candidates are usually only hired after they’ve met the hiring manager in person. And, influencers still tend to recommend candidates that they know and have met directly. So, take your online relationships offline. Participate in networking events, organize a MeetUp, take a connection out to lunch and ask for informational interviews to get some face-time with potential employers.

Additional Resources:

7 Secrets to Getting Your Next Job Using Social Media (Mashable)

How to Find a Job on Twitter (Mashable)

Finding a Job Using Social Media (SlideShare)

Photo by My TwiStEd wOrLd

I have had so many discussions lately with marketers and PR folks that are practically in a panic about how to engage in social media. Suddenly, their CEO or their clients are adamant that they need to be on YouTube, FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, blogging…. and a host of other activities. They want them to go from zero to 100 miles an hour by Friday. With budgets shrinking and appetites increasing for customer engagement and revenue generation, executives are right to turn their attention to social media. But, it can’t ALL be done overnight if you want it done right. So, here are a few tips:

1. Pick one medium – one form of social media – and do it right. You don’t have to be on every channel. Pick one, commit to it, own it.

2. Incorporate social media into what you are already doing. Can you add widgets to your website to allow people to save, share or discuss topics? Can you expand your profile on LinkedIn or add a button that says ‘Follow Us’ on Twitter to your existing web campaigns?

3. Set Expectations. You’ve read about the runaway successess that companies have had with social media campaigns – you might not. Set realistic expectations and work towards those goals. Once you meet them, raise the bar again.

4. Get some ROI. Make sure you are picking a platform to invest in that is going to give you some tangible ROI (to show your boss). Will it increase web traffic? Sales? Downloads? Registrations? It’s good to listen, engage, and keep the customers happy, but usually the person paying the bills wants something a little more hard core to budget dollars and time against it.

5. Find an expert  – in or outside of your organization. If you aren’t sure where/how to begin, find an expert that can help you. You can hire a big gun at a pricey agency, or small guns (like us!) that can be affordable and efficient. Surprisingly, you might just have one in your organization as well – an employee with an active blog, a master networker on your sales team with 1000 Facebook friends, a Twitter addict on your IT team. If you don’t have the budget for outside counsel, use your internal resources or search for free ones on the Web.

6. Collaborate. Putting together any successful social media program usually requires interactivity – with customers and influencers on the outside as well as on the inside of your organization. Check in with legal, take the pulse in IT, talk to marketing and see if you can pool resources and brain power to make it work.

On a final note – don’t let the fear of making a mistake paralyze you from making any progress. If you have good intentions, you’ve done your research and you’ve thought out your strategy, you’ll probably be in good shape. As the wise Rob Key, CEO of Converseon, once said on a panel with me regarding what your social media usage policy should be – “Just Don’t Be Stupid.”

Good luck! Let us know how it goes.