There is no simple answer to these statements or question, but the reason I bring it up is that these comments help me understand the plight of those wondering how to maneuver through the maze of social media options for us and our organizations. Here are two simple tips to help you get better results faster:

1. Pick Two: You know how you go to out to eat and they give you two sides to pick with your entree? Here, I’m recommending you do the same with social media. This will help you leverage those two social media tools that can be the most helpful. Recommendation: I would recommend a blog and a tool like LinkedIn and Twitter depending on what type of product or service you are selling. For a business-to-business play I would suggest LinkedIn. Twitter allows you to make a worldwide reach.  Determine your niche, and follow others with similar interests and values.  I strongly suggest tweetchats too. Learn everything you can as to how to use these tools. According to the amazing site, Hubspot, writing a blog, even once a week, will help successfully you grow inbound leads.
2. Choose Ten Companies to Follow: I am always looking for companies and leaders in those companies to follow that I admire. Right now my list includes: Digitas, Southwest Airlines, Zappos and SAS. You can follow these companies with tools like Google Alerts, Twitter and LinkedIn. Learn how these companies make the most out of their social media tools. Learn who are the most active “social media leaders” in each company. Connect to these leaders, but, first, see what matters to them most. Don’t just connect for the sake of connecting. Connect with a purpose.

What do you think? What other tips do you have? What has worked for you or your colleagues?

Related articles

• Best Social Media Tools to Build Connections (networldingblog.com)
• LinkedIn company page and follow company feature (marketing.yell.com)
• What is social media marketing? (marketing.yell.com)
• Can social media tools help to strengthen relationships? (marketing.yell.com)

He gives the example of Amazon who has six options listed for those people who bought one book there are six other book options available. He also talks about Chicago’s 37 Signals who offers 4 – 5 options from each of its services.

The important thing to remember here is that people want to choose and they want you to make it easy for them to buy. I can’t tell you the number of times I have spoken to prospects and clients who have dozens of ideas they want to offer their marketplace. This is a big red flag. Take the time to cull your offers down to a few really great offers. Then think about what makes those few offers really unique. It will be all about those personal touches, going the extra mile, the unique differentiators that will draw people to you.

And most of all, realize that we all need help. Ask your colleagues, your advisors, your friends to help you figure out those first three really good offers you can start with if you are in the place of having too much you are currently offering. Do MORE with LESS . . . NOW.

I have been invited to tell you about my book, We First. Naturally, I don’t want to give it all way, as that would spoil all the surprises, but let me give you some insight into why and how I was prompted to write it—as I am inviting you, personally, to join me in the We First movement.

Several years ago, I read a speech that Bill Gates gave to the world’s top business people, economists, and social thinkers at Davos. In his talk, Gates challenged corporations to be more creative about how they might fulfill the needs of the world’s poor. He suggested that corporations could find new ways to account for their profits, such as amortizing their costs across a wider spectrum of products, lowering their license fees and profit margins in poorer countries, and adding the value of the reputational boost they get from socially responsible activities into their profit accounting.

After reading this speech, I decided to apply my experience as an advertising creative director and social media consultant to Gates’s challenge. I reflected long and hard on the myriad crises of the world and considered numerous ideas to see if I could help capitalism become more “creative.”

My thinking grew and expanded in multiple directions. Meanwhile, the financial crash of 2008 was taking its toll on the world, causing tens of millions of people to lose their jobs, their homes, and their life savings.

I suddenly realized that the answer to Bill Gates’ challenge was that the world needed a serious reengineering of capitalism. We need to inject new thinking into how we conceive of this economic system. We needed to learn how to get away from a destructive mentality that has come to dominate business and finance, evident in the Wall Street and corporate greed that only seeks profits, and evident as well as in the unbridled consumerism that leads millions of people into debilitating debt.

Slowly, the solution unfolded for me. What I recognized is that, if humanity is to survive and thrive on this planet, we need to shift our economic system from Me First to We First capitalism. This transition involves altering our mindsets and our behaviors; it requires eliminating our selfish ways of acting and replacing them with socially responsible ones in alignment with the global dynamics of the 21st century. This transformation is as necessary for corporations as it is for consumers because we now live in an interconnected, complex world, where prosperity must be defined as the well-being of the many, not the wealth of the few. Capitalism can no longer be an elite system to fund a small class of people, leaving billions of others living without opportunity or hope.

Thinking about the We First approach, I saw that we must accomplish four major shifts in how corporations think:

1. The first is how we define and act out our self-interest. Me First capitalism has become all too prone to allowing selfishness and excess replace any reasonable meaning of self-interest. Wall Street bankers, CEOs, and corporate executives pay themselves sky-high salaries compared to what most workers are paid. Corporations and investors perceive self-interest only as maximizing profits, regardless of any negative consequences they impart on the environment or on society. The middle class is disappearing, our cities are under-serviced, and the march of poverty is picking up pace. In place of this myopic view of self-interest, we need to recognize that self-interest can no longer be defined in such narrow-minded, personally selfish ways. We need to look deeper and see that mutual self-interest more often provides greater benefits than immediate rewards. In an interconnected, complex world, capitalism cannot survive if it ultimately pits the self-interest of 7 billion people and 120+ nations against each other.

2. The second mindshift we need to make concerns profit versus purpose. In free market capitalism, profit for profit’s sake is everything. Corporations seldom think about the purposes they could fulfill in society, while professional economists argue that companies have a responsibility only to their shareholders and owe nothing to society. This is the Me First attitude that we can no longer accept. Consumers are increasingly demanding companies to pay equal attention to social purposes as to profits.

3. The next mindshift regards sustainability, which we most often apply only to the environment. But the We First approach suggests that we must extend the idea of sustainability far beyond this. We First capitalism must be sustainable economically, morally, socially, ethically and environmentally, in the sense that this economic system must create in each of these domains the conditions for long-term success, not just short-term rewards. For example, economic sustainability means that we need to acknowledge that prosperity is the well-being of many, not the wealth of a few. Without shared prosperity, capitalism is not sustainable.

4. The fourth mindshift involves recognizing that our philosophy of capitalism has lost its human values. Too many companies manipulate, cheat, defraud, and create the conditions for a race to the bottom among competitors. In a We First approach, we must re-instill values into how corporations and people practice business. All companies need to embed these values deep into their core, values like accountability, fairness of rewards, responsibility, global citizenship, and sustainability.

These four shifts are the core of We First. They are the basis for how we, as a society, can transition ourselves out of the practices and customs we have allowed to compromise free market capitalism, which, through the changes We First recommends, could be perhaps the only serious economic system that has the ability to bring prosperity and freedom to the majority of people on the planet.

But how can we implement these shifts? What can concerned consumers and social activists do to help transform capitalism? How do we answer Bill Gates’ challenge? We First explains this in great detail and I invite your to join me in making the changes we need in business thinking and behavior a reality.

Simon Mainwaring is the founder of We First, a social branding consultancy that helps companies, non-profits and consumer groups build a better world through changes to the practice of capitalism, branding, and consumerism using social technology. More information is available in We First: How Brands and Consumers Use Social Media to Build a Better World (Palgrave/Macmillan, June 2011). Or visit www.wefirstbook.com. Note that 10% of book proceeds go to the United Nation’s Girl Up Foundation that supports education for young women in the developing world.

But perhaps what is even more interesting here are the lessons that can be learned and the insights leveraged for your own business from a product that effuses feelings of fun and pleasure. Here are two lessons I see in this creation:

1. Spend time thinking cross-paradigmatically. Yes this is a big word. For years people have laughed when I use the word cross- paradigmatic. It’s about mixing one product with another or one service with another or even, one experience with another to make new products, services or experiences.  For example, say you love golf. What if you mixed together networking and golf outings? That could be a new business.
2. Spend time building a network of  potential  online followers. It’s pretty easy to find people online who like golf, taking the prior example. I just searched LinkedIn today and see there are 374,940 people currently who put the world “golf” in their LinkedIn profile. I added the keyword “networking” in a search and there are almost 40,000 people who have both terms listed in their profiles. And this is just a LinkedIn search. What about Twitter and Facebook?

So the next time you are ready to create something, create something with a cross-paradigmatic approach. Stretch yourself. Go with Einstein’s suggestion to find your true genius through this approach. Please share your stories with me as you create your path to success!

I was looking at articles on the growth of social media data collection sites by Bloomberg Business and came across this company that had won a contest sifting research on why men like stubble on their face (answer: they think it looks good, but I digress). I went on the web to check out the company, Netbase, who won the contest and found an awesome site–friendly, fun and one I know I’ll be returning to regularly.

So, why talk about this site? Well besides the fact that they “get” how to research social media better and faster than most of their competitors, I see they have the elements of Networlding–they do better business faster because they show the “human side” of their business.

I couldn’t find one page on their site or blog that didn’t show me people. Real people working in this real company doing really good work . . . and have fun at the same time. The picture, above, is a picture of Net Base’s blog. Check it out.

They are definitely in my top ten list of great sites and I plan to follow them on Twitter and LinkedIn. How about you?

I take great pleasure in sharing my success and expertise in assisting fellow thought leaders publish books. Don’t heistate to come talk with me by Contact me here, connect on LinkedIn, or call 312-560-0982 to chat with me free of charge!

Social Media and Publishing

I have 15+ years in publishing and eight years in online social media strategy and implementation that includes:

• Check out the collection I’ve authored and/or co-authored on Amazon including best sellers 50 Ways to Better Social Media and 75 Cage Rattling Questions to Change the Way You Work.
• Publishing – write books that get you more speaking engagements, new clients and customers and grow your position and credibility as a thought leader. After authoring and co-authoring twelve books and helping hundreds of others do the same, I have found there is nothing more successful that offers returns year after year than publishing a book.
• Leveraging LinkedIn – using it since it began, we have helped 4000+ people and have been coaching 6 Figure executives through 6 Figure Jobs on this since LinkedIn started
• Continuing to leverage Twitter and Facebook integration with LinkedIn
• Content development – Turn your blogs into e-books and what we call “Pre-books” and then into self-published print-on-demand books
• Publish through Kindle, Ipad and, now, Google

Coaching

Ready to just jump into a coaching session? I’ll share all my top tips and best strategies for growing your business through social media and/or publishing starting with a one-hour session. From here I’ll apply this first payment to any other service offering we have at Networlding. Alternatively, if you got what you wanted in the first session, that’s great too! I look forward to talking with you!

$300 Introductory Coaching Session with Melissa

Speaking and Our Speakers Bureau

Please vist our speaker page.

Help Networlding 4.0

This year we realized that it’s time to rewrite Networlding and that’s what we’re working on with our current working title, “Networlding 4.0: Mastering the Power of Social Networking.” To this end we would love your ideas, Networlding success stories and questions on the new book.

Give Back

Over the past decade we have given to the community annually in efforts such as a Networlding contest and free celebration for the best Networlders, a revitalization event for the City of Chicago that brought out more than 300 professionals, a mentoring event for Scholarship Chicago students, free Networlding seminars for high school, undergraduate and graduate students and annual cash donations to charities that serve the disadvantaged.

Currently our focus is on an initiative I created called Leadership 12-29 to help young people get better starts in their careers.

We also help non-profits achieve their goals. To this end we offer our Networlding books (in electronic form) free of charge. To learn more call us at 312-421-4213 or by contacting us here. We look forward to helping you.

Biz Book PitchFest 2010 Contest is your opportunity to win $500 and get your book published!

Networlding has teamed up with crowdSPRING to create Biz Book Pitchfest 2010. It’s our way of  helping aspiring business book authors to realize a dream of having a book published. If you are a successful entrepreneur, consultant or professional who is a recognized thought leader and already have a great social media and speaking platform but have yet to publish a book, this is your chance.

June 15th, 2010, all submissions due in from Round #1 of Biz Book Pitch Fest 2010.

July 8, 2010, three winners ‘ submissions will be chosen by our panel of judges and each winner will receive $500.00 plus the chance to win a coaching package and to have their book published by Newtworlding.

These three winners’ pitches will then be presented to the world through the crowdSPRING and Networlding communities. One of the three will become the winning author.

The winning author of Round #2 will receive a comprehensive coaching package by me, Melissa Giovagnoli of Networlding. We will also publish your book through our publishing division. (Publishing includes, cover design,  interior book design, and the book launch, valued at $10,000.00)

August 5, 2010 the winner of the Biz Book PitchFest 2010 Contest will be announced.

Judges’ Bios

Kevin Small

In 1996, Kevin was recruited by the leadership development author John C. Maxwell. Kevin was tasked with the creation of a platform that would be used to bring Maxwell’s leadership books to market. As the
President of Maxwell’s company, Kevin launched a satellite event training series that would enroll over 1 million students while rolling out an integrated publishing platform that launched four New York Times bestselling leadership titles. Maxwell’s annual book sales grew to over 1.2 million books. Under his leadership, the company grew dramatically over the next four years – from 10 to 125 people, and from $2 million to $25 million in revenue. Kevin managed the company’s sale in November 2004.

Meanwhile, the book business was changing quickly. Publishers were less and less able to commit the usual level of resources to authors’ launches. Kevin recognized that market conditions would soon require
that authors have their own marketing representation in order to have impact — despite the strength of their ideas, or their platform.

Kevin’s response was to form ResultSource, a boutique marketing firm that works with today’s thought leaders to build bestsellers. Kevin and his staff of six full-time employees serve as the business managers for Chip and Dan Heath, best-selling authors of “Made to Stick.”

Steve Farber

Steve is an executive coach, speaker and a best-selling author. His latest book, Greater Than Yourself: The Ultimate Lesson of True Leadership, has been a USA Today and Wall Street Journal Bestseller.
This first book, The Radical Leap: A Personal Lesson in Extreme Leadership” was recently named one of the “100 Best Business Books of All Time.”

Sarah Miller Caldecott

Sarah is an innovation champion who works with companies to ignite the innovation process, bringing a world-class innovator’s toolkit to individuals, teams, and leaders. She is also a great grandniece of  Thomas Edison, an innovation author, and an MBA with 25-years of domestic and international marketing expertise.

Her best-selling book (Dutton Penguin) on Thomas Edison’s innovation methods was endorsed by the New York Times, Fortune Small Business, USA Today, 800-CEO-READ, and Investor’s Business Daily.

Brett Farmiloe

Brett is the social media manager for Jobing.com- the nation’s largest, locally-focused provider of employment media. He is a Gen Y’er who frequently speaks on the topic of how to use social media to  attract and retain top talent. He has interviewed hundreds of leaders and employees in companies like Microsoft, Nike, and EA Sports in a social media intensive project he founded entitled Pursue the Passion (www.pursuethepassion.com). He also just published a book called ‘Pursue the Passion’ available on Amazon.

Melissa Giovagnoli

Creator of Biz Book Pitch Fest, Melissa is an eleven-time author with four books on bestseller lists. She recently launched Networlding Publishing a division of Networlding to help thought leaders and organizations with thought leaders grow their market share better and faster through the creation of award-winning blogs, profitable e-books and books. Networlding also helps thought leaders grow their platforms with the development of a community of “fans” who promote their books and hire them for
speaking, consulting, training and more.

Contest Details

To enter the Biz Book PitchFest 2010 Contest, submit your pitch to crowdSPRING by June 15, 2010 with the following:

· Your Name, Title, and Company

· The proposed title of the book

· The projected number of pages

· An overview of the book’s concept

· A brief description of your competition and what makes your book different from books on the same subject

· A brief outline of your marketing and pr plan for the book

· A statement about why you feel you should be the Biz Book PitchFest 2010 winner.

Qualifications

First, you must be a successful entrepreneur, consultant or professional who is a recognized thought leader.

Second, you must already have a great social media and speaking platform but have yet to publish a book.

Examples and helpful resources

http://www.agentquery.com/writer_hq.aspx

http://fineprintlit.com/submission-guidelines/w…

http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2007/02/how-to-…

http://michaelhyatt.com/2009/05/writing-a-winni…

Final Note:

Send your submission to me  melissa@networlding.com or by going to crowdSPRING by clicking here.

*Feel free to also email with any questions you might have.

1. Showcase someone you admire weekly. This week I want to showcase a recently new author, Brett Familoe. Check out his blog and his book, “Pursue the Passion.”  I met Brett when he was traveling through Chicago a number of years ago meeting up with people who had pursued their passions and as a result, realized a life of significance, and, often, success. There is so much more I can say about Brett but you will read more about him when we release information on our Pitch Fest 2010 Contest soon to be launched. Brett is now the social media manager at Jobing.com.

I can’t thank Barry Moltz enough–a great writer, speaker and consultant in his own right who recommended that Brett contact me.

2. Learn a new social media strategy once a week. One of my favorite tools is Bud URL. This site allows you to “shorten” all those URL’s that are dozens of characters long and incorporate them into social media programs like facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. You also can use them in e-mail marketing initiatives. Use the site to create custom, shortened URLs for articles you’ve authored or are recommending.

Additional Tip: Go one step beyond and brand your URL to leverage your marketing efforts. For example, if you are marketing a kitchen consulting Webinar or live event, you might call it http://budurl.com/kitchenconsultevent. Don’t get this one we need the info here about how to get your site up in searches.

When thinking of social media “best practices” think of strategies that leverage your brand by creating great content that inspires others to share those ideas.

I was having a great conversation with a long-time colleague and friend, Stephen Meade last evening that lead to a discussion around what creates great social networking. Stephen offered the following insights:

People love recognition, referrals, and revenue. To that end, I love making introductions.
However, keep in mind the 3 C’s when you do so.

Make a referral, but hope you get back:

1. Credit (for the referral, especially when other people use your contact for their benefit, they should give you public credit for the introduction)
2. Contacts (that can help you and your business)
3. Compensation (If and when appropriate, compensation)

I was pleased to see such a simple overview of what often goes unsaid in a networking exchange. So, I ask you, how many times have you connected with someone who reached out to you where you ended up offering support in the form of ideas or leads or even referrals where you got back absolutely nothing?

If you wonder what you can do to avoid these experiences I recommend that you create upfront contracts with your networking partners. Share with them what your expectations are and ask them what their expectations are emphasizing that the more clearly you share intentions the better the outcomes for you and your networking colleagues.

What do you think? Are there other ways you have seen work well to better ensure successful outcomes for your networking? Please comment below and share this with your colleagues to get their input.

Growing Your Brand Through Your Book and Other Book Products

Here are just a few line extensions that could come from your book:

• A Tips Booklet: An example would be our Networlding 101 Ways to Better Networlding tips booklet which is offered free on this blog. This helps your prospects “try before they buy.”
• An E-Book: We are big fans of e-books because they can be the precursor to your book or follow-on books. An example here would be a product created by the organization Z-Mags. Take a look and see what you think. This organization enables your prospects and clients to really dive deep into the value your organization can bring to the table.
• A Guidebook: If you have a book that is a how-to book then a guidebook will really help with training from you and also, licensing your training to others. Here also consider a facilitator’s guide for train-the-trainer programs. We are just getting our guidebook published with a facilitator’s guide.
• Games: Everyone loves games. They engage. They create connection. They accelerate learning. Consider starting with something simple like card decks that help educate like The Creative Whack Pack by Roger Van Oech or Think Pak: A Brainstorming Card Deck by Michael Michalko.

Finally, I also mentioned Chris Brogan’s new book, Trust Agents, which is all about building trust effectively online. The emphasis here is not that you can build the kind of trust you might build with a best friend or even a group of good friends but a way to be more “trustworthy.” With the growth of networks online this becomes a challenge and Chris and his co-author, Julien Smith, help provide a path to make that challenge easier. The result is that those who understand this difference can become more trustworthy which then adds value and credibility to their brand which can also lead to better sales.