Wikipedia defined Social / New Media as media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media use web-based technologies to transform and broadcast media monologues into social media dialogues.
Social Media can take many different forms and applications, such as:-
- Communication : Blog, social networking, events
- Collaboration : Wiki, social bookmarking, social news
- Multimedia : Photo & Video sharing, Livecasting, presentation sharing
- Review and Opinions : Product / Business review, Community Q&A
- Entertainment : Virtual worlds, games, etc
- Brand Monitoring : Brand monitoring & analysis
The first question one needs to ask yourself (as a business professional) is the health of your online presence. The simplest task to perform (as many recruiters, potential employers or business partners would do) is to Google yourself.
If you’re one who’s not extremely active with online activities, chances are the search results will feature your LinkedIn profile, your Facebook / Twitter profile and perhaps some online sites that you have previously commented on. If you’re a “personality” in your company, you might even have appeared in some press clippings or articles from your last Press Conference.
As a business professional, you need to ask yourself what your primary online presence. If you’re being Google-d, where would you like it to be pointed to? Essentially, it should be your LinkedIn profile (or a website / blog, if you have one).
LinkedIn is a great business networking site, but many business professionals fail to see the effects or benefits of the site. Many don’t even have a 100% complete LinkedIn Profile.
For starters, you should really work on getting your LinkedIn Profile 100% complete. Your profile page should be an overview of your CV, a sales page of yourself. For privacy reasons, you can control if other users view your brief / full detailed profile. This LinkedIn profile should serve as a landing page for anyone doing a professional search of yourself.
You should also ensure that your LinkedIn Connections are healthy. This is not a personal social networking site. More friends / contacts don’t mean you’re more popular. You need to develop a list of quality contacts. Colleagues, vendors, customers, business partners, etc are good contacts that you want to keep long-term. LinkedIn has a good address book import tool allowing you to search through your Contact List to find out which of your contacts are also on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn Profile Recommendations cannot be ignored as well. This is now becoming an online reference check. Receiving quality recommendations helps you maintain a good credibility of your work for future references, be it future employment, business collaboration or consulting offers.
Once your LinkedIn Profile is 100% complete, you shouldn’t leave it at that. You might want to enhance your profile by adding LinkedIn Applications such as Blog Link (to link to your blog) or SlideShare (to include presentations, case studies, portfolios) to showcase your work.Like any business, you want to always continue to keep engaging on the site, network and maintain activity. A good way to engage in the community if to join Groups, follow Companies, participate in Discussions and Answers.
If all these is confusing you already, LinkedIn maintains very good documentations and tutorials for you at LinkedIn Learning Center.
Here are some interesting reads :-
