As companies emerge from one of the steepest economic downturns in history, they understand the significant reach and importance of using social media to promote and rebuild their organizations. A new CareerBuilder survey reports that 35 percent of employers use social media to promote their company. One-quarter (25 percent) of these employers said they are using social media to connect with clients and find new business, while others are using it to recruit and research potential employees (21 percent), or strengthen their employment brands (13 percent). The survey was conducted among more than 2,500 employers between May 18 and June 3, 2010.

CareerBuilder is the global leader in human capital solutions, helping companies target and attract their most important asset – their people. Its online career site, CareerBuilder.com®, is the largest in the United States with more than 23 million unique visitors, 1 million jobs and 32 million resumes.

Businesses of all sizes and industries report using social media to promote their companies. Twenty-nine percent of organizations with 500 or fewer employees said they do so, followed by 38 percent of companies with 501 to 1,000 employees and 44 percent of companies with more than 1,000 workers. Comparing industries, leisure and hospitality topped those surveyed with 57 percent saying the use social media to promote their business, followed by IT, (48 percent), retail (43 percent) and sales (41 percent).

When it comes to managing social media strategy, 43 percent of employers report that their marketing department handles social media outreach, followed by public relations (26 percent) and human resources (19 percent). One-quarter (25 percent) of employers have 1-3 people communicating on behalf of their organization, while 7 percent report that 4-5 people handle the work. Eleven percent said that more than six people communicate for their company via social media. Fifty-seven percent said they didn’t know.

Workers report that they are turning to social media sites for more than connecting with friends. They’re also using social media to research companies and jobs. Workers who come across company pages on social media sites shared what they would most like to see, including:

• Job listings – 35 percent
• Q&A or fast facts about the organization – 26 percent
• Information about career paths within the organization – 23 percent
• Evidence that working at the company is fun – 16 percent
• Employee testimonials – 16 percent oPictures of company events – 12 percent
• Video of new products/services – 10 percent
• Company awards – 9 percent
• Research or studies that the company has conducted – 9 percent
• Videos of a day on the job – 8 percent

On the flip side, workers also shared the biggest turnoffs when encountering a company via social media, including the company’s communication reading like an ad (38 percent), failure to reply to questions (30 percent), failure to regularly post information (22 percent) and removing or filtering public comments (22 percent).

Survey Methodology
This survey was conducted online within the U.S. by Harris Interactive© on behalf of CareerBuilder.com among 2,534 U.S. hiring managers and 4,498 U.S. workers (employed full-time; not self-employed; non government); ages 18 and over between May 18 and June 3, 2010 (percentages for some questions are based on a subset of U.S. employers and/or employees, based on their responses to certain questions).

With a pure probability sample of 2,534 and 4,498 one could say with a 95 percent probability that the overall results have a sampling error of +/- 1.95 and +/-1.46 percentage points, respectively. Sampling error for data from sub-samples is higher and varies.

Whether you’re looking for a job or starting a new company, LinkedIn can be a powerful marketing tool. Because its culture is very different from other social media sites, it’s important to respect the rules and tread lightly.

The best analogy would be successful in-person networking. You would never barge into someone’s desk and raid their address book or Blackberry. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn’s culture wants you know actually know the people who are your connections. Don’t try to connect with someone you’ve never met; instead, ask someone in your connection list to introduce you, or meet the person outside of LinkedIn before contacting them. Just because someone is your Facebook friend doesn’t connect you enough for LinkedIn. Make sure you have a real, personal connection (although it doesn’t have to be face-to-face).

It can be tempting to want to take short-cuts when you see a person you’ve been dying to meet among one of your friends’ first-level connections. It’s OK to ask your friend to make an introduction, but ethical networkers don’t pretend to be referred by someone who hasn’t given permission to use them as a referral.

LinkedIn is valuable for entrepreneurs, too. While it’s easy to see the job hunting benefits of LinkedIn, the connection value is high for business owners who know how to get the most from the system. What can you do to market yourself or your new company on LinkedIn?

• Create a profile that shows you and your experience at its best and most credible.
• Use your Update box to let your contacts know about speaking engagements, new projects, or job-related news.
• Use the My Travel app to share where you’ll be traveling if it’s important to you to make the best use of your travel time by fitting in extra lunches, coffee and dinner with out-of-town contacts when you visit the area.
• Use the Events app to invite your connections and increase your event visibility.
• Be generous in giving (truthful) recommendations, and ask your contacts to write recommendations for you. Give first, and others will reciprocate.
• Use caution in deciding who to add and whose invitations to accept so you protect the integrity of your connections. Only add people you would know well enough to refer or to ask for them to refer you.
• Use the “six degrees of separation” indicator to ask your connections to refer you to others in their networks.
• Use the WordPress, Tweets and BlogLink apps to have your blog, podcasts, videos and Tweets automatically update your LinkedIn page to keep it fresh.
• Fill out your profile completely, and use a good, recent, professional photo.
• Offer to give referrals to your contacts, and introduce people you think might benefit from the connection.
• Use polls to get snapshots of what your customers and prospects think about key issues. Polls can also help you gather statistics for reports and presentations.
• Join groups and participate to add value. Virtual chapters of professional, industry and alumni associations where you’re already a member are especially valuable.
• Reconnect with mentors, colleagues, and subordinates whom you’d lost track of from prior companies. (The company and industry search functions are very helpful for this.) You expand your active network with people you already know.
• Start a group if your key membership organizations aren’t represented. If you remain active as a group leader, it can be a great visibility tool.
• Let your contacts know what kinds of new projects you’re interested in, so they know if you’re open to be approached.

LinkedIn is a powerful tool to extend your professional network, leverage the power of “six degrees of separation” and rekindle profitable business relationships. Make the most of your connections and watch your business grow.

Excerpted with permission from 30 Days to Social Media Success, by Gail Martin, new from Career Press in September, 2010.

About the Author:
Gail Z. Martin owns DreamSpinner Communications and helps companies and solo professionals in the U.S. and Canada improve their marketing in 30 days. Gail has an MBA in marketing and over 20 years of corporate and non-profit experience at senior executive levels. Gail hosts the Shared Dreams Marketing Podcast. She’s the author of The Thrifty Author’s Guide to Launching Your Book and 30 Days to Social Media Success. Find her online at http://www.GailMartinMarketing.com and on Twitter @GailMartinPR.

Gail is also the author of the Solopreneur Survival Guide home study course and suite of products for start-up and small businesses, coaches, consultants and speaker/authors. http://www.SolopreneurSurvivalGuide.com.

“Our Lips Are Sealed” is a song written by Go-Go’s guitarist Jane Wiedlin and Fun Boy Three singer Terry Hall. First recorded in 1981 for their album Beauty and the Beat, the song served as the band’s debut single. In 2000, Rolling Stone named it one of the 100 Greatest Pop Songs of all time.

It may be a perfect example of classic 80s music in the age of MTV, but it offers no hope of helping you further your brand. Keeping your lips sealed these days will bring you about as much popularity as a “Bring Back the Mullet” fan page on Facebook.

Discover a 4-Step Process

Luckily, I’ve got a 4-step process to share with you that will enable you to develop and implement your own reputation management strategy — and I’ll be sharing it in a free teleseminar on Thursday, August 12th at 7PM EST.

I hope you’ll join me for this light-hearted, information-packed hour full of actionable tips and resources.

How to Attend

Please register for the event at this link, and I’ll rush you the call details. Can’t make the call? Register anyway, as that is the only way you’ll be able to receive the replay audio file.

Here’s a newsflash — information posted online isn’t private.

Think of your personal accounts as your own personal brand, and treat them as such. You truly ARE what you tweet (and post to facebook, and youtube).

It’s pretty common knowledge that computers at companies and government offices are constantly monitored. The software for doing it is cheap and easy to install, making monitoring easy and popular.

It’s understandable. Both businesses and the government need to get the most from their payroll dollars. And they need to protect themselves from lawsuits stemming from unwise remarks by an employee.

Just last week I read a story on the Huffington Post about 13 cases of being fired over Twitter posts. Clearly, there are still some folks who didn’t get the memo.

Don’t post anything you wouldn’t want the world to know.

Revealing trade secrets is another act companies guard against. Employee blogs are tracked to prevent boss-slamming, sexual harassing of co-workers and the posting of discriminatory remarks.

Quoted in USA Today, the CEO of Smarsh, a seller of monitoring technology, says employees should assume they going to be watched. His company serves about 10,000 workplaces.

Lewis Maltby, author of the workplace rights book Can They Do That?, says a classic mistake is thinking that changing to your personal account gives you any privacy. It still goes through the company server.

But it doesn’t stop there. Employers have the technology readily available to track employees’ movements, listen in on conversations, and monitor their email.

A study by the American Management Association shows that 14 percent of employees admit to emailing confidential or proprietary information about the company, its people, products and services to outside parties. And 89 percent admitted to sending jokes, gossip, rumors or disparaging statements about the company to outsiders.

On the employer side, 1-in-10 say they’ve gone to court to fight lawsuits that were specifically triggered by employee e-mail. In addition, 2% of employers were ordered by courts or regulators to produce employee instant messages (IMs). That’s twice the amount reported in 2006.

“There are two trends driving the increase in monitoring,” says Maltby. “One is financial pressure. Everyone is trying to get leaner and meaner, and monitoring is one way to do it. The other reason is that it’s easier than ever. It used to be difficult and expensive to monitor employees, and now, it’s easy and cheap.”

Small Business owners are getting confused from all of the buzz about social media, and are worried that learning how to use social media would be too complicated or time consuming or just wouldn’t work in their business.

Author Mike Saunders teaches readers how to integrate an MBA-level marketing strategy into social networking and access free local business consulting services that many business owners may have never known existed.

Saunders holds an MBA in Marketing and helps small business owners increase sales using social media and online marketing. In addition to coaching and consulting clients in his firm Marketing Huddle LLC, Mike enjoys teaching Marketing as an Adjunct Marketing Professor at select Colleges and Universities. He is a Marketing Consultant with the Denver Small Business Development Center (SBDC).

In The P.R.I.S.M. Salvation: A 3-Step Solution to Social Media Domination for Busy Business Owners (Volume 1), main character Andy Stubbs discovers resources and strategies to help him succeed in implementing a social media marketing strategy in his business. Andy discovers how the meaning of P.R.I.S.M, “Powerful Relationships Integrating Social Media”, and an MBA-level marketing strategy, become the salvation to his business.

FREE Facebook marketing bonus package ($77 value) including:

• Facebook Marketing Video
• Facebook E-book
• Facebook Tips 24”x36” Wall Poster

To learn more, visit Mike’s website.

What you don’t know about LinkedIn could be hurting your business.

LinkedIn is the world’s most popular online platform for professionals, and yet merely 1 percent of users are taking advantage of all the site has to offer.

That’s why Atlanta-based marketing firm MLT Creative, is hosting “LinkedIn: Basic Best Practices for B2B Marketers,” an open webinar featuring LinkedIn expert Viveka von Rosen, founder of Linked Into Business.

With this webinar, which will be held Wednesday, July 28 from 2-3 p.m., von Rosen aims to make a lot more LinkedIn users part of that 1 percent.

“Despite LinkedIn’s enormous popularity,” said Billy Mitchell, MLT Creative president and creative director, “only a small percentage of professionals are using this vital social media tool to its full potential. We at MLT had a lot to learn ourselves. So we brought in an expert.”

Viveka von Rosen is the founder of Linked Into Business. She is a successful entrepreneur, IA Certified LinkedIn trainer and expert, and a respected social media speaker. Her sales and marketing background includes a specialization in helping her clients use social media marketing techniques to increase their business exposure.

Mitchell held an interactive webinar for his own employees, who learned a lot from von Rosen’s advice.

“Viveka used an entertaining, informative webinar, as well as subsequent personalized videos, to show each of us, individually, where and how our LinkedIn profiles needed improvements,” Mitchell said. “Her guidance has been invaluable, and we’re excited to share that knowledge with others.”

Webinar attendees will learn to:

• Represent their personal brand and their company
• Optimize their profile to get found
• Increase their search rankings within LinkedIn
• Grow their network strategically
• Set weekly goals to build authority

Additionally, attendees will receive an eBook, a written reference guide for all best practices covered in the webinar, with added tips and checklists.

B2B marketers use LinkedIn more than any other form of social media, and for good reason, according to Forrester Research. With more than 70 million users and one million company profiles, LinkedIn is focused purely on business discussion and professional networking. The demographics of the average LinkedIn user fit the background of the key decision-makers in B2B environments.

“LinkedIn should be an important part of everyone’s inbound marking plan,” Mitchell said.

Interested B2B marketers can sign up for this free webinar, click here.

Used to be, a diligent small business owner with a great idea and plenty of gumption could grow a business through word of mouth alone. In many ways, that’s still true. Yet today, much of the “word of mouth” conversations and recommendations, which can make or break a business, are happening online, not face to face.

Small business owners still recognize the value of word of mouth – 63 percent say it remains the most effective way to market their business and find new customers, according to a recent survey by Citibank. Yet that same survey found that 81 percent of small business owners do not use social media – word of mouth in the technology-driven world.

“Many small businesses have yet to really harness the marketing and communication power that online tools can provide them,” says Raj Seshadri, head of small business banking at Citibank. “Our survey of 552 small business executives throughout the country reveals a huge opportunity for many businesses to begin using some of the basic online tools, such as e-mail marketing, to drive their sales.”

Moreover, business owners should utilize a variety of social media and online platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, their Web site’s homepage and even blogs, experts say. Profiles on multiple networks expand your business’ reach and help engage current and potential customers.

Studies show that after a purchase, online shoppers “friend” or follow businesses more than 50 percent of the time. Reasons include an affinity for the business, allegiance to a company, and the opportunity to receive invitations to special events and/or exclusive offers and promotions through social media.

Here are some tips for using some of the top social media options to help grow your small business:

Blog about it
Short for “weblog,” a blog allows you to speak directly to customers and establish yourself as an expert in your industry. You can use your blog as the main source for information about your business, to feature customer testimonials, answer frequently asked questions, or even to resolve problems. Blog posts are usually short and pithy – you don’t have to write the great American novel for each post. Just make each interesting, useful and brief.

Facebook is your “friend”
Facebook is the largest social network, with more than 450 million users around the world, and another 100 million logging on from mobile devices. Create your free Facebook account and begin inviting customers (through direct e-mail, signs posted in your store and other communications) to “friend” your page. Use it to interact with your community of customers, offering them specials and deals. You can also share customer reviews online, feature a “customer of the month” and even chat directly with customers during scheduled chat times.

You should know YouTube
Smart companies use this online video library to distribute news of their products and services to a broad community. Create a quick video that spotlights what’s special about your product or service, new products or to highlight your product in the context of current events.

The buzz about Twitter
Twitter accounts are also free. More than 105 million users post in excess of 50 million “tweets” daily – short posts about current events or what’s going on in their lives at that moment. Use Twitter to relay stories of positive customer experiences, mentions of your company in other media, product announcements and updates, links and photos from your blog, or even to directly thank a specific customer in a public way.

Linking up with LinkedIn
Think of LinkedIn as the professional version of Facebook. The networking site allows you to post information about your qualifications, your work experience and your business, and to connect with other professionals.

To learn more about Citibank small business services that can help your company grow, visit www.citibank.com.

- Courtesy of ARA

In a FastCompany video series, Gina Trapani, founder of Lifehacker, shares these tips on living in a tech world:

Master your social-media life if you have Facebook, Twitter and more. Manage multiple accounts by funneling alerts, interacting with a single interface, and designating each as business or pleasure.

Manage your email Inbox by treating it like a post office box. Empty it every time you check it. Have a filing system for emails on various subjects.

Remember that Google is now the pre-interview. What you do online tells present and future employers as much about you, as your resume does.

Facebook is now THE most popular social networking site in the world. Some people set up an account to connect with family and friends or to meet new friends. Some people use Facebook as a social networking marketing strategy to boost their business.

The intent of Facebook is to grow your friend base and form connections and relationships with your friends. That’s what Facebook is about! But, I’ve noticed many people seem to be forgetting the ‘connecting’ and ‘relationship’ part.

One of the great aspects of Facebook is meeting people, getting to know them, chatting with them and getting to know about them. But unfortunately, many people simply get friends and pitch their business and spam.

Sorry, but I see it every day…

If you’re on Facebook to grow your business, this one – seemingly small – gesture could drastically improve your presence…

When you send someone a friend request, send them a message! Don’t just send a friend request! It’s like meeting someone at a party, shaking their hand, and walking away! Sending a friend request is a gesture of….hello, I’d like to meet you…I’d like to get to know you…let’s connect…let’s learn about each other.

If you were to send a friend request to a friend of a friend, would you just click ‘send friend request’? Noooo, you’d send this person a message saying who you were, and how you came to know about the person.

If you want to be friends with someone, let them know why…What interested you about them? What did you read about them that you liked? What do you have in common?

Facebook isn’t just about getting a bunch a friends and pitching your business to them. It’s about connecting with them, getting to know them…their needs, their wants, their interests, finding what you have in common.

I’ve connected with some great people on Facebook! That’s what it’s all about!

If you ask someone to connect and be your friend on Facebook, make a connection and be a friend!

So, next time you send a friend request…connect! Send them a personal message…let them know that you asked for their friendship for a reason! Let the person know that you’re truly interested in them as a person, not just a prospect or a sale.

About the Author:
Social Media is a big part of promoting your business on line. If you like this article, Jackie Hall has many more valuable posts on her blog. Come by and leave her a comment! http://www.NewBodyCoach.com.

William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has been given a 21st century makeover. The star-crossed lovers’ tragic romance is being retold in real time on the social media site Twitter – and causing quite a stir in England.

Shakespeare’s plays have been performed for 400 years. But never before like this. Such Tweet Sorrow, the newest version of Romeo and Juliet, is ‘tweeted’ online by six actors.

They make sure key elements in the plot are there. But for the most part, they improvise.

Juliet is tweeted by Charlotte Wakefield. She says it’s no easy feat. “You have to kind of deliver so much of the story through your own written texts so it’s difficult in that way because you have to get a character and a point across in 140 characters or less.”

The question is, with only 140 characters and thoroughly modern slang, has the romance been lost?

James Barrett says his Romeo character still has it. “Romeo was getting a bit poetic last night so they were fun, coming up with those and telling the world about my poems,” he said.

But this Internet-savvy Romeo is very much a product of the 21st century.

The idea is to get young people interested in Shakespeare.

“What’s great about what we’re doing is it allows them to come to it in their own terms and of course the thing that young people find most alienating about Shakespeare is the language, which feels like a different language to them and this isn’t in anyway attempting to copy Shakespeare’s language – it’s written by young people in a language they would use,” Director Roxana Silbert explained.

And the language is different.  Take Shakespeare’s original.

Romeo: “Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged.”

Juliet: “Then have my lips the sin that they have took.”

Twitter talk is a different language all together. A language that appeals to British teenagers.

And so with a little help from modern technology it looks like William Shakespeare may have won a whole new batch of followers.