Bloggertone

There are now over 100 million people on LinkedIn, people you can do business with, people you can impress with your profile and your knowledge. Most business people have a profile on Linked In and I’m sure you do. However, is your Linked In profile as professional, effective and engaging as it could be? I’ve noticed more and more business people failing to update their Linked In profile effectively; leaving it incomplete and not making use of the many benefits within Linked In. Here’s our recommendations for ‘what to do’ and ‘what not to do’ on LinkedIn.

Why should people buy from your company? Sure, you’ll need to have a mix of compelling offers, superior service, value for money, easy access and so forth. But increasingly that’s not enough. Your company may need a ‘personal’ credibility boost to win more business.

Today I was reading a white paper from comScore called US Digital, Future in Focus 2012 and the stats are amazing. They cover all aspects of online behaviour, some of which I have listed below:

If your company or brand went out of business would anyone notice? Honest answer? One of the most important questions any company or brand should ask itself is: if your company went out of business, would anyone really notice or care?

I came across Starbucks and they are clearly using modern technology to their advantage. Let’s take a look at how Starbucks uses Facebook and Mobile to get their message across and create engagement with their customers.

While it might be easy enough to understand how B2C could use Pinterest to showcase their products, the manufacturing process, the ingredients, the lifestyle around the products etc., figuring out how to use it for B2B requires a little more thought….

I think we can all name dozens of people that are everywhere on the web etc. without knowing what they actually contribute. This is their absolute entitlement – but one has to ask: are you more worried about how well-known you are or for what reason you have a reputation albeit large or small.

There have also been studies that suggest that increasingly consumers are looking more and more to independent sources, like online reviews and expert bloggers, for advice on what products and brands to chose with their increasingly limited budgets. The premise being that they see advertising as making overblown and exaggerated claims.

Some people are of the opinion that blogging has limited use for their business, some don’t see the need for it at all, others see it as useful for improving SEO and with good calls to action, believe it capable of delivering increased sales. However, blogging (and other social media tools) can do so much more for your business than driving people to your website through improved Search Engine Optimisation.

Always on the lookout for interesting Entrepreneurs to speak with and learn from, I hooked up with Sean O’Sullivan to find out more about his business ventures and what he has been up to recently. Sean, who is credited with co-inventing the term “cloud computing,” is Ireland’s latest Dragon, on RTE’s Dragons Den.