I know I know, I’ve talked a lot lately about using LinkedIn - in part, because I’m really beginning to feel a shift there from a contact-list kinda-place to more of a networking tool, or a shop window for businesses and smart people (OK, maybe not exclusively smart people - I’m on LinkedIn, after all). This follows the announcement of LinkedIn applications last week.

So please bear with me while I indulge myself with another (great) list about how to get the most from LinkedIn, this time by Brian Wallace of Mashable - How to get the most out of LinkedIn.

Brian lists seven LinkedIn features that most businesses could benefit from using:

Quick Lookup - Look up who you are having that next business meeting with. You’ll be able to break the ice right away.

Q&A - Post questions to others in your industry. The Yahoo Answers look and feel of this feature has definitely made LinkedIn more active and interesting. A public question can be responded to by anyone that works in really any discipline. Such was the case where Derek Edmond spotted a discussion occurring about the trustworthiness of SEO.

Recommendations - Have clients or co-workers post recommendations, which future employers and clients can view to gauge your skill and level of trustworthiness. Conversely, if you’re an employer, these imply trustworthiness for a potential freelancer or new hire.

Background checks - Look up potential new hires or freelancers. This should be right up there in an HR manager’s toolbelt.

See what your competition is up to - Keep track of what others in your industry are up to. Network updates gives you a feed of recent activity, so you can see who your connections have friended, groups they have joined, and the people they have recommended. You’ll even be able to see when people are switching jobs.

Introductions - Use people you already know to help make introductions. It’s a great way to get in the door with a company you need to contact.

Open Networking - Go out and become a LION! You are an open networker.

Brian also links to a great post by Jennifer Laycock on Search Engine Guide about why LinkedIn is the one social network she would always recommend - the post gives some compelling, real world examples of the power of using LinkedIn. A great read for those who are unsure whether to bother investing their time and energy into the LinkedIn network.

So, there you have it. Even more reasons why LinkedIn could be good for you, and your business. And yes, I promise not to go on about LinkedIn for a while…

The Times Online last month published an interesting article about blogging amongst legal firms in the UK: Legal blogs: isn’t it time British lawyers staked their claim in the blogosphere? (read the full article here). The article cites several established lawyers who have been blogging and have seen success from blogging, including…

Peter Wainman of the Naked Law blog:

“We’ve had a huge amount of PR since starting the blog, both from online and traditional print media,” he says. “The blog is also a great way of engaging with the public, of generating discussion about interesting legal developments.”

and Alex Newson, an IT lawyer:

“Blogging has massive potential for businesses in general in the UK, including law firms. The publicity we have had since we started Impact nearly two years ago has been massive. We have been on the radio, been invited to speak at conferences, given quotes to national newspapers and have submitted papers. Technology only moves forward, not backwards, and the challenge now is to harness the blogosphere for law firms’ benefit.”

The benefits for law firms engaging with their customers are the same for businesses in other industries, but perhaps due to their specialization, law firms may be the ideal candidate to demonstrate their expertise, develop a voice (and even a personality), and begin establishing and strengthening customer relations.

If you are reading this post from our website, you may have noticed that we are in the process of refreshing this site with a new design, clearer messages, and more relevant content - whilst trying to eat our own dog food. Our blog forms the spine of our site (why a blog?) and we wanted a powerful, expandable, and easy-to-use tool to allow us to manage it all. Free would be nice too, of course.

Step up, Wordpress. Wordpress is a blogging publishing tool, which is free, and can be easily expanded to provide all the features of a complete content management system. From the Wordpress site…

WordPress is a powerful personal publishing platform, and it comes with a great set of features designed to make your experience as a publisher on the Internet as easy, pleasant and appealing as possible.

It’s also open-source, which means anyone can open up the bonnet, have a play with the source code and make changes to suit. We use Wordpress for all of the reasons above: Free. Easy-to-use. Lots of features. Free. Fully customisable.

Why choose Wordpress for your business blog?

• It’s easy-to-use. Wordpress gets out your way, just providing the tools you need to create and manage all your site’s content, through a secure, password protected admin interface.
• You can host within your own business domain. Choose to create your Wordpress blog within your domain name and you retain full control over your own content, instead of hosting it elsewhere.
• You can fully customise the design. Skin Wordpress with a free ‘theme’ of you choice, or get a bespoke design completed to compliment your existing site and brand.
• It supports multiple Authors. Wordpress can manages multiple authors, which makes it more than capable of supporting a structured blogging strategy.
• Plenty of features and easily extended Boasting a vast array of plugins plus the ability to open the bonnet and code your own feature extensions, Wordpress can cater for almost any requirement.
• Oh, and it’s FREE.

Wordpress is used to power millions of blogs and web sites all over the web, including: Dell (yourblog.direct2dell.com), Xerox (blogs.xerox.com), Southwest Airlines (blogsouthwest.com), Digg (blog.digg.com), New York Times (walkthrough.nytimes.com), oh, and Stephen Fry (stephenfry.com/blog).

We’ve decided to eat our own dog food, and that’s pretty pointless if we don’t share how sweet it tastes, so here’s a quick overview of how bpodr has been getting it’s fill in the last month…

Popular Posts. Our Google analytics shows us that our two most popular posts of the month were those introducing and discussing Socialprise. We posted these in response to a press release we read, and within 24 hours found ourselves on the front page of Google when searching for Socialprise, which then drove traffic for these posts, and our web site in general. (Notably, our blog attracted over 82% of all our traffic in March)

Extending our Reach. We’ve been busy adding new features to our blog to make it easier for our readers to er, read, and to further our blog tools to broaden our readership. These features include:

• Technorati Tags. We now let Technorati know more about our content, and allow our readers to find similar content of interest.
• Subscribe by Email. We added the ability for our readers to get email alerts when we post new content. Thank you Feedburner.
• More useful RSS feeds. Feedburner has also helped us add more features to our RSS feeds, which allow readers to easily email our posts, digg posts, or add posts to their social bookmarks.
• Wordpress Stats. We have also installed a wordpress stats plugin, which has started gathering accurate information about our post views, we will soon know which are our most popular posts by number of times they have been viewed.
• Graham’s Twitter Feed. You can now catch Graham’s ‘tweets’ (what’s this?) from right here on the blog.

So a lot of house-keeping on our blog, but all should lead to a better experience for our visitors, and wider exposure on the Net for us.

Twitter, Twitter. Grahams Twitter activity has led to him being quoted by a well known Social Media thought-leader from the States. Although of no direct benefit, each referral helps us in building credibility for bpodr as a valuable resource for businesses here in the UK. (Follow Graham on Twitter here)

LinkedIn. Graham’s LinkedIn profile lead to an old work colleague who was interested in how our services could help them re-invigorate his business, which led to a business meeting, which led to drinks, which may lead to…

We may share future success - both ours, and our customers’ - in this series of ’should-be-about-once-a-month-but-may-not-be’ posts. If you want to stay tuned, easily, then just subscribe to our RSS feed on the right-hand side (that little orange icon… up a bit… that’s it!) and have future posts delivered to you.

You don’t have to eat any dog food, but you may develop a taste for engaging with your customers - and the Web - in new and exciting ways.

Perhaps you think you should get your 10th cup of coffee for free, or you would like free Wi-Fi access, or even a free birthday brew… whatever your suggestion, Starbucks want to hear it.

Starbucks have unveiled MyStarbucksIdea.com - a social community site aiming to give their customers a platform to share their ideas and suggestions, vote on the ideas they would most like to see in-store and find out what ideas Starbucks have actually implemented. It seems Starbucks have placed blogging and communicating with their customers at the core of their “New Strategic Initiatives To Transform and Innovate the Customer Experience” er, strategy.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced this week -

“We engage in millions of conversations with our customers everyday, and those conversations and ideas have helped shape the company we are today,” said Schultz. “With the launch of MyStarbucksIdea, we are extending the Starbucks community online and creating a dynamic forum that enables us to capture and act upon our customers’ best ideas.”

Starbucks seem to be doin’ it right: offering transparency for the process and what they want to do with your ideas, employee-driven content and encouraging customer engagement. If they do ‘act upon’ some of their customers ideas, it looks like Starbucks may succeed in extending the customer conversation on-line.

Regardless of how many of their customers actually choose to engage in this conversation, Starbucks are set to benefit as they gain cost-effective customer feedback, potentially improve their pubic image, and maybe even hear that gem of an idea that makes a difference to their profits.

We love a good portmanteau, especially when it’s relevant to the web, and even more so when it’s relevant to the web and to businesses working with the web - so you can imagine our satisfaction when we had a whole new word to play with after Inside View announced it’s latest on-line venture - Sales Viewâ„¢.

“Enterprises are inherently social because they are comprised of relationships between employees, and among sales people, customers and partners,” said Rand Schulman, chief marketing officer of InsideView. “As social applications are reaching critical mass both in users and content, it is not a matter of if but when they will mature into becoming a core part of every enterprise application. InsideView recognizes this inevitability by introducing SalesView, the first Socialprise application designed to capture the burgeoning social data inherent within the enterprise.”

Sales Viewâ„¢ will allow CRM (customer relationship management) users to utilize the power of the web to deliver more information about potential customers and sales-leads, scouring blogs, social media applications and the like for the latest customer data.

I can see many businesses donning their trunks to ride this wave over the coming months - unlocking the wealth of information held by the individuals who feed social networking, blog and publish themselves on-line. The power of collaboration for whoever wants to harness it.

‘Socialprise’ represents more than just a catchy, nice-ring-to-it, word-2.0-type phrase - It represents the fact that the web 2.0 and social media applications (like facebook, linkedin, jigsaw) are being leveraged to help businesses of all sizes improve their efficiency, better understand their customer and ultimately, drive profits.

No matter what you call it, businesses embracing the social web is an exciting prospect.

EBay have moved to offer a greater transparency to their business operations; an interview with eBay’s new full-time blogger on CNN money suggests that eBay are truly embracing open communication channels with their customers: 

New eBay recruit and social media veteran Richard Brewer-Hay will launch a blog next month that aims to give eBay’s users a direct, unfiltered communications link with the company. Can he repair the company’s battered relations with its users?

“…My words go straight up onto the blog, unedited.

It’s got to be transparent. There’s got to be an authenticity to it, an honesty to it, otherwise there’s no point in doing it in the first place. I’m going to open up my e-mail to questions from folks. People can comment, too, and comments are going to be open. You’re going to get the good, the bad, and the ugly.” read more…

We like Richard’s blogging ‘ethos‘. EBay already have various channels available for communicating with their customers, but this initiative seems to be different; existing blogs are written by staff members with a history at eBay, Richard has joined eBay solely for this role and appears to be enthused by the prospect of talking about a huge range of eBay’s business.

We’ll be following eBays’ latest conversation-starter with interest, as well as keeping an eye open for other businesses employing full-time bloggers to help them converse with their customers. 

Dell continues to invest in it’s direct2dell blogging group, with an announcement that it has launched ‘In the Clouds‘, a blog that discusses the future of cloud computing.

Perhaps the biggest insight into how dell have adopted blogging comes from within the announcement (titled: more conversations…):

“From the beginning, the purpose of Direct2Dell has been to educate and to support our customers on a wide variety of topics that they care about. This blog has grown since those early days. And that growth has encouraged more Dell folks to want to have conversations with our customers.”

Dell’s strategy is also now including other web 2.0 channels - youtube, flickr and twitter to extend their conversation, and reach their customers in new ways.

Last week I outlined what a blog is, and began to look at why a business should invest time in developing, writing and promoting their own blog. Here I want to look at 6 key reasons why your company needs to blog:

1. Gathering Feedback - A blog can serve as an essential communication channel with your customers. Customers feedback, critiques, praises and complaints can prove invaluable. How much would you be prepared to spend on customer opinion polls, surveys and focus groups? A blog is a cost-effective way to listen to your customer feedback.

2. Clearer Communication - How would your business deliver relevant, up-to-date messages regarding events in your business or market to a broad audience, instantly? A blog helps you attract new customers and offer a personal touch to your communications with existing customers.

3. Google loves a blogger! - A blog can form a cost-effective, measurable solution to gaining higher rankings in the major search engines. Google loves relevant, updated, ever-changing content - the essence of a good blog, plus, if you’re talking about your market and business, your blog is naturally keyword heavy. (your talking about your products/services/industry after all, right?)

4. Blog for your staff - You value your customers feedback, thoughts and complaints, but how about your most valuable asset: your employees? Offering a channel for airing staff views and offering a virtual ‘water-cooler’ for your staff to discuss ideas, what’s working and what’s not, can provide direct feedback and it can help keep staff motivated and feeling valued.

5. Stay ahead of the competition - A blog allows you to demonstrate your industry expertise. Striking up conversations with potential and existing customers may well set you apart from your dull corporate competitor. If your competitors aren’t blogging, who are your customers listening to?

6. Extend your brand - Don’t just give your company a voice, how about a personality? A blog gives you the opportunity to talk to your customers in whatever accent you choose. The ethos of your company can be projected in the way you communicate, and what you choose to communicate about. A blog gives you the chance to further build on your brand.

Bonus 7. It’s the way you tell ‘em - Say what you want to say, when you want to say it - a blog allows unedited views, announcements or statements without being at the mercy of press editors. Press publications rarely tell it as you see it, so why aren’t you?

So, I believe these are among the most compelling reasons that your business has to join the on-line conversation, but the road to blogging bliss is crawling with considerations: who will write your blog? What will it be about? How often should you blog? Will it be hosted by yourself? Do we moderate comments? And more…

Of course, [warning: blatant service offering ahead] bpodr would be happy to help you implement your new blogging strategy, or just talk you through your options.

You’ve heard people talking about them, seen links to them littered over the Internet, and occasionally wondered what on earth they actually are - Blogs. The fact that you are reading this, and that this is in fact a blog, means that you have certainly been exposed to at least one blog - and you are about to find out what a blog is and more importantly, how one can work for your business.

A Blog (pronounced blog, short for web log) is a small website which allows its owner (or blogger) to post entries on any subject they care to write about (blogging). A Blog might contain news or information about a niche subject, a personal diary, or a corporate means of making announcements. Just about every imaginable topic has a broad array of blogs with an army of bloggers, blogging. (blogsearch.google.com is a good starting point to begin your searching blogs.)

There are a lot of sites around for creating a blog (blogger, wordpress, typepad…), and a large number are free. The fact that blogging is freely and easily accessible by everybody means everybody can become a published writer. Everybody can have a voice - a published voice, with an audience ready to listen to what you have to say.

Why should my business care?

Your business can benefit from starting an on-line conversation in several ways…

• Start conversations with your customers. Tell them about upcoming events or promotions, new services or what your working on. Well established blogs even find their customers responding to posts with comments of their own - providing valuable feedback.

• Position yourself as an expert in your business field. Publish your thoughts, ideas or reactions to what happens in your field and establish yourself as a leading authority on your business subject. Show your customers why they should choose your business and its expertise instead of a competitor.
  

• Reach a new audience. Increase the exposure of your business, get listed in blogging directories, and reach a wider audience.

• Be your own editor. Say what you want, when you want, and however you want. Give your business a voice and start talking with your customers.

• Boost your search engine ranking. Google loves bloggers! Google loves content that is relevant and up-to-date. You’ll love being ranked higher in Google!