Today I thought I’d share these bookmarked resources with you as an RSS Feed (so as I add more they’ll automatically add to the list or you can subscribe to my feed). Make sure you thank all the content providers as we all should keep learning.

Almost forgot to ask. If you have suggestions for me to read, please add them in the comments (so everyone benefits). Thanks.

The post 82 Twitter Resources that are Useful appeared first on Hagen Business Systems.

Begin a Dialogue with Your Employees
Don’t just lock everyone out of everything! This reactionary approach will make your firm look like a dinosaur to your team as well as your customers. I’ve seen this implemented at large publicly held construction companies and I think they’ve shot themselves in the foot by locking out everyone with URL filtering. Determine which employees and social media applications can contribute to your company brand, market reach and customer relationships. Ask your marketing, communications and sales people including anyone involved with customer relationship management or customer support for their input. Check out your competitor’s website to see what social media applications and tools they are using. Often you’ll see a few icons listed somewhere on their site, an invitation to connect in the sidebar of a blog or perhaps an RSS feed of their social activity.

Establish a Social Media Policy
Start with defining what is acceptable and unacceptable when using social media sites as you do for email and cell phone usage. Yes, your Legal and Information technology teams will probably influence (scare) you enough that risk tolerance decisions will need to be made. My favorite book for addressing social media policy is The e-Policy Handbook by Nancy Flynn. You may have already decided that “we only allow LinkedIn”, period. Think again. The most popular Business to Business (B2B) network by far in the United States is LinkedIn and they’ve just added the ability to display Twitter feeds and blog posts on the Company Profile. Since blog posts often have videos embedded in articles, you may have just policed yourself into not being able to view your own marketing materials.

Get the IT Department on Board
With budget cuts across the board, IT is trying to do everything without spending money and often takes the “lock down” approach as the only thing they can do with the tools they currently have. Perhaps you should consider budgeting for new equipment, particularly firewalls that address social media. It’s not good enough anymore to rely on old technology. Traditional firewalls rely on port and protocol to classify traffic, allowing tech-savvy applications and users to bypass them with ease; hopping ports, using
SSL, sneaking across port 80, or using non-standard ports. It may be time to have your network traffic analyzed for applications, users and content, you need to know what bandwidth is used by social media and have a way to monitor and enforce your policies effectively. The Interface2010 Technology Symposium has this topic covered and while I attended the Scottsdale, AZ event last week, you can still catch them in a few other US cities this year.

We’re in the process of scheduling a webinar to help educate business owners and their IT departments on social media policy, monitoring and network security. If you’d like to receive a webinar invitation, be interested in a network audit or have questions, please ask us by posting a comment. Please share this with your business partners, IT friends, and customers.

The post Social Media Policy or Police? appeared first on Hagen Business Systems.

For those that list their Twitter handle in their LinkedIn profile, Tweets extends the ability for you to listen to those you follow. It also has a tab for your LinkedIn contacts. The tab aggregates all your contacts that list a Twitter handle and provides a handy follow button.

Why is this important? If you are keeping in touch with your contacts, it stands to reason you can achieve a closer business relationship by knowing what your contacts tweet about. This also holds true with contacts that blog. These creators of content are using social media to share their expertise and often provide gems to improve productivity, enhance relationships and display thought leadership.

Now if you can’t get IT to change their minds about Twitter then start reading the blogs your contacts write by using the LinkedIn app BlogLink. It aggregates all the blog posts of your contacts and you can set it to display on your LinkedIn Home and not your profile. This can build trust and stronger relationships quickly. This is business development basics! You notice when someone takes the time to comment on your blog or mentions the topic you blogged about in a phone conversation.

I shared this information as a guest speaker for the AZ Entrepreneurs group in Scottsdale this morning(Yes they are a LinkedIn group) and I’m sure some of them have already added the apps. I know a few have already invited me to join them on LinkedIn (still waiting to see a few Twitter followers).

After you try Tweets or BlogLink tell me you wished you knew about how to use these LinkedIn apps sooner. I’d also liked to hear about your success stories, so bookmark this page to come back and comment.

Please also consider sharing this with your business contacts too.

The post Listening to LinkedIn Contacts appeared first on Hagen Business Systems.

The premise is if you had to take a 1-minute internet safety lesson before being allowed access to the Internet your employees would recognize just how important it is to protect their identity and the electronic information contained within the company. The article mentions many of the popular social media sites but doesn’t give you 10 lessons to kick start the idea. So why not make this blog post a place for everyone to share their ideas…and build a 100 or more “lessons”? I’m extending this to LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter too (as I believe a 140 character tip will ensure the time constraint of keeping it to one minute).

Safety Tips

To get us started, here are a few of my one minute safety tips:

• Know your company’s policy on Social Media use (Write a corporate policy on Social Media)
• Make all your passwords more than one word in length and include at least one number
• Never write (post) anything you wouldn’t want your mom or your boss to read (or see)
• Text Messages from your Blackberry are “discoverable” so think of them as business emails
• If you blog independently of work, make sure it is understood the contents are not the opinions of a past, current or future employer, but only that of the blogger’s
• If you post while at work to Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn make sure it is work or industry related (see corporate policy)
• Never open attachments or click hyperlinks from people you don’t know and trust

Now that you get the idea, let’s hear your one minute (or less) lessons and Tips. I promise to share them with you all!

The post Social Media Safety Meeting Minute appeared first on Hagen Business Systems.

Here are the 3 most useful social media twitter tools for construction, or for that matter any business:

1. Blogging. Once a week someone at your firm must have something they could share that could help: Establish your brand, identify a new business niche, further the relationship with a client, improve the communications with your suppliers or empower your employees.  Why not blog about it and establish yourself as an expert!  Blogging will  assist in attaining higher search engine rankings and gives you the ability to create a unique voice.  Why is this a Twitter tool?  Because when you publish your blog article it should immediately post to Twitter.
2. Twitterfeed or Feedburner.  Feedburner has been around the longest and was aquired by Google long ago.  They recently added the Socialize function to “push” your blog posts to the Twitterverse automatically.  It doesn’t have some of the reporting options that Twitterfeed does, but I suspect that will arrive shortly.
3. TweetBrand.  I was so impressed I became an affiliate of theirs.  What it does is further your branding within your tweets.  There’s a timeline entry for every tweet that says how it was posted (via Twitter, Ping, Tweetdeck, LinkedIn, etc).  What if instead it had your company name that hyperlinked to your company website or URL of your choice?
   

   Stop giving away your Tweet Real Estate

For the B2B and B2C (Business to consumer) Facebook is also something to consider.  If the AGC of America, Turner Construction and ENR all have Facebook pages you’d think that there must be value there right?  As a social media strategist it still surprises me that so few construction  firms have even tried to dabble with social media tools.

Perhaps you think social media is a waste of time, that your employees would lose productivity, that there are only teenagers out there using Twitter to “instant message” their friends.  But social media can be used for much more.  What are your favorite tools?  Can’t wait to hear your comments.

Why not try out TweetBrand and tell me if your like it as much as I do.

The post 3 Social Media Twitter Tools I Recommend for Construction appeared first on Hagen Business Systems.

Source: Business.com’s 2009 B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study (http://www.business.com/info/b2b-social-media-benchmark-study) 

The post Social Media Use in Real Estate and Construction Industry appeared first on Hagen Business Systems.

Once you have that done, you can add your own LinkedIn column based upon your preferences.  From TweetDeck click on the add column button and select the LinkedIn icon.  You can decide what items to include like recommendations, connections, status updates, etc.  Here are your choices so you can be a smarter, more efficient listener:

Now that you are listening, have you tried out the Twitter options on LinkedIn?  I blogged about it a few weeks back.  Read it here if you missed it.  Now have you all considered using Twitter (or some other microblogging application) for your company press releases?

The post LinkedIn and TweetDeck Together at Last appeared first on Hagen Business Systems.

But these are not the gems of the application.  What I really like is if your LinkedIn connections don’t have Twitter you can directly share the tweet message with them.  It doesn’t even have to be your own tweet.   Just click share and then pick your LinkedIn connection to compose a message.  It will default to the subject “Interesting Tweet Found in LinkedIn Tweets”  and put the tweet in the body of the message.

Now go try it out and tell me how you like it!

The post Share Tweets with LinkedIn Connections (even if they don’t have Twitter) appeared first on Hagen Business Systems.

This gives the viewer of your blog feed or site an opportunity to pass it along, make it more popular with Digg and spread your message.  Once you choose FeedFlare, select the options you want for your feed or site and it will show you what it will look like to your readers:

You can reorder the choices you selected by dragging the Share on Facebook or Digg it hyperlinks using drag-n-drop. You’re done when you hit SAVE.

The next time your feed goes out, all your subscribers will have these choices to share and you will reap the rewards!

There is also a FeedFlare catalog of other choices to add including english to spanish translations, adding links to your favorite charity, event promotions and Map It
(to Link to a web mapping service display for feed items that have location context associated with them).

Go ahead and experiment. Try out FeedFlare and let me know about your success.  We love your comments.

Oh, and since you read the whole blog post, you can add a follow me on twitter flare with these instructions from HyveUp

The post More Tips on Blog Subscriptions appeared first on Hagen Business Systems.

I think Twitter got this one right.  If I want to know what my followers are really interested in, it should be their retweets.  After all it is a call to action for their own followers and represents the groundswell of our followers reach too.  What better way to understand the value of content than from our followers.  This is a keeper as far as I’m concerned.  Now will this feature be incorporated into some of the popular aggregators like TweetDeck?  How do you decide when to retweet?

The post I’ve been Beta’d by Twitter appeared first on Hagen Business Systems.