Web Ink Now

Why I am not on LinkedIn

I receive a handful of email invitations each week from people saying: "I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn."

And to each person I send a polite note saying more or less: "Sorry, but I don't do LinkedIn. You can find me at my primary hangouts including my site and my blog and Facebook and Twitter, and you'll see me pop up at several dozen other social networking sites from time to time."

Some people email me back and are either surprised: "Wait! You don't do LinkedIn?" or seem a bit offended: "Why the heck don't you do LinkedIn? Do tell."

Why I am not on LinkedIn

The LinkedIn site says: "Over 30 million professionals use LinkedIn to exchange information, ideas and opportunities. When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional accomplishments. Your profile helps you find and be found by former colleagues, clients, and partners. You can add more connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you." On the LinkedIn about page, there is a laundry list of things you can do with LinkedIn, such as find potential clients, search for jobs, land deals, and get introductions.

Well, all of the things that LinkedIn says it can help me with, I am already doing with the other social networking services that I use, so I don't need that specific help. And if people want to find me, they can Google David Meerman Scott.

I hope I'm not offending anyone when I say that I’ve found that the majority of people who email me to ask me to be a part of their LinkedIn network fall into one or more of these three categories: 1) I do not know them 2) They are salespeople or 3) They are looking for a new job.

I meet people every single day on my blog, on others' blogs and on Twitter, and at this stage I am not looking for another way to connect. Regular readers of this blog know that I try really hard to help those who are looking for work by providing ideas for them that are more helpful than linking in to people who I know.

If you want to connect to me, just do it. If you want to know who I know, look at the people who follow me on Twitter or who comment on my blog. Or who write about my ideas on their blogs.

You can't go to every party, so why even try?

Of course, it's not just LinkedIn that I don't do. I'm not on Second Life either. I tried it a few times two years ago and just didn't like it. I don't have a MySpace page because I've found that it is best for artists and musicians, not for me. There are thousands of other social media and social networking sites that I am not on such as Nexopia, Bebo, Hi5, Tagged, Xing, Skyrock, Orkut, Friendster, Orkut, Xiaonei and Cyworld.

We can't possibly be a part of every conversation. It sort of reminds me of a terrific cocktail party with a few hundred people. You know there are tons of great conversations going on and you know that you can't be a part of them all. What do you do at a party? Some people do the look over the shoulder of the person you’re talking to thing to always be on the lookout for a better conversation. Some flit from one person to another every few minutes all night. Some may think you're rude when you spread yourself thin, but hey, you don't miss as much. What I like to do at parties is have a few great conversations and be happy that I'm at a wonderful event. I know I can't be with everyone, so I have fun with the people I'm with. What more could I want?

Chris Brogan said it well in a post called Do You Have To Touch Every Conversation. Chris says: "There are gazillions of other conversations that I'm not touching, that Seth isn't touching, that Scoble or Kawasaki or whoever the heck you want to put in the *.person.who.should.join.the.conversation should be touching. But is that really the goal? Or is the goal to fish where your fish are, to do what you plan to do, and to do it well?"

PodCamp Boston 2: Learn, share, and grow new media skills

PodCamp Boston 2 is the new media community UnConference that helps connect people interested in blogging, podcasting, social networks, video on the net, and new media together for three days to learn, share, and grow their new media skills.

PodCamp Boston 2 will be held October 26 - 28, 2007 at the Boston Convention and Expo Center and is free to attend.

I attended PodCamp Boston last year. I learned a lot and made some new friends like John Wall, CC Chapman, Owen Mack, Bryan Person, Christopher Penn and the Toronto band Uncle Seth. I'll be there again this year and look forward to meeting PodCamp leader Chris Brogan. I may present my ideas on The New Rules of PR. You can learn more on the PodCamp Boston2 Wiki.

The great thing about PodCamp is that it is for all levels of experience. Anyone just getting started with social media will benefit but so will all you veterans. PodCamp attracts podcasting, blogging, second life, twitter, and video folks. But it is also great for educators, business people, community leaders, and real world users.

Register for free to attend the event.

If Boston isn't convenient for you, check out the PodCamp Wiki to see the other locations holding a PodCamp, including NYC, Miami, UK, SF, Copenhagen, Toronto, and more.

Randstad offers virtual jobs in Second Life paid with real money

Randstad is one of the largest temporary and contract staffing organizations in the world. The company has over 2,500 offices and employs over 300,000 people every day.

I think it is fascinating that Randstad is the first HR services provider to open a branch office in Second Life. Randstad offers real jobs "in world" such as positions at ABN AMRO Second Life offices. Employees who work in Second Life are paid in Euros.

Randstad has put together a terrific YouTube video about it’s Second Life office.

Second Life residents can visit the Randstad branch.

Web landing pages: Required for search engine marketing

Marketing with Web landing pages is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to get a message read by a target market, and it's a terrific tool for moving buyers through the sales cycle.

A landing page is simply a place to publish a targeted message for a particular demographic that you're trying to market to and they are used not only in search engine marketing but other Web marketing programs as well. For example, landing pages are ideal for describing special offers mentioned on your Web site or calls to action referenced in another content page (such as a blog or ebook).

Landing pages also work well for telling an organization's story to a particular target market, promoting a new product offering, or providing more information to people who link from your news releases. Marketing programs such as search engine optimization are—to borrow an idea from the classic sales cycle definition—designed to attract the prospect's attention. The landing page is where you take the next step; once you’ve got your audience’s attention, generate and develop customer interest and conviction, so that your sales team gets a warm lead ready to be worked to a closed sale or you can point people to an ecommerce page to buy your product right away.

Effective landing page copy is written from the buyers' perspective, not yours. Landing pages should provide additional information to searchers, information based on the offer or keyword they just clicked on. Many successful organizations have hundreds of landing pages, each optimized for a particular set of related search engine marketing terms.

Here is a very simple landing page I built for my book The New Rules of Marketing & PR

Another type of landing page is the free trial offer page such as this one from WebEx

Don't make the mistake of so many organizations by investing tons of money into a search engine advertising program (buying keywords) and then sending all the traffic to your homepage. Because the homepage needs to serve many audiences, there can never be enough information there for each search term. Instead, keep the following landing page guidelines in mind:

Make the landing page copy short and the graphics simple. The landing page is a place to deliver a simple message and drive your prospect to respond to your offer. Don’t try to do too much.

Create the page with your company's look, feel, and tone. A landing page is an extension of your company branding, so it must adopt the same voice, tone, and style as the rest of your site.

Write from the prospect’s point of view. Think carefully of who will be visiting the landing page, and write copy for that demographic. You want visitors to feel that the page speaks to their problems and that you have a solution for them.

A landing page is communications, not advertising. Landing pages are where you communicate valuable information. Advertising gets people to click to your landing page, but once a prospect is there, the landing page should focus on communicating the value of your offering to the buyer.

Make the call to action clear and easy to respond to. Make certain you provide a clear response mechanism for those people who want to go further. Make it easy to sign up or express interest or buy something.

Use multiple calls to action. You never know what offer will appeal to a specific person, so consider using more than one. In the business-to-business world, you might offer a white paper, a free trial, an ROI calculator, and a price quote all on the same landing page.

Only ask for necessary information. Don't use a sign-up form that requires your prospects to enter lots of data—people will abandon the form. Ask for the absolute minimum you can get away with—name and e-mail address only if you can, or perhaps even just e-mail. Requiring any additional information will reduce your response rates.

Don't forget to follow up! OK, you've got a great landing page with an effective call to action, and the leads are coming in. Great! Don’t drop the ball now. Make certain to follow up with each response as quickly as possible.

Book Review: Second Life: The Official Guide (or more accurately, the "official travel guide")

One of the reasons why I love Web marketing is that the tools, techniques, and content are constantly evolving. This stuff is more art than science, and your buyers reward creativity by responding to your online efforts. But the Web moves very quickly. Just when you figured out that blogging thing, along comes podcasting and YouTube.

But if you're open to trying out new things, you can be first in your industry to use something new to communicate to your buyers. Some of the very first blogs are still the most popular in their niches—the authors are rewarded for their foresight with popularity.

During the process of researching and writing my new book The New Rules of Marketing and PR, I became fascinated with the online virtual world Second Life. For those of you who aren't residents yet, I'll give an overview (if you know this stuff, skip to the next paragraph for the book review): Second Life is a 3-D online world entirely built and owned by its residents. But this is not a "game" because there is no goal and nobody is keeping score; rather (except with money), it is a world with well over a million residents (as of this writing) and an economy built on the Linden dollar in which millions of U.S. dollars (at the current exchange rate) change hands each month. The Second Life World is teeming with people who use a self-created, in-world avatar to interact with others by buying, selling, and trading things with other residents (and just milling about and chatting). You can purchase land, build a store or business, and make money. People sell clothes for avatars, artwork and furniture for homes and businesses, and, well, basically anything that you need in the real world. There is an, ahem, underworld of sleaze as well. But you don't have to be into commerce, you can just walk around and hang out.

I'm most interested in what organizations are doing in Second Life from the marketing and PR perspective. Examples: CNET, an interactive media company, has opened an office in Second Life that looks like its real-world San Francisco office. Sun Microsystems has a presence where they work with their gaming developers. The rock band Duran Duran is playing a live concert in Second Life. John Hockenberry, host of The Infinite Mind, NPR’s popular mental health program, interviewed author Kurt Vonnegut inside Second Life. But there is so much more.

The best way to learn about Second Life is to become a resident. It's free to get started.

But if you want to bone up first (or if you are already a resident to learn about things you never knew before), I highly recommend the excellent new book Second Life: The Official Guide by Michael Rymaszewski, Wagner James Au, Mark Wallace, Catherine Winters, Cory Ondrejka, and Benjamin Batstone-Cunningham. The book is due out mid December 2006. (I had the pleasure of receiving an advance copy.)

Wow. Second Life: The Official Guide is just great. But I need to explain where I am coming from.

I'm happy to be a reasonably early technology adopter and I usually practice the "jump in and try it" mode. For example, I figured out my blog in 2004 without any guidance. But as I was thinking about Second Life as a brand new resident a few months ago, I was sort of feeling like this isn't a new technology metaphor, it's a travel metaphor. Second Life is a new place that needs to be learned more than it is a new technology that needs to be learned.

I've traveled the world a great deal. For example, I lived in Japan for six years and Hong Kong for two as Asia Marketing Director for Knight-Ridder (at the time, the second largest newspaper company in the U.S.). My entire career has been as an internationalist. I've visited some 40 or 50 countries on business or pleasure and logged several million air miles. Before departing for somewhere like Bombay or Bangkok or Brussels, I always purchase a travel guide and read it on the plane. I just like knowing the basics like what's a funky old restaurant to try, how to hail a cab, and how much to tip (or not).

What Second Life: The Official Guide does is act as your travel guide to a new place. The authors got that right. Thanks! Just like a great Frommer's travel guide, the book is chock full of places to go, people to see, etiquette, currency exchange, what to wear, and more. In fact, the publisher, Wiley, could do a version of this book as an actual Frommer's guide, to complement the Sybex computer book imprint that Second Life: The Official Guide is published with. Wouldn’t that be cool!?

Yes, there is also a boatload of stuff for Second Life experts including details on the Second Life scripting language. This stuff is beyond me but if it is as well written as the parts that I devoured, than even long time residents will get a great deal of practical information from the book. Several of the authors work at Linden Labs, the company behind Second Life so it must be accurate.

Thanks for doing this book, guys. It is important.

Disclaimer, the publisher of Second Life: The Official Guide, Wiley, is also publishing my new book.