And while I encourage clients to learn from the leaders and benchmark their peers, I do so with a word of caution. Just because GE is a badass on Pinterest and USAA rocks Facebook does not mean you have to follow their lead.  Consider your goals, assess your content, and put a toe in the water. Everyone starts somewhere, the point is to start.

Selling Through Social Media to Close More Leads InsideView

I have a Pinterest account mostly because I was goaded into getting one but I confess I’ve yet to make time to really tinker, o I found this infographic from Intuit I thought I’d throw it up and open the debate up to my peers. Remember, we’re talking B2B businesses and professional service firms, not Martha Stewart. What do you think? Who’s doing it well? Are you fully engaged or more like me, sitting on the sidelines, looking for a reason to dive in?

via: Should Your Business Be on Pinterest? Find Out [INFOGRAPHIC]

Once again we’re honored to have famed photographer Audia behind the camera. He’s photographed everyone from Obama to  Ditka and produced dozens of fashion spreads for some of the world’s leading designers and fashion magazines. Audia’s regular fees for a professional studio sitting begin at $495 but for two days only,  he is offering my friends and network a very discounted rate  of just $185. As this is a very limited engagement with a deep discount, some restrictions apply – please read the following details carefully.

Limited Engagement:

• Friday, February 24th from 3:00pm to 7:00pm
• Saturday, February 25th from 9:00am to 2:00pm

*Hours may be extended or additional days added if needed.

Location:
417 N. Ashland, corner of Ashland & Hubbard, Chicago. Street parking available.

Fees:
Parlay Rate $185 for one retouched 8×10 JPEG at 300ppi delivered via e-mail (regularly $495.) This includes minor retouches such as softening under the eyes, smoothing wrinkle lines, eliminating lens glare, and hiding minor stray hairs.

Make-Up Artist:
Hollywood make-up artist James Lacey, who has worked on Grey’s Anatomy, E.R., Home Alone 2, The Fugitive, and Groundhog Day, will be accompanying Audia for anyone interested in a professional make-up application. Fees are $60.00 for women, $45.00 for men, and includes beauty make-up / grooming such as concealing any blemishes, minimizing dark circles under eyes, eliminating five o’ clock shadow, and minimal hair styling suitable for camera work. False eyelashes are an additional $12.00 and I highly recommend them.

Optional Upgrades:

• Change of clothing – $50 each – must be pre-purchased to allow sufficient time.
• Extra retouched photos – $55 each. You can purchase in advance or after your shoot.
• Additional retouching requests will be estimated for client approval at $75 per hour.

Pre-Payment in Full Required:

Headshot Only ($185.00)
Change of Clothing ($50.00 each)
Extra Retouched Photo(s) ($55.00 each) **Can be purchased after your shoot

Fine Print
Payment in full is required to secure your space. Full refund less $25 handling fee available through February 20th.  50% refund February 21st or later.

Sign Me Up!
First, view available time slots here. Next,  email Pattie with your preferred date and time, as well as the best number to reach you on the day of your shoot. Please be sure to note any upgrades that you will be taking advantage of so we can  allot enough time for your session. Remember, your session is not confirmed until payment is received.

Take a Look at Our Previous Works of Art:

Kerri Zeil

Pattie Lee

Noeleen McGrath

David Muruli

And of course me!

In the wild early days of the commercialization of the Internet, I was fortunate enough to work for Neoglyphics, a design / development / strategy shop that built the very first websites for leading brands such as Abbott Laboratories, Ameritech, Citibank, Hallmark, Motorola, and Sears. Sure, accessing the Internet was in my job description yet somehow I managed to look past dancing babies and get my work done. Around the world, people still managed to get their work done. So I have to chuckle when someone tells me they can’t access Facebook from work. Unless you are in a highly regulated industry, shutting down access is not the answer. It will never be the answer.

The answer is education.

If you don’t have a plan to help your employees understand smart, safe social networking, what are you waiting for? Give your staff the benefit of the doubt and lead by example. Exhibit trust. Establish guidelines for what information can be freely shared and what should be safeguarded. Leverage social channels to foster employee camaraderie, communicate with remote workers, and heighten your employees’ sense of autonomy and inquisitiveness. Position your business as a desirable place to work.

Are there risks? Of course there are risks. Bad tweets happen to good people. Talk about it now so that in the event of a Facebook faux pas you are prepared to deal with it. Not ready to go there? Well you do have choices. You can hope Facebook falls, Twitter tanks and LinkedIn stops growing at two new members every second.  Or you could confiscate your staff’s web-enabled smartphone every morning. Yeah, that could work…

I confess, it has been nearly a month since my last post but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing. I recently penned another column for Social Media Marketing Magazine about personal branding and bias.

If you’re a business owner, a rainmaker, a career climber, or a job seeker  - have I left anyone out? – then I encourage you to give it a read (it’s short) and give this important topic some serious thought.

No one likes to talk about it, IT being the snap judgments we make about people when we first meet them, be it online or off. A quick Google search and I can find your LinkedIn profile, your G+ updates, your Twitter stream – and depending on how well you’ve been keeping up with the never-ending stream of Facebook privacy changes – I might be able to find out that you “Like” Celine Dion.  On the other hand, if we first meet in person first, there’s a good chance we’ll get connected one way or another online.

Be it an ill-timed tweet, a typo in a LinkedIn profile, or some politically charged post on Facebook – the opinions we have about one another continue to form over time. What can we do about it?

For starters, be aware of it!

The heart of the issue is this: try as we might to manage our personal brands, we’re not exactly in control. We are judged, right or wrong, by the actions we take online. The challenge is to be true to ourselves yet mindful of how we may be perceived by the prospects, customers, and hiring managers that matter to us most.

This particular column is extra special because I had the great pleasure of interviewing one of my favorite columnists Erika Napoletano, aka Redhead Writing, a woman who owns her personal brand and readily admits that she’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

Read it here and then come back and let me know what you think but be forewarned, right or wrong, someone will read what you write and judge you for it. Think about it.

The truth is, strong brands lift each other up. It’s precisely why Accenture partnered with Tiger Woods. Wait, bad example. Try Lady GaGa and Polaroid. Talk about a leap of faith!

Look at Scott Monty and Ford Motor Company. Does Scott have a strong personal brand? You bet. Does Ford benefit from it? Without a doubt. Sure there’s risk that someone might pull a Gottfried or send an ill-timed tweet from the wrong account but isn’t the risk higher if you bury your head in the sand and hope for the best? Start the conversation. Offer training. Set reasonable boundaries and enable the social butterflies in your office to take your message to the street.

Instead of thinking about how to shut down access to Facebook at the office, why not spend some energy giving staff something positive to shout about? Besides, unless you can time-travel and un-invent the smartphone, the whole “shut it down” mindset is pretty much moot.

Image credit

I left the conference thinking about what B2B companies and professional service firms can learn from Tindell’s commitment to employee engagement. What might it look like if your employees were a veritable army of brand champions, using their social networks to “lift up” the good work you are doing for your customers and in the community?

Rather than shutting down their access to Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, consider instead how you can enable employees to take your company’s message to the street. Here’s how to start:

1. Engage Early Adopters. Don’t force employees onto social networks; start with the ones already there.
2. Encourage Participation. Make sure staff know it’s okay to be “social” during work hours.
3. Endorse Editorial Content. Share company news in soundbites that easily lend themselves to social channels.
4. Enlighten Staff. Make social media part of your corporate culture. Develop standard company language. Offer training and incorporate social “best practices” into your onboarding process.
5. Explore Advanced Tools. Look at adding social widgets to your intranet,  Jobvite for recruitment, or Yammer for the enterprise.
6. Exhibit Target Behavior. Lead by example. If building brand ambassadors inside your organization will require a cultural shift, be sure it has support (and visibility) at the top.
7. Embrace Social Opportunity. Don’t let the Chapsticks of the world discourage you. Trust that with adequate training and encouragement your employees will do the right thing.

Sound scary? Think of it this way – if your employees can’t be trusted not to badmouth you online do you really think they’re not already doing it elsewhere? Build an organization where employees enjoy their work and are proud of their contribution to both the business and the customers you serve, then encourage them talk about it. After all, do you even have a brand if no one knows about it?

What tipped me over the edge was an email I received this morning. It was easily half a page long and included two different Facebook icons, two different Twitter icons, links to three separate websites and a graphic image of the Las Vegas strip inviting me to Register Now! I was so distracted that I could barely read the message, what with all the shiny eye-candy tempting me to click here or there and share something else.

To throw salt into the wound, this afternoon I spent 10 precious minutes looking for an email attachment that I could not find because of all the email signatures that are attachments in and of themselves. Why, why, why is this necessary?

If your email signature meets one or more of the following criteria, skip the aspirin and go straight for the sedatives:

• Includes attachments of any kind. Seriously, stop it.
• Reads like a short story. No one cares.
• Blinks, rotates or moves in any way. Enough said.
• Directs me to more than 3 links, 4 tops. Aggregate or aggravate.
• Uses color to make your point. The color blind are not amused.
• Attempts to be overly clever. Because you’re not.

Do what you want with your private email but when it comes to business, mind your personal brand. Your professional email signature should be just that – professional. Remind people what you do, make it easy to contact you, and offer a few thoughtful links for more information. Period.

That’s the discussion I’ll be moderating on Thursday, October 6th at the Chicago American Marketing Association event entitled  ”Zen and the Art of Social Media*.” As any good moderator will do, I’ve been doing my homework, chasing all manner of links about boobs and well – okay – it was admittedly hard to stay focused.

Truth be told, my world is mostly business-to-business and professional service marketing and I confess that I enjoyed the excuse to explore what some of the bigger consumer brands are doing online.

If you were me, what would you ask these giant brands? Here’s my plan of attack:

Shawn Jones, Edelman Digital, will be sharing insights from the Together Counts national campaign created to inspire active and healthy living.  Founded by the Health Weight Commitment Foundation, it’s the first-ever coalition of more than 160 retailers, food and beverage manufacturers, sporting goods companies, insurance firms and more that have banded together to support  families focused on getting healthy.  A worthy goal indeed; check them out at @togethercounts and Facebook.com/togethercounts.

What I hope to learn: More about targeting and community building… How do you find families who care about their health and drive them to a brand new space and engage them there?

Joe Strupek, State Farm, will be share his tale from the social media frontline including what it’s like to start a conversation at the brand level, the necessary partnership between marketing and public relations, the difference between engagement and trust, and the never-ending debate between “push vs. pull.” Check out what State Farm is up to at @statefarm and Facebook.com/statefarm.

What I hope to learn: More about being social in a regulated industry. State Farm has to contend with both national and state-specific restrictions – how does that scale?

Matt Gibbs of Playboy has already taught me something: What NSFW stands for (Not Safe For Work.)  Thankfully I was in the home office that day… Matt will share with us what it’s like to be a NSFWbrand in the SFW world of social media. His presentation will focus on leveraging celebrity (even when you’re not one), engagement and revenue. Channel your inner Hef at @playboy and Facebook.com/playboy.

What I hope to learn: How Playboy tracks the contribution social media makes to the bottom line.

If you were moderating, what would you ask these mega-brands about their social media strategy? Weigh in, but keep it clean, this is a SFW blog buddy.

*Care to join me? Use promo code “referral-1011″ for $20 off your non-member ticket.

My point? Don’t relegate your social networking to someone who doesn’t understand the nuances of your business, the complexity of your sales cycle or all the moving parts of your go-to-market strategy. Don’t confuse enthusiasm with skill. To be blunt, beware of the overnight social media celebrities. If it was as easy as learning to tweet, wouldn’t we all be working that mythical 4-hour work week by now?

Some months ago I received an email from LinkedIn Co-founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman thanking me for being among the first million people to join the increasingly popular social networking site. I was #141,212 and joined on January 20, 2004 to be precise. Does being a early joiner make me an expert? No, joining is easy. As evidenced by the infographic below, more than 100M people have figured at least that much out.

You become an expert by doing. Success is reserved for those who do.

Those of us who practice social marketing are doing just that – practicing. Experimenting. Taking thoughtful risk. Monitoring. Measuring. Listening and learning.

Want to become an expert? Take action. Want to hire one? Look for a strategic thinker, not a superstar.