The Piano Inside My Brain

LinkedIn has gained broad acceptance as a social network for business professionals. Here are my LinkedIn rules to live by: (Your mileage may vary.)

1. Keep it professional.
The goal is to make you look good in a professional networking environment. So don’t be a troll. No one likes trolls. (Except, perhaps other trolls.)

2. Do not add your entire contact list.
LinkedIn has tools for importing your address books from a variety of software and services. Don’t do it. This generates a huge amount of junk mail with your name on it. Unless you are a recruiter and depend on a HUGE database of names or loose connections, you don’t need to connect with everyone you have ever gotten a business card from.

3. Only invite people that you know and trust.
If you would feel strange about calling someone on the phone and having a conversation, perhaps you shouldn’t invite that person to connect.

4. Just because someone invites you doesn’t mean you have to accept.
If you don’t know the person well or at all, perhaps you shouldn’t connect. Call the person wanting to connect and schedule a time to have coffee or something to strengthen your relationship.

5. Don’t be a stalker, or even a little bit creepy.
Use Facebook or MySpace to look up old friends. Once you have rekindled a trusted relationship, invite the person to LinkedIn if it makes business sense.

6. Recommend people and get recommended.
If you have done business with someone and would recommend that person to a friend or client, write a nice recommendation on LinkedIn. We know how lukewarm testimonials sound, so don’t write one unless it is meaningful.

7. Answer questions.
LinkedIn’s Answers section provides an opportunity to show your expertise. Answer with the intent to provide useful information. The person asking acknowledges good answers and you can receive added credibility to your profile.

8. Remove stale connections.
Once a month, browse through all of your connections. Consider removing people that you simply cannot remember. LinkedIn doesn’t alert the other user, so the other person probably won’t notice at all since they probably cannot remember who you are either.

9. Make connections part of your referral process.
If someone gives you a good referral, part of your thank you process should be connecting on LinkedIn. And if you give a referral, ask to connect on LinkedIn.

10. Share your connections.
Those that are connected to me know that my connections are trusted, not flimsy. So if they need an introduction, they know that I can facilitate not just online, but in the real world.

Let’s say you just searched for “Bounce Rate” in Google. Perhaps you had been reviewing your site statistics with Google Analytics and wondered, perhaps out loud…

“Why are so many people that click on the link to my site, bouncing?”

But first, A little definition is in order. What is bounce rate? According to Google’s definition in Analytics…

Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. You can minimize Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.

At first you might think that you should do something about it. Change the page content, create targeted landing pages, add graphics, make your product cheaper, etc.

Wait a second and consider this. Bounces happen.

People search for things, click on links and realize that your page wasn’t the right one for them. That’s okay, in fact, probably saving you time by reading and leaving.

Writing this made me think of this recent post by Seth Godin. Rather than focusing on the bounces, consider the people that stayed on the site. How many pages did they read, how long did they stay on the site, did you have return visitors?

It isn’t that the bouncing clicks are silly, it is that it is silly for us to focus on the bounces.

For those of you that happen to be female and live in the Greater Philadelphia Area, I will be speaking at the event for the Women of Wit and Wisdom on June 26th, 2008 at 6:30pm at the Pyramid Club in Philadelphia. The details for the event have not yet been posted to their website.

Using LinkedIn to Promote Your Business

Is it 12 or 73 invitations that you have received from LinkedIn so far? You have either ignored them or perhaps created an account. So now what do you and you 4 connections do next?

Learn to use LinkedIn to improve your reputation online:

• Create powerful connections for business networking
• Give and receive recommendations
• Promote yourself by answering questions
• Create opportunities for new business

More information to follow about registration will be posted on their site. Hope to see you there!

Once Adobe took ownership of Dreamweaver, I knew that this day would come.

• Adobe Discontinues GoLive

I’ve known you since you were called GoLive CyberStudio.

I remember when Adobe bought you and GoLive 4.0 was released. You were such a special application and I officially moved away from NetObjects Fusion to author all of my sites with you. I even beta tested new features for Adobe for a while.

No one did templates and components and site organization like you did. You fit so well with my obsessive habits and made so many things fast and easy.

But the future was to be not quite so rosy for you.

Years passed, others caught up and lapped you, and Dreamweaver was so popular with so many developers. And you just didn’t evolve.

Now, you are officially a software orphan. Today is a sad day and I’ve shed my final tear for you.

But I will not submit to the evil Dreamweaver! I will use my text editor once again!

Here’s a post from my Twitter network @pprlisa about a boy who uses echolocation to overcome blindness. It is amazing and inspiring.

So, what if you don’t want the phone contract from a smartphone but still want a killer PDA? If you are typically at a desk in an office or home, a pre-paid cell phone for emergencies or infrequent calls is a very inexpensive way to go. (My wife’s pre-paid phone service for a year costs about as much as one month of my iPhone.)

While I might be speculating, the iPhone SDK will turn the iPod Touch into an amazing PDA and gaming device. The WiFi enabled iPod Touch and the potential that the SDK offers surely will deliver all of the features that users of a traditional PDA would demand.

Post your thoughts in the comments.

When I gave my presentation at my local BNI chapter two weeks ago, my speaker gift was a little different. I purchased two copies of “The Dip” by Seth Godin. I instructed the winner that one was him to read and the other copy was for his best client.

(I got some strange looks at first, but I’m used to that by now.)

See, the whole point about books with interesting ideas is that you share them. Once you have read it, you pass it along. Let the idea spread. If you ever decide to read the book again, buy another copy and then pass it along again. (Rinse, repeat.)

Good ideas get better when they spread.

For those of you who have ever put in temporary text when doing page layout, check out the bottom of the first page of the sports section from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

All I have to say is, “Refer hereh ag hag ha hga hga hgh ag hag hag ha hga hga hg ahg.” Now please turn to E11.

Thanks to the explosion in online commerce over the last 10 years, FedEx and UPS have grown nicely. But what about local courier services?

To me, it seems that with local businesses trying to compete with the likes of Wal-Mart and Amazon, shouldn’t local courier services see some benefit for this? Probably, but I really haven’t seen local courier services create online convenience for its customers.

If a local flower shop wants to do online commerce, it shouldn’t just be partnering with FTD. We all like to support our local businesses but we also like convenience. So the question really is to find a way to make using your local florist more convenient than 1-800-Flowers. The key is the courier service and the end result is a same-day delivery of fresh flowers without any effort from the purchaser. It’s up to the florist to make it smooth but the florist doesn’t want to be in the “driving around town” business.

And this extends to so many businesses that depend on its clients being local. These clients have Internet access and want online options. As I see it, a potential disruptor in the online economy would be a courier service that offers an “on demand” service that gives local businesses a way to be more convenient. The customer doesn’t hire the courier, rather it is just automatic from the business. And then the local businesses would have something to differentiate themselves from their competition.

As a kid, I wanted to be an astrophysicist. Watching this demonstration was pure joy.

And for good measure, more information is available from the WorldWide Telescope website.