LinkedIn may now use your picture to advertise other products.  Change privacy settings if you don’t like this.

Details:

LinkedIn is doing “social advertising”, which means that they can use your picture in LinkedIn ads that are shown to your connections to advertise products that you might not endorse.  Your connections may be misled and think you endorse them, depending on how savvy they are.  (Facebook did this at one point, and most people hated it).

LinkedIn was probably using my picture to “get attention from the ladies”.

Here’s how you stop it:

1. Hover your cursor over your name in the upper right hand corner of your LinkedIn page
2. Click Settings
3. In the lower left, click “Account”
4. In the top middle, click “Manage Social Advertising”
5. Uncheck and Save

Call LinkedIn and offer to sell the use of your picture for $500,000 per year, as I did.

Still waiting.

Do you care if they use your picture?

You can start a YouTube video at some point other than the beginning by using the #t option.

Details:

I love this tip.

Problem:

You want to show someone a video, but you don’t want them to waste their time with the introduction, or you just want them to see a small portion, but its 2 minutes and 2 seconds into the video.  You could just tell them to start at 2 minutes and 2 seconds into the video, but here’s how you make them automatically do it.

Solution:

Add the option #t=2m02s to the URL, where the “2m” tells Youtube “2 minutes” and “02s” means “2 seconds”.  For example, there’s a very funny, short African frog video at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlEzvdlYRes

If you wanted to start it 7 seconds into the video, use the URL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlEzvdlYRes#t=0m07s


Another example, and embedded YouTube video

You can also do this in embedded videos.  For instance, on my demo video, I bring in my Mom 23 seconds into the video at Start embedded YouTube video at different start time

Save your friends some time with this feature.

Cool, huh?

Here’s how your Facebook status updates can be seen by the public, and how to restrict them so the public cannot search for them.

Details:

You may know that your public status updates can be seen by anyone in the world, but do you know how people find them?  I’ll show you both sides here:

How to post Facebook statuses to the public

When you post a status update, just to the left of the “Post” button, there is a drop down menu that allows you to post to the whole world or just to a “custom” group, like your friends, or even a more restricted group, like your friends except for work friends.  In my shameless self promotion, here I am on Fox news talking about this at 1:23.  Note that at the time (Feb 2011), the “Post” button was the “Share” button.

How to see public Facebook status posts

Let’s say you wanted to see what people are saying about Comcast.  If you put Comcast in the search box at the top of your Facebook page, it will show you

• The Comcast business page
• A bunch of “Comcast sucks” and “I hate Comcast” pages

However, at the bottom, click where it says “see more results for comcast”.

Now, on the left, click “Public Posts” and you can see posts from anyone that set up their status updates so that they can be seen by the public.

Implications – why you care

Here’s how this information can be helpful to you:

• Careful what you say – your bosses, ex-girlfriends, enemies, and competition can see it
• My conclusion is shown at 2:59 in the video above – don’t post anything on the Internet that you wouldn’t want to be seen on the nightly news
• If you are getting cable, you’ll see why you don’t want to get Comcast.  The public is constantly talking about their bad experiences with them, and I’m one of them.  This works for any product you are considering.
• If you have a brand, you may want to monitor what people are saying about you.

Be careful out there.

***************************************************************************************
Patrick O’Malley, aka (617)-PATRICK, is a professional speaker on social media and Google ranking.

Summary:

Before you call a prospect, check their interests.  Or you can look for interests in a “reverse direction”.

Details:

If you are

• cold calling
• calling a new prospect
• meeting someone for the first time

you should have some way to start the conversation.  If you care cold calling, you need some way to get their attention in the first 5-10 seconds, since most prospects don’t have time for idle chatter.

LinkedIn tip

Look at the prospect’s LinkedIn profile and look at their “Interests”, which are at the bottom.  This is a clever technique that very few people use.

Real example of scrutinizing a LinkedIn profile:

When I went to do the keynote in the video above, I knew I would meet the CEO of AMS, Jim Bourdon.  I looked at his profile and noticed that he listed “golf” among his interests.  Therefore, the first thing I started talking to him about was golf, and the conversation went effortlessly.

Using interests in “reverse” fashion:

Let’s say that your target prospect is typically a CFO, and you are trying to get some new prospects to join you for a golf outing near Boston.  Try the following – do an advanced search in LinkedIn with the following search

• Title: “chief financial officer” OR cfo
• Keywords: golf OR golfing
• Location: near Boston

Now take a look at the results, and the CFOs that you contact will probably be much more interested in your golf offer.

There are even better, smarter, and more efficient ways to do this, and we teach them in our training sessions, which are full of awesomeness.  Call (617)-PATRICK for more.

Go forth and prospect.

Summary:

My interview on Fox TV News about how I used social media during the tsunami in Japan.

Details:

This is one of my two recent interviews last week on Fox TV News after the tsunami talking about

• how I helped a friend of mine who was in a hotel in Tokyo during the tsunami by communicating with her using Facebook (her only working option)
• how I used Twitter to try to warn people about the tsunami continuing to move to other areas, like Guam
• how Microsoft Bing made a huge mistake by trying to use the tsunami to market the search engine

In addition, I got to talk about one of my passions, which is that I think cell phone companies ought to warn you if an emergency is happening in your area.  They know where you are, so why can’t they warn you?

My sound bite:

“If the cell phone company can tell you that there is s Starbucks 5 minutes away,

why can’t they tell you that there is a tsunami 5 minutes away?”

There’s a new sleazy technique that spammers are using to get an account with lot of Twitter followers, and got 20,000 a day using the “Charlie Sheen” effect.  The trick?  Create a charliesheen account, but replace the lowercase “L” with and uppercase “I”.

Details:

On the day I wrote this blog entry, Charlie Sheen was the biggest thing in the news, outdoing

• Spring training
• An NFL strike
• two wars
• uprisings in Libya and Egypt
• whatever Justin Bieber is doing

By the time you read this, I assume Charlie Sheen will be dead, probably from “abdominal pain”.

Regardless, a sleazy spammer figured out a way to get 24,000+ followers in a day by exploiting Charlie’s fame.

Here are the facts and techniques:

• Charlie Sheen had one of the craziest TV interviews of all time, which was completely nuts and completely entertaining, and created new words and phrases like “tiger blood”, “Adonis DNA” and “bi-winning”
• Parts are shown in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5aSa4tmVNM
• Charlie creates a Twitter account, and gets over 1 million followers in the first day – unprecedented in Twitter history
• New hashtags appear which are related to Charlie, including #tigerblood, #teamsheen, and some others which become Trending Topics due to their popularity

This is where it gets interesting from a Twitter point of view.  Someone creates an account called charliesheen, but since charliesheen was already taken, they created an account that is spelled the same, but they replace the lowercase “L” with an uppercase “I”, which looks identical when you look at the Twitter name in the font that Twitter uses.

Sleazy. Nerdy.  Clever.

They also choose the same picture that Charlie uses on his real account.  No one would type in charliesheen with an uppercase “I” instead of a lowercase “L”. but if you search for sheen, or click on the hashtags to see what all the fuss is about, you’ll see tweets from the fake account.  If you click on the (since the human eye can’t detect the wrong spelling), you see a brand new account with 24,000+ followers, and you’d probably think it was him, so you might follow him.

Why do this?  One reason is that some nerds and hackers just love to get away with it.

Another is that after a few days, they will probably have a Twitter account with 50,000 followers.  If they now change their name to something like Make_More_Money the account will look authoritative because it has such a huge following, without following anyone back, which is almost impossible to fake.

There isn’t much you and I could do about this other than flagging the account as spam.  Twitter should see it and fix it, and should change their font to minimize the possibility of this being done again.  In fact, if you look at a similar account on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/charIiesheen you can clearly see that the lowercase “L” was replace with an uppercase “I”.

Regardless, I thought it was an interesting study.

Therefore I rant.

This is a 90 second “rap” that I did in a social media keynote speech at the LOMA Insurance Conference in Las Vegas last October.  And it ain’t worth 50 cent.

Details:

The audience was full of insurance professionals who had just passed a test, like FMLI or FSSI, and were awarded with a trip to Las Vegas to go to this conference (and to see me).

Here are the words to the rap:

If you meet someone cool, and you like how they think
or you go to the pool, and they buy you a drink

if you meet someone smart, and they just can’t disguise
that they just passed the tests, for the FMLIs

or if somebody studied, until they got dizzy,
and passed all the tests for the designation FSSI

and there are people here who proved they’re the best
at customer service so they have the ACS

and then they came here although they are still in a tizzy
and they’re starting to look like the old band …. Thin Lizzy

and I know there are others that some of you had…
and if I had more time I’d make up a rhyme just as bad

I guess my designation, if I thought this was clever
from your cool generation, would be “Worst Rapper Ever”

but when all of you are playing in the “City of Sin”,
don’t just party and drink. Also – get LinkedIn!

Audience applauds wildly, starts throwing panties and motel keys like they used to do for Elvis…

Summary:

How do you back up your Facebook status updates, pictures, wall, etc, in case you delete something, or Facebook accidentally does.

Details:

How do you back up your Facebook status updates, pictures, wall, etc, in case

• you want to see your old status updates
• you accidentally delete something
• Facebook accidentally deletes something

Either view the 3 minute video above, or follow these instructions:

• Go to your Facebook Home page
• In the upper right hand corner, click Account
• Click Account Settings
• Near the bottom, it says Download Your Information.  Click “learn more”
• Verify your password
• Download

It will download your information as a ZIP file, so you have to have a ZIP program to uncompress it.  Your Wall will be in the HTML directory in a file called wall.html, and your pictures and videos will be in directories that have those names.

You will now be able to sleep at night knowing that your Facebook data is preserved on your own computer.

If you want to become a fan of my Facebook business page, please click “Like” at http://www.facebook.com/pages/617-PATRICK-Social-Media-Training/299670470854

Good luck out there.

Summary:

Whether you want to make a sale, get a job, or network for business, it’s a good idea to be connected to powerful people like CEOs, but it’s tough to get their attention.  Here’s a unique and original idea that might get you some positive attention from some CEOs and other Chief Officers.

Quick version:

Want to connect with CEOs?  How about finding the ones that spelled the word “chief” wrong in their LinkedIn profile, and telling them about it.  You can do that with a LinkedIn search, and you may someday get a sale, a job, or a business relationship.

Introduction:

This is one of my favorite original tips, and it might help some of you

• make a sale
• get a job
• develop a great new relationship

I’ve been giving this idea out in recent speeches that I’ve given in the last couple of months to

• the LOMA insurance conference in Las Vegas
• Meeting Planners International in Washington, DC
• the Inside Sales Conference 2010 in Boston
• the Boston BestEvents Expo 2010 in Boston
• the ASTD National Chapter Leaders Conference, in Washington, DC
• Northeastern University Marketing students in Boston

so if you were in one of those sessions, you’ve heard it already, and most people really liked it.  I already gave it to my newsletter readers over a month ago, so they had a head start on you.  You should sign up for my newsletter on my web page.

If you want to see the video where I explained this to 350 College and University business officers at EACUBO, click on the video at the top of this article.

How to get the attention of some CEOs through LinkedIn

If you want to connect with CEOs, the easiest way to do it is by helping them in some way.

What if they misspelled the word “chief” in their LinkedIn profile, and you tell them about it before someone else does?  Here’s the idea:

• Do an “Advanced search” in LinkedIn
• Under Title, put in “Cheif Executive Officer” with the word cheif spelled wrong
• Take a look at the 425 results, of which 200 are in the United States
• Send them a LinkedIn invitation, and in the invitation, tell them about the misspelling
• I usually send an introduction that says

FYI, I just wanted you to know that you spelled Chief wrong (i.e. cheif) in your profile. Just trying to help.

While I’m at it, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.

- Patrick O’Malley

• When LinkedIn asks how you know them, I usually say it’s through my current company

If you help them, there is a good likelihood they will accept your invitation, and in some cases where I’ve done it, I’ve also gotten some “thank you” replies or further discussions.  I’ve never asked for anything from them, but I could probably ask for an introduction to one of their connections in the future, or get 5-10 minutes of their time to talk about Social Media Training for their sales staff or other employees.

You could do the same type of thing  for your business whenever you thought the time was right.

Danger of IDKs

There is a danger in doing this.  If the recipient clicks “I Don’t Know <you>” in response to the invitation, you will get a black mark from LinkedIn.  If you get 5 of these, you get put on the IDK list.  This means that you can’t invite any more people unless you know their email address.

However, there is a solution.  First, if you email LinkedIn at cs@linkedin.com and apologize, they usually forgive, unless you’re a chronic offender.  If that doesn’t work, I do have another radical solution, and if you email me, I will send it to you.

Regardless, I don’t think many of these CEOs would IDK you, and I have sent out dozens of these myself.

Good luck out there…

People pay $100,000 or more to get to the first page of Google results.  Here’s a pretty cool technique I discovered which can get you there in one hour, for free.  Pretty cool, huh?

Details:

Value of a high Google ranking:

When people search for your product or service, they go to Google.  Therefore, every business wants to show up on the first page.  However, it’s tough to get there, because every other business wants to be there also, and only 10 sites can show up on the first page.

Therefore, most companies have to pay for Google ads (on the top and right hand side of the results  page), and some pay $100,000 or more a year to do so – and it’s worth it.  Google makes almost all of their money on these ads, so they are effective, but it’s better to rank on the left hand side in the organic results, since 65% of people never click on a paid ad.

Others pay an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) consultant (like me) to show up in the organic rankings on the left hand side, where most people look anyways.  It’s tough to get your web page listed there, because everyone who is an “accountant” wants to show up there when a potential customer searches for “accountant”.

Consultants who do SEO know the fastest ways to get there, but I have 5 techniques that can get you there in a few days if there isn’t too much competition, and I’ve never seen anyone publish this one.

This particular technique might get you there in an hour – no kidding.

The trick is to create an entry on Craig’s List, and to have it contain the keywords that your potential customer might look for.  This 4 minute video will show an actual example and some more details…

There are huge upsides to this approach:

• Its free to do (and I gave it to you for free)
• It can legitimately get you to the top of Google results in an hour, as you can see in the video

There are some problems with this approach:

• If there is a lot of competition for your keywords, you may not rank highly
• Its transient.  It will probably only last a few days, and Craig’s List doesn’t like it if you re-post in less than 4 days or so
• You’d have to put your contact information in there, including your phone number, email, a pointer to your web site, et cetera
• Depending on your business, buyers may not be convinced by a Craig’s List ad.  However, at the very least, you’d knock some of your competition out of the top 10.

The actual Craig’s List entry in the example (from 9/30/10) is at http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/doc/evg/1981470943.html and the search that was done in Google was

Amateur videographer Washington, DC

Of course, you probably won’t’ want to advertise yourself as an amateur videographer, but the fact is that if you choose keywords that your target market would use to search for your service, you can use this technique to get a great Google ranking for a while.  After a few days, you can do it again.

Good luck out there.