Alphablogs

By now, you’ve all figured out that I’m a big social media enthusiast.

Since many of our readers are people who don’t spend that much time on the internet, let me just clearify again what social media is

Social media incorporates the online technology and methods through which people can share content, personal opinions, swap different perspectives and insights into world issues and generally discuss the evolution of media in itself.

Social media website content can come in many shapes and forms:

• Text - text is often used to put across opinions or write blog posts
• Images - images and photos can display anything from holiday photos to shots by professional photographers.
• Audio - social media lets you create podcasts for users to download.
• Video - video sites mean that you’ll be able to record a video of your child’s birthday for friends all over the world to see.

(Thanks to Big Mouth Media)

Social media can be a real jungle. That’s why our blogging friend Vivien started up a social media mega project, to help us find our way through it.

Here at Alphablogs, we’re going to be hosting the section about LinkedIn (and on my other blog I’m hosting the section on Twitter.)

Let’s remember what LinkedIn does for us:

LinkedIn is an online network of more than 17 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries.

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.

Your network consists of your connections, your connections’ connections, and the people they know, linking you to thousands of qualified professionals.

Through your network you can:

• Find potential clients, service providers, subject experts, and partners who come recommended
• Be found for business opportunities
• Search for great jobs
• Discover inside connections that can help you land jobs and close deals
• Post and distribute job listings
• Find high-quality passive candidates
• Get introduced to other professionals through the people you know

So, let me ask you - do you have experience with LinkedIn?

Share with us how you work with LinkedIn. Here are a few ideas: how do you integrate LinkedIn into your work life? What are your good or bad experiences? How would you compare LinkedIn with other social media sites? What do you and don’t you like about LinkedIn? How did you benefit from becoming a frequent user? What secrets have you learned?

Tell us about it!

Tomorrow I’ll share with you some stories I’ve heard about LinkedIn. In the meantime, if you’re not familiar with it, go here, and you can also

Here are the guidelines:

1. Write a post on your blog about LinkedIn.
2. Contact me with your name, email and a permalink to your post. If you don’t have your own blog, you can always write a guest post on my blog, or simply send me your thoughts by contacting me in person.
3. Once I collect the links from all participants and publish them on my blog, you can write another post and link to either all or only your favourite articles by other bloggers.
4. You can contribute one article per project/site. You are more than welcome to visit other participating blogs that host projects dedicated to the different social media sites we are talking about and take part in those projects by submitting your articles about other social networking sites.

Here are two more guidelines, developed after talking to a few people:

1. If you want to submit an article that talks about more than one social media site, that’s fine, but you can only submit it once, to one host.
2. If you’d like to submit an article that was written in the past, please make sure that the information is still current, and please edit the article to show the link to the overall project as well the link to the host to which you are submitting the article.

The project runs until February 22, 2007.  On February 25, 2007, Vivien from InspirationBit will collect all the posts in one big super mega hyper article about social media.

And if you’re curious what other social media we’re looking at, here is the complete list. If you have experience with any of these sites, please write about it and submit the post to the respective blogger.

Del.icio.us. Host: Aaron Stroud from On financial success

Facebook. Host: Ina from Inspiring Wear

flickr & zooomr. Host: Brian Auer from Epic Edits

Twitter and LinkedIn. Host: Isabella Mori from change therapy and Alphablogs

Stumbleupon, youtube, myspace. Host: Karen Zara from a1-fan-fun

Sphinn. Host Simonne from All tips and tricks

Second life. Host Dandellion from Metaverse

Mixx, netscape, squidoo. Host: Pearl from Fresh perspectives

Sk*rt, blogging zoom, bvibes. Host: jhs from Colloquium

Digg, reddit. Host: Vivien at InspirationBit

Technorati. Host: Monica at Me like the interweb