Phyllis Zimbler Miller's Blog: Phyllis Zimbler Miller Author, page 59

Recommended LinkedIn Groups to Consider Joining

Thanks to Publicity Hound Joan Stewart's free "The Best of the Publicity Hound's Tips of the Week of 2010" (see report link below) I learned about a LinkedGroup called "Top Recommended People" for which there's a requirement to have at least 10 recommendations of yourself displayed on your LinkedIn profile.

As I have more than that number, I immediately took Joan's advice and submitted a request to join the group. I then received an acceptance from group creator Ross Dodwell.

You can read more about the group at the Top Recommended People website at http://toprecommendedpeople.com If you are on LinkedIn and have at least 10 recommendations, do apply to join the group.

And right after this I got an email from a LinkedIn group to which I already belong -- TopLinked (Open Networkers) -- of which over 110,000 people are part of the TopLinked.com group. The email included a link to find "other great groups" at http://www.GroupsToJoin.com



The email went on to talk about the Job & Career Network groups divided by city, state, country, industry, profession, etc. The full list of these groups is at http://www.TopJobGroups.com



I'm going to check out the industry and profession groups http://linkd.in/LIconsulting and http://linkd.in/LImarketing

Which groups are you going to check out?

And now get Joan Stewart's free tips to get more great ideas for promoting your career or business!

© 2010 Miller Mosaic, LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller can be found on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/phylliszimblermiller and you can get download her free company report "5 Tips for Staying Top of Mind With Your Target Markets" at www.millermosaicllc.com/los-angeles-social-media-consultant



You can also learn about the Miller Mosaic LinkedIn Professional Setup to help you start using the power of LinkedIn to attract your target markets.

LinkedIn Social Media Strategies for Online Book Marketing

LinkedIn may seem at first glance not to be a top choice for online book marketing – after all, it is a professional networking site that recruiters find particularly fruitful. Yet LinkedIn actually offers numerous opportunities for book authors.

First is the profile, in which if you are a nonfiction author you can display the background and/or credentials that form the foundation of your books. And if you are a fiction author you can display your writing credentials.

Whether a nonfiction and fiction author, you can add the Amazon application on your LinkedIn profile. Instead of displaying the books you are currently reading, display your own books.

Second, there is now a company profile on LinkedIn. If you have formed a company for your book activities, you can set up a company profile. And then you can create product information or services within that company profile.

Third, you can join groups that focus on book marketing or online marketing or social media marketing or any number of topics, including topics related to the subject matter of your fiction or nonfiction book. Do a search for specific topics after changing the default "People" search category to "Groups."

And on these groups you can ask questions, answer questions and add links to articles that you think would be of interest to the members of a specific group.

Fourth, if you are a nonfiction book author, you can answer questions open to all LinkedIn members in categories related to your nonfiction work. If you are a fiction book author, you can answer questions open to all LinkedIn members in categories related to writing.

To find these questions that you can answer, once you have signed into your LinkedIn account click on "More" on the top nav bar and then click on "Answers." On the right under "Browse" click on a category. Then under this category you'll see sub-categories.

As an example, here are the sub-categories under "Marketing and Sales":

• Advertising and Promotion

• Business Development

• Graphic Design

• Mobile Marketing

• Public Relations

• Sales

• Search Marketing

• Writing and Editing

For maximum exposure when answering questions, spend a few seconds analyzing which questions are best for you to answer. This analysis is not only for subject matter but also for:

1) when the question was first asked (if the question is a few days old it may be "stale")

2) how many answers there already are (an indication of how popular the question is)

In your answer you may include a link to an article – yours or someone else's – that adds to the specific "answers" discussion. But only link to an article that really does add worthwhile information to the discussion.

And here is how to make a hot link on LinkedIn:

You must use the http:// format before a URL (other social media sites do not always require this format for hot links).

In conclusion, start using the power of LinkedIn now for book marketing. And be sure to use your own headshot in your profile – people want to see who you are and not the cover of your book.



And if you want help with your LinkedIn social media activities, see our LinkedIn Professional Setup.



© 2010 Miller Mosaic, LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the co-founder of the social media marketing company Miller Mosaic Power Marketing. You can download the FREE company report "5 Tips for Staying Top of Mind With Your Prospective Target Markets" at www.millermosiacllc.com/los-angeles-social-media-consultant

Privacy Concerns: Delete Button and Hacker Attacks

The December 14th Fast Company article "Delete Button for the Internet: Tool Removes Personal Info from Google, Facebook" by Austin Carr reports on a new service from Abine.com that removes posted items from the web.

I found it very ironic that, a few hours after I read this post, my gmail account was hacked and everyone in my database was sent emails hawking prescription drugs.

An online friend emailed me: "I'm guessing you already know but you got hacked big time."



I sure did.

And here's something you should do right now:



Log in to your Google account by going to google.com/accounts. Under "Dashboard" click on "View data stored with this account" and you will be asked to log in again. Then under "Account" click on "Websites authorized to access the account" and click on "revoke access" to any websites that you do not know or that should not have access to your account.

My business partner checked for me and, when she saw an unfamiliar website had access to my Google contacts, she quickly revoked access. (Although, as she herself said, she should have first written down what website this was before revoking access.)

In addition to this, one rule to minimize the risk of being hacked is NOT to use the same password for everything, especially on major sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Google. I don't use just one password, but still there are a lot of sites on which I use the same password.

Another rule is to have a reasonably complex password – and definitely do not use your birthday or current street address. (I don't.)

Then remember to practice vigilance when typing in a password in a public place. (Who saw the December 15th episode of the television show"Human Target" in which the math savant could remember a password by watching someone type in the code just once?)

And when it comes to privacy in general, only put on the web the photos and personal information that you can live with the entire world knowing. No matter what the privacy controls supposedly are – your information can probably be made public.

Read the Fast Company article now.

And for ideas about how to participate on social media to stay top of mind with your target markets (provided you use strong passwords for these accounts), get our Miller Mosaic Power Marketing FREE report "5 Tips for Staying Top of Mind With Your Prospective Target Markets"

© 2010 Miller Mosaic, LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) and her social media marketing company partner Yael K. Miller (@MillerMosaicLLC on Twitter) are committed to taking the mystery out of social media so that individuals and companies can utilize the power of social media to attract more business.

Sign up now to get email notifications of new social media marketing posts at www.millermosaicllc.com/get-miller-mo...

Warning: Facebook Becoming More Like LinkedIn

Facebook guru Robert Grant is someone whose social media marketing information I truly value. (A few months ago I listened to all the videos comprising his Crowd Conversion 2.0 online course.)

Having just told a friend that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are adapting more and more features from the other two, I clicked on Robert's email with the subject "If You Don't Know This You Will Get Banned From Facebook!" because I certainly want to ensure that I don't get banned.

What I found was a brief email with a link to a video. And I clicked on the email and watched in fascination as Robert demonstrated a new wrinkle in adding a friend on Facebook.

The openness of sending a friend request has been changed to a request model closer to that of LinkedIn, where you are suppose to know the person before sending a connection request.

And this is truly a game changer for adding friends on Facebook -- plus a quicksand trap if you don't follow the new rules.

Rather than explaining this new Facebook friend change, I urge you to watch this video by Robert Grant. The Facebook account you save may be your own!

Robert Grant's video on Facebook's new friend request function

(This is NOT an affiliate link but it is an endorsement link.)

(c) 2010 Miller Mosaic, LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) and her social media marketing company partner Yael K. Miller (@MillerMosaicLLC on Twitter) have two company Facebook Pages: www.facebook.com/powermarketing and www.facebook.com/bookmarketing

Get their new FREE company report "5 Tips for Staying Top of Mind With Your Prospective Target Markets"

Invest in Social Media for Your Company

If someone told you that you needed to invest in a computer for your business because using an electric typewriter for invoices is no longer considered a good business practice, you would probably invest in the computer.

Or you would if you wanted prospective customers or clients to think of your company as forward-thinking.

Or if someone told you that you should reprint your business cards to include your email address and your company website URL, you would probably do this because it makes good business sense.

Now I'm telling you that you should take part in social media sites for your business because it both demonstrates that your company is forward-thinking and it makes good business sense.

Regardless of how large or small your marketing/advertising budget is, you should be using social media to get in front of your target markets.

And clearly defining those target markets on social media is very important.

For example, someone followed me on Twitter whose Twitter bio said "Read my latest book at …." As I always check out people who are following me before deciding whether to follow them back, I clicked on the link and discovered his book was a YA novel.

I followed the person so that I could send him a private message politely suggesting that he change "my latest book" to "my latest YA novel." (I got a private message in return thanking me and telling me how much better this was.)

You might think, if you didn't know about niche marketing, that it would be better to announce a book instead of a YA novel. You might think that perhaps more people will click on the link to a "book."

In truth, a generic term such as "book" often does not attract book readers. A specific term such as "YA novel" does attract fans of YA novels. You are better off spreading a smaller but directed net than a larger net directed specifically at no one.

Back to investing in social media for your business:

A new year will soon be upon us. Make this the year that you start effectively investing your time and efforts in using social media to get in front of your target markets.

And once connected to your prospects on social media sites, stay top of mind with those target markets by furthering the connection.

For ideas about how to do this, get our Miller Mosaic Power Marketing FREE report "5 Tips for Staying Top of Mind With Your Prospective Target Markets"



© 2010 Miller Mosaic, LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) and her social media marketing company partner Yael K. Miller (@MillerMosaicLLC on Twitter) are committed to taking the mystery out of social media so that individuals and companies can utilize the power of social media to attract more business.

Sign up now to get email notifications of new social media marketing posts at www.millermosaicllc.com/get-miller-mo...

Google Preview: An Important Reason NOT to Use Flash on Your Website Home Page

Yael and I have written blog posts before about the problems using Flash on your home page can create, including slowing down the loading time so that people get impatient and click away to another site.

Now Yael has pointed out to me a more serious problem with using Flash on your home page:

Do a Google search and get the search results returned to you.

On the same line as the site title (which is a hot link to the site) on the far right-hand side is a little magnifying glass – this is Google Preview.

You can click on that magnifying glass to see the site's home page WITHOUT LEAVING the Google search results.

If your website's home page consists entirely of Flash, nothing is returned except for a grey puzzle piece.

This is because, at this point in time, Google Preview cannot read Flash. (If your home page uses Flash only for a segment of the page, your home page will be shown.)

Obviously you do NOT want your home page to appear as a grey box if someone clicks on the magnifying glass after your site comes up in the search results. Why work on having your site come up on the first page of Google if you're going to hinder people's willingness to click through to the site?

And along with this warning goes another caution:

Although we had never seen this before, when Yael and I looked at a website that uses Flash for the entire page of every page on the site, each page did NOT have a separate URL. Each Flash page showed as the URL of the site.

While we do not, of course, have any knowledge of the Google search algorithms, one has to wonder what Google would think of this hodge podge of different pages all sharing the same URL. It probably isn't conducive to Google respecting the content of this site.



Bottom line? When you come up with very "cute" ideas for your website but these cute ideas require full-page Flash on the home page, think again whether you want to make it easy for people to be interested in your site. Or will you be happy just having the "cutest" site on the web.

P.S. We have a brand-new FREE report – "5 Tips for Staying Top of Mind With Your Prospective Target Markets." Download it now at www.millermosaicllc.com/los-angeles-social-media-consultant

© 2010 Miller Mosaic, LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) and her social media marketing partner Yael K. Miller (@MillerMosaicLLC on Twitter) are committed to taking the mystery out of social media so that individuals and companies can utilize the power of social media to attract more business.

Sign up now to get email notifications of new posts at www.millermosaicllc.com/get-miller-mo...

Tracking Your Retweets on Twitter Is No Simple Matter

I like to acknowledge people who have retweeted me. Thus several times a day I check my @Mentions on my Twitter home page to see if anyone has retweeted me.

It was an unpleasant surprise to learn that I have been missing some retweets of my tweets.

Here's how this happened:

Yael and I personally use a third-party application to retweet. This application shows our own photo rather than the photo of the person who originally tweeted. And other people also use a different retweet application than the one on Twitter itself.

These third-party application retweets are picked up in @Mentions as well as other tweets mentioning me by my Twitter username of @ZimblerMiller.

But the people retweeting me who use the Twitter website retweet function are NOT picked up in the @Mentions. Instead, I need to click on Retweets on my home page, which gets a dropdown menu and then I have to click on "Your Tweets, retweeted."



Now here's the difficult part to see who has actually retweeted a specific tweet:

Hover over the tweet, which brings up a little arrow in the top right-hand corner of the tweet, and then click on the arrow.

This opens up a panel that shows that tweet in large type. And underneath the tweet is: "Retweeted by "

What a bother! How much easier to show these retweets in the @Mentions screen?

Now my apology: To everyone whose retweets I haven't acknowledged because I didn't realize I had to check both @Mentions and Retweets/Your Tweets, retweeted.

I promise to check both in the future.

© 2010 Miller Mosaic, LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) and her social media marketing partner Yael K. Miller (@MillerMosaicLLC on Twitter) are committed to taking the mystery out of social media so that individuals and companies can utilize the power of social media to attract more business.

Sign up now to get email notifications of new posts at www.millermosaicllc.com/get-miller-mo...

Social Media Activity Does Have a Direct Impact on Search Engine Rankings

Thanks to Mark Watts of Manchester, England (www.seomanchester.org.uk), who found Miller Mosaic on the Internet and with whom we are now working, here is confirmation of the importance of social media in search engine results:

[B]oth Bing and Google have confirmed … that links shared through Twitter and Facebook have a direct impact on rankings (in addition to the positive second-order effects they may have on the link graph). This has long been suspected by SEOs (in fact, many of us posited it was happening as of November of last year following Google + Bing's announcements of partnerships with Twitter), but getting this official confirmation is a substantive step forward.

This quote is from the December 2nd blog post by Randfish, the CEO and co-founder of www.seomoz.org, and the link for the entire article is below.

What does this mean for those businesses that insisting on keeping their heads in the sand about social media?

(For this reference see my Bizymoms.com guest post "Please Take Your Head Out of the Sand When It Comes to Social Media Marketing")

It means there are even more reasons why you should be actively participating on social media. The new year is almost here. Start planning now how 2011 will be the year you truly harness the power of social media.

Now read the entire www.seomoz.org blog post.

P.S. And read Mark's "My SEO Story."

© 2010 Miller Mosaic, LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) and her social media marketing partner Yael K. Miller (@MillerMosaicLLC on Twitter) are committed to taking the mystery out of social media so that individuals and companies can utilize the power of social media to attract more business.

Sign up now to get email notifications of new posts at www.millermosaicllc.com/get-miller-mo...

Social Media Marketing Opportunities Are Growing by Leaps and Bounds

I am a member of the Social Media Marketing group on LinkedIn. And when I got an email about a change from a closed group to an open group on LinkedIn, I clicked through to the group.

Here's the LinkedIn message I got:

Your previous discussions are in an archive for members only.

Your new discussions can be seen, shared, and discovered.

On December 6, the group owner (Michael Crosson) switched Social Media Marketing to be open. Previous discussions are stored in a read-only archive for members only. All new discussions can be seen by non-LinkedIn members, shared on Twitter and Facebook, and indexed by search engines.

Note the "indexed by search engines." This is powerful stuff. But it is not available to all groups yet.

Apparently Social Media Marketing group was picked as a beta group for this new open discussion feature, which does seem appropriate given the subject matter of the group.

According to LinkedIn, at this moment in time there are 111,492 members of this group.

If you are on LinkedIn, interested in social media, and not yet a member of this group, consider joining right now. This looks to be a very interesting opportunity.

Remember, you can check out our new LinkedIn Professional Setup if you are not yet effectively using LinkedIn.

© 2010 Miller Mosaic, LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) and her social media marketing partner Yael K. Miller (@MillerMosaicLLC on Twitter) are committed to taking the mystery out of social media so that individuals and companies can utilize the power of social media to attract more business.

Sign up now to get email notifications of new posts at www.millermosaicllc.com/get-miller-mo...

Adding Hot Links to Your Twitter Bio

You have 160 characters for your Twitter bio and it's important to make every character count towards sharing information that will be of interest to your target markets.

In addition to this bio, you have one hot link under the designation "web" under "profile" under "settings" (NOT your top nav "profile" button).

A few days ago I noticed that @CathyGoodwin had two hot links in her Twitter bio – one in the "web" slot and one in the bio part. Curious, I thought.

Then I saw someone else with two hot links on a Twitter profile page.

Always looking for new social media opportunities, I went to my Twitter bio to try adding a hot link besides the one in the "web" slot. And to really test this out, I tried the link without the http:// that Twitter use to prompt as needed for the "web" hot link.

Lo and behold! I got a hot link starting with www in my Twitter bio separate from the "web" hot link. Very exciting!

Then I revised my bio copy so that the two hot links would not be next to each other (too confusing).

Here is what my bio says now in exactly 160 characters:

Social media marketer whose company coaches clients on effectively using social media; blog at www.MillerMosaicSocialMediaMarketing.com & more info at



Followed by the "web" hot link:

http://www.MillerMosaicPowerMarketing.com

(You can see how this looks on the screen at http://twitter.com/ZimblerMiller)

As I'm usually torn as to which one URL to include in my Twitter bio, I'm very pleased by this ability to include more than one URL.

Go ahead and try it for your own Twitter bio if you have more than one URL you'd like to share. And if you don't yet have a blog or a website, be sure to use that "web" hot link for your Facebook Page, your LinkedIn profile, or another suitable social media presence.

And if you are not utilizing your LinkedIn presence effectively, check out our new LinkedIn Professional Setup – it may be just what you need.



© 2010 Miller Mosaic, LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) and her social media marketing partner Yael K. Miller (@MillerMosaicLLC on Twitter) are committed to taking the mystery out of social media so that individuals and companies can utilize the power of social media to attract more business.

Sign up now to get email notifications of new posts at www.millermosaicllc.com/get-miller-mo...