Coleman Unlimited LLC » social media

Linkedin Now Has Events: Great for Associations and Local Networking Groups

Sonia — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 22:45:27 +0000

Business networking website Linkedin.com now has an events function, which is a great step to really becoming a competitor to Facebook. For all of us who have ever worked in associations, this feature makes the pulse jump a tad! You can add an event and then link your participation to it, as a speaker, organizer or attendee.

I think this will be an excellent feature for many groups. I already want to start adding the monthly luncheons for my local PRSA and NFPW chapter. Plus, it will give me a reason to log on to Linkedin more often.

The thing that I see that’s missing is the ability to invite others to your events, like Facebook does. Also, the events that show up are auto-selected, rather than something you choose. But no matter what the bugs, this is a great new feature.

I imported all of my contacts into Linkedin (which I’ve been intending to do for about 6 months). Now, after the holiday, I plan to let it rip and so how many of my business associates I can connect with through the site.

Check out the new Linkedin events feature (there’s even a video). And while you are there, connect with me.

10 Best Social Media Tools for PR Professionals & Journalists

Sonia — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 23:30:53 +0000

Every once in a while I come across a post on the web that is so valuable that I have this urge to print it and save it somewhere in a vault of “important informaton.” However, these days, I am retraining myself to save the link or if I must print it, print it to a PDF to put in my database.

Yesterday, thanks to a Twitter post from Peter Shankman of Help a Reporter Out, I read a post on the 10 Best Social Media Tools for PR Professionals and Journalists on mashable.com. I love this post, and I’ll probably be spending some time tomorrow checking out all these tools.

The list includes Shankman’s Help a Reporter Out, as well as tools like PitchEngine and ReportingOn. I was especially excited to see Media People Using Twitter and Twellow, because I find Twitter’s search functionality difficult to use.

Why are these tools so wonderful? Because accessing the right people for an effective PR pitch can be an expensive and time-consuming job–not easy for those of us with smaller budgets. However, this enables us to get great, well-written information into the right hands. I guess I’m becoming a bit of a social media junkie.