Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Chris Lee is the cofounder of the Seattle-based Meeteor, which scours your social graph in search of second- and third-degree connections to people who might be able to help advance your career. Fast Company caught up with Lee to talk about coffee, sandwiches, beer, and other networking tools.

The person I know who is the best networker has a technique: He looks up friends of friends on Facebook, messages them and says, “Hey, I see you know so-and-so. Want to get coffee?”

A big part of our inspiration came from seeing how friends would, in a casual, analog way, talk to friends whenever they ran into them, and express, “Hey, this is what I’m looking for.” And friends would make referrals. Similarly, people were using online tools like Facebook or LinkedIn, but in a very manual way. We search through your network to highlight people you might want to reach out to, and we tell you why. Basically we want to remove as much friction as possible from the networking process.

Why do you use Facebook instead of LinkedIn, the supposed professional social network?

One reason is just pure numbers: Facebook has close to around 850 million users, while LinkedIn has around 130 million. Also your friends on Facebook are more likely to help you; they’re the ones you’d casually reach out to anyway. Facebook friends are your close friends, the people who are gonna go out on a limb for you. That said we’re currently exploring integrating with LinkedIn more.

But are sites like yours a real warning sign for LinkedIn? If Facebook takes over networking, what does that mean for LinkedIn?

I think it’s also very much a demographic issue. For people in their late 30s, LinkedIn is very much their siloed professional network. Lower in the demographics, people are blending personal and professional social network use. For a lot of people in their 20s, they’re adding people from work, their bosses, on Facebook.

Who is Meeteor most popular with?

We’ve gotten really positive feedback from college students who we talk to. They need more of a helping hand at this point. They don’t have large professional networks, or a huge Rolodex of people they can call upon. They’re really looking for tools integrated with their lives, and their lives revolve around Facebook.

Part of the insight of Meeteor is that help can come from unlikely places. You might think your guitarist friend would have the hookup to the music industry, but it turns out to be some random person you played soccer with in first grade.

Exactly. I have 800 connections on Facebook. There’s no way I can keep track of all those people. We’re really trying to tap into the network you may not even know you have. One of our users mentioned she was interested in meeting people connected to libraries. Meeteor introduced her to one of her brother’s friends, and she quickly realized that this friend was working at the place she wanted to intern at. The exact person she wanted to get in touch with worked down the hall from her brother’s friend. Three days later she had an interview with the woman, who offered her the internship on the spot.

You talk about Meeteor as though it were a being of its own.

We position Meeteor as this service that’s working for you. You could be the one that’s doing the grunt work.

But you’re not. Step two of the “how to use Meeteor” section on your site is, “Make a sandwich.”

Networking is kind of a pain. And we don’t think you should have to spend all your time doing all this arduous labor.

You were president of the Brewmasters’ Guild in business school. That sounds like a good way to build a network.

I still love exploring all the local breweries and beer bars in Seattle. When I do come across someone with a love of beer, there’s an instant connection there, something we can easily chat about. In general, when you find another person has a shared passion, it accelerates the relationship.

This interview has been condensed and edited. For more from the Fast Talk interview series, click here. Think you’d make a good Fast Talk subject? Mention it to David Zax.

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LinkedIn has announced the beta launch of LinkedIn Signal, a new product that is essentially combines LinkedIn and Twitter updates into a single newsfeed. We have invites for the first 250 readers that are able to snatch them up.

LinkedIn Signal is a content consumption application with more filters than we could possibly ever need. Signal pulls in both Twitter and LinkedIn updates from LinkedIn connections and presents them in a style similar to the Facebook News Feed.

The goal here is to help professionals find the signal in the noise, thus the name. To that end, Signal has a slew of filters to help users find the news and content they’re craving. There are eight dynamic filters, based on your network, industry, company affiliation, recency, location, university or hashtag. Picking any of these options on the left-hand column will clean up newsfeed and only display relevant results. So yes, an aspiring screenwriter could be as specific as “only updates from the entertainment industry posted in the last week in the Los Angeles area from people that work at major movie studios.”

But wait, you can make Signal even more specific than that. There is also the option for following only specific keywords, people or topics based on your searches. Once you follow a specific topic or search query, it is saved in a box on the left-hand navigation.

At the same time, the company is also tackling the issue of finding what’s hot on the web with its “Trending Links” section. This section in the right-hand column displays the most shared links in your Signal stream. The results change dynamically based on the search query or the filters you are using. You can even drill down into shared links with the “Who shared this link?” feature. Not only can you find the people who are sharing specific links, but you can also filter them by industry, company or region.

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LinkedIn’s Big Bet on Content Consumption

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The fact that LinkedIn build such a detailed product almost completely outside of the LinkedIn social structure surprised us. It would be one thing if it were filtering just LinkedIn updates, but we found that Signal was utterly dominated by Twitter activity during our tests.

That shouldn’t be a surprise though; just think about how often you update your Twitter compared to your LinkedIn. The result though is that Signal is essentially a Twitter consumption app. It’s a very sophisticated, well-designed Twitter app, but a Twitter app nonetheless.

When you think in terms of where LinkedIn struggles though, launching something like Signal makes sense. LinkedIn is indeed the world’s most prominent social network for business, but users rarely come back unless they’re looking for a job or want to connect with someone they met at a business meeting. There is little incentive to come back every day.

Nearly everything the company has launched in the last few months has been focused on increasing user engagement, especially in the realm of content consumption. Updated company profiles, the acquisition of mSpoke, the revamp of Groups and new link sharing options have all been part of a trend to keep users more engaged on the site through content consumption.

The question now is whether people will find Signal useful enough to use every day or week, or if it’ll just become another LinkedIn tool that nobody uses until they’re looking for a job.

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Invites

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LinkedIn Signal is currently in an invite-only beta, but the first 250 readers to visit this link will automatically have access to it.

Wikipedia defines “avatar” as “…a computer user’s representation of himself/herself or alter ego…” That is to say, an avatar is the “you” of the computer world. Most of us think of the word to mean the graphic we use alongside our social media account, but that’s only part of what defines an avatar. In this post, we’ll talk in a somewhat more rounded what about how your avatar on the web becomes quite important to doing business in this new world.

It Starts at About

To me, your main website needs a good strong about page that tells the story of who you are, as well as your business story. Note that I want both. It can’t just be “We make great oriental rugs,” but instead that “we build great oriental rugs” and “My name is Denise Sanders.” Why? Because when people finally click through to wherever you’ve made your home base, they might want to know more about you. So start there.

A Good Graphic

I’m a fan of using a picture of yourself for your avatar. Let me be clear what kind of picture: it should be candid, but not a red-flash-eyed close-cropped clip of you from a party with someone’s cheek nearly touching you. It should be a decent snap of you, but not one of those corporate in-front-of-a-blue-cloud-screen shots. And if you want your logo in the avatar snap, consider making a really tiny avatar that you can wear at the bottom. Example: Look at Scott Monty’s avatar. You see that little Ford logo? Plenty. We know who he is.

Same Graphic Everywhere? Same Graphic Always?

I change my avatar picture frequently. The reason is that I change my looks frequently (beard, no beard, short hair, long hair, no hair). I want people to be able to find me at a conference. I don’t have a really strong “same graphic everywhere” policy myself, but I can tell you that it’s probably best if you do some kind of graphics management. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others all have a spot for your avatar. Maybe you should sweep through every two months or so, when you decide to change your avatar. It’s a pain, but might be useful.

Quick note: some folks adhere to the “you should keep the same avatar all the time, because people won’t recognize you if you change it” school. I don’t subscribe. I think it’s okay to change who you are.

The Bio – Where The Meat Is

Your avatar biography is very important. If you’re big on LinkedIn, I wrote a post about how to make your LinkedIn profile work for you. For Twitter, there are fewer words you can use. I recommend a link to your blog or to your about page. One great idea I got from Laura Fitton of OneForty is to write a specific blog post that welcomes people who’ve come in via a specific service, and make that the bio page link for your accounts. I do like that.

From the biography on your avatar, people should get some small sense of how/why they should do business with you. Even when it’s brief, that’s the real goal.

Linking Things Together

Depending on the site, it’s a great opportunity to use your avatar to point people towards your home base. For instance, add your URL to LinkedIn, to your Facebook profile, to your YouTube and Flickr accounts, to anywhere that lets you put in a website URL. And don’t forget your email signature. You don’t think of it as such, but your email serves as an avatar between who you are and your intentions.

Linking things together is a strong way to build attention and attraction between you, the social networking person, and your home base, your website.

Things To Do

You and your avatar should spend time connecting with others on social networks like Twitter or LinkedIn, or even Facebook. Join a few LinkedIn groups (that apply either to your geographical region or your trade). Search a few blogs to see if anyone’s talking about your products or services or competitors or whatever will get you into a conversation you find is useful. You might look around Alltop to find the right blogs for your space. You might poke in a Twitter search to see who’s talking about your town, your product, etc. Make sense?

You might also look into setting up a few passports.

Passports for your Avatar

Passports are what I call accounts that you might find useful to have, should you find yourself in need of commenting or participating in certain sites. Here are just a few sites to consider getting an account through, for passport purposes:

• Google Accounts
• WordPress
• Yahoo!
• Digg
• Yelp
• Disqus (for commenting)
• BackType (which tracks comments, too)
• and probably many more (you can add in the comments section, if you want).

Get Out And Visit

In my estimation, using social media tools for business splits into three buckets: listen, connect, and publish. The avatar we’ve created for you is for that middle one: connect. Get out there and use it to meet new people, to talk about what other people are doing, to build some awareness and a reputation on other platforms. Help people to understand who you are, and then they’ll want to know more about your business, too. We buy from people who are like us. We buy from people we understand.

In the next installment, I’ll write about what to do with your site before you seek business.

Are these helpful? Questions?

My blog is one of my key tools in growing business. I use it to promote other people’s good work. I use it to share my way of thinking. I use it to equip you for success, knowing that should you need more than what’s offered on the blog, you’ll ask for a way to work with me. Here’s how I look at distribution and why I think it’s important.

Distribution Points for Your Blog

I currently share my blog in 3 main places: LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. In each case, they are shared differently.

In LinkedIn, I have the WordPress for LinkedIn connection, so that imports my blog in a simple, clean way into the regular fabric of LinkedIn. If I really need traction on a post, I might share it again in my network updates, but I try to use that very sparingly. LinkedIn doesn’t really like a lot of link promotion.

On Twitter, my automated account, @broganmedia shares out my blog post, but I don’t rely on just that. If I think the post is good, I tweet out a link to it, asking a customized question with that link. For instance, if I were tweeting out this story (and I will), I’d say something like, “how many distribution points do you have for your blog?” And then I’d put the link to this post. Make sense?

On Facebook, it’s shared via a note. I don’t do very much with that method, to be honest. Instead, I rely on shareability, as I’ve covered it before. But, lest you think I don’t value Facebook’s addition to my blog, I’ll tell you of the time that Steve Rubel accidentally kept me from quitting Facebook. You see, I was just about to hit the delete button, when I saw that a new message had come in. Steve said to me, “I don’t know why I never saw your blog before now, but it just came across my screen on Facebook.” I thought, “rats,” and kept my page alive.

Email – Sparingly

Now, let me be clear. I love it when you subscribe to my blog via email. If you haven’t, feel free to sign up here (I respect your privacy):

But I really rarely and sparingly send out emails pointing to my posts. For the most part, if I know how to reach you, you probably subscribe to my blog. Secondarily, it feels like a waste of an email touch. I’d rather use those for important things, like promoting Invisible People.

One last note about email: I think it’s great to put a generic link to your blog in your email signature, if that’s what you most want people to do after you email them.

Distribution Elsewhere

There are many more services through which you can distribute and/or promote your blog. I’ve only talked about the three major and one minor method through which I’m distributing [chrisbrogan.com]. By all means, feel free to add other points in the comments, and we can talk about those, as well.

What about you? Where else are you distributing your blog? How have you found the experience? Any questions on what I’ve put up above?

Look at this:

You see that LinkedIn will let me share with people within the system. What’s missing? Oh right: sharing with off-LinkedIn platforms.

But here’s the thing: if I share the stuff I like into Twitter or Facebook or my blog, then I’ll be adding LINKBACKS to LinkedIn, which will encourage traffic, enhance Google Juice, and better emulate that which made the web worth it.

By sharing only within LinkedIn, what’s that buying me?

Please don’t copy Facebook. Please share out into the wilder world. It’s more funnerer that way.

I’ll admit it. I’ve written about using LinkedIn effectively more than a few times. Very specifically, I’ve poked and poked about better LinkedIn usage. I’m writing this post because it further dawns on me that you might not be considering the ramifications of how you use your LinkedIn-to-Twitter connection. Because if I “hide” you, you’ll never get back in front of my eye.

So, if you’re using LinkedIn to put out the occasional business-minded status, I think people will watch them go by, even if a certain update doesn’t really apply to them. But if you frustrate someone with your Twitter cross-posts or your Foursquare updates, etc, you’re losing the chance, permanently, to influence people on this business network.

Take a look at the picture below. Some of the updates are great (especially after I hid 14 people). Others are going to convince me to hide them, too. And by “me,” you can see how active LinkedIn users will come to the same conclusion likely, right?

Is it worth losing opportunities to keep your Twitter tied to your LinkedIn, instead of using the selective #in tag?

LinkedIn is a great business social network. The crown jewel of its services is the great reputation engine, fueled by LinkedIn recommendations you write for others. As much as your own recommendations matter, it’s just as important that you recommend others. Here are some tips to what makes a great LinkedIn recommendation.

Only Recommend People Whose Work You Can Vouch For

I’ll say this once: if you recommend someone and can’t really vouch for their work, you’re just setting your own reputation up for a blow. Don’t do it. LinkedIn and I disagree in the area that I’ll link to anyone (are you and I LinkedIn? Connect with me and use linkedin @ chrisbrogan . com as my email address). But I’ll never recommend someone whose work I don’t know enough about.

Lead With Strong Language

No, not cussing. Lead with the strongest thing you can say about the person. “Gerry is a clutch player in the world or project management.” When I said that, I wanted people to know that you had a real anchor player in Gerry. Not just “a sufficiently skilled project manager,” but a “clutch player.”

Start with the best possible thing you can say about the person. If you can’t say anything particularly strong, you might reconsider whether you’d recommend them.

Be Brief, But Be Useful

People don’t want to read Moby Dick. They want to know what others say about their prospective new hire, or their potential new customer. Be brief and pack it full of value.

What’s useful? Using Gerry as my example, I’d say about Gerry: “Gerry is a strong communcator, and gets his point across simply. He knows how to pad a schedule, but keep the project tight. Gerry gets disparate teams together to execute with great success.” All of these things, said of a project manager, will improve Gerry’s potential hiring, and will tell his manager what you think.

If You Want to Convey a Negative

Of another person’s recommendation, I added the following gently-couched negative statement, “_____ isn’t always clear in what she needs. She sometimes needs encouragement to draw out details that might be useful to the execution of the project.” I did my best to make this sentiment clearly an issue, but didn’t crush the person. I didn’t say, “____ is too shy and mumbly to successfully convince people to follow her lead.” The first would be a bit kind to her; the second a bit harsh.

And again, if there’s a reason you wouldn’t recommend the person, don’t.

Turning Down a Recommendation

Sadly, I’ve had lots of experience doing this. If I follow you on Twitter and have commented on your blog here and there, I still don’t really know just what kind of marketer you are. I just can’t tell someone to work with you, if I don’t have much experience with you as a colleague.

Here’s how I word those rejections of a recommendation:

“Hi _____ –

I’m honored you asked for a recommendation. Thanks for thinking of me. Because I haven’t worked enough with you professionally, I fear my recommendation wouldn’t be useful. I simply can’t vouch for your work experience beyond our casual interactions online. Best of luck in getting some stellar recommendations.

–Chris…”

You can use a variation on that, if you’d like.

Recommendations Work Two Ways

I can’t tell you the number of times that my recommendation of someone else got either me or that person a new hit for a potential project moments after it got posted. Recommendations show up in the network updates, so people connected to either of us see them. That in mind, it makes for a great potential success builder.

They work in two ways because it shows what you value in others, and it also obviously works for the person you’ve recommended.

Questions?

What else can I tell you about recommendations on LinkedIn? Do you have a few you can leave to others? Swing by LinkedIn and leave some recommendations for people who can use them.

Dan Klamm is the Outreach & Marketing Coordinator at Syracuse University Career Services, where he advises students on using social media for career success. Connect with him on Twitter @DanKlamm.

Succeeding at a job interview is all about coming prepared: Doing company research and being able to articulate how your unique skills and experiences are a fit for the job. Social media can help you gain crucial insights about the company you’re applying to, as well as the people you’ll be interviewing with, so that you can gain an edge during the interview process.

In the past, doing research on a company meant looking at their website, reading over press releases, and searching for mentions in the news. While these are still valid techniques, now you can learn about companies through people-powered online networks like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Blogs provide additional insight. With social media, you can get a fuller picture of the company — not just the official corporate message, but all of the messages from the “little people” on up to the CEO.

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1. LinkedIn Company Page and Employee Profiles

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To get started, search for the company on LinkedIn. A company’s LinkedIn page features a list of new hires, recent promotions, departures, as well as demographic information about its employees, such as gender, geography, and career track. If you’re interested, you can have daily or weekly e-mails sent to you with new activity. Just hit “follow” at the top of the page.

Take a look at the profiles of employees, particularly those you’re scheduled to meet with during your interview. “Candidates should be looking up hiring managers and recruiters on social media, just as hiring managers and recruiters can look them up,” said Tracy Tillapaugh, technical recruiter with Professionals Incorporated in Liverpool, New York.  Resourceful candidates can learn about each individual’s background and job description so they’re prepared to ask more insightful questions during the interview, Tillapaugh said.

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the company page on LinkedIn is the ability to see how you’re connected to current and former employees at the organization, and immediately tap into those connections. In some cases, you may know a person directly, while in other cases it might be a friend-of-a-sister-of-a-colleague who works there. The best way to learn about a company is to make use of the expertise of its employees, as they are the ones with inside knowledge of the organization and the challenges that arise on a daily basis. They’re also the ones who can tell you that little kernel of information about the job you’re interviewing for that’s not in the job description.

If you find an employee you’d like to contact, you can send them a message directly or request an introduction from a mutual LinkedIn connection. Ideally, the connection will be made quickly and seamlessly, and you can move forward with setting up an e-mail, phone, or in-person conversation to learn about the company. For detailed advice on information-gathering conversations and etiquette, visit the Informational Interviewing Tutorial on QuintCareers.

A LinkedIn company page also provides insight into the organization’s hiring practices. Take a look at the roster of current and former employees, and click through a few profiles. How long do most people stay with the company? Where do they go after? Do all current employees share similar credentials or belong to certain professional associations? You can learn all sorts of information about their employee population that may not be directly applicable during an interview, but may give you a better feel for the landscape of their business.

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2. Corporate Blogs and Accounts on Facebook and Twitter

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Additionally, visit the company’s official Facebook Page, Twitter account, and blog. This is a great way to keep up on company happenings whether you’re interviewing for a small organization or a global brand.

Ray Lapena, a recent public relations graduate from Syracuse University, closely followed General Electric’s Twitter account and blog as he prepared to interview with the Fortune 500 company. “GE was in the middle of changing its portfolio of businesses,” Lapena said. “By reading blog posts regarding these changes, I was able to capture somewhat of an inside scoop and understand things from GE’s perspective.” During his interviews with GE, he directly referred to blog posts he had seen. “I was able to talk about GE in a way that was relevant at that time. I think some of my interviewers were pleasantly surprised when I brought up specific things that they were doing,” he said. Lapena was hired for General Electric’s Communications Leadership Development Program and will begin in June 2010.

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3. Employee Blogs and Social Networking Accounts

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In addition to official corporate accounts, many CEOs and higher-ups tweet and blog as individuals. You can gain extraordinary insight into a company by following them, as they are the people driving the organization. What issues do they face? What motivates them? What do they write and tweet about on a daily basis? These are all things that can help you better understand the company as you approach your interview.

Take it a step further and find the accounts of non-executive employees within the company at which you’re interviewing. This should be easy to do, as many people include links to their Twitter account and blog in their LinkedIn profiles. If you’re having difficulty identifying employees, use a directory like Twellow.com.

The benefit of following employees is that you may get hints about issues currently affecting the workplace that you wouldn’t see in official press releases or the CEO’s blog. For instance, a mid-level manager might tweet about challenges presented by the company’s new database software. A junior employee might blog about the recent effort to emphasize team-building in the company’s training program. Some of these insights may directly relate to the position for which you’re interviewing. These comments also give you a feel for corporate culture.

On Twitter, it’s easiest to set-up private lists to follow the tweets of employees at particular companies. Some may call this “stalking” — I call it “being resourceful.” As you prepare for your interview, you may even want to reach out with a tweet: “I’m interviewing for a marketing assistant job at your company next week. Any insider tips?” If you’re going to do this, it’s usually best to exchange a few introductory tweets first.

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Conclusion

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Researching the company has always been an important element of interview preparation. Now, social media tools have made it easier to gather relevant and useful information. Once you’re armed with knowledge about the company, you’ll be on your way to interview success!

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Image courtesy of iStockphoto, AdamGregor

In my last post, I talked about making sure we Use LinkedIn Effectively. Here’s something else to think about: stop importing your Twitter feed into LinkedIn indiscriminately. If LinkedIn is meant for business networking, what do you think these updates (pulled at random) are doing to help your business?

Let’s see, we have:
A quote – shows you can copy and paste (okay, and a little bit of where your head is).
A link – this one’s actually pretty good, as it leads me somewhere, but it’s a request for help with a contest. (still okay)
News talk
Sports talk
Location talk – which is good for finding potential business meetings.
Software talk (?)
Another quote
Um… wtf?
And a retweet of a retweet of a quote.

Business Value

There’s nearly no business value in any of those items listed above (I’ll give Lewis a pass for his location quote). As someone using LinkedIn for business networking, what do you think others see when they read those bits of information? Do you think they’re at the desk, thinking, “Wow. Now THIS is actionable. I’m going to get a little deeper with this person right now.”

I’m going with no.

Use LinkedIn for Business Status

Now, what does that mean? Advertise? No. Maybe it’s a mix of uses. Here are a few I put out there over the last few days:

In one, I ask a question about using LinkedIn for networking. It gets 27 comments (which isn’t bad, but also tells me that people certainly had some thoughts about the topic, so I make a note to blog more about this). In the one before that, I make a direct request for folks to subscribe to my blog. This is partially because I just added a bunch of new connections on LinkedIn, so I want to be sure to invite them into my primary property (my home base).

But in all cases, anything I put across that status message is something that pertains to my business interests in one way or another.

Keep The Stream Valuable

Frankly, what I can see happening in short notice is that people might choose to unlink from you to clean up their status stream. So, you might even be risking network connections by threading Twitter into LinkedIn.

Just because you can doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

Thoughts?

I’ve been going on and on about LinkedIn lately. I promise that I’ll stop after this little discovery. In looking at my network activity for a while yesterday, I noted a few things. You’re working to keep LinkedIn clean per my post (so thanks). You’re using LinkedIn effectively per my post (thanks again).

So NOW, I really want to read that ultra-tidy wonderful stream of my network’s activities and information. But I don’t want to hover around on the site and press refresh.

That’s when I noticed the RSS button. You can click here to subscribe to YOUR LinkedIn network feed. Then, you can throw that into your RSS reader of choice (mine’s Google Reader) and suddenly have a lot of network action information at your fingertips.

If you’re prospecting or networking or looking for a job, or helping others find work, this is gold. It’s like a news stream for your network, but one that’s a lot less noisy than Twitter and a lot more business-minded.

Tasty.

Thoughts?