January 13, 2010
Ning is a super cool free tool that allows anyone to create their own social network. That means you can create a private or public facebook-like site with user profiles, blogs, forums and more.
If you’re thinking about creating your own site – stop right there buddy! Why start your own site when you can just leverage someone else’s?
I want you to join at least one Ning site where your prospects are talking. They might be there discussing exactly what they buy from you (for example, you sell surfboards and search for a Ning site about surfboards) or you might need to be a little more abstract. For example, someone who sells to bookkeepers could search for a Ning site about quickbooks, a tool that bookkeepers often use.
There are two ways to find Ning sites. Ning does have discovery tool on its homepage but let’s be honest people – it sucks. Go to http://www.ning.com/ and click on the circles to see what I mean.
A better way to find Ning sites is our old friend google. Simply go to google and add the word ning to your search term. So in the examples above I would type “ning surfboard” and “ning quickbooks” into google. When you’re scanning the search results just look for sites with ning in the URL (which is pretty easy as it will be bolded in your search results).
Once you find a targeted site, dive in a start talking! Comment on a blog, post on the forums, have some fun and see what happens.

January 11, 2010
Facebook groups (which are different from fan pages) are a great way to find like-minded folks in the messy maze of facebook. You can find a group that shares your profession, a group with a common interest, or connect with a group of potential clients.
To find facebook groups, put your search term in the general search box in the top right corner then click on the blue “groups” tab.
Once you find a group you’d like to join click the “join this group” text link on the right side of the page.
Your assignment is to join 3 groups. But you can’t just leave it at that! After you’ve joined the group you need to interact in some way, start a discussion, add to a discussion or post on the wall. This should not be an advertisement for your business, the goal here is to discover new contacts and build relationships. Who knows who you’ll meet!

January 8, 2010
There are two ways to send a retweet on twitter – one that allows you to add a comment to your retweet and one that doesn’t. If you want to know how to add a comment to your twitter retweet (the “old way” to retweet), watch this video:
Click Here To Read The Transcript
Hi, I’m Laura Roeder. You can find my site at lauraroeder.com, just like it says right here. Today I want to tell you how to create a retweet on Twitter because there are two different ways that you might not know about. A retweet is when you copy someone’s tweet and send it out to your followers giving credit to the original tweeter. So, basically it’s just a way to share a tweet that you’ve read with everyone who follows you.
So, the first way to retweet is to use the built in retweet feature on twitter.com. So, I’m signed in on my account, lkr @ twitter.com, right now and all you do to retweet is click this little retweet button right here. So you can see when you’re just looking through the tweets it won’t show up, but when you hover on the right side this little retweet link will come in. So all you have to do is click this button, it’s going to ask you if you want to retweet to your followers and then you simply click yes. So, once that happens your followers are going to see a message that looks like this. See how there is this little icon right here with these arrows and you see the same icon repeated right here? It says retweets from people you follow appear in your timeline.
So, I actually don’t follow this person, Paidz. This is a retweet from someone else that I follow so it has a little retweet button in front of it so that I can see why this person who doesn’t normally show up in my stream is showing up. So, if you’re seeing people who you don’t follow show up on twitter.com, that’s why. It’s because somebody else has retweeted one of their messages and so you’re seeing it on your homepage. So, again the first way to retweet is just to click this little retweet link by whatever tweet you want to retweet and then click yes.
The second way, kind of the old school way, the way people used to do it on Twitter, is just to copy and paste what someone wrote. So, let’s find a simple one here. So if I want to retweet this tweet from Phil Macnevin, all I do is literally copy what he wrote, paste it into my twitter box here and then I’m going to write rt@philmacnevin and then his tweet comes up. So what this means is ‘rt’ stands for retweet, I need to make sure to put the @ sign in front of his name so that it will show up as a clickable tweeter name just like this one right here and this one right here, and then I paste in his message. So the way – the traditional or old school, it’s kind of funny to say that about Twitter right, the original way to do a retweet is to just simply copy and paste the entire tweet just like this. You want to paste it into your little tweet box and then you want to put an ‘rt’ on the front to show that it’s a retweet and you want to make sure to put the @ sign so that their name comes up as a clickable Twitter link just like these.
You need to make sure that the spacing is correct too. There needs to be a space between ‘rt’ and the name and there cannot be a space between the @ sign and the name. So, to retweet this I just paste it in here and click update. So again that’s one way and the other way is to click this little retweet button. This was Laura Roeder showing you how to retweet.

January 7, 2010
Mentioned in this video: Christine Kane (Go to her site NOW!)
