I’ve always said that I see very little value in LinkedIn – I don’t need a resume and a bunch of people kissing your ass in recommendations to tell me to hire you or not. Additionally, the groups serve very little purpose to me – I want to know something? I ask Twitter. For that reason, I’ve always been a much a fan of Facebook’s profiles – I can learn not only everything about you, but (and this is clutch for me) I can learn about the people you associate with – Much like “you are what you eat,” it can also be said “you are who your friends are.” If I look at your wall, and it’s filled with [...]

Remember my post back in August about how it’s time to say goodbye to free WI-Fi in coffeehouses, in airports, etc? I have never been more sure of something in my life – Today, I’ll prove it. I’m on the 6:20am Amtrak from NYC to Boston right now. For a brief moment, I switched off my Sprint EVO 4G, and am using Amtrak’s free WiFi to prove a point. I also installed a little Add-on to Firefox (I usually use Chrome, I switched to Firefox for this experiment,) called Firesheep. If you haven’t heard of Firesheep, prepare to be really, really frightened. I’m not a true tech geek, so please forgive me if I don’t totally speak Geek. Essentially, FireSheep [...]

While in San Francisco last week, I had a spectacular opportunity to have lunch with Philip Hotchkiss, Joe Fernandez,, and Ash Rust, the three heads of one of the hottest social media companies currently out there, Klout. For those living under a half-mile of earth for the past 69 days, Klout is making quite a stir lately, as the company that’s assigning each user of social media (Twitter, Facebook, and the like) a “score” to determine their influence in the online world. The more you engage, the more people find you interesting enough to respond, repost, or retweet your information, the higher your Klout score will go. Essentially, Klout is using various algorithms to determine your relevant worth in the [...]

I got an email from someone two days ago from the shankman.com contact page – and true to what I preach, I responded – Me – no one else. (Took me a day, but I did.) This person simply asked, “How do you cultivate the seemingly endless energy you have to constantly meet new people and grow your network like you say you do?” I thought about it for a while – And it bothered me – Because I couldn’t come up with an answer immediately – I don’t think I’m full of energy – Quite the opposite – I see myself as constantly tired. As much business travel as I do, always up early for training for this stupid [...]

I spent a day last week speaking to a Fortune 100 company about the best ways to integrate social media into their marketing plans, and how best to use social media to help their marketing to continue to generate revenue. The majority of questions they asked me afterward fell into the following categories: 1) So how do we get more followers? 2) So how do we get more likes? 3) Should we hold a contest to get more followers/likes? 4) How do we get our followers/likes to spread the word about us? These are smart people. These people are the marketing force behind a company that interacts with millions of people through multiple brands every day. These people aren’t stupid [...]