web marketing coach

Tuesday 0

An Expert on How to Become An Expert

I've had several people ask me about the services I offer and thought it was about time for me to post a self-serving plug for myself. Hopefully, however, you will still find it oriented toward you, the reader of this blog, and how I might be able to help your business grow.

Sometime back, I was introduced to speak for a business group as "An expert on how to become an expert." I liked that intro quite a bit and have since adopted it as my "elevator pitch" or tag line.

I specialize in helping professionals and professional services organizations market themselves with social media. As a former lawyer myself, I know how difficult it is to market or "brand" oneself.

To this end, I offer several services:

One-on-one coaching sessions by telephone and email on how to market yourself better by becoming an expert in your field.
One-on-one coaching for professionals who are seeking to make a career change and want to use social media marketing to gain an edge in the job market and become known as an expert.
Training sessions for professional services firms or association groups.
Professional "ghost" blogging services for lawyers and law firms. (This means that if you do not have the time to write your own blog, you can hire me to do it for you).
Speaking engagements and workshops for groups whose members would benefit from becoming recognized authorities in their fields.
Reviews of your current marketing efforts. This means I will analyze your advertising, websites and other marketing materials and give you review with suggested ideas to improve what you are already doing.
Consultation on improving your Google and other search engine rankings and how to get more traffic to your website.
Consultation on how your firm can become a "thought leader" in your industry.
Consultation on how to use non-spam, permission-based email marketing to build your practice.

I hope you find this list helpful. I you would like to discuss how I might help you further, please feel free to call me at 817-501-6892 or by email at chbrown/at/webmarketing-coach/dot/com.

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NOT USING NON-SPAM EMAIL MARKETING FOR YOUR BUSINESS YET? Learn why email marketing is the easiest, most effective and most affordable way to get new clients. Download my free ebook and receive tips, ideas and case studies to help you get more new customers at http://www.trafficwave.net/lcp/chbrown/emailmarketing/6604.
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COPYRIGHT © 2009, Charles Brown
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Monday 0

Blog Power: Why Content is Still King

For some time now I have been asking the question, "why would anyone choose to have a static website over a blog?"

The short answer, I suspect, is that the cost of a static site is money, whereas the cost of a blog is time.

A static site is rarely changed and very little new information is ever added. In fact most business owners I know have so little hands on connection to their own sites, that they have to call their web designer anytime they want to change or update anything.

Contrast that with a blog. Blogs are made to be easily updated. In fact, both owners and readers of a blog expect to see fresh, new content on a regular basis.

And as a blog owner, you have an easy place to post new information and ideas. A blog cries out for new content like a blank white board.

And because a good blog is regularly updated, it attracts not only visitors but also search engines as well. It has been proven over and over again that Google consistently ranks a blog with fresh content over a static site even when they both contain similar information.

This came to mind earlier today when I read an article called, How Can 10 Simple Articles Change Your Life? by Chris Pearson. Although he doesn't talk about blogs specifically, Pearson makes an excellent case for why content is so valuable for any site.

The point he makes is this: A friend who was doing well selling baseball cards on eBay, came to him about setting up a website so he could increase his business. In answering this problem, Chris makes a very strong case for writing articles.

He talks about how content adds "equity" value to a site. If his friend simply writes 10 short articles on collecting baseball cards or buying and selling baseball cards on eBay, he will have something none of his competitors have.

If, over the course of a year, he increases that number to 100 articles, he would not only probably have a high Google ranking, it would be a very tough job for any competitor to take his ranking away.

This is where my advice to his friend would be to choose a blog. To the average business owner, 100 articles in a year sounds like a huge task, but fortunately a blog does not always require that you personally write all of your own content.

Last week, for example, I was busy with some other projects and merely posted some YouTube videos that I liked and added my own short commentaries to them. Nevertheless I still added content that kept this blog on Google's radar. At the same time, I feel I added value to my readers because these were very good and informative videos.

While I still argue that you should post mostly your own articles on a blog, few of us have so much control over our work schedules that we can blog every day. But we can always add new, useful content that meets the needs of our readers.

In fact, if you read a lot of blogs, you may notice that there are a lot of excellent blog posts that are not entirely original content. In some cases these bloggers have drawn from other sources and added their own commentary. In other cases they have cited other articles and added their own spin (in fact this article would be an example of that - I had no idea what I was going to write about until I read Chris' article). You can even, occasionally, use articles that are posted on article banks like ezinearticles.com, but don't over do this, as it may diminish your standing as an expert in your own field.

There is one other compelling reason for adding new content. If you are using Twitter, Facebook or other social media platforms, new content gives you something to point links to. People will follow you on social media sites if you are a giver of good, quality content.

Fresh, informative content is the heart and sole of creating a personal brand online. It is what inspires people to read your blog and get you noticed by search engines. And what is more, having a sufficient amount of quality content makes it almost impossible for your competition to take your place.

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Friday 0

New Ebook on Viral Marketing With Twitter

I just completed my new ebook called, 7 Rules of Viral Marketing With Twitter. You can download it free and do not need to opt in or leave me your email address.

But if you do like it, I encourage you to pass this link along to anyone else who might find it worthwhile: http://twurl.nl/ccfzdo.

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Thursday 0

How to Create Viral Marketing With Facebook

Are you using Facebook for more than a means to connect with your friends? many business people are finding that in addition to being a fun way to keep in touch and network, Facebook is also a powerful marketing tool.

In this video, Ryan Wade shows you a few ways to turn your Facebook account into a viral marketing platform.

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Wednesday 0

problogger

How would your business change if you became THE recognized expert in your field? Even if you were only recognized within a small geographic area, wouldn't that make a huge difference?

Alternatively, how successful would your job search be if you were known as an industry expert? Do you think you would have to mass mail hundreds of resumes, or do you suppose headhunters would be calling you?

In reality, you simply cannot put a price on becoming an expert. Instead of being just another person with a sales pitch, or just another person seeking a job, you can position yourself as a trusted advisor, or the only credible solution to a problem.

But how do you become a recognized authority in your field?

One very good way to do this is to conduct research on topics within your area of expertise. Have you ever noticed that most so-called gurus simply recycle the same information available from other sources? Maybe the one guru you follow words these ideas better, or maybe she synthesize ideas from several sources to come up with new slants on the same thing, but when you get right down to it, how many original ideas and insights do these gurus actually teach?

The solution to this is to do research. I’m not talking here about complicated, labor intensive statistical sampling and polling, but simple mini surveys that can shed new light on a topic.

Here’s how it works, write out about 5 to 7 questions, including both open-ended and closed questions, and write a questionnaire. Send this questionnaire to companies that should be doing business with you. When you get a significant number of responses back, write up a report.

Once the report is written, use it both as a PR piece and as a lead generator. Send copies to the media and to the same companies you surveyed.

This original research will most certainly elevate you in the eyes of your target market.

Years ago I knew an MBA student who used this very method to get a very good job upon graduation. He spent the better part of his final year in grad school conducting one survey after another and sending the reports to various business publications and corporations. Not only were potential employers clamoring to interview him, he also got to name his starting salary.

A consultant I know uses this method to keep his name constantly in the spotlight of his chosen industry. He conducts 3 or 4 such surveys a year and hardly a month goes by that he is not mentioned in at least one of the industry trade publications.

But now I’d like to add a slight twist to this idea by sharing something I recently learned from Larry Genkin, who hosts the Thought Leadership Marketing Mastermind Group on Facebook.

Larry suggests that instead of just researching your target prospects, you also conduct research of the companies your prospects want to do business with. By doing this, Larry finds that you can gain access to top level executives within your target market.

Here is a letter I received from Larry’s Thought Leadership Marketing Mastermind Group just the other day:

"Here are the details on one of the quickest techniques to help you quickly elevate yourself in the eyes of a business person you're looking to make an impression with. It has the added benefit of getting you in the door for a personal meeting with virtually anyone."

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The Thought Leadership Marketing "Vest Pocket" Market Research Technique: Get an Appointment With Anyone -- Including the CEO

By Larry Genkin, Creator, The Thought Leadership Marketing Method
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Everybody knows that it's more effective to sell "top — down" than "bottom — up." The real question is, when you're in sales, how do you get the people at the top to WANT to meet with you.

Here's a very effective technique that worked like a charm for me back in the early days of my career when I was still "wet behind the ears" selling magazine advertising. I call it "The Vest Pocket Research Technique", here's how it works:

Step #1: Select your sales target

Step #2: Get the contact info of 20 prospects for your sales target

Step #3: Create a short survey. The goal is to ask questions that will provide interesting thought provoking results. Here are some sample questions I would ask.

* When you think of ___ (category of product/service of your target) who is the first vendor that comes to mind?

* What other vendors can you name?

*Who does the best work in ___ (category of product/service of your target)? Why?

* Who does the worst work ___ (category of product/service of your target)? Why?

*What are the most important factors when you make a decision to purchase ___ (category of product/service of your target)? Why?

* If you could give vendors in ____ (category of product/service of your target) a piece of advice what would it be?

* Do you have any plans to buy ____? If so when? How much do you anticipate you will you spend?

Step #4: Call the contacts from Step #2 and conduct the survey. Have it take no more than 3-4 minutes. Get 10 completed surveys.

Step #5: Call the CEO or Sr. exec you want to meet with. Explain that you have some market research about their company that, while not scientific, is very instructive. Give some of the highlights and close for the appointment, like so:

"Mr. Shapiro, this research produced some very interesting results. What I learned during these calls included: What companies in your sector had top of mind awareness, who is perceived as doing the best (and worst) work and the buying factors that are most important to them when making a purchasing decision for ___. And, I've even got the names of people who've told me they're going to be buying ___ in the very near future and how much they have budgeted to spend. When would be a good time for us to set up a meeting for me to share my results."

Not only has this gotten me meetings with CEO's when I was a jr. sales rep, but I've walked into these meetings to find the CEO and 4 of his staff with them waiting, with notepads, to hear my research.

It's a relatively quick way to completely change your relationship with a client/prospect. One second you're a peddler, then next your valuable business partner. And, when you have that kind of relationship, when it comes time for them to buy your category of product/service, who do you think they're going to be most inclined to buy from?

When you become an expert within your niche, you practically OWN that niche. After all, why would anyone choose to do business with anyone else?

Use the ideas in this article to come up with your own survey questions and ways to leverage original research to become a true authority in what you do.

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COPYRIGHT © 2009, Charles Brown

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Tuesday 0

Who Are Your Buyer Personas?

I am a really big fan of David Meerman Scott. I find it amazing how much useful information he posts on his blog, Web Ink Now, and what a terrific resource his books, The New Rules of Marketing and PR and World Wide Rave are.

One of the key concepts he talks about is "Buyer Personas." These personas are not mere client demographics or statistical results of traditional market research. They are instead fleshed out representations of who your buyers are, and why they seek out your services.

Here is a great video David put together.

Last year, during the United States presidential campaign, David spoke to groups all over the world, and asked audiences to some up in one word what Barack Obama wanted people to believe about him. Overwhelmingly, the audiences' answers were, "Change."

Did you notice though, that David came up with several personas for the example of a hotel website? Rather than using that site to tell people all about how fluffy their pillows are, he suggests that the site talk about young couples looking for a place to have their wedding receptions, corporate travel offices of nearby companies, self-employed business travelers, or families planning their vacations.

What do you want your potential clients to believe about you? Who are your buyer personas (make a list and don't assume you just appeal to one group)? And what problems do these personas want to solve?
And for goodness sake, if you haven't yet read anything by David Meerman Scott, go over to Web Ink Now and check him out.

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COPYRIGHT © 2009, Charles Brown
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Monday 0

Is This the Best Commercial Ever?

I really don't have a lot to write about today, so I thought I'd pass along what just may be the very best commercial ever. What is particularly telling is that it wasn't an expensive ad to film. Even though the advertiser is a very large corporation, I think even a small firm could have created something wonderful to put on YouTube.

Watch it and see if you agree with me that this is the best commercial ever.

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COPYRIGHT © 2009, Charles Brown
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Saturday 0

Social Media Marketing: Avoid the "All Tweet and No Meat" Trap

I recently read a great article on Hubspot.com about why social media marketing works best (if at all) when it is combined with your own fresh content. The article, Is Your Online Marketing Strategy All Tweet and No Meat? poses some very thoughtful questions for anyone seeking to embark on a social media campaign to market their business enterprise.

This week I was involved in two conversations with business people and the conversation came around to what I do. Usually this is that ever-awkward elevator speech time when someone politely listens to you and either waits for their chance to tell you what they do, or casually looks for an exit.

But when I mentioned social media, Twitter, Facebook and the like, the dynamics of both of these conversations changed dramatically. There was a real interest. People have heard about social media and how it can attract lots of traffic to a website and create "buzz" about an organization.

But social media is not magic, and it does not wave its wand without some hard work as well. As the Hubspot article points out:

Social media works best in conjunction with a site that's full of fresh content like blog posts, white papers and videos.

If your marketing strategy is just Twitter and Facebook -- no longer-form content of your own -- your company will end up a big-talking cowboy without cattle. You'll be making comments about everything, but substantive contributions to nothing.

Using social media to alert your followers of great online content that comes from other sources is a big part of serving your "community." In fact, Kenneth Wu (@emailcopywriter) suggests that Twitter users maintain at least a 7 to 1 ratio of sending out good quality content that does not come from you, versus each mention of your own content (that should still be designed to provide helpful information).

But if, using Twitter as an example, you are only "retweeting" or forwarding other people's messages, and you never provide anything that you add to the conversation, your contribution is minimal. And you will not be building your personal brand.

Creating new, original content need not be a major undertaking. Start a blog. Have someone film you in front of a white board explaining a five point how-to discussion. Write a 400 word article.

I am more and more convinced that social media is becoming the new search engine optimization. It is no longer necessary to try to "game" the search engines to get a page one ranking. Instead, businesses will create social networks that will spread the word about them (a far less costly way to market than by using traditional media).

But social media is a process of creating evangelists. In other words, you let the market, do your marketing for you. It is the old, word of mouth marketing dressed up in new, more technical clothing.

However, to create evangelists and word of mouth, you have to have something new to add to the conversation.

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Friday 3

Are You Wasting 80% of Your marketing Budget?

I am reading David Meerman Scott's new book, World Wide Rave, and just came upon something that I wanted to pass along.

Whenever he gives a public presentation, Scott asks the audience members to raise their hands to signify "yes" answers to the following four questions. "In the past two months, either privately or professionally, in order to find an answer to a problem or research (or buy) a product, have you:"

Responded to a direct-mail advertisement?
Used magazines, newspapers, TV or radio?
Used Google, or another search engine?
Emailed a friend, colleague, or family member (or used instant messaging, chat rooms, or equivalent) and received as a response a URL, which you then clicked to visit the web site?"

His results over the course of over a year, have been remarkably consistent, regardless of what demographic he is speaking to. Less than 20 percent of the people have raised their hands to the first two questions (accessing mainstream media to find answers or look for products), but 80 to 100% of the people have raised their hands to the latter two options (accessing the web to get this information).

What is the point to this impromptu survey? Clearly the web is where people look for answers, information and solutions. They go to the web when they want to buy a product or service, and are paying less and less attention to traditional media (hence the ever growing number of print newspapers that are failing).

But how do these same marketers promote their own services or products? You guessed it, through traditional channels(which incidentally tend to cost far more than online media).

I see this as well in my target market: professional services organizations and individual professionals that want to become recognized authorities in their fields.

While they themselves look for information online, they still resort to older media forms to get the word out about their own expertise and services. To change this, I am constantly urging them to get involved in social media and blogging. I know of no other way to fast-track a service provider to "online stardom" in the marketplace.

Social media marketing, in particular, is a way to allow the marketplace to do your marketing for you. If your organization is willing to invest in putting quality content that solves problems for your intended clients, social networking can create an online "buzz" about who you are and what you can do.

"Buzz," is simply modern terminology for word of mouth, except that web 2.0 media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and your own blog are involved in this rapid transmission of information.

Here is a very, very important point: Just as in the offline world, buzz or word of mouth marketing hinges on one vital thing. Whatever you offer must communicate value. When you venture into these new arenas, you must ask yourself if your value, your ability to solve urgent problems, or your ability to help clients achieve important goals, is clearly evident in your content. Otherwise, your message will get lost in all the noise online.

It seems tragic that during this economy, when firms are failing for lack of new business coming in the door, that they are failing to target the 80% or more of their potential clients who are looking on the web for them right now.

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COPYRIGHT © 2009, Charles Brown
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If you like this article, follow me on Twitter.
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Thursday 1

The Value of Listening on Twitter

A lot of virtual ink has been spilled on topics like how to get more Twitter followers, the value of having a large following, how having a lot of followers can enable you to establish a personal brand faster or market your products and services, etc.

But relatively little seems to have been written about how incredibly valuable the people you follow are to your social networking efforts. Yet I often find that the people I follow provide me with a lot of really valuable benefits that I simply would not receive otherwise.

The first that comes to mind is simply the ton of awesome ideas I've gained by reading the links I get on the many tweets that I see each day. Since I've been on Twitter, my Digg file of bookmarked sites has started bulging because I am constantly being exposed to ideas that I never would have seen otherwise.
The second gain I get is that I am able to build relationships with mutual follows. I have received and given comments to various people that have led to full-blown conversations (both online and offline). In some cases, we have even done a little friendly, humorous bantering that has cemented an online friendship. I have long been amazed at how friendships can form online, but Twitter seems to accelerate this process.
I confess to being something of a lurker online. I will at times just read the tweets as they scroll by. What I get from this is a real sense of what people are thinking as a large group. I'm not sure if this will ever add to my wallet, but that is not the point. I am better informed and that makes me better able to write to a larger audience.
Fourth, I find that the people who follow me look a lot like the list of people I follow (another reason to avoid those "black hat" methods that involve following and unfollowing large numbers of people). Of course a high percentage of the people I follow will also follow me in turn. But because I tend to retweet some of the things I learn from them or I write about similar topics, the people who follow me often share common interests.
There is an advantage to having a certain level of homogeneity on Twitter (although I would not want to have all my Twitter conversations be on the same topic). It makes little sense to send out tweets if the people getting them have no iuterest in the topics you tweet about.

I guess what I am saying holds true for other social media platforms as well as Twitter, but I personally use Twitter more often than all the others combined, and the ways I have benefited have therefore been most strongly noticed via Twitter.

The point is, of course, that all social media is about two-way communications. Old style broadcast methods were all about sending messages (aka "shouting"). Social media is about sending, receiving, responding and engaging.

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Wednesday 0

Become an Expert With 5 Ideas a Day

Recently someone introduced me to a business group as an expert on how to become an expert.

I help professionals or professional services organizations that want to become recognized authorities in their fields. I call myself a Rainmaking Coach, a Personal Branding Coach, or a marketing strategist for professional practices.

This does not mean I can take people who are not good at their profession and pull a P.T. Barnum scam with them. These people must actually be good at what they do in order to promote them. But we all know there are some very good professionals who toil away in obscurity because they do not know how to market themselves.

In the past, self promoters sought out speaking engagements, wrote articles for publication and wrote books to get publicity about themselves.

Without neglecting these possibilities, the internet has opened up a lot more doors to spread the word about who you are and what you do. But it still comes down to having useful information to share, in a simplified format that communicates well. You can’t be an expert if you don’t have expert advice to share.

One of the best formats for sharing your knowledge and skill is giving tips or numbered lists.

Let’s face it, even if we are in a highly professional field, we still prefer to read articles, blog posts and information pieces that are in the form of short bullet points and tips.

This format is easier on the eyes, breaks complex information into “bite sized” pieces and makes difficult concepts easier to understand.

I keep a notebook with me in which I write down all kinds of short ideas having to do with self promotion and web marketing. I have hundreds of tips written down in that book and I use it as a constant source of ideas. I draw from this notebook when I am preparing for a speaking engagement, writing an article for this blog, or a series of video presentations I am working on, my ebooks and of course the BOOK I am currently at work on.

In fact, this article is the result of just one of those tips written into my notebook.

I have made a commitment that no matter what, I will write down five ideas a day in that notebook.

If you want to become a guru, an expert, or “micro celebrity” in your field, you need a system to collect all the great ideas that pass through your head each day. If you will keep a place handy to write them down, you will never be at a loss over what to write a blog article about or what to talk about in a workshop you have to give.

Just promise yourself that you will write down five ideas a day. It couldn’t be easier.

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Tuesday 3

How to Find Time to Blog

There’s no doubt about it, starting a blog is a commitment. To use an already overworked metaphor, blogging is a marathon not a sprint.

Your daily investment need not be very large, but if your goal is to establish a personal brand or become a recognized authority in your field, you have to keep at it over the long haul to see real results.

The challenge is to successful blogging are significant:

What to blog about? In other words, what is your over all theme?
How to come up with new things to blog about, day in day out?
How to write a blog if you are busy making a living?
How to produce new blog posts on a regular, consistent schedule?

Fortunately, there are a number of ways to streamline this whole process so that your time commitment to your blog doesn’t overwhelm your life. Here are some ideas:

Begin with a theme. For most professionals, you would do well by focusing on the problems you are both very good at solving. Then determine a niche of people who need to solve these problems. This is your niche and the theme to your blog.
Create a master list of how-to tips. Just collect and write down as many tips and ideas as you can, and then over time, keep adding to this list. Once your list gets fairly large, you will find an almost endless supply of things to blog about. Each tip might be an entire blog post, or a group of them might fall into one article. You might also find that you can drill down into each idea to find more insights.
Decide on a schedule. Few busy professionals can commit to putting up a new blog post every day, but posting two or three new articles a week should be doable if you follow the other tips discussed here.
Create a comparatively smaller list of long tail keywords. Constantly refine this list and use these keywords in two ways. First, you will want to draw from your keyword list as you write your various articles, in order to optimize your blog for search engine results (see “Blogging to Dominate Keywords and Google – Part One” and “Blogging to Dominate Keywords and Google - Part Two” to see how one blogger did this the right way).
The second reason for having a list of keywords is to set up Google Alerts so that you will receive daily emails whenever new pages pertaining to these keywords show up on Google. By the way, another use of Google Alerts is to help you refine your keywords. If you find you are getting a lot of “junk” results, that are not what you are looking for, you know your keyword needs to be revised.
Identify several other bloggers that write on topics similar to yours. Blogging is not a competitive sport. Instead you will find a lot of cooperation amongst bloggers. When you find a good blog, subscribe to its RSS feed, post regular comments on it, and write trackback articles that spin off from interesting articles you find on them.
Have a couple of “cheats” ready in reserve. There will always be times when you either don’t feel like writing or are too busy. When this happens to me, I often go over to YouTube and find a video that relates to my topic. Then I will embed the code (this embed code is just to the right of the video) on my blog and write a few paragraphs about the video and the idea(s) behind it.
Another “cheat” you may wish to use is http://ezinearticles.com. This is a site that makes a massive amount of articles available for reprint as long as you reprint it without modification and give the author proper credit. The quality of these articles is all over the map, however, so be very selective. Also, if you overuse a source like this, you will dilute the brand and voice of your blog. Remember the purpose of your blog is to position YOU as an expert and this won’t happen if you always use other people’s material. But as an occasional respite, it probably won’t do your blog much harm.

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Monday 2

Facebook vs LinkedIn? Which is The Better Self-Marketing Tool?

Ok, let’s just jump right into the fray. Which is a better social media platform for business people who need to market themselves? And by this, I would also include those who are conducting a job search.

Facebook is obviously the bigger kid on the block with much more muscle to flex when it comes to building a social network online. But LinkedIn has its fans too, and seems to especially target business people. LinkedIn reputedly has the added advantage of being a place where corporate headhunters lurk in order to find high value talent.

One thing I especially like about LinkedIn is that it provides a visual representation of the “Six Degrees of Separation” concept. If you look someone up - assuming that person is on LinkedIn as well - you can often find that they are connected to someone you are connected to... or connected to someone one of your contacts is connected to, etc. This visual landscape of connectedness can be very valuable as you can then ask your contacts to make introductions for you via their system.

Another big plus going for LinkedIn is that it displays a person’s profile and references at the click of a mouse.

All this means that if you are on the buying side of a transaction, you can easily use LinkedIn to seek out quality vendors and get recommendations from people in your network.

But for the self marketer, there are a number of flaws that I find in LinkedIn’s system. The first is that it is very difficult to add new people to your first level of contacts. Obviously this is done for the purpose of preventing a lot of unsolicited sales pitches, but as we will see, there may be a better way to accomplish this purpose.

Like all such platforms, LinkedIn gathers most of your first level of contacts from your email address book. The trouble is that many people I network with are no longer people I communicate with by email. I have met a great number of people using other platforms, such as my blog, Twitter or Facebook. We may communicate with each other quite a bit, but I just don't have their email addresses handy.

Contrast this to Facebook, which provides a button that I have placed on my blog. If someone wants to “friend” me on Facebook, they just have to click the button and send me a friend request.

If I want to “friend” someone else on Facebook, I just have to search for that person and send them a friend request. I can add a small comment to tell this person that what we have in common or where we met, etc. Then that person has the option of confirming or ignoring my friend request.

If I want to add someone to my LinkedIn contacts, I have to send a message to an existing contact who must then send an introduction to the person I want to contact. (I don’t think LinkedIn allows for third or fourth level introductions, but I am willing to be corrected if someone knows better).

Let’s contrast both of these to Twitter, which is the 800 pound gorilla when it comes to ease of adding new contacts. In an excellent article, 7 Lessons Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Twitter’s Success, Rohit Bhargava, points out that enabling users to “Skip the Extra Step” is one of the reasons Twitter has grown so quickly.

Admittedly, Twitter has one purpose and Facebook/LinkedIn have another. I use Twitter’s fast growth capabilities to attract people to my Facebook page and to my blog. But I like the control Facebook gives me to ignore some friend requests if I choose. On the other hand, LinkedIn’s process is just ridiculously onerous, in my opinion.

Another big factor tilting the scales in Facebook’s favor is the ease of joining or creating Facebook groups. These groups can be formed around a common purpose, which is an awesome way to expand one’s network.

If you become an active participant in such a group, you can then send friend requests to various members of the group based on a common interest. Although LinkedIn also has groups, the “Extra Step” they require to reach out to fellow members and add them to your contacts makes them practically useless.

I am well aware that some of you may have strong opinions on this subject and may even (perish the thought) disagree with me. If so, I welcome your comments.

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