So you’ve been to the networking breakfast and the guest speaker told you that regular, frequent tweets are essential to building your presence on Twitter.

But what to tweet?

For some people, that never seems to be an issue.

For others, it’s a challenge.

If you sometimes feel you have a Twitter content deficit, this post may help you.

But first, have you connected your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts?

If you haven’t added your Twitter account details to your LinkedIn account, go to “Edit My Profile” and click “Add Twitter account” next to the Twitter field. Twitter will ask you to verify your account name and password. Once the account is verified, you’ll be asked how you’d like to share your tweets on LinkedIn.

Or if you have already connected your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, you can just go to Settings and click on “Manage your Twitter settings” (half way down the Settings page).

Note by the way that I’ve used the second check box option to share on LinkedIn only those tweets that I so specify. That’s my personal (business) choice, in that I don’t think all my tweets belong on LinkedIn: my guess from a lot of updates that have come from Twitter is that some people have left that box unchecked.

Now, for a constant supply of tweetable content, let’s look at LinkedIn Updates

LinkedIn Updates draws on the various updates that people in your LinkedIn network provide, both with conscious attention, as in sharing a link, and by default when they take certain actions without necessarily thinking about sharing, such making a new connection or updating their profile.

Many of those conscious updates can provide you with instant content for Twitter, either by re-tweeting from within LinkedIn, or bu using the Share function.

All LinkedIn members can add to the update stream by:

• creating an update on their Home page
• creating an update in the Edit Profile view
• clicking on Share on someone else’s updates

A bit more about the LinkedIn Update stream

Because the update stream is drawn from our individual networks, the stream is different for everyone. Each of us can see ours on our Home page on LinkedIn.

The default setting for the update stream on our Home page is All, as in this screenshot of my Updates as I write this.

By clicking through the menu bar you can select another option. For example, you can just have Shares showing, which excludes all those notifications of who has connected with whom, so using that option you can screen faster for content you want to share.

From the three updates in the screenshot above, you can see two types of update: the first is a notification of a connection between LinkedIn members – those are triggered automatically; the next two are posts made first to Twitter and then copied to LinkedIn (see the information about Settings above).

The main objective of this post is to show how you can send items the other way, from LinkedIn to Twitter.

And in that regard, you’ll have noted that those update examples above don’t illustrate the Share option for adding an update.

So in this screenshot below, from an update I’ve done today using the Update option with View Profile, an arrow points to the Share option. If someone wants to share that update with their network, they just click on “Share”.

Et voilá, the update appears at the same time on Twitter – although in abbreviated form within Twitter’s 140 character limit.

That was easy.

In fact, I did not have to do anything extra beyond providing the LinkedIn update, because  the update editing box has the Twitter share set as default, as indicated in the next screenshot.

I just have to remember to uncheck that box if I don’t want a particular update of mine to copy across to Twitter.

Using LinkedIn updates and linking to Twitter helps also with your LinkedIn presence

One of the many ways people miss out on the potential of LinkedIn to help them grow their business or career is in not realizing that there is a lot more to a successful use of LinkedIn than having just a nicely polished profile there.

Making it a daily habit to provide updates on LinkedIn and sharing them to Twitter can give a real boost to your presence on LinkedIn as well as on Twitter.

Leverage.

In another post or two I’ll explain how to use a couple more LinkedIn features to provide fresh content for your Twitter account – and in the process for your LinkedIn presence too.

Seven years ago in this month of May in the year 2005, the LinkedIn Bloggers Group was created, initially on the Yahoo! Groups platform and not long afterwards on LinkedIn Groups.

So using Mr Reiss’ calculation as a guide, the LinkedIn Bloggers Group is 32.9 old in “people years”.

I think you would have to call that well established.

About the Group

LinkedIn Bloggers Group is a discussion and networking group focused on blogging and other social media, in the context of professional networking, especially via LinkedIn.

From the outset, the Group aimed to attract (and succeeded in attracting) both newcomers to the field, willing to learn, and people with experience, willing to share, including leading, well respected bloggers.

Open group

At first, LinkedIn Bloggers was a closed, members only group. A while ago we made it open, which means that discussions can be seen by anyone on the web and can be shared on other social networking platforms. People who want to participate in the discussions still have to apply for membership, but that is rarely declined – mainly if someone has no information on their LinkedIn profile and we can’t find any evidence that there is a real person applying.

Spam free zone

Having checked into a few other LinkedIn groups recently, one thing that strikes me is that a number of groups seem to be not much more than link farms, where in the “Discussion” section people just post a link to their own latest blog post, without any accompanying, discussion-promoting comment.

Whereas with LinkedIn Bloggers we have been able to keep the group almost completely free of that practice, which I personally regard as group spam, although enough people have disagreed with me to know that I would be unlikely to get 100% support for the notion in any gathering of bloggers.

It would be fair to say we take a hard line on excluding anything that looks to the group managers like spam.

That’s because we want to hold the Discussion space for just that – discussion.

And civilized discussion at that.

We have always followed a strict policy of insisting that discussion be conducted in a civilized, courteous, if often vigorous, mode.

Only two rules

There are just two basic rules at LinkedIn Bloggers:

Rule 1: Respect the discussion space, in terms of topic, content and tone
Rule 2. Respect your colleagues in the group

We spell out what those rules entail: see  Group Rules (link at top right of Group page).

Your invitation

If you are looking for a group where you can have serious and enjoyable conversation about blogging and other social media and/or professional social networking, where you can bounce ideas, seek information and advice, I encourage you to check out LinkedIn Bloggers.

Often, especially when I’ve been strapped for time or blog post ideas, or both, I’ve thought how good it could be to have some guest bloggers keeping the show rolling with more frequency of posts.

And in fact I get pitched enough by prospective guest bloggers to make that quite feasible.

The thing is, I don’t want to rush into any such arrangement.

I need to think through the implications. And the expectations on both sides.

Especially I need to think what the implications and expectations might be about the focus, content and style of this blog, all of which have for the most part been for me to decide and execute since I started the blog, about seven and a half years ago.

Especially, I will want to have some idea of how a guest blogger is going to add value to the site.

It’s Not That I Don’t Think There’s Room for Improvement

I really don’t believe I’m being precious about this.

I know that the blog could offer a lot more in terms of content and style.

It’s just that if I am going to set out on the guest blogger path, I want to have thought it through and set out some “rules of engagement”.

And I’ll want to have some reasonable assurance that the guest posts will add value.

In doing that, I would be drawing on both good and bad experiences.

On the good side, I would draw on my experience as part of the team on the Business Blog Consulting site, which has gone a bit quiet just now, but back then was for me both a challenge and a delight to blog for.

A challenge because I was suddenly in the company of some very smart, very fluent and well-established experts in the field, so I was always keen to put my best blogging foot forward. A delight because it was something special to be part of that group and to learn from them. An unanticipated bonus is that some of those bloggers became and have remained good friends and always helpful colleagues.

The experience showed me what might have been bleedingly obvious if I’d thought of it, that a blog with a number of authors with something worth saying and the skill to say it well can sometimes be much more interesting and valuable than a blog with just one, or mainly one, author.

On the not so good side, I’ve found myself more than once starting to read a post on a site I’ve liked and respected and had the experience of wondering just when the author stopped being able to write a coherent sentence or have something useful or interesting to say. Only to find that it’s a guest post by someone evidently not in the same league as the author. I’ve rarely gone back to the site and I’ve usually stopped checking the site in my RSS reader.

So if and when I start opening the site to guest bloggers, I want to be sure that there will be at the very least some broad consistency of focus and a quality of post that is respectful of the thoughtful reader and is of a standard of thought and presentation that won’t embarrass me or irritate you, the reader.

It Would Probably Help to Have Read at Least a Few of the Posts Here

I am alternately amused or slightly irritated when I see from the details provided by my contact form system that someone wanting to provide a guest post seems to have looked only at the home page and the contact page.

Maybe on a previous visit they looked at some of my posts, but I have to wonder. Certainly I can’t recall any such enquirer giving any indication that they had actually read any of my posts, let alone agreed with what I’d written, disagreed, been confused, or had any particular reaction.

Nor do people generally provide links to their own work so that I could get a sense of possible compatibility. And a list of topics someone could write on is not a sample of work.

Time for Some Guidelines?

I don’t actually need another item right now on my To Do list, but I’m including “guest blogging guidelines” and will at some time in the not too distance future put some work into that. If you know of any existing examples of such guidelines and they are public/shareable, I would appreciate knowing about them.

Also if you have any views for or against guest blogging or any tips you care to dispense, please share.

Image credit: “Blogging Fun!” by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com on Flickr CC BY 2.0

This post is a follow up on a post last week about finding free images to use for blog posts and presentations, where I focused on using Wordle images.

This post is about using images from the photo sharing site Flickr.

Now if you’ve used Flickr you might think a post on the subject would be an example of the old adage about teaching your grandmother to suck eggs.

But when it comes to using images from Flickr for blog posts or presentation decks, there are a few extra steps beyond going to Flickr.com and downloading images we like.

Because while all the images on Flickr can be copied or downloaded, there are copyright issues which govern how we can use specific images.

Creative Commons

Fortunately for bloggers and presenters wanting to use images appropriately, Flickr provides the tools, under Advanced Search, to find an image with a Creative Commons license meets our needs.

Not everyone seems to understand that there is not just one “Creative Commons” license, as has been illustrated for me a couple of times when I asked someone if I could use an image for a specific purpose, say for a blog post, and got the response, “Sure, it’s Creative Commons”. As I explain below, just knowing it’s “Creative Commons” might not protect me from breaching the license terms.

The fact is, we need to be sure we are complying with the terms of the specific Creative Commons (CC) license attached to the specific  image we propose to use. The different licenses and their terms of use are explained here.

By the way, a caveat if one is necessary: I am not a lawyer, nor any kind of copyright specialist. I’m just sharing here what I know and how I understand it.

The three types of license I make use of are:

Attribution CC BY

This gives you the most scope for use, as long as you provide attribution to the owner. I usually do that at the end of the blog post or presentation.

Attribution Share Alike CC BY_SA

This license lets you remix, tweak, and build upon the original work even for commercial purposes, as long as you credit the owner and license your new creations under the identical terms.

Attribution No Derivatives CC BY_ND

This, as the name suggests, gives a narrower protection to the original image. For example, with this license in play I can’t crop an image, or add text to it. But if I just want to use the image as is, there is no problem with using one covered by this license.

The three other CC licenses are more restrictive if we want to use an image commercially. Does that mean I need the owner’s permission if I want to use an image so protected on a company blog? Just google “Creative Commons non commercial use” and you’ll see it’s a gray area. Personally, I don’t want to be holding up a blog post till I have checked with the image owner: so I don’t use images which come under any of the “NonCommercial” licenses.

There’s a Catch – or Two

As I said, I don’t like to hold up a blog post (or a presentation slide deck for that matter) to wait on permission to use an image, so even when I have found an image that has one of the three CC licenses but has other conditions, I don’t bother.

The two other conditions that I’ve seen are:

• where under the CC info there is also the Getty Images “g” symbol and some text requiring permission to use the  image is identified as being from Getty Images and you need to pay to use it
• where the owner specifies that he or she is to be contacted for approval, prior to specific use

Even with those limitations, that usually still leaves me scope to find an image I can use.

Still to come: using Flickr Advanced Search to choose your images

In another post I’ll go through the process, step by step, for using Flickr’s Advanced Search to choose the images you want and then download them.

I’m no web search expert, but from various things I’ve heard and read from people who seem to know what they are talking about, having images, not just text, in our blog posts can help the search engine ranking prospects of those posts. See for example this presentation by Danny Dover, from the top search people, SEOMoz.

So I nearly always have an image of some sort in a blog post. And I work at finding something related to what’s in the text. Sometimes the relationship is a bit tenuous, as in the image of clouds which I used yesterday in a post elsewhere about the use of the word “nuance”.

I usually spend more time than I care to in searching for a suitable image for a post. Which is why I like to be on the lookout for easier, faster ways to accomplish the objective.

Ease of use is important

I like to get images that are:

• free to use
• ideally able to be modified without breaching copyright

A note on “free to use”. I’ve found I can waste a lot of time looking at “free” images I’ve found via Google, that turn out to be “royalty free” but still requiring a one-off payment before they can be used.

Two sources I use a lot are Wordle and Flickr.

I also invariably use one or both of those for slide decks for my presentations.

In this post I want to focus on Wordle: note that I posted about Wordle a couple of years ago, so this is an update which hopefully benefits from my longer experience now with the tool.

In a subsequent post I will turn my attention to Flickr.

Wordle

Wordle is self-described as “… a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide”.

A toy it may be, but it is also a very useful communication and business aid.

For example, in a presentation on social media a while ago for a local business group, I wanted to explain how a systematic, strategic approach to social media can transform confusion and overwhelm to clarity and a sense of balance. To do that, I used the same set of words and then used the Wordle tools to rearrange how they were presented.

To start, I just typed some words out. You can do that straight into the online tool or type them into an external file, then copy and paste them. You don’t need punctuation and in fact the tool will not feed punctuation marks into the image.

You hit Go and the image is created.

This was the first, “confusing and overwhelming” version I created for my presentation to the business group:

This was the second, “clear and balanced” version:

Note that the words used for the two images are not identical. For the second image I used more words.

Also, I discovered that the clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text, so with the words I wanted to emphasize for the key platforms I was focusing on in my presentation – Facebook, Twitter, blog, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn – I just typed them in more than once (from memory twice, but you can experiment to find out what works for  you).

By the way, from the feedback I got, the images worked very well to make the points I wanted to make.

Create with Atom, RSS or URL 

You can also create a Wordle image by dropping into the appropriate box an Atom or RSS feed, or a URL for a web or blog site.

This is an image I created using the URL for one of my blogs:

You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

This is what I got when I changed the font and colors (but not the layout) for the image just above:

No prize for guessing what words I use most in my blog!

Lots of Options

The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. Or, as I do sometimes, just take a screenshot and save that.

You don’t even have to link the images back to the site or provide attribution to Wordle.net, but as a courtesy I always aim to provide an attribution: with presentations I do that on the acknowledgement slide at the end.