By Roving Social Media Reporter: Kristen Weaver

I can’t tell you the last time I was actually awake at 6am…. but this morning I woke up bright and early to get ready for Meredith Oliver’s new seminar as part of the WOAMTEC Social Media Bootcamp! Today’s session is on LinkedIn, and I’m looking forward to learning more about this powerful business networking tool.

My drive across town was an eclectic mix of old school Janet Jackson (Miss Jackson, if you’re nasty), The Ting Tings and Iron Maiden. Fashionably arriving about 40 minutes early (in true Kristen Weaver style), grabbed a blueberry bagel (from Via Panera), a banana and some orange juice – I’m set up, logged in and ready to learn about LinkedIn!

Meredith’s boot camps are really great because she does so much hands-on training. We all were able to bring our personal laptops to plug in and follow along. Because honestly, hands-on is one of the best ways to learn and become familiar with these new tools.

Ahh, Allen has arrived and decided to harass me about my upcoming housewarming party. If you don’t know Allen, he’s Meredith’s husband (aka Partner in Crime) and super-dad to Brady and Molly Oliver (Molly is the fabulous facebooking dog and infamous, in her own right).

8:30 am – Meredith just kicked off the lesson! Everyone is so attentive! She’s opening by asking everyone what new ideas they took with them following last week’s Facebook session and how they’ve used them. Lots of great accomplishments! Everyone’s been working on their Fan pages, linking and “being wild” – ok, well some of them got the message

Social media can be tedious, long and sometimes overwhelming. But let’s talk about ways to fix that on days when time is money – and you’re short on both! There are 86,400 seconds in a day. If you can spare 300 of them, we’ll be in good shape.

First – using a web client that specifically targets your needs is critical. I prefer to use Mozilla Firefox because of their new improved speed features. Browsing has never been faster, bookmarking has never been simpler, and finding things in a crunch has never been better. Consider it your own “PIA” (Personal Internet Assistant). Firefox has this cool “Awesome Bar” (you may know it as the address bar) that will use your words to find things you’re looking for quickly and easily. Over time, it actually adapts to your preferences to find your favorite websites faster!

The solution I am proposing is to use social media to reestablish trust by allowing your raving fans to do the selling for you! Who do consumers trust? Each other! We naturally trust our neighbor’s referral over any type of formal advertising. Traditionally this has been called “word-of -mouth” marketing.

Here is the GREAT news. Social media is word-of-mouth networking on steriods. And, this is no longer just my supposition. Today eMarketer.com published a study that confirms online advertising trust is on the rise worldwide. “According to the “Global Online Consumer Survey” by Nielsen, 41% of worldwide Internet users trusted online advertising.” In fact, the study reveals the number one advertising tactic trusted by consumers is “recommendations from people I know”. You should definitely check out this fantastic article by eMarketer.com.

This strategy will require risk on your part. What if the reverse happens? What if someone says something negative? Can negative comments destroy all the trust you’ve worked to build up? Yes, if you don’t have a service recovery plan in place. You need a step by step plan in place to handle any negative posts. The plan should answer the following questions:

• How fast will you respond?
• What will your message be?
• How will reassure your other online followers?

With a plan a place you can effectively handle negative posts. AND, get this….you can actually earn MORE trust by allowing an honest dialogue to take place, showing that you have a plan in place and that you take your customer’s concerns seriously. This is the mark of a trustworthy company.

But, let me quell your concerns about negative posts. I monitor a lot of “business” social media sites. I don’t see a lot of negative posts EXCEPT for the big “corporation” type companies. Why? No one wants to fire the first shot across the bow. I believe we are all thinking “If I start the negative avalanche it will eventually catch up to me!” We are afraid to say something negative about another business in fear someone else will do it to our business. Make sense? In fact, I mostly find social media pages for small businesses to be a sickening love fest of unrealistic proportions!

Start allowing your past, current and future customers to talk to each. They can sell you better than you ever will. Open up the dialogue and reap the rewards.

We practice what we preach! Please post a comment below and we invite you to disagree! And, we invite you to become a fan of the Internet Marketing Hotline on Facebook!

Need help with social media? Sign-up for Meredith’s Social Media Boot Camp, Aug. 11, 18 & 25 at the HBA of Metro Orlando.

Are you having trouble keeping all of those little status updates current? I mean, really – there’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace… and it never ends! By the time you update your third website, the first one is already outdated!

There have been a lot of new widgets and applications that you can add to your blog, website and other social media places that will feed directly from your twitter account – but some are still incompatible, like LinkedIn.

So what’s a gal to do? Check out ping.fm! Ping is a free service which allows users to post to multiple social sites simultaneously.

As social media grows in popularity, more of these “hybrid” sites are popping up, allowing us to pull all of our other websites together with one simple interface. Ping is one of the most inclusive sites, with the easiest level of usage and broadest range of coverage.