By honing your social networking skills and adapting them to this fast-paced environment, you can use Twitter as the starting point to build a strong business network.

There are two parts to networking on Twitter:

• First, you need to connect with the people you want to get to know.
• Second, you need to find a way to establish relationships with the right people and get beyond the scope of Twitter.

Just like in the offline world, you’ll find people with different styles of communication and different levels of people skills.

We don’t all have Mari Smith’s communication pizzazz.

But don’t let this deter you. You simply need to identify the communication styles used by the people you want to connect with and then join in.

Here are 8 different ways to begin networking on Twitter.

#1: Show Others What You Want to Talk About

First, remember to show others what you are most interested in. You communicate your areas of interest in several ways:

• Paint a picture of who you are with your Twitter bio.
• Shows others what you like to talk about with the content you tweet.
• Share the conversations you are interested in by using hashtags in your tweets.
• Tell others who’s important to you with the names of your Twitter lists.
• The lists you are on show how others see you.

By paying attention to the consistency of your Twitter presence, you’ll send a strong message of what interests you and you’ll attract the people you want to connect with most.

#2: Get Your Actions Right

Your first impression always counts, even on Twitter. Others will notice content on your Twitter profile page: your Twitter handle, your photo, your name, the page you link to and your bio. And they will also notice the actions you take.

• Follow. Do you have approximately the same number of followers as the number of people following you?
• Autofollow. Do you automatically follow everyone?
• Welcome messages. Do you send a welcome message? Is it a personalized message or one that looks like an automated message? Does it promote something or does it show you want to connect and care?

There are no absolute guidelineson what you should do.  You simply need to act in an appropriate way for the people you want to connect with. 

Twitter monitoring will help you find out how to make the right first impression. Regular monitoring will also keep you up to date on any changing trends in Twitter etiquette so you can adjust your tactics when needed.

#3: Retweet Others

Do you feel uncomfortable about reaching out to others on Twitter?  Retweeting is a great way to start networking but you usually need to do a bit more to get a response and start a dialogue.  For example, add some personal comments to the retweet.  Notice how others engage with people and copy the ones you like.

"Good morning!" The simplest tweets often work best.

#4: Shout Out to Others

If you want to connect with someone on Twitter and just don’t know where to start, here are some ways of simply shouting out to people on Twitter to get them to notice you.

• Consider mentioning them for #FollowFriday.  You do this by simply saying something nice about the person, include their Twitter ID and “#FollowFriday” or “#ff”.

• Another option is a public mention of someone you appreciate.

Show your appreciation after connecting elsewhere.

#5: Link to ‘Other’ Social Conversations

As you monitor Twitter and other social media platforms, you’ll notice more conversations. Show others you are paying attention to their conversations.

• When you notice someone’s birthday on Facebook, send a “Happy Birthday” with their @name on Twitter to show you are paying attention to them.
• When you come across a great LinkedIn question, link to it and give the @name of the author on Twitter.
• When you read a great blog post, share the link and take the time to find and mention the author’s @name in your tweet.

The more you show others you are listening to them, the more they’ll pay attention to you.

#6: Write Tweets to Engage Conversations

After getting on other people’s radar, it’s time to take the networking up a notch and try to begin a real conversation.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to reply to a tweet and add value.

• Add useful information.
• Ask a good question.
• Show you are sincerely interested in the topic.

Make it easy to respond to your tweets.

#7: Introduce People

As you meet more people on Twitter, you’ll see people with similar interests.  Take the initiative and introduce people! This is a great way of strengthening your own network because others will notice your introductions and make associations.

Introductions are easy to make.

#8: Create Opportunities to Network Further

What can you do when networking opportunities just do not seem to pop up naturally? Create a reason to network with the people who interest you!  Tweetups and Twitter discussions are a great way to do this.

Another easy first step is to start a public list of people you recommend on Twitter. As you come across people to add to this list, give them a shout out to show your recognition. You’ll find it much easier to connect with people this way.

You might also want an additional step to feel more comfortable with the people you meet on Twitter. Sometimes you need a good ice-breaker.  I find Twitter Interviews helpful because they are usually a fun experience for both participants and I also get to know more about the people I interview.

Networking Beyond Twitter

As you begin to develop your network on Twitter, you’ll want to regularly spend time making connections beyond Twitter.  A phone call or a chat on Skype is always a good step.

Twitter will simply become one of the communication tools you use in your overall business networking plan.

Do you network on Twitter? What tactics do you use to reach out and connect with others? I’d love to hear about what works best for you.  Please share your stories in the comments below.

Yet, how do you pull off “authentic” while maintaining the company brand message?

It’s tough enough for a small business. What if you’re #2 on Business Week‘s best global brands list, with nearly 400,000 employees across 170 countries?

At IBM, it’s about losing control.

“We don’t have a corporate blog or a corporate Twitter ID because we want the ‘IBMers’ in aggregate to be the corporate blog and the corporate Twitter ID,” says Adam Christensen, social media communications at IBM Corporation.

“We represent our brand online the way it always has been, which is employees first. Our brand is largely shaped by the interactions that they have with customers.”

Thousands of IBMers are the voice of the company. Such an approach might be surprising for #14 on the Fortune 500.

Edgy at 114

At 114 years old, IBM seems to be the Madonna of the corporate world, staying relevant from decade to decade. The first company to build a mainframe computer and help NASA land a man on the moon still holds more patents than any other U.S.-based technology company.

As it turns out, its decentralized social media approach is another milestone in the company’s history—driving unprecedented collaboration and innovation.

IBM lets employees talk—to each other and the public—without intervention. With a culture as diverse and distributed as IBM’s, getting employees to collaborate and share makes good business sense.

“We’re very much a knowledge-based company. It’s really the expertise of the employee that we’re hitting on,” Christensen says.

No Policing

IBM does have social media guidelines. The employee-created guidelines basically state that IBMers are individually responsible for what they create and prohibit releasing proprietary information.

But the document lacks any mention of brand messages or values.

Nor does IBM corporate regulate employee social media activity. Only three people hold social media roles at the corporate level, and oversight isn’t part of their jobs.

“We don’t police. The community’s largely self-regulating, and so there hasn’t really been a need to have someone go about and circuit these boards and blogs,” Christensen said. “Employees sort of do that themselves… And that’s worked wonderfully well.”

17,000 Inside Blogs

IBMers use tools such as Twitter and LinkedIn for external activity, but take advantage of mostly IBM tools inside the company. Internally, 100,000 employees have registered on the blogging platform to rate and comment on posts across 17,000 blogs.

In this vibrant forum, employees exchange ideas, advance conversations and do a little self-promotion of their projects.

An internal wiki serves as a hub of information, drawing well over a million page views every day. Additionally, downloads in the company’s user-generated media library now total 11 million.

An IBM tool called Dogear functions like Delicious, a social bookmarking site. Blue Twit mimics Twitter. A tool called SocialBlue acts like Facebook, helping employees stay connected with former colleagues and get to know new ones.

Like Facebook, the 53,000 or so SocialBlue members share photos and status updates. In IBM’s widely dispersed environment, family photos mimic cubicle-decor and dialogue mimics water-cooler interaction.

Thousands of Voices

Run an online search for “IBM blog” and you’ll find countless IBMers posting publicly on everything from service-oriented architecture to sales to parenthood. If you want to blog at IBM, you simply start.

IBM lists all of its blogs in a simple directory sorted by the name of the blogger.

They share thoughts, ideas, presentations, photos, videos, you name it. In 2006, the IBM mainframe blog hit the big time for posting a series of videos on YouTube that linked back to the blog. The Art of the Sale mockumentaries, in The Office style, lightheartedly poke fun at IBM and corporate sales in general.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSqXKp-00hM

Additionally, an estimated 200,000 employees are on LinkedIn, with another 50,000 former employees in alum networks on LinkedIn and Facebook.

The Wisdom of Crowds

Christensen ties IBM’s social media explosion to company “jams.” In 2003, IBM conducted its first jam, not unlike a band jam, bringing employees together in an online forum for three straight days.

“It was a big, online collaborative experiment,” Christensen said. “The first 8 to 10 hours, it was very negative. Over the next 12 hours, the conversation completely changed to being very constructive. By the way, there was no intervention by corporate to say, ‘Hey guys, let’s be more constructive.’ It was completely employee-led.”

“We realized we could trust employees to engage. Employees realized, ‘if we’re within reason, we’re going to be trusted’.”

A couple of months later, IBM opened blogging platforms inside the company.

IBM now includes much bigger and more diverse crowds—as many as 500,000 people in some cases. An innovation jam in 2006 brought together employees—and friends, family and clients—to discuss more than 50 research projects within the company.

From there, they voted on the 10 best, which became incubator businesses that IBM funded with $100 million, all based on “crowd” discussion.

Smarter Planet

A few incubator businesses—intelligent utility systems, smarter transportation systems and electronic health records—were the start of what is now a major IBM movement, Smarter Planet. The initiative puts IBM computing power and problem-solving toward issues like rush-hour traffic or natural disaster response.

It really began as a grassroots movement among employees.

“There are communities that, long before IBM started talking about it, had already congregated online and were talking about these areas. We are very focused on understanding where those communities are and how we can appropriately play with them.”

Christensen himself is one of several authors on the public “Building a Smarter Planet” blog, which highlights ideas and initiatives on the topic, not just within IBM.

Here is a screen shot of the Building a Smarter Planet Blog.

But all the public IBM Smarter Planet discourse is not just about amassing IBMers. Sometimes Smarter Planet projects—which can impact millions—need public support.

“There are communities that are passionate about this, and maybe we can help to amplify some of their voices and really make some of this just happen,” Christensen says. “So social media plays a big role in it.”

The Payoff

IBM invests in creating its own social media tools. But it’s earning that back by monetizing some of those as part of the IBM product portfolio. The other part of the investment equation—employees’ time—doesn’t seem to be a concern, according to Christensen.

That’s because collaboration and knowledge make IBM what it is. And that’s a company with $12.3 billion in earnings on more than $100 billion in revenue with a 44.1% gross profit margin in 2008.

Christensen says to date there’s not an effort to tag a return on investment to its social media efforts.

“I think if you’d ask any senior executive at IBM, ‘How important is it for our employees to be smarter?‘, inherently they understand that these tools can play in helping with that,” Christensen said. “I don’t see myself rarely or ever having that hard conversation on the value of engaging employees in these spaces.”

What do you think about IBM’s social media program? What level of control have you found most effective for your company’s social media efforts? What are your favorite crowd-sourcing tools?  Leave a comment below.

Did you know you can add retweet buttons inside your PDF files?  The benefit: readers can effortlessly share your great work with their Twitter followers—just by clicking a button in your PDF file.

Below I lay out how to do this in six simple steps.  By the way, if you like this article, please click the retweet button you see above.

How it Works

If you have white papers, ebooks or reports, then you’ll want to add embedded retweet buttons inside your PDF files.  As readers discover your valuable PDF document, they simply click a retweet button within the PDF file.  The result: a message is sent to their Twitter followers pointing them to your document (can you say viral marketing?).

The retweet button allows any reader to easily post a tweet into his or her Twitter account.  And it’s not just any tweet, but one that’s prefabricated by you and links back to the original landing page where your document resides.

Here’s an example:

Note that I precrafted the above tweet.  The only steps readers need to take are clicking the retweet button in the PDF file and then clicking the update button in Twitter (see above image).  If a reader is not logged into Twitter, it still works.  The reader simply is prompted to login and then your tweet is populated into the “What are you doing” field as shown above.

Why You Should Create Retweet Buttons in PDF Files

Because of their portable nature, PDFs are often downloaded to readers’ desktops. In addition, PDF files can be easily emailed to people, or posted in forums or on other websites.

Because a PDF file can float around, the promotional options typically found on your landing page (like a retweet button) are not available to someone who only has the file.  So it’s important to provide your readers a simple way to share your great document with their fans. And that’s precisely where the PDF retweet button comes in handy.

A few benefits of having a retweet button in your PDF file include:

• Empowers readers to easily share your PDF with their fans
• Allows readers to show their appreciation of your work by simply clicking a button
• Provides steady streams of traffic to your PDF file (because as people discover the file, they will retweet it if they like the content)
• Allows you to know precisely who is sharing your document (for marketing engagement)

And I’m sure there are tons of other benefits.

6 Steps to Creating a Retweet Button in Your PDF File

Step 1: Create a Retweet Graphic and Put it in Your Document

You will need to create a little graphic you can place in your original document.  If you have access to a designer, you’ll want to create something really simple that says “Retweet this.”  I might suggest you place a blue bird on the graphic to give a visual signal to Twitter users.

Or, you can just swipe the one my designer created (see below):

You’ll need to place this image in your original source file.  So if you’ve created your document in Microsoft Word, you’ll want to pick some strategic locations to place the image.  I suggest placing the retweet image in more than one location.

In my Social Media Marketing Industry Report, I placed the retweet image in three locations: pages 2, 5 and 25.

Step 2: Create a Tracking URL That Links to the Document Landing Page

You need a permanent home for your PDF file—one where Twitter fans can go to locate the document.  For example, http://www.whitepapersource.com/socialmediamarketing/report/ is the resting place for my Social Media Marketing Industry Report.

I recommend it be a landing page that links to the actual PDF file, NOT a link that sends people directly to the PDF file.  A real landing page (like the link you see above) provides you the benefit of explaining what the document is all about.  In addition, you can add videos, comments and other features to that landing page which will encourage people to engage.

So once you have the actual URL for the landing page, the next step is to use a URL shortener.  These services will take your long URL and create a short one.  Look for one that also does marketing tracking.

Two I suggest are http://bit.ly and http://cli.gs.  I am a fan of bit.ly because it provides real-time click data, is able to tell what parts of the world people are clicking from and also tracks social media conversations tied to your bit.ly URL (see image below).

This image shows some of the intelligence bit.ly provides based on click-through data.

Step 3: Write Your Tweet

Now that you have a shortened tracking URL, go ahead and craft a compelling tweet for your PDF document.  Here are a few tips:

• Keep it simple. Try to keep the total length to 120 characters or fewer (ideally 100).  This allows Twitter folks to add comments or content to the tweet.
• Consider using a hashtag for tracking purposes.  You can simply go to http://search.twitter.com and search for “#yourtag” (where you replace ‘yourtag’ with a series of unique letters).  For example, we used “#smreport” for the Social Media Marketing Industry Report.  This allowed us to easily track the number of retweets by simply searching Twitter with the hashtag.
• Use your Twitter ID: If you want to grow your following, consider using your Twitter ID in your tweet.  I used @Mike_Stelzner in my example, to help grow a following.  A few conventions here include adding ‘via @YourName’ to the end of the tweet or ‘RT: @YourName’ to the front of the tweet.

Step 4: Create the PDF File

You should now have your retweet graphic in a few key locations inside your PDF file.  Go ahead and generate the PDF file.  If you use a PC and do not have the ability to make PDF files, you can go here to learn how to do that: https://createpdf.adobe.com/.

If you are on a Mac, all you need to do is select the PDF option in the print menu (see image below).

Step 5: Create the Special URL

So here’s where the magic comes in.  It’s really very straightforward.  You’ll need to create a special URL that will tell Twitter everything it needs to know to make this all work.

Part one: Copy this text: http://twitter.com/?status=

Part two: Add your tweet from Step 3 above.  For example: http://twitter.com/?status=RT: @mike_stelzner Social Media Marketing Industry Report (Free, must read) http://cli.gs/QYEpY2 #smreport.

http://twitter.com/?status=RT: @mike_stelzner Social Media Marketing Industry Report %28Free, must read%29 http://cli.gs/QYEpY2 %23smreport

A note about hashtags.  If you have a hashtag (the # symbol) in your tweet, you need to replace it with the following text: %23.  For example, #mydoc becomes %23mydoc in your special URL.  Note that I have seen some situations where # works and others where it does not, so play it safe.

Now test the link.  If you paste it into your browser, it should show up in your Twitter status window.  Make sure your hashtag is showing up.

Step 6: Hotlink the Retweet Graphic Inside Your PDF File

This next step is going to require Adobe Acrobat Pro.  If you do not have Acrobat Pro, try to find someone who does.  Acrobat Pro will allow you to create hotlinks inside your PDF file.

In Acrobat, locate the retweet buttons you added into your file and simply create a clickable link for each retweet graphic.   Use the special URL you created in Step 5 above.

Here’s what you need to do.  When in Acrobat Professional, you want to use the Link Tool.  In Acrobat Professional 8, this is found under the Tools menu and then under the Advanced Editing submenu.

Once you have selected the Link Tool, you can simply take your mouse and drag a rectangle over the retweet graphic.  Up will pop a box called ‘Create Link’ (see below).  You want to keep the link type invisible, highlight style to ‘None’ and select ‘Open a web page’ as the link action.

Then hit the ‘Next’ button.  You’ll be prompted to enter your special URL.  Just paste it in.

Now repeat the process for all the retweet buttons you have in your PDF file.  Save it and you’re done.  Your last step is to get the file up on your landing page.

Now you can sit back and watch the magic happen as people retweet your PDF document.  I like creating a saved search query in my Twitter profile so I can see with a single click how often the document is retweeted.

So what do you think? Is this something that could benefit your business?  Let me know your experience.