Am very pleased to launch a "guest post" series in this blog. Ali Turnbull (one of my virtual friends on Twitter, we've spoken on Skype etc and it would be nice to meet up one day!) kindly responded to my previous post on Twitter & Linkedin and offered her very interesting take on Linkedin.

Ali is a web content strategist and a very nice person to chat to!

Ok, now I'll hand over to Ali..

p.s. I'm working on my Twitter/Linkedin type app - it's called WeAreRecommended.com - more details soon...

How LinkedIn adds quality to your Twitter following

Last week in this blog Joel asked ‘Can we use Twitter as LinkedIn?’ and came up with some wizard tips for recommending folk on Twitter in the same way that we do on LinkedIn.

But he said ‘LinkedIn doesn't really do it for me’ and I can see what he means.  Like him, I definitely prefer the informality and fun of Twitter and the discipline of squeezing everything into 140 characters.  And, like him, I believe in quality over quantity when it comes to followers.

However -  there is great potential in LinkedIn for building up quality contacts and prospects. I use LinkedIn to enhance my Twitter experience. Here’s how.

Let’s say I want to connect with internet strategists – people, in fact, just like Joel. First, I’ll choose a town or city to focus on – let’s try Newport in South Wales.

Go to LinkedIn Advanced Search

Enter keyword ‘Internet Strategist’

Location > United Kingdom> in or near NP1 with a 25-mile radius.

Voilà! There he is, Joel H. I see a brief resume but I don’t really know what makes him tick. I see that we are third cousins on LinkedIn, which is a rather distant relationship.  If I want an introduction to him I have to go through several layers of connection, asking third parties for referrals. Moving from Know to Like to Trust is going to take some time and may involve meeting in person and shaking hands. He is 270 miles away.

I could just send him the standard   ‘I’d like to add you…’ LinkedIn message. But I know this is poor LinkedIn etiquette and my response to these is usually  ‘Excuse me, and you are…?

But look! There, on LinkedIn, is a link to Joel’s Twitter profile. I can cut out the middlemen and women who stand between us and go straight to his business Twitter account www.twitter.com/Jojet. I see he also has a personal Twitter account where I find out that he likes to start the weekend with a pint of Rev James (ABV 4.5% – ‘Full bodied and warming, rich in palate, spicy and aromatic with a deeply satisfying finish’). I have moved from Know to Like in a matter of seconds. 

I don’t warm to everyone I find this way. I keep my LinkedIn-Twitterati in their own column in TweetDeck and monitor them carefully. At any whiff of automation from them, I go straight to the Unfollow button. But those who make it through my strict quality controls have taught me some great stuff, and I know that I am now firmly on their radar.

Try it yourself. It works just as well if you are looking for accountants in Aberdeen (AB1) or project managers in Penzance (TR18).

Ali Turnbull

www.twitter.com/fit_to_print

Linkedin doesn't really do it for me, I 'get it' as an idea but I just find it's whole web experience confusing and I have no idea what they have spent all their money on (dot com bubble anyone?).

Still, I do appreciate the value of a recommendations - and, better still, I value recommendations from people I know, like and trust. This feature is at the very heart of linkedin.

So, my mind got wandering to "how could we use Twitter for such recommendations?"

In a sense we already do, I'll ask my followers advice etc but I was thinking there might be a bigger solution out there...

For instance, if we tweeted something like:
"I #recommend @XXXXX as a superb accountancy based in Newport, South Wales. Speak to Diane."

Now it's not rocket science to create a Twitter app (see note 1) which will monitor twitter and store such #recommend tweets (note 2).

The website could then show a page for all Twitter accounts which have been recommended - and what the recommendations were.

Now where I think it gets sexy is:
1) You could search for recommendations
2) You could filter recommendations and ONLY see recommendations made by people who are within "n" degrees of separation from you.

To me recommendations made this way are very powerful: eg I put a lot of time/effort into my @joel_hughes Twitter account - it has nearly 20K tweets. If I recommend someone it is validated by me & my account - not something done lightly.

I'm not proposing that we start doing this, I'm simply improvising with the concept of using Twitter for recommendations. My gut feel is that any such app needs to record criticism as well as recommendations.

Update:

Please read a great guest blog response to this...

Notes:
1) Really it's not. I wrote http://tweko.com

2) The hashtag could be anything of course, just needs to be a convention.
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device