What are those little buttons at the bottom of each Post?

Social Media Buttons to Share Outstanding Information

Social Media Buttons for Sharing Information

At the bottom of each blog post are a series of little icons that enable you to share various blog posts that you’ve found particularly useful. Brad, our expert guest bloggers, and I all appreciate your sharing our content with other folks in the Vistage Community when you read something you thought worthy of sharing.

At a fundamental level – that’s the way blogging and social media works. Someone writes a blog post or shares something interesting they found on the Web that has a few good take-away points, you like it, and share it with your friends, associates, acquaintances, the Members of your Group, other Vistage Chairs, your favorite Speakers and Trusted Advisors.

So, what are these buttons?

Delicious: Delicious is a popular on-line bookmarking site. You can store all your bookmarks here and you can share all your bookmarks with those looking for similar content. Posting your bookmarks on subject matter expert areas is one of the strategies to personally brand YOU. See my list of bookmarks on Delicious as an example. You have be logged into your Delicious Account to post bookmarks.

Facebook: You can share a valuable blog post with your contacts on Facebook. Once you click the button, you’ll have an opportunity to enter the post into your news feed on Facebook. Obviously, you have to be logged into your Facebook account for this to work.

Digg: Digg is similar to Delicious as one of the most popular bookmark sharing sites on the Internet. The content that Digg and Delicious have accumulated is exceptional. One of the key places I do my research now in addition to Google is to go to Digg and Delicious to see how others have voted on various websites and blog postings.

Email: This button will allow you to forward the link of a blog article you found interesting to someone in your email address book. The system picks up whatever email program is your default – such as Outlook.

Google Bookmarks: This allows you to save interesting articles you find so that you can refer back to them at a later point. For example, if you read the blog postings of one of the feeds on this portal site, you might want to bookmark a particularly interesting blog post.

Twitter: Twitter is all the rage on the Internet. It is a micro-blogging platform where you can send 140 character mini-messages to those following you. For example, I have almost 7,000 people following me on Twitter around two different categories – executive job search and hiring talent. Many of those individuals join our LinkedIn Discussion Group, download our free materials, and purchase our products/services. Approximately 10% of our web site traffic comes from Twitter.

It’s a viral environment where people who like what you have to say repost to their network. It’s another form of personal branding and differentiation. You should have a Twitter Account. You can look at my profile and see one of my lists of  Vistage Community Members using Twitter.

The primary way Twitter gets used is to make a statement/ask a question, repost the tweet someone else wrote (called retweeting), and post a link to something you found useful.

LinkedIn: This button will allow you to repost the blog article to any of the LinkedIn Groups you participate in. It automatically creates an entry in the news feed of the group. You can select the specific group you would like to post the news item (blog post) into to share with other members of the various LinkedIn Discussion Groups.

Barry Deutsch

Graphic courtesy of DavidZimm

Vistage vs. TEC Language

TEC Logo Vistage Logo

How should we refer to the worldwide community of Chairs, Members, Speakers, Staff, and Trusted Advisors?

I recognize that many of the readers of our blogs, members of our LinkedIn Discussion Groups, and followers on Facebook and Twitter are from the worldwide community, ranging from Hong Kong to Vancouver. In most of the US, we call it Vistage (there are some exceptions), and outside of the US, we call it TEC.

For ease of communication, please accept our use of the name Vistage even though you may be part of a TEC community. We mean no disrespect, but rather use this naming convention as means to avoid tripping over ourselves in referring to the worldwide community of Vistage and TEC Members.

I realize that I probably don’t have to publish this blog post on this subject; however, I thought it might be useful to explain why we were only using the Vistage label.

We would like to embrace the entire worldwide Vistage/TEC community that is interested in learning and growing. Please accept our use of the Vistage Label when referring to the entire worldwide community.

Thank you.

Barry Deutsch

Navigating around the Vistage Leadership Community Portal

Navigation around the Vistage Leadership Community Portal

In this blog post, I’ll describe how to navigate around to some of the key areas on our Vistage Leadership Community Portal Site.

We’ve already discussed in another blog posting the tabbed content of Best Practices. You can read about the tabbed structure of this site by CLICKING HERE.

At the top along the header you’ll see four links for “home”, “contact us”, “meet the experts”, and “why am I here?” These are links on our website that help you to navigate the site and provide additional information.

The home link returns you from any tab of information with blog feeds, such as the managing sales tab, back to the home page of the blog on best practices.

The contact us link provides you with a contact form to send a quick message back to us.

The Meet the Experts Page gives a short background on both Brad and I, and all our guest blogger experts.

The Why Am I Here Page provides a precise reason for reading the blog, using this site as your “portal” site for information, tools, tips, techniques, and discussion on hiring, retention, leadership, managing sales, and social media. You’ll also be able to see the more active Vistage Community Members who have established a very strong reputation for the quality of their unique content and blog frequently with great value and advice.

At the bottom of every page are 3 columns of information. First, is the Recent Posts column which lists the last 10 recent posts. Second, The featured posts column lists blog articles that we consider to be the best content posted on the blog (check back often since the posts in this column change frequently). Third, is a series of links to our LinkedIn Discussion Groups for Hiring and Retention, Vistage Chairs for leveraging social media to find great members, Vistage Members to build and enhance their business through social media, and Vistage Speakers/TAs to engage to market their services and engage with their clients more effectively.

On the sidebar (which only appears when you are on the home page/blog article listing), you’ll find a search box to locate information based on your search term. Below that you’ll find a list of blog articles that are specifically for managing your interaction with this portal, including how to navigate the site, the tabbed structure of content, and how to share information you find useful with other members of the Vistage Community.

Moving down the sidebar, you’ll see the ability to find articles listed by category, by series, and by tags (hot topics). Below that is a listing of the key blog posts for how to use this Portal site for information and learning.

Barry Deutsch

Are You A Vistage Blogger

Calling All Vistage Bloggers

Calling All Vistage Bloggers

Calling all Vistage Bloggers

Are you a Vistage Blogger that would like to be featured in our Vistage Leadership Community Portal.

We have assembled a listing of all the known Vistage Bloggers (Chairs, Members, Speakers, and Trusted Advisors). We’ve tried our best through Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to identify all those in the Vistage Community who are actively blogging. (We define active blogging as writing at least one blog post every week).

We may have missed a few folks in this process. If so, we apologize – no oversight intended.

Would you like to be featured in our directory on this site. We’ll show the last 5 blog postings in your feed to the visitors on this site.

Our combined monthly volume of visitors to our various Web content properties is now in excess of 25,000 visitors. We cross-promote between these various blogs and all of our content is promoted and reinforced through guest blogging, ezine articles, and our weekly Internet Radio Show Broadcast, not to mention exposure to over 100,000 CEOs and Presidents on LinkedIn on a daily basis.

Not only are we seeking Vistage Community Members who might like to have their blog featured on this consolidated portal site for the Vistage Community, but we are also seeking guest bloggers who might like to write an occassional article aimed at one of the subject areas on this portal – including hiring, retention, culture, employee engagement, leadership, sales management, and social media. We are seeking those who have the ability to provide best practices aimed at the entrepreneurial-middle market company.

If you’re interested in having your blog featured and/or would like to be a guest blogger, please send us a note using the contact form on this website OR you can find me in the Vistage Directory.

Barry Deutsch