Twitter can be a confusing place. There are so many people, and so much content being shared. Don’t get me wrong, that’s an amazing thing – it makes Twitter one of the most exciting social networks around. But it can be difficult to know where to start, who to follow, and where to get the best content. I’m not going to tell you that this is the definitive list of people you should follow on Twitter – because it isn’t. This is just a collection of people I like, people who make me laugh, and people who share content I love.

• @acarvin – Andy Carvin is a senior strategist at NPR, and an online community organizer. He has been live tweeting the recent events in the Middle East – providing analysis, retweeting people at the scene and always confirming reports before passing them forward. His tweeting has been a truly amazing example of how Twitter can be used to spread news from countries where the press isn’t always that free.

• @HilzFuld – Hillel Fuld is a tech blogger and enthusiast – and an incredible tweeter. He produces and shares content at a speed that leaves me in awe, and is always happy to help or comment on tech questions and stories. Plus, he’s a really nice guy!

• @caitlinmoran – Caitlin Moran has been one of my favorite writers for a long time, and the chance that Twitter gives me to read her snarky comments and funny thoughts on an hour-by-hour basis was not one I could miss. Caitlin tweets such truisms as: “Great when you return from a hot Saturday night party, check your internet history and see the last thing you did was buy Urine Off”; “This song would make even elves puke”; and “My [rugby] training sessions would consist of standing on the touchline in a fur coat, smoking a fag, shouting “RUN and CATCH! RUN and CATCH!””. You can’t argue with genuine wisdom like that.

• @gilescoren – Giles Coren is another writer who I love and who Twitter gives me a chance to stalk more closely. As one of the food writers for The Times (UK), I have been giggling at his restaurant reviews/critiques of society for years. Now I get to giggle at his tweets too – including his honest response about his builders: “Paying builders online, Barclays site with typical lazy phrasing asks, “How much do you want to pay them?” Truthful answer: not much.”

• @RyankHudson – Ryan Hudson draws one of my favorite webcomics – Channelate. When I started using Twitter and didn’t know who to follow, I checked out my favorite websites to see if they had Twitter accounts – and sure enough, Ryan obliged. It’s great seeing the man and the thought processes behind the comics.

• @francescomugnai – Francesco Mugnai is a designer, blogger and teacher from Florence. I had followed his blog for a long time before I started following him on Twitter – he was someone else I found as soon as I started tweeting in a search for people whose tweets I liked.

• @brainpicker – Maria Popova is the editor of Brain Pickings, and also writes for other sites including Wired UK, The Atlantic, and Design Observer. Her blog is so interesting, with each short post giving a short history about something you thought you never cared about until you found yourself in the middle of her fascinating description of it. A Pictorial History of Muscular Women, anyone?

• @OMGFacts – I’m not a big fan of automated Twitter accounts, as I see Twitter as a way to interact with others, not as a way to shout out information. This account is one of the few that I follow that disproves that theory. Did I know that Central Australian Walibri men from different tribes greet each other by shaking penises on ceremonial occasions? No. Did I care? No, not really. But do I feel more intelligent now that I know that useless and amusing piece of information? Yes, I do.

• @imrogb – Roger Byrne works in advertising, but his Twitter account focuses on photography and design. He tweets interesting content, and is a great conversationalist on Twitter. In addition, he curates a list of design related tweeters which I also follow – his list is a more passive, yet very comprehensive, way to provide excellent design content to others via Twitter.

• @sarahezekiel – Sarah Ezekiel is my aunt, and also my inspiration. She was diagnosed in 2000 with Motor Neurone Disease (ALS/Lou Gehrig Disease) and, after a rocky start, has become a pillar of the ALS community online. She uses her Twitter account to connect with other people diagnosed with the disease, and to chat to family and friends of those who have been diagnosed or who have passed away. She’s constantly fundraising, working to spread awareness about the disease, and providing support to those around her. In my opinion, this is the perfect use of social media and Twitter.

There are so many amazing tweeters out there, many of whom I could have put on this list. I have had the good fortune to have connected with many amazing people via Twitter, almost none of whom made this list despite being people whose content I love and who I interact with on a nearly daily basis.

Twitter, despite being a network used by millions of people across the world, is a very personal thing – and everyone has their own favorites. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic – who do you love to follow on Twitter?

Joanna is a Content and Community Manager at Blonde 2.0

Starting tomorrow, each Tuesday, a different Blonde 2.0 employee will publish a guest post and share his insights. Posts will feature new apps, add-ons, reviews, tips and tricks and much more. You’ll have the pleasure of hearing many different views on the most innovative social media tools from the social media experts themselves.

Awesome new app? We’ll let you know about it. Cool internet add-on? We’ve got you covered. New search engine you need to try? We’ll direct you to it. Besides providing exposure to the most up-and-coming media services, the Blonde 2.0 team will be providing a plethora of information about the best social media marketing strategies. Get ready for some seriously exciting social media talk. Enjoy!

At the beginning of the month I was asked to speak at a panel that discussed Social media, Social Networks and What’s Coming Up Next. In research for this discussion, I came up with a few insights on what I foresee coming up next in the world of social media. Here are my top 10 insights:

1) The physical and digital worlds will be more highly connected than ever before – already today we are able to run in the park and track our progress online while sharing it with our friends or track our weight loss, or even our ovulation (well, some of us, that is) with iPhone apps that connect to our Facebook and twitter profiles and enable us to keep track of our progress as well as share the data with our friends. Robert Scoble had a brilliant presentation on this topic at the last TNW Conference in Amsterdam. You can see it here.

2) Facebook, Twitter and other major social networks will become increasingly what Fred Wilson coins “Social Dashboards”. In essence, Facebook and Twitter are social channels on which other companies can grow and develop their own technologies and businesses. Both Facebook and Twitter have created economies far larger than many nations. Take for example, companies like Stocktwits, Tweetdeck and Zynga, (amongst others) that have gained huge profits “piggybacking” on these two platforms.

3) Until now, brands have been very concerned with bringing as many people as possible to their pages. Consumer brands can now finally reap the fruits and build social commerce stores where Facebook users (all 700 Million of them) can purchase products on their favorite social network without needing to go to any destination site. Facebook will become one of the major channels of future online shopping.

4) Companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon are currently collecting information about each any every one of us: Our likes and dislikes, our interests and disdains. Soon in an age of Web 3.0, an age of Semantic Web, we will no longer need to search for information on the Web as information will find us based on all this data which companies are collecting. The right information will be served to the right people at the right time, saving us all a lot of time, effort and energy.

5) Mobile technology will become more dominant and NFC technology will be developed further enabling it to offer us special promotions, coupons and tips based on our geographical location and the interest graph we discussed in insight #3.

6) Human Relationships will no longer be as physically dependent and we will befriend and hang out with people from all over the world and all walks of life, all ethnicities and all beliefs, creating a worldwide melting pot.

7) We will no longer be passive media consumers. Media will interact with us in dynamic ways on all platforms. Just like gamers playing WOW today, we will all become a part of a virtual world unknown to us yet where we will all be avatars in the game of life.

8 ) As the Web is overloaded with more information, the content that we are exposed to will become more and more customized to our needs as companies will large sums of money to companies like Facebook and Google, making sure that the information we are exposed to is highly targeted to our interests. Rather than experiencing information overload, we will actually experience the opposite effect.

9) Companies will understand better how to measure the “ROI of social media” and realize that social media is not about the number of people brands have in their communities but rather the amount of engagement that they see on their page and the overall online sentiment they faced this month as opposed to the last. See Gary Vaynerchuk’s response to how companies should measure the ROI of social media in the video link above.

10) Services will become increasingly crowdsourced. Whether it be the way that we get from point A to point B (Waze), the way that we find answers to our questions (Quora), the manner in which we test our Websites (uTest), the way that we get things done (Fiverr) or the way that we share information (Wikipedia).

All of these insights are of course complete speculations based on my years of experience in the world of social media and following of trends occurring all over the digital space. Do you agree with these speculations? Is anything missing? What do you think is coming up next in social media?

This post was originally posted on The Next Web

In today’s social networks, particularly Facebook dominated world, many companies are asking themselves: Do I need a destination site or can I move all my online activities to the social networks I am on?

Here’s a great blog post I found from a year ago which predicted the decline of the Destination Web vs. the Social Web.

The Reasons Why You DON’T Need A Website:

1) Why work so hard to bring traffic to your website when Facebook alone has 550 million users? Do you know how long it would take you to get 550 million people to come to your site utilizing SEO efforts and buying ads? Today, companies can engage with potential customers and current customers on their Facebook page far better than on a static site, with many more social features of engagement than anyone could have ever dreamt of.

2) On Facebook you can integrate all of your other social activities right on your page by creating specific tabs for your twitter profile, YouTube channel, FAQ’s (Get Satisfaction) and specific landing tabs to expose your promotions, such as this one.

3) On Facebook you can even open an online store and sell your products. It’s called F-Commerce. Take for example, Pampers web store and Toy Story Facebook page.

4) Facebook’s Photos application is one of Facebook’s most popular apps and is the most popular photo directory in the world. On Facebook you can feature all of your product photos in nicely organized albums for the world to view.

5) On Facebook you can create company events – whether virtual or offline – and integrate them with the rest of your activities.

6) On YouTube you can aggregate all your videos and create a channel where you can feature special videos and create your own customized channel (though you can and should upload your videos to Facebook as well).

7) On LinkedIn, you can target all of your business contacts and initiate contact with them unlike on a static website

8 ) On Facebook, users can view Facebook Insights (or analytics) for all your pages. Here you will find information regarding your monthly active users, number of new likes, members’ demographics and page views.

Here Are The Reasons Why You DO Need A Website:

1) Image is everything. And in today’s world, a company without a website is a company without a face.

2) Building your own database of – users, clients, names. What will you do if tomorrow Facebook closes your page and you are left with no database of your own? You will be lost. You must have a database of your customers.

3) Search – people today still search Google when looking for things – a hotel in Paris, a new coffee-maker, etc. You want to be high up in those Google search results when they do their searching.

N.B. It will be interesting to see what happens with FEO (Facebook Engine Optimization) when search comes to play a more major role in Facebook’s existence.

4) Blogging – creating a company blog enables you to make a name for yourself in your field. Look at Mint for example and what a remarkable job they did with their blog. Their blog got so popular that it was bringing tons of traffic to their site and increasing their brand awareness.

At the end of the day, it’s all about the cross-promotion of your different properties and maximized utilization of each and every one of them. Each of your social channels is supposed to promote your destination channels and vice versa. Your blog should be promoted on your Facebook page. Your Youtube videos should be promoted on your Twitter profile. Your Twitter should be promoted on your blog and your Facebook should be promoted everywhere. Take, for example, Skittles’ amazing website which basically acts as an access point to all of Skittles’ online social activities and acts as a catalyst of virality. Hopefully not only you will be promoting your different properties but others will as well and this will in turn help your SEO and increase the traffic to your site while also helping your social profiles thrive.

We live in a world where word spreads fast. Take advantage of certain technologies and applications which you don’t need to develop on your own while understanding which basic utilities and functions you do need to program on your end so as to not only properly function but even succeed as a business.

I have heard numerous stories of companies that checked up on potential job candidates and dismissed them based on information the companies found about the candidates on the Web. This age of openness where anything and everything can be shared has created a whole new more careful and cautious breed of social media users. Or has it?

A quick search on Google of people who have been fired for social media revealed this shocking and reasonably comprehensive list of people fired due to blogging, Facebooking or Tweeting.

The length of the list is shocking yes, but not scary. What is scary is what’s been happening lately in terms of social media affecting national security. The case of an ex-Israeli soldier is nothing compared to what happened on April 5th, 2010. WikiLeaks – the website that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, organizational, or religious documents – leaked footage of a US Apache helicopter attacking civilians in Iraq in 2007. WikiLeaks again sparked controversy on July 25th, 2010, by releasing thousands of documents called the Afghan war diaries, which went into classified details about the state of the US war in Afghanistan.

The debate on how far freedom of expression should extend is an old one. Yet social media appears to be adding a whole new set of factors to be considered in this discussion. The ability to instantly disseminate information in a viral fashion has created a very real dilemma for institutions and countries that require a degree of discretion to survive. The problem stems from the fact that it is not possible to police and control the entire internet nation. Furthermore, in a nation without borders, who would be in charge of such policing?

As it is with all new and powerful tools, it will take time for the rules and regulations of social media to work themselves out. However it is obvious that democratic countries now face the issue of whether or not they will enact some sort of measures which will keep social media users from jeopardizing national security.

The fact that social media’s mandate will have to be defined by governing bodies in some manner over time is a certainty. Social media is one of the most powerful tools out there today, with great corporations, and even political trends, bowing to the power of its collective force – but in the great words of Spiderman’s uncle Ben: “With great power comes great responsibility. ” Most of these instances of social media run-a-muck can be avoided with users utilizing some sort of common sense. For example, if you’re serving in the military, it might not be a good idea to check-in on Foursquare. The same unwritten laws of human decency, courtesy and responsibility, still apply even after the birth of social media. In an age where “sharing is caring” – how much sharing is just too much sharing and how should institutions/countries control this endless sharing of information without becoming dictatorships?

on Sunday I gave a lecture at The Marker’s Customer Experience Conference. I spoke about: “The relationship between the brand and the consumer on social networks: From flirt to love.”

How should brands engage with consumers on social networks? You’ll see that the relationship between brands and consumers on social networks is very similar to the relationship between couples.  The presentation displays three examples of  brands that handle their social media efforts differently. HP, the third brand, clearly exemplifies how giving back to your community, being responsive and listening before selling is the best policy. Please note that the presentation is in Hebrew.

Last month we launched our Skype contest and announced that we would give out Skype Buddy Kits to the five people who could give us the best answer to the following question: “What Social Feature Are You Missing in Skype?” We wanted to share with you some of the best answers we received:

1) Roy Rubin feels that what is missing in Skype is “better integration with other social media services. Skype should have a much stronger user’s profile page, with links to twitter and FB for example.”

2) Anat Eshel wishes there was Skype share – the abillity to share part of the chat on social networks, such as facebook or twitter.

3) Doron Sanders suggests that Skype add a Chatroulette feature that will allow you to talk to random people on Camera.

4) Ilan Yogev simply wants a “e-hugging” feature.

5) Oren Todoros would love if Skype had a “Record and Podcast It” button. He wants a feature that would allow him to record the conversation (video or voice) and enable him to publish it straight to his blog, hassle free.

6) Benyamin Shoham would like to be able to add his friends from other IM services to skype: Import friends from Gtalk, Facebook chat, twitter etc. and show which of his contacts has skype.

7) Ted Russ suggests: “I’d love for selected people to be able to message me on Skype and have it sent to my mobile phone.”

8 ) Jesper Åström adds: “I am missing the feature of “Person x is currently talking to person y”. I would like to have a “Join this conversation” button and a “Private conversation” button for those convos that aren’t open. Perhaps a bit intrusive, but highly social. That way people would “hang” on Skype for longer periods of time, just random…”

9) Nir Soffer would love to be able to preselect certain groups (Friends, Family, Work, etc.) and have the capability to assign different statuses to each group (busy to work, invisible to family, online to friends), assign different forwarding numbers to each group (have a work phone, family phone, etc.) and assign a different SkypeIn number for each group. He would also love to be able message the entire group.

10) Skype’s lack of integration with other social networks was the most popular answer. As Jonathan Ross comically expressed: “There are times u just want to be able to see all your evil henchmen and collaborate via video on your latest project for world domination, (or is that antisocial media?) It would make it infinitely easier if Skype connected my Twitter contacts/ friends/ followers.”

We enjoyed reading all your creative answers and will make sure to deliver this feedback to Skype. You might just see some of these ideas integrated in Skype’s next version.

So with no further ado, the winners of our contest are…..(drumroll):

1) Doron Sanders

2) Jonathan Ross

3) Ilan Yogev

4) Oren Todoros

5) Jesper Åström

Congratz to the winners! Thanks to everyone who participated from Buddy, Skype and the Blonde 2.0 Team.

I will contact the 5 winners via Facebook and get your shipping details so that I can get Buddy on his way to you.

If we look back in history , we will find that much before Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, there was ICQ. For anyone who doesn’t know, ICQ was created in 1996 and is now wholly owned by AOL. ICQ was THE pioneer of social media and real time updates. It introduced us to instant messaging and a revolutionary new way to communicate with people instantly in real time. ICQ could have been Facebook or Twitter a long time ago. It’s taken ICQ quite a long time to get back to its status as a social pioneer but now with it’s new client, ICQ is getting back to what it was about all the way from the beginning – a place to interact with your friends everywhere. Everybody Everywhere is after all ICQ’s slogan and being an ICQ veteran myself, I am very excited to announce the launch of the new ICQ 7.

ICQ 7 is a client that brings together all your social interactions from across the Web. Instead of having to open a few different pages and applications to get my friends’ status updates on Facebook, to read tweets of my favorite people and to follow what’s happening on other sites as well such as Youtube, Flickr, Digg and Delicious.  ICQ 7 allows me to use one personal communication tool to integrate all my online social activities.  I am able to syndicate my updates to all of my social networks with a single click and get status updates & tweets from all my friends in my networks in one single platform.

ICQ 7 enables real-time updates from content sharing sites and top social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg and Delicious and will soon announce the integration of local social networks. Found side by side with the ICQ Contact List, users can find a separate tab of real time feeds and updates from their friends from their various social networks. Users will no longer need to open up a new browser and log in to separate networks that they’re members of each time they want to comment on their friend’s updates. From now on, consider ICQ to be your social networks’ one-stop-shop no longer will I need to search for content on different platforms – the content finds me.  ICQ 7′s interface is also improved with software that is fully compatible with all versions of Microsoft Windows, including Windows 7.

My Status: Status updates I make on ICQ can be automatically posted in my other supported networks as well.  I can also easily share pictures and links.

Feeds from Friends: Updates made by user’s friends on leading social networks and content sharing sites appear in real time in the “Feeds from Friends” tab on the contact list.  The user can comment on these updates directly from his/her ICQ and the comment will appear also in the relevant social network/site.  ICQ users can see updates from all their friends in the various social networks – not just from friends that have ICQ.

My Box: The “My Box” tab on the ICQ Contact List is the place where ICQ users get all notifications of their personal online activity – who commented on my status and in which site, who liked the photos I uploaded, etc.

New User Profile: ICQ 7 presents a more enhanced user profile – both within the client and on the Website.  The user profile is the place where users can display who they are by sharing pictures and personal updates on their page.  The new user profile is now offered in color schemes that are fully customizable to suit the user’s mood. Additionally, the new user profile allows ICQ users to view their friends’ contact lists and add new people to their own contact list, thereby increasing their circle of friends.

Picture-Sharing Tool: A new, quick and fun application for sharing pictures with friends:

Faster, Lighter: ICQ 7 performance has been vastly improved with installation time reduced by nearly 50% and requested space for installation reduced approximately by 30%.

ICQ 7 offers a Social Messaging client that enables quick and easy communication friends from across networks, ability to view real-time updates from: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Digg and Delicious. ICQ’s Managing Director, Eliav Moshe, says:

“ICQ 7 brings Social Messaging into play, integrating users’ online social world with their personal communication tool.  The new version answers users’ needs for a quick and easy communication tool that also helps you be up to date with everything that’s going on in multiple social networks and content sharing sites.  With a loyal community of over 42 million users worldwide, we are working on the upcoming integration of local social networks into ICQ 7 as well.”

It is only fitting that the company that was the pioneer of the Web 2.0 era has now integrated this Web 2.0 world into one manageable space in the best possible manner.  Try it out for yourself and let me know what you think. In my opinion it offers the best solution we have today for one platform which integrates all my social interactions into one convenient platform.

Become an ICQ fan on Facebook

Check out their Twitter

(Disclosure: Blonde 2.0 is ICQ’s social media firm)

Many B2B companies ask me whether Social Media is right for them. This post is all about why social media and B2B go hand in hand. Social Media is all about conversational marketing and this is why it works so well with B2B strategy.

Social media is not about the masses. It is about reaching your target audience. Listening before selling and hearing before talking. Oftentimes businesses like to measure a social media campaign’s success by the number of followers its twitter account has or the number of fans their facebook page has, however, these measures are not necessarily the signs to a well-executed social media campaign.

Social media is all about the few rather than the many. The community you build up is ideally made up of the people who are most interested in your brand. If we apply the 80-20 rule here, we are speaking of the 20% who make up 80% of your business.

B2B strategy, just like B2C strategy is all about networking, conversing with the right people,  at the right time. The more in tune you are to things that are happening in your network, the more you increase your chances to be at the right place, at the right time.

According to eMarketer in 2010, these will be the results for online marketing spending:

As you can see, Website spending is forecast to rise 71% and social media spending will increase 60% in the next year.

It is apparent that companies are understanding that they need to: 1) Create a social presence within social networks and 2) Create a Website and/or blog that reflects an active online presence.

As to the reasons most B2B companies are using social networks, emarketer had the following results:

As you can see, companies turn to social networks to show their leadership in their field, to find new potential customers by communicating with the community, to receive customer feedback and give customer service. There’s no better tool these days than twitter to handle real-time customer service issues and many brands do this beautifully, including ComcastCares, Dell, and Starbucks. They also advertise and do market research via social networks.

What about the reasons that companies use social media?

The top reason B2B companies (just like B2C companies) use social media is to generate awareness about their brand. Second top reason is to engage with customers on an on-going daily basis. As you can see, the 3rd top reason that companies use social media is to engage with top influencers on the Web.

Monitoring online conversations and responding to feedback is an extremely important element of social media which only 14% of companies seem to understand.

B2B companies that are not utilizing the social tools they are given today, will find themselves at a major disadvantage to other B2B companies that are using LinkedIn, twitter and other such networks to extend their reach and create better communication between the brand and their customers and potential customers.

Next time you doubt whether social media is right for B2B companies, think about what B2B strategy is all about – it is about the relationships and partnerships you build with your colleagues and there’s no better way to do this today than through social media.

Image credit: StickyMessage

For years, I have been using social networks like Facebook & Myspace to reconnect with old friends and make new ones. As much as I love my social networking time and devote hours of my day to it, I have become an even bigger advocate of LinkedIn – a social network that I consider covers my “professional side” – and feel that it doesn’t get as much recognition as it should in the social media world. My friend and I recently got into a brief debate about the effectiveness of LinkedIn, where I stated my strong views about this site being a great source for job hunting, and his response was: “LinkedIn? That’s not a fun website!” I disagreed immediately, for expanding my professional network is genuinely fun for me! This network has made such an impact on my professional career that I felt the need to share how much I value my LinkedIn profile.

Earlier this year, I moved to Israel after growing up in the US and obtaining my Bachelor’s degree. Arriving in a new city, new country, leaving all my former connections behind, I was a bit worried about ways of connecting with potential employers for employment opportunities and establishing myself again. I signed up with a few employment agencies and job hunting websites, and even got a few callbacks and interview requests to the hundreds of resumes I sent out. But I must say, the biggest influence on my professional network and what has helped me the most with my job search prior to getting an offer was my dedicated involvement with LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has helped me connect and reconnect with so many people on so many levels. From former employers and clients to colleagues and classmates from college, my professional social network began to grow exponentially and my job search soon became fun and productive. Rather than simply sending employers standard emails with a simple cover letter, my resume and sign my name with my phone number (as if they would really call me, right?) I started including a link to my LinkedIn profile as part of my email signature. The added benefit of adding a link to your profile “enables people to see all your credentials, which would be awkward if not downright strange, as an attachment,” according to Guy Kawasaki‘s blog post in Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn.

But before sending my resume to any employer that somewhat appealed to me, I did the proper research about the company on LinkedIn to see if they had a presence. By checking on the company and by screening through their list of employees and who may possibly be holding a position I am applying for, I could get the inside scoop on the company, my potential future colleagues and managers and my growth potential within the company. According to Guy, the LinkedIn network consists of “more than 8.5 million experienced professionals from around the world representing 130 industries.” How cool is that?! Still, it was surprising to me as to how many companies I searched for that did not have a company profile on LinkedIn, and this factor sometimes made it easier for me to pass judgment on the credibility of the company and of their growth potential in their industry.

When it comes to connections – the more the merrier, as the more connections you have the more opportunities you are exposed to. Your contacts have the potential to help you grow your career, find a job opportunity, be a source for referrals and reference checks and expand your professional network. According to Guy’s blog post, “people with more than twenty connections are thirty-four times more likely to be approached with a job opportunity than people with less than five.” The format to adding connections on LinkedIn (when compared to Facebook, for example) is a little more reserved, as it asks you to state where you may know this potential connection from. I found that by joining relevant groups or networks within the career field I was interested in, I could participate in forums and offer my opinions about topics within the industry, and this actually made it easier for me to connect to others within that group. Joining groups within the industry I was interested in pursuing – such Marketing & PR Innovators - opened many doors for me in terms of making new connections and expanding my knowledge about the industry.

Another way that I was able to connect to someone that I didn’t know personally was by turning to a current connection of mine to “introduce” me to their connection. This was a great way for me to express my interest in the connection’s industry, let them know I am interested in learning more about their company, inquire about potential job openings that I might be suited for – all while a formal introduction was sent through my trusted connection. I was amazed as to how many people accepted the introduction and were so helpful with my job search.

As I write this post and sigh with relief that my job search is over and am happily employed at Blonde 2.0, I know that I am where I am today because of the help of my professional network and can thank LinkedIn for providing me with that outlet. Since resumes can be long and tedious to read at times – and never simple to fit all of your accomplishments on one page – as employers suggest, having a LinkedIn profile is a direct and effective way to show people who you are professionally without confining yourself to a conventional resume. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.

Dorine Sinigaglia is the Account & Content Manager for Blonde 2.0

Dorine is a dedicated individual with experience in account management, sales and business development for large corporations. She gets to know all the ins and outs of each account she handles and gets up close and personal with everyone she works with.