There is much to be thankful for at TVLAI (The Virtual Legal Assistant, Inc.) this year! I’m sure you have similar things that you are grateful for as a small business owner. Here are a few of mine:

1. I’m thankful I don’t have to wear panty hose and a suit in sub-zero temperature on public transportation to get to work.

2. I’m thankful for my awesome clients, even when they are a challenge.

3. I’m thankful for my colleagues who support and entertain me when I’m feeling down.

4. I’m thankful for the freedom to say “no” to a client that is sending up a ton of red flags.

5. I’m thankful for the 350+ people who view this blog each and every day!!!

6. I’m thankful for my awesome office that my brother-in-law helped me design.

7. I’m thankful for free Web apps that make my life easier.

8. I’m thankful for the people I’ve met on all of these social networking sites, including my virtual professional sistahs!

9. I’m thankful for Barack Obama who made me feel excited about our government and possibility again.

10. And, of course, I’m thankful for my friends and family for their love and support.

What are YOU thankful for this year?

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It’s been drummed into you over and over. You know you need to be active on social networking sites, tweeting on Twitter, interacting in groups on Facebook, and answering expert questions on LinkedIn. But you are a busy solo practitioner or entrepreneur and this is all so time consuming. We have several online applications to suggest that will help you manage this increasingly important task! We want to thank Guy Kawasaki and his recent post

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Ping.fm

: This is a must-use site. Ping.fm allows you to register all of your sites, including some of the social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, and then update your status or blog from Ping. It then sends those out to the ones you’ve registered. So you can update your Twitter feed and your status on LI and FB quickly, all at once.

TweetDeck: TweetDeck is an app you download to your computer and it acts like a dashboard for Twitter primarily. You can manage multiple online screen names (some have one for business and one for personal use), watch feeds, shorten URL’s instead of moving to another site to do this. It’s a handy tool and very slick. However, if you don’t want to download anything and you want most of the same features, we suggest…

HootSuite: HootSuite is a Web-based applicaton that also lets you manage multiple personalities, is less cluttered than TweetDeck and still allows you to watch your incoming tweets. It doesn’t have as many features as TweetDeck but the learning curve is faster and it is extremely user-friendly. If you work in a corporate environment with restricted Internet access for social sites, it may allow you to get around this and tweet from work.

FriendFeed: FF is a one-stop social networking stop! It collects information from a variety of other sites, including Flickr, so you can easily see what the people you follow are doing across multiple platforms and vice versa. It shows your social activity in a variety of places and gives you a broader idea of what your contacts are up to.

Seesmic: We are less familiar with Seesmic at TVLAI, but it is also a downloaded application that more easily allows you to manage Twitter and Facebook, combining the two sites and their activities into one window. You can post to both simultaneously and watch the activities of your friends and those you follow in one spot without going to two different sites. LinkedIn would be a nice add but LI doesn’t offer as much “real time” activity as the other two so at this point perhaps it makes sense not to add it.

If we were going to recommend just two of these apps, it would be HootSuite and Ping.fm. However, if you are a heavy FB user, Seesmic seems like a good add. If you are a Sessmic user, share your experiences below and let us know what you like or don’t about the application.

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It used to be that companies and solo practitioners with a product or service to sell simply hung out a shingle, placed an ad in the Yellow Pages and newspaper, ordered some business cards and customers came. Why? Because there were fewer visible and available options to choose from. With the advent of the Internet, the game has changed. Your competitors are everywhere, they have a Website, a blog, engage in social media, deliver information via podcasts and more! How do YOU stand out from this?

First, make sure you are doing all of the same things the competition is or you will get buried. Make sure your presence is known as much as possible. This can be extremely inexpensive, but it does require a time investment and patience. Make sure your site and blog are search engine optimized with strong keywords and meta tags and that you are actively involved in at least a few key social media sites. Encourage your customers to interact on your blog and to email you with comments.

Second, take excrutiatingly good care of your existing customers. Call them up, send a card, stop by when appropriate. Ask them for their input on your services, what they’d like to see in future offerings, and what their pain points are. Customers and clients want to be involved like never before. No. They EXPECT to be involved like never before.

Give information and content away for free. Entice customes with goodies to build loyalty. This can be a slide presentation on LinkedIn The Living and the Dead download Jason and the Argonauts movie download Vanishing Point psp Red Eye video Scrooged divx

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download The Miracle Maker movie , a small free ebook, a newsletter, training videos, or a short tutorial you deliver via email over the course of several weeks. By showing what you offer for free, they are more likely to buy your “premium” services or products.

These are challenging times for everyone. For entrepreneurs with an Internet presence, you can feel like a tiny little fish in an infinite pond. Hang in there! Keep pushing through and you will build a following and loyal customer base.

If you are a solo practitioner, freelancer or virtual assistant you are probably trying to organically grow your website traffic and potential client base through using online social networking. One of the areas that many individuals overlook is the importance of networking with other bloggers via commenting. Not only do you often get the attention of people you admire and would like to work with, you also get exposure to their readers.

I’m not going to whitewash this. If you want to effectively use this method for marketing yourself and your business, it takes time. You’ve got to be willing to actually read posts and have something meaningful to say. I recommend using a blog reader like Google Reader to subscribe to blogs that you are actually interested in. In addition to the benefits of interacting with new groups of people, you also learn from other experts and will often get inspiration for new blog posts of your own.

Google Reader’s home page lists the most recent posts from all of your subscriptions. You gain the most exposure when you are one of the first comments on a very popular post so seeing a post early is helpful. Watching Twitter

for post links is important as well, especially if it is from an extremely popular blog like Problogger, Copyblogger or Mashable

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. BUT if you have a niche group or interest, that is where you should be commenting as well. Check out Technorati’s Top 100 list for current, highly read blogs.

Many blogs use separate services to manage comment profiles. Be sure to register with these when offered, fill out a full profile including your website or blog and photo. And then have something valuable or controversial to say. It often helps to have a really strong post ready to publish that ties in with the comment you’ve written which can attract subscribers of your own. Make sure your site is polished and you are blogging regularly. When someone reads a strong comment, they routinely click on the profile which takes them directly to that commentators site.

Check your blog reader several times weekly for intriguing posts and try to comment 2-3 times per week on various blogs. This can build strong, loyal organic traffic and you can be sure some popular bloggers were found just this way. I know I’ve seen my own traffic spike after a strong comment! Good luck and comment here with your results!

If you have to pick one online site to network for your business, I recommend LinkedIn as your first step. Far more professional than Facebook, many more users than Plaxo or Naymz, LinkedIn has added new features to make the site much more interactive and necessary to your business. In addition to the questions and answers feature many of us are already using, the events section offers a lot of local activities where you can either add to your business learning or meet other users face to face. It can be a little tricky to find (why isn’t it up there with People Jobs Answers and Companies?), but generally has events you won’t find anywhere else. A recent check of New Jersey brought up 62 varied offerings including “Emotional Intelligence & Leadership in Organizations”, “Fundamentals of Sales Management”, and “Flexing Your Communication Skills”.  

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I’m also enjoying the Reading List by Amazon application. Not only can I see what other people are reading (and vice versa), but I can do a search by book to discuss it with other LinkedIn members. If they are pretty interesting, you can add them to your “people to watch” so you get updates on what they are reading next.  24 7: Twenty Four Seven download  

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include Company Buzz (allows you to see what people are saying about your company on Twitter download The Mummy dvd ), SlideShare Presentations (allows you to add presentations to your profile) and My Travel (allows you to see if you will be traveling to the same city on the same date as any of your contacts). All of this, plus the LinkedIn app for iPhone and easy of use, make LinkedIn my favorite for business networking Cube Zero move The Beguiled download

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online. Have you used any of these new applications? Share them with us and let us know what you think!

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If you aren’t on Twitter, you are missing out on a unique interactive experience. Twitter’s numbers are through the roof and many of the entrepreneurs we’ve featured here, along with other business experts, interact routinely with their Twitter followers. It’s fast and easy but there are ways to make the experience better. Most importantly, DO be sure you have a profile up with a URL to your site or blog so followers can find details about your business.

1. If you want to see what’s being tweeted about, use www.search.twitter.com. The best way to find a search term is to use a # mark before the word, i.e. #law. This will bring up conversations with “law” in the topic. Be sure to help others out by using the # mark in your tweets!

2. To find new folks to follow, use WeFollow.com

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Brian's Song download Look Whos Talking psp . A Twitter directory of sorts, WeFollow allows you to list yourself under three terms (i.e. lawyer, entrepreneur, athlete). When you go to find others to follow, do a search under what you are looking for and people who have listed themselves under that designation will come up for you to follow.

3. TweetDeck is the most chosen desktop app to improve the Twitter interface. It lays out three columns that you can watch at once: Tweets by those you follow, your @replies (replies to you that others can see) and your Direct Message replies (private messages). It has additional apps on the page to improve the user experience.

4. Twittergroups. Similar to Facebook and LinkedIn groups, this allows you to follow a group of people with similar interests. Martindale-Hubbell

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(most respected legal network) has several groups, entrepreneur has too many to mention and so on.

5. Want to make a cool Twitter background? There are several sites offering free backgrounds that you can customize. KillerTweets and PrettyTweet

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 have some unique designs.

New apps for Twitter pop up daily so we’ll do a follow up in a few weeks with some more but these will get you up and running with a new, hip, easier to use Twitter experience! What will you tweet about today?

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SXSW Interactive is one of the most popular and hip tech fairs out there, partly because it is associated with the music and film festivals of the same name and it’s in cool Austin, Texas. This is the place to be for in-depth conversation about social networking, online marketing, increasing creativity and all the technical stuff like open source software and Web design. It offers awesome presenters like Pamela Slim, Guy Kawasaki, Imdb’s Col Needham The Elephant Man dvdrip and Chris Anderson from Wired. By the way, Guy Kawasaki has added FindVirtual.com, part of the virtual professionals social networking group that I’m a part of, to AllTop.com, his site for recommended blogs and web sites! You can read about that here

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However! I have a treat. My business colleague, Kelly Livesay, from AROnetworking

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, will be reporting several times for us from SXSW and hitting some of the highlights from the presentations and keynotes she attends, along with posting some photos for us! You can follow Kelly as she goes on Twitter (kellylivesay) or you can wait for that day’s post with a summary of what she heard and saw. If you can’t be there, it’s the next best thing and TVLAI There’s a Stranger in my House dvd

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is excited to offer it to you!

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The Legal Tech NY conference took place this past weekend and judging from legal bloggers it was a good one (MUST go next year!). One of the sessions was “Best Practices for Online Networking” which covered the reluctance of attorneys to do online social networking, how this type of networking benefits lawyers especially during a time of tighter budgets and time constraints, best practices on selecting a network and using them to their full advantage.  

The discussion, according to Patrick DiDomenico of the blog LawyerKM (KM=knowledge management) and David Hobbie of Caselines, included some interesting, though not terribly surprising details about the legal industry and online networking. Lawyers are intimidated by online networking and do not understand the potential benefits. This was an interesting tidbit from Caselines: 

“Of [non-legal] companies that have adopted it [use of social media and online networking], 2/3  see improved customer satisfaction, and 2 in 5 can associate increase in sales with adoption of social media. BUT…

Only 2% of lawyers think that social media is a valuable tool for client development.” -Bob Ambrogi

The developer of Martindale-Hubbell’s Connected spoke as well. This site will surely be the top of the line when it comes to online professional networks for attorneys, though many behind the scenes (aka Twitter) discussions challenged this and said Legal OnRamp was already doing what Martindale-Hubbell wants to do.

SO. What does the future hold for attorneys and online social media? Oh, they’ll (you’ll?) get to it, but  they are clearly not early adopters. If you need help managing your contacts, contact us at The Virtual Legal Assistant

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. We’ve got that covered! 

Like all of the established social networking sites, LinkedIn is continually adding features. If you aren’t staying caught up reading about social media like we are at TVLAI, you might miss out on some opportunities to interact and engage more fully using some of these new features. Let’s check out LinkedIn and make sure you are using it to its full potential!

LinkedIn has added some great applications. Unlike Facebook, the application offerings are slim but they are also all very useful. If you have a Wordpress blog, you can use the WP application to have your posts show up on your LinkedIn profile. The Google Presentation app download Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo dvd Juice divx

allows you to upload PowerPoint presentations and video to your LI page. The SlideShare application provides a similar function.

Box.net is one of the most robust online file storage sites. If you want to allow your contacts to review your resume or review a spreadsheet, this application facilitates that sharing on LinkedIn. You can add a poll The Exterminator trailer

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to your profile so you can get feedback from your contacts on a variety of business issues. And, if you are reading a fabulous business book and you want to discuss it with someone or find “like minds”, you can add the Amazon.com application

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Be sure you are checking the Events

listings for opportunities to do offline networking with colleagues or that you are adding your event to increase participation. Keep an eye open for questions you can answer for someone. Finally, if you are seeking a way to make more contacts on LinkedIn but do not necessarily want to open network, join appropriate groups. This allows you to invite any member to connect directly.

Keep checking back on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter and your other favorite social networking sites for added features!