“Jesus” is the least connected word on LinkedIn.  How did Dan Zarella, author of “Zarella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness,” arrive at this interesting but seemingly apropos of nothing conclusion?  As usual, he studied the data.  (The method is less important than the result.  I trust Mr. Zarella’s methodology only to a certain point.  I believe his pseudo-scientific approach allows him to identify correlations, from which he makes logical conclusions.  But that’s as far as it goes.)

The blog post where he published his findings (which I’ll divulge shortly) is not completely clear about the meaning of “connected words.”  What I think he means is this: Words that appear in the titles and summaries of LinkedIn profiles and how they correlate to the number of people that person is connected to.

At any rate the conclusion about the word “Jesus” is no surprise, given the purpose of LinkedIn.  What’s more surprising is the most connected word, which is “recruiters.”

Besides the fact that it’s plural (go ahead, imagine using it in a sentence) I find it interesting that LinkedIn holds fast to its original roots of being a place to network for job opportunities.  When I joined in 2004 I did so because I was considering looking for a full-time job.  I ended up changing my mind about job hunting and didn’t use my account for several years.

Somewhere around 2007 or so it started to get more press as a professional networking site I started using it again.  In 2009 when I was promoting my business, Avarra Solutions, I started using it heavily and seeing it’s real value to small businesses as a professional social networking tool.

Go ahead and look at the infographic Dan posted.  Look at the top nine words on the Most Connected Words list.  Four of them have something to do with job hunting.  Three are related to networking.  So still after all this time, the most heavily connected people on LinkedIn have something to do with looking for employment.

So if you’re looking for work, or if you’re thinking of hiring someone in your business, LinkedIn is definitely still the place to be.

I reached another milestone this week.

I’m getting emails from strangers.  They want to sign up for my newsletter. They are wondering when my next free webinar will open up for registration.  They want to get a free analysis of their web site.

It’s thrilling.

As a small business owner myself, I’m constantly promoting my business services using internet technology.  Of course I do, that’s my business.

But it still has it’s frustrations.  I tell my clients — not everything you do will work, and nothing works immediately.  And finally, the more you do the better.

My marketing tends to work slowly because I have limited resources and can only do so much.  Plus I do a lot of different things, so I’m spread pretty thin.  I also do a lot of local business networking, and that’s where I see most of my business coming from still.

The end goal is to have most of my business come from the Internet.  I’m far from being there, but I can see the shift coming.

I recently read an excellent article by Sue Cartwright on using Facebook for business reasons.  It’s actually a review of another article (which I did not read) and she uses that article as a springboard to talk about this topic, which is near and dear to my heart.

The big challenge of Facebook marketing is this: your facebook page is a personal page.  You can only have one, and it must represent you as a person.  As a small business owner, you may decide to use your personal Facebook page as a platform to promote your business.  This is loosely equivalent to being out with some friends and someone asks you “so, how’s business?”

Sue gives some nice takeaways, which I will share with you in my own words:

Just as in any networking environment, always remember the goal is to build relationships.

You are a person and a business owner, and you have both business and personal relationships.  These lines get crossed in real life as well, but on Facebook the blurring of those lines is even more prominent.  Everyone can see both sides of your life, or at least anything you post on your own wall or someone else’s wall.  [FYI, I'm simplifying a bit here because Facebook's privacy settings allow you to finely tune what gets seen by whom, but let's assume you've left your settings at the default for now.]

You should aim to provide posts, quotes, links, and opinions that people will find interesting and helpful.  Posts that smack too much of self-promotion will, at best, get ignored, and at worst, get you un-friended and perhaps even stridently dissed.

Facebook “ranks” posts by popularity and uses that ranking to decide which posts will show up higher and more often on your friends’ walls.  The more interesting your post is, the more comments and likes it will get.  This achieves a level of popularity which will help your post, and you, get more exposure.

Sue goes on to talk about the difference between posting to your personal page vs. your business page, so I recommend reading the article if you want to learn more about that.

I will close with an interesting excerpt from Sue’s article, because she articulates this much better than any re-phrasing job I could do:  “…the degree to which our professional relationships become personal vary but our professional connections will mingle with our personal ones and this will lead to new business, new opportunities, new ideas and inspiration for a new direction.”

Clearly Sue is a strong advocate for using your personal facebook presence for business.  Sue also started her facebook account with the intention of using it mostly for business.  I on the other hand started with a personal facebook page a good year and a half before I started using it for business.  So I still tend to be ultra-careful about what I say and what I comment on.

Either way, each of us has to decide for ourselves.