(Note: reposted with permission from Part-Time Perfectionist.)

A year ago I had my first day at Klout. There were five of us, we were sharing a space with four other companies, and we were just about to launch Klout 2.0. Today, there are about 35 of us, we have our own gigantic space, and we just beta launched Klout 3.0. It’s been a crazy, busy, amazing ride and I have never been happier that I decided to join (plus I’m pretty sure this means some of my stock is now vested, so, woot!). So while I think the biggest lesson I’ve learned is that I have so much more to learn (cheesy, I know), I thought I’d share a few others things I’ve learned along the way.

1. Culture matters. At a startup it’s not just work, it ends up taking up a lot of your life. If you’re not happy going into the office on Monday (or at least once you’ve had that first cup of coffee), you’re in for trouble. And, as much as this is about loving what you DO, it’s about liking the people you work with, wanting to make awesome things, and this weird thing that develops out of that that is work “culture.” Once upon a time I thought people who worried about work culture were crazy. Now I totally get it. No wonder all those consultants make so much money.

2. Learn from the people around you. I’ve always been a big believer in learning by doing, but, it turns out, it is much less effective and — let me just say it — lamer than learning from smart people who have already gone through this. Or at least smart people who can help you break new ground together. Luckily Klout is filled with smart people. I’m always happiest when I’m learning and Klout has been amazing for that.

3. Influence is hot. I probably didn’t have to tell you that and who knows if it’ll last, but Klout is hot right now because EVERYONE is trying to understand and measure influence. It’s a space I personally find intellectually fascinating and, clearly, I’m not alone. Please hit me up for debates about influence, reputation, trust, and, although I hate the term, personal branding any day of the week.

4. The social media community is amazing. I can’t even begin to count the number of awesome  people I’ve met through Klout and the social media community. Seriously, what a bunch of talented, kind, and funny people. Yes, there are haters out there too, but I try not to waste thought on them.

5. It’s good to be challenged. We’ve had our fair share of debates at Klout and my coworkers will be the first to tell you I don’t shy away from heated discussions. Although I like being right, I’ve discovered that there’s also a lot to be said for being wrong and learning from your mistakes. Perfection is overrated anyway.

There’s actually a lot more I could add in here about the perils of trolls, personal vs. work life, and many other lessons learned, but five is a good number (being the youngest of five kids, I’m quite partial to it) so I’ll stop there. Have you had similar experiences/lessons in your job?

My team and I make it a practice to look at the profile page of every single person who follows me on Twitter.

We do this for several reasons:

• I don’t want people who are just hawking their wares and publishing what I consider to be Twitterspam following me. Call me crazy, but I want no parts of these people/brands.
• I don’t want people who are peddling porn following me. Enough said.
• I also don’t want people with protected Twittersteams following me.

So, my team blocks these people. And, yes I know when we block them, it reduces the number of people who are following me.  In the case of the spam and porn, I don’t rightly care; I’ll gladly leave those folks in the dust, but it’s the ones who have protected Twitterstreams that concern me. I don’t understand them.

I’ve looked at a few of these “protected” profiles and most of these people appear to be normal, law abiding citizens and yet their Twitterstreams are protected.

Here are my thoughts:

Social networking is primarily about communication and sharing information. How can you be doing either of these things if your Twitterstream is protected?

For the most part when a Twitterstream is protected, it’s the stream of an individual, but I have seen a good number of companies with protected streams. And, I wonder what the point is?

Many people say that they just want to be able to control who has access to their “thoughts” and “intellectual property”. That attitude is so 1995. And, people wonder why their approach to social networking doesn’t work?

My question to these people would be:

Is your “need to control” so great that you’re putting a barrier in between your company and the people who could potentially cut you a check?

The other thing I’d feel almost compelled to share with these “protectors” is: if someone can steal your “intellectual property” from your 140-character Tweets, Twitter is the LEAST of your problems.

When it comes to social media, many business people are overworked, overloaded and just plain over it.

I get that and I feel their pain.

Social media has a lot of moving parts and it’s very easy to become confused. That’s why I always try to provide actionable suggestions that are straight-forward, easy-to-implement and easy-to-digest. I mean, it’s great to read a blog post like this with loads of high-falutin’ ideas only to find yourself lost in technology soup when it comes to actually actioning any of the ideas.

So, let’s keep it simple, shall we? Here are three things you can do in three days to expand your social media influence:

1. Offer to write a blog post for another blogger. For right now, they don’t have to be the most “popular” blogger in the world, the main thing is to take yourself out of your comfort zone.  Sometimes when we’re writing for someone else, we have a different feeling of purpose and duty and that’s when our best work bubbles forth.

When you write that post, make sure you Tweet the link a few times the week that it goes live and once the week after.  Remember, not everyone reads everything you write all the time. If you spread your Tweets across the week, more people will be able to see the link. Don’t overdo it though; you don’t want Tweet spam.

2. Make a concerted effort to reach out via Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, to someone whom you’ve always wanted to meet. And, not the easy person, either. You know that person I’m talking about…the person who makes you a little nervous? Actually take the time to read their Tweets and blog posts and when the time is right, contribute. Give them a digital high-five by retweeting them. Heck, send a smoke signal, just DO something (sane) to get on their radar.  So many people don’t want to be perceived as a “stalker” so they don’t do this. Here’s the deal, if you were a stalker, you’d know it, so stop making excuses and take action.

3. Interview someone. If you have a telephone or a pen, you can interview someone.  Here’s the trick, take the time to think of a REALLY cool interview angle for them. Make it an offer they can’t refuse. Show them that you’re smart and that you don’t want to interview them about the same old topic.

The same thing you did in tip #1, do the same thing here. Tweet it and make sure you include the interview in your newsletter, too. And, guess what your interview subject is going to do? You guessed it…they’re going to Tweet and Facebook it, too.

BONUS TIP:  Get the interview transcribed, edit it a bit, add a cover and bundle it together with the audio and you’ve got a GREAT lead generation tool!

All three of these things are totally do-able. So, get going and come back and let me know how they worked for ya!

Lena L. West is an award-winning social media consultant, blogger, speaker, journalist, technologist and the Founder of the Authentic Influencer Braintrust, a high-level, social media marketing membership program for business owners and Real Women Do Social Media, the only social media training initiative created exclusively for women business owners.

With so much buzz about social media marketing these days I can’t help but wonder how many people think manufacturing fake word of mouth is a good marketing technique.

I’m referring to people who get onto sites like Quora, a collection of good questions and answers, and recommend their own stuff without saying it’s their own stuff.

One thing is answering a question by linking to your own website, book or blog post. I’ve done that myself, in Quora — but only sparingly, when the link directly answers the question, and never without disclosing my bias.

It’s quite another thing to troll the web looking for places to recommend your own stuff as if you were an objective third-party person recommending it. People trust objective recommendations, so maybe this works. But does it work over the long term, when they do it as a marketing method? Wouldn’t that kind of marketing cut into long-term business health by killing your credibility?

In Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook we at least have the on/off function, like channels, follow or not, friend or not, which helps somewhat. But in Quora, it’s question by question, and if this continues, eventually we’ll have to wade through the fake answers to find the real ones.

John Jantsch summarizes marketing as getting people to know, like, and trust you. If your introduction starts with something fake, can you gain credibility later?

And meanwhile, this kind of fake word-of-mouth or stealth marketing in social media sites threatens the value of the sites. I’ve been spending a lot of time in Quora lately, and I think I’m starting to see it more and more. It seems like a damned shame, really, because Quora has started out as an excellent collection of really good answers to really interesting questions. The more it gets polluted by fake recommendations, the less valuable it will be.

I hate to say that spam obviously works because it keeps coming. And some other unpleasant tactics that show up in social media must work, because they keep coming. But are we too dumb to see through these fake recommendations? Does that work too?

I don’t know how far I would go with this, but it certainly got my attention, and the site it came from looks very good, too. This Infographic compares Facebook to Twitter in terms of use, demographics, and activities.

You can click the picture for a larger view.

And let me clearly thank Dave Larson of tweetsmarter for posting this. It’s his creativity, not mine.

If you’re curious, read the comments, too.  And there is one correction: “in college” should have read “had some college.”

The problem with this idea is that I’m not sure how you’d make money doing it, but it’s a web app I wish existed, so maybe this suggestion is useful to you. It’s related to twitter. And it would use both the Twitter and the klout.com APIs (application programming interfaces).

I want to be able to browse through the people I follow and those who follow me in a more organized way. I’d like to be able to sort them by Klout score, by number of tweets, by number of followers, by location, by topic expertise as defined by Klout, by tweets per day, according to groups or lists I’ve defined, and of course by whether or not the following is mutual. Within the same browsing function I’d like to be able to reshuffle them in the lists I manage, to follow, or to unfollow.

I’ve been through several lists of various apps already available to do some of what I’d like, but none that I’ve been able to find does this.

If you know of one, especially if you’ve already published it, please tell me about it. I want to use it.

I keep running into people who insist that every business, every business owner, every manager, every job seeker and everybody else should be developing his or her web presence. You should have a blog. You have to be on Facebook. You have to be on Twitter. You know what I mean.

Yes, I agree that reputation is important, and that the online world provides a wonderful opportunity to share and validate expertise and build a reputation. I’ve known some and read about many businesses that do very well in online reputation and social media. What worries me, though, are the half truths and lies that so often come with the advice. So, with that in mind, here’s my reality check:

1. I worry about people underestimating the time and effort it takes to do it well. It’s not a part-time or occasional kind of an activity. You dedicate time to it, or it doesn’t work. And few people really out there running a small business have that kind of time left over.
2. As you start planning, start with a good estimate of resources. And if you have no idea, I’d start by saying that the absolute minimum time budget for managing a small company’s social media face is half time.
3. I think that if you’re going to do it today or in the near future, you should try to lever off of existing opportunities, like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, rather than build something new. I’m sure there are still some opportunities for new community sites. There always are. But develop your presence around existing sites first. It’s a lot easier, and a lot more likely to succeed. It takes critical mass to make a social site, aka community, work.

And here’s a final thought: Do you think that online reputation, alias social media, is one of those things you have to either do well or not at all? Don’t throw your reputation into dabbling in social media. And do you think that thought applies to business and professionals, as a business thought, and not to your personal online self, alias (ugh) personal branding? I’m just asking; I don’t know.

The other day somebody asked me how to get started on Twitter. I decided to write my answer down and post it here, because I thought it might be useful to others. If you’re already a Twitter user, then this post is probably not for you. Sorry.

If you aren’t a Twitter user and don’t want to be, then this is not for you, either. Sorry again.

But if you aren’t a Twitter user yet and you’d like to be, I can help. I took the time to think it through and write it out, and here are my step-by-step suggestions.

1. Examine your goals. What do you want out of Twitter? It might be business relationships, leads, customer service, personal relationships, a new job, timely information. Get it straight in your head.
2. Set up a Twitter account–and remember those goals as you do. Go to twitter.com and follow directions to set up a new account. Choose a Twitter handle–your own name is often best; I use “timberry” and my daughter Megan uses “meganberry,” but some people use names related to their business or blog, like my friend John Reddish who is “getresults” or Anita Campbell, who is “SmallBizTrends.” Palo Alto Software uses the name of our business plan resource site, “bplans.” You’re going to have to live with it.
3. Log in and upload a picture. First, look around, see what others are doing. You don’t follow anybody yet, so that won’t work to see a bunch of Twitter people; but you can search for a term, and that will work. Try a term that fits your interest. I searched first for “business plan.” That generates a list of 140-character published microposts, which we call “tweets.” The list will show the pictures or icons the people are using. Most people use their face, but some businesses use their logo, and some accounts have an icon or something. Do upload something. Only newbies have no picture.
4. Edit your profile. Here, too, you should first look at some examples by searching for a term that interests you, which will generate actual tweets. Create a profile that is true and authentic, but also one that presents the side of you that best fits your goals. If you want to pursue your knitting hobby, let the profile show that. If you want to get a new job, have the profile show your present job in a good light. Make it all true, of course, but you just have a few words to describe yourself, so choose them well. Align them with your Twitter goals. Later on you can play with backgrounds and such to customize your look. But that’s later.
5. Start searching for tweets that interests you. Your goal is to turn up tweets that address your goals. If it’s about your knitting, then search “knitting” and “yarn” and whatever else (I don’t know much about knitting) works. Look for tweets with links to blog posts on that subject. Click the links, visit the blogs. Follow people tweeting about things that interest you. Subscribe to blogs on subjects that interest you.
6. Learn how to retweet. That means you see a tweet that interests you and you click a button and tweet that same tweet again, giving credit to the originator. For example, if I tweeted:
   

   It’s Easier to Maintain Business Momentum Than Overcome Intertia http://bit.ly/9Db5dq

   (the last bit there is a link to a blog post, and it’s included in the tweet), then you would retweet it as follows:

   RT @Timberry: It’s Easier to Maintain Business Momentum Than Overcome Intertia http://bit.ly/9Db5dq

   That’s gives you several benefits: First, it’s publishing something that seems like good content, so that later, as somebody looks at your Twitter presence, you’ve been adding useful tweets. Second, it gives you a record of a tweet you liked. Third, it alerts the originator of the tweet to you, that you follow him or her and, maybe, that he or she should follow you back.

7. Repeat steps five through seven from now on, building your presence in Twitter, your list of people to follow and the list of people who follow you.
8. As the lists get bigger, experiment with tweetdeck (my favorite) or its competitors that allow you to organize your Twitter world better. I divide mine into lists of friends and family, cyberfriends, business, journalism, news, leaders and so on. Tweetdeck displays the different groups in different columns, making it easier to see what’s going on.

I like Twitter; I use it a lot, and I recommend it. It seems to me like the debate about Twitter is calming down now, meaning that few people care that much who uses it and who doesn’t. But if you’re an entrepreneur, and you haven’t tried it, I would recommend that you do. It’s not about what people are having for lunch–you don’t have to follow those people –or annoying sales pitches–because you don’t have to follow those people, either. It’s about what’s up, what’s interesting and what’s going on.

Follow me on Twitter: timberry. Please.

Fashionable. Trendy. New. Different. Important for entrepreneurs.

Of course you don’t need to always be new and exciting, or different or trendy, to make a successful new business. Just do something well, offer value, do something people want and will pay for; that’s a really good start. Think of the restaurant business. Just because there are millions of them already, does that mean new ones don’t start and make it? Of course not.

Still, new business happens more often, more readily, on new business landscapes. Technology keeps offering new opportunities. I can’t help thinking that as entrepreneurs we should be aware of the major technology trends. Which are, for me at least, the four in the title here.

Over the long holiday weekend I read “Why Twitter Will Endure,” a good thought piece by David Carr on NYTimes.com. Everything he says there makes sense to me. If you like Twitter, there are no surprises in that piece. If you don’t, maybe you should read it.

Although I liked what Ann Handley added to it, on Twitter:

I like @carr2n‘s NYT piece, but I still think @stevenbjohnson said it best last June: “Twitter matters because it’s about what matters.”

And those other three? Well, just within the last week or so, there’s Ben Kunz on Business Week with “5 Ways Apple’s Tablet May Change the World.” And Seth Godin touts the growth of the eBook reader in this piece on his blog. And Megan Berry, of Mobclix, on “How to Get in on the Mobile Boom.” (disclosure: she’s my daughter)

Maybe none of that affects your business, specifically; but should we agree to add the word “yet?”  As in, none of that affects your business yet?

I found these very interesting statistics on Huffington Post yesterday. The post was titled Women Dominate Most Social Networking Sites. This is according to a survey sponsored by Pingdom, a network uptime monitoring business. The chart here gives us the interesting, detailed breakdown, by site name.

I’m not sure what, if any, conclusion to draw, but I found this interesting because personal computing and web use started out more male than female. And although I’ve been expecting it to even out, this came as a bit of a surprise to me.

Not to get gender specific or anything, but this comment–

Um . . . perha­ps that’s because women dominate MOST social discourse.

–amused me, in a comedic sort of way.

And the statistics seemed interesting, in an entrepreneurial business plan sort of way. Good to know, even if not all that surprising.