At that conference, I’ll be presenting information on Social Networking for Business. The first presentation will be in the networking track of the event. In that time, I’ll be showing just how similar social networking is to face-to-face networking.

There are many people afraid to jump into the social networking arena. I correlate that to businesses who did not think there was a need for a website 10 or even 5 years ago. I don’t meet business owners any more who don’t think it’s necessary to have a website. The time has also come for social networking.

There are many excuses for not doing social networking.  People are always telling me things like – I grew up with a phone that had a cord, with a tv that had tubes, without a computer… -  so did I – Get over it! If you want your business to be found on the web today, social networking is absolutely necessary. A website alone is not good enough anymore. Even a website that has great search engine optimization needs more. Having your profile on LinkedIn, updating your info on Twitter and having a business page on Facebook are just a few of the steps that need to be taken in social media to get people to know about your business.

The other piece of what I’m doing is presenting on using Facebook pages for business. Facebook is not just for connecting with friends and finding old classmates. When it’s used correctly, Facebook can be a great business tool. Jobs are found, business is transacted and money is made.

Hope to see many familiar and new faces at this great conference. Did I forget to mention that there will be plenty of time for face-to-face networking?

As a follow up to the post I wrote asking “What are YOU creating,” I’m also working with fellow members of the Lake County Prosperity Forum on a volunteer basis on a business conference that will be occuring later this summer (details to be released once our site is up and running). I’ll be a panel speaker on the topic of using Social Media to build your brand, as I’ve become one of the in-house gurus on all things Twitter.

In order to create BUZZ for the event, I’ve set up a Twitter account for our conference, @Vision2020Conf, and just yesterday stumbled across a wonderful blogpost by @MariSmith about using a free application called Group Tweet that will allow several Twitter users to post through the @Vision2020Conf account so that no one person is running around like a maniac from one exhibitor booth or conference room to the next during the all-day event.

So here is the “HOT” part about the post. After looking through a few more of the posts on Mari’s Blog, I clicked to mark her blog as one of my favorites via Technorati, and stumbled across a new widget (now in our far right column) that lets you graph the top searched tags / key-words in the blogosphere, and was blown away by how much more popular Twitter is in searches than LinkedIn. (Twitter is the blue line way on the top; LinkedIn is the line that’s nearly non-existent on the bottom.)

I have run into so many people in the last year (during my “Job Search 1.0″)that were finally starting to understand that having a compelling LinkedIn profile is no longer an option in today’s professional world — it is a must. Linked in went from 10 million users two years ago to 40 million as of the end of April, 2009.

I heard of and joined Twitter last summer. Estimates were that it had roughly 5 million users last year April, this article estimates that the site had nearly 17 million “unique visitors” (not sure if that means user accounts) in the month of April, 2009 alone, during my “Job Search 2.0″.

So now go look at that graph widget I’ve posted on the top right of Unleashed Abundance again — as of this posting, Twitter’s search rate is kicking LinkedIn’s butt. Ponder this a few secs….

A couple years ago, LinkedIn was hot stuff. Many business professionals are just NOW starting to understand they NEED to be there. Fast forward to today. Twitter is HOT STUFF. You might want to consider whether YOU should be there…

Cheers,
@Hrichtfort — looking forward to seeing y’all at @Vision2020Conf with a shout-out to my fellow #Vision2020Conf partners in crime: @Anup25 @EverybodySafe @MasterSF @RealtyFreak @JDGershbein and @FootballChic