If you don’t know what LinkedIn is, or haven’t heard about it, you should go to the site immediately and check it out. Initially launched in 2003, consider it the Social Media network for the working professional. Over the years it has prove that from a business perspective, it is an excellent place to make and expand contacts, and is fertile recruiting ground.

Creating a comprehensive, actionable social media strategy around your brand isn’t all that hard, but it is difficult. The distinction is an important one. The work itself is fairly easy. You won’t strain either back or brain in the doing of it. Getting it right though, takes some finesse.

Nobody likes being stuck in traffic during the morning commute, but if that describes your morning routine, then here are some ideas about how you can make the best use of that time. It might not make the daily commute any more pleasant, but it will at least make it a bit more productive.

The drive to better ourselves is embedded in our DNA. From the first time our earliest ancestors made the shocking discovery that a rock made a better tool for smashing things than a bare fist, the race has been on. These days, of course, it’s far less about finding new and innovative ways of smashing things, and far more about other, more intangible skills.

From a business perspective, cloud computing is useful in a variety of ways. It can, for instance, allow you to more easily grant and control access to company data, enabling easier collaboration with remote, far-flung users. It can allow your employees to more easily work from anywhere there’s an internet connection.

Hiring is probably the biggest headache a business has, regardless of its size. Finding qualified people who fit your company’s lifestyle and ethics is not an easy task. Even harder, once you’ve found them, how do you keep them happy and loyal, instead of working with one foot already out of the door? Here are some suggestions on how to keep your best people happy:

Show Them They’re Valued

No one likes to feel unappreciated.

Sometimes, less is more. Sometimes, it is the simplest strategies that work best. In the ongoing quest to find new, better, faster, and more efficient ways of reaching out to, and connecting with, our customers, maybe we sometimes over-engineer solutions, when what we really need to do is to pull back just a bit.

The world is changing so rapidly at this point that you can almost see it happen before your eyes. There are several different bits of technology on a collision course that will forever change how we live and work. Among these technologies are wearable computers and the “internet of everything” or the “internet of objects.

Do you have a Twitter account for your company? If not, perhaps it’s time. Twitter is the #2 Social Media platform behind only Facebook. It has nearly 650 million users and is growing at a rapid pace. Even better, in response to the rise of Social Media upstart, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook have recently undergone fairly dramatic redesigns to place more prominence on images and videos, both of which can now be incorporated into your Tweets.

Trade shows are one of those particular things that are hard for companies to get right. You know you’ve got to do them, but most companies are content to recycle their same old booth, design, and format everywhere they go, and every time they go. You know the drill, you walk past a booth and there’s a somewhat nervous or expectant looking booth attendee who starts pitching you, carney-style, does a little demonstration, asks a few questions.