Amazon is practically giving away some of the hottest titles around for those have a Kindle. And a $79 annual Amazon Prime membership.

This is a real inducement not only to spring for a Kindle (which can be had for as little as $79), but for Amazon Prime, which allows for “free” shipping, and other benefits. If you use Amazon frequently, the Prime option is a good deal, considering what you save on mailing fees. You can also get free or reduced-price television and movie downloads and, now, titles that range from the Hunger Games trilogy to Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. These are former or current bestsellers – not the public-domain titles that you can download anywhere, titles such as Pride and prejudice and Moby-Dick. You can get Water for Elephants or Fast Food Nation or another 90 or so other notable books free (though not all at once).

Barnes & Noble’s Nook already offers the ability to borrow books from public libraries. Many people have opted for the Nook because of that function. If you’re already in a community with a good library (that your taxes support), why not go with a Nook and save money?

Barnes & Noble sees a continuing future in Nook, despite the brutal battleground at the brick-and-mortar bookstore level. Barnes & Noble will double the size of its Nook boutiques to 2,000 square feet at its busiest locations, in time for the holiday season.

But the real news is the continuing growth of social networking, of conversation, in certain e-readers.

Buried beside the Amazon announcement and the news of Barnes & Noble’s continuing Nook strength is a new edition of the Kobo Vox e-Reader for about $200 (Kobo offers other readers at $129 and $99). This new version has a color display, and like the Kindle Fire, you can read newspapers, magazines as well as browse the internet, access email, listen to music, watch movies, play games. You can also access over 15,000 free apps

The Nook Friends feature already lets people allow their Twitter and Facebook friends see what they’re reading, and also allow friends to read a book for a limited period.  Of course, on the iPad, you can also simply email your friends about what you’re reading on the Nook or Kindle or iBooks app without any problem.

But it’s likely that e-readers will add more tablet features and try to create a growing interactive experience for the solitary reading one. I myself rather prefer the solitary reading experience – you can really only share a book if you’re reading it aloud to someone.

I read in all different ways. But recently I’ve been walking around town and taking public transportation while listening to an excellent audio book version of Anthony Trollope’s great novel, Can You Forgive Her? Audio book sales are still quite strong, and even growing, but it wasn’t too long ago they seemed the latest thing. Who’d have thought that listening on an iPod to a well-narrated classic would suddenly seem so old-fashioned?

I’ve been following the development of online business networking for several years, particularly at the inception of sites like Ecademy.com, Ryze.com and, of course, LinkedIn. While there are many competitors to LinkedIn, it has certainly for now risen to the top of sites that are devoted primarily to business networking.

I use a variety of social networks to interact with colleagues, associates and friends, but LinkedIn has some features that set it apart from the rest. LinkedIn is a way that many of the members of my off-line network (BNI – Business Network International) have stayed in touch with each other in the online space. As a person in the “500+ connections” category, I use LinkedIn as a way to disseminate the many articles I write every month, as well as to promote books and publications.

Here’s how I use it and what I recommend to others.

1. Connecting with More People
I’ve spoken to countless entrepreneurs who have doubled or tripled their business because of the relationships they are able to make on LinkedIn. With the ability to view detailed profiles, become connected to people via a shared acquaintance, and to post updates about one’s business or career for these connections to share, a huge number of the barriers to connecting with people in different geographic locations simply don’t exist to members of LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is also well-known as a resource for both job seekers and recruiters. The site lets businesses pay to post jobs and sells enhanced profile and services to jobseekers. Successful recruiters rely heavily on networking and LinkedIn to find candidates for open positions.

2. Participating in Groups
LinkedIn’s Groups feature is a wonderful way to meet others who share an affinity, whether it be an industry, cause or an employer, and to have an online arena for possible exchanges. Being a member of the same group as someone else removes the barrier that LinkedIn ordinarily imposes that you must personally know someone to send a message or invite him or her to connect.

LinkedIn’s Groups feature might just be among its most valuable, especially when used effectively to build influential connections. Participating in a group — by asking questions, suggesting topics, answering questions or recommending another member’s answers — is a way to build a more personal connection. For example, I mentor a large number of entrepreneurs who want to better their business writing skills, meeting with them on a regular basis via telebridge. These “mentees” have also formed a group on LinkedIn, where they can share writing opportunities or get reviews from peers on a new piece they’ve written.

Participating in groups can take as much or as little time as you choose. For maximum impact, choose group discussions that are highly popular, judged from the number of responses.

3. Capitalizing on Search Engine Optimization
LinkedIn profiles show up very high on search-engine results. The more links you add to your profile, the higher one’s ranking may be in search-engine results. LinkedIn allows you to incorporate two very important links to a profile: websites and a blog. Adding these to your profile not only builds your profile’s link count, but lets you promote your site or sites. I use this feature to highlight my own website, BusinessNetworking.com.

4. Tying in a Twitter Connection
LinkedIn easily dovetails with Twitter. Indeed you can adeptly integrate Twitter with several social networks using Twitter’s application programming interfaces: I cross-promote content I have written across my various social networking accounts. Every article I write can be seamlessly shared via my Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn status postings.

Tying your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile (achieved by clicking a box), allows you to promote your Twitter profile easily through LinkedIn.

5. Building and Enhancing Credibility
LinkedIn may well become the first place everyone will look to determine the business profile of an individual. LinkedIn allows a professional to showcase a collection of printed works or publications, recommendations from other LinkedIn users, company affiliations, and work history. When I want to know more about someone I’ve just met, I can get quite a bit of information about them by reading their LinkedIn profile. I can see where they’ve worked, or what they’ve done in the business world, and I can see what others think of them by reading recommendations that others have written about them.

Since most professionals do not stay in the same job for a lifetime anymore, their LinkedIn profile can continue to capture their work history narrative.

LinkedIn also allows for profiles of companies and brands, which can be cross-connected with the profiles of the “humans” associated with those organizations – including executive management, the founders, and the employees.

These days, a professional’s worth is frequently judged by the quality of his or her network. So LinkedIn is particularly vital for today’s entrepreneur, demonstrating knowledge, expertise, experience, social capital, and the breadth of one’s network.

Called the “father of modern networking” by CNN, Dr. Ivan Misner is a New York Times bestselling author. He is the Founder and Chairman of BNI, the world’s largest business networking organization. His newest book, Networking Like a Pro, can be viewed at www.IvanMisner.com. Dr. Misner is also the Senior Partner of the Referral Institute, an international referral training company.

1. Poll Your People.

In this new economy the way to know what to sell is by finding out how you can serve people. Ask them what their biggest challenge is with the topic you serve and they’ll tell you. And, once you get the conversation going (particularly if you give people a choice between two polarizing topics) it will grow like a snowball rolling down a mountain.

2. Provide Free Content.

Next, you’ll want to give them some of what they need – for free.  Posting your content on a blog and connecting it with social media works beautifully. Here’s a great example from Eben Pagan’s current launch. (Another tip: if your audience can get fast results from anything you teach them during this part, they’ll be hungry for more.)

3. Engage.

Always in social media you want to be conversing. It’s a two way street. Comment on your target market’s posts and prepare to do a web show (or a teleseminar, or event…). Again, here’s Eben with a replay. People need to know you in order to buy from you. This is the point when you want them to experience you.

4. Provide An Opportunity to Purchase.

Most seasoned entrepreneurs have this part down, but I’m amazed by how difficult this is for many early entrepreneurs. If you don’t give them the chance to purchase, they won’t. And don’t just send emails, strategically use social media for this too. (If you don’t understand how to sell through social media, contact us – we can help.)

5. Show Social Proof.

You’ll want to let people see that what you do works. You can ask your clients to post proof on your wall. You can post a “Congrats!” on your wall to a client who has had great results (make sure to link to their page). Social proof is easy – and key – in a social media world.

6. Keep Selling.

This is where many people fail. Simply because you’ve started selling doesn’t mean you’ve stopped. After purchasing, people will post, comment or respond about how excited they are. Continue to allow people to purchase. You’ve just begun to get the results that social media sales will give you.

7. If Your Launch was Successful…Re-Launch.

We’ve had people launch the same thing three times and sell like hotcakes. The first group of purchasers will encourage the second group to purchase, etc, on social media. People truly want to spread good news about you and if you only launch once, you cap their enthusiasm.

It was the first time that Michael [Drew] and Andrea [Reindl] were teaching a person with my level of computer skill and understanding how to blog.

This has been difficult lately, not knowing what to do. And frustrating for my masters also, as they were challenged in how best to teach me. The one thing that became evident was that I have to become known in the social media world. There are great benefits in doing so.

The lesson or gem that I became aware of is that I needed to join a bunch of social networking groups.

The easiest way to do this is by using a site that such as ping.fm, that will get you signed up quickly and easily.  On that site, there are multiple other sites all inter-connected, so that if I put a message on the ping board, that message gets broadcast through all of the social media places that I join.  Easy!

My assignment for the month of December to join the sites and take notes.

So far, I have joined Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Linked in, MySpace, Tumblr, and Plurk.  So, if you want to go and join those and add me as a friend, that would be wonderful.

Let me know when you join, or what you join.  Just think…a whole new batch of friends!

How am I going to succeed?

In order to be successful, with blogging, I have to make myself known amongst the Social Media group.

To be known, I need to be acknowledged – the world needs to be able to hear me. To hear me, I need to be visible. How do I become visible?

How? Not so hard. Join all the social media groups.

There are many places to be seen within the social media world. More than I knew about, there is a web page called at www.pingfm.com. When I went to pingfm, I am able to join as many as I like. There was Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Tumblr – I am not going to name them all. But there are at least 30 different sites.

I am in the process of joining them all now. To the best of my understanding, now when I post something, Ping will distribute it through all the sites I joined. I am not quite sure how all this works yet. I will keep you posted.

This is like in the days of old when people used television, newspapers, or radio to let the customer know about a product or service being offered.

My assignment until Christmas is to join the groups.

1. The first step to any sale is bonding. (When someone hands over a credit card is simply the end of a process that starts here.) So, share meaningful things and converse with those you want to sell to. It is what separates you from a used car salesman!

2. Don’t hide your business (see #5 here). One of the biggest challenges I see is that people don’t want to appear “too salesy” – so then they never mention that they are a coach, sell kids clothes, or are in business. The aren’t door-to-door customers for a reason. You have to let people know you have something to sell in order for them to buy.

3. Know when to take the conversation off of social media. At a certain point, you can tell when the relationship is warming up (it’s that moment when if you were meeting someone you know the moment is NOW to ask them for the number). Most often, the feeling of intimacy that social media creates does not replace real human interaction. Ask for their phone number.

4. Use Facebook events, Twitter hashtags and Ustream shows to promote your business. Put up an event to highlight a sale. Add a hashtag to your posts to create buzz. And, video shows are hands down the way I see people selling the most using new media. You always want to have a social media sales plan that incorporates these.

5. Follow up with those who have yet to buy and those who have already bought. If you go to someone’s page and thank them for their business, they will often comment on what a great service or product you provided. Then, all of their friends see that, along with their glowing recommendation. This is one of the most effective ways to sell through social media.

Soon Facebook hopes that you will not leave them to shop – that it will replace most websites and that you will buy things directly from there (if you’d like to get started now, here are some options), so selling on these sites is a skill you need to learn. Done well, I’ve seen people build six-figure businesses through social media.

Got questions? Please ask away below this (I love talking to you all)!

1. Networking groups: There are many Facebook “like” pages where people have assembled groups of people and welcome you to provide resources, insights, and substance (for instance http://www.facebook.com/Driven.DIVApreneurs). It is easy to be seen as an expert there, and then easier to get clients quickly (they already “know, like, and trust” you ~ as the saying goes).

2. Watch for people’s pain ~ then solve it. If you are a nutritionist, you can daily see people who are agonizing about how much they eat (especially this time of year). The same applies for many fields. Contact them (if the topic is vulnerable, do it via email).

3. Do web shows. Social media isn’t simply Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Go new media and utilize the intimacy of a web show. Vokle.com is a fabulous choice where you can even take video questions. We live in a world of social media because people value connection, transparency, and authenticity. A web show meets these needs in spades and if you’re trying to sell me anything that’s a service, seeing you interact on video makes it a much easier purchase for me.

4. Share people’s testimonials. If someone is thinking about hiring you, they will probably watch your social media (even if they’re not interacting with you). Our guard goes up if someone tells us how great they are; however, if a third person says something wonderful it’s easier for us to believe it. Testimonials often will be the thing that convince someone to purchase from you.

5. Provide opportunities to purchase. The biggest concern I hear is, “I don’t want to seem salesy.” In reality, you would never even know that many people have anything to sell based on their social media. Posting about your dog will not actually increase your sales. Posting “What a wonderful day I had coaching” or “We got so many holiday orders today I’m going to be up ‘til midnight filling them!” encourages sales.

Social media is social – and I don’t think that any of you would simply post your website on someone’s page as a way to sell. Honestly, I think that most of us don’t actually sell via social media because of fear. (If you were at the grocery store and someone asked you what you did for a living, you’d tell them, right? Same deal with social media. The fear of talking about what you do on Facebook, Twitter, etc., doesn’t serve you – nor does it serve the people who need you.)

So, I challenge you to post something that would let someone purchase from you through social media today and let me know how it goes. Feel free to even post a link to your page so we can all go support you (which by getting you into the Top News feed will also help your sales)!

Here’s the thing, it brings up the question ‘How real is too real?’.  How much do you share with people you only kind of know (or don’t know at all)?  How much is too much?  How do you evaluate what may or may not be too much?

Each of us must answer the above questions for ourselves.  Wether you like it or not, transparency is really no longer an option. Things like social networks and social media have made it easy to find information for just about anyone. Reality is, we have to consciously decide what information about ourselves we’ll be putting out online.

Gretchen Rubin of ‘The Happiness Project’ has some standards that she keeps as part of her checklist before she posts something.

•           Am I being funny?

•           Am I giving interesting information from science, history, literature, etc.?

•           Am I revealing my character?

•           Am I telling stories?

•           Am I showing what it’s like to live in New York City?

•           Am I linking to other bloggers?

•           Am I comfortable with my parents reading this? (I never work blue.)

•           Am I criticizing anyone except myself?

Facebook and other social media were not something that I was automatically comfortable with.  It took me some time.  Honestly, I’m still not sure where my line is. How much information I really want out on the big world wide web about me and my personal life.  I think a checklist is a great starting point to gauge what I want to post.

Below is a video that shows some of the details about social media, the web and how things are changing.  While you watch it pay close attention to the words and what’s being said. What do you think?  Have you thought about it?  Have you really put conscious thought into what kind of personal information you want exposed?  I would love to know where you stand, might help me come to some of my own conclusions

The truth can now be told.

Well I can attest that it is, indeed, legitimate. You see, she was on the line with me and I know the whole story.

The commotion over the video is validation of my hypothesis, taught during my Buzz Snatching course, that anyone – even an unknown 33-year-old Belfast maker of trashy horror films, can become an instant global celebrity thanks to the power of the viral Internet.

In this case, said unknown filmmaker is one George Clarke, who before discovering the fur-wrapped woman in a top hat chatting away on her cell phone was best known as the director of Battle of the Bone, a no-budget kung-fu zombie flick that found a surprising – albeit small – cult audience.

It is Clarke, standing in front of a movie poster for Battle of the Bone, who prattles on for nearly 8 ½ minutes on YouTube about the mysterious cell phone caller.  She might be a time traveler, he offers, since cell phones themselves weren’t used by regular folk until at least the late 1970s.

It’s hard to measure how many millions of viewers have witnessed Clarke’s video since he originally posted it on October 19^th.  By the time you read this column, Clarke’s own original post will have surpassed 5 million views.  But that is a drop in the viewership bucket when weighed against the other YouTube knockoffs of his original; the video’s global network television audience; and the forests of trees that have been felled to carry the print stories on the so-called mystery.

Credit is due to Clarke. More people have viewed his poster for Battle of the Bone in the past two weeks than ever had or ever would have heard of him and his flick if he’d live to be 1,000 years old.

Clarke recognized the power of the public’s fascination with anything even remotely supernatural and he exploited it to its fullest.  Bravo for him.  His films may suck, but his marketing instincts are Nobel Prize-caliber.

So who is the mysterious women on the cell phone?  Her name is Gertrude Owens, a 54-year-old unemployed actress from Santa Monica.  Trude and I bet 50 bucks that she couldn’t travel back in time and complete a cell phone call to me at my office in Denver.

Well, go know!  Trude did it with aplomb and even had the chutzpah to call me collect.  If you want to learn her whole story, you’ll have to watch my soon-to-be-posted YouTube video that reveals all. I’m shooting for 500,000 viewers and airtime on the new Conan show.  Be sure to look for the “Buzz Snatching” poster in the background.

Dean Rotbart, an award-winning journalist and media relations consultant, teaches a workshop titled: Buzz Snatching: Proven Methods for Grabbing More Than Your Fair Share of the Public’s Attention.  The course is offered through the Wizard Academy in Austin, TX.

With social media, the key to success is outlining a strategy that takes into account the amount of time you can realistically dedicate each day to your online marketing efforts, and to be consistent.  People have a tendency to get online at random times and start clicking away. Then something mysterious happens in the “space-time continuum” and all of a sudden two hours go by and they have nothing to show for it!  Here’s how to avoid falling victim to that trap . . . have a plan and work it! Write up a plan for how often you will work your social media and for how long.

Sit down and map out a weekly schedule that outlines specific days and times during which you will spend developing your social media strategy. Figure out what’s realistic and what makes sense for your company and go from there. For example, you might schedule yourself simply to post one update at 9 a.m., one at 1 p.m., and one at 5 p.m. daily, and then dedicate 10 minutes to responding to comments and direct messages at 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays.  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, you might then dedicate 10 minutes at 10 a.m. and 10 minutes at 3 p.m. to re-tweeting people’s comments that you find valuable and also thanking people for mentioning you or for re-tweeting your posts. This is just an example, but you should definitely take the time to devise a social media strategy along these lines that specifically makes sense for you.

Leverage your time! Be sure to utilize the various tools currently available that are designed specifically to save you time in your social media efforts. For example, sites like http://ping.fm, www.seesmic.com, and www.tweetdeck.com are designed to send your social media updates to multiple social networking sites, including Twitter and Facebook, with one click.

Some sites even allow you to link multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts (if you have more than one) to one desktop application where you can post updates to all sites as well as view and respond to your friends’ posts on those sites and keep a log of all your past posts. This means no more logging into multiple social networking sites . . .  you can manage all your social networking accounts from one place!

Also, there are sites such as www.cotweet.com where you can schedule updates in advance so your updates will be posting even while you’re not online. With all the traveling I do, this is a tool that I’ve personally found to be very useful.

Once you have your strategy in place, you will no doubt be anxious to start seeing a return on your online networking investment and it’s very important to remember one thing: Networking, whether online or face-to-face, is more about farming than it is about hunting.  It’s about cultivating relationships with people. The bottom line is – it takes time. It is about building the credibility of your brand. That doesn’t happen overnight.

Return on Investment (ROI) is directly correlated to either:

1.     Dollars spent (online paid marketing), or

2.     Time and/or effort spent – in saturating and building strong profiles on whatever social media channels are deemed effective for the brand (including blogging).

Don’t forget that some businesses will benefit much more from spending more effort on “niche” networks that may have less traffic, but that are more targeted to the brand’s ultimate consumer.

If your network is a mile wide and an inch deep it will not be successful. It is important that you create a network that is both wide and deep. You do this by being visible and engaging in the conversation. Over time, this gives you credibility that leads to building your brand and your sales and that will ultimately give you the biggest ROI for your online marketing efforts.

Most of what I’ve discussed so far has focused on what you should do in order to carry out an effective and profitable social media campaign for your business. But there are also some things you should be sure to avoid in order to be successful.

Below are the top five common mistakes that businesses make when it comes to social media networking—avoid all of these:

1.     Spending too much time on sites you enjoy and not fully evaluating whether those particular sites are the most effective ones for your efforts.

2.     Going onto a site for “work” and then running down rabbit holes getting distracted by friends who may have posted something interesting or something that requires a response.

3.     Not being able to properly define when it is more cost-effective to delegate certain social media responsibilities to someone else to handle.

4.     Setting up a blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter page and then not keeping it populated – consistency and fresh content are key.

5.     Forgetting that social media is about engaging in the conversation and not just about selling.

Called the “father of modern networking” by CNN, Dr. Ivan Misner is a New York Times bestselling author.  He is the Founder and Chairman of BNI, the world’s largest business networking organization.  His newest book, Networking Like a Pro, can be viewed at www.IvanMisner.com.  Dr. Misner is also the Sr. Partner for the Referral Institute, an international referral training company.