By Steven Roll
ASBPE President

Becoming involved with ASBPE is a great way to learn about and experiment with new social media technologies. Limiting your early interactions to your colleagues in the business press allows you to avoid making costly mistakes. It also helps you to build up enough confidence to begin using these applications for work.

Paul Heney, an ASBPE past president, sent me an invite to join LinkedIn sometime in 2006. Not knowing what it was about, I decided to go ahead and sign up for it. I did this more out of deference to Paul than genuine interest in the Web site.

Today, I can see that Paul was really on to something. I just started a LinkedIn group for my publication. It’s a great way to communicate with our subscribers. Having been involved with setting up ASBPE’s LinkedIn group, I learned enough about it to convince my boss that we should start one for our publication.

This cycle continues to repeat itself. A few years ago, ASBPE’s New York Chapter President Warren Hersch and I began conducting Webinars on editorial topics for ASBPE members. I helped to promote them and moderated some. I also became familiar with the technical aspects. Since late last year, I’ve been using these skills to promote and moderate Webinars for my employer.

More recently, ASBPE started a Twitter account. Just to go along, I started using Twitter too. After using it for about a year now, I finally feel comfortable enough with it make a formal proposal to use it to promote my publication.

Have some fun and invest in your career by joining the conversation with other ASBPE members in the social media world. Follow me on Twitter at @b2beditor. If you slip up and accidentally send me an inappropriate message, none of your subscribers will be the wiser.