Wil – I love the use of LinkedIn to get a more accurate picture of the makeup of small businesses, especially in tech-related fields. Very smart way to gain some additional insight.
I’m also glad to see the clarification on the importance of a Twitter profile in your reply to Joanna. I’m beyond passionate about search and web development but I consider myself to be pretty bad at Twitter. I use it more like a feed reader — on good days, I check it in the morning, at lunch, and at the end of the day. Some days, I’m too busy to get to it. The way I use Twitter, it’s hard to be super interactive… I’m just not on it enough. That doesn’t invalidate my passion, however.
Beyond that, many people prefer their social experience to be *real* social. I’d rather interact with people at a meetup than on Twitter, since that type of interaction allows much greater depth. I’m just not built for 140 characters.
Along those lines, I think meetup.com is a great “passion detector.” If you go to Google and type: ‘site:meetup.com “eppie vojt”‘ you’d see a bunch of industry-related meetup groups I’ve attended. If it’s a company looking to hire an SEO firm, they can identify the company’s principals and employees and perform this query on them. If I were hiring a firm to do SEO work, I’d feel a lot better about a group of people who were spending their free time improving their craft than a group who just punch the time-clock. Topical meetup = passion.
Thanks for the thought-provoking post and the really good bits about LinkedIn.