The money raised will help support Marie Curie Nurses who provide free nursing care to people with terminal cancer and other terminal illnesses, in the place of their choice.

Marie Curie Nurses provide practical and emotional support for terminally ill people and their families. Every £20 raised provides one hour of Marie Curie Nursing care in a patient’s home. So the money raised of £150 pounds for the swim, should equate to around 8 hours of care being provided to a patient by Marie Curie Nurses.

Thank you to all those that have supported us and in particular, Mark, on the swim for charity and training has already commenced for the next charity challenge. This will be an 8 mile swim for The Stroke Association.

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The money raised will help support Marie Curie Nurses who provide free nursing care to people with terminal cancer and other terminal illnesses, in the place of their choice.

Marie Curie Nurses provide practical and emotional support for terminally ill people and their families. Every £20 raised provides one hour of Marie Curie Nursing care in a patient’s home.

If you have suffered from cancer or know someone who has suffered or is suffering from cancer then you will appreciate the fantastic support provided by this great organisation at such a difficult time in a persons life.

So if you are able to sponsor Mark on his swim, any amount is a great help then please select here and thank you for your support.

To be in with a chance of winning this great prize, worth hundreds of pounds. You need to do the following by Friday 16th March 2012:

- Like us on Facebook – click here to Like
- Follow us on Google+ – click here to follow
- Subscribe to our YouTube channel – click here to subscribe 

A lucky winner will then be drawn at random from those who have taken part in the competition by midnight GMT on Friday 16th March 2012. The winner will then be contacted with details of how they can claim this great prize.

Good luck and we look forward to working with the winner to help them achieve their personal or company goals through this fantastic professional LinkedIn network.

This is a great way for sharing your LinkedIn company profile and integrating the two together, through the incorporation on to your website.  It’s also a great way to share recommendations you have received for goods / services from previous customers that are held against your company profile.

Internal research shows that 70% of LinkedIn’s members follow or would follow a company on LinkedIn and 60% expect industry insights as well as news from the companies that they follow.

To add a follow button to your website, click here and this will take you to the LinkedIn developers network where you can very simply create the style of button you require and then it’s a simple case of copying the code on to your website and that’s it !!

Intelipad has today launched a series of webinars, which will offer the attendees a full overview in terms of LinkedIn, how to make the most of their online presence, discuss personal branding, along with tips and tricks from the No.1 best selling author within the LinkedIn category of the Amazon Kindle Store.

The webinars will commence on Tuesday 6th March 2012, last an hour and run every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday at 1.30pm GMT on a fortnightly basis.

So, why not take the chance to sign up here, for one of these great cost effective webinars and make the most of your LinkedIn experience.

The first training session covers the subject of how to utilise the reports and demographic information within LinkedIn group reports, to target discussions and also for market research.

Each bite sized training session is around 5 minutes or less and supports our blog posts around the subjects.

A full series of bite sized LinkedIn training videos is planned, so watch out for the announcements, keep checking the website and subscribe to the Intelipad’s YouTube channel.

Happy watching and learning from the Intelipad team.

I know I hear you cry, this is available already within LinkedIn, so why now bring this facility in to LinkedIn groups ?  Well it provides a great way to spark of conversations within the group and also to gain really quick insights in to your members.  For example I run a Golf Networking group for Directors across the North West of England and I might want a view from the members as to which golf course to play next.  Polls allows me to quickly and easily request this information, without the need to message all group members or rely on them commenting on a conversation that I start.

I can also see that as with Polls elsewhere in LinkedIn, you can utilise this tool as a means of gathering useful information for your business, so effectively performing market research.   So for example, we provide LinkedIn training seminars across the UK and I might want to target specific groups and start a poll in terms of where would you next like to see a LinkedIn training seminar ?  And provide a list of cities across the UK.

If you are a group owner then this facility comes with all of the controls available with other areas of functionality, so you can control who can start polls within your group.

LinkedIn have recently relaunched their cardmunch services which takes your business cards and converts them in to digital format, as well as pulling additional information from the LinkedIn database.

Cardmunch is available for use on your smartphone and I can certainly advice that my experience with using the iPhone version of the app is that it’s very straightforward and very fast at digitising the information. This is also backed by the fact that to date over 2 million business cards have now been digitised using cardmunch.

So head over to the App store and download then you to can start to digitise your business cards, ensuring that details of a key contact are not lost.

It’s amazing how these theories stay within your mind and how during your career that you realise that you are subconsciously utilising them and also the reality of the actual situations that you encounter within the working environment either prove or disprove these theories.

Both theories in my view play a real importance with regards to building teams, managing teams and most importantly, ensuring that the team feels motivated.

With Maslow, his hierarchy of needs, helps us to understand the key elements that every human being requires to ensure a feeling of as he puts it “self actualisation” or in my view self worth.  If you apply each of the following element to the work place then these are my thoughts in terms of how they are addressed:

• Physiological – these are the basic human needs such as food, water, shelter and clothing.
• Safety – this is with regards to ensuring that a person feels that their job is safe that they have job security.
• Love and belonging – this is key to a teams success, creating a sense that each members contribution is valuable, thus ensuring that that individual feels part of the team (they belong to the team).
• Esteem – this is the humans desire to be accepted or valued by others.  So as a manager and I follow this golden rule – it cost’s nothing to make sure that an individual is thanked for their contribution or simply told that they have produced an excellent piece of work.

• Motivation factors – challenging work, recognition, job enrichment, job rotation, personal growth
• Hygiene factors – job status, job security, salary, fringe benefits and work conditions

I always work on the basis that in terms of his theory that Motivation factors are the absolute key to getting the most out of individuals or teams.  However, you still have to address the hygiene factors, although their contribution to satisfaction are very short lived.  Although ignoring them, you do so at your peril.  I say short-lived, since being given a different job title or indeed an increase in salary, will only result in that individual feeling an “increased spring in their step,” for maybe a day or two.  Whereas if an individual feels challenged through their work and knows that they are supported by you as their manager then that is what keeps them motivated, which then has a knock on effect to their’s and others input in to the overall teams success.

Our book has been really well received since being published in August 2011 and regularly features within the top 5 on Amazon Kindle charts in terms of those books covering the subject of LinkedIn.

The book takes you on a journey and works on the basis that you are a LinkedIn newbie.  Describing how to setup a basic profile and then enhance to take advantage of some of those not so well known features to help market yourself or yourself and company.  Discussing the subject of Search Engine Optimisation and why its important to have a presence on this fantastic Professional Network.

So don’t hesitate, take advantage of this one day offer by following the link and download your free copy today.

We hope that you enjoy and would really appreciate any review / comments you would like to leave us on the Amazon website, oh and don’t forget to “Like” the book as well.