Developing Relationships With LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the shirt and tie venue of social networking. It is relatively formal and designed to be corporate/business like. It is not for everyone. LinkedIn is a place to cultivate relationships and share information on a professional level. To get a more detailed picture of how LinkedIn fits with other networks see Mapping the Networks and you can also look at the Denver DataMan LinkedIn Dictionary.

LinkedIn is a great way to connect with people in your industry, your school, your Chamber of Commerce, your clubs, Fraternal organizations, etc. it is not the place to connect with people who like the ABC hit Lost. I guess, it would be possible to have the business owners who like Lost group but this type of group lends itself to the more laid back nature of Facebook. Groups give you a way to connect with people who are like yourself or are seeking your service.

LinkedIn Answers is my favorite part of LinkedIn. With LinkedIn answers users post questions that they have about almost any area of business or technology and then get answers from people who just want to help and get their name out there. You can get business by being seen as the expert but don’t write that you sell the answer. The best way to use LinkedIn answers is to write quality answers and get the question asker to mark your answer as the best answer. You can also get valuable answers for yourself using this tool.

Each person who has worked extensively with LinkedIn will have a different view on the quality vs. quantity debate. I put myself squarely in the quality camp and believe that LinkedIn works best as a tool to enhance existing relationships or to start new ones with introductions. LinkedIn does not work well for hard selling at all or for blast messaging; it just does not fit the culture of the network.

If you are someone who is a public figure and you are expected to “link” with everyone, you should do this and you will need to consider your spheres of influences and expectations by others when making your plan of action for using LinkedIn.

The top 10 things you can do with LinkedIn

1. Connect with people who you know like and trust in your business community

2. Fill out enough information in your profile that people finding you can learn new information about you and understand why you are an expert in your field

3. Write recommendations that show that you care

4. Avoid the hard sell

5. Answer questions on LinkedIn answers to share your expertise

6. Join groups that relate to your industry, organizations and passions

7. Only share information that you would share with your most distant clients (content on a social network should be able to be posted on the Interstate)

8. Use applications to enhance your profile like the Amazon application to share books you are reading in your field

9. Add events to the events directory – as the events directory becomes more know it will become more valuable

10. Avoid excessive blast mailings to your connections and groups

Use these tips and you will start to make LinkedIn an effective tool.

Lots of Great Reading

Recently I have been doing lots of great reading, well listening to learn more about the way the Internet works and how it is changing our world. You can keep up with my reading list in full using my LinkedIn Profile and the Amazon Application or I tend to blog about books I am reading here.

I read - Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe that examines how businesses and nonprofits can use the crowd (the 1 Billion Internet users) to communicate and interact in the new world. This book was a bit long but provided a lot of great examples.

John Brackney, president and CEO shared with me a book called Tribes. This is a short must read for anyone who is in business and those who want to know what the business world is doing. We are all in Tribes, our family, our city, our companies, our HOAs, PTA, Churches and Temples and everywhere else we are in tribes and we are looking for leadership. Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin paints a very clear picture of what is happening and what we all need to do to move with the tides and not be pulled under by the current.

Right now I am working on two books - Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000: Running a Business in Today's Consumer-Driven World by Pete Blackshaw a leader in understanding consumer generated content like this blog post about these books and The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman who shares why the world is becoming flatter and flatter with technology.

Each of these books have great information and their authors are well versed in their fields. I look forward to sharing my findings and gleanings on this blog, my sessions and in my Email Newsletter.

LinkedIn Ads

Denver DataMan will be hosting a Email Marketing seminar on 12/2 and I am trying to expand the audience for the session. To do this I started looking at LinkedIn events and I posted the event and then decided to connect this with a LinkedIn events ad.

Creating the event was very easy once I figured out how to get into the interface. I had to click on another event and then it showed me a main page for LinkedIn events. You can get into LinkedIn Event at http://events.linkedin.com. Like the rest of LinkedIn you are very limited on formating. You can see what an event looks like at http://events.linkedin.com/pub/15457.

I like that the events are linked to the person who created it so you can see their LinkedIn profile information. I also like that you can see the public profiles of people who are attending.

After you create an event it asks you if you want to buy adds for the event. I did not want to buy an add for the first event I posted - http://events.linkedin.com/pub/15453 - because the event is free but when I posted my e-mail seminar I chose to buy an ad.

Ads on LinkedIn are sold by impressions (number of times the ad will be shown). You can filter out who you want to see the add by geography, industry, gender, age, company size and similar demographic information. As you do this the size of the population of users you will reach is updated as well as the price. For example I paid $16 per-1000 impressions.

There is a $25 minimum order - and unlike other Ad tools there does not appear to be a way to set budgets. For example on Google you can say I want to spend up $50 over the month. Here you are pre-paying for impressions.

Overall I like the interface for both LinkedIn ads and LinkedIn events. I look forward to seeing how effective either will be for the promotion of events.