Monthly Archives: November 2012

Adding Connections on LinkedIn – Invites

Adding Connections on LinkedIn – Invites

In our previous post, Create a Company Profile on LinkedIn, we talked about how to create a company profile on LinkedIn. In this post, we start looking at how to add connections on LinkedIn.

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Adding Connections

After you’ve created your profiles, the next thing you’ll want to do is to make connections. As we mentioned, you start with 3,000 available invitations, lifetime, so, while that’s a lot, you don’t want to be frivolous with them, either.

Before you go sending out invitations, a word of caution. We mentioned the danger of getting an IDK in a previous section. When you first join LinkedIn, you may be tempted to enthusiastically invite all kinds of people whom you don’t really know all that well. It’s not a good idea, not just because they could IDK you, but because it’s a bit rude.

Think about it. If someone you don’t recognize invites you to connect, what is your reaction? Chances are you’ll scratch your head, visit that person’s profile and try to figure out where you may have run into them before. That person just took a few seconds or minutes out of your day, because they didn’t give you the context for the invitation.

When you invite a contact while viewing their profile, LinkedIn suggests the text for the invit­ation, similar to the following figure.

LinkedIn Invite

Pretty minimal, huh? It gives the recipient absolutely no context.

Never use the default text unless you know the person really well, and they’re expecting your connection request.

Always include an explanation for why you want to connect, and a little bit about how you know the person. Not only do you avoid being rude this way, you’ll also be much less likely to get an IDK. If you think the person might reject your request, some people append something like, “If you decide not to accept my invitation, I would appreciate it if you click Ignore rather than clicking Report Spam.”

We feel that if you really need to add a disclaimer, you should think twice about directly contacting the person, and opt for getting recommended by someone in their network.

Next up: Types of Direct Connection Requests


Adding Connections on LinkedIn – Invites is the 89th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 263. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances

Report Says Social Media Ad Revenues Will Top 9 Billion in 2016

See on Scoop.itEnterprise Social Media

“According to BIA/Kelsey,  U.S. social media ad revenues added up to a cool $4.6 billion in 2012.”

 

Interesting stats, but the paragraph that stood out for me was:

 

“Google makes $9.2 billion before breakfast but social media has had a harder time collecting ad dollars so these numbers are very encouraging. It would seem to indicate that we still believe in the power of social media in spite of all the evidence that shows it doesn’t work.”

 

A rope don’t work if you push it . . .

 

We’ve got lots of evidence that social media works in our Be a Person series of books (http://bit.ly/BeAPerson) and our recently-released The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success book (http://bit.ly/InfPipe)

See on www.marketingpilgrim.com

Create a Company Profile on LinkedIn

Create a Company Profile on LinkedIn

In our previous post, Create Your LinkedIn Profile, we continued our series with a discussion on what to consider before setting up your LinkedIn profile, and tips in doing so.  In this post, we will talk about how to create a company profile on LinkedIn.


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Make and Get Recommendations

As we mentioned in the opening of this chapter, lack of recommendations is one of the main reasons why your profile is not complete. Perhaps the best way to get started with recommendations is to make a few first. Often those you recommend will return the favor, but be careful that all your recommendations aren’t mutual, since that could look like mutual backslapping.

Figure 19 — Sample Recommendations on LinkedIn

Recommendations are generally quite important for recruiters. In fact, we have a friend whose LinkedIn recommendations were reviewed by the CEO of a company in advance of a phone interview, during which he got the job.

Create a Company Profile

Once you’ve gotten your personal profile squared away, it’s time to create your enterprise’s profile.

Anyone can create a company profile, but it’s important that the first person to do so for your enterprise has registered using the organization’s email address. LinkedIn will search for other LinkedIn members that have similar email addresses (the part after the @ sign), so if you’ve registered with LinkedIn using a Gmail or other non-organizational email, get somebody else to create your enterprise’s profile.

Figure 20 — Sample Company Profile on LinkedIn

After you put in a description of your enterprise, LinkedIn does a lot of work for you. They list:

All current and former staff members on LinkedIn                                    Related companies

Employee career paths                                                                   Common job titles — derived from staffers on LinkedIn

New hires                                                                                    Recent Promotions and Changes

Recent Activity                                                                                         Key statistics, including:

Headquarters                                                                                                                        Industry

Type                                                                                                                                            Status

Size                                                                                                                                         Founded

Website                                                                                 Top Schools (of LinkedIn members)

Median Age                                                                                                               Median Tenure

Gender Breakdown

Having all this information available on LinkedIn can be a big help in recruiting staffers and finding partners and prospects. And it’s free.


Create a Company Profile on LinkedIn is the 88th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 260. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances

Next up: Adding Connections on LinkedIn – Invites

Create Your LinkedIn Profile

Create Your LinkedIn Profile

In our previous post, Who is On LinkedIn, we continued our series with a discussion on who is on LinkedIn, including a look at demographics of average users, and characteristics of expert users, called LIONs.  In this post, we continue with a look at what to consider before setting up your LinkedIn profile, and tips in doing so.


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Be Careful Out There

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of setting up your profile and using LinkedIn, a quick consideration of other ways you can get in trouble on LinkedIn:

  • Name Field — If it contains anything but your name, you can get your account restricted or even have it deleted
  • Spam or Abuse — If you are accused of spamming or abuse, LinkedIn may restrict your account. Always remember that spam is in the eye of the beholder. If you think someone might misinterpret something you say — anywhere online — don’t say it.
  • Page Views — This is a weird one. If you view “too many” profiles, LinkedIn may suspend you for suspicion of intent to commit identity fraud. By the same token, be sure the information you share online doesn’t reveal too much about you.
  • Non-Professional Profile Picture — Don’t show too much skin or wear something inappropriate. Even though in practice, you can use a logo or an avatar instead of a picture of you, LinkedIn policy says you can’t. We’re not too sure how tightly this is enforced, since we have several connections who use logos and many who use avatars. This policy is most likely used as just one more reason to ding someone who’s being obnoxious in other ways.

Now that that bit of unpleasantness is over, let’s get into creating your profile, your complete profile.

Create Your LinkedIn Profile

Completeness is the name of the game for your profile. It’s not your resume. It’s more properly considered as search bait. Think about it. How are people going to find you on LinkedIn? By searching, of course. So the more you have in your profile, and the more keywords you have in your profile, the more you’re going to get found.

Here are some tips on creating your profile:

  • Current and Past Positions — Put in all your jobs unless you’re ashamed of any of them. It’s better to be complete in case old colleagues suddenly want to look you up.
  • Education — Include all the places you went to school, even if just for a few seminars or quarters. Again, for findability.
  • Photo — As we said in the introduction to this chapter, include a photo of just you, taken by a pro. If you’re sensitive about your appearance for any reason, consider substituting a high school yearbook photo, or a caricature or avatar.
  • Nickname or Maiden Name — Include all the names people have known you by (OK, if one of them was Stinky, leave that out). This is so people can find you.
  • Summary— Your summary is one of the most important portions of your profile. It’s often thought of as your elevator pitch — the pitch you’d give if on an elevator ride with a prospective customer. However, you can feel free to make it a bit longer than that, since you also have to appeal to search engines.You should write, rewrite, and polish your summary. It should convey who you are, what you’ve accomplished, and what you’re looking for on LinkedIn.There are two parts to the summary. Generally people concentrate the first part on a brief statement of experience, accomplishments and goals. While you don’t want to write a novel, length is not as important as it may be on, say, a resume. Make sure you have a catchy opening, but don’t feel bad if you can’t distill yourself down into a single paragraph.The second part is called Specialties, and it’s a great place to put a lot of keywords that will help attract other people to look at your profile. It’s not really intended for humans to read, but rather search engines. Don’t skimp on the keywords here.
  • Websites — Include all of the Websites you may have been associated with.
  • Interests — Be careful when adding interests. While it helps to show a rounded picture of who you are, be sensitive to including anything that might cause someone to have a bad reaction. Remember, this is first impression material. If you’re into something off-the-wall — not that there’s anything wrong with that — wait to discuss until you know your audience better.
  • Email addresses — Including email addresses is controversial because if you do this, you’re likely to get spam. If you want to include an email address — anywhere online — use the following format: you at wherever.com. By breaking up the address, it makes it harder for spambots to come along and harvest your email address to slap onto lists that are then sold and resold.
  • NO TYPOS! — Nothing kills a buzz like a typo, especially if you’re a professional. Have somebody else proofread your profile.
  • Use Industry-Specific Keywords — Since it’s all about search, make sure you use the buzzwords from your product category or industry.
  • Use Acronyms and Spell Them Out — Use any relevant acronyms; spell them out so outsiders can understand what you’re talking about.

Keywords, keywords, keywords! It’s all about the keywords. Jam pack your profile with high-value words that people you want to attract will likely be using to find you. If you’re stumped as to what to use for keywords, Google your product category to find good ones. You can also search for your industry on LinkedIn for ideas.

When you’re done with your profile, there’s one last, very important, step: Make your profile public.

From time to time we come upon people who have private profiles and we ask ourselves: Why are you here in the first place if you don’t want to meet anyone? However, leaving that existential question aside for a moment, there is one supreme reason why you make your profile public:

It can be found on Google!

In fact, it’s likely to be ranked highly on Google, because LinkedIn is a very popular site. Try Googling your name or the name of your enterprise before creating your profile and then again about a week later. We guarantee you’ll see an improvement in your ranking.


Create Your LinkedIn Profile is the 87th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 257. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances

Next up: Create a Company Profile on LinkedIn

How Red Bull’s Marketing Wings Lifted Them to Most Powerful Brand in Social Video

See on Scoop.itSocial Media and Marketing Research

“I have used Red Bull a couple times in the past as an example of a company that understands the nature of branded online video content quite well and it se (How Red Bull’s Marketing Wings Lifted Them to Most Powerful Brand in Social Video”

 

So let’s see. All you have to do to dominate the news, reach millions of new potential buyers and light up the social media world is spend seven years and millions of dollars to drop a claustrophobic hero with anger issues from 128,000 feet.

 

Got that?

See on www.reelseo.com

BMW’s Stunning Brand Gesture for the 5 Series

See on Scoop.itSocial Media and Marketing Research

“Beautiful, Impactful Brand Story-telling from BMW BMW stunned Singaporeans with an interactive 3D outdoor brand experience (a first in Asia) to promote its BMW 5 series. They transformed two busy office buildings at Suntec City from a symbol of work, into a symbol of Joy”

 

BMW gets it. But then again, BMW has gotten it ever since it plopped Madonna down in the backseat of an M5 and sent her on a wild ride (http://bit.ly/5BS9f) four years ago.

 

This is what brands need to do: create experiences that engage. Something more than “I can get it for you cheap . . . .”

See on www.trulydeeply.com.au

Now That Nielsen Tracks Tweets, How Will That Change TV?

See on Scoop.itSocial Media and Marketing Research

“We’re curious just like everyone else to see where the two companies go with all this,” says Evan Silverman, senior vice president for Digital Media at A&E Networks.

 

Well, NIelsen Media might be starting to get it. At least this acquisition might get networks and advertisers to try to listen. But trying to roll all this up into some kind of quant score really misses the point.

 

It’s funny for an industry that makes more and more of its bread from “reality” can’t face the reality of the social media revolution.

 

Your quanitified approximations of reality might still work, for a while, but you’re missing the whole point of social media: the ability to reach out and touch someone – as more than some fuzzy representative of a basically flawed, demographics-based persona.

 

There’s a sea change in the wind and seeing everything in terms of the world you know now will cause you to miss the real opportunity.

See on www.forbes.com

Brand Engagement Rate Still 1%, But Facebook Is OK With That

See on Scoop.itSocial Media and Marketing Research

“new research says people aren’t engaging with brands on facebook.”

 

Brands on Facebook have gone from 1% engagement all the way to 1.4% engagement, mostly courtesy of Facebook changing the way they measure engagement.

 

The solution? As proposed by Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, a marketing think tank based in Australia: “Facebook is becoming more and more like traditional media. It may be time for advertisers to move on from worrying about how many fans they have to instead explore how many category buyers Facebook can reach, for what cost, and to what effect.”

 

What rubbish!

 

The solution is to actually engage with people. Have something to say besides “I can get it for you cheap!”

 

Wake up marketers. This isn’t your grandkid’s marketing. It’s a whole new way of relating to your franchise, beyond BS demographics.

 

The only thing that will work – and you may eventually find this out – is developing relationships, not better segmentation.

See on adage.com

Who is On LinkedIn

Who is On LinkedIn

In our previous post, Using LinkedIn to Search for Talent, we continued our series with a discussion on how to find and recruit talent on LinkedIn.  In this post, we continue with a look at who is on LinkedIn, including a look at demographics of average users, and characteristics of expert users, called LIONs.


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Who is On LinkedIn?

According to a study done in 2008,[1] the people on LinkedIn tend to be middle-aged (42), highly compensated ($100K+), and describe themselves as decision-makers. Now you must remember that these stats are all self-reported, so take them with a grain of salt.

Internet traffic measurement company Quantcast reported the US demographics[2] shown in the following figure in September, 2010.

Figure 17 — LinkedIn US Demographics

Income represents total household income
An index of 100 represents the average across all Internet users

The average LinkedIn member has a pitiful 34-38 connections. Really, now, we’ll bet you could sit down for five minutes with a pad and pen and come up with more than 40 current and former associates, classmates, and other connections you might know well enough to invite to connect on LinkedIn.

There are some people on LinkedIn who think it’s all about the numbers, and they keep score by amassing hundreds of connections. Those who will indiscriminately connect with anyone are called LIONs.

What is a LinkedIn LION™?

LION™ stands for LinkedIn Open Networker. LIONs are not endorsed or supported by LinkedIn. In fact, the LION concept — connect indiscriminately — runs counter to LinkedIn’s slogan: Relationships Matter. Nobody knows for sure, but there are probably well in excess of 16,000 LION members on the site.

LIONs connect with anyone. They don’t care who you are, what you do, what they can do for you, or what you can do for them. They tend to crow that their networks are huge. But what does a huge network of people you don’t know do for you?

You know what? We belong to a network that will allow us to ask anyone in the developed world a question.

It’s called the telephone network.

We’re about as likely to get help with a problem, or get referred to a valuable contact, by randomly dialing the phone as we would by using a LION’s network.

There is an upper limit to LIONs’ — and any member’s — number of connections: 30,000. And you only are permitted 3,000 connection invitations, lifetime. That’s why you’ll see so many LIONs requesting that you send them an invite, rather than them inviting you.

One of the LIONs’ codes is that a LION will never IDK you.

What is an IDK?

If you try to connect with a LinkedIn member and they don’t remember you, they can IDK — I Don’t Know — your attempt. It used to be quite obvious how to do this — I Don’t Know was a button shown below the invitation. Since LinkedIn did a redesign in mid-2010, there’s now an Ignore button, which removes the request from your queue, and a Report Spam button. If you can choose to Report Spam, that’s the same as IDKing them. You should only do this if the person persistently bothers you to connect or is otherwise misusing LinkedIn.

Figure 18 — Example of Ignoring a Connection Request on LinkedIn

If you get a lot of IDKs — as few as five — LinkedIn black-lists you and can terminate your usage or suspend your account for up to 90 days. So it’s a very good idea to not extend LinkedIn invitations to folks you barely know.

If a LION IDKs you, you are not penalized, supposedly, but this is hard to rely on, since LinkedIn doesn’t condone LIONs.

Help! I’ve Been IDKed!

If you get even one IDK, immediately contact LinkedIn Customer Service and explain the circumstances. Conversely, limit your own use of the IDK to truly obnoxious people. If you don’t want to accept a connection request, simply archive or ignore it.

Alternative to Being a LION

Being a LION can be exhausting work. Since you agree to connect with anyone, and advertise this fact in your professional headline, you generally get lots of connection requests, which you have to honor, one at a time. This can add up to quite a daily chore.

We recommend that, as an alternative, you find at least five LIONs in your industry, locality, or occupation and connect with them. This simple technique will grow your network exponentially, and it takes very little effort vs. being a LION.

We asked a certain LinkedIn Rock Star LION how many connection requests he had to deal with every day. He said generally dozens, with 120 pending at any one time. It took him more than half an hour each day to deal with them. We asked him how big his LinkedIn network was and he said, boastfully, 6 million.

Imagine his surprise when we told him that, using our strategy we had maybe one or two connection requests a day maximum, and a network size of 12 million (up from 8.3 million in less than nine months).


Who is On LinkedIn is the 86th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 254. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances

Next up: Create Your LinkedIn Profile


[1] Summarized by TechCrunch: tcrn.ch/dsZ1R4; Anderson Analytics’ report: bit.ly/be9i11

[2] For up-to-date demographics from Quantcast: bit.ly/cAj0Z9