Masterful Marketing » relationship building

Organizing LinkedIn Connections via Tags

Debra — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 17:28:12 +0000

Organize your connections into different groups via tags

LinkedIn is in beta with a new connections page that makes it easier to find, organize and stay in touch with your business contacts. The update adds a panel that makes it much nicer to browse contacts quickly, enabling you to find what you need with a few clicks. You now are able to browse contacts by their companies, industries or locations. Selecting the recent activity filter, you can see who has added new connections.

When you click on one of your connections, a mini profile appears in the right panel, showing you contact information, photo, current position and number of connections.

One feature that caught my attention is the ability to tag your connections. Similar to friend lists on Facebook and lists on Twitter, you now can segment your connections so you can send specific communications depending on which list they are on. It’s no longer an all or nothing selection! This is a feature many have been waiting for with LinkedIn and is a welcome addition.

The Marketing Impact

This new LinkedIn connections interface makes it easy to browse and get information on your connections. But something that this interface also points out is whose profiles need work. Profiles without pictures, status updates or website/blog addresses are profiles of people who don’t want to get noticed. In this very crowded market, you must go the extra mile to be visible. Having a complete and compelling profile is one simple exercise to help you stand out. By the way, using your company logo as your profile picture doesn’t count – people don’t build relationships with logos or companies. Relationships are among people and the more approachable you are, the more likely someone will want to connect with you. There’s a reason why Facebook differentiates a personal profile from a business page.

Spend a few minutes each day updating something in your profile. The benefits include making your profile interesting and the fact that you updated something in your profile gets publicized to your connections, ensuring you stay visible. What’s keeping you from filling out your LinkedIn profile (or any social media profile) completely so people can connect with you and develop those so very important relationships?

Seek Quality not Quantity in Your Social Networks

Debra — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:41:40 +0000

I have always been about quality. I know a lot of people, but value my few close friends. When it comes to clothes, I would rather have one quality, custom outfit than a dozen that were just ok. And when it comes to social media, I want to build a quality network of people rather than a massive list of names.

The first step in building a community is to develop relationships with people who have similar interests to yours and then engage in conversations, offering something of value and interest to them.

My goal is to build my networks strategically. I don’t add followers, friends or connections just because I can. I add quality people that have some personal or professional connection to me. To many, my networks may appear to be rather small, but they are enormous in their value to me.

In addition to my blog and email list subscribers, I am building the following social communities:

I have 293 connections in my network on LinkedIn made up of people I have met in a professional setting, including previous employers, clients and prospects and those I’ve met at both live and online events. I am very comfortable inviting the people I’ve met to connect with me on LinkedIn. I know I have value to offer and want to remain in touch, even with prospects that never become clients. I always include a personal message to them and hope that they value connecting with me as well.

If someone invites me to connect that I have never met, I review their profile, looking at their picture (absolute must have), basic info and profile summary for common interests or business synergies. I view all people as potential business partners, future clients or someone who can open the door to an opportunity that is important to my business.

Facebook

I have 174 Facebook friends made up of life long friends and golf buddies, business contacts and social media contacts. Facebook is a wonderful place to meet people and interact with them. I love getting invitations from people from all over the world to become a friend. The stream of activity on your wall can help you learn a lot about someone. You can be more casual while staying professional in your conversation. I connect with all types of people on Facebook, including friends, colleagues and folks I meet networking because Facebook enables me to build Friend Lists, private groupings of friends based on my personal preferences, so I can organize my conversations and privacy settings.

Facebook Business Page

Every business should have a Facebook Business Page where you can make connections in a business casual atmosphere. Facebook provides many capabilities to enhance your Business Page to make it more interactive and interesting. Provide a steady stream useful and relevant information and those who are interested will become fans. Although some people send out requests for fans, I prefer to let the list build organically. I am thrilled when I see someone new become a fan. I currently have 66 fans and I am thankful to you all!

Twitter

With 914 followers and 742 friends (those I follow), Twitter is like going to an event and talking with everyone around you. The open conversation is very casual, but a lot of useful information can be found. My criteria is simple: I follow interesting people – not robots, spammers, automated accounts or adult content. A real picture of you will more likely get me to check your profile to see if there is a connection. Use a custom background image on your Twitter page to add important information about you and your value. If I don’t know who you are or what you have to offer, I probably won’t follow.

Bottom line is I’m very open to connecting, friending and following interesting people. I look forward to connecting with you.

What is your criteria for building your social media network? Share your strategy with us.

Do You Hide Your LinkedIn Connections?

Debra — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:57:03 +0000

Photo courtesy of kthypryn on Flickr

I’ve noticed that some of my contacts (10% to be exact) have made their connections private on LinkedIn. As a social network, hiding your contact list seems, well, not very social. When a contact list is private, I can’t browse my connection’s network to see who I may know or who may be of interest to me. I can still find people in their network via a keyword search showing them as the first-level contact that provides the connection, but I have to know what I’m looking for and I can’t just open up their connection list and peruse them for familiar faces.

Why Do People Choose to Hide Their Networks?

To prevent competitors from gaining access to your customers and business partners
To avoid having to make an introduction to someone for a person you don’t really know
To preserve confidentiality
To eliminate unwanted solicitations

All very valid reasons.

I’ve also discovered that originally LinkedIn set the default as private, so it’s highly possible that some people just don’t know that they can change this setting. So if you are in that category, go to “Accounts & Settings”, “Connections Browse” and select “Yes, show my connections list” radio button if you wish to open up your network.

Should You Make Your Network Visible?

One of the real strengths of LinkedIn is its ability to assist in connecting people. Everyone on LinkedIn has chosen to share their information to some extent with everyone in their network which includes your 3rd degree network and those with whom you share groups. By not sharing your connections, you appear to be anti-social and imply that you want easy access to my connections but are not willing to share yours in return. And although that may not be the case for your choice, networking is a two-way street and some people may take offense.

If you open your network, you can:

Help other people connect
Create new opportunities for you and others
Build new relationships
Grow your network

Professionals should apply the same networking skills to LinkedIn that you would in a face-to-face networking event and behave responsibly. I hope those I connect with act professionally and can be trusted to use the network appropriately, enabling me to expand and add value to not only my network, but to yours as well.

What’s Right for You?

The purpose of LinkedIn is to create an opportunity to discover other professionals that may be beneficial for me to know. Most often, I’m not going to spend a lot of time browsing other’s connections and mostly will make use of the search feature to save time. If someone truly feels that hiding their connections is right for them, then that’s their choice and it’s fine with me.

Do you open your network or protect it and why?

My First Week’s Experiences on Twitter

Debra — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 23:15:47 +0000

Is it Worth It?

I have to say that using Twitter was not high on my list for a long while, but I finally dove in to see what this social media tool was all about. But since joining the service and selecting a few folks I wanted to follow (right now I’m following only about 20 people who’s blogs I read regularly), I find I’m really seeing a lot of value in this social network from the business perspective.

For those reading who have not heard of Twitter:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? (from the Twitter FAQ).

In 140 characters or less, you can send thoughts, observations, ideas, questions and other topics around you to your “followers”. These posts are called “tweets”.

The service is free. If you don’t have text messaging in your mobile phone plan, you could spend a bit of coin following those you want to keep tabs on. You can also follow using a web browser and Google Talk. Better yet, you can get a Google Gadget for your iGoogle page as well.

As you can see to the left, I have also inserted one of the Twitter badges to display the tweets of those that I am following, including my own. So every once in a while, you will spot my face among the notables tweeting regularly. But rather than just post my tweets here, I though visitors would enjoy to see what others are doing as well.

I have also installed the Twitter Updater WordPress plugin so that all new posts automatically get broadcasted to my followers.

Mike Sansone (who I’m following and vice versa), wrote an interesting post on Twitter on the day I signed up and started poking around (was that fate?). Check out his post on why he uses Twitter.

What have I found interesting and valuable?

Most of those you follow, follow you back – this makes you feel welcome into the community. These folks don’t know me and I certainly didn’t expect people to follow me right away as they don’t know me at all. So if you think you can lurk for a while, you can’t. Those of you who did follow back, I hope my life and daily tweets are as interesting to you as yours are to me.
I get constant updates from people on what’s happening in social media. I can quickly scan the information and decide what is important and what is not. There are many things I’ve gleened over the past week that I would not have heard about had I not been following the buzz. And I just implemented a Yahoo Pipes feed as Mike suggested to keep those tweets that contain a URL to something I may want to find again later.
It keeps me connected at all times. Whether I’m out at an event, in the car, or at my desk, I can keep informed and catch a few morsels of what others are doing.

On the down side, I don’t know how folks who follow hundreds, or in some cases thousands of people, can really absorb all of the information they get. I would assume they tune into certain folks and tune out others. Only following a handful of people to get started, I find myself already doing that.

But the most valuable aspect of Twitter for me is that I’m getting to know many people who I would never have come in contact with personally (and hopefully they are getting know me as well). This media brings the world closer and connects people from everywhere with a common interest. To me, it’s almost not what you say, but the fact you are saying it to me, regardless of where I am.

So is it worth it? I would say absolutely.

How Much is Too Much?

Debra — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 01:00:04 +0000

As a service professionals, we are challenged to provide proof of our expertise. We do that through articles, blogs, free consultations and speaking engagements. All of these exercises help us build our personal brand reputation as an expert in our field.

However, Drew McLellan has struck a nerve in his post Why Do We Keep Giving Away the Milk? How much free advice is too much?

Getting paid for our services is why we’re in business. But all consultants, coaches, mentors and pretty much most service professionals get drawn into the “hey can I run one by you over coffee” conversation time and time again.

And that’s ok … to a point! I like coffee as much as the next person, but it does not pay the bills.

Of course, there are exceptions – a person who gives you great referrals, collaborates and helps you.

As you can see, there is really no black and white answer to this dilemma. Take a hard nose approach and it could hurt your business. Give away too much information and it could hurt your business!

I’m certainly not going to repeat the advice being given on Drew’s post at the MPDaily Fix so head on over and join the discussion, but here’s my view:

I give advice to most who ask. My belief is that most aren’t out to pick our brains dry. If they are, they should be easy to notice as they most likely have gained that type of reputation anyway. I usually sit down with someone one to one, discuss their situation and offer advice. You see, if that person knows as much as you do about what you do (in my case marketing), then they will never hire you anyway. If they truly have a need, your discussion will lead them to the next step where they will hire you.
I never provide implementation details as part of the discussion. Ideas can be found everywhere on the Internet. But how to implement the idea is really what you get paid for. Keep the conversation on ideas and you should be ok. If you find yourself getting into how to implement the solution, then you’ve gone too far.

It never is easy to know when enough is enough. We all have a lot to do to work on and in our businesses so it will grow.

As those looking for advice, be considerate of those you are asking. If someone is that good that you keep going to them for advice, try to provide a great referal. I know that if someone sends me a paying client, then all the free advice is more than worth it in my opinion!

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