Linked Intelligence » Social Networking

Tips from the LinkedIn Rockstars: Top Ten Annoying Behaviors of People on LinkedIn – Number 10

Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:00:41 +0000

Let’s do this in reverse order. It is so frustrating when you receive an invitation from someone who is building a network purely as a numbers game. They are just burning through their initial limited supply of invitations (3,000) and responding to a message like this is like flocking to the Firesale announcement of local stores “Going out of business!”

There is not anything wrong with building a large, open network on LinkedIn. My partner and I have both already hit the 30,000 mark, then went back and deleted the profiles that seemed faked so we could accept more people. The key is, if you’re building this type of network on LinkedIn, do it with the understanding that you’re connecting to people, not numbers.

Building a network of that size is not about hitting numbers to brag about; it’s about connecting with people around the country, and around the world, that you can collaborate with and reach out to on a scale that simply wasn’t possible before LinkedIn.

The Magic is in the Mix!

Jan Wallen — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:40:07 +0000

Last week I had the opportunity to speak at the MeetUp group, NSA-NYC (National Speakers Association, New York City chapter), about LinkedIn and how to get more speaking engagements using LinkedIn. A number of questions arose about where do you start, and where does LinkedIn fit in with the rest of your marketing? And how do you have enough time in your day for social media?

Since I started using LinkedIn more and more after writing my book, I find I spend less time and get more real results when I cluster my time and do similar networking and marketing activities at the same times each week. In doing so, I’ve streamlined the way I work, and really focus.

The Magic is in the Mix. Whether you want speaking engagements, new clients, more face-to-face meetings, or referrals and introductions from LinkedIn, always ask yourself this question every week, “What is the one thing that will make the most difference for my business this week?” Then focus on that all week – in your online networking, in person meetings, phone calls, writing and everything else you do. There is no one ‘Silver Bullet”. The Magic is in the Mix. Continue to use every marketing avenue that you currently use, and stay focused.

Cluster your time. Before LinkedIn, I woke up and read the newspaper with my morning cup of coffee. Now I wake up, scan the newspaper, scan LinkedIn – the updates and news, and spend 15 minutes catching up with people in my network, setting meetings with them, and updating them on things that will advance their networking, sales and businesses. I check e-mail twice a day – in the morning and the afternoon. I asked people to call me if they want to reach me in between times.

For more information about the MeetUp and more tips, check out my post on LinkedIn for Sales, and as always – Success to you!

Happy Holidays with LinkedIn!

Jan Wallen — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 22:32:02 +0000

Jan Wallen, author of Mastering LinkedIn in 7 Days or Less

‘Tis the season for good tidings, holiday parties, shopping, music and time with family and friends. It’s also a good time to simplify. LinkedIn can help you with that.

Focus on doing one thing with LinkedIn over the holidays. How do you decide what’s the best thing to focus on? The holidays are busy, so pick something that doesn’t demand a great deal of your time, yet gives you a good return on your time investment.

For example, now is a perfect time to connect with people you meet and reconnect with people you haven’t been in touch with for a while (perhaps those who send you holiday cards). Invite them to connect. A few invitations a day really adds up without taking a lot of time. Remember to always add a personal note in the invitation that refreshes their memory about where you met and how you see networking together.

Or if you don’t have many Recommendations, request them from people you worked for, worked with, and from people who have worked for you. Someone who reads your LinkedIn profile wants to know what it’s like to work with you from several perspectives and what you can do for them. It may be a company that’s looking for the perfect candidate for an open position or opportunity, or it may be they’re deciding who to bring in to work with them to solve their business challenges. Be sure the Recommendation they write is results-oriented. The best way to do that is to tell them what you’re doing now and ask them to relate what they write in your Recommendation to that. Say something like, “I’m building my business now, and want potential clients to know what it’s like to work with me. It will be helpful if you include how we’ve worked together, how you found it to work with us, and the results we helped you achieve when you write your Recommendation”.

After the holidays, review your LinkedIn profile and be sure it’s aligned with your goals for 2012. Set a goal for 2012 to maximize LinkedIn and integrate it into your marketing and business development plans so you expand your reach to the thousands and thousands of people who are on LinkedIn. Take advantage of the endless stream of opportunities on LinkedIn. I’ll tell you more about how to do that after the holidays.

LinkedIn: More than a Numbers Game

Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 17:30:07 +0000

After last week’s post, readers made some excellent comments regarding the value of large networks. A couple of people seemed to think that the focus of my post was entirely about numbers, and so I am back to clarify.

Building a large network of 30,000+ is part of the lifestyle I have chosen to ‘live out loud’ via social media. I accept people into my network on LinkedIn, always open to see how we may be able to work together, to see what value someone will share with me. It’s not about the numbers and it sure isn’t about me! It’s about allowing someone to reach out, shake my hand and say they want to be part of my network—part of my life—and then responding in a way that encourages them to continue the conversation.

I have met so many wonderful people with whom I have excellent relationships. Most of those I first connected with on LinkedIn, and most often by accepting their invitation to connect. Our networks intersected, we were interested in each other either professionally or personally, and the relationships took off from there.

I even met my business and life partner, Mike O’Neil, through a LinkedIn search of Denver, CO when I chose it as a place I wanted to visit. In this case, I did the search sorted by people with the most connections (because I believed they would be the most open to helping me), he came up at the top and responded positively when I reached out. That was circa April/May 2008. We met in person in September of that year and the rest is history.

Having a large network opens doors to meet people you may have never otherwise interacted with. You show up in searches and interact with people all over the world that you can reach with a large network. When my partner and I travel, we often post our travel plans on LinkedIn, keeping our connections updated. We search for people in the cities we are visiting and the airports we layover in, coordinating meetings when we can.

Having a large network has helped me cultivate amazing relationships; it is not a numbers game. It is a means of reaching out to people…people around the world…people I have the chance to call friend.

Happy Birthday to Me, and How Distributed Cognition Enhances Relationships

Scott Allen — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 15:41:38 +0000

It’s 9am on my birthday, and already, 65 people have posted birthday wishes on my Facebook wall.

Several more have Skyped me.

Sure, it’s just a simple act – some might argue it’s only slightly more social than a poke, but I disagree. Frankly, I think this is really what the social web is all about: using distributed cognition to truly enhance relationships.

How so?

Ever heard of Dunbar’s number? Basically, it’s the theory that the size of our social network is limited by the size of our neocortex, and for human beings, the maximum number of “close” relationships we can theoretically have – the number of people whose names and faces you remember easily, who you can remember details about them, like what they do for a living, the last conversation you had with them, etc.

But what happens when our capacity for social relationships is no longer limited by our brain capacity?

Some people think that tools like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even CRM or contact management systems have created an illusion of having more “real” friends than we actually do. I suppose, for some, that’s true.

I look at it differently, though. I look at these tools as distributed cognition. Essentially, we’re making our brains larger by using external tools to enhance our memory. I can “remember” hundreds of people’s faces, because they’re right there when I interact with them. I can call them by name – one of Dale Carnegie’s most important tips for winning friends and influencing people. I can easily recall the last conversation I had with them with a couple of mouse clicks. I can see what they’re up to and ask specific questions about it rather than wasting my time and theirs with small-talk questions like “So what are you up to these days?” LinkedIn already knows, so I already know.

Social media isn’t just a way to have a bunch of trivial relationships; used properly, it’s a way to treat more than 150 people that you truly care about like you treat those 150…like you would if you were smarter, or had better memory.

This isn’t a new concept, by any means. It’s the same principle behind The Mackay 66, a collection of 66 questions that uber-networker Harvey Mackay used to build the strong relationships that allowed him to build a phenomenally successful company in the face of much larger competitors. It includes information such as the client’s college fraternity/sorority, children’s interests and birthdates, their immediate and long-term business objectives, health conditions, etc. Before every call, Harvey would pull out the client’s file so he could have that information at his fingertips. As he gleaned little bits of information during the course of the conversation, he would note it in their file.

As a result, his customers were constantly amazed at his apparently great memory, and the remarkable personal interest he took in them.

Cynics might say that it’s just a brilliant ploy to manipulate people. Harvey will tell you that it’s just the only way he could keep track of the information that helped him show how much he truly cared about people. And that’s also good business.

So this is why you should wish your Facebook friends happy birthday. Congratulate your LinkedIn contacts on their promotion or new business venture. Comment on their blog about how adorable their new baby or puppy is. It’s not being manipulative. It’s not being trivial. It’s acting like you want to act towards people you truly care about, and like you would on your own, if you were just smarter. Let social media make you socially smarter.

P.S. In the 30 minutes it’s taken to write this post, 7 more people have posted to my Facebook wall and 4 more have Skyped me. What a great way to start the day!

Proper Etiquette for LinkedIn Invitations and Messages

Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 13:22:29 +0000

As we begin to use the internet and social media more and more often for business purposes, it becomes increasingly important to remember that etiquette applies to the internet world as well as the real.

I recently received an email from a colleague asking to connect on LinkedIn…

…the problem was he sent the same email to about one hundred different people, and included us all in the ‘to’ box!

Whenever you send an email to large groups of people, it is important to remember to use the ‘bcc’ (blind carbon copy) function. When you include all the email addresses in the ‘to’ box, you end up handing out everyone’s personal email address to a group of people they do not know.

This is a big ‘no-no’ in the media world.

On LinkedIn, if you are sending an email to a group of people, there is a box checked by default that allows all the recipients to see everyone else’s contact information (read as: email address).

Be sure to uncheck it before you press send.

The second issue I addressed with this connection was what to do if you run out of invitations on LinkedIn.

You can actually request more invitations by writing to customer_service@linkedin.com. You can ask for up to 500 every thirty days. The only requirement is that you have less than 20 invitations left when you make the request. I also find that it helps tremendously if you include in your message why you need the additional invitations.

For example, if I am getting ready to attend a conference, I may send something like this:

“I’ll be attending a conference in two weeks with an anticipated attendance of 800 people. Since I’m a featured speaker, I will have a lot of people who want to exchange cards with me and connect on LinkedIn. I’d really like to be able to be the one who reaches back out with an invitation. May I have 500 more please?”

Using these steps I have not had a problem receiving additional invitations from LinkedIn, enabling me to continue to grow my network with people that I meet who inspire me.

What I Like Most About LinkedIn

Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 20:54:32 +0000

I recently connected with a gentleman, Mark, who sent this email: ”Lori, please accept my genuine thanks for connecting with me on LinkedIn. What do you like the most about LinkedIn?”

Others have asked the same question in person, but I’ve never had the opportunity to put it in writing before. So here’s my response:

I love connecting with people and am always open to starting new relationships with interested people, particularly when we have synergy and can find ways to help each other. What I like most about LinkedIn is its ability to enhance relationships with people that might otherwise dwindle. Because we get to share so much more self-information than we otherwise would in a networking environment, it really supercharges conversations. We don’t put in our own real time decisions about whether or not a person we are talking to would be interested in one tidbit or another about us. When we populate our profile, we include what we feel is important and the reader can then judge for themselves what they find of interest.

The lesson here is to complete your profile with everything you might want to tell someone. Show some character, include some personal tidbits, be as real a person online as you are off. You will be glad you did!

Rock On!

Social Networking Sites Make Collaboration Easy

Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:39:29 +0000

The meterioric growth of Social Media in a down economy has made one previously underused tool of the business world easier and more effective than ever before. I’m talking about virtual teams collaborating on mutually beneficial projects.

For example, I know people who have created video projects, beneficial for the business owner and the production team, both for their marketing efforts. Another example is guest posting on blogs and in books (i.e., Scott Allen and dozens of other authentic social media masters contributed to our latest book). Also, small-to-mid sized companies who share a common target market coming together to offer more value for each of their customers. The list of examples could go on and on.

The ability of people to find like-minded and similarly passionate people who would be a great fit for projects like these is greatly enhanced by platforms such as LinkedIn, facebook and Twitter. People ask why they should connect to people they don’t know? I say connect to people you know and those who you want to get to know. Then work on the relationships. It doesn’t take a lot of time, most people are very busy. With a minute amount of effort, you can make enough of a difference in people’s lives that they will want to make a difference in yours as well.

Free Social Media Strategy Webinar – October 7

Scott Allen — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 05:37:07 +0000

In conjunction with MicroAssist, I’ll be presenting a free webinar on creating an integrated social media strategy on Thursday, October 7, at 2pm Central. Register at http://smwebinar.eventbrite.com.

For a growing number of organizations, using social media tools such Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and blogs are mission critical to their success. People within those organizations are using social media to:

* learn information that is critical to their jobs
* form connections with industry leaders
* become recognized as industry thought leaders
* address customer service issues
* market their own products and services

However, without a cohesive social media strategy you can easily end up with a lot of social media activity but very little meaningful business results.

In this webinar, we’ll show you how individual, departmental and enterprise social media strategies integrate to create a total value for the organization that is greater than the sum of the parts. We’ll also provide you the basic strategic framework for developing individual, departmental and enterprise social media plans. And finally, you’ll learn some high-ROI social media strategies that you can apply on any platform – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, blogging, niche communities, or whatever “the next big thing” turns out to be. Again, you can register, at no cost, at http://smwebinar.eventbrite.com.

Be sure to tell a friend!

Facebook Bankruptcy

Scott Allen — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 02:47:52 +0000