February Meeting Recap

Submitted by Betsy Rhame-Minor on Wed, 2010-02-10 16:38
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Speakers: Emile Paradis, The Referral Institute, and Carol Shepherd, Tech Zest Advisors
Topic: Developing business using LinkedIn
 
LinkedIn is an important tool for connecting with others professionally. Here are some tips for making it work for you.
 
  • Use LinkedIn to get connected where you want to be. Find your target market. You don’t want to market to everyone.
  • You want your completeness to be 100%. LinkedIn will prompt you for what is needed to get you there.
  • Claim your vanity URL.
  • Remember that this is your web site, not your company’s. If you change jobs, you can still use your LinkedIn profile.
  • Post a picture of yourself. Sometimes people remember a face before they remember a name. Just make sure the picture is consistent with the professional message you want to broadcast.
  • Make and seek out meaningful connections. Be careful about who you connect with. Make sure you know them well enough to recommend them for a job if you are asked to. One hundred and fifty connections can be about the right number.
  • You can categorize your connections by how you know them.
  • If you don’t know someone well enough to recommend them for a job, you might want to reconsider connecting with them, unless you have a very good business reason to do so. If you are unsure, you can correspond with them through InMail without connecting with them. This can give you a better idea of who they are and if you should connect with them or not. Never click “I don’t know this person.” That counts against the person who sent you the request.
  • LinkedIn used to charge for InMail. Now you can use a few InMails at a time to correspond with connections.
  • Promote yourself by promoting others’ businesses. Once a week write a recommendation for someone else.
  • There is value in joining groups on LinkedIn. You’ll be able to share and receive information that will help you professionally. You can join up to 50 different groups.
  • Don’t be overly salesy on your network updates.
  • Create a booklist of professional material you’ve read and enjoyed.
  • You can share samples of your work on LinkedIn by putting up files for people to see using the Box.net application. Look in the More menu to see the Application Directory. You can add a variety of applications to make your page better for you and your business.
  • Twitter and your blog can be integrated with your LinkedIn account.
  • Through Profile Organizer, you can save someone’s profile if you’ve found someone interesting you’d like to know more about. (This is a premium feature and costs extra.)
  • When you’re meeting with someone, search LinkedIn to see who you have in common before you go.
  • One of our own members, John Tabellione, has another helpful hint: On someone’s Settings (link at top of any page), under Privacy Settings, under Profile Views, you can hide your name. That is, if you view someone’s profile, your name does not appear under Who’s Viewed My Profile, but rather only your general title shows, e.g., “Director of HR at a large marketing research company.”  Sometimes, however, the title does give away some clues depending upon the circumstances such as the size of the company or the industry, e.g., “Freelance Business Writer in Atlanta” or “Marketing VP at a large consumer beverage company in Atlanta.” So, it is not totally fool-proof.