Posts Tagged ‘LinkedIn’

I know I know, I’ve talked a lot lately about using LinkedIn - in part, because I’m really beginning to feel a shift there from a contact-list kinda-place to more of a networking tool, or a shop window for businesses and smart people (OK, maybe not exclusively smart people - I’m on LinkedIn, after all). This follows the announcement of LinkedIn applications last week.

So please bear with me while I indulge myself with another (great) list about how to get the most from LinkedIn, this time by Brian Wallace of Mashable - How to get the most out of LinkedIn.

Brian lists seven LinkedIn features that most businesses could benefit from using:

Quick Lookup - Look up who you are having that next business meeting with. You’ll be able to break the ice right away.

Q&A - Post questions to others in your industry. The Yahoo Answers look and feel of this feature has definitely made LinkedIn more active and interesting. A public question can be responded to by anyone that works in really any discipline. Such was the case where Derek Edmond spotted a discussion occurring about the trustworthiness of SEO.

Recommendations - Have clients or co-workers post recommendations, which future employers and clients can view to gauge your skill and level of trustworthiness. Conversely, if you’re an employer, these imply trustworthiness for a potential freelancer or new hire.

Background checks - Look up potential new hires or freelancers. This should be right up there in an HR manager’s toolbelt.

See what your competition is up to - Keep track of what others in your industry are up to. Network updates gives you a feed of recent activity, so you can see who your connections have friended, groups they have joined, and the people they have recommended. You’ll even be able to see when people are switching jobs.

Introductions - Use people you already know to help make introductions. It’s a great way to get in the door with a company you need to contact.

Open Networking - Go out and become a LION! You are an open networker.

Brian also links to a great post by Jennifer Laycock on Search Engine Guide about why LinkedIn is the one social network she would always recommend - the post gives some compelling, real world examples of the power of using LinkedIn. A great read for those who are unsure whether to bother investing their time and energy into the LinkedIn network.

So, there you have it. Even more reasons why LinkedIn could be good for you, and your business. And yes, I promise not to go on about LinkedIn for a while…

More and more of the people I meet professionally these days have joined LinkedIn. The majority of these people recognise that LinkedIn has real value but haven’t quite grasped how to exploit its potential.

Step forward the Commoncraft team once more. LinkedIn approached them and asked them to create a short video that helped explain some of the benefits of belonging to the network. The original Commoncraft blog post about the video is here.

But if that’s too far to go, here’s the video.

LinkedIn has been busy this week releasing ’stuff’. There was an updated version of their Firefox toolbar, which I installed on Friday, and now there is a mobile service.

The best part of the toolbar for me is the ability to link quickly to the LinkedIn profile of anyone who sends email to my Gmail account. There are other useful elements, of course, and you can find the full specification here.

Now there’s a mobile version of LinkedIn. The best thing about this will be accessing questions and answers on the go. I could also see sending LinkedIn invitations as a new form of exchanging business cards in meetings etc. But whatever works best for you: social networks thrive on the innovation of their users, after all.

The best way to find out about mobile LinkedIn is to point your phone to m.linkedin.com. There’s also a YouTube video from one of the lead engineers at LinkedIn, which I’ve added below. 

This is the final post in my short series on listening. In the previous two (here and here) I looked at why listening was so important for companies attempting to find new ways of connecting with their customers. This post is a practical look at some of the ways to make listening a conscious action.

Al Alvarez is a wonderful writer. He writes criticism, essays, non-fiction studies of subjects as diverse as poker, mountaineering, divorce, and working on oil rigs. He’s also a poet and a novelist and has written a superb autobiography called “Where Did It All Go Right?”. In a recent series of lectures - now published in book form as “The Writer’s Voice” - he introduces his subject like this:

“…in order to write well you must first learn how to listen. And that, in turn, is something writers have in common with their readers. Reading well means opening your ears to the presence behind the words and knowing which notes are true and which are false.”

There are two key points here. Firstly, that writers and readers share a common trait; and secondly, the ability to detect what’s authentic. But let’s leave the world of literature and apply these insights to social marketing. Traditional marketing ‘listened’ through surveys and opinion polls, market research and measuring media coverage. All, quite obviously, driven from ‘above’ and producing results that could easily be interpreted in whatever way best suited the marketers. There was no way to gauge what was authentic, in other words. Worse, the only voices heard were those both willing to be interrupted and to respond. Over time, this method almost guarantees that the marketers and the market are heading on separate paths.

Finding the conversation
To start listening, you need to find the conversation. You want to know what people are saying about your products and your company. Given the size of the internet and the vast numbers of people using it, this might seem an impossible task. Luckily, however, there are tools that make the task slightly less Herculean. Here are three simple methods of determining where you are being discussed:

• Google alerts - anyone can set up an alert on Google and, whenever your search term (eg. “purple king-sized super widget”) is found by Google, you’ll receive an email pointing to the link.
• del.icio.us - this takes a bit more work but if anyone has created a shared bookmark and tagged it with your company name or your product name, it will be here. You can widen your search to take in competitors and similar products, of course. The aim is to discover some of the authoratitive voices on the internet that may be discussing you.
• technorati - at the time of writing this post technorati claims to be “Currently tracking 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.” One of its most useful features is that it clearly shows you how long ago a blog pot was written, so you can get a sense of when activity peaked on a certain conversation.

Passive listening (or tracking the conversation)
Once you’ve found the opinion makers and thought leaders or the forums where your type of products are discussed, it’s time to put in place a method for tracking the conversation.

The best way to keep track of blog conversations is via RSS. Adam put up a post here recently explaining what RSS is and what it does. Keeping track of your feeds is easy with a feed reader. I use Google’s reader but if you prefer an off-line version, give FeedDemon a try.

When conversations take place on forums, it can mean that you need to visit the forum regularly to keep up with the discussion. This is not necessarily a bad thing as it reinforces the listening habit. Remember why you’re doing this? It’s easy to lurk on a forum and just listen. Sometimes, forums have functionality to allow you to receive an email when a particular discussion is updated. Check the FAQ of any forum you join or visit to find out some of the ins and outs.

Active listening (or joining the conversation)
Lurking and eavesdropping are all very well for a while. But it can become a bit frustrating hearing only one side of the conversation. Now it’s time to let your voice be heard. If you’ve been paying attention in the forums and to the blog posts you’ve been reading, you should have a feel for the tone, topics, and limits for each conversation. Now’s the time to let them know you’re there.

One of the quickest wins comes from simply leaving a comment on a blog. If there’s a post that directly relates to you, your company, or one of its products, state your view. Let them know who you are and why you can talk with authority. If a post refers to a case of poor customer service, for instance, tell them you’ll look into it. Do that and report back your findings and you’ll find that immediately some of the bad press is diminished.

The next step is to start your own blog. Use it to ask questions and drive traffic to it by leaving comments on other blogs and forums. Make it a blog that matters to the audience you have been listening to.

Listening as call to action
As you establish your credibility, honesty, and authenticity through your blog and your willingness to listen, you’ll find that you can begin to shape the conversation. This is not about advertising: it’s about sharing news and information with an audience that is interested. They are reading your blog: you are not interrupting. Where before, this audience wanted to talk about your products and company but were limited to rumours and opinion, now they have a real-life horse’s mouth to get the facts from. You’ll stilled be called up on mistakes and bad judgement but the long-term ill effects will be minimal and be heavily outweighed by the positive effects.

Get listening today.