As more businesses realize the potential for finding new business on LinkedIn, I am amazed as to how companies are starting to look at social media as if it gives them the right to cold call and send what I would consider spam to anyone and everyone in LinkedIn.  I wanted to go through some bad examples of what a lot of people are doing before giving you my advice, as it is important to understand some fundamentals regarding social media.

1. First of all, NO ONE LIKES BEING SOLD TO UNLESS THEY HAVE A PRESSING NEED AND YOU CONTACT THEM AT THE CORRECT TIME. And, needless to say, the person you contact must perceive value in what you are saying. Unless you are carefully analyzing a person’s profile, status updates and/or activities, and they indicate they have a pressing need, it is safe to say that no one wants to be contacted by someone if they don’t see value in what you have to say.
2. LinkedIn is a social networking site for professionals.  It is not some playground for you to advertise something on.  Just as it may be easy for you to join a LinkedIn Group or connect with someone that you want to advertise to, you can be kicked out of these groups as well as blocked by these users.  In fact, starting today, unless I receive what I feel is a personalized and relevant message, I will start reporting these spammers by sending an email to abuse@linkedin.com I recommend that you do the same.
3. If we are in the same group or are connected and you want to sell something to me, make sure you send me a personalized and relevant message.  Yes, this will take time to create a database and personalize your messages, but what is the point of displaying my interests on my LinkedIn profile if you are ignoring it?  To quote Scott Allen, the author of The Virtual Handhsake, “I AM NOT A NUMBER.”
4. Social media is about being real and genuine.  Anyone who sends irrelevant, impersonal, and sometimes repetitive emails to members of LinkedIn Groups or connections is no better than anyone who has a fake LinkedIn profile.

So, in keeping with my thought process above, here is my advice for you to “sell” your service to your connections:

• Keep a database of who you contact and check it so that you do not send the same message twice. Very important to show that you are personalizing your approach.
• Make sure you utilize as much LinkedIn profile information as possible to personalize your message. At least, personalize your message for the location and/or industry that this person is in.
• Prove Your Value early in your message. What possible value does this person have in spending his or her precious time despite a busy day to read your message?
• Watch your frequency. I would argue that once-a-month is the most frequent timing you should have for your messages.  Anything more frequent than that and you will be noticed.  This could be good, but if your message is irrelevant, impersonal, and doesn’t have any value, that person will be more tempted to send your message to abuse@linkedin.com
• Think twice before adding someone to an email database. Services like Constant Contact allow subscribers to unsubscribe AND report spam, and I for one am not afraid to do so.  If you have the utmost confidence that the person has an interest in receiving your emails, fine, go for it.  If not, allow people to opt-in first.

A lot of businesses think that social media gives them a new avenue for advertising, and they are right.  But social media is “social” and you need to deal with people individually.  Yes, I have signed up for webinars or contacted some people after receiving their targeted messages on LinkedIn.  And, yes, some businesses and services provide tremendous value, so I am not opposed to being sold to as long as there is value in it.  But remember: just as good things can spread rapidly on social media, bad press can as well.  Spend the time to follow my advice.  Your success rate will increase exponentially.  And contact me if you would like more information on how I can help you and your business utilize social media in an intelligent way.

We wake up and visit LinkedIn after booting up our computers.  And before we turn them off at night we are again checking in with LinkedIn.  For the many of us who consider ourselves “Power Users” of LinkedIn, the social networking site for professionals is an integral part of our professional lives.  And because of that, there are particular things about LinkedIn that may annoy us in a peculiar way more than others.

I thought that I would write about this as it came up for discussion the other day at a networking group meeting.  These particular attendees pointed out their favorite LinkedIn pet peeves as:

• People who don’t reveal their connections
• People who receive lots of recommendations but don’t give any

I have different experiences and pet peeves, but let me first comment on the above.  First of all, I covered this topic in a past post called “Why Do So Many People Keep Their Contacts Private?”,  but there are many valid reasons why someone would not want to reveal their LinkedIn connections.  At the networking meeting, the impression was that some people did not want to reveal their connections because somehow they thought that they were special or something, but I have a totally different perspective on this and am not bothered by it.  Do you really want to look at my 15,000 connections for someone you know, searching through 500 screens of 30 people per screen to find one person?  Use the Advanced Search functionality…that’s what it’s there for!

As for the imbalance of recommendations written and received, well, I also have an imbalance, but maybe it’s due to my being in transition recently.  I have never really looked at this before, but if I saw someone who had received 20 recommendations and only written 5, I would wonder what this person is about and if they are a good networker.  Still, this doesn’t bother me as I never really thought about it until that recent networking meeting.

As you can imagine, I have many pet peeves concerning LinkedIn, and they seem to rotate and change with each day.  The fact that I have so many connections means that I probably receive a lot more irrelevant mail than most LinkedIn members, but here is my list with my commentary added for your viewing pleasure:

• People who don’t display their photo (or, better yet, show a company logo) – Come on!  Get real!  LinkedIn is a SOCIAL NETWORKING site, so get social!  Or are you a FAKE PROFILE?
• No profile – Who are you?  And why are you on LinkedIn?  If you registered and created a profile, doesn’t it make sense to fill it up?  Or are you a FAKE PROFILE?
• Ask for recommendation even if I don’t know them – If I don’t know you, how the heck can I recommend you?  Are you for real?  Your recommendations certainly aren’t!
• Invitation to irrelevant LinkedIn Groups- Look at my profile, location, and industry.  Don’t invite me to something that I probably wouldn’t be interested in.  Simple enough.  Waste of time.
• Stupid or totally irrelevant questions in the Answers board – Don’t you have any friends that you can ask your silly questions to instead of parading them to 40 million strangers?
• Slow LinkedIn performance – Have you noticed improvements in LinkedIn performance over the last few weeks?  Or is my browser performance improving?  Or both?  Not so many complaints here anymore.
• People I don’t know who invite me before they have (50 or so) connections - I may be a LION, but I also have real friends. What is the purpose of a SOCIAL NETWORK if you aren’t inviting the people you DO know to connect with you?

I must say that the above are all pet peeves of mine.  But the following is my ultimate LinkedIn pet peeve of recent:

• Adding my email address to your marketing databases after connecting

Look, just because we are connected, it doesn’t mean that you have some right to put me on a mailing list to send me something that I may not be even potentially interested in.  A LinkedIn connection is just that; I am a networker, not a potential customer.  Before you put someone on a mailing list, think twice: social media is a great thing in that you can blast your message to a lot of people, but you can also piss off a lot of people, and their complaints can spread like wildfire, as viral as the best of those marketing message campaigns out there.  Now if you are sending me something that I may be interested in by looking at my profile and further understanding me, I may be more inclined to buy from you.  If not, take me off your mailing list before I start blogging about company names and people who do this to avoid.  Thank you.

Always interested in hearing about your LinkedIn pet peeves, so please feel free to comment!

LinkedIn, as you already know, is a social networking platform for professionals.  It is no secret, then, that there is business to be found on LinkedIn for companies of many sizes and industries.  If you are a small business owner, you may be confused as to whether you should use your company name or personal name for your LinkedIn Profile name.  Be confused no more, as I always recommend you use your personal name, and here’s why:

1. As mentioned, LinkedIn is a network for professionals, not companies.  We’re not talking about Hoovers here; instead of being a database of companies, LinkedIn is a database of people.  Professionals are connecting with each other, finding each other and creating new relationships, answering questions, providing advice, etc.  If your name is a company name, why would I want to connect with you?  What value is there from a social networking perspective of connecting with a business?  I realize that, as a business, you want to get some free advertising on LinkedIn, but do this in your profile, not in your name.  And you will find that people are not necessarily looking for vendors, so an indirect approach (utilizing Q&A and/or Group Discussion Boards with your expertise, etc.) will establish your credibility better than merely sending out advertisements to all of your connections.
2. In general, the more real and genuine you are the more people with trust you.  A lot of professionals are still turned off by social networking, and are especially weary of their privacy on social media.  If you, with a business name, wants to connect with someone, they might think suspiciously of you.  After all, a business name creates a shield and makes you a little invisible.  Social networking is all about being transparent and paying it forward, so drop the shield.
3. People buy from people, not companies.  Even companies buy from people, because it is the people inside the company making the purchase.  If you want to connect with future customers, connect with them from a personal perspective, in which case you’ll have a much higher potential of winning business from them.

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I recently did a Twitter Chat for #smbiz on utilizing LinkedIn for small business.  You can find out more about what we discussed here, but since then I have been contacted by small businesses looking for advice on how to utilize LinkedIn. I decided to answer this particular question on my blog because it did not come up on the chat.  Furthermore, I have even had a member of my So Cal Sushi LinkedIn Group recently add a similar tip of this blog post to the Discussion Board there (which you can access if you are a member), so I think there is a lot of buzz around small companies on how to utilize social media and LinkedIn that should be addressed.

Up until now, the preferred way of finding company information was and still is Hoovers.  Hoovers provides a huge database of company information, but also adds lots of information and services around this to provide a truly comprehensive treasure chest of information for any company that you might want to research.  Where does LinkedIn fit in, you ask?  Professionals are inputting their personal profiles, including companies they work for, into LinkedIn’s huge database.  By organizing all of this company information into their own proprietary database, and in conjunction with Business Week, LinkedIn is able to provide its users a database of information that someday may rival that of Hoovers.

But LinkedIn has their own angle on the company database.  In their words, “Company Profiles is a research tool that helps users explore and find the right companies to work for and do business with. Company Profiles leverage our unique network data and surfaces the people you need to get business done. They can be used to view job opportunities in your field and better understand the types of roles companies hire for and the latest news on people that have recently joined the company.”  In other words, where LinkedIn differentiates themselves is in providing targeted  people information and job information.  And if you are researching a company, this is more than likely the reason that you are looking at them, right?

So, if you are a small business owner, entering your Company Profile will put your company on the map and searchable.  In essence, as with your personal profile, your company can now be found, so you may start getting some passive marketing power.  You will also be given a URL (www.linkedin.com/companies/companyname) and thus will also start showing up if someone Googles your company name.  So, because it is a free service, the service can only be recommended to any business owner.

Adding a Company Profile is easy.  You simply go to the “Companies” tab at the top of your LinkedIn home page and then select “Add a Company”.  You then need to enter your company name and email address, and you need to make sure that the email address matches the domain name of your company.  In other words, if you are using a gmail account, I don’t think you will be able to add your company to the database here.  The other reason why you are asked to enter your email address is that it will check to see if somehow someone else didn’t already create that profile.

Once you confirm reception of the link, you will then be forwarded to where you enter the company profile.  Note that this email address that you provide will also be added to your personal profile, and although I am not experienced in it, it would not surprise me if you are prompted to update your own personal profile with this company information if you have not done so already.

The company profile will, first of all, be defined by the Company Name and domain that you first entered.  Then you will need to fill out the information in the “Basic Information” section as follows:

• Description.  This is the main body of text that will describe what your company does, so you should make sure you are branded properly.  Because LinkedIn provides the ability to search for companies using a keyword, make sure that this Description is properly search engine optimized.
• Specialties.  Any keywords that you couldn’t enter in your Description can be entered here.
• Website URL
• Industry.  This uses the same database as in your personal profile.
• Type (privately held, non-profit, etc.)
• Status (operating, out of business, etc.)
• # of Employees (this is a mandatory item that you must input even if you are the only employee)
• Year Founded
• News Module (this will bring the Business Week news on your company into your profile)

Next you will be able to upload your Company Logo, enter Locations, input your Financials (Annual Revenue, Year, Currency), link your company blog (if you have one), and finally enter information for any related companies and what the relationship is.  Not all of these are mandatory to enter, and what you enter really depends on how much you want people to know about your company.  For the majority of you, in addition to the Basic Information, I only recommend that you minimally upload your logo and link your company blog to the page.

The entire process shouldn’t take very long, and it will definitely give your small business a bigger presence on LinkedIn.  Just be careful to only include the information that you feel comfortable with and make your company profile searchable by the same keywords as with your personal profile.

Hope to see your company on LinkedIn!

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