Windmill Networking: Understanding, Leveraging and Maximizing LinkedIn now available on Amazon!

Before I could issue my official press release, and much to my surprise, Amazon this week suddenly started shipping my book on utilizing LinkedIn, “Windmill Networking: Understanding, Leveraging and Maximizing LinkedIn.” So without any fanfare, thank you for your patience and I hope you enjoy the book as much as I enjoyed writing it!

To help you gain further insight on the book and Windmill Networking, I wanted to give you some background as to why I decided to write a book about LinkedIn.  I am not an author by profession, and I began embracing LinkedIn back in February of 2008 as a job seeker.  I had unusual circumstances in that I had built up my network outside of my native United States and birthplace of Southern California.  You can imagine how difficult this made it for me when I was in transition for the first time ever in the US without a local network!  I utilized LinkedIn to help me build up a future network which would become my “Trusted Network of Advisors.”

As I became a power LinkedIn user, combined with my “newbie” approach to social networking, I soon became the go-to person in my expanding network for questions about LinkedIn.  But I also became very interested in creating relationships not just online but offline as well.  I started my first LinkedIn Groups, So Cal Sushi (Southern California) and The Izakaya Club (Japan), to try to bring people that I had met on LinkedIn together in a physical networking environment.  After finding a new job I used LinkedIn as my professional yellow pages.  I found the platform invaluable in helping me develop business, find partners, secure appointments, and source vendors.  And I continued expanding my network online while reaching out to more people offline.

As my networking activities continued to ramp up, combined with the fact that I found myself again in transition with the onset of the recession, I began having many conversations with various people about how best to use LinkedIn.  I went out of my way to try to help people, realizing that this is something that I could now contribute to others that would help in developing relationships of value.  I coached not only job seekers in my network, but also CEOs, small business owners, and sales and marketing executives.

And I started blogging.  There were many restrictions and confusing things that I had found about networking on LinkedIn that I wanted to tell others about; thus, my original Windmill Networking blog (“LinkedIn Questions”) was born.  I also realized that many people found my understanding of LinkedIn and social networking insightful, and thus I ramped up my blogging shortly thereafter to cover topics above and beyond LinkedIn.

It was one day in February of this year that I decided to write a book on LinkedIn.  Why?

• Although other books about LinkedIn existed, I was confident that I could help bring our understanding of LinkedIn to a new level and provide my readers with unique value by viewing LinkedIn through the lens of Windmill Networking.  Without providing value there is obviously no reason in blogging or writing a book, so this was and continues to be my thought process on engaging with social media whether it be as an author, speaker, or consultant.
• As a LinkedIn Open Networker, or LION, I thought that writing a book would be an ideal vehicle in which to network with more people than I could possibly meet online or offline.  I have blogged about how to grow your LinkedIn network: wouldn’t a book be an ideal way to attract LinkedIn invitations from relevant professionals to whom we could add mutual value to our networks?
• As a Pay It Forward networker, I thought that a book was the ideal format in which to inform as many people as I could about my understanding of LinkedIn so that they could achieve more on the social networking site.  And the better my network networks, the more valuable all of our networks become!
• I also believed that writing a book, regardless of my future career, would be a positive addition to my personal brand.  In fact, regardless of what happens to the economy or future jobs, a book is now part of a brand that cannot be affected by external circumstances.

But the most important reason why I decided to write the book was really an exercise in Windmill Networking.  I provide a concise definition of this new social networking concept in the book and plan to write a blog post giving more background on it in the near future.  To put it simply, I thought that by writing the book, and in combination with the other reasons listed above, it would provide me with a lot of good karma, that by helping others the best that I could, I would be helping myself in the long run.  That is why I decided to write the most thorough and comprehensive book about LinkedIn in as much detail as I could without holding anything back.  It is also why I include the Windmill Networking concept as a centerpiece of the book, to teach others to see LinkedIn (and any other social media) through this lens, and to hopefully provide others with the right attitude to help YOU achieve whatever your LinkedIn Objective is.

Writing the book has definitely changed my life, as now, in essence, I have two brands: 1) my traditional high tech sales & business development executive who is fluent in Japanese and Chinese, and 2) a social media strategist, speaker, and author.  Obviously, my background in sales as well as doing business in Asia has had profound impact on my understanding of social media, so I continue to discover how my new brand owes a lot to my previous work experience.

I plan to do some fun social media promotions for the book going forward, so stay tuned on the usual channels for the details.  But, in the meantime, publishing my first book, as you can tell from how I began this blog post, really changes nothing about me nor about this blog.  Our social media journey continues, and I appreciate that you have decided to spend time with me for the ride.  Let me know how I can help you, and I look forward to everyone providing me feedback on my book as well as sharing their Windmill Networking success stories on this blog!  Thank you!

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(This is the first in a two-part blog post on how to utilize LinkedIn for Executive Job Search.  This first part will look at using LinkedIn in the “traditional” manner of utilizing Jobs Boards and searching out Hiring Managers, while the second part will take a Windmill Networking approach to utilizing LinkedIn for Executive Job Search through a deeper understanding of social networking and personal branding.)

As a sales and business development executive who has personally experienced being in transition during this recession, I can relate to other executives and their current job search in this dismal economy.

Not only has the economy dipped at an unprecedented rate for a prolonged period of time, the job search environment has been radically altered.  Where networking with other executives may have provided more plentiful job leads in the past, this recession may be proving to be a little more difficult.  The executive recruiters that you may have fostered relationships with in the past may not be calling you when you most need them.  And because the higher up you are in the food chain the fewer jobs there are, it may start to feel a bit lonely at the top.

What hasn’t changed is that the “hidden job market” is still where a majority of positions are being filled, even more so at the executive level.  If you have not attacked that market, it will make it even more difficult to find your next position.  Of course, the only way to attack that market is to 1) get in front of decision makers and hiring managers and 2) expand your network to help you get in front of these same targets.  For this purpose, LinkedIn will be the most valuable online tool that you can utilize.

I like to refer to LinkedIn as being a huge database of people, a place to find and be found.  I talked about finding others in the above paragraph, and this is very easy to do on LinkedIn.  Utilizing the Advanced People Search you can easily pinpoint decision makers in the organizations that you are targeting.  How you contact them on LinkedIn should be just as you do in person: asking for a referral from a trusted connection.  And for that purpose, LinkedIn has an Introduction functionality that you can use.  If you want to research more companies to add to your target list, move over Hoovers: the LinkedIn Companies database is growing and includes a lot of very interesting data that you can utilize to analyze where you might be a good fit.

You’ll notice that I have not even mentioned the Jobs section of LinkedIn until now.  Just as we all sometimes get lucky in Las Vegas, some are lucky enough to find a job on the Internet.  Job boards are not the preferred way to look for a job, as the chances that you will find a job on them are slim.  Furthermore, once you list your profile, you get contacted by the people you have no interest in.  And muddling through the lower-level jobs yields very few executive jobs.  The Ladders, obviously, is the exception here, and I am one who has found a job on The Ladders.

But the LinkedIn Jobs boards are different.   LinkedIn is, at the heart of its platform, a place for you to connect and develop relationships with other professionals.  And because of this, LinkedIn is a very attractive place for recruiters to be.  LinkedIn hosting a robust Jobs board section is a natural extension of this phenomenon.  And the quality of the Jobs board is high, very high.  You won’t see the “garbage” that other sites often post.  In terms of volume, you definitely won’t see as many jobs posted here as on the other infamous jobs boards, but you should know that there are many jobs that are posted on LinkedIn that aren’t posted elsewhere.  Case in point: I did a search for “VP” this morning within 50 miles of my home here in Orange County, California (by the way, Orange County, with a population of 3 million, still is considered part of “Greater Los Angeles” on LinkedIn).  Only 19 results came up.  But 8 of the 19 were exclusive to LinkedIn.  And they were all of very high quality.  In other words, if you are not using the LinkedIn Jobs board you may be missing out.

What else do I like about the LinkedIn Jobs board?  Check out this screen that recruiters see when they post a job to LinkedIn: “Receive on average 30 applicants.”  You hear the stories that other job sites get hundreds if not thousands of applicants for each job posted.  LinkedIn gets only 30 on average.  30 people on average is not a lot of competition.  Searching for your next position on the LinkedIn Jobs board may be the best kept secret out there! (until this blog post, of course )

Details of how to use all of these LinkedIn applications to their fullest extent will be made available in my upcoming LinkedIn Book, which I am happy to announce is tentatively slated for an October 2 publishing date.  I am even happier to announce that you can see the front cover of the book for the first time by clicking on that LinkedIn Book link.  For a preview, if you haven’t read it, check out how the editor of my book found her job on LinkedIn utilizing the advice in the book.

An interesting note on job boards, though, is that social networking sites are starting to replace them as the premier source to find candidates.  And that is why you shouldn’t be using LinkedIn only for the above activities: you need to realize that social networking, like LinkedIn, is free career insurance that you should buy into and can never have enough of.  I will continue this conversation in the 2nd part of this blog post.

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