Not Everyone Likes LinkedIn but with 120 Million Users Can You Afford to Ignore It?

April 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Getting the Point About LinkedIn

LinkedIn professional social networkWhenever I get up to speak to a group about LinkedIn, I’m conscious that there will almost certainly be some people in the group who have decided they don’t like the platform and others who may not feel strongly for or against it, but just don’t see the point.

Because let’s face it, for many people, the word “LinkedIn” just conjures up the image of messages, including from people they may not even recall having met, declaring they would like to add the recipient to their “professional network”. Those people probably think of LinkedIn, if they bother to think of it at all, as at best a mystery and at worst an annoyance.

Which is a shame, especially for anyone in business or wanting to promote their brand or career, because there is so much benefit to be derived from LinkedIn. And I for one believe the network should be an essential part of a social media strategy for just about any business, and especially for any business in the broad field of professional services.

So I see it as a key part of my mission these days to show people how they can most effectively use LinkedIn.

Because:

  • LinkedIn with its more than 120 million members, gives us a valuable key to managing our online identities, both for our individual careers and for our brand or company, and
  • I’ve spent more time than I care to think of learning about how LinkedIn works and I love sharing from that experience

So in this post I’m basically:

  • promoting the idea of LinkedIn being good for all or most businesses and
  • doing a bit of shameless, but hopefully not excessively intrusive, self-promotion of my LinkedIn-related services.

A Must for Business

It’s my belief that just about any business, from large corporations to solo professionals, should have a developed, optimized presence on LinkedIn.

As the Chief Marketing Officer for industry giant HP, Michael Mendenhall said recently:

“LinkedIn is a pioneer in harnessing the power of social media and brands can benefit tremendously from participating in this networking of leading professionals.”

And indeed I see increasing signs that business people are recognizing that LinkedIn may well provide fresh opportunities for market development, reputation-building and even real live deals.

One of those signs is that over the past eighteen months or so I have been getting – and accepting – invitations to speak about LinkedIn for business, such as a webinar for the Australian Businesswomens’ Network and as speaker for a sold-out networking breakfast in the nearby city of Brisbane.

Much, Much More Than a Resume Posting Site

For all the growing interest in LinkedIn among business people, I have to acknowledge that there are still some who ask me questions that show they do not understand the power of the network.

Questions like “Isn’t LinkedIn just a site where you put your resume if you are looking for a job, and maybe somewhere recruiters check to see who is available? I’m not looking for a job and I don’t need staff, so what use would LinkedIn be for me?”

Well of course it can be, and indeed is, a job-seeking/candidate-sourcing site. But it is much more.

That “much more” is why every business owner and executive needs to pay attention to LinkedIn, and especially to the ongoing efforts by LinkedIn to enhance the site’s features as a key social media site for business.

For example:

  • Company profiles: as well as the individual profiles many people (over 100 million actually) have on LinkedIn, you can also add your company profile and to that you can add information about products and services
  • LinkedIn Groups: there is a plethora of groups for all sorts of professional and personal interests and some people use those very effectively to promote themselves and their companies – and if you want to set up your own group, you can do that with a few keystrokes
  • LinkedIn Answers: I am continually amazed at how much information and business wisdom is shared through responses to questions posed on LinkedIn Answers – and asking as well as answering questions there is another way of building your profile and your company’s.

Linked Leverage

The short story then is that LinkedIn is an effective way of gaining leverage in the marketplace, a way of standing out, especially – although not exclusively – for professional services companies and practitioners.

But after doing a lot of presentations, webinars and individual coaching about LinkedIn, I do understand that some things that seem clear enough to me are not at all clear for people new to the platform.

That’s why I produced my short, complimentary ebook, 5 Simple Steps for Getting Started with LinkedIn.

And for people who want to get real value from their LinkedIn membership I cover all the main issues and share tips and guidance, in my range of LinkedIn coaching and workshop packages, under the headings:

  • LinkedIn profile makeover
  • LinkedIn profile Done For You
  • Personal LinkedIn strategy
  • Corporate workshops on LinkedIn

It’s hard to find good case studies

As a speaker and a coach, I’m always on the lookout for case studies showing how companies, especially in the field of professional services, have been able to use social media to good effect. I’ve had some success in terms of social media generally, but it’s been a harder call for LinkedIn specifically.

When Bill Vick and I wrote the recruiting industry guide, LinkedIn for Recruiting, we were able to find and share a number of case studies for that industry. But that was several years ago and those stories were specific to recruitment.

Right now, I am especially interested in stories from the financial services and legal sectors.

So if you have a case study from one of those professions or some other that you can point me to, or share here in the comments (or send me the info via the Contact page) – or maybe not even a “case study” but just a success story, that would be very much appreciated.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , , , ,

Boomer Business Owner Challenge – Emotional Resistance to Social Media

October 18, 2011 By

I keep telling myself I won’t do it again, but there I was yesterday, having another fundamentally frustrating conversation about social media with a Baby Boomer business owner who did not really want to listen.

It started with his making a polite enquiry about what I “did” by way of business and – once I had answered – it quickly moved to his expressing what seemed to be a quite visceral hatred of anything going by the name of social media or social networking.

At least this one didn’t complete his tirade by turning on his heel and storming away, as I had experienced at a business networking event not so long ago. In fact, the one yesterday seemed to want to keep talking.

But what had brought on the tirade? Well, Facebook featured in both of those conversations. Or rather, the protagonists’ views of Facebook. Yesterday it was about the harm perceived as being done to the younger generation through being on Facebook. For the other it was the disruption of his office when their page suddenly attracted a huge amount of attention (yes, what for many would have been public relations manna from heaven was for him a catastrophe of unproductive activity).

In the conversation yesterday, being not totally deterred by the initial outburst, and with what in hindsight was a ridiculous exercise in optimism, I tried quietly to suggest ways in which some strategic engagement with social media might actually help his business.  The conversation, as you will have guessed by now, went nowhere in any productive sense.

Don’t try to confuse the issue with facts

Typically with this sort of conversation, the haranguer of the day will tell me, as a matter of objective fact, that his (usually a “his” – I find women Boomers more open to listening to the facts) customers are older and aren’t “on” social networks. I’ve discovered, through a few other conversations on the topic, that a good way to get such people even more angry is to point to research that shows the rapid growth of social network usage by older Internet users.

Such as the Pew Internet study report published in August this year that found a whopping 60% uptick in Baby Boomer (ages 43-64) participation on social networks, up from 20% of American Internet users to 32%.

Pew Internet social network site usage by online adults 2005-2011

So it’s not about facts. Which means that asking these business owners to just “think” about how social media can help their business may well be a futile exercise.

It’s about emotion.

I’m not a psychologist and I don’t know of any study that has been done on the role of emotion in business owners’ decision processes about social media. But I have on several occasions, not just the couple I mentioned above, been struck by the forcefulness of the resistance to any discussion about social media.

Which does suggest to me a very strong emotional undercurrent is at work.

Implications for marketing social media strategy services

Up till now, my next day reaction to these situations has been to tell myself once again that I am not really interested any more in evangelizing social media and that I just want to connect with people who are ready to roll and looking for a strategist guide and coach to help them get where they want to be, faster and more effectively.

But lately I’ve been reflecting on some advice I had once in sales training, to the effect that the person who is most resistant to your initial presentation is worth spending time on and may turn out to be a good customer, whereas the person who appeared initially more open is likely to be the one who never buys.

So in focusing my attention on those who are ready to rock ‘n roll, am I leaving some good business opportunities untapped? And thinking of those more resistant business owners and the opportunities I see them as blocking from sight and hearing, is there something different I could do, or could I do something differently, that could help them move into a more open-minded, more receptive frame of mind (and “frame of emotion”)?

Some fear about social media can be quite understandable

Of course not everyone is going to be hostile to the idea of engaging with and through social media. Others may be more or less fearful or anxious, and often with good reason, depending on what they’ve heard or read about the risks involved.

So I’m thinking that in offering my social media strategy services to Boomer business owners I will to well to take more notice of how the owner feels about social media for business, and seek to address that effectively.

I”m not really thinking here about the hardcore resisters – I’m not masochistic – but more about people who are feeling uncomfortable or even a bit fearful about social media and are ready for an open conversation about that.

If you know of any research findings, or case studies, on this topic, and you’d like to share a link to those here, I would be very grateful.

Credit: Chart from Report, “65% of online adults use social networking sites” Pew Internet & American Life Project, August 26, 2011, p. 6, http://pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2011/PIP-SNS-Update-2011.pdf accessed on October 18, 2011

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Should Google Plus be Part of Your Social Media Strategy?

September 19, 2011 By

Lately I’ve been wondering just how much or how little I should be talking, with clients and with groups I present to, about the still relatively new but in many ways quite fascinating service, Google Plus.

Google+The company calls this the Google+ Project and explains it as “real life sharing, re-thought for the web”.

Ambitious concept.

Right now, I’m pretty sure my real life sharing works more simply and more effectively than my attempts on Google+ to share and join in other peoples’s sharing.

But it’s early days and many people are trying to figure out whether this is truly the Next Big Thing, or another great idea by Google that never got sufficient traction to become a serious contender in the battle of the social media platforms (remember Google Wave?).

I don’t want to overload clients and others with bright, shiny, new social media items for the sake of it, but at the same time I don’t want to neglect alerting them to things I think they should know about, so that they can keep up with the game, so to speak.

Because the fact is, when I’m talking about social media with business people who are not heavily into the topic, I find many of them feel quite overwhelmed with the plethora of social networking platforms and options. So, rather than adding to their overwhelm, I endeavour, while still sketching for them the big picture about social business, to chunk it down to digestible portions.

That usually includes providing my recommended list of a handful of platforms any business should be on or at least consider being on. I should mention that, in terms of the people I’m usually addressing, the list is focused on what I would regard as basic in terms of doing business in the USA, Canada, the UK, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand. For China, Brazil and a number of other countries the options vary, with different platforms having to be taken into account.

With that latter proviso, the basic list was until recently: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, company blog.

Just how  and to what extent each of those or other platforms are to be used most effectively will depend on a particular company’s business and social media strategies.

So if I want people to feel confident about my basic list, as I do, would I even consider including Google Plus as part of the recommended basic kit?

Well, given what I’ve seen so far, I believe that even at this early stage businesses should know about Google+ and individuals within the business who have business management or social media management responsibilities should be aware of it and probably should join and put some time into learning how it works.

It may well be that Google+ will soon be part of my recommended “basic business kit” for social media engagement.

But at least one key factor for me, before that happens, is that the user base will need to be more reflective of the wider population. As Richard McManus observed in an interesting post yesterday, “While Google Plus has a fervent base of early adopter users, it hasn’t managed to attract mainstream people yet.”

So the short answer is no, not part of the recommended basic kit – or not yet.

As far as I can tell, becoming a Google+ user is still by invitation only. Like many others, I have quite a stack of invitations, so if you have not yet received an invitation and would like one, please email me at deswalsh(at)gmail(dot)com and ask: I’ll be happy to send until they run out.

Next week, as part of my monthly free Social Media Strategy webinar series, I will be focusing on Google+ for business, going through the various features and indicating where I see possibilities and limitations for this platform in the business context. If you have not yet registered for these webinars, you might like to do so at this link (recordings of all the previous webinars are available for registered participants).

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Why Some Companies are Wary of Investing in Strategic Social Media Engagement

March 30, 2011 By

Today, as part of my current course with the Social Media Academy, I’ve been working an exercise to develop a concept and framework for a consultancy business in the field of social media. In line with how the assignment was set, the first thing I did was to endeavor to define the problem my business would seek to address.

I framed that in terms of the area I would like to do more work in, mainly medium sized professional services companies.

danger sign

After reading my screed through a couple of times I felt it was a fair representation of how I currently see the field and why some, maybe many companies in that sector might be reluctant or even resistant to investing in developing and implementing social media – or social business – strategies.

Then I wondered how others might judge what I’ve written. Which is why I’ve decided to stick my neck out and invite comment and critique here on the blog.

What I’ve written is frankly based not on detailed research so much as my sense of the current state of play. So it’s quite possible that my sweeping generalizations do not measure up to current business realities. On the other hand, my observations here are not completely subjective: I read what others write and I listen to what business owners and executives say.

I recognize too that what I’ve written is not what you would call revolutionary. I’m just endeavoring to set down a summary of how I see the situation.

So here goes.

The problem

Many business owners understand, at least at a basic level, that the all-pervasive adoption of social media has changed the business landscape dramatically and irrevocably. They see that their own company is not up to speed and they do not want to be left behind. Some even say they want to be at the leading edge of change. But they or their business partners, or their legal or other advisers, counsel caution and a wait-and-see attitude, often citing all the things that can go wrong via the social networks.

They want to act, but are afraid of getting it wrong:

  • they don’t know what is involved – cost, time, people, reputation
  • they don’t believe you can get an ROI calculation
  • they don’t know if their organization and/or their people are ready
  • they don’t know who to trust to show them

Companies in professional services and in heavily regulated industries, such as financial services, are especially wary. For most such companies, all or nearly all of the members of the board of directors and the C-suite executives will have spent their working professional lives in a culture and mindset of command and control, with hierarchical structures and chains of command. To them the social web can, understandably,  look very much a place of anarchy, with social media engagement a recipe for serious, possibly terminal reputational damage and trashing of the brand.

If they decide that they want to “do something” about social media, their training and orientation to risk management through a command and control structure may make them susceptible to the advertising agency or other purveyor of social media services or “solutions” who offers to provide them with some semblance of social business. A social media tasting. Typically this can be along the lines of “why don’t we just set you up with a Facebook page and see how that goes?”.

Such a piecemeal approach is not likely to be based on anything like a comprehensive strategic assessment, much less a strategic plan of social media implementation: so the chances of success are slim at best. And because there is no strategic framework for identifying what “success” might look like, the company is unable to make an informed judgment later about the value of that particular experiment, or of the potential benefit of other social business initiatives that may be proposed.

Properly advised about precedents and procedures for risk management, even the most conservative of companies may be willing to invest some of their people’s time, some reputational and social capital and some money into socializing their business. But if the only ideas that are put to them are essentially tactical, not strategic, and do not address the financial controller’s concerns and those of other C-suite executives, the decision may be made, however reluctantly, to do nothing.

The fundamental problem then is that they have not had the benefit of being shown how they can move along the path of a holistic socializing of the business, sensibly, strategically and measurably.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , ,

Launching Free Social Media Roadmap Webinars

January 18, 2011 By

I don’t know if this is an ideal time to launch my long thought-about series of free, monthly webinars on social media. But I believe it’s a good time.

(Note: a week after this post was written, a trademark was issued for the words “Social Media Roadmap” and this was drawn to my attention in early February. Accordingly, I am in the process of re-badging the seminars. The naming issue will not detract from the value of the content – if anything, I will be just even more determined to provide great content!)

More and more business people and freelance professionals are starting to think about how they can tap into what is going on with Facebook and Twitter and blogging and all the rest of it. Part of their challenge is knowing what questions to ask.

So next week, January 24 in the USA and Canada, January 25 in Australia and environs, I’m launching my Social Media Roadmap Webinars.

Going through to December 2011 (at least), this series of free monthly webinars will provide a way for business owners, entrepreneurs and freelance professionals to tap into current developments and thinking about social media in a business context, or ‘”social business”. One of my aims is that the webinars will help participants ask better questions about social media. It will also provide a “space” to help participants develop social media roadmaps for their own businesses or careers.

Clearly there is not one roadmap for all. Or even a handy set of “template” roadmaps.

While there are some markers and signposts, and some salutary tales of what has or has not worked for others, there is still enough that is new, unresolved, even unpredictable about social media that each of us in business must, to an extent, devise our own roadmap, fitted to our own business or career objectives, our business values, our mission, our business culture or ethos.

In his excellent book Engage! The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate and Measure Success in the New Web, social media thought leader Brian Solis says (Preface, p xi):

We are at the beginning of something new and incredible, and its paths and processes are for the most part undefined and far from standardized.

It’s not that we can’t with confidence say some things about the path ahead, more that we are all to one degree or another learning as we go.

That’s why I want the Social Media Roadmap Webinars to be as interactive as possible, consistent with each webinar being as valuable a learning experience as it can be for each participant and as useful as it can be for his or her business or career. When there is interactivity, I always find that there is something I can learn from others, or something I can look at in a different light because of someone’s question or other contribution.

Who will benefit?

  • Generally, people working on their business or career social media strategy
  • Anyone already developing a social media roadmap and looking for ideas and feedback
  • People who prefer interactive webinars to being lectured at
  • Anyone looking for frameworks, ideas, or tips on effective use of social media
  • Anyone who likes the idea of hype-free monthly updates on the state of social business

Why free?

  • An obvious reason for providing these webinars free of charge is that I am hoping they will help me build my business coaching and social media strategy business (but I am committed to keeping them going for at least 12 months even if that doesn’t happen).
  • I  like sharing what I know and rather than doing that as I have been for too long now, in piecemeal, off-the-cuff, unstructured conversations here and there which may or may not be in fact very helpful, I wanted to set up a way to help people more systematically, including those who might not now or ever decide to avail themselves of my paid services.
  • I love teaching, both for the help that can give others and what I can learn in the process.

Details

When: every fourth Tuesday Australia and New Zealand, fourth Monday for US/Canada,

Times: Australia 12 noon (AEDT) Tuesday, New Zealand 2 pm Tuesday; USA/Canada 5 pm PST, 8 pm EST Monday

Where: my online conference room – details to be sent to those who register.

What if those times don’t work for you?

They are not set in stone. If there is a case made for a different time and perhaps even for a different day, I’ll be as receptive as I can. Also, the sessions will be recorded, so if you register you will be sent details to enable you to download them and play them at a time that suits you.

More information

You can get more information and register at this link. If you want to contact me directly to ask questions or get further clarification, send me a message via the Contact page.

I’m excited about this. I hope you’ll come and join me and help make this a great learning experience and ideas exchange for all of us.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , , , ,
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