company.
Though you’ll interact as an individual with others on LinkedIn, there is an opportunity for your company to be represented on the site as well. In addition to addressing how to establish your personal credibility as a sales or business development professional on the site, this book provides information on how to establish a corporate marketing presence on LinkedIn (such as in Chapter 5 regarding companies pages and in Chapter 6 regarding groups). It’s important to consider this hybrid approach because LinkedIn was originally created for professional networking by individuals, but there is an obvious advantage for companies that have both a corporate presence and an active employee presence on LinkedIn. Business is a fluid concept, and because so many positions require some crossover between sales and marketing—and because companies have a stake in having both departments represented online—it simply makes sense to address them both under the same cover.
I highly recommend that everyone read all sections of this book to better understand all aspects of the sales, marketing, and business development spectrum on LinkedIn. However, because this book addresses individual profiles as well as the corporate presence of enterprises, you may focus on those chapters that are most appropriate to your specific professional role in your company as follows, although all of the content will be relevant to small-business owners and solo practitioners:
•Chapters 1 and 2—Background information on the importance of social media in general, and LinkedIn specifically, for professionals [everyone]
•Chapters 3 and 4—Optimizing profiles and networks for individuals [everyone]
•Chapters 5 and 6—Establishing your company’s LinkedIn Group and Companies Pages [corporate marketing]
•Chapters 7, 8, and 9—Developing business by engaging, prospecting, and utilizing business intelligence available on LinkedIn [sales and business development]
•Chapters 10, 11, and 12—Using LinkedIn to develop leads and attain thought leadership through participation, paid media, and social media optimization [corporate marketing]
•Chapters 13 and 14—Optimizing the LinkedIn presence through optional paid accounts and creating a daily routine for maximum efficiency and return on investment (ROI) [everyone]
If you are interested in learning more about LinkedIn and social media after reading this book, take a look at Appendix A, which provides additional online and print resources of interest. Case studies throughout the book and cataloged in Appendix B illustrate how professionals and corporations have used LinkedIn successfully, and will I hope provide inspiration for you and your employees, regardless of specific job functions.
The content presented in this book, along with this supplemental material, will equip the sales, marketing, and business development professionals at your company with new and creative ways to develop and foster business so that everyone can enjoy the success of maximizing LinkedIn.
1
The LinkedIn Mindset
CHAPTER OBJECTIVES
•Understand how your online persona reflects your professional brand
•Differentiate between content that is appropriate for online professional interactions and that which is not
•Learn how to communicate messages that are aligned with your professional goals
•Appreciate that there are real people behind the virtual identities you meet online
Before I begin explaining how companies and professionals can leverage LinkedIn for business purposes, I believe there is a certain mindset you should have in order to take advantage of the functionality and opportunities LinkedIn offers. Allow me to provide some personal experiences and insight that will hopefully put you in the right mindset to maximize LinkedIn.
Your Brand Is Your Online Persona
Whether you plan to use this book as an individual or to represent a business, you will be interacting with and be seen by others without having a chance to meet them. While corporate websites give us complete control over how we depict our brands, products, and personnel, LinkedIn levels the playing field by stripping away the design elements and simply presenting every user in basically the same way. Let me take this one step further and tell you that others may make decisions on whether or not they want to do business with you based on how you’ve utilized your LinkedIn profile.
An analogy that helps explain this has to do with business interactions I’ve had in Japan. I lived in Japan for 15 years, often representing foreign companies with little or no brand recognition in the market. When I went on a customer visit, therefore, everything I did represented not only my personal brand but also the brand aligned with my company. Did I take a meishi (business card) with two hands or one? At what angle did I bow when I was introduced? What was my body language when I presented to them? How quickly did I respond to their emails, and did I strive to use Japanese or fall back on my native English? All of these little activities added up to create a larger picture of who I was and how I did business, which then shaped how they viewed me as a person and eventually how they saw the company I represented.
This is exactly why social media, including LinkedIn, requires a strategic approach. Regardless of how much “branding” you try to include on your professional profile or company’s page, your actions and words online speak much louder about you and your company than anything else.
You Are What You “Tweet”
In addition to your actions and words affecting your brand, you are what you tweet—a direct reference to posting a maximum 140-character message on the real-time social networking platform Twitter. If you are trying to generate business from other professionals, you need to stick to appropriate topics. There may be a time and place to talk about sports or family when you meet people in person, but on LinkedIn, these types of conversations are out of place and awkward. A professional’s goal when using any form of social media should be to share content that his target customers find useful, allowing him to become the expert “channel” for that type of information. If you post useful and engaging comments that are aligned with your sales and marketing objectives, people will perceive you and your business as being skilled and experienced. However, if you clutter your message with off-topic comments, you run the risk of losing your credibility.
This concept holds true for status updates (or tweets, for those of you who have integrated them into your LinkedIn profile), discussions in LinkedIn Groups, and all other public avenues for communication that exist on LinkedIn. For instance, it might be tempting to chime in on a controversial subject that has been brought up in a LinkedIn Group or a disputed question on LinkedIn Answers, but due to the fact that anyone on LinkedIn—and, for answers and open groups, anyone on the Internet—can view your responses, you need to remember to communicate on brand.
When you create and display your profile, you must make public-facing decisions that communicate who you are as a person. Embedding a video and using a link that automatically plays when someone visits your profile may
