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Today I joined a group, responded to correspondence I’ve received, and commented on a couple of posts. Mainly, I’m giving myself permission to take my time, to get familiar with the visual aspects of LinkedIn and to allow the medium to follow its course.
The number of invitations I’ve received to link has increased. I’ve gotten positive responses to most of my invitations and am nearing a thousand connections. I think that’ll be plenty.
An interesting side note: I believe myself to be an open-minded person, but when I saw that one member’s profile emphasized her affiliation with a religious group that I find a bit scary, I became less interested in furthering a business relationship with her.
On the theme of discernment, I’ve noticed an increase in comments on my blog and have to share one that I immediately disposed of as spam, just so you can see what’s coming through the airwaves of cyberspace:
Thank you for every other informative site. The place else could I am getting that type of info written in such an ideal
method? I’ve a undertaking that I am just now running on, and I have been at the glance out for such info.
Wha’? This feels like it went through a bad alta vista translation box. Oy! Spam!
I’m putting in my time, even though the daily rewards aren’t as exciting as I’d like. I’ll continue putting in 3 hours per week, as much time as I would spend going to networking events, and see what results.
I’ve heard from many of you with great suggestions and support.Thank you!
I’ve now clocked 6+ hours on LinkedIn and am looking for ways to challenge myself and go deeper (suggestions welcome).
I created a subgroup of Connectors – 259 people from my connections (out of close to 800) who have 500+ connections themselves. I am deducing that these are the men and women who are most seriously working this medium and who will pay attention if/when I post something to them.
I’ve increased the number of invitations I’m receiving, which I’m attributing to the saying, “What you focus on grows.”
I will make an outreach call to someone today whose website is dedicated to helping people on LinkedIn. I have to say, it’s overwhelming to me to be given 20, 30 or 100 things to do on LinkedIn. Please, can you give me ONE? Then I’ll try it. Offer 25, and I may need to take a nap to think about it.
One of the positive outcomes, so far, is re-connecting with people by through the InMail piece of this site. That feels good.
I’m a big believer in top-of-mind marketing, so being active in this way helps with that status. I did receive a referral last week from someone whom I had just reached out to connect with via LinkedIn. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
I put in my second hour this week towards my committed 3 hours a week dedicated to working LinkedIn. What’s different now than ever before is my attitude. I really want to do this. It’s no longer, “I know I should…” I want to!
I created a folder in Outlook for all email messages having to do with my new connections. I’d moved about 5 dozen postings there as responses came back to me after sending out invitations to connect.
Today, I went through that folder, read profiles, gave testimonials and sent messages to several beloved colleagues and friends.
I expect that in short order I’ll just go onto the LI site and read everything there, but for now, I’m doing it the way I know best. It may appear cumbersome to those of you in the know. Trust me, this is how I operate. Tortoise style. I know my own behavior all too well. I’ve learned to respect my pace and honor my perseverance. It works for me in the long run.
There was discernment involved. If the person’s profile had no photo and little content, I passed over connecting further. (It is Passover y’know.) That’s a clear indicator that s/he isn’t working the site. No judgment, but no need to delve further.
Or, if they had fewer than 250 links, I made a similar decision. I want to participate in this network with those equally committed. As I would any network that I joined. There used to be people who joined EWN just to have their name show up in the directory. I need more than that to do business with someone and to refer them to others. Showing up, in person or online, is a critical part of the equation and relationship.
I believe I’ve already gotten some business, though it’d be hard to track it directly. Since I reached out to colleagues starting on Monday, I received a message from a friend of one of those people asking for coaching. It might have been coincidence, but prefer to think that my action prompted this response.
It’s like the pigeon pecking the bar and receiving a pellet of positive reinforcement. This increased opportunity and activity is all I need to keep up the new behavior.
As promised, I devoted over an hour today to working my LinkedIn network. First I answered the questions that popped up when I went to my profile, which took about 10 minutes. My profile is complete. I’m happy with it and ready to move on from this starting point.
A pop-up on the site asked me if I wanted to connect with some 700+ folks who must’ve at some time or another emailed me. I was familiar with over 1/2 the names, but not interested in connecting with all of them. I selected about 200 from the list and sent out the automatic invitations from the site to those parties. I’ve already been accepted by 60 today.
Tomorrow I will write a personal note to each person who accepted my LinkedIn offer and spend time seeing what they’re up to.
I’m actually attending a live event in the city tomorrow, so I will have a comparative experience and see which feels like where I want to spend my time.
I feel excited to be undertaking this experiment in collecting comparative networking data and tracking where I have greater enjoyment and success. I feel optimistic and engaged in the process of exploration.
Has anyone else dug in too?
Brian Bish – Social Media Architect
Social Media Architect Brian Bish addressed my Mastermind Intensive on Friday about the why’s and wherefore’s of social media. It was a convincing talk, and I’m seeing a good deal of activity among our members as a result.
Brian talked about the credibility of a strong web presence supported by a strong social media presence. I backed up this sentiment with a recent example. My new New York friend forwarded me an email invitation to a women’s conference (which shall remain nameless) in CT that she was considering.
Unconsciously, because it’s become second nature to me now, I googled the keynote speaker and went to her website to check her out. It was a nice site, but not a clear-cut draw for my attention.
Next, I went to amazon to see how her book, which was being heavily promoted on the conference and her websites, was ranked. Close to #2,000,000. Again, definitely NOT impressive.
Then I wanted to check out how many followers she had on twitter: 10 LinkedIn: 121
I know you can’t judge a book by its cover, but through all the visible channels where YOU can make yourself known and get seen, I want to be sure that the keynote speaker I go to hear will offer me something I don’t already have. There was little evidence of that happening in any of the marketing materials or Web 2.0 locations to tell me that story.
Jim Rohn used to say, “People shouldn’t judge you by how you look, but they do.” We could update that to say, “People shouldn’t judge you by your online presence, but they do.” Or at least I do when it comes to spending my precious resources like time and money.
One of the things that comes up for me and my coaching clients regularly is fear and intimidation around social media, particularly twitter. With all the hashtags and bitly url’s, it can be confounding and overwhelming.
What I recommend, and practice myself, is the drip method of adjustment. Try a little at a time, when you feel ready, and at your own pace. Ten minutes today, then again for 20 minutes in a week or two. Remember when email seemed daunting? Eventually the look of the medium and the gradual adaptation and acceptance of the form became second nature. Soon enough, seeing 140 character missives will get under your skin in the same way and become a part of your normal day’s work.
I’m reminded of a quote I have referenced by David Pogue, a tech writer for the NYTimes, about using digital cameras. The acceptance, use and comfort with that technology is nearly universal. When you read this quote, written for the Circuits section in 2002, you can nod in appreciation of how far you’ve come and trust that the same will happen for your comfort level with social media.
Just connect the camera to the computer with a USB cable; copy your multimegabyte JPEG files to the hard drive; open the photos in an image-processing program; rotate and crop each one, adjusting the color; calculate the pixel density and desired output dimensions — and then click on print. What could be simpler?
My apologies for any of you who received a tweet from my hacked account yesterday. The brilliant hackers knew to appeal to our self-interest and claimed that a photo of me/you was to be seen at the url that created that damage.
Imagine my delight when turning the pages of Food and Wine magazine looking for inspirational words and images, an article caught my eye: Real Heroes Don’t Tweet. I loved the sentiment of the message and was further enchanted when it turned out to be about Calvin Trillin, the New Yorker writer whose books I’ve fallen in love with.
You won’t find a Calvin Trillin website, but you can find the man himself being interviewed by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. These two media hits were tantalizing forerunners to hearing him live this weekend.
I’d been looking forward to his appearance since we got tickets a few weeks ago. It was a sellout crowd at the Cornwall Village Meeting House in Cornwall, CT on Saturday evening at 5pm. He did not disappoint. He spoke with notes and from memory for about 40 minutes, then responded to questions from the crowd.
When asked about whether or not he was tweeting, his response was, “I try to stay 3 technologies behind.” His words went straight to my soul. Of course, being Calvin Trillin, he doesn’t have to join the crowd, but his non-conformist attitude enchanted me. Plus, he had a provocative question as a writer who, as a deadline poet, gets paid by the line.
“If you tweet, who pays you for that?”
My father, who was in retail for most of his career, wrote a book called the Savvy Shopper. He had been a department store executive and knew the ins and outs of how to get the best price on anything. My siblings and I still rib each other when asking how much another spent on a purchase, “Oh really?!” we’ll tease. “I could’ve gotten that for a nickel.” (My dad was a Depression-Era child, so a nickel was the standard back then.) Read the rest of this entry »
Wendy took this photo at the beginning of the Remarkable Women’s Network event tonight and immediately posted it in five places.
I never take pictures of what I’m eating and post them online, but watching Wendy Limauge document the goings-on this evening at my Remarkable Women’s Network event, and immediately posting them out there to her minions, altered my viewpoint. Her enthusiasm for recording her activities, and the ease with which she communicated, made it all seem much more doable.
You could have heard a pin(terest) drop while each of my three guest speakers shared her wisdom about LinkedIn, twitter and blogging. Wendy demonstrated it through her actions, then shared about “the house that blogging built”–an inspirational story about finding one’s niche and capitalizing on it.
Carol McManus, America’s LinkedIn Lady, made a clear and straightforward case for using her favorite social media site for simply being a witness to her friends and colleagues successes. By daily reading the newsfeed on her LinkedIn page, and commenting on, congratulating and making natural connections, she has monetized her LinkedIn relationships through referrals back to her. She cited an $8000 speaking opportunity that came directly out of her being a champion noticer and referrer on this site. Damn inspiring!
Robin Horton of Urban Gardens raised significant questions about what your end goal is with using these tools. As she so brilliantly put it, in the old days when everything was done with pens and paper, dial up phones and ink and air, no one went around asking “What kind of pen are you using?” As though that would make the difference in your success in business. Her point being that it isn’t which tools you use for being social through the media, it’s how you’re using them to further your main purpose. Getting clear on that is half the battle.
Bottom line, just like I’m writing this blog post to show my appreciation and enthusiasm for these new media, it’s what you do with the information that matters.
My hunch is that because of my blogging over the last three years, I’ve become more visible and indirectly gotten speaking engagements and clients due to my 3x a week postings.
But last week I got what had to have been the first actual reward I can tie directly to my blogging. I received this notification:
CONGRATULATIONS! We have exciting news for you! Your entry in the Staples Martha Stewart Blogher Blog Post Giveaway Sweepstakes has been selected as a Grand Prize winner. It is our pleasure to inform you that you have won:
A SPONSOR-SELECTED STAPLES MARTHA STEWART PRODUCT GIFT BASKET.
It arrived yesterday, and what a treat! I unwrapped tons of desk accessories and stationery items designed by Martha for Staples. Lucky them! They just elevated the taste level of their desktop offerings about 1000%. The stuff is gorgeous.
All I did was stop by Martha’s booth at BlogHer ’12, accept a journal that her people were distributing to all the attendees, and then follow it up with my take on how her products can benefit women business owners, professionals, etc. Piece of cake! I truly liked the journal, so writing something complimentary was a pleasure.
I hope you can take this marketing genius’ example and apply it to your own businesses in a scaled down version that meets your market. What Martha did you can do too.
Step 1 – Identify your client base.
Step 2 – Show up where they are.
Step 3 – Make them an irresistible offer (free product works!).
Step 4 – Create a contest or other viral, participatory activity that engages them and has them telling others about you–especially through social media.
Step 5 – Reward them so they’ll continue to promote you.
Rinse and repeat. Thank you, Martha Stewart. I do love your beautiful and practical supplies.
