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Introduction

This book is about using LinkedIn to build the professional relationships that will help you succeed in your current job or set you up for new opportunities. It shows you how to use LinkedIn, along with a handful of other social tools, to strengthen the professional relationships you already have. It also shows you how to extend that network of relationships by focusing on getting to know the people and organizations that will make the biggest difference to your professional goals.

Twenty-seven percent of American Internet users now use LinkedIn (compared to 90 percent for Facebook, and 30 percent for Twitter). A recent study conducted by my colleagues at Vision Critical found that more than 40 percent of LinkedIn’s users visit the site less than once a week. Many of these professionals use the site as a contemporary résumé, making some effort to keep their LinkedIn profiles updated and accepting and making connections on the site. But, frequently, I have heard even professionals who keep their LinkedIn profiles up-to-date say that they aren’t actually sure what LinkedIn is actually for.

Those professionals are missing out. LinkedIn is very powerful because it can not only help you find a potential contact in just about any organization (or at least, any industry), but also show you the road map of relationships that can get you an actual introduction to that person. The confusion about LinkedIn’s purpose may have come about because unlike Twitter, Facebook, or Google+, LinkedIn isn’t primarily an online hangout or communications channel. It’s more usefully understood as a cross between a dream phone book (one in which you could search people by any combination of company, job title, and keyword) and an atlas of human relationships (mapping who knows whom, worldwide).

While this combination of functions makes it easy to use LinkedIn to make connections, that doesn’t mean that collecting as many contacts as possible is the right strategy, though that’s a trap many of us fall into. To be sure, LinkedIn’s interface, as well as the broader culture of social media metric tracking, nudges us toward thinking of that network in terms of quantity rather than quality when it comes to making connections. But building a very large but superficial network of relationships on LinkedIn can actually undercut the value you get from this potentially powerful tool.

When you search LinkedIn for a way into a company, for example, you want to see search results that reflect meaningful connections. That means people you can call for an introduction to someone they’re connected to or for another kind of business favor. If you’ve connected to everyone under the sun, you’ll get lots of search results, but it’s a highly hampering needle-in-a-haystack challenge to find the connection that can actually help you.

For example, Internet guru Chris Brogan has famously embraced a broad approach, saying “I’ll connect with anyone.” But it’s also Brogan who shut down his account in part because LinkedIn “hasn’t done much for me for business.” So while it’s true that the utility of LinkedIn is directly related to the scale and depth of your 1st-degree connections, you also need to make sure that all of those connections are meaningful and that they can, in fact, do much for you in business.

That gives you a very pragmatic reason for embracing a larger truth: networking isn’t about numbers; it’s about people. To make LinkedIn a powerful tool, you need to focus on the individuals you’re connecting to, rather than how many of them there are.

What This Book Does

If you’re one of the many people who’ve set up a LinkedIn profile and made some initial connections, but haven’t really dug into using the tool as a way to actively make, strengthen, and use real human connections to support your work, then this book will show you how. If you’re already using LinkedIn actively as part of your on- or offline networking, this book will help you focus that activity on the people and interactions that will have the biggest impact on your professional goals, and it will give you new tips, tools, tricks, and ideas for using LinkedIn in your day-to-day work.

This book is based on the idea that you need to be efficient in the way that you network (on- or offline) in order to get the most out of the relationships that you are building. That means you need to:

1 Be selective about who you connect to. In chapter 1, I’ll introduce you to the favor test and the fairy godmother rule, both good connection guides.

2 Be clear about whom you want to proactively go out and meet, and diplomatic about how you approach them. In chapter 2, I’ll show you how to use advanced search to translate clarity into specific targets, and I’ll walk you through how to ask for an introduction.

3 Be effective in making use of the introductions and meetings you get through LinkedIn, especially when you’re traveling. In chapter 3, I’ll provide some ideas for how LinkedIn and other social tools can help you make the most of the time you spend on the road and at conferences.

What This Book Is Not, and Where to Learn More

This book is not a broad, complete manual of LinkedIn functionality but, rather, a focused guide to those features and practices that can help you use LinkedIn to strengthen your relationships with other professionals. It also doesn’t include a lot of detailed how-tos: if you need help with the specifics of LinkedIn’s interface, you can visit its help center here.

Many people turn to LinkedIn for specific purposes like job hunting, sales, recruitment, or event planning. This book covers some of these common scenarios for using LinkedIn, but it’s not limited to them. If you are looking for more detailed guidance tied to a specific use, here are some books to try: Marketing, advertising, and salespeople can check out Brian Carter’s LinkedIn for Business or Neal Schaffer’s Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales and Social Media Marketing. If you are polishing up your LinkedIn profile for a job hunt or want more detailed advice on profile development, Wayne Breitbarth’s The Power Formula for LinkedIn Success and Brenda Bernstein’s How to Write a KILLER LinkedIn Profile are thorough, smart options. Veterans as well as active service members have an even more focused option in Tim Savage’s LinkedIn: Creating a Great Profile as a Member of the Armed Forces.

Finally, things change quickly in the world of social media. For updates and comments about how things have changed since this book came out, please visit http://alexlov.es/linkedinupdate.

About Me

I joined LinkedIn in April 2005, when the nascent network had about 2 million of its now 200 million members. When my husband and I launched our social media practice, we used LinkedIn for everything from sourcing subcontractors to scoping out sales prospects. This book also draws on my seventeen years of experience as an Internet researcher, speaker, and strategist: I’ve helped people understand how the social web is reinventing the modern workplace and how to harness that power to build their own business and career. Today, in my role as vice president of social media for Vision Critical, the world’s largest market research technology provider, I not only work with LinkedIn as a core part of our business-to-business marketing toolkit, but have been able to peer into LinkedIn’s influence and usage through our research with tens of thousands of social media users worldwide.