Читать книгу Windmill Networking: Understanding, Leveraging & Maximizing LinkedIn - Neal Schaffer - Страница 5

My LinkedIn Credentials

If you are reading this book, you may be standing where I stood a little more than a year ago—before putting pen to paper. Starting out on LinkedIn, you want to get to the next level, to understand what you might be missing, to make some sense of what you should be doing on LinkedIn. I don’t intend this book to be a simple user’s manual about LinkedIn. During the last year I have lived the “LinkedIn Life,” starting out with a close network, slowly expanding it, and then becoming a LION, or a LinkedIn Open Networker. Along the way I created a filter, Windmill Networking, through which you can look to separate yourself from LinkedIn; using Windmill Networking, you can look at LinkedIn from a completely different, yet invaluable angle. The reader will find this experience, combined with this pre-requisite manual of LinkedIn’s features, most valuable. He or she will then be able to reflect upon and implement their own LinkedIn Brand.

According to my own research, I currently now have the more LinkedIn connections than anyone else where I reside in Orange County, California. At my current level of nearly 17,000 connections in early August, I am almost in the top 50 of all LinkedIn users worldwide. But more importantly, while becoming connected to so many people, I have utilized LinkedIn to search for and apply to jobs, to research potential customers, to find sales channels, to learn a great deal about many subjects, and to create my own groups to find like-minded professionals. I have also reestablished contact with old colleagues while helping people in various ways. I have most importantly made acquaintances with many people who are willing to spend a lot of time helping others. It has been a magical adventure I hope you all have a chance to experience on your own. That is really the motivation for me to write this book, to share as others have shared with me, and to give back to the wonderful LinkedIn community. As I will mention in the concluding chapter of this book, the more we connect with each other and become better LinkedIn users and better networkers, the positive effects and increased value will be passed on to everyone within our networks.

Like many of you, I received my first LinkedIn invitation a few years ago from someone whom I cannot remember. I signed up one day in 2004 (turns out that I am member number 235,001, as indicated by the key code in my URL), but I really didn't do anything with the site aside from accepting invitations from people that I knew. I remember having a long email conversation with one person who invited me that I did not know. I remember feeling that somehow my privacy had been violated—a feeling that I have not forgotten.

That all changed in 2008. After building my career in Asia and looking for a job for the first time in the US—without an established network—I took the plunge and decided to use LinkedIn as my primary networking tool. I couldn’t attack the “hidden job market,” a market where some people say 70% of the jobs are “found” or “created,” without becoming a better “networker.” Thus, my LinkedIn journey began, and I soon became a heavy user and increased my connections from 100+ to the now 17,000+.

As I started becoming a heavy user, I began connecting to people beyond my immediate group of friends and co-workers while actively reaching out to recruiters. I started to become the “go to” person for LinkedIn in my close physical network of family and friends. Many acquaintances had never heard of or did not understand LinkedIn to the same degree that I did. I could look at the official LinkedIn Q&A sections and begin answering questions about how to use LinkedIn. Finally, as I built out my network to encompass thousands of direct connections, I would offer to help anyone if they had a question about LinkedIn by saying so in an email. Whenever I invited someone to connect or accepted their invitation, I addressed them personally. Many people seemed to find value in what I had to say. I decided to begin a LinkedIn blog to provide a consistent place to publish my knowledge and tips. That blog now resides at www.WindmillNetworking.com.

Through this book, I hope to share all of this information with everyone to pay back the community for what it has given me. When I started my blog, a friend recommended that I write a book. At the time, I scoffed at his suggestion, yet here I am, a year later, putting the final edits to my work.

Am I uniquely qualified to be writing a book on a site that has 40 million users? Hey, I always believed that anyone has enough unique and valuable life experiences to write a good book. Is there information you can gain from me that you can’t find on the official LinkedIn site? Most definitely, because any information is based on personal experience. Will reading this book help you become a better networker, find a job or candidate quicker, sell more effectively, and deepen your understanding of LinkedIn? I am confident that it will.

Most importantly, I hope to fill the “information vacuum” that exists around LinkedIn. This really is the missing manual that I couldn’t find, and thus decided to create. When I first began my LinkedIn journey, I was surprised at the limited amount of “useful” information there was about LinkedIn on the site itself. It seemed that the people utilizing LinkedIn were either not sharing the “insider” information or didn’t know for themselves. At that time there was only one “real” LinkedIn book available. As time progressed, I started receiving many questions; I also began seeing many other questions appear within the official LinkedIn “Answers” section. I realized the timing was right and the audience was there; I was now ready to communicate my approach to using LinkedIn. Since I began writing this book, a few new publications about LinkedIn have appeared. This book, however, provides more than strategic and useful information for the beginner and the expert to use throughout the process: it also creates a framework through which you can better understand and more effectively utilize LinkedIn. For me, the mechanics of LinkedIn are a prerequisite, but you need to look at LinkedIn through the eyes of Windmill Networking and create your own LinkedIn Brand to really fully harness its value.

As a brief introduction to how I’ve organized this book, I begin with an attempt to help you better understand social networking, Windmill Networking, and what potential value LinkedIn has for you. I also go through potential user scenarios and provide you with a hands-on guide to create your own LinkedIn Brand. I follow this map throughout the “meat” of the book, which details the different sections of interest in LinkedIn. I have decided to focus and delve deeply into those areas that I believe will be of the most value to readers. While the book may not be 100% comprehensive, I have tried my best to provide detailed and unique insight into all of the latest features of LinkedIn that are relevant to you as a user. For instance, I purposefully do not go into length about features that are part of the paid service, nor do I explore utilizing optional toolbars. As the wording implies, these are not features that everyone uses (you may have a free account) or has access to (you may use the unsupported Google Chrome for your Internet browsing and/or use Gmail instead of Outlook for email management).

The final sections of the book offer strategic tips you can use to leverage the power of LinkedIn. I also provide closing commentary that will give you additional food for thought about how to make LinkedIn and social media work for you.

First-time or limited LinkedIn users will get the most out of this book; however, there are enough tips that I recommend any experienced LinkedIn user read this book from cover to cover. I have sprinkled even the basic sections with information I have gleaned from my thousands of hours utilizing LinkedIn. The data I have gathered through my personal experiences will provide insight, even for heavy LinkedIn users. Most importantly, the attitude I want to instill in LinkedIn users through covering the concepts of Windmill Networking will be invaluable to even the most advanced LinkedIn user.

Finally, if you have not connected with me yet, please feel free to send me an invitation through my profile at:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/nealschaffer

Thank you and hope to connect with you soon!