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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 be a savvy Internet marketing tactic, but it may be perceived as a punch in the face to someone who just wants to check out your profile in order to potentially engage you in new business.

Treat LinkedIn with the same amount of respect you would treat a professional association meeting or industry convention and you will be on your way to building and enhancing your LinkedIn brand, which will be optimized for business success.

Creating a Public Persona

When you see the value of communicating on brand or in a way that is aligned with your professional objectives for being on LinkedIn, you’ll likely sense the need to create a “public persona” of yourself. In other words, avoid posting your private information on LinkedIn, and all social media in general. Did you know there are tools, such as a plugin for Gmail called Rapportive1 and the social CRM platform Nimble,2 which can be used to publicly display available information for every email address with a registered social media profile?

If you’re not careful with your Facebook profile, for example, your private information could cost you potential business.

The fascinating thing about social media, of which LinkedIn is definitely a part, is the social component. It is what draws some people into having conversations and posting things on various social media channels that they might later regret. It is very possible for this to happen on LinkedIn. Consider the fact that LinkedIn allows you to input information about your hobbies and interests in your public profile. Including this information may help make a connection with a potential customer, but it may also turn off potential customers who perceive you in an unintended manner.

The overarching problem is that everyone sees and uses social media from a different perspective. A statement that is considered harmless by some may be perceived differently by others. When Kenneth Cole tweeted in the midst of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, “Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online . . . ,”3 some of his fans didn’t think twice about the message. However, because of the public nature of Twitter, within a few hours of the tweet, there were complaints via Twitter and even blog posts talking about how insensitive the tweet was. Shortly thereafter, Kenneth offered an apology via his Facebook page, but that didn’t stop the tweet from being broadcast on national news that night . . . and printed in this book.

It’s easy to say that in creating your public persona you should avoid putting certain things in your profile, but because social media is, well, social, we’re frequently tempted to say things that may catch us off our public brand. Before you post something in any social media channel that may be controversial and therefore affect your future business prospects, ask yourself the following four questions:

Would my family approve of this?

Would my boss approve of this?

Would all of my customers approve of this?

Would a court of law approve of this?

Unless you can answer “yes” to all four of these questions, keep your public persona intact by simply not posting your opinions on the Internet.

Building Virtual Networks Online

The final thing to remember about public personas is that there is a real person behind every photo and profile on LinkedIn. It is easy to browse through hundreds of profiles and treat them as mere numbers, but the fact is that these profiles represent professionals from across the entire American and global spectrum. These are people with whom you want to create mutually beneficial and long-lasting relationships. Because social media was made for people and not for businesses, this will require you to network with, instead of market to, people, in order to generate business. If you can understand this concept, you can use LinkedIn to create a hyper-targeted and global network of professionals in a way that is much easier online than offline. Online networking requires you to socialize in a different way than you do offline, but real, valuable relationships can be created through LinkedIn.

I started becoming a heavy LinkedIn user in early 2008 when I was looking for new professional opportunities. I had been a member since 2004 and understood its potential value for sales and marketing, but after living in Japan and moving back to a new location in my native United States, I realized that my network had minimal reach in my new locale. LinkedIn, and thereafter Twitter and Facebook, became my tools of choice to develop and expand my professional network. The people in my network continue to support me by providing recommendations for services that my business needs to grow as well as introducing potential clients to me. I also appreciate knowing that, wherever I travel around the world, there is a small network of LinkedIn connections that I can tap for whatever business networking needs I might have.

While some people choose to keep their LinkedIn connections confined to those they know personally (which is in line with LinkedIn’s current User Agreement which states, “Don’t invite people you do not know to join your network”4), the people you connect with outside of your established networking circle may become your most valuable business contacts.

figure 1.1 Windmill Networking—The Value in Building Out Virtual Networks through Social Media

Many networkers I meet agree that the value of networking is in meeting new people. Armed with a well-crafted public persona and the ability to look at LinkedIn as a networking tool for business (rather than personal) purposes, I am confident that you, too, can make virtual connections of value on LinkedIn that will help your sales, business development, and marketing efforts.

With this mindset in place, you will be able to increase your chances of developing business on LinkedIn specifically and in social media in general.

LinkedIn User Advice: “LinkedIn is only valuable if you decide to be an active member.”

When I reached out to a number of companies and professionals who had developed business using LinkedIn, I was struck by the recommendation of James A. Rohde,5 a market research consultant based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Here’s his advice, in his own words, on the LinkedIn mindset.

“I recently started my own research consulting firm and have been lucky enough to develop business clientele mostly by relying on LinkedIn. Based on what I’ve found so far, the network has been amazingly valuable, though only when used the ‘right’ way. LinkedIn is a great public forum to see what issues people are trying to solve, which has obvious benefits when your job is to sell solutions. That being said, I have never opened and closed a prospective deal by relying just on LinkedIn. It is simply a valuable tool in a larger set.

“LinkedIn is built on the idea that there is power in knowing the ‘degree’ of your relationships with other professionals. The value of the system when it comes to selling is in understanding that this philosophy works both ways. By presenting the benefits and philosophy of your services to an open forum of people who can trace you back through their own connections, this bolsters an initial trust that is not obtained through traditional advertisements or even the more traditional conferences (in the B2B world).

“LinkedIn is only valuable if you decide to be an active member. At least for me, the success I’ve had with the networking site has stemmed from participating in conversations and providing honest and real opinions to the topic at hand.

“My overall feeling is that LinkedIn allows more people to take comments and conversations seriously because everybody has their professional reputations on the line. Discussions are being held by more than just random names; they are held by people working at specific companies that also employ two or three other people you worked with in the past.”