Linkedin Thought Leaders

Over the past couple of months I've found myself intrigued by a new feature on LinkedIn  Content from Thought Leaders. What’s is actually more fascinating than reading the content has been watching how various Thought Leaders are using their new content channel on LinkedIn.

Thought Leaders are good promoters by nature, that’s how they got to be leaders of thought in their respective spheres. They promote their ideas and they brand themselves well. In creating the Thought Leader space, LinkedIn provided this group with a new marketing platform to expand their reach. The more aggressive participants took to this new channel and started figuring out how to use it to their advantage instantly.

Tony Robbins, for example, started off with some original content but then shifted management of the channel over to a marketing flunky and the channel spent a few weeks as just an ongoing sales pitch for Robbins products without providing any value to the reader. In the past month the content has changed to be more tailored to LinkedIn and it appears more thought is going into who comprises this new market and how to interest them.

Richard Branson is just having his marketing team port content over from his company blog (none of which appears to be written by him.) It’s good stuff but I think the self-promotion level is higher than it should be.

Guy Kawasaki wrote some original content for LinkedIn but quickly just turned his channel into another spigot for content he is posting across his entire social network. I think this is a mistake but I also know how tough it is to generate original content for specific channels (you see how often I manage to get a blog post out here!) Writing a lot of original content is hard, especially if you’re running a business, promoting a book, setting up your next project, etc.  One thing I keep reminding myself that as a leader, my job is to innovate and market.

 Blogging is marketing and needs to be treated as such.

So, I’m hoping to do a better job at creating original content in 2013. With a book and a web app to promote, it’s time for me to start getting on the ball with my own marketing and original content. Either that, or I need to invest in a bunch of cleverly branded lolcats.

Happy New Year!

The Biggest Mistake in Social Business Networking

What’s the biggest mistake being made by business social networkers? Failure to put up a good profile picture.

Your picture is the most important part of your personal brand, it’s how people will remember you. Our brains are neurologically wired for faces, it’s the first place we look when we meet someone and the most likely thing to be remembered. The face you present to the business community is how you will be known. Your face is your brand.

Business social networking is branding and marketing, make no mistake about it. If you are going to get in the game, you need to play like you mean it and that means a good profile picture.

What is a good profile picture?

• A good profile picture shows your face, especially eyes. It has a smile. It is warm, friendly, intelligent. It makes the viewer think to themselves “this seems like a pleasant and competent person to know/do business with.” 

• A good profile picture is NOT a picture of your cat, a picture of your kid, a picture with you and your significant other, or any picture where you can’t see your face clearly. Save those for Facebook and other non-business applications. 

• A good profile picture is NOT a glamour shot. Someone should be able to immediately recognize you in person from your profile picture. We aren’t working with dating sites here, this is business. Save the funky angles to make yourself more attractive and cleavage pictures for someplace more appropriate. 

You've probably just realized that you don’t have a single picture that is good for a business network profile, which means you should get one taken. Depending on your industry, you can opt for either a standard backdrop portrait studio picture or you can go with something a bit more creative and relaxed. My personal opinion leans toward more relaxed and natural rather than stiff and posed. Whichever way you go, the picture should solidly represent who you are and, even more importantly, who you would like to become.

There is an old and wise adage that you should dress for the job you want, not the one you have. Your profile picture should also represent the job you want, not the one you have. That picture is going to create an indelible image in the minds of your business contacts - make sure the picture says what you want it to say.

Money spent on quality pictures from a professional photographer is an investment in your career, just like a good interview outfit. People will make snap judgments about your character and likability from your profile picture, so make sure it’s a good one.

Don't Be a Jerk!

It is common wisdom that nobody wants to work with a jerk and social networking has made it easier to identify a jerk before you add one to your team.

While a lot of people have their Facebook pages set to private, things are a little different over at LinkedIn where all your activity is public and shared with your business network. I've been noticing that a lot of people on LinkedIn don’t take into account the persistence of their social contributions. I continue to be astonished at the number of people who forget that they are contributing/commenting under their real name, not an anonymous email account that doesn't tie back to their real identity.

I was watching the comments to an article posted by a LinkedIn “Thought Leader” the other day and my jaw dropped several times when people made flat out inappropriate comments under their business account. I suppose that these people are doing the rest of us a favor by clearly outing themselves as not ready for prime time, thus eliminating themselves as job competition. Yet it still seems like they should know better than to join a business network platform and proceed to be a jerk.

Nobody wants to work with a jerk. Nobody wants to hire a jerk. And, after watching what an election did to many people, a lot of people don’t want to be friends with a jerk, either.

One thing that’s really come around to me in the past couple of years is that the Web is a place of business for many of us. It takes very little for someone to tie email addresses together and match them to a real identity. Keeping this thought out in front has really changed the way I communicate, even when I think I’m doing so anonymously. Now, I approach everything as if it might come back to haunt me next week, next month, next year. I make I really want to own anything I put out there and I especially make sure that anything I do on LinkedIn dovetails with the personal brand that I've built there.

Social media is allowing us to see the real person behind the facades most of us erect in our day to day lives - we contribute spontaneously across our social networks and our internal editor goes silent more often. But it is critical that we keep that editor engaged when contributing socially, that old saying should guide appropriateness “the Internet is forever.” Once a comment, picture, or email hits the Internet, you can’t take it back. Control of it is lost to you forever.

That by itself should make anyone think twice before hitting the send/post button.

Small Business Branding with LinkedIn

A lot of small business owners are hesitant to jump into social business networking via LinkedIn and consequently they are missing a vital opportunity for branding and building their businesses.

Today we want to cover some basic concepts of using LinkedIn to brand your small business with a focus on creating your starting network. We are not going to go over details on the LinkedIn platform elements, as there are tons of great tutorials on this topic already.  

For purposes of this post, we are going to assume that you’ve created a LinkedIn account and are unsure of your next steps forward to start branding yourself and your business.  We are also going to assume you probably already have an existing network of clients, customers, and other professionals that you currently do business with via email. We want to turn this group of people into an audience for you to brand yourself to.

Create your starting network:

•  Follow the LinkedIn directions for finding contacts. Export your email address book from Outlook or whatever mail program you are using (I found that LinkedIn seems to prefer .txt files over .csv files.)  Import your contact list into LinkedIn.
•  LinkedIn will then match up your contact list with people who are already on LinkedIn and will offer to send out “Connect” invites.  You can select people individually or just go all-in and hit your entire email list with an invite.
• Sit back and watch who connects with you and how fast.

Task:  Make a list of the people who responded to your invite in the first 48 hours.  Those people who responded within 48 hours are your active business network on LinkedIn. Those are the people who are truly paying attention to the LinkedIn platform and using it. They are the audience you are branding yourself to.

Most people who are in your active network are either logging in daily to glance at their news feed, accept invitations, send out invitations, etc.  Or they are at least following what’s going on in their network via the Weekly Digest email. This means that your name is going to be appearing in front of these people (your active network) on a regular basis. 

The way to use LinkedIn most effectively as a business owner is for branding. Associating your name with an idea or ideas.

True story. There’s a guy in my network named Mike. I somehow worked with him somewhere long ago, don’t really remember. Mike used to post these slideshow presentations on business topics as a self-promotion tactic. I thought it pretty smart what he was doing and made a mental note. Then he stopped posting those great presentations....Time passes and he drops off the radar. Until about a year ago, when he joined a LinkedIn group that talks about small airplane selling. Now, for the past year, every time I see Mike’s name in my LinkedIn news feed or on a Weekly Digest update, it is in relation to a post he made in a group on airplane sales.  So, in my mind…Mike is an airplane broker. I associate his name with airplane sales because that’s what I see his name most often in relation to.  If airplane sales are not his main revenue stream, then he’s totally botched his branding because that’s what I associate him with now. 

See what I mean?  You become what you share.

To borrow a concept from Guy Kawasaki: "You should post about what you want your followers to know you for." 

Your active network is going to see every move you make on LinkedIn. And you want them to, because you are branding yourself. Everything you do will be to associate your name with key words and key ideas.

You can put ideas out in front of an enormous range of professionals with elegance and subtlety. Instead of following the ideas around, you become someone who influences the ideas in your network.

But we are not going to go into influence and ideas just yet, baby steps. First you build up an audience to play to and get comfortable with the LinkedIn Platform. You want to make your “new guy” mistakes with 20 followers, not 500. You’ll aim for adding 10 new connections a week. You want your network to grow – the larger your network, the more people you are influencing.

We will talk about sharing engaging and relevant content that builds your brand in a future post, be sure to bookmark us or add us to your RSS feed so you don’t miss it!

3 Ways to use Pinterest for Special Event Marketing

Pinterest is the rage in the social media and special events marketing world - and for good reason. It's a visually rich platform built on images, so it has lots of potential for any events that generate a lot of great images or video content. It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words and all those pictures your event generates tell a story - that story is an integral part of your special events marketing strategy.

Special Events can use Pinterest for marketing in all three marketing phases:

1) Pre-event marketing - pin images and video from previous events or images that will draw the right audience. For example, if you have an art show, start a collection of great art imagery that all links back from Pinterest to your website and/or blog. Encourage participation by announcing to your mailing list that you have a board on Pinterest for lovers of art and start your audience participating in curating the collection. Run contests around art images and showcase outstanding images curated that week on your event Facebook page.

If you have previous images from last year's event, put those up - encourage event participants to share their pictures from last year. Done correctly, you end up creating a community built around the sharing of images relating to your event. We will come back to that word: community, in future posts. Social media is all about community.

2) During event - be posting pictures and video constantly from the event, encourage your participants to do the same. Create contests and build community. The more you interact with your social participants, the more they share your content and help you build your brand/event. If you can bring them back to an email sign up page and collect addresses for future marketing, even better.

Pinterest

3) Post event marketing - it's the day after your event and you've got hundreds of photos and videos sitting around not helping you start your marketing for next year. Pin 'em up! Put them out slowly over time so that you can use this month's collection of pictures as a reason to reach out and touch your email list or Facebook fans, encourage participants to share and repin. You did hire a professional photographer, didn't you? User pictures are wonderful, but you need your own professionally shot photos for promotion. This is such a small budget item in the grand scheme of things; and any event is pound foolish to be cutting this expense to save a few pennies.

Just like any other form of social media, there are dozens of ways to build community through participation and sharing. The only limit is your own creativity and willingness to spend the time to participate yourself and cultivate the relationship.

My boards in Pinterest are here. Follow me if you like gorgeous images of architecture and art!

Small Business Branding 101 – Lesson 2 What do you do?

When we look deeper into Small Business Branding and Marketing, we find more and more questions to be answered that helps us craft our Small Business Marketing Plan.  The next question we consider is What Do You Do?  

We know What Business You Are In now, so what exactly do you do in that business? Today we will take a page from well-known sales guru BrianTracy and take an in-depth look at what you do. 

When a new contact asks “what do you do?” your answer needs to be framed around the benefit to the customer, because the reality of people is that they are mostly interested in what the benefit is to them. If you can provide them with a benefit they desire, suddenly ears perk up and you have an interested prospect. 

The wrong way to answer the question:

New Contact: “What do you do?”

You: “I’m a Chiropractor.”

Yawn. There’s no engagement here. There is no way for you to tell automatically whether this person you are talking to is really interested in your product/service. 

The right way to answer the question:

New Contact: “What do you do?”

You: “I help people achieve better health and increased physical mobility.”

Here is where you determine whether you have a new contact who is a potential customer. The potential customer will notice a benefit to him/her in the form of better health and physical mobility. If they are interested in those benefits, you are most likely going to get a positive response asking for more information.

New Contact: “Really? How do you do that?” 

Now you get to detail your service/product offerings to an engaged prospect who has demonstrated an interest in the benefits you can provide. 

As we keep reminding you, people don’t buy products, they buy solutions to problems.

Sell the solutions. 

Small Business Branding 101 – Lesson 1

After struggling a great deal with direction for where we want to go and what we want to accomplish with this blog, I think where I really want to dig in is two areas: conversations and branding. Logic suggests that it would be best to start with branding, since it’s hard to have a conversation about your business if you don’t really know what business you’re in – right?

So, today we will kick off with branding for small business and we are going to start from the beginning, because if your small business has been around for a while, it probably needs a brand refresh for the digital age. There are enormous advantages out there to small businesses that re-align their brand to who they really are and how customers/clients can expect to be treated, and those advantages shine their brightest when it comes to marketing your brand through social media.

Before we can market, we need to know what product/service we are selling. So, where do we start?

What Business are You in?

What do you do? What benefit do your customers receive from your company?

I read an article recently that quoted Theodore Levitt (Marketing Myopia) which discussed that in the 20th century, railroads lost out to air travel because they thought they were in the railroad business when instead they were actually in the transportation business of moving people and goods from point A to point B.  Frankly, you see this all time. You can see it happening right now in the movie industry, which is myopically focusing on the idea that they are in the DVD distribution industry when they are actually in the entertainment industry. When your company focuses on the wrong parts of what you do, customers notice because attention to the real business slacks.

Knowing what business you are in is the #1 element to branding. What do you really do for your customers?

• Get their car running again? 
• Prepare meals for them? 
• Provide them with tools?

What you ultimately do is solve a problem for them. Your customer needs lunch; your food service business provides it for them. A guy needs a new tire and you solve his transportation problem and get him back on the road. When you realize what business you are really in, it opens up all kinds of opportunities for solving your customers’ problems.

What problem does your business solve?

What benefits does your business provide to the customer?

One of our clients in the beauty industry recently realized that he isn’t in the Beauty Industry, he’s in the business of making people feel better about themselves. When you change up your direction like that, now you’ve got something to market. Market the benefit to the customer – because that’s really what the customer is interested in.

The benefit you provide is the business you are in.