Liking LinkedIn?
Does LinkedIn offer any value when it comes to selling professional services? In his blog Contrarian Consulting Million Dollar Consulting author Alan Weiss writes “This is a mild diversion with limited utility for serious entrepreneurs and consultants in a world where time is a non-renewable resource. Worse, it has created a cultish behavior among many of its adherents who see the leaf and not the tree or the forest.”
As you can imagine, it’s been a controversial post, generating lots of comments.
I responded to Alan that the biggest problem with social networks is that trust, necessary for a good relationship, doesn’t travel well over the Ethernet. A number of my clients have found LinkedIn quite helpful by overcoming this limitation under certain conditions.
Many have found signing people up a good way to rekindle old relationships. By agreeing to link the contact implies openness to a networking relationship. Here trust was established before any linkage through LinkedIn.
Some, who have local markets, use LinkedIn to identify people they want to know and then seek introductions through a mutual contact identified by the system. These people then meet the new contact for breakfast or lunch, broken bread being a superior medium for developing trust.
These are but two examples. In all cases, those who get a lot out of LinkedIn put a lot into it. No surprise there.
I do believe that “there is a pony in there somewhere,” if you know the old joke. If enough people work at it, some will find ways to make use of what is a phenomenal data base of relationships. But it’s not for everyone.
Alan didn’t agree.
How about you, has LinkedIn helped you network? Do you put much time or effort into it?
October 3rd, 2008 at 9:28 am
I put very little time into LinkedIn beyond accepting invitations, but it has paid off for me. Earlier this year I linked with an old colleague and read on her profile page that she had a new job. This ultimately led to my getting a client of mine into a high-profile article in a major technology vendor’s glossy magazine. It never would have happened without that initial LinkedIn connection.
The trust, as you say, had already been established through our years of working together. But LinkedIn let us reconnect after nearly a decade apart.
October 3rd, 2008 at 10:34 am
Andrea:
And it sounds as if this reconnection might well not have happened without LinkedIn.
Ford
October 4th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
David Chief has an interesting post on using LinkedIn for lead generation on HubSpot (http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4262/default.aspx#comment24840)
October 4th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
Dear Ford,
I like Alan’s style I have to admit. He is true to his claim to be a “contrarian” consultant and if nothing else, his posts often generate a lot of vociferous debate.
However, I do disagree with the man in relation to LinkedIn.
I think the fundamental misunderstanding is that LinkedIn is a marketing tool. I contend that it is not - it is a networking tool.
I use it often and intensively.
I run two groups there which have acted as the basis for the email newsletters that I have started to publish recently.
The forums are useful to get answers from some really bright minds on a whole range of subjects for my blog and personal growth.
The recommendations in my profile are now a part of my online and off line marketing materials, and I also include a link to my LinkedIn profile on my emails as well as in proposals that I submit.
And when I want to meet somebody and speak to them I merely search for them, send them an inmail or invite them to connect. (After an introductory email of course)
This is how I got to link to Alan Weiss, Dan Pink, Dan Roam, Nancy Duarte and a range of other consulting / speaking heavyweights. (All of whom have actually been very helpful contacts and nice people to boot)
Below is a link to a post of mine on consultants using LinkedIn.
http://www.consultingpulse.com/2008/08/linkedin-for-consultants.html
Thanks for the post,
Kind regards,
Daryl Mather
October 5th, 2008 at 11:37 am
Daryl:
Thank you for the thoughtful comment and the link to your article, which was also helpful. I enjoy Alan’s style, too, and find debates a bit spicier than repetitive complements and agreement.
I have a comment that leads to a question about what you say. While marketing techniques sometimes put you in front of a potential client ready to buy now (I will calls this “immediate access”), more often they help you meet people whom you have to get to know for a while before they buy from you or refer you to someone who does (I will call this “relationship-based access”). For example, one rainmaker I interviewed makes cold calls, about which he says, “Cold calls are just a way to meet people; they have to be in my network for a while before they hire me.”
I understand that you don’t believe that LinkedIn provides you immediate access to buyers, but does it initiate relationship-based access for you? If so, I would argue that it does help generate leads for you as a part of a larger process.
Techniques that provide immediate access are great while they last, but, in my experience, they eventually stop producing. It is relationship-based access which endures.
I look forward to your response.
Regards,
Ford Harding
October 15th, 2008 at 11:51 pm
Ford, you may recall we first met when I was researching an article for the SMPS Marketer on social networking sites. It led to this article: http://www.construction-report.com/admin/links_files/SMPS%20Marketer%20Feb%202008%20Tools.pdf
The irony is the sales rep we hired through Linkedin.com flamed out after about eight months — he then went on to produce an incredibly well developed blog — which he he hasn’t updated in two months! Meanwhile, the relationships built with you, SMPS Marketer Randy Pollock, and others continue to develop. Can I trace any direct business from this stuff? No (with one significant and unexpected exception), but I know it all makes sense and is worth persuing and our company’s sales/business development team is learning how to observe the same, longer-range, relationship developing approach to business.
October 16th, 2008 at 8:41 am
Mark:
LinkedIn and its usage are evovling rapidly. Without giving anything away that you shouldn’t, can you tell us anything about the exception?
Ford
October 16th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
It is hard to answer the question without discussing very specific matters, still in process, but undoubtedly the blog and e-marketing bridged the gap and helped create trust/communication for a truly significant sale.
October 22nd, 2008 at 9:53 pm
I use LinkedIn for three things:
1. To keep track of old friends and acquaintances: since they update their e-mail and contact info it complements an address book I maintain.
2. To write testimonials for folks that I have worked with or who I’ve met who have been helpful. I tend to be critical of folks shortcomings and this is an effort to stretch myself in the other direction and practice seeing the good in people.
3. When I meet someone or read about someone I may meet (e.g. a speaker at a conference) I will search for them on LinkedIn and find them about 80% of the time. It’s a nice complement to Google.
I don’t accept invites from folks I don’t know.
I don’t use the system to make connection requests and will forward a request if asked but will normally send a “Joe meet Jim, Jim meet Joe” e-mail instead.
I have been on the system for several years and in earlier years people would ask me to forward through me to someone distant. I tried it for myself and don’t forward other requests if it’s not from someone I know to someone I know (as the destination).
I haven’t stopped any of the other networking/rainmaking activities I was doing before LinkedIn and look at it more as way to keep in touch with people I know. It has helped me to reconnect with people I went to college with or worked with more than a decade ago.
We had one client who, against our advice a year ago, attempted to send a lot of connection requests to folks that were “three away” (the target was not known to someone he knew). He ended up burning a lot of social capital and never get any business out of it. He was an engineer and looked at it as a replacement for normal networking approaches–phone calls, e-mail, events, etc..
Hope this helps. I think Alan may have accepted a lot of connection requests from strangers which led to some of the other problems he was complaining about. You can edit your connection list and delete a connection to someone who you realize you shouldn’t have accepted a connection from. I don’t do it often, but I have done it a few times when a casual acquaintance started to make inappropriate requests.
April 11th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Hi Ford,
Apologies for commenting on a really old blog post - I don’t know if you or anyone will actually get to see this!
The reason for my post is that I had a bit of an epiphany with Linkedin recently.
For years I have used Linkedin as most people do. The contacts on there were ex-colleagues and friends plus people who I don’t get to meet or network with regularly. I essentially use it as a way of keeping in touch when I can’t do so face to face.
I hadn’t really put any of my current, regular face-to-face contacts in Linkedin. Why should I? I thought. I’m in regular contact anyway.
But when preparing an article on getting more client referrals, a real insight hit me.
One of the critical pieces of advice I was building in to the article was to be really specific in what you ask for when askign for referrals. Tightly specificying the type of person or firm you are looking for a referral to really helps the referrer. And, of course, if you ask for a referral to specific named individuals it makes it even easier for the referrer.
Of course, the problem with that is you rarely know just who you client, ex client or business contact really knows. So asking for specific individuals or companies is often a stab in the dark frequently resulting in a miss.
Then it struck me. If the person you were asking for referrals from was on Linkedin you could look through their contact list and see who you were interested in meeting.
It’s simple really. Without Linkedin we’d all be far too embarrassed to ask to borrow our referrer’s contact book and to page through it looking for useful contacts. It would be really valuable to do so, but it would breach all sorts of etiquette. But with Linkedin we can do it without embarassing anyone.
After finding the people we want to be referred to, we can do the asking face-to-face - that way increasing our chances of getting a referral.
It’s this combination of online research - plus real-world referral asking that really works.
Previously I’d either been thinking all real-world, or all online (getting referred via Linkedin itself or sending “inmails”). But combining to two gives the best of both worlds.
Ian
April 11th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Ian;
This works in reverse, too, starting with the person you want to meet to see if you have contacts in common who could introduce you. LinkedIn is more a massive directory than it is anything social. I will have more on this in an upcoming post. But the use of LinkedIn is shifting so fast, what I have written may already be out of date.
Good to hear from you.
Ford Harding