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 But the use of LinkedIn is shifting so fast, what I have written may already be out of date.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

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

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.

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

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

And it sounds as if this reconnection might well not have happened without LinkedIn.

Ford