MKLINK Linked Webinar Wednesday 17^th November 2010 – Notes/Transcript

Today I'll be offering a brief insight into one of the most successful websites on the web today that I think most people are not exploring enough. And when I say that, I'm guilty of this too. My intended audience here today is for UK businesses of varying sizes.

I'll be looking at why you should have a presence in linked in, and basic etiquette.   Then I'll be briefly be looking at some of the easiest ways to leverage the site and looking at some the tools, techniques and apps that you might wants to use to generate leads and sales for your business as well as sourcing key suppliers from other people's businesses.

However, before I go on, I think it's only right and fair and proper that I introduce myself properly so that you know who I am and where I come from. If you have listened to my seminars before then you can go to sleep for the next 30 seconds…

Some Stuff about Mike Knight & MKLINK

1997 Worked for an ISP in Bristol.

1998 MKLINK Incorporated.

2004 Paull Newsome Joined the Team

2005 Bought ClickTracks Web Analytics

2008 Offered  Web Marketing Training

2010 + Offer ‘Retention' Solutions.

1000 UK Business Clients Helped.

£40 Million+ Online Revenue.

5key members : Mike Knight, Jim Knight, Gill Harvey, Paul Stradling,  Paull Newsome

Overview of LinkedIn

So, to start off with then, why should you even consider linkedIn in the first place? Well, to answer that, let's quickly look at what LinkedIn is trying to achieve.

Under the all embracing banner of social-networking website, Linkedin is primarily a website where professionals can network with each-other. It was setup in 2002 by Reid Hoffman from Paypal. For the last few years it's been doubling its membership and now boasts around 80 million professional users.

To give you an idea of the Value of that database, On July 28, 2010, Tiger Global Management LLC purchased a 1% stake in the company at a valuation of approximately $2 billion.

A new member is coming on board every second.

For most people, it's known for being associated as the place to find professionals and looking for – and sourcing jobs … and finding out more about specific companies.

Now the keyword I've mentioned here a couple of times is professional. It's literally that, a network of professionals – which is why I rather feel it's been undervalued as a marketing resource by most people.

Before I go any further, I must stress the difference in culture between LinkedIn and other Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Because it's aimed at professionals, it has a much more ‘serious' edge to it. Stuff that you'd be happy to post on Facebook or Twitter – like what you were eating for lunch or pictures of your holiday, really isn't the kind of thing that LinkedIn is all about. It has a much more mature and some would say serious nature to it.

On Twitter, you might post stuff about Prince William getting engaged or who you think will win the X-Factor. On Facebook you might post pics of your holidays or the office party. On Linkedin – if you are doing any posting – it'll be a feed to your blog about changes in VAT rates or newly introduced  European law- or how to install configure certain kinds of software. Not everyone does that and of course some people are more relaxed about it but be under no illusion – Linked in has a much different etiquette to other sites.

For example, you can have your account removed if LinkedIn believe you've been spamming people. I'm not even talking about emailing hundreds of them, I'm simply saying that if a few people flag up that you've contacted them and that they don't know who you are, you can have your account removed – it's that serious.

And when you've spent ages building up a profile, getting loads of connections and recommendations, having your account taken away is no laughing matter.

On a side note, there has been debate on who actually owns a particular LinkedIn account. Many people – that work for larger organisations (especially recruitment companies) encourage their staff to use LinkedIn to source candidates. If that member of staff then leaves the recruitment company – who actually owns all that intellectual property??  i.e. the linkedIn account. Anyway, that's a questions for the lawyers – and ironically there are several on the webinar today.

Anyway, moving on, now that I've made it quite clear that you can't simply go wading in and contacting all and sundry in LinkedIn and emailing them, you need to know how to build up your connections and how to leverage them.

I'm not going to be explaining how to setup a linked in accounthere today because that's outside the scope of the webinar. I'm assuming here that you are either a professional in practice or a business owner and that either you already have an account or that you will soon have one.

If you get really stuck, then we can give you one-to-one training about this – simply get in touch and I'll organise a call about this.

LinkedIn – Why use it?
Hopefully then, given the fact that LinkedIn is full of professionals and business owners, you will hopefully see straight away the value in being able to leverage that network.

Either from the point of view of finding people to sell to or to joint venture with or to secure suppliers. And of course you can use it for jobs – either for yourself or looking for candidates for your business. You can even use it to find out more information about businesses – whether they're suppliers, clients or even competitors.

So, to start of with then, I'm going to assume you have an account – a free one at least and that you are looking to make connections.

My suggestions here is to have an open mind and don't be scared about appearing on LinkedIn – you can always change your profile settings later to increase your visibility and contact-ability if you want. Initially at least, my suggestion is that you get stuck in and get a bunch of connections and have a good look around the site. You can even disconnect from people – and they won't know – at least not until they try and contact you anyway…

The more information you put on your profile about you, what jobs you've had, which companies you've worked for and which colleges or university you went to, the more suggestions that LinkedIn will give for you in terms of people that you might know and that you might want to connect with.

Like I said just now, Linked in has a zero spam policy and when you click on people's profiles, it's important that you only request connections with people that know you because you've been to school with them, you've worked with them or you've been an associate in some way or other.

If you start contacting people who don't know you yet then they might flag up the request as spam or an “I Don't Know” this person – and several of these and you can be blacklisted so be careful.

Once you've got a few connections of course, you can start to see who's connected to your connections and then – a bit like Facebook – you can see who you know in common. Without going into all the maths of it, LinkedIn works on associations with people by ‘degrees'. You may have heard of the 6 degrees of separation theory – in that everyone is only seven steps away from knowing everyone else in the world.  It's also known as the Kevin Bacon theory for some reason in that anyone in the world will k now someone, who knows someone, who knows someone else and so on – that knows Kevin Bacon. I guess he must be pretty fed up of all this by now!

You'll see this yourself in LinkedIn. You've got your 1^st degree contacts – which are people that you are connected to. You might have half a dozen or 20 or 200 or whatever – that kind of order of magnitude. Those people then know other people – called your second degree contacts – and this might be in the order of 40 or 400 or 4,000. Your third degree contacts will be in the orders of tens of thousands and so far and so forth.

Suffice to say, you can spend a long time looking through your direct contacts and seeing who they're linked to  get a good source of people that might be useful to connect with that you may already know.

The next way to find a bunch of people, after LinkedIn's initial recommendations and then subsequent trolling through those contacts and contacts of contacts, will be the search facility. You can search by various categories such as people, jobs companies and you can refine your searches by industry type, location, company size – you name it. It's one of those things that if you really haven't used it you need to practice it for yourself.

What this means is that you can type in old companies or colleagues or even keywords about the industry you're in to see who comes up and whether you know them or if they have any connections that you have in common.

In a nutshell then, before we even look at the techniques for getting contacts from people you don't know, you can instantly find dozens or even hundreds of people that you have already come into contact with from school onwards.

Whilst you can't email people directly (at least not in theory with a free account), you can ask LinkedIn to import your address book to get in contact. I didn't even bother to do that, I simply emailed a few people I know from a business club I'm in and asked anyone who has a linkedIn account to get in touch. I didn't do this with my main mailing list on the basis that I didn't want umpteen thousand people getting in touch with me all at once!

The more I play with linkedIn, the more contacts I'll be getting and conversely the more guarded I'll be about receiving email – but that's another story for another day.

To get up and running just make sure that you can be found – especially for the keywords that you want to be associated with.

On that note, I'll make a quick note about making sure that you are easy to find.

You'll want to have your profile setup so that the main headline – for which you get 120 characters, say what you do – using whichever search key phrases that you want to be found for – and ideally a main benefit as well.

Add a picture – it definitely inceases the amount of people that will contact you – even if you only have a face for radio like me. Just remember that it's not Facebook – use a respectful picture and not one of you wearing a batman costume.

And basically puts loads of stuff on your bio. As much useful and relevent stuff about your employment or companies you've worked for. Even your interests will have a bearing in how many people get in touch. As an aside, you can put more than one educational institution on as well – again increasing your historical contact reach.

You'll have the option of displaying what reasons you want people to get in touch for. My suggestion is that until you've got more contacts than you need – just leave everything ticked so you're available. Like I Said, you can always untick all this stuff and become more private later one.

Right, now that I've quickly covered how you can get direct connections, let's look at how to get more connections – indirectly - and the benefits of doing that.

Firstly – and forgetting trying to find people for a moment, you should have a play with
LinkedIn Answers. Even if you couldn't care less about getting more business via linked in and have no need to look for jobs or candidates, LinkedIn Answers is a resource that you should checkout and become familiar with. If you've never used it then it was worth your while coming on this webinar just for that.

There are several MILLION answers already posted. And more being posted all the time – by experts. They're all indexable  by Google by the way, meaning that they can be a great source of web traffic and inbound links from a high page ranking site.

Let me give you an example. The other day I was contacted by an old client that sells a load of his products to Ireland. He was concerned that his clients were saying that they couldn't always find his stuff listed on Google.ie so he asked me if he thought it was worth getting another website. Now I know a lot about SEO but I don't know everything about everything and I wanted to get my facts right.

To be frank, I wasn't 100% sure about the answer and I so I used LinkedIn answers and basically posted my question. Very quickly I got a couple of really great answers – from outside the UK – which really helped me out. Now, the moral here is that not only did it confirm some of the stuff I thought but wasn't sure about but it meant that I got talking to some really great contacts.

Let's say you're in the same boat. Let's say that you sell insurance. Do you know everything there is to know about insurance, in every industry? I doubt it. The point here is that there is a network of 80 million educated people out there that can potentially help you – even if you might think at first glance that they're competitors.

The benefits here are huge but a lot of people really don't see them and they wouldn't want to post a question either because they don't know they can or they don't think of it or because they're scared that they'll look stupid.

Like I said, it doesn't matter if your expertise is insurance or law or engineering or installing software, no one knows everything and having a network of people you can call upon is just huge. But think about all the benefits of asking a good question.
1) You get your profile raised. Asking questions is GOOD – not Bad!
2) You can get great answers from a number of different people – all round the world if you choose. (Or you can limit the answers to just people locally or from a certain industry)
3) You get to have contact with people that you can connect to and hopefully network with, complimenting your business skills and experience
4) You get to choose who you think answered the question the best and then that gets displayed – which helps them out and encourages them to help you again.
5) Your client – and everyone that has clients or customers – ultimately gets better service!

All from asking a question! Of course if you ask a question like “Who's going to win Strictly Come Dancing” – then you're in the wrong place.

It's probably quickly worth mentioning that you should always thank people for answering your questions. And of course, the converse of all this is true.

The people that answered me know that value of the concept of “Pay-Forward”. They're actively monitoring questions in the categories that they have an interest in. Look at the benefits from their point of view :

1)    They get their profile raised and are seen as being helpful and pro-active. A great endorsement for the whole world to see.

2)    If their answers are good, they get an accolade of best answer – which goes on their profile and enough of those will earn them the accolade of expert

3)    They also get to communicate with – and connect with potential clients and joint venture partners

4)    They maintain an active pulse on what people are asking about – which is ultimately all marketing is really – finding out what people want and then giving it to them.

The big caveat that I'd mention here is that you should really try and find out first – by doing a bit of searching whether a question the same as your has already been asked.

Just as importantly – if not more importantly – if you see a question – or are alerted to one because you've setup a system to alert you when a question in your interested field is asked, try and make sure that it hasn't already been answered – or if it has – that your answer is different or building on top of an existing answer – otherwise it can look a bit ‘rude'.

So you'll see that these people – in this case marketing professionals have had some great exposure and I talked with them about some potential business. The law of reciprocity kicks in here. It's one of the reasons I give so many free webinars and free tips – I know that the more I give the more I get – simple as that.

Anyway, asking questions on LinkedIn and giving answers can also be done inside the wrapper of a dedicated group. There's literally THOUSANDS of groups within LinkedIn and there's almost certainly a group that you can join that will be home to people that share common interests, professions or industries that you can tap into.

As always, I'm against the clock here today so I'm going to make  a few quick suggestions here and you'll have to pick the bones out of what you think will work for you.

To start off with, I'm going to suggest you search under groups for the town or city where you live or work. Depending on how big the place is, this should bring up some interesting results. In fact I'm a member of Gloucestershire Independent Network – a young networking club that was setup just over a year ago.

After 11 years of being in business last year, I'd never been to a networking club and I have to confess that I didn't think that it was for me. Bear in mind that I'm talking about a physical club that meets at a hotel once a week. My clients are all over the UK and some are abroad so what would a local business club do for me.

Well, I was invited along and lo-and-behold I met some people that have been great in more ways than one. Not only have I made some good friends but I can call upon a whole bunch of people that always give me great service because – apart from being genuinely nice and helpful people – wouldn't dream of doing anything that might get them a bad reputation.

But OK - you might ask – being purely mercenary – where's the business? Well, what I hadn't counted on is that not only are a number of the members of that club now clients of mine, but each and everyone of them knows a whole bunch of people that they've been putting me in contact with as well. This all goes back to that Kevin Bacon Theory.

Getting back to the discussion in hand what this means for you is this :
Firstly, you can use LinkedIn to find local clubs, national clubs or even international clubs and within those clubs there will be people and contact of those people that will want your services in one way or another and from one degree to another.

You can join clubs that relate to you or you can join clubs that will relate to your clients. Think about that last one for a moment! If you want to catch fish then you need to go where the fish are. Again most people won't bother to do this but the ones that do are the ones that don't keep complaining that they never get any clients or referrals!

Secondly – you can use those same clubs as a really great place to see what's being discussed and share in those discussions – and ask questions which – for the reasons we've already looked at is a great way to connect with people.

As an aside – if you see the word LION – it means LinkedIn Open networker. In a nutshell – that person is much more open to being contacted and networking with people either inside his own clique or the world at large. They tend to be the ones that do most of the useful stuff.

So – moving on quickly – my suggestion is that you search on whichever interests that you think will ultimately be useful, interesting or profitable to you – either locally, nationally or internationally and then apply to join. Join several and get the feel for it.

They don't all automatically let you join – very often they want to make sure they're happy with your profile first. Like I keep saying – it's a professional network and anything that can introduce spam or upset members is self-policed quite well.

If you want – you can start your own group – and be in charge of it. Depending on the size – you might want a group just for your own company or niche. We've got one for the Gloucestershire Independent Network and when I've finished with it and tied it in with the website, it'll be a neat way to keep up to date with stuff without constantly emailing everyone. Even just posting the details of the Christmas meal menu can save people time – so it's definitely something worth considering!

If you really need to develop a group with more bells and whistles on it and increased functionality, I'd suggest linking to another site called ning.com where you can start you own entire social network – entirely free if you don't want the premier version.

In fact on that note – there's thousands of separate groups on ning.com as well which you can checkout and see what's going on as well – but again that a story for another day.

Just finishing the point about groups, it's my suggestion that you dominate a certain space  i.e. niche and be the expert on it – even if there is a group on something, you can always find something you can be the expert in. Groups enable the building of subgroups by the way – check it out.

Of course all your hard work asking questions, posting answers and adding to the group discussions can also be added to your website of course so you have a rich source of content. LinkedIN Answers are indexable by Google by the way so avoid duplicate content but it does means than the whole world – not just LinkedIn people can see you when you ask and answer questions.

I'll leave it there about groups – there's loads of stuff you can setup like RSS feeds and alerts but you'll have to play around with it – or get in touch. Just remember that if you do decide to setup your own group, make sure you put searchable key phrases in the description of the group and until it has critical mass and you have help, you'll need to encourage people to discuss topics and comment on discussions as well as occasionally blocking a non-relevent member.

Now that we've looked at connecting with people, asking questions and leveraging groups, I'd quickly like to rattle through some other opportunities that many people don't even think about.

Firstly, you can use LinkedIn as a fantastic research tool for people and businesses, as well as for jobs and staff. Information is of course a double edged sword but seeing as your competitors are more than likely to be using LinkedIn, you might as well make have a system to check up on them occasionally.

You might also want to check up on staff members as well and see if any of them are getting itchy feet – just look at their activity for clues!

More importantly (and being more positive about this) you can use it to research potential clients. Just because LinkedIn doesn't like you contacting people you don't know in an unsolicited manner doesn't mean that you can't contact them outside LinkedIn.

Doh! I have to apologise but I completely forgot to mention the' introduction' facility by the way. This is where you can ask your 1^st degree contacts to introduce you to second degree contacts and get them to connect to you – it's a self explanatory process but I should have mentioned it earlier.

Anyway, getting back to the point. Depending on the value of the relationship of a potential client – you might want to contact them in a more traditional way. By knowing more about them, you can personalise your communication in advance so that it's completely tailored to them.

If you're trying to win the business of a large firm of lawyers for example, you can send a letter to the exact contact by name that really stands out and addresses issues that will be affecting them with laser precision.

Although I didn't get the image from Linkedin (although I could have) I once sent a mug with a photo of the recipient on photo-shopped into a library image of someone reading a newspaper that showed them winning  an award for exceptional marketing insight for using MKLINK!

The whole thing cost me half an hour of my time and cost less than a tenner including postage. Given I'd never met the person before and they ran the marketing department of a high street building society you'll understand that I thought it was worth it as they became a client…

The moral here is that sometimes, personalised and targetted marketing is worth a bit of extra effort.

LinkedIn have also got some pretty useful apps by the way – for free – that you can use, like embedding your blog feed into your profile page or Amazon's Recommended Reading app – enabling people to see what books you rate.

There's even a Twitter ‘Buzz' App so you can see which keywords are hot at the moment. If you're in PR or know anything about reputation management – you'll know how useful this can be.

There's an app that lets you upload a PowerPoint presentation to your linked in profile. I've not got round to doing this yet but the opportunity here is that you can have a multimedia presentation about what you have to offer and get it looked at by the movers and shakers. Likewise an App for uploading YouTube Clips. All these things give you the ability to stand out if you use them.

One thing that I believe is a must is to make sure that you have a few recommendations. You can ask people within LinkedIn for them but I think personally it's quicker and easier to send a round robin to people that you've worked with or done business with to endorse you. It's certainly a good time to know who your friends are!

For obvious reasons, I'm much more likely to want to work with someone that has lots of connections and recommendations than someone that doesn't.

While it's not strictly on the same subject, you can list your company within linked in as well, under whichever category you choose. If nothing else, it's a link for Google. Same for the section on service providers.

However, DON'T make the mistake of trying to advertise a personal profile as a business – it's against LinkedIn's terms and conditions – it is a site for networking professionals really, not a business directory.

Free or Paid?
Everything I've talked about here you can do with the free option. You can pay for LinkedIn service as well if you want. There's Business, Business plus and Executive ranging from $24.95 per month to $49.95 per month to #99.95 per month.

Should you bother? Well that's up to you. I don't personally but then that doesn't mean you shouldn't. The main benefits of paying are that you get  what's known as an InMail account – which is like a LinkedIn version of email, which means that you can directly contact other people – irrespective of your relationship with them.

It also means that you're supposed to get premier service and you get more results on the searches that you run.

In my view, if you're using the filters properly, you shouldn't have your search results truncated anyway and as far as emailing people is concerned, I'd rather use my regular email address and follow the no-contacting people you don't know rule and just get in touch with people that answer questions, are members of groups or are friends of friends.

If you are especially curious, having a paid option means that you can discover (with more information) who has been looking at your profile.  You can also do this with the free account – with less info. Again, I think a lot of this functionality is just aimed at people that are either looking for jobs or looking for staff and whilst that's really powerful –it's not what I wanted to talk about today.

Once again on a side note, if you wanted to work in “stealth-mode” for want of a better expression, you can change your settings so that it doesn't show other Linkedin member that you viewed their profile.

Just go to the link at the top right hand side, just above the search box and click on settings. As I mentioned earlier, you can adjust what emails and alerts you receive from various groups and what-not here as well.

Personally, I've left myself visible but that might change in the future – I haven't had a reason to hide myself away just yet.

One last thing I'd like to briefly mention is advertising directly on LinkedIn.

In my view it's very similar in style and setup to advertising on Facebook in that you construct your ads in the same way and you set a certain budget for the day and elect to spend a certain amount per click.

I'm advertising on LinkedIn myself and whilst the cost of clicks aren't that cheap, the quality of the traffic seems to be really good. That's not surprising when you consider that the people I'm advertising to are quite targeted. And I know that because not only are the people in Linkedin typically more my target market anyway but I can narrow down by location, age, job title and function and company size.

Personally – for this reason – for B2B Advertising I think it's better than Facebook.

Also, given that you have to login to Linkedin, I'm assuming that each viewer would only click on your advert once as LinkedIn know's who they are and so ClickFraud from competitors should be vastly less than it would be on Google for example. That's only conjecture by the way – I don't know for sure.

Well, I hope I've given you a few things to think about today. As always I can only scratch the surface really and there's loads of other stuff I could have talked about but didn't want to overcomplicate this introductory webinar.

Recap
Ok then, so we've looked at why LinkedIn is a great resource for finding suppliers, staff and potential clients.

We've seen that you can tap into a vast wealth of knowledge and make some contacts that will enrich your business life and also be able to pass business to you. We've seen that you can ask questions, join groups and add an increasing array of apps to your profile as well as uploading multimedia presentations as well if you wish.

You also know that you can search for people and also be seen, by either networking getting introduced, getting proactive in groups or even simply paying to advertise to a list that you can elect to be as specific and targeted as you like and if you want you can join the premier service and get enhanced features and email people directly.

If you would like help with your internet marketing either with LinkedIn or Facebook or twitter or Youtube or Search Engine Optimization or Conversion or Emailing marketing or indeed any one of dozens of different topics that you might want help with, then please go to www.mklink.com/getstarted
and request a free 20 minute consultation. My colleague Gill will be in touch to book a phone appointment and I'll do my best to make some suggestions – for free – that'll help, with no obligation for anything else.

Of course, if you do want to come on one of our training courses or ask us to do some work for you, that'd be  great and that's entirely up to you.

So please go to www.mklink.com/getstarted and register for your free 20 minute consultation today and I hope to speak with you soon.

Thanks for listening and all the best for now.

Mike Knight.