Among the one-liners of business success, there’s one that I’ve noticed has been critical and it has to do with connections.
I’m going to focus on LinkedIn, but first here’s the one-liner:
“It’s not who you know, but who knows you that determines your success”
This is why I highly recommend using the power of social media to build a network.
In the 1990’s as a young advertising sales guy in Detroit, I was tasked with making cold calls to find businesses to advertise. It wasn’t fun and I actually quit. Since I was not from the area, I had only a few connections and none were business owners. Armed with a phone book and a car, well that was about it. There was no social media in the 1990’s. MySpace launched in 2003 and Facebook after that.
But did you know that LinkedIn also launched way back then, in the early 2000’s?
LinkedIn used to be thought of as a place to find a job. You’d fill out your employment history and it sort of functioned as an online CV or resume.
It has become much more than that.
LinkedIn promotes itself as a social network for professionals for professional connecting which is pretty much true. I also recall the debates over who to connect with.
“Should I only Link to those people I know?”
Well, that is a good start and some of you haven’t even done that.
Please do that first. Then it’s time to really grow your network.
Anyone that you are connected to has connections and while LinkedIn will tell you whom you share connections with, it will also show you something called 2nd degree connections.
These 2nd degree connections are where the real potential value is, I’ve discovered.
It’s the Kevin Bacon Effect. The Kevin Bacon Effect was a fun gun to play to see who was connected to whom and how many people you had to go thru to connect to Kevin. Look it up if you care.
Before I was preparing this article, I had no idea how many 1st degree connections I had. Just glancing at my profile, says 500+ which seems like a lot. But when I dug deeper, I saw I have over 3,000 first degree connections!
Here’s the fun part, and I’m going to scale it down using a low number of connections.
100.
If I had just 100 connections, and each of my 100 connections had 100 connections, that means in theory I have 10,000 second degree connections.
Move that number up to 400 and do the math and that adds up to 160,000 connections.
Of course there are a lot of variables but according to LinkedIn, the average number of 1st degree connections is between 500 and 999 for active LinkedIn Profile users. When I looked at my co-workers, I saw most having less than 500 which means they are missing out.
What are they missing out on? And what are you missing if you aren’t active on LinkedIn?
When I am doing research on a company or a potential contact, LinkedIn is one of the top 5 searches I do. My role with my radio station includes looking for potential candidates to hire for positions that may open up. I also do some research on companies that might be a good fit as an advertising partner. Besides the 1st degree connections, I can also reach out to 2nd degree connections. And I do this free.
Yes, I don’t pay a dime for my LinkedIn account, and I usually don’t advise people to get a paid account either. If you instead build your contacts and connections, you will grow it over time and it will become a valuable resource.
Finally here’s the added benefit that has been happening a lot, and that is people reaching out to me. Every single week. Some just want to connect for networking but others are seeking me out because they want to consider buying what I have to sell them.
Would you like people contacting you like that? What are you waiting for? Get Linked!
This is stuff that I originally learned before I joined Cirrus ABS last year.
Content, Content Content
Promote, Promote, Promote
Now there really are a whole bunch of other things you need to consider when you are wanting a successful website, and I’d be glad to talk to you about them. Just contact me.
But for now, I’m going to share something from my own experience.
I launched this website 3 months ago after about 3 months of planning and preparation.
I redesigned the layout last week.
Before I had this website, I had 5 active blogs.
The most popular, Collective Wisdom has nearly 6,000 articles on it that I posted from 2004 thru October 3, 2011.
It still gets between 300 and 500 visits a week.
Why? All the content about advertising, sales and marketing that I posted over the years.
I like these types of videos and appreciate those that assemble them as that is not one of my skill sets nor is it something I want to learn.
I’ve used these videos in presentations and seminars that I’ve given to open folks eyes to the magnitude of impact and influence that Social Media has on our lives.
This video was just released last month, so the stats are pretty current.
I also learned that I am above average in the number of Social Media connections I have compared to the stats shared.
But remember it’s not a race or a contest, but it’s more of figuring out what works best for you and your situation.
When we think of Social Media there are several Social Media Channels and Platforms that come to mind including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn to name some of the most popular.
Each Channel has a different type of user and participant and those demographics are evolving.
Facebook for example, was started as a college networking community and has grown into a network filled with all ages and from nearly every country around the globe.
LinkedIn began as a “Professional Business Networking” community but in the past couple of years has bubbled over into the non-professional world.
The simple concept behind LinkedIn was a referral network, common to the old boys’ networking principle of getting introduced to people that your friends know via that mutual friend.
And in order to maintain that type of protected network, you had to know someone’s email address when you reached out to connect or LinkedIn wouldn’t let you connect unless you were referred by a common connection.
LinkedIn also became a place to create an electronic resume and even get recommendations from those whom you have had a professional relationship with.
Over the years that I have worked in the advertising and marketing business, I accumulated a lot of email addresses from contacts.
This private email list grew to over 1000 including friends and family, business folks, and also a third category, the “Unknowns”.
Unknowns, are those whom I have never met but somehow I had their email.
How did I get their email?
Best practices in email says to use the “Blind Carbon Copy” (BCC) feature when sending an email to a group of people that may not want their email addresses made public.
Yet not everyone follows this best practice and at least once or twice a year, I get an email that was also sent to dozens of others. Sometimes I would “Reply to all” with a thank you note to the sender of the email. By doing this, all of these emails become my email contacts and are added to my email address book.
Let’s take a moment and think about the consequences of this.
If I were a spammer looking to harvest email addresses this is one way to do it. True Spammers have more sophisticated software programs however.
In my case, I wanted to grow my list of connections for legitimate business purposes. I left one company after 8 years and wanted to inform every one of my new position and how to reach me.
LinkedIn now has a feature that will help you connect with people that you know if you have their email address. This is a semi-automated feature, where you give them temporary access to your email address and password; they pull out your list of email contacts and compare them to their LinkedIn database.
Your email contacts are then divided into 2 classifications, those who already have LinkedIn accounts, and those who are not yet on LinkedIn based on the email address you have for that person.
LinkedIn will ask you if you want to connect to those already on LinkedIn and you can pick and choose who you invite, or invite all. I decided to invite all.
In the second step, LinkedIn asks if you want to invite the rest of your email contacts to join LinkedIn and again you can select individuals or invite all.
Again, I decided to invite all.
A few years ago when I did this and people were less familiar with LinkedIn, the response from those who did not already know me was minimal. This time it was significantly different.
This time my number of LinkedIn Connections grew from around 600 to nearly 1000. Out of all of the invitations LinkedIn sent, only one person asked “How do I know you?” which was a common question that people would ask a few years ago.
What has changed? Are we more willing to connect with people that we don’t know? Or perhaps we have connected with some of these new LinkedIn connections via the other Social Media Channels such as Facebook or LinkedIn.
For whatever reason, the ability to make this world a bit smaller by connecting with people who are open to being connected on LinkedIn will only lead to fostering greater relationships both business and personal if you are willing to reach out and connect.
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