Linkedin - Share your thoughts on brand building

[Whitey]

How can building a brand better utilise LinkedIn ?

Sure, straight targeted advertising - but are there complimentary things that seem to work well for grabbing attention that sticks. Anyone prepared to share some encouragement and ideas? What's the ABC of LinkedIn marketing? Thoughts?

[SevenCubed]

A real quick (not negative) observation from the outside in:

LinkedIn is primarily a congregating place for business people. If you are a business to business service you may be able to benefit from it. If you are a business to consumer service you'll be singing to the choir.

But even if you are singing to the choir, they too are consumers albeit (mostly) intelligent ones. They are also influential within their own circles.

IMHO you'd just better be a very good vocalist or the crowd will see right through your motives much quicker than the minions at facebook, Twitter or Pinterest.

And, if you join, you'll be perceived as fresh meat to be poked and prodded for commodity value by other choir members.

[SevenCubed]

Ah another afterthought. LinkedIn's value is as a networking platform. If you can provide a knowledge commodity you'll gain trust from other members which is more likely to lead to referrals.

Just find a healthy balance of 70/30. Give 70% of your participation to community building and 30% for self-promotion. That nice spoon full of sugar will help the medicine to be more easily swallowed. Same is true for Twitter.

[Whitey]

Well I finally got invited to a LinkedIn breakfast down here in Sydney. Fascinating observing the different people and understanding the various motivations for using LinkedIn.

Here's a few lines from notes I took:

BtoB

-Establish reputation [ personal ; business ]
-Sell yourself [ professional photo ]
-Sell your business / what you do in 3 paragraphs max
-Have a good product by association - then the sell is easy
-Solicit leads accurately. 77% of folks surveyed found cold calling [ includes emailing ] ineffective
-Monitor your salesforce's pipeline, measure activity, use scrapers to bring in data
-Have a unique message / selling proposition
-Use a warm connect to reach your target effectively ie a referral
-Get sales groups to get reviews , PR/Press Release and publish
-TAG into CRM's

Above all, take a thoughtful approach, use warm intro's , be relevant.

Can folks see this working for them at some level in their work functionality and the marketing of their business?

My reading was that attendee's were at varying levels of sophistication on how to drive through the value LinkedIn provides.

[engine]

Thanks.

Let's take that first one:

-Establish reputation [ personal ; business ]

Did they explain how to do it on LinkedIn?

[Whitey]

-Establish reputation [ personal ; business ]

Did they explain how to do it on LinkedIn?

Sort of :

Personal :
> Professional image [ mentioned above ]
> Transform the stiff old style of CV into a more communicative assembly of facts.
> Communicate your personal values
> Communicate what you offer others

Support with
> Initially support with close persons
> Branch out to 2nd degree leads via referrals
> Have a following
> Keep that following informed via updates, quotes, group involvement

Business :
> This particular presentation touched on " persons" ability to sell products/services , and if the presentation was solid then the reps could close deals pretty fast.

Folks need to adapt the networking opportunities to suit their objectives.


There's a lot to take in, on something seemingly so simple. So as food for thought I've provided the Slideshare link of the original presentation:
[slideshare.net...]

[anallawalla]

Personal branding is easily achieved by personal participation in relevant groups. The problem is that for a given topic there could be thousands of groups, each started by someone who wants a personal database of people to pitch to, albeit subtly. The groups have a lot of people who are not likely to be your customers, so persistent visibility will pay off.

The other way to remind your contacts that you exist is to post updates i.e. links to outstanding third-party articles and not your own content.

[martinibuster]

Questions
What are the measurable goals that are part of a "brand building" LinkedIn campaign?

Can any of these LinkedIn activities be measured, tallied and expressed on a spreadsheet as a monthly list of objectives reached?

[BoostSoftware]

Depending on your business, you could set goals the following way for a Linkedin campaign:

You could measure the power of the links to your account by the links that the linking account has. The more network it is attached to, the better it is for your business.

As for the quality of the links, you would want people related to your business linked to your account, rather than just random links. Over time you could create a metric based on how many contacts are built up through a contact (linking because of a link) or sales because of a contact (buying after accessing from your linkedin account).

[martinibuster]

Good observations, BoostSoftware. Something to think about.

[Stickywebz]

I agree with what is said above. Linked-In is for business individuals so marketing related content, offers, and other things business owners want should be how you obtain a strong following.

[henry0]

Pretty much same "User's manual" as BNI
(Business Network International)