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LinkedIn – Why I Want To Talk Before I Link To You

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (5)

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

LinkedIn is the first online social networking site that I joined and it is still my favorite. I have met a lot of great people on LinkedIn and worked on some interesting (and paying) projects because of the relationships that started on LinkedIn.

Today I thought I would share some thoughts on how I approach making new connections on LinkedIn. One quick note – I’m not trying to say that my way is the “right way”, this is just that I use. It has evolved over time and is effective for me – your mileage may vary.

I want to talk to people before I connect with them on LinkedIn. I guess I’ve always assumed that if you are on LinkedIn, you have something you would like to accomplish by being there. I’d like to know how I can help you accomplish that goal.

This has pretty much been my “policy” ever since I joined LinkedIn back in March of 2004. It used to be that in the beginning, I was an early adopter, so I was the one inviting my contacts to LinkedIn (and explaining what it was). As LinkedIn has become more popular, I have received more invitations from people I don’t know.

When someone I’ve never met invites me to connect on LinkedIn, I send them a note that looks like this:

Thank you for the invitation to connect. I make an effort to know my LinkedIn connections so I can do a better job referring them, would you be open to having a brief phone call sometime in the next 2 weeks to chat?

Afternoons typically work best, but you can see my schedule and set up a time here – https://tungle.me/billbrelsford

If you send me your number, I’ll be happy to call you.

Bill Brelsford
913.962.9261

To be clear, I like meeting “strangers” on LinkedIn. I am always open to meeting new people, I just want to know 1) how I can help them and 2) how they may be able to help other people in my network.

I want to have a conversation for a number of reasons. First, I’m not particularly good at remembering names, companies, or titles without any context. I am very good at remembering conversations and stories. If I can’t remember you, I can’t refer you or refer people to you.

On a similar note, if we have a conversation, I put notes about that conversation into my CRM system. After I think “I talked to someone about 6 months ago who I think may be able to help you” I go to my CRM to find the name. I then go to LinkedIn to see if anything has changed in that persons professional life before I make an introduction.

Again, if I don’t know much about you, I can’t help you. Not only can I not help you, I’m doing a a disservice to the people that I do know. How many times have you asked someone for an introduction to one of their LinkedIn connections only to hear “Oh, I don’t really know that person, we’re just connected on LinkedIn.”? If I have to give that answer, I feel like not only have I wasted that person’s time, but I have probably discouraged them from asking me for help again – when I would be able to help them.

Of course, I haven’t had the opportunity to do business or personally experience the service of everyone that I am connected to in LinkedIn. That’s not any different from the connections I have in “real life” – people I know from chambers of commerce and other networking groups.

But if I talk to someone, I try to learn about what they do and how they really help their customers. I get a sense of what type of a person they are – would I want to work with them? These are things I would share with you if you asked me if I knew someone or not – whether I had met them online or offline.

And if I invite you to meet and you don’t respond, or you miss our appointment and don’t follow up, well I’ve still learned something, haven’t I?

That’s what works for me when it comes to managing LinkedIn connection requests – what works for you?

P.S. – Feel free to connect with me – www.linkedin.com/in/billbrelsford

Comments (5)

Categories : Marketing, social media marketing

Tags : LinkedIn, social media

Buffer – A Great Tool For Sharing Content on Twitter

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Tuesday, October 11th, 2011

“Be Awesome on Twitter” say the folks at Buffer. Buffer helps you be awesome on Twitter by giving you a dead simple way to collect the things you want to tweet about and then share them with your followers throughout the day.

I’ve been using buffer (bufferapp.com) for just over a week now and I love it. I typically catch up on my reading early in the morning. Before buffer, if I found things I wanted to share I had two choices; 1) tweet them immediately or 2) cut and paste a link into a tool like Hootsuite and then schedule it to go out. While this doesn’t seem like a lot of work, it really interrupts the flow of reading.

With buffer, when I find something I want to share via Twitter, I simply click on a toolbar icon on my browser, or select the “Send to Buffer” feature in Google Reader. When I do, I get a dialog box like the one below:

From here, I can edit the description, add hashtags, etc. When I choose “Add to Buffer”, it goes into my queue where it will be posted on at on of the preset times in my schedule. Here is a screen shot of the dialog box that allows you to set your buffering pattern:

You can even have a different pattern for different days (i.e. weekend vs weekday) by using the “New Buffering pattern” button.

Another feature I really like is the ability to rearrange the items in your buffer using a simple drag and drop interface. Because I organize my Google Reader feeds by topic, I may have several tweets in a row in my buffer about a similar topic. Using the drag and drop feature, I can spread these out throughout the day.

In addition to using Buffer in your browser and Google Reader, you can even add items to your buffer via email. It looks like the folks at Buffer are also working on adding the ability to update Facebook as well.

Use this link to sign up for Buffer and we will both get some extra space in our account.

Comments (0)

Categories : social media marketing

Tags : social media marketing, Tools, twitter

Monitoring Social Media With NutshellMail

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Tuesday, August 30th, 2011

As social media continues to mature, new tools continue to be developed that aim to help us manage our various social accounts and the plethora of updates and messages we receive from them. One such tool that doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention in NutshellMail from Constant Contact.

I started using NutshellMail shortly after Constant Contact bought the company, which I believe was in mid 2010. For a while I used it sparingly because I was using RSS and other tools. Now that Twitter no longer provides RSS feeds for saved search results, I’ve been using NutShellMail more.

Basically, NutshellMail delivers your social media updates to you via email – so if you spend most of your day in your email inbox, I recommend taking a look at this tool.

NutshellMail is a free service. Currently, you can use NutshellMail to connect to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube, Yelp, Foursquare, and Citysearch.

For each service, you have a good deal of control over the type of information you want to receive and the maximum number of items you want to receive in an email. Here is a screen shot showing some of the configuration options for Twitter:

You also have a good deal of control of how often you receive an email from NutshellMail. Here is a screen shot of the screen where you can set your delivery options:

Another benefit is that since NutShellMail pulls results from the searches you save in Twitter, you can take advantage of Twitters special search criteria like “near” and “within” for finding messages within certain radius of your zipcode – something you can’t currently do in popular tools like HootSuite and TweetDeck.

Once you receive an email from NutshellMail, you will see buttons below each status update like the ones below:

that you can use to join or continue a conversation.

NutshellMail can be a great tool to help you stay on top of your social media conversations and for monitoring your brand.

Comments (0)

Categories : social media marketing

Tags : social media, social media for professional service firms

Social Media Strategies for Professionals and Their Firms

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (3)

Thursday, April 28th, 2011

Social Media Strategies for Professionals and Their Firms: The Guide to Establishing Credibility and Accelerating Relationships

This book review is way over due. I actually pre-ordered it, so I’m a little embarrassed that I’m just posting about it now. But I’m going to blame it on Michelle (the author, Michelle Golden) for writing such a damn good book. It seems like every time I pick it up to write a review, I get caught up in re-reading it and run out of time. Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

This is easily the best book about social media that I’ve read. I haven’t read them all, but I’ve read a lot of them. I promise this is a book you will dog ear and refer to over and over again.

Before I talk about what’s in the book, I want to talk about why I think Michelle was able to write such a good book about social media. It’s because she get’s it. Sure, she’s a good writer, obviously brilliant, and did great research. But she also “walks the talk” using social media to build and nurture relationships.

How do I know this? I often refer to Michelle as “my favorite person that I’ve never met”. We’ve never met in person, but I feel like I know her. We connected primarily through social media (we may have exchanged emails early on), having brief conversations over time. I would recommend her without hesitation to anyone in my professional network. My point in sharing all of this is that if you follow the recommendations in Michelle’s book, you too can build strong relationships with potential customers and referral partners whom you may never have met without social media.

Ok, enough of my gushing <g>, let’s take a look at the book. It is divided into four main parts – What, Why, How, and Tips.

The first section explains “What” firms need to know about social media and includes a chapter on establishing firm policies and guidelines. Personally, I’m not a big fan of creating policies for social media (I view them as regulating talking), but I accept the reality that firms want policies. If you must set policies, the process outlined in chapter 2 is the most reasonable approach I’ve seen. I love how it starts with an assessment of your firm’s risk tolerance and builds from there.

The second section dives into the “Why” of social media. Actually, section two is just a wonderful section about marketing professional services in general. In my opinion, this is exactly how it should be. I’ve been arguing for some time that “social media marketing” isn’t a thing; rather, social media is a set of tools for communicating. Marketing messages are just one type of message we can convey using social media. Of course, the book makes this point far more eloquently than I do.

The last chapter of section 2 relates some case studies demonstrating real life examples of professionals effectively using social media to grow their practices.

Section 3 covers the “How” of social media. How to set up and the most common social media tools – LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. The chapters in this section will walk you step by step through each tool and give you some helpful tips about how to use the tools once you get them up and running.

The last section of the book contains tips for helping you get the most out of social media in your practice. Tips include how to be effective online, how to write for the web, social media etiquette, and other best practices.

Whether you are a social media newbie or veteran, you will find helpful, practical advice in this book that will help you build relationships and grow your business.

Go buy the book now.

Comments (3)

Categories : Books, Marketing, social media marketing

Tags : professional services marketing, social media

Outsourcing Social Media Doesn’t Have To Be All or Nothing

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

Leyl Master Black has an interesting article on Mashable.com that asks Should You Outsource Your Social Media Efforts? Leyl poses four questions to consider when deciding whether or not to outsource your social media activities:

Can effective social media drive your business growth?
How well is your social media working today?
Could outsourcing free up your time to focus on business operations?
How do you measure ROI?

In addition to these questions, I would add one more – Which parts of my social media activities should I outsource.

Most articles that I read about outsourcing social media address it as if it is an all or nothing proposition. I don’t know if this is because of how social media service providers package their offerings or the mindset of their buyers (probably a little of both). There are many activities that go into using social media as a marketing tactic. Some of those activities are better suited to outsourcing than others.

Here is a scenario that I see played out everyday. Business owners who want to learn more about social media will often spend their own time figuring out how tools work and setting up their profiles. It takes time and effort to get set up and get to the point where they can start making connections, having conversations, and building relationships. However, when they get to this point they are often mentally fatigued (it takes energy to learn this stuff) and\or they have to get caught up on all the tasks they put on hold while they where “learning social media”, so they look to outsource their social media activities.

Viewing this scenario with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, it seems backwards. It would have made more sense to outsource the mechanical work (i.e. setting up profiles) and used their time and attention for the higher value activity of engaging in conversations.

A while back I wrote a post about the building blocks of a marketing tactic where I discussed this idea of looking at the different knowledge and skills needed to implement a marketing tactic. I like to use this as a framework for deciding which activities as best outsourced and which should be performed in-house.

If you are deciding whether or not to outsource your social media, remember you also have the option to outsource some but not all of your activities.

Comments (0)

Categories : Marketing, social media marketing

Tags : social media marketing

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