Tagged with 'LinkedIn'

Some days it seems like an invite to a particular network spreads like wildfire. First you get a smattering of invites for LinkedIn, and then Spock invites spread, and then, out of nowhere, Naymz appears in your inbox, telling you to worry about your personal brand management. It’s enough to give anyone social media overload.

Now that we are nearing the end of 2008, has the BusinessWeek projection citing Facebook Fatigue as one of “Ten Likely Events in 2008,” in fact come true? A year previously, ZDnet’s blogger Steve O’Hear asked on his blog, The Social Web, Could 2007 be the year of social network fatigue? I don’t suppose we’re really nearing a death march or depletion of social media sign-ins. Then again, the announcement of the shutting down of Pownce, one of the first microblogging sites, seems like a sign of the beginning of the end (or the start of consolidation).

Aggregation to the extreme

There’s also a trend of aggregation – collecting and gathering your content contributions whether it’s a video, picture, link, or blog entry. Check out Profilactic offering the ability to update 190 social sites at once. One hundred ninety. Their tagline is “preventing an online identity crisis since 2006″ which I like better than the name. Come on, was ProfileAddict.com taken? In the How to Manage Your Social Profiles and Create Virtual Business Cards entry on Mashable.com, one of the commenters gives a three step method for managing all your online profiles, starting with Profilactic to create all the accounts, then update those services supported by Ping.fm and Posterous.com, and finally use FriendFeed.com, Lifestream.fm or Yahoo Pipes to aggregate all the data. Whew.

Networking strategically

Let’s find some strategies for the time you spend and the activities you do with social media.

In a TechSoup article, Eight Secrets of Effective Online Networking, Beth Kanter gives great guidelines for determining when and where to create that social profile and what to do with that profile once you’ve created it. Her guidelines for online networking are related to those you’d use in real-life networking. To summarize her secrets:

• Invest time in your network.
• For an organization, try an individual profile before setting up a group.
• Establish a routine, and realize that crossover on different sites means you can target just a few selectively.
• Recruit others to help with your efforts.
• Keep it personal and network selectively, avoiding random reach-outs or connections that aren’t meaningful.
• Lastly, her eighth tip is full of good technology ideas for making the most of your time online such as using RSS feeds to fill in content on multiple sources, and mobile technology timesavers.

Protecting your time investment

So if you invest all this time into your social profile and online brand, how can you protect your investment? Is there an open social profile that is portable to different sites? Google rolled out the OpenSocial API over a year ago, partnering with MySpace. Speculators said the move was to take on the Facebook walled garden. From where I sit though, your best protective measure is to export regularly. As a “lazy” user I want my photos and blog entries safe in the cloud but also would love to pick up and leave when necessary.

What do you think? How are you protecting your investment of your time online?

Should you put a link to LinkedIn on a biography page of a law firm website? That was the question posed recently on the Legal Marketing Association (LMA) listserv by Gail Lamarche Director of Marketing at Henderson, Franklin, Starnes & Holt.

I opined that, for professional services firms such as this law firm, the attorney biography page is the best thing we have as a “money page” on the website. Therefore, driving visitors away from the money page was, strategically, a bad idea. Moreover, it seemed if there were really content on LinkedIn that was valuable to the site visitor, then that information should be on the bio page. And if it wasn’t there, the bio page was somehow deficient.

Smug I was in the righteousness of my response. But I got an earful of dissent from LMA listserv contributors. The arguments are worthy of consideration:

Jayne Navarre, LawGravity, presented these points persuasively:

• Branding – The LinkeIn link is like a hip badge of Web 2.0 awareness
• Connections – LinkedIn provides a transparent view to an attorney’s connections, arguably a value to any prospective client
• Authoritative – Access to the LinkedIn Questions & Answers provides additional proof of the attorney’s authority

Heather Milligan, Director of Marketing at Barger Wolen emphasized that LinkedIn:

• Human – helps make the attorney “dynamic, human, liked”( in case we have any residual concerns about their humanity) and helps the attorney pass the “known, liked & trusted” test of prospective clients.
• Dimensional – And in rebuttal to my “bio is deficient” comment, Heather notes that to maintain a certain appearance consistent with other bios and the overall website, “the firm bio is controlled for content, style, etc….(while) LinkedIn is the perfect place where an attorney can bring together their outside interests and professional careers, making them more human and likeable.
• Connections – Perhaps the most valuable feature, LinkedIn is fundamentally a connecting tool that might serendipitously reveal a third party connection to the site visitor which presents all kinds of opportunity for real introduction.

It’s not a slam dunk either way. The answer to Gail’s original question seems to be, “It depends.” The circumstances dictate the strategy. I’ll give it a nod of possibility and something worth trying.  Yes, I know, “first I was against it, now I’m for it.” Thanks to the enlightenment of my marketing peers.

But I’ll have this last (never!) word.  Think doubly hard about sending your site visitor from the most valuable conversion page of  your site to an information wasteland. Don’t do it unless the LinkedIn profile to which you are sending visitors:

• provides a rich set of business connections
• demonstrates some effort to contribute authoritatively to the online Q&A discourse
• otherwise expands on the website attorney bio page
• (if possible) provides a path back

And whatever you do, measure the results. Professionals keep score.

Now you can link away to my LinkedIn profile.