Five Things You Didn’t Know About LinkedIn

As readers of this blog will confirm, I’m a huge fan of LinkedIn for selling and consulting. I wanted to share a few additional features many casual users of LinkedIn probably are not aware of:

LinkedIn has a store, where you can buy branded merchandise. Up for sale include mugs, shirts, luggage tags and even reusable grocery shopping bags. For me, I’ve got my eye on the lapel pin for in-person networking.

The LinkedIn blog is frequently updated with all the new and cool enhancements on the network. Writers use the content here for their own blog posts. And for those of you who like to comment on blog posts, the structure here publishes your profile URL, which is a unique twist, and may help you with optimization.

A fairly new feature is the ability to reorder the elements on your profile. Via simple drag and drop, you can move the pieces of your profile around to best highlight your skills, expertise or experiences and stand out from the crowd.

I launched my first DirectAds campaign earlier this week, and the results seem promising. The targeting is robust, but the $10/day minimum is pretty high when compared to Google and Facebook ($1/day or so). More to come on the results of my campaign.

LinkedIn also makes it very easy for you to promote your profile with badges. When logged in to your account, the badges are automatically updated to include your profile URL.

I hope you find these features useful to your networking goals on Linked In, and I welcome your comments, and connection requests.

Photo credit by ilco.

Idea: Using Social for Local?

I was in Knoxville this week for a presentation to the local Association of Legal Administrators. I couldn’t help to think I’d see Bill Dance, TV fishing personality, walking around the University of Tennessee campus (just a few blocks away) with his signature hat. No such luck.

During the presentation, a number of questions arose about pay-per-click, how websites are optimized and what works best for client development. One of the things I recommended was to create local business profiles, on places like Google Local, Superpages, etc.

Unfortunately, we ran out of time, and didn’t get to my series of slides on social marketing. I had an idea I wanted to share: could you use social for local? Since all major search engines included social media elements for just about any given search, I thought there might be an angle lawyers and other professional service providers could take. I came up with the following rule and super simple plan:

Rule
Never alter your Name, Address or Phone number (NAP) from platform to platform. It’s hard enough to rank for popular phrases, why complicate things?

Plan

• Create local profiles on Google Local, Yahoo Local and Best of the Web. Be consistent with your NAP!
• Once you sign up on Twitter, occasionally tweet your NAP. And while you’re at it, make sure your Name, Address and Phone Number are listed clearly on all social media profile pages.
• Add your social media profiles as links on your local profiles. Couldn’t hurt.

What do you think? This three step plan is easy to implement, and should pay dividends down the road.

• Linda Glasgow, of Lewis King — thank you for the opportunity to speak!
• Marsha Wilson, the executive director of the Knoxville Bar Association
• Marc Upchurch, of Kramer Rayson, LLP
• David Kristy, an attorney with Butler, Vines & Babb, PLLC
• Randall Miller, Executive Director of Woolf, McClane
• Pam McMahan of Wimberly Lawson

Photo credit by robhoward.

Social Marketing for Lawyers: Do’s and Don’ts

It’s hard to ignore the presence and power of social marketing for business. And you don’t have to look far to see reports of sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter registering usage of billions of minutes per day. Even a large percentage of lawyers use these sites as well. A 2009 Martindale-Hubbell “Networks for Counsel Survey” had 89% of attorneys between the ages of 25-35 and 66% of those aged 46 or older belonging to one or more social networks. But social marketing for lawyers creates some unique challenges.

These do’s and don’ts establish good starting points for your online activities:

Do’s

• Consider social marketing as another tool in your client development kit. Along with your website, social marketing is an easy to use, intuitive way to build trust and create potential referrals.
• Quickly remove or “untag” photo’s posted on Facebook that might cause a few eyebrows to wrinkle.
• Use social networking sites to build contacts, answer questions and exchange information. LinkedIn and Martindale-Hubbell Connected are the two obvious choices here.
• Let common sense prevail over your 1st Amendment rights before posting or publishing.
• Use social networking, ethically, for information in litigation. Most users have little or no privacy settings set up, so it’s wide open. Happy hunting to all family & divorce lawyers.

Don’ts

• Don’t avoid it because you think it’s just another online fad. Social media and social marketing are here to stay. Just ask Facebook’s 400-million+ plus members.
• Before posting, think “do I want this information out there, forever?” Don’t put anything on any of your profiles you wouldn’t want potential clients, judges or opposing counsel to see.
• Reconsider before you use social marketing or social networking sites to complain about judges, juries or venues. Just because you can call a jurist “clueless” doesn’t mean you have to publish it for the world to see. This scenario actually happened to a lawyer in Illinois! See this article from the NY Times for more examples.
• And never, ever pretext or employ deceptive “friending” strategies to gain information on a defendant or client.

Social marketing and networking is a fun, exciting way to practice client development. Join, contribute and be part of the conversation!

Image credit by kentoh.

How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile

With more than 60 million members, LinkedIn has become the best resource for developing your professional network. It’s a great place to meet, post and find jobs, answer questions and join groups. Once you’ve created a basic profile, here are some tips to get the most out of LinkedIn.

First, and without question, your profile should be 100% complete. School, work, past work and other relevant information assists others searching for contacts, and helps build your own network. Next, add a profile photo. Your picture triggers recognition and makes networkers feel like they are connecting to a real person. Then optimize your summary section with relevant keywords. Use Google’s Keyword Tool or Wordtracker for your research. This particular section of your profile is often indexed fully by major search engines.

Potential SEO Benefits?
Take a look at this screenshot, which is a portion of my public LinkedIn profile. There is speculation (and some confirmation) the items in this section helps with organic search engine optimization.

• Add your website, link to your blog and link to your company. Make sure you further “edit” each by giving it a name other than the defaults provided by LinkedIn. As you can see from my list, I’m hyperlinking phrases such as “Marketing Blog” and “Consulting Services”.
• If you’re on Twitter, be sure to add your Twitter profile, and connect the accounts together. Under your profile, click on Edit and look for your Twitter settings. You could also try this link when logged in to LinkedIn.
• Always choose a real name or variation on your name over the default format LinkedIn provides for you. This certainly feeds your organic name optimization and enhances your online reputation. As you can see, my profile link is my full name “brianjfarrell”.

Connecting with Twitter
This image below shows my Twitter settings — my account name (@findtheclient), my privacy settings, and the most important section, whether or not all or select Tweets should show on my profile. When I first set this up, I sent all Tweets to LinkedIn. Since I’m on Twitter often, this amounted to sometimes a dozen or more updates in a single day. When friends said they couldn’t keep up with me, I changed this to show only Tweets with the “#in” hashtag. Much better results, and I can leave up new blog posts or polls for a longer period of time.

Build Your Connections
Once you’ve done the above, it’s time to build your network. Start with people you know, such as co-workers, clients and colleagues. Also look for connections by company name, under the “Companies” tab. Once you’ve built up this initial base of connections, ask for and make recommendations. But before you do this, read as many as you can. You’ll quickly see what makes up a good (or bad) recommendation. It also helps to personalize your request for a recommendation rather then sending out the canned form letter provided by LinkedIn.

Finally, updated your status often, since it appears on LinkedIn as well as in network updates to your connections. Updates should be considered a professional status, not what you’re eating for lunch. And if you haven’t done so, let’s connect on LinkedIn!

To Blog, Or Not To Blog

The phrase “to be, or not to be” is one of the most famous quotations in literature, and comes from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c. 1600), act three, scene one. In today’s market, the question I hear most when giving inbound marketing seminars is “should I blog?”. In my opinion, professional services firms that fail to capitalize on modern social marketing, like blogging, may appear behind the times when compared to their competitors who do. So my answer is always emphatically yes.

But, before writing one word, think about the focus of your blog. Ultimately, you’d like your blog to build word of mouth marketing and your social following, so carefully tune your content toward the people, and work, you’d like to do. For example, I set up this blog to provide marketing information and advice to professional service providers (attorneys, lawyers, doctors, and the like).

So Who’s Reading This Stuff?
Although I’m targeting professionals, it’s likely their support staff, spouse or business advisors are the ones reading this blog. So my content is mostly professional, with a lighter tone. The material comes from my real life experiences and appointments, so often, I’m answering a question or addressing something that came up in a real client setting. The blog is my ongoing seminar to clients, prospective clients and potential referral partners.

Benefits of Blogging
Your blog is a very effective way to raise visibility, both online and offline. It also strengthens your online reputation, and positions you as an accessible, helpful resource on your specific topic or niche. If you write valuable posts, and share within your social network, you’ll likely attract new fans, new comments and new leads.

From a technical perspective, blogs beat websites because they have a built in feed. Every time you post a piece of content, your blog sends notice to search engines alerting them to the new material (unlike your traditional website, which often has to wait for the search engines to come back, and hopefully find your new page). The more you post, the more active and attractive your blog becomes to search engines. I should mention that quality matters more than quantity — a blog full of relevant information is much better than hundreds of random posts.

The best part about blogging is potential for engagement with your audience. Real success comes from creating conversations with your readers. Not only do I read every comment (and also thank publicly and privately for their contributions), I often send requests to connect on LinkedIn and when appropriate, meet in real life.

Social marketing, and blogging in general, isn’t about the technology you use (I prefer and use WordPress, but just about any solution will do). It’s about engaging people, clients and prospects – and building relationships with them.

Photo credit from the Chandos portrait, as found on Wikipedia.