marketing & social media strategy consultant and trainer focused primarily on helping public sector organizations achieve their objectives more efficiently and effectively
international keynote speaker on the topics of strategic marketing, new media, modern communications, social media engagement and government 2.0
Public Sector Marketing 2.0 - Mike Kujawski's blog on government, association and non-profit marketing in a Web 2.0 world
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This weekend I decided to set myself an initial output objective surrounding my new “Learn in 60 seconds” video series. It is as follows: “Produce one new “Learn in 60 seconds” video every Monday morning for the next 2 months”.
Seeing as how today is Monday, here is my second video, Lesson #2: “How to find free HR insights about a company based on LinkedIn profiles”:
I recently switched smartphones (now representing 50% of the worldwide cell phone market) from RIM‘s Blackberry Storm to Apple’s iPhone 3GS. Why did I do it, and more importantly why should you care?
The first reason is simple. On November 5th, 2009 Telus released the iPhone, finally taking the Canadian network monopoly away from Rogers (i.e. not my provider of choice to put it lightly).
Whenever I give a workshop relating to social media, I often ask the following question when talking about social networks: “How many of you are currently on LinkedIn?”
In most cases about 60% of the people in the room put up their hand. I then ask those same people: ” How many of you have ever actually received any value from being on LinkedIn”?
One hand usually stays up.
What people tend to forget is that in most cases you’re not going to “receive” value simply upon signing up. This applies to all social media tools/applications. You need to be willing to put in some work (i.e. “give”) in order to receive. The truth is, the majority of people couldn’t be bothered and thus never end up using their accounts.
It is for those people that I want to provide the following simple use for LinkedIn, which involves very little time investment. It’s often overlooked and yet it’s right there front and centre. Basically, by following these steps you can find and connect with almost any person, from any industry in any city. The bigger your network, the better it works (concept of 3 degrees of separation).
This sets into motion an automatic message that will be sent to the connector from your immediate network as well as the end person that you are trying to reach. The ball is thus in their court and you will receive an answer 99.9% of the time. Just remember to limit your first degree connections to people that you have either personally met, done business with, or at least chatted via phone.
Why does this work?
Simple: When people see an introduction from a familiar contact, they feel obliged to respond. Don’t forget, 50 million users wouldn’t have signed up if this stuff didn’t work.
Have a look at my “Quick Tip” presentation below , which explains this exercise in visual form.
