Tools of the Trade: LinkedIn

In most of my speaking and writing about building relationships for success, I focus on helping people acquire a relationship mindset through understanding and practicing four fundamental principles.

1. You can’t get there alone.

2. Business relationships are personal relationships, which are built upon developing real

3. Intimacy through sharing passions and struggles and

4. Giving without keeping score.

 
I focus on those principles and the relationship mindset because that’s where most of us can make the greatest improvements, and because you must acquire that mindset before you can realize the full potential of any magical networking tactic – or tool.

Today, however, I’ll discuss three basic and important tactics which have been made easier through an interesting online tool called LinkedIn.

1. START WITH YOUR OWN BACK YARD

To people just starting to put some effort into building relationships for their success, one of my first pieces of advice is to look into your own back yard. It’s a tragedy that we often forget about all the strong relationships we already have – from past schools, jobs, clubs, even our families and hometowns.

One of the coolest things about LinkedIn is how easy it is to reconnect with past colleagues. After you input your past employers’ names in your professional profile, every time you log in to LinkedIn’s main page you’ll be automatically notified of current and past colleagues who are LinkedIn members. So after I punched in “Deloitte Consulting,” I was shocked. Of course there were many people I didn’t know, but it was definitely worth scanning the list of names to find the several people I wanted to reconnect with. It's been years and years since I have seen one particular HBS classmate of mine who's now (I just discovered) a partner at Deloitte. I totally lost touch with him, but now I can't wait to see him this Friday night for dinner. I’ve even rediscovered past employees of mine. It’s pleasantly surprising how many opportunities have unfolded just through my own back yard.

 

2. BECOME A (PUBLIC) EXPERT

One of the best ways to build your personal brand is to become an expert. In this crazy world, to be a “generalist” is to be average. You really need to develop deep expertise in something to get noticed. And just as important as developing your expertise is making yourself easy to find for those who need your expertise.

In your professional profile on LinkedIn, you can indicate your “Primary industry of expertise” and even specialties within your industries of expertise. And since LinkedIn members can perform searches by those fields, they can basically access a resume database anytime they need advice or, better yet, an expert opinion to support a story. 

Yup, journalists are now using LinkedIn as a channel to source expert comments and opinions for their stories. Click here to see how.   

Of course, as I recommended in Never Eat Alone, it’s wise to befriend at least a few journalists because they are natural super-connectors. Journalists are powerful (the right exposure can make a company or turn a nobody into a somebody), needy (they’re always looking for a story), and relatively unknown (few have achieved enough celebrity to make them inaccessible). Moreover, it’s also wise to use tools like LinkedIn to make it easy for journalists you don’t know to find you, because as good as it is to become an expert, it’s better to be a public one.

 

3. BE A CONFERENCE COMMANDO

If you’ve heard my talk on how to become a Conference Commando, you’ll remember the 7 P’s: Prior Proper Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance. It’s so valuable to set up meetings with other conference attendees before you even arrive at a conference. And given the outrageous fees that conferences charge these days, I’d say it’s mandatory! It seems that LinkedIn also understands the importance of the 7 P’s.

I just learned that conferences which use LinkedIn’s group service enable their attendees to see who else is going and view each other’s professional profiles. And even if attendees have no other friends in common, they can directly contact each other because they’re in the same conference group. No gatekeepers! What’s better than that?

(Click here for a demo of LinkedIn's group service. Takes a bit to download, but it's worth it if you want to see firsthand how exactly the service works.) 

Personally, I haven’t yet attended a conference that used LinkedIn’s group features, but I sure want to soon. And as a member of Yale's board of alumni governors, I’ll be sure to suggest it for any future Yale conferences. Anything to make the "Old Blue" network stronger is good from my perspective.

There you go. Three basic things you should already be doing to network in real life that you can now enhance with the help of the online tool LinkedIn. Check it out, and if you like it, use it.