maximum success with linkedin by dan sherman

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Chapter 1: Social Media Is Not Your Father’s Marketing

Before we jump right into LinkedIn, it’s important to lay down a few ground rules about marketing yourself in social media. It will help you approach LinkedIn the right way and get the best results. I want to help you avoid being “that guy” . . . the person who is shunned by people at networking events because he shows up and immediately starts tossing out his business cards like he’s dealing Texas Hold ’em in a Vegas card room. You need to approach mar-keting on social media with some fi nesse and restraint.

Let’s start at the beginning: I’ve been in marketing well over 20 years, working in Silicon Valley, as I mentioned, and also for large corporations like Charles Schwab. I’ve been in the advertis ing game since I graduated from Tufts University in the Boston suburbs with a degree in English and got a job at an advertising agency as a copywriter.

The changes that social media has brought to the world of adver-tising and marketing have been nothing short of earth-shat tering. No longer are marketers held hostage to TV, radio, and newspapers for presenting their wares to the world. With the push of a button and click of the mouse, anyone can send a market ing message via video, post, tweet, update, blog entry, and more around the world in an instant.

In short, marketing has been revolutionized. What does this have to do with you? Well, you are marketing a product called You, Inc.

Maximum Success with LinkedIn

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You will notice on LinkedIn that the site revolves primar ily around people, not companies (there is a section for building a company profi le, which we’ll examine later). As you market You, Inc. on social media sites like LinkedIn, you need to pay heed to the new rules, because marketing today is a brave new world.

We used to have traditional marketing, or interruption mar-keting, where marketers would break into your Steelers game or American Idol episode and bark at you with some ridiculous commer-cial. (This still happens, but technology has invented so many ways, like TiVo, to avoid it.) Now we have social media marketing, which is in essence a conversation. Specifi cally on LinkedIn, so cial media marketing is a dialogue you have with the people you want to infl u-ence to, among other things:

• Hire you• Work for you• Invest in your company• Be your mentor• Partner with you

So you need to think soft sell, not hard sell. You can equate mar-keting on social media sites like LinkedIn to a backyard barbecue. Now, you would never walk up to a stranger at a barbecue and say, “Hi, can I sell you some insurance?” You get the point. Social media is all about engaging people in conversations, get ting them inter-ested in you fi rst, and then seeing if there is some common ground for doing business as a next step.

Honesty Is King

Essentially, visiting a social media portal is just like attending a party where you let people get to know you and then invite them to learn more about you by vis iting your site or blog, where you provide more information on how you can help them. Marketing on social media sites like LinkedIn means being real, authentic, and honest. People buy from those they know, like, and trust, and in social media you

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have the opportunity to let people see how much you know and let them make up their own minds that you’re someone they need to do business with.

The old saying (attributed to many people, including Zig Ziglar, the granddaddy of sales training) is “people don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.” With social media marketing, you show people that you care about them by being inter-ested in them, asking questions, and offering help. Then you move on to creating a business relationship.

Fortunately, LinkedIn has extensive ways for you to create situ-ations where people can get to know, like, and trust you. It’s a great place to become a valuable resource to people by ex pressing your expertise through group discussions, through the Answers feature, and by presenting your knowledge in videos, blog posts, Power-Points, PDFs, presentations, and more that you add to your profi le using LinkedIn’s free applications.

Social media is a “pull” medium as opposed to a “push” one. You use LinkedIn’s powerful features to show professionals from around the world your expertise and pull them into your sphere. It goes without saying that it’s not the place for the spam or trickery that sometimes is associated with a certain rogue ele ment found in the Internet marketing world (e.g., the folks who have you click on a link purporting to take you to a cool site that instead takes you to a male enhancement drug advertisement). LinkedIn is a place where you can build your brand as an ex pert and have people knocking on your door . . . and what’s simply amazing is that it’s free! Yes, there are premium accounts, which we’ll cover, but I would say that 90 percent of the world can achieve its goals with the free basic account.

With that disclaimer about marketing on social media out of the way (be nice, play fair, don’t be pushy—not too hard, right?), let’s take a closer look at marketing You, Inc. on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn: Your Personal Worldwide Database

There are plenty of social media sites to join, but none will have the immediate impact that LinkedIn will on your professional career.


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You can play Farmville and Mafi a Wars on Facebook or watch Lady Gaga and silly cat videos on YouTube, but you can achieve tremendous success on LinkedIn, and that’s why it’s grow ing at an astounding rate. LinkedIn has 175 million members right now and is growing fast by adding two users per second.

The best thing about LinkedIn is that it has the most affl uent, most well-connected users of any social media site. Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are registered on LinkedIn, and 66 percent of LinkedIn’s members are decision makers or have infl uence in the purchase decisions for their companies. LinkedIn holds the record for the highest average household income over all other social net-working sites at over $109,000 per member!

While you can plant imaginary crops or wink at potential mates on other sites, LinkedIn is all business. There are no distractions. On LinkedIn you will fi nd professionals who are focused on one thing only: networking to create success for themselves and their businesses. LinkedIn is no longer a secret; with its IPO in 2011 valuing it at over $6 billion, everyone now knows about LinkedIn. In 2011, even America’s president joined the LinkedIn phe nomenon by holding an online town meeting to talk about his economic proposals.

Who’s Having Success with LinkedIn?

LinkedIn helps professionals across the board. Although many peo-ple at fi rst considered it to be a job-hunting site, it is so much more than that. The range of people that the site helps is quite extensive:

• Consultants who want to connect with prospective clients and build up their brand equity as experts

• Business-to-business marketers creating awareness of their new product launches or service offerings

• Sales professionals who do research on prospects before con-tacting them, fi nding out personal interests, school af fi liations, and whom they might know in common in an ef fort to create better rapport

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• Job hunters expanding their circles of business contacts to both create a better chance of fi nding that perfect job and keep themselves top of mind with potential employers

• Small businesses staying in front of customers and reach ing out to prospects

• Entrepreneurs seeking funding who are getting the atten tion of investors in their ideas

• Recruiters looking to fi nd staff for their companies and sort-ing through the world’s largest pool of talent

Basically, anyone in business can get a boost from the glob al net-working capabilities of LinkedIn. I tell my consulting clients fl at out: if you are not on LinkedIn, you are not in business.

LinkedIn offers you the platform to achieve all your business goals, including:

• Driving more traffi c to your sites• Getting media attention• Promoting your events• Finding the perfect work• Interacting with professionals from around the globe you

would never have been able to contact before• Obtaining free advice from top consultants on urgent busi-

ness issues

Understanding the LinkedIn Levels

Any discussion on how to leverage LinkedIn should begin with its overall structure. Your connections on LinkedIn are made up of the people you invite to join your network and, by degrees, all the people in the networks of those directly linked to you. Say you invite Sally, who works with you, into your network. She becomes your fi rst-degree connection. You and Sally might have other fi rst-degree connections in common, since you may both have invited other col-leagues into your networks.


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Now Sally is in your network as a fi rst-level connection, and all fi rst-level connections can be contacted with a free, direct message. Your second-degree connections include all the peo ple who are fi rst-level connections with Sally. For example, if Sally worked with John at another company and they are fi rst level connections, now John is your second-level connection. You can ask Sally for an introduc-tion to John and send John an invitation to connect; if he accepts, he becomes a fi rst-level connection with you.

Let’s say that you haven’t yet invited John into your network. Sally is a fi rst-level connection; John is a second-level connection. Your third-level connections are all the fi rst-level connections of John, your second-level connection. Say you wanted to meet Mike, a third-level connection who is connected on a fi rst level with John. The process is that you would send an introduction request through Sally to John to meet his connection, Mike. You create a message asking Sally to send it to John to send it on to Mike. In most cases, your fi rst-level connection, Sally, will be happy to forward the intro-duction request on to John and Mike.

Why is that? It’s primarily because LinkedIn exists entirely for networking. People understand why you are there and will most often send on your requests. From personal experience, I know that I send on 100 percent of the introduction requests I get. I feel fi ne doing it because I know that the person getting the request has the complete right to accept it or ignore it. It’s re ally up to the other person if he or she wants to make the connection. So I and many others forward all requests. Now, as you will learn later, there are many communi-cation methods available to you on LinkedIn for you to reach other professionals with whom you are not fi rst-level connections.

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Now you know the basic rules for marketing yourself on LinkedIn and how the site is structured. The sky’s the limit. This is your op portunity to use the world’s largest professional network. Starting with the next chapter, you will learn how to build your foundation for success on LinkedIn: a powerful, user-friendly, and customer-focused profi le.

maximum success with linkedin by dan sherman

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