Why Isn’t Your Entire Company On LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is best known as the place where professionals network with other professionals.  With over 400 million members, LinkedIn has built a very large network that you can take advantage of.  The concept is pretty simple.  I’m sure you’ve heard of the six degrees of Kevin Bacon.  The concept is that any two people are six people or fewer acquaintance links apart from each other.  By creating this large network of professionals, you have the opportunity to connect with any professional that you want to using LinkedIn.  This tool allows you to easily find contacts at other companies and discover who you are connected with that may be able to introduce you to those contacts.  Here are some suggestions on how you can benefit from having a LinkedIn presence for your company and how your employees can help your company grow using LinkedIn.

Create Your Own Company Profile   – If you haven’t done so already, create a company profile on LinkedIn.  It’s really easy to do and along with your other social media networks, you will have more visibility to more customers.  If you don’t know where to start, I recommend reviewing some very impressive LinkedIn business pages including Microsoft , Google, Salesforce, and Harvard Business Review.  According to LinkedIn, these companies have a few things in common that have made them very successful.

• 99% of the top global brands have employees sharing their content to their networks
• 97% of the top global brands have employee posts contributing to their content efforts
• 99% of top brands regularly share updates on their Company Page
• 73% of top brands are utilizing Sponsored Updates
• All of these top brands post an average of 12.6 updates per week

Although you don’t need to have your content machine in place on day one, these are great practices that should be emulated.

Sales – It is a very good idea that each of your sales staff has their own LinkedIn profile. Companies like to do business with people that they know.  Having a professional photograph and information about each sales person will help your company’s professionalism online and help them by having an “online business card”.  By the way, having a LinkedIn profile URL on your salespeople’s business cards is another way for your customers to learn more about them and you.

Sales should use LinkedIn to find key contact names of targeted prospects.  A word of caution –  many salespeople say they want to network and connect with professionals, when all they really want to do is turn that networking opportunity into a sales pitch.  Presenting your products and services to targeted prospects subtly is one thing, but don’t use LinkedIn as a tool to hound them for sales.  The better approach might be to see who you know on LinkedIn who might be able to introduce you to that contact.  Referrals are much more effective than cold calling on LinkedIn.  LinkedIn offers advertising opportunities to present your company’s products and services which is respectable way to get noticed.

Marketing – As mentioned above, there are some successful companies using LinkedIn very effectively.  Your marketing team should research these LinkedIn companies for best practices.  There is much to be learned about effective methods of leveraging LinkedIn and other social media networks.  The more updates that you can post on LinkedIn, the better.  Keeping your updates flowing, keeps your customers and prospects interested and updated on what is going on with your company.  I also recommend that your marketing team sign up for different LinkedIn Pulse channels.  There are millions of marketing professionals on LinkedIn and these groups love to share ideas that have worked for them.

Human Resources – Job seekers use LinkedIn as an online resume with the added value of providing recommendations from colleagues, skills, endorsements, volunteer information, blog posts, videos, photos, slide presentations, and documents. Your HR department should comb LinkedIn to find new talent.

Administration, IT and Production Staff – Having your administration, IT and production staff on LinkedIn can help build the company profile to your prospects and customers.  Not only is it important to have them create their own profiles, but also having them provide content for your corporate LinkedIn pages and sharing that information with their contacts spreads the word exponentially on social media.

Executive Team – The average number of connections that CEOs have on LinkedIn is 930.  Executives need to leverage LinkedIn for peer and new business relationships, partnerships and strategic alliances.

If you don’t have a corporate LinkedIn profile, build one.  Encourage your staff to create their own LinkedIn profiles and whenever you have a company update, make sure that you get your staff to share that information with their connections.  Leverage the power of LinkedIn to give your company more visibility and to expand your brand through networking.

If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile, my website and my blog.

Photo credit: A Name Like Shields Can Make You Defensive via Foter.com / CC BY

Statistics: LinkedIn and DMR

Overcoming Adversity

Everyone faces adversity in the workplace and at home.  Whether it’s a co-worker who is jealous of your accomplishments, a vindictive supervisor, an unhappy employee whose daily goal is to make everyone else have a lousy day or a teenager at home who has questionable friends, every day presents a new challenge.  When I face daily challenges, I follow a few simple rules that can make the most difficult day an enjoyable one.

Spirituality/Prayer

Spirituality and prayer can be a powerful force for stress relief. Every day before I go to work and on my way home, I pray for my co-workers, family and friends.  Many of them are facing their own sets of challenges with sick or elderly parents, kids who are in trouble, an abusive spouse, financial stress and the list goes on.  If you think about it, by the time you get to work, there is an incredible dynamic of people of all different backgrounds and experiences, coming to one place to accomplish a goal of making your company perform like a well-oiled machine bringing their own experiences both negative and positive to the workplace.  If that’s not a recipe for prayer, I don’t know what is.  To learn more about the power of prayer and spirituality and how it relates to stress relief, check out this Mayo Clinic article.

Attitude

I have found that attitude has a lot to do with how I react to different experiences throughout the day.  When I go to work with issues and concerns about things happening elsewhere, I find myself bringing baggage with me at work.  It’s like going on a flight.  Check your bags and forget about them until you arrive at your destination.

Let your positive attitude be contagious.  People like being around positive-minded people.  When you surround yourself with people who are negative and every goal is impossible to achieve, you will fail.  Oftentimes, I have found that my attitude and not my co-workers is the thing that is holding back our success.  Don’t let your attitude be the reason why goals aren’t accomplished or why your co-workers are having a bad day.

Give

You’ve heard the old saying “it’s better to give than receive.”  It’s true.  Go to a soup kitchen and help feed the homeless or go to an organization like Habitat for Humanity or the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts of America and work on a community service project.  Reaching out to injured military service personnel like Wounded Warriors or being a volunteer for newly settled Syrian refugees will quickly put things back in perspective.

What does this have to do with adversity at work or home?  Everything.  Organizing a community service project with your co-workers, enables you to build a stronger community both outside your workplace and within your office.

Communicate

Communication within your workplace and at home is very important.  Many misunderstandings stem from miscommunication.  Email is easily misinterpreted.  How many times have you sent what you thought was a clear message only to get responses back that totally misconstrued your original message?

It might make sense to get up from behind your desk, walk over to the person you were sending an email to and have a conversation.  In a world of texts, SnapChat, and online messaging, it’s refreshing to have an “old-fashioned” face-to-face conversation.

Conclusion

Whether you are at work or at home, I recommend starting and ending your day with prayer (sometime you need to keep praying throughout the day especially when it’s an overly challenging one), have a positive attitude, have a charitable heart giving back to your community whenever you can and keep your lines of communication open and clear.  Using these simple guidelines can help anyone successfully deal with adversity.

If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile, my website and my blog.

Photo credit: jlwo via Foter.com / CC BY-NC