Actually the blog wasn’t competing but I was using two posts that are currently listed here: “The 7 Worst LinkedIn Mistakes and Their Fixes” and “Are You a Lion, Turtle, HoundDog, or Alley Cat – What’s Your LinkedIn Connection Strategy”.

Here’s a press snippet:

“Blog-Off II, a blogging contest offering social media enthusiasts and professionals the opportunity to be independently assessed by judges and statistics on their capability of implementing the fundamentals of social media marketing, came to a close with the announcement of the winner on December 24th.  This years winner, Sean Nelson author of the Social Media Sonar blog, was able to beat out an impressive collection of 28 bloggers representing 6 countries.  During the 12 day contest. Sean’s two posts generated over 8,000 visits and over 200 comments, with an impressive time spent on each post of 6:17 and 5:09 (that’s minutes:seconds).”

What’s not covered in the results above are the several hundred comments that were made in LinkedIn groups where I posted a link to the articles in a Discussion Post and as a News Article. (more…)

Since September I have been working on a 10 part series asking the question “Can LinkedIn Work for You?” The better questions should be “Can Social Media Work for You?”

In both cases the answer is yes. If you’re willing to put the time and effort required to make it successful. What I’ve often found is that many people start experimenting with the various tools but then abandon their efforts when they don’t immediately see results.

Here are the previous 9 articles:

Can LinkedIn Work for You? (part 1 of 10)

Why Are You On LinkedIn? (Part 2 of 10)

Enhance Your Networking with LinkedIn (part 3 of 10)

Expand Your LinkedIn Reach (part 4 of 10)

Building Credibility on LinkedIn (part 5 of 10)

New Opportunities-New Hires on LinkedIn (part 6 of 10)

Prospecting with LinkedIn (part 7 of 10)

5 Ways to Communicate Your Message on LinkedIn (Part 8 of 10)

Growing Your Business with LinkedIn (part 9 of 10)

Within these posts is much of the information you need to make LinkedIn work for you. Many of the same concepts apply to the other social media tools. What’s missing is how you personally can take this information and make it work specifically for you and what it is that you do. (more…)

Over the last two years I’ve written often about the tips and strategies to more effectively utilize LinkedIn. It’s just as important to consider the mistakes that people make on LinkedIn that will affect their success. Many of these mistakes are often errors of omission. Today I’m going to discuss seven mistakes and then I’m going to show you how you can correct them.

Let’s get started.

1. Bad Photo Choice

One of the first things most people do when they visit a profile is look at the photo. Its natural to want to see the person behind the profile. People connect to people and a photo helps improve your visitors perception.

One of the worst mistakes is to not include a photo. What does it say about you as a business professional if you don’t understand the importance of the profile photo?

Another mistake I see is that someone decides to include the family in their photo. That’s fine on Facebook but on a professionally based network it misses the point. Add to this photos with effects or simply unclear. If someone can’t see your face or recognize you there is a problem. (more…)

LinkedIn is a fairly harmonious place. People tend to act professional and when there are opposing opinions they typically become a case where people “agree to disagree”. Things change though when you began discussing LIONS. Suddenly the conversation isn’t so rosy.

LION’s, for those who don’t know are open networkers. They connect to just about anyone. They see opportunity increasing as the number of connections increases. Those who disagree see LIONS as simply driving their ego’s by counting the connections, as if the purpose of LinkedIn is to proudly claim to have 1,000’s of connections.

For the record I don’t consider myself a LION, yet I’m an open networker. When writing my first LinkedIn book I identified three LinkedIn connection strategies. This year I added a fourth to define how I now connect.

How you choose to connect will impact how you use LinkedIn and in the end your chances of finding success.

Before we look at the four connection strategies I want to make one point. How you choose to connect on LinkedIn should be of no concern to anyone else. It’s your network and your strategy. As long as it works for you thats all that matters.

The Four LinkedIn Connection Strategies: (more…)

For the last two years I’ve written this blog to help people more effectively use LinkedIn.  I decided it was time to benchmark the blog’s success by competing in the BlogOff 2 competition.  I need your help to have a chance to win the competition.

Your Task:  Visit my new blog post “The 7 Worst Mistakes on LinkedIn and Their Fixes“.  This post will help you identify and correct the mistakes I see many people making on LinkedIn.

VOTE NOW:  Your click is your vote.  *******Comments on tT7he post are a major component of the voting so please consider adding a comment.*******

Thank you and have a great day.

Sean Nelson

Two months ago I started this series asking the question “Can LinkedIn work for you?”. Today we come full circle and look at expanding on the four keys of success that I listed in the original article:

1.  The Right Purpose = The right Activities
2.  More Reach = More Opportunities
3.  Provide Value to Others = Know, Like, & Trust
4.  More Activity = More Success

Get these four right and LinkedIn will work for you. The components of each of these have been covered throughout the series so if you’ve followed along this should put the icing on the cake.

The Right Activities
There is the ideal and there is reality. Reality is that most of us first joined LinkedIn and begin to explore it over time. Most people get that LinkedIn is about connecting to other people so the first step is that people invite those that they know. After those first connections are made, though, is where most people hit the wall.

My kids love movies and there is a scene in “A Bugs Life” where the ants are carrying food in a neat and orderly line…one after another. Each one is simply following what the other is doing. Suddenly a leaf lands between two ants and the one in front keeps moving but the one behind has no clue what to do. The leaf is the ant’s wall.

After some coaching the ant simply changes directions to go around the leaf and the line continues moving.

On LinkedIn the ability to move around your walls is dramatically increased if you have taken the time to develop goals and a strategy for reaching the goals. Because if you don’t know what you hope to achieve (purpose) how do you know which actions you should be taking.

You need to think about why you are on LinkedIn and develop a strategy to make it work for you. My purpose for being on LinkedIn is to make money. Actions such as connecting, starting discussion posts, posting news articles, joining groups, asking and answering questions, posting status updates, etc. are all done with this purpose in mind. (more…)

I recently wrote about receiving a spam message on LinkedIn from what appeared to be a fake LinkedIn account.  You can read that post and decide for yourself if I received a spam message from a fake account.

Today there was another spam message in my LinkedIn inbox.  Why do I say it’s spam?  Because the message I received was an unsolicited sales message in the form of a “hey, check this out” message.

The one common thread in the two cases is that the name Carl Doppler appears to be associated with both.  In the first case he was listed as the VP of operations with PMA Desk.  In this case Doppler Internet , Inc. is listed as the Registration Provider.  Once again I’ll present the facts you make your own decision in regards to what’s going on.

The message:

Notice the link to http://www.webcontentthatsells.com. (more…)

When I first joined LinkedIn my thought was that this would be a good place to network and connect to other business professionals.  What I’ve learned since is that LinkedIn is a great place to communicate your message to millions of business professionals.  Most often through indirect methods.

Most people think in term of communicating directly, but that’s a traditional perspective.  Social networking/media has its own rules in regards to sales related activites and most often using a direct sales pitch will fail and potentially cause damage to your brand.

There are a few ways to communicate directly on LinkedIn.  The most obvious is to send a direct message to your first degree connections.  Personally when I receive a direct sales message I immediately archive it.  Most often it’s from someone I’m connected to but do not personally know.  If I receive several I simply remove the connection.

If you want to sell to me you have to first introduce yourself and then start a conversation.  It all starts with the three requirements necessary for someone to choose to do business with you.  First they have to know you, second they need to like you, and finally they need to trust you.

Connecting or interacting within LinkedIn groups can accomplish the “getting to know you” requirement.  Moving to like and trust requires time and interaction.  You’re going to have to share value over time for this to occur.

Here are some of the ways that I communicate my message to tens of thousands of LinkedIn members each week. (more…)

I’ve been on LinkedIn for over three years and I’ve been amazed that spam related content has not been a huge issue.  Rarely do I see, or maybe its that I haven’t recognized it, this type of activity.  Compared to Twitter direct sales messages rarely work.

Today I received a message from a fellow group member that at first I assumed was legitimate.  Now I’m not so sure.  I’m going to leave the final decision up to you.

First here’s the message I received from Bradley Mitchell which included a note apparently sent to him from Mr. Brad Kenzie.  It includes a link to http://www.moresocialleads.com which advertises a social media product called PMA Desk.

The message is pretty straight forward.  Since I work with clients helping them with their social media strategies, and having written a blog for the past two years that discusses LinkedIn and social media, I was curious.  I clicked on the link to check it out. (more…)

Last week I discussed New Opportunities, New Hires with LinkedIn that discussed using LinkedIn to advance your career and for companies to find new employees.  Todays conversation addresses using LinkedIn to prospect.

Most people use LinkedIn to connect to other business professionals that they know or meet while networking.  It definitely can help put an additional degree of connectivity to these folks.  But limiting your use to simply networking leaves a significant opportunity out of your monetization toolbox.

The tool that most people fail to take advantage of is the ability to prospect for potential opportunities.  Let me be clear, prospecting is not sending sales messages to your direct connections.  It’s not posting sales messages in groups.  It’s simply identifying potential people or companies that could eventually become clients.

LinkedIn, like other social networking sites, are not great places to overtly sell your products and services.  Can doing this work? Sure, but you’re more likely to turn people off than to turn them on.  A better approach is to connect and engage in conversations so that people first get a chance to know and like you.  Then you can begin converting the “like” into trust.

I recently received a message form someone stating that they had looked at my profile and read my blog.  In the message they simply asked if they could follow up with a question.  I said sure and then next communication was an offer for me to use their services.

Bad strategy.  I’ll talk about how they could have approached things later.

The two ways you can prospect on LinkedIn are People and for Companies. (more…)