Walk into a networking group meeting – you know the sort of event – a breakfast meeting, or maybe just a bit of ‘networking’ at another event. There will be people doing a range of things.

Some will be ‘sharks’ working the room with a view to pushing their business cards on as many as possible, and getting as many people’s cards as they can so they can spam the owners within 24 hours and then repeatedly until they get round to opting out.

Some will be ‘mates’ sticking with their friends, not interested in meeting anyone else and rather rudely ignoring the new people.

Not surprisingly, there will also be some ‘lurkers’ hanging around at the edge, wondering what to do.

And then there are the networkers, greeting new people, moving around too, introducing people in the room and writing on the back of business cards what they promised to do in their follow up. If you meet one of these people they’ll probably get in touch after the meeting with something you told them you need – not with a plug for their website, seminar or blog!

The woman who taught me about networking, Nicole Bachmann, told me that the networkers probably make up 15% of any networking group. The trick is to find them and get to know them. You can learn from watching what they do, and of course they are there to help you too, so whatever you need, they’ll be able to help somehow, at some point, or they will ‘know a man who can’.

Of course if you want to be a good networker, you have to be like them. And it’s easier than you think. Ask them about themselves. Be interested. Find out what they are looking for, and have a think about whether you know anyone who can help them. Remember, a good networker is an advocate for all her hundreds of contacts. She might not be able to help herself, but maybe one of her colleagues can.

It should become apparent here that good networkers tend to seek each other out. Its no fun going into a ‘shark pit’ of a networking meeting, but there may be some gems in there, some you don’t yet know, so I think its worth having a look, especially if you can use social tools online to help you find the right people quickly.

The funny thing is, I find people using exactly the same behaviours on twitter and linkedin. There are the sharks, collecting as many contacts (even on linkedin, those they don’t know at all) that they can and then spamming them with sales messages. There are the ‘mates’ who only want to talk to each other and are offended when someone on twitter sees a tweet and politely joins the conversation. And there are lurkers, reading what other people are saying but not taking part.

The question is, where are the networkers online and how do you find them?

Nicole is teaching how to Network at the Essex Business School next year if you’d like to check her out.

Image by hermanusbackpackers

About a fortnight or so ago I got featured in the first paper.li daily news thanks to @stevenhealey who often finds things first. When I saw it I was absolutely fascinated, because it met a need I had identified – people don’t want to miss stuff on twitter, particularly good links.

It is really interesting getting on board a new thing before the mass (being an early-adopter) because you’re aware before other people find it and can try and predict how it will pan out, how people will adapt it and what might be popular, or unpopular, and with whom.

So much for being smug though. Typically I completely missed a huge problem with Paper.li… which is how its notifications bother hugely popular tweeters.

Paper.li becomes popular and finds its haters

By chance I stumbled across a tweet from Graham Linehan (celebrity writer of amongst other things, Father Ted and the IT Crowd). He asked what this ‘Daily News’ thing was because it had completely destroyed his @mentions inbox. Every first, second and third tweet was a notification of someone’s paper featuring him, and he and other well-followed tweeters voiced their disgust.

This wasn’t just a problem for @Glinner though, other people didn’t like it because it mentioned the person who shared the link, not necessarily the originator. Paper.li cannot tell who wrote the blog post, it just has the users who shared the link, and some how chooses which one to feature on the paper.

Paper.li moved quickly to change the automatic daily tweets its users turned on so that they didn’t include featured usernames, and things have quietened down.

But the furore is just that – is there something more to paper.li?

Paper.li is Useful When Used Right

I’ve been using it myself but only with accounts or lists that are topic specific, so that the links shared are related stories. The best one is the tweets from all the Architects I follow on @ArchitectLeague, because architects tend to talk about architecture and design, the paper is usually full of related interesting material.

Have a look at the papers you are producing – are they useful for your followers, or just for you? If they create another way to provide focused material that fits your objectives, then yes, share them. Promotion is optional, so use it wisely.

What I like most about paper.li however is that if I share a link, the other people who include me in their paper, share my stuff with a wider audience of people, in a format which is more sticky than the original tweeted link. I have found that I’m getting a good number of clickthroughs direct from paper.li to my blogs and websites.

Even though Paper.li’s Daily Papers are only around for a day and therefore ephemeral like twitter, they hang around longer than a tweet and in a different form and this seems to draw more people to read further by clicking through to my sites. And if they like what they see, then I’m happy.

Today the Fresh Business Thinking website published an article of mine entitled “Twitter is a Serious Business Tool” which has received more than a little interest, which is great. Over the next days I’m going to elaborate on some of the ideas in the article, and I’ve started with this one because it has raised particular interest with my construction marketing friends. Here’s what I wrote:

… With some simple searching I have found more than 1000 architects and estimate that the UK Construction industry is represented on Twitter by about 20–30,000 active accounts.

I first quoted this estimate (then I gave around 20,000 as the figure) in February 2010 at a construction marketing conference. For the benefit of those who asked, here’s how I first came up with the estimate of 20-30,000 UK Construction people, for you to take a look and see if you agree with me. If you have another, more reliable way of estimating the usage I’d be most interested.

Twitter does not publish figures of the number of user accounts or any other demographic so one has to rely on other companies like Compete.com, Sysomos.com and so on to make some estimates. For this reason these figures must remain broad brush.

1. Total Unique Visitors Per Month

Compete.com shows site analytics for sites like Twitter. In July 2010 Monthly Unique visitors were 28million, 288 thousand, two hundred and three, and had been around 27-28m for the previous four months.

2. UK Unique Visitors Per Month

Of those 28 million or so, Sysomos calculated that 7.87% were in the UK. Look at the article from last summer to see the percentages for other countries and cut down your unique visitors by your target country.

If I do this I get 7.87% of 28,288,203 giving 2,226,281 in the UK. By the way if you know a more recent breakdown please use it – and let me know!

3. UK Construction Unique Visitors Per Month

Next we need to work out how many of these UK users are likely to be in the industries of your choice. I used the UK Construction Industry Overview by Corporate Watch UK March 2004 (couldn’t find anything more recent, but I think the size of the construction industry got considerably larger than that in the late noughties, and has shrunk again since, so it’s a reasonable enough metric).

Corporate Watch says “The UK construction industry … employs 1.4 million people” which is 2.33% of the UK population (currently at approximately 60m). So we can reduce our 2.226m UK population to just 2.33% and get the proportion of those users likely to be in the UK construction industry, assuming the demographic is similar to the total population. This gives us a number of users of 51,872. These are estimated users in the UK, likely to be employed in Construction in the UK.

The final measure I want to use is activity.

4. Active UK Construction Unique Visitors Per Month

When I first made these rough yardstick measures I used Sysomos’ report (as above) to look at active twitter users. Sysomos said that “50.4% of Twitter users haven’t updated their status in the last seven days.” In other words, 49.6% had updated their status in the last seven days. For some twitter users, this is activity. With this measure, we’d have a figure of ‘active users’ of 25,728.

But if you want to be more pessimistic and describe activity as updating in the last two days, Sysomos’ graph suggests that 39% updated in the last day or less. This would give a figure of 20,230 ‘active users’.

In summary:

There were 28.288m unique visitors to twitter.com in July 2010;

7.87% (i.e. 2.226m) of these were in the UK;

2.33% (i.e. 51,800) of these probably work in the UK construction industry, and

49.6% (i.e. 25,000) of these posted an update in the last seven days, or

39% (i.e. 20,230) posted an update in the last day or less.

An Underestimate?

Now it is worth mentioning that this figure we have arrived at is probably an underestimate of the number of UK Construction people using twitter, because it is based on people visiting the twitter.com site. Sysomos’ report from November 2009, Inside Twitter Clients, put the proportion of users who use the twitter website to post updates at just 46.79%, less than half. The remainder use third party applications, such as Tweetdeck, tweetie (now twitter for iphone), twitteriffic, hootsuite, and so on. These access twitter via the API (a feed of the stream) so the 53.21% of users using twitter with these other tools won’t register as a visit to twitter.com. For this reason I think that it is an underestimate to say that 20-25,000 UK Construction People use twitter every day/week, it could quite easily be more than that.

It is also important to remember that we are talking about people here, not brands or companies. Many of the twitter users I have met are employed in the UK Construction industry but you might not even know it. Perhaps they are your employees?

Over to You

So how helpful is this? I think it is a limited exercise because in the end the numbers are so large they become relatively meaningless in the general scope of things. What matters is what you do with twitter, that is what will determine whether it is successful for you or not. However, if you want to demonstrate the potential of such a hugely popular tool to a sceptic, these numbers might help.

Right, now lets be bowled over by the size of facebook…

I had a great reply from Cindy Frewen Wuellner over on this post and thought it was a good topic for another, so here goes.

Cindy’s question was that to do with having trouble following over 4500 people and keeping up with them all. At my suggestion she took a look at Refollow as a way of analyzing the people she follows and added:

Of my followings, none are ‘dead’ or ‘lazy’. No way to easily cull; I like them all. How do you suppose our friends w/ 20-40k ppl manage their twitter streams. @ImadNaffa says he just uses groups.

It is a good question Cindy. I follow over 3000 now and it is partly because I don’t want to miss anything, when I find interesting people I want to add them to the stream. But as I mentioned in another post, you can’t read everything, and no-one should expect you to.

Chris Brogan follows over 140,000 people on twitter and he also says that he spends around 60% of his time on twitter using Search. This is because he is looking for something.

Remember when the internet first started to get going in the early 90s and new people arrived who weren’t just the experienced techies? They started to read everything they found which was of interest. Pretty soon there was a cult of content consumers and everyone said ‘the internet is a time waster’. Then in the dot com boom the same thing happened but it had pictures.

Today we say the same thing about twitter but we have missed the point – twitter isn’t about browsing (though it is nice to browse a bit, I do this on the train) it is a tool for networking. Whatever you do you can’t have deep meaningful relationships with thousands of people, but you can build them step by step. Do this by search.

How to do it? Set up detailed advanced searches using the advance search on twitter for subjects of interest, geolocation and so on. Pick up the RSS feeds and add them to a reader, or put the searches into hootsuite or tweetdeck and make columns. Then when anyone (including people in your stream) tweets about your topics you can read a list of just those tweets and start engaging.

You can still read the stream too, but don’t try and read everything, you’ll just burn yourself out!

What matters here is what your objective is. My technique requires you to have one. Why not set up a behaviour that will deliver it?

Image: A Direction to Follow by batega

I’m grateful to Sarah Arrow who runs a Linkedin group for Essex businesses, for alerting me to this problem, which I’m sure is of concern to many of you who use the Groups feature on Linkedin. Groups have become a very important feature of Linkedin with some real potential, but many are going astray.

Groups are New

A few years ago Linkedin didn’t have twitter integration, it didn’t have groups and it was purely focused on connections, which is what made it attractive to the rather conservative professional market. Now that Linkedin has introduced some of these features from other platforms it is important not to let the bad aspects of them damage what we have and put off the core, very special Linkedin audience.

Linkedin Groups are in essence a type of online community of interest. A group of people get together in a group to focus their networking in a common subject – in the case of Sarah’s group, “those that wish to network and do business with Essex Business people.” It is this common interest that should always be the focus of any postings to a Linkedin group.

Focus on Shared Interest

I defined Push and Pull marketing here when I said,

“Push marketing is when the customer doesn’t want your product or service. Pull marketing is when the customer does want your product or service.”

A special interest group can be a good thing for marketing because it narrows the field of people you network with to a smaller group with a shared interest, and if that shared interest is related to your business you’re in benefit.

For example if you run a guesthouse in Essex, people interested in getting a recommendation for a guest house in Essex might ask someone they know in Essex, and they might get that recommendation from someone in the Essex network, so it makes sense to join the network and get to know the people there. The important thing is that you are getting to know them because they may become your advocates, in the same way as they are getting to know you because you may become an advocate for them. Don’t sell to them – you are then a spammer.

Sales masquerading as shared interest

The problem with groups is that the opportunity exists (as it does with your status updates) to post marketing messages as if they were discussions. For example, I recently saw this on a property networking group on Linkedin:

“CHEAP LONDON BUILDERS
We are a building contracting company operating in London, having expanded vastly due to recommendations and clients satisfaction – We have grown in size, quality and ability
WE ARE ABLE TO DO ALL TYPES OF BUILDING WORK including: Extensions (Rear, Side, Single or Double…”

This is not a discussion, it is an advert.

The reason why these messages don’t work on Linkedin Groups is what happens next.

The Damage Sales Messages Do to Linkedin Groups

Linkedin Group discussions are not indexed by Google, so this plea for help isn’t shared with the world. Instead it is emailed directly, or in digest form, to everyone in that group who has chosen to receive updates.

Those people have volunteered to get involved in the activity of the group, and one thing they offer up gladly is their email address. It is clear that the majority of people who receive an ad like ‘CHEAP LONDON BUILDERS’ are going to be rather cheesed off if it arrives in their inbox masquerading as valuable contact from their Linkedin group. A less charitable person would say the ‘CHEAP LONDON BUILDERS’ are hijacking linkedin to do their direct mail campaigns.

Of course this type of behaviour is very bad for your brand image. But worse for all of us, it also damages the group – I have left numerous groups where this type of activity is unchecked, and turned off updates from others. Those groups don’t get much of my attention any more.

What you should do instead

So instead of spamming a Linkedin group with your content, what can you do to generate some genuine good value leads for your business? Here are some suggestions.

1. Get in the shoes of your audience

A linkedin group is relatively closed, so your audience is the people in the group. What do they care about? What issues have they identified? How can what you know and who you know help the situation?

2. Join a conversation

Look at what other people are discussing and see what useful contribution you can make. If you comment on other people’s discussions others may respond, and you may find they contact you privately as well to start building a relationship. This is how you get genuine advocates.

3. Demonstrate your expertise

Remember no-one has your specific knowledge and experience, so share information and opinion which shows you know your stuff.

4. Join the Community

When people start truly participating in a Linkedin group like this, things really take off. In fact, the group really stands out from the crowd and you’ll find more joining. And more people means more people reading your useful, interactive content, which is specifically targeted to them as members of a special interest group.

It is in your interest that a Linkedin group works – or why bother? So stop spamming people on Linkeding groups and join a conversation instead.

Image: Hackney the Old Hospital by L-Plate Big Cheese (creative commons>

What is Sharing Online? Wherever you are on the internet, there are a myriad of sites and platforms which are all in essence a means of publishing material (or ‘content’) for other people to read, comment upon and share onward. Some of these platforms are illustrated in the Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and JESS3.

But why do people do this?

1. Because You Have Something To Say

Firstly because they have something to say. According to Technorati the blog search engine there are over 120,000 blogs around the world, regularly updated with things we just must share. Here is just one example of the excellent Brian Green offering his usual cutting remarks on construction economics on his blog, Brickonomics. A must read for the construction industry.

2. Because You Have a Problem.

Then of course people share their problems. It is much easier to find things if you can ask questions of your network. For example is a friend of mine film maker Neil Fairbrother asked on twitter about CO2 emissions from wind turbines, we had a conversation on Twitter and Linkedin as I put him in touch with a couple of people who could help him.

3. Be Useful to Your Own Advantage Too

People share to be useful, but they also have other motives. The premium sanitaryware manufacturer Grohe tackles a bottleneck in their sales funnel by targeting installers direct with their ‘active’ site to show not only that installing their products doesn’t have to be difficult, but also that learning how to do it can give you a competitive advantage.

4. To Be Beautiful

Or for the other side of the William Morris quotation,

Have nothing in your houses which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

People share the stuff they love. I live on the Essex Coast and James Dodds is one of my favourite artists. His paintings and prints of boats and Essex coastal towns are an inspiration. This one (which he’s given me permission to share with you here) is one of 100s on his website. The painting will be exhibited in Maine in August.

5. To Make Productive Conversations

Why do we share this stuff? The new internet is no longer about broadcasting, its about conversations. By discussing things we care about, we can create and develop ideas, and it helps us learn if we could work together.

6. Huddle Together with People You Agree With

Some people like to find people who agree with them and collectivise to take action. Here’s a campaign aiming to get construction people to lobby their MP about how every £1 invested in construction produces £2.84 of GDP. Together we can make a bigger noise!

7. To Swim the Other Way

But some people actively collect the mavericks. Every day TED publishes a short talk by a thought leader – like John Kasonaa who has helped turn the poachers of Namibia, including his father, into conservationists, giving them “ownership in the wildlife.” Every day, another thought leader to listen to, for free in your inbox.

8. To Be Remarkable

And why are thought leaders so important? They teach us how to be remarkable – literally. When you’re doing something amazing people remark upon it. They share it with others. Seth Godin wrote a book about this called ‘Purple Cow’.

9. Because People are Searching for Us

Before the internet, being remarkable didn’t always work – you might just have found yourself yelling in a bucket. But now we have Googlewhack. The more obscure your remarkability is, the better. It just makes it easier for people who are looking to find you via google. Want to know what a GoogleWhack is? Check the definition here.

Being remarkable is no longer a disadvantage. It doesn’t stop Amazon stocking your book. It doesn’t stop the local cafe competing locally with McDonalds. The Mass Market no longer lords it over the Niche Market. We might be in ‘The Long Tail’ but now we can be found by whoever is interested.

10 So Be Specific

So be Specific about what you have to share. My company, a firm of business minded architects, recently rebuilt the services section of our website to speak directly to the people we can help most with their concerns about buildings and property [in London, Essex and Suffolk, for example]. We are the best architects (at what we do) and you can be the best too, online 24/7.

11 To Be Sticky and Get Stickier

If you are specific and remarkable then you’ll be memorable. Your contribution sticks not only in people’s minds but it sticks onto the internet, building up a footprint of your remarkableness.

12 Because People Will Come To You

This means that instead of having to shove your stuff in people’s faces, people will break down your door for it. Sharing helps them know you, and if they need your help, they’ll come to you. 38,000 fans on facebook for a blender company? Now that’s sticky.

13 Because it is Pull Marketing

You don’t have to sell blenders to identify what makes you remarkable. The new BlackPool regeneration agency just set up a photoblog to share images of Blackpool as it is now, rather than as how many of us remember it.
To quote from the Seth Godin’s book ‘All Marketers are Liars’;

There are only two things that separate success from failure in most organisations today:
1. Invent stuff worth talking about, and
2. Tell Stories about what you’ve invented

14 Don’t Worry!

And lastly, just in case you were, please heed the advice of David Meerman Scott (who wrote ‘The new Rules of Marketing and PR’.

Don’t worry about sharing your best information online. Your competitino already knows what you’re doing, and People like leaders, not followers.

That was August 19th 2008 by the way. He was ahead even then.

So there’s your homework:

Say something, something you care about.

Ask for help because a problem shared with 13,000 people is…

Be useful and be beautiful too. You can always get a designer to help you with both.

Create Conversation, be part of the conversation, either with people you agree with, or people you don’t

Either way, remember to be remarkable, then you’ll be searchable. And if you’re specific about what you have to say then you’ll be much stickier online and off.

And don’t worry, because we’re listening, and if we like what we’re saying we’ll share it too.

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Remember this post where I talked about doing market research? In it I explain how to use the internet to find out what your clients, competitors, or just your favourite people are doing online, for free.

At the end of the post I mention briefly that you can manage this information using alerts, or preferably RSS, but I don’t explain what RSS is.

RSS is a way to arrange for information you choose – news, blog posts, search results, to be sent to you when they are published, without you having to go and search for them all over the internet. Here is a fantastic video by Commoncraft about RSS and how it works.

RSS in plain English by CommonCraft

It is the first ever instructional video Commoncraft made, and is pretty impressive. While you’re on YouTube you might want to check out their other instructional videos or even subscribe to their YouTube channel!

Now you can set up all the searches you want – on twitter, on google, wherever you like, and pick up the RSS feeds and view them all in a reader. Every time your topics are mentioned online you’ll get a new entry. When you’ve signed up for a reader, why not subscribe to this blog? Just click the orange RSS button on the right.

You may have noticed from my last post that Linkedin is very like face-to-face networking in some ways. You’re not going to walk right up to a stranger and offer them your services (or shout at them for that matter). Instead you wait to be introduced. Polite.

Today I’m going to talk about Twitter, and in some ways one might think that Twitter is different. Whilst twitter can look like a place for spammers, in fact it is the opposite.

Twitter is a complex, dynamic consent network, with people following and unfollowing, listing and unlisting, all the time. It is so easy to add and remove people from your conversations too. With apparent easy you can go and find people who are talking about the things you want to talk about, listen in, and then join in when you’re ready. In that way it is similar to a huge cocktail party, happening 24/7, all around the clock, all around the world.

Some twitter users don’t have conversations, they just broadcast. Usually it is their news feed, but whatever it is, it’s all one way. But it isn’t Push marketing. No-one is sending you emails you must delete here, they are just talking into the space, and you decide whether or not to listen.

Push marketing does exist on twitter though. It arrives in conversations. Here are some examples.

Push Marketing on Twitter

Sending Direct Messages automatically when people follow you, inviting them to visit their website. Don’t do this. If you have a website, put a link on your profile and they will find it there when they decide to find out more about you. People who follow you don’t want to be spammed in their inbox, they want to read your tweets when they choose to. They will get in touch when they are looking not when you want them to.

Listening out for discussions in your field and then @replying to the participants offering your services. Look honestly at the conversation. Did anyone specifically say ‘I’m looking for a widget salesman in Albania’? Thought not. Remember that in Pull marketing the person must be looking for your product or service. No-one likes a gatecrasher. Join the conversation don’t sell into it.

Sending large numbers of people links to your website asking them to check it out. This is precisely like spam email, because your @replies inbox is like an email inbox and should be full of helpful relevant messages not unsolicited calls to action. Twitter users can spot these messages, they only have to look at the profile of a complete stranger to see they are spamming everyone the same. Then they will block you. Goodbye.

Lets now look at these three examples from a Pull Marketing point of view.

Pull Marketing on Twitter

When someone follows you, take an interest. You might want to check out their profile, and if they look interesting, their web link and their tweets. Its easy to follow people, but not compulsory. Do you see something of interest? Why not say hello and ask about it. Start a conversation – you’re getting to know your contacts. Maybe you can help them with something – what are they interested in? Who could you suggest they follow? If your conversation doesn’t lead anywhere yet, no worries. You’ve reinforced your reputation as a helpful person to know. Maybe they will reciprocate when they read one of your tweets.

Use search to go and find things you need. Twitter is easily searchable and you can set up RSS feeds for tailored advanced searches. You might find someone looking specifically for a widget seller in Albania, you could say ‘Hello, I sell widgets in Albania, can I help?’ That’s not Push marketing, because the person is looking, and search helps you find these people. Companies like BT and Dell use twitter to good effect in this way for customer service. They search for their customers complaining and offer assistance, when it is precisely what the customer is looking for.

Set out your stall and let people come. Make sure your profile is complete, so that strangers can find out who you are and provide a like so they can click through for more information. Provide a focused source of information – be known for something, so that people who follow you know what they’re going to get. Instead of sending people links, which fills up their @replies stream and their DM inbox, why not broadcast them as public tweets? You probably don’t want to do this because you don’t think people are listening, but you’d be wrong. Google is listening, so write for google. People are searching, so write for them. And if you get involved in conversations, the people who come across you that way will check out your profile and see your tweets, they may even decide to follow you if they think you are of interest, but it will be their choice.

The power of Twitter lies in its dynamic nature and its searchability. In the same way that Linkedin connects and informs your trusted contacts, so Twitter connects and informs the entire internet. By being a good networker on twitter and using Pull marketing techniques, you’ll become the person to come to, rather than the person to avoid.

Is there another platform it would be useful to discuss Push and Pull Marketing on? Let me know and I’ll have a go.

Image: Life could be much easier… by Threadless

Last time I defined Push and Pull Marketing in this way:

Push marketing is when the customer doesn’t want your product or service. Pull marketing is when the customer does want your product or service.

Now lets look at a couple of social tools. These tools put a greater number of people in touch with each other, and for this reason they can fall prey to Push marketeers. But good networkers ignore these people, opt out of their networks and built their own trusted communities who don’t push, but who help them pull instead.

Using Pull Marketing with Linkedin

Remember my example in the last post about face to face networking, when you seek out people who need help and help them out? Well you could do this on Linkedin. You could add connections, then look at their connections for people who look like they might need your services.

What do you do next?

How about if you send them an Inmail (Linkedin mail) offering your services?

What if you request an introduction to them from a mutual contact so you can offer your services?

Are these push or pull techniques?

The answer lies purely with the recipient of your advances. Do they need your services right now?

If they did and you were perfect, then you might be able to contact them. But how do you know? The answer is, you don’t know they need you, and the chances are they probably don’t. Not just now. Not when they’re rather busy with something else. Fact is, you’re just being another double glazing salesman.

So the way to using Pull marketing on Linkedin and get all the brownie points and none of the reputation damage, is to let someone contact you, when they need you.

Linkedin is perfect for helping people get in touch with you, find out about you first, check you out with trusted people they know who also know you. All these techniques are built into Linkedin, but they should be used to help people get in touch when they need something. Not when they are selling something.

Pull marketing on Linkedin is actually rather easy – the platform facilitates it. All you have to do is make sure your profile explains what you’re good at, and make sure your contacts know it too. Don’t push your skills at them, instead let them find them out as they get to know you better, and whilst you’re at it, find out the skills of the people you know. That way when one of them asks you if you know someone who… you’ll be able to put them in touch with just the right person.

If you do spot someone who would be the ideal client for you, don’t push yourself at them – remember how damaging that could be to your reputation. Instead, see whom you have in common. Build relationships with the people you do know, and you’ll find that when the need for your services does arise, they won’t have to look far to find you.

As you get to know people, your circle of trusted contacts will widen, and as you help people out who ask for help, so your reputation will improve. Connect on Linkedin to the people who trust you, so you can use your network more easily to help them, and they you.

Next time we’ll talk about push and pull on Twitter.

image: Runner in the Bay to Breakers race 16 May 2010 by smi23le

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