Frederic Martin's List: Linkedin

• The business-oriented social networking site LinkedIn has 23 million members, with 1.2 million new members signing up each month.
• By enabling dynamic connections between industry professionals, these communities effectively hit the overdrive switch on word of mouth referrals.
• They also provide a way to reach decision-makers and influencers when they are assessing business products and services.
• While there are good guerilla marketing tactics you can employ to make the most of your presence on LinkedIn, one key principle to remember is that the site is a user-driven community where users create content that you cannot control.
• While the drawbacks are obvious, the good news is that you get pure, unfiltered and unbiased points of view.
• The following article provide tips for fostering the good, listening and reacting to the bad and applying beauty treatments to respond to the ugly.
• 
  1. Analyze the chatter.
• You can gauge the overall reputation and health of your company by seeing what people are saying and by gathering insight and specific recommendations for improvements. Search on your company or product names and see what comes up.
• 2. Identify and network with decision makers and influencers in large organizations.
• Conduct an advanced search in the People section of LinkedIn with your target account name and a few keywords related to your product, service and the customer decision-making process.
• Review the profiles of the people the search generates and ask your contacts for an introduction, or upgrade to the InMail direct contact feature to gain access to these people directly.
• Asking for feedback is a good way to engage these people. People like to share opinions. Be genuine. Are you writing a piece of content for your website? Deciding what tradeshows to attend or publications to advertise in? Conducting a survey to improve your offering? Ask for their feedback. 
• 3. Start a user group.
• Now it can be a matter of exploring for interested people, reaching out to them to determine whether they are a current user of your product or service, and inviting them to join a user community formed by you, with a logo and a name. People list the groups they belong to in their profile and the groups become a way to build their contacts. This is a win-win since a user group also creates a way to organize and coordinate interested people to help spur market adoption and improve your offering.
• 4. Start a company group.
• LinkedIn provides ready-made functionality to create a private company group to help you expand your network and share information.
• You can use your company group to help coordinate the LinkedIn activities of your employees.
• 5. Recruit

16 more annotations...