LinkedIn as a Garden

This week our Guest Blogger is Dan Olson of Star Collaborative. He is a master at working with LinkedIn and his business has experienced much success as a result of it.

Linked In as a Garden
The old adage ‘You can’t fake a crop’ is the main thought here. The most successful networkers I have encountered view LinkedIn as a garden that requires frequent care and feeding. Just like a gardener that constantly waters or weeds their plants, LinkedIn has a multitude of activities that require your attention before you can harvest something from it.

To increase adoption, and to make it more palatable, I suggest the following approach to tending to your LinkedIn garden: Plan on spending three sessions a week with your LinkedIn profile, for no more than ten minutes each time. A Monday - Wednesday – Friday rhythm has proven to be most effective, and helps keep you top of mind with your connected network.

Mondays: Write a recommendation for someone you know that has done exemplary work and is deserving of praise. Be genuine in your writing, specific in your comments, and choose people who have made a significant difference. Write the recommendation in Word so that you benefit from its grammar and spell check features, then cut and paste it into LinkedIn. Shoot for a 5 to 7 sentence write up.

I recommend that you write at least ten recommendations for others before asking someone to write one for you (pay it forward). In fact, I have seen many people who make a ten week commitment to this approach get spontaneous recommendations written for them by week four or five. People take notice of such activities and feel motivated to respond in kind. Posting recommendations is a great way to help people in your network get credit for the things that they have done, and helps them build their online brand.

Wednesdays: Post a book recommendation to your profile using the Amazon Reads module. You do not need to add any commentary, simply chose one business book that you think your network will be interested in or gain some special insight from. Since this takes only a minute, also post an interesting article to your status. Pick something that relates to your career brand or area of specialty (project management, logistics, marketing, etc.). Make sure you are posting something that has value and is interesting or provocative.

Fridays: Since you are undoubtedly always working on your resume, chose one interesting factoid or sentence from your resume and add it to your LinkedIn profile. Don’t fall into the trap that you need to spend eight hours perfecting your profile in one fell swoop. Most people who attempt this get burnt out by the activity, get frustrated with LinkedIn’s poor user interface, or loose enthusiasm for the work. Again, if you are viewing this as a long-term project, give yourself ten or more weeks before you see significant improvements or changes to your profile.
Since this cut and paste will take you mere moments, use Fridays as a day to find a group or forum on LinkedIn that relates to your career interests. Once you find an interesting group, join it so it is listed on your profile, and start interacting with the people there. Within your budgeted ten minutes of activity, you should be able to read the postings of others, answer a few questions, and ask a few of your own. This is a great way for you to help others, learn new ideas, and to further substantiate your online presence.

LinkedIn is a journey
So, what’s the net effect of this LinkedIn interaction regime?

1) It’s a great way to pay it forward and help others: Writing recommendations, posting interesting articles and books, as well as helping others in groups all contributes to good karma. Have an abundance mentality first when it comes to networking. It is the right thing to do.

2) It keeps you top of mind: Each time you do something to your LinkedIn profile, it sends a notice out to everyone in your network and shows up in their newsfeed and daily summary e-mails. I have found that people who show up three times a week are more likely to get attention and responses from people in their network. Those who show up more often get ignored as spammers, those who post less frequently are easily forgotten.

3) It keeps you engaged: As you work on these activities, with this frequency, it is easily absorbed into your daily routine, and will soon become a habit. It will also help you in your face-to-face networking since you will have more knowledge of the person in question through your LinkedIn interactions. Like Facebook, LinkedIn will allow you to monitor your colleagues’ work lives and interact with them constantly.

4) It builds your online brand: Linked In is the virtual storefront of your brand. Make sure that you are creating a compelling an accurate value prop for people to see and respond to. These activities will help build out a robust picture of who you are, making you a more valuable resource to the people in your network.

To me, LinkedIn is a journey, not a destination. You will never complete editing your profile or finding something new and interesting to add to it. There will always be another connection to make, recommendation to write, or question to post. If you use a pay-it-forward mentality, you can significantly help your colleagues in their career endeavors while making deposits on a karma bank account. If you help others via this tool, you will get back as much as you give.

Are you LinkedIn?