LinkedIn: You Can No Longer Ignore This Social Media Tool

May 18, 2011 by · 1 Comment

LinkedIn Blog

When LinkedIn surpassed 100 million members, the official LinkedIn Blog published an interesting set of fun statistics. All joking and funny statistics aside, LinkedIn is an extraordinary powerhouse of a site. If you’re not using it for recruiting top talent, business development, market research, prospecting for sales, lead generation and nurturing, branding, pr, and content delivery to your target market – then you’re leaving a pile of money and opportunity sitting on the table.

Here’s a couple of simple examples to illustrate how poorly most people and companies use LInkedIn:

We created a simple one-page self-assessment for executive job seekers to evaluate their LinkedIn Profile to determine whether it was effective in attracting the attention of recruiters, hr managers, and hiring executives. Over 1000 executive job seekers sent us back their completed profiles – less than 10% met a minimum standard.

In a recent survey of company hiring practices in the Vistage and TEC Community of companies in the $5-$50 million revenue size, less than 5% use LinkedIn as a proactive sourcing tool to find passive candidates.

In our Executive Search Practice for high level sales professionals and sales managers,we discovered through in-depth interviewing that less than 20% leverage LinkedIn effectively for referral networking – yet referral networking has proven to be the most viable method of generating sales for products/services which lend themselves to solution selling vs. transactional selling.

What’s wrong with this picture?

If LinkedIn is such an effective tool and resource, why do so many professionals and companies underutilize it?

Is it a training issue – most professionals and companies don’t know how to leverage LinkedIn? Then the question surfaces of why they are not getting training? Is it a unconsciously incompetent issue – we don’t what we don’t know. Is it that there is a steep learning curve and no one wants to take the time to come up the learning curve because they don’t yet buy into the value from using LinkedIn?

Help me out – I’m curious why you’re not rushing to start using this amazing tool. Even if you just use it for recruiting great talent and prospecting for ideal customers, are you still not convinced it could bring better people to your company, reduce sales costs, and improve lead generation?

Here’s a few fun statistics from LinkedIn about their membership:

 

  • 1,091 profiles with chocolatier listed as a position
  • 79+ million job transitions/changes tracked
  • 46 profiles with beatboxer listed as a position
  • 428%: Year-over-year membership growth rate in Brazil, one of our fastest-growing countries
  • Lee, Smith and Kumar have alternated over the last 8 years as the most common last name of newly registered users
  • 951 years: duration of back-to-back 5-minute phone calls made by 100 million professionals
  • 50%: year-over-year growth in our iPhone skill index
  • 4 profiles with dog or cat psychologist / psychiatrist listed as a position
  • Some industries with the fastest year-over-year new member growth rates: Education (175%), Facilities Services (121%), and Ranching (112%)
  • 100% of Fortune 500 companies have executives on LinkedIn
  • 1 profile has martini whisperer listed as a position

 

To see all the fun statistics, click the link below:

The LinkedIn Blog – 100 Million Gumballs

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: social media · Tagged: , , ,

Can Twitter Help Your Business?

January 21, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Savvy B2B Marketing Blog

Here’s an interesting blog posting on the Savvy B2B Marketing Blog about the power and leverage social media can bring to a business, especially Twitter. The author presents a number of different scenarios in how Twitter might be used within your business.

Unless you’re living under a rock, you probably noticed everyone jumping on the social media bandwagon over the past year or two –  Twitter in particular. Along with the enthusiasm (hype?), there has been a debate over which social media platforms are appropriate for which businesses and how they would be used to their best effect.

Many executives, consultants, coaches, and speakers say to me”:

Barry – what’s this Twitter thing about? Why are people so excited to be sending messages that they’re standing at the dry cleaners or supermarket? I don’t get it and I don’t see the value of it.

To read more about leveraging Twitter for B2B marketing, sales, and lead generation, check out the post by clicking on the link below:

Savvy Speaks: Best B2B Twitter Tips – Savvy B2B Marketing

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: social media · Tagged: ,

Is It Time to Put the Social into Customer Service?

June 3, 2010 by · Leave a Comment

Another excellent article was recently posted on Mashable by Lauren Vargas, Community Manager at Radian6, about implementing social media within the customer service function. All in the name of improving customer interactions, relationships, and communication. The title of the article was “5 Steps to Taking Customer Service Social.”

Success stories can be found everywhere in almost every business sector imaginable where companies are beginning to leverage the power of social media first in their customer service/customer engagement functions.

Implementing social media tools, activities, tasks, and processes within customer service can serve a three-fold role: It allows you to put your toe in the water around using social media, provides a great “testing” platform for trying different things, and it might have the greatest short term impact on your business – both from a revenue and bottom line impact – not to mention the competitive advantage it could give your firm.

Do you have a plan to research how social media might play a role in your customer service function? Who will be responsible for the research and recommendations?

If you don’t have the internal resources, have you considered hiring an “expert” to help guide you through implementing social media in your company.

What’s holding you back from examining, researching, testing, and piloting social media within your company – especially in the customer service area?

We’re well beyond early-adopter, geeky, flaky type applications. Social media is now a mainstay of interaction for most people, whether it be through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogging, or a specific industry forum – whether you’re a travel nut, foodie, or B2C supplier.

It would be a shame if your competitors got a year head start over you in leveraging social media to build stronger relationships with your customers.

Barry

Filed Under: social media · Tagged: , ,

Are You Adapting to the New Frontier of Social Media

June 2, 2010 by · Leave a Comment
Image representing Mashable as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase

One of my favorite social media “news” blogs to follow is Mashable. If you want to stay current on all the latest tool, tips, examples, illustrations of how to use social media – particularly in an entrepreneurial to small business company – you should subscribe to the RSS feed for Mashable.

I was reading an interesting article today that was was posted on Mashable titled 5 Small Business Success Stories. It talked about how 5 different small businesses  -4 retailers and 1 service company – were changing their entire business model as a result of social media.

My business model has changed dramatically with the coming of age of social media. My cost structure for recruiting talent has declined dramatically, my leads for new executive search projects, consulting projects, and hiring manager training have increased significantly through our web presence – especially blogging. We’ve even created an entire web-based business model that includes e-commerce and on-line training.

How are you leveraging – incorporating – adapting – social media into your business?

  • Are you engaging with potential customers at a different level?
  • Is social media enabling you to differentiate yourself more effectively?
  • Is the quality of your customer service increasing beyond your peers?
  • Can social media give you a competitive advantage?
  • Is it opening up a new world of networking for candidates, benchmarking, and information?

How have you started to adapt social media to your business model?

Barry

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Filed Under: social media · Tagged: , , , ,

Navigating around the Vistage Leadership Community Portal

April 1, 2010 by · Leave a Comment

Navigation around the Vistage Leadership Community Portal

In this blog post, I’ll describe how to navigate around to some of the key areas on our Vistage Leadership Community Portal Site.

We’ve already discussed in another blog posting the tabbed content of Best Practices. You can read about the tabbed structure of this site by CLICKING HERE.

At the top along the header you’ll see four links for “home”, “contact us”, “meet the experts”, and “why am I here?” These are links on our website that help you to navigate the site and provide additional information.

The home link returns you from any tab of information with blog feeds, such as the managing sales tab, back to the home page of the blog on best practices.

The contact us link provides you with a contact form to send a quick message back to us.

The Meet the Experts Page gives a short background on both Brad and I, and all our guest blogger experts.

The Why Am I Here Page provides a precise reason for reading the blog, using this site as your “portal” site for information, tools, tips, techniques, and discussion on hiring, retention, leadership, managing sales, and social media. You’ll also be able to see the more active Vistage Community Members who have established a very strong reputation for the quality of their unique content and blog frequently with great value and advice.

At the bottom of every page are 3 columns of information. First, is the Recent Posts column which lists the last 10 recent posts. Second, The featured posts column lists blog articles that we consider to be the best content posted on the blog (check back often since the posts in this column change frequently). Third, is a series of links to our LinkedIn Discussion Groups for Hiring and Retention, Vistage Chairs for leveraging social media to find great members, Vistage Members to build and enhance their business through social media, and Vistage Speakers/TAs to engage to market their services and engage with their clients more effectively.

On the sidebar (which only appears when you are on the home page/blog article listing), you’ll find a search box to locate information based on your search term. Below that you’ll find a list of blog articles that are specifically for managing your interaction with this portal, including how to navigate the site, the tabbed structure of content, and how to share information you find useful with other members of the Vistage Community.

Moving down the sidebar, you’ll see the ability to find articles listed by category, by series, and by tags (hot topics). Below that is a listing of the key blog posts for how to use this Portal site for information and learning.

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: blog information · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,