Week 13: Managing Your Network
As you start to build your network, implementing these management tools might help you not only to organize but also communicate better with your connections.
Monday: Tag Your Connections
To those of you just getting started on LinkedIn, I am so jealous! One of the great tools that LinkedIn offers is the ability to tag your connections. Tagging is similar to lists on Facebook, and if you get into the habit of tagging your connections as you make them, you will be far ahead of folks like me who have too many connections to tag effectively, or those who just can’t be bothered. Why? Well, not only does tagging allow you to group your connections into categories of your making, it also enables you to send targeted messages to each tagged grouping.
Where do you find tags? As you can see in Figure 5-14, under Contacts click My Connections, and you will see Tags to the left of your Connections list.
Figure 5-14: Tagging
LinkedIn will qualify and tag some of your connections for you depending on how you are connected: group members, friends, partners, colleagues, classmates, and untagged. But there is so much more you can do.
You can create up to 200 tags, and then classify your connections adding as many tags to an individual’s profile as you want. Because most communications on LinkedIn are limited to only 50 recipients at a time, it’s a good idea to add fewer than 50 people to each tag. That way, you can send a message to a group of people just by clicking on the tag.
Some tags you might consider creating are:
- Men
- Women
- Strangers
- Acquaintances
- Friends (real ones—not Facebook-like friends)
- Clients
- Prospective clients
- Competition
- Affinity partners
- Locals
- Association members (list different associations)
- Conference attendees (list different conferences)
- Network members (list different networking groups)
- Niche industry
- Former coworkers
- Fellow alum
- Potential candidates to hire
- Potential employers
- Twitter friends
- Meet-up friends
- Et Cetera
So I might have one person tagged as: Woman, WOI member, WLO member, Lawyer, Previous Client, and Prospect. And now I can use any of those defining tags when creating a list of people to send a message to.
Let’s say I want to establish myself as a LinkedIn expert by sending out a new LinkedIn tip every week. I could export my contacts into my email program and send them all a tip at one time (this is somewhat frowned on by LinkedIn and I don’t recommend it either), or I could take the time to customize the tip to the specific grouping of people tagged in my network, as shown in Figure 5-15.
Figure 5-15: Sending a message to tagged connections
So the same tip can be customized:
- As a legal professional on LinkedIn, did you know you can add your areas of practice to your professional headline? You have 120 characters to work with.
- As an accountant on LinkedIn, did you know you can add your special designations to your professional headline? You have 120 characters to work with.
- As a graphic artist on LinkedIn, did you know you can add your special skills to your professional headline? You have 120 characters to work with.
As you can imagine, tagging a big network can be quite a task, so don’t wait until you have thousands of connections. If you start now and do a little each day, you can be done by the end of the month. (I know this is an hour-a-day book, but this task will definitely take you more than an hour depending on how many connections you have.) If you have an assistant or virtual assistant, you can even create some guidelines and have them do some of the work for you.
Once your connections are tagged, start creating a communications strategy. Each week reach out to different groupings of people to keep them in the loop. You don’t want these messages to always to be sales messages (at best you’ll be ignored, at worst reported as a spammer). But if you have written a relevant blog post, have discovered a new strategy they might find interesting, or have valuable information to share, then this becomes a great way to reach out and touch someone and stay top of mind. And never forget WIIFM; when you are creating your communication strategy, remember that in order for them to open your note, they are going to want to know what’s in it for them.
To help you with your communications strategy I have created spreadsheets you can download at www.sybex.com/go/linkedinhour. You’ll learn more information about these spreadsheets and how to use them in Chapter 9, “Optimizing Your Time Using LinkedIn.”
Tuesday: Use the Profile Organizer
The Profile Organizer on LinkedIn comes only with the paid premium accounts. It allows you to save and organize member profiles, add notes, and track your messages to clients, experts, job seekers, employees, candidates—just about any person of interest.
You’ll find the Profile Organizer under the Profile menu bar at the top of your home page. If you have a free account and click Profile Organizer, LinkedIn will give the option of upgrading. If you have a paid account, LinkedIn will take you to the Profile Organizer page.
One of the reasons I started paying for LinkedIn was to get access to the Profile Organizer. Until tagging came out, it was the only way to organize your network.
The Profile Organizer allows you to bookmark a person’s profile, either from the Save Profile link at the upper right of the member’s profile, or from the Search Results page (just to the right of the person’s information).
As shown in Figure 5-16, you can create a folder and put the profile in it right away, or you can just save the profile to the Profile Organizer and add that profile to a folder later. Kind of like in Google+ Circles, you can add individuals to many different folders.
Figure 5-16: The Profile Organizer
As mentioned earlier, you can also add notes about where you met that individual or why they’re important to you. No one will see the notes except for you.
If you have a premium account, you can save as many profiles as you like, but there are some limits to the folders you can add. With the basic Business account you get 5 folders, with the Business Plus account you get 25 folders, the Executive account has 50 folders, and with the Pro account you get 75 folders.
If you added a profile to a folder and you decide you don’t want them in there anymore (maybe they went from being a top prospect to a client), then all you have to do is open your Profile Organizer from your home page, click on the folder with the link to the person’s profile that you want to delete, and uncheck the box next to their name. You can also delete folders or rename them. Once you delete a folder, only the folder is gone—your profiles will be moved to an uncategorized folder that you can then rename.
The thing I like about the Profile Organizer is that you can place any profile in a folder, whether you are connected to that person or not. Until LinkedIn comes up with a real CRM system, this is at least one option of organizing and tracking your network and network communications on LinkedIn.
Wednesday: Manually Organize by PDF
As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, you can save a member’s profile as a PDF. This can be any member on LinkedIn. They do not have to be in your network.
The nice thing about saving a profile as a PDF is that not only can you save it in your own folder, but also you can send that profile to anybody you want to. Consider saving your own profile as a PDF so that you can send it to people who are not on LinkedIn.
To save a member’s profile as a PDF, click the PDF icon, as shown in Figure 5-17.
Figure 5-17: Saving a profile as a PDF
When you click the PDF icon, the LinkedIn member’s profile will download into a nicely formatted PDF file. The header will include their name, professional headline, and if they are a first-level connection, their email address.
The document will also include the Summary and Specialties sections (if they are not a new member), Experience and Education, Skills & Expertise, Honors and Awards, Recommendations, and Areas of Expertise. To make life easy, LinkedIn has added a link that allows you to contact that person through LinkedIn. Why might you want to download someone’s PDF?
- To organize your network when you don’t have the Profile Organizer
- To keep a record of someone in case they leave LinkedIn (or your network)
- As research before an interview or meeting
- For some name/face recognition before a tradeshow or conference
- To keep a file for referral partners
- To keep a file for potential clients
- To keep a file for potential employees and candidates
- To keep a file on your competition
- To keep a file on potential vendors
- And as I mentioned earlier in this chapter, to help you organize and connect to a relevant and strategic network!
Thursday: Use the Outlook Social Connector Or Xobni
There are some pretty cool third-party applications that will help you organize your network. Let’s look at a few of them now. (We’ll explore more options in Chapter 11.)
Outlook Social Connector
The Outlook Social Connector allows you to manage your professional network on LinkedIn within Microsoft Outlook. Of course if you don’t have Outlook, this isn’t going to work.
To find the Outlook Social Connector, go down to the bottom of your screen and click Tools. Next to Overview is the tab for the Outlook Social Connector. Select that tab.
You can download LinkedIn for Outlook only in the 64-bit version on LinkedIn, but you can go to the Microsoft website to get the 32-bit version. In order for the LinkedIn Outlook Social Connector to work, you’ll need to download Outlook Social Connector from Microsoft itself. To do that, go to http://g.msn.com/0Cr1033/80. (Just be aware that doing this will download the EXE to your desktop if you have a PC.)
The Outlook Social Connector allows you to keep track of what your LinkedIn connections are doing right at the bottom of an email you receive. You can see who they’re connecting with, the articles they are reading and sharing, and the questions they’re asking and answering. Another thing I like about the Outlook Social Connector is that it keeps you up-to-date on your connections’ professional contact information. Profile details and photos from your connections will appear in your Outlook Contacts folder (which will be named LinkedIn), so you’ll always have the latest contact information from LinkedIn.
Probably my favorite part of this tool is the green Add icon that will show up next to any email sender who you are not directly connected to on LinkedIn. What an easy way to grow your network!
Xobni
Xobni (inbox spelled backward) is a company that creates inbox and address book tools that make it easier for you to search for and discover all your contacts on various social networks—even those who might not be current members of your LinkedIn network. It shows you a connection’s social media presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Hoovers as well as when they communicate, what they communicate, and analytics as the best time to communicate with them.
At this time, Xobni will only work with Outlook (not Outlook Express), Gmail, and on your Android, iPhone, or BlackBerry. There is a free membership, but I recommend the paid account, which works out to less than $10 a month. You can find Xobni at www.xobni.com.
While similar to the Outlook Social Connector in function, one thing I loved about Xobni (which has nothing to do with LinkedIn) is its appointment scheduler. When someone asks you for an appointment in an email, Xobni will pull up your calendar for the day and the times you have available. When I bought my Mac I purchased Outlook for Mac just so I could keep using Xobni.
If you use Outlook, be sure to take a look at these two options.
Friday: Explore Paid Management Tools—JibberJobber and Salesforce
There are some awesome CRM tools if you are willing to invest some money in them. We’ll take a look at JibberJobber and Salesforce here.
JibberJobber
I would be remiss not to mention JibberJobber, which is a job search organizer and personal relationship manager (PRM). I am not a job seeker but I find this system intuitive and easy to use. It has all the places to add notes and documents and reminders that I need to record and follow up with my contacts effectively. I might get a notice that a client is having an anniversary and I can send a note to them via LinkedIn right from JibberJobber!
You don’t have to be a job seeker to use it, but if you are, you will be amazed at all the other tools this site offers (such as webinars, help with your 30-second introduction, insider information on companies you might want to work with). JibberJobber was designed by Jason Alba, who also happened to write one of the first books on LinkedIn, I’m on LinkedIn, Now What??? (Happy About, 2008).
Because JibberJobber is a third-party application, if someone leaves LinkedIn (or you do) you will still have access to the community you built and the conversations you had. Get JibberJobber at www.JibberJobber.com.
JibberJobber is an excellent complement to LinkedIn. LinkedIn is about finding the right people to network and communicate with and develop these relationships. JibberJobber is a great tool to track who you are communicating with and what you are saying. It’s a tracking system that lets you keep up with all the conversation.
Salesforce
As a business professional, you have probably almost certainly heard of Salesforce even if you are not using it. I mentioned the Salesforce LinkedIn app in the first chapter, and I highly recommend it for anyone using LinkedIn and Salesforce.
Let’s get this out of the way: Salesforce is not cheap! I’m not telling you to go out and get a Salesforce account. But if you are already using it in your company, have your Salesforce administrator install the application into Salesforce and provide you with access.
The LinkedIn Salesforce application lets you view LinkedIn information about your network: leads, contacts, accounts, prospects, and business opportunities right in Salesforce itself. It also keeps all the information in one place so you don’t have to move between multiple browser tabs to gather information. Not only will this save you time, but it will also keep you from losing crucial information when you click off a page.
According to LinkedIn, LinkedIn for Salesforce can help turn cold prospect information into closed deals by allowing you to:
- Quickly get accurate, up-to-date information on your leads and accounts
- Get real-time updates on your accounts and contacts so you know when to reach out and contact them (or not!)
- Gather information on LinkedIn without leaving Salesforce which, as I mentioned earlier, will save you time
This is not an inexpensive app. You need both a premium LinkedIn account and a Salesforce account. But if you already have them, definitely look into utilizing this application.