Social Marketing Is Marketing

Here’s the good news. When it comes to marketing with LinkedIn, you do not have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In fact, many of the skills, tools, and strategies you have developed as a businessperson will not only be applicable to your LinkedIn social media marketing strategy but will be absolutely essential. There may be times when reading this book that you think, “Well, that’s not social media marketing, that’s commonsense marketing!” And you would be absolutely right. Social media is just another tool that you can add to your business toolbox. It might be the Swiss Army knife of your arsenal, providing many different tools in one, but it is still just a tool you can use. I think people get overwhelmed with the social media platforms themselves, forgetting the most crucial elements of marketing: communication and engagement; listening and sharing (notice which I put first). LinkedIn, like Facebook and Twitter, just gives you a different, sometimes better, sometimes more informed way to communicate with your business audience.

Do you remember your world before social networking? Those ancient days before Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter? Whatever did we do before social networking? How did we connect? How did we set up meetings? Reach our audience? Connect with employees and investors? How did we communicate before texting, tweets, and status updates? I vaguely remember a piece of ancient technology I used to use before Skype: it was called the phone. And there was that other text-based communications channel called email…as well as those practically prehistoric practices of face-to-face meetings, including coffees and networking events.

I’m being a little sarcastic here to make a point. With the “new” technology and platforms available today, many people forget to use the traditional communication platforms from which they originally built their businesses. Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes people make is only adopting social media to the exclusion of more traditional forms of communication. I’m here to tell you that even though this book is about communicating and marketing with LinkedIn, those traditional tools of the trade—your phone, your email service, your favorite coffee house, trade shows and conferences—will remain an integral part of your business marketing success. When it comes to business communication and marketing, it is amazing to me how much, and how little, our world has changed.

Do you remember the first time you heard about LinkedIn? I remember it clearly. I was the general manager of the Executive Center where we rented office space, full and part time, as well as business services and equipment to solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, and small business owners. I was sitting in one of our conference rooms overlooking beautiful old-town Fort Collins, Colorado, listening to an Internet marketing and copywriting expert, Laurie Macomber of Blue Skies Marketing, speak about Web 2.0 and how the interactivity of the Internet was affecting how we were doing business. Even though the Executive Center had a website and we did some basic brochure type marketing on the Web, I had no idea of the power of web marketing. I learned many things from Laurie that day. Near the end of her presentation, Laurie mentioned this online business networking site called LinkedIn and how she had used it in her move from Manhattan to Fort Collins to find the office space, realtors, vendors, and business contacts she would need in a new city.

This was early 2006 when Facebook was still a newfangled site for college students, MySpace was scaring the pants off parents and the only social networking sites that “normal” people knew about was Classsmates.com and Match.com. So the idea of a business-focused social networking site was intriguing to me. Since I had doubled our office business center membership in a year with face-to-face networking events (which I still strongly advocate), I thought, “If I can do that in a town of 100,000 people, what can I do with 7 million people using LinkedIn?” Our business was an interesting combination of business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C), virtual, and brick-and-mortar, so there really were no limits. Apparently I was not the only person having these thoughts. In 2006, LinkedIn soared to 20 million users and it became apparent that this was a social networking site that wasn’t going away.

The Theory of Inbound Marketing

There are all kinds of descriptions and theories of inbound marketing. In fact, we have a whole book on it, Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs, co-authored by the “Father” of inbound marketing, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shaw (John Wiley & Sons, October 2009). To put it simply, take everything you know about traditional marketing and turn it on its head.

Traditional outbound or push marketing is about sending out (blasting) your message to your potential customers and clients and “interrupting” them in their homes, places of work, and so forth. Traditional marketing tools are TV and radio ads, direct mail, newsletters, coupons, and just about any other form of marketing you and your ancestors experienced up until about 2004. Traditional marketing takes a lot of money, research, and time. Traditional marketing worked in the past because people had to interact with the marketing medium. They had to watch the commercials on TV and listen to ads on the radio. The ads were in our newspapers, in our newsletters, and in our mailboxes.

But then we, as the consumer, started making our own choices. We recorded TV shows and fast-forwarded through commercials. Later the adoption of TIVO and DVR technologies allowed us to skip commercials altogether. We subscribed to XM Radio. We downloaded our own music and created our own playlists. We decided what we wanted to absorb, and in most cases it wasn’t the commercials and advertising of products and services we had no interest in.

So began the shift.

Another huge shift was Web 2.0 enabling communities’ ability to comment on products or services in a very public manner. We trusted our peers, what they liked or disliked, much more than the advertisements landing on our TV screen that we were no longer even looking at.

In order to grab the attention of their consumers, marketers had to start producing content that was valuable, useful, and interesting to them. They had to start building relationships with their consumers. And relationship marketing took on a whole new meaning. Beyond the more traditional definition of relationship marketing as getting to know your prospect on a lunch date or via referral, relationship marketing became about engaging a tribe of like-minded individuals, people who knew, liked, and trusted you enough to buy your product or service.

There’s one very positive result of this inversion of the marketing pyramid: Not only is more useful content being shared, but engaging in inbound marketing is markedly less expensive than traditional marketing. Anyone with time, knowledge, passion, and a computer can play!

What does this have to do with LinkedIn? As I mentioned earlier, LinkedIn was built on a platform of relationships. Its mission statement is to “Connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.”

Many of the techniques you’ll learn in this book have to do with creating and sharing content that your connections and network will find interesting and valuable. I’ll share step-by-step techniques, whether you are a beginner or an advanced user, that will help you to more easily engage with the exact people you need to in order to be “more productive and successful.”