by Caroline Leach | Mar 4, 2017 | Careers, Social Media
“In growing your network, you want it to be both diverse and concentrated,” personal branding expert William Arruda wrote recently in Forbes about how to cultivate a powerful LinkedIn network.
First, begin with why you’re on LinkedIn. What do you want to accomplish? How can growing your network help you do that?
Second, ask yourself this question: Who did you meet this week, who will you be meeting soon and who do you want to meet?
Third, take a few minutes every week to add to your LinkedIn network. Always send a personalized invitation, explaining how you know each other and why you’d like to connect.
As you build your network, make sure your profile presents you in the best light. Here are great profile tips from LinkedIn career expert Catherine Fisher and Landit CEO Lisa Skeete Tatum. They spoke this winter at the MAKERS Conference for women’s leadership.
Who did you meet this week? Did you start working with any new colleagues? How about vendors? Invite them to join your network.
What professional, civic and charitable organizations are you involved with? Invite key people from those groups to be part of your network.
Look at your email contact list, your Facebook friend list, your Twitter followers and so on. Identify the ones you want to invite to your LinkedIn network. The “grow your network” feature on LinkedIn will see who you already know based on your email address book.
At the airport recently, I ran into someone I met a few years ago at an event at my son’s school. We struck up a conversation and caught up on what was going on at our respective employers (opinions expressed in this blog are my own). To keep the connection going, I followed up with a LinkedIn invitation.
One of my professional associations, a roundtable for senior communicators, also had its quarterly meeting this week. At the end of each day, I sent personalized invitations to people I’d met. An even better strategy – one colleague sent invitations in real time during our roundtable discussion of timely issues.
Who will you be meeting soon? What’s on your calendar for the coming week or month? Will you be meeting new people? Send them an invitation in advance of the event.
When you meet in person, you’ll already be acquainted with each other’s LinkedIn profiles and you may find a great conversation starter. For example, maybe you know interesting people in common or your new connection is working on a project you want to learn more about.
Who would you like to meet? Are you working in a new area and want to learn from the luminaries in the field? Are there companies of interest you want to know more about? Are there second-level contacts you’d like to add to your network?
This is where the personalized invitation is especially important. Explain in a compelling and brief way why you’d like to connect.
Take advantage of the “people you may know” algorithm in LinkedIn. Is there anyone you’ve missed connecting with? Invite them to your network.
Lucas Buck recommends looking at alumni groups and people who have similar college degrees. He’s an area sales manager at Farmers Insurance who uses LinkedIn highly successfully to achieve his business objectives.
He spoke last fall at a networking group affiliated with my son’s school. What did I do the same day as the event? I sent personalized LinkedIn invitations to the people I met at the event, along with Lucas.
Here’s a sidenote about conference speakers. Introduce yourself and chat with the speaker briefly before they speak, if they aren’t too busy with final presentation preparation. Fewer people line up to talk with them before their presentation, as opposed to the larger group that tends to gather after the talk.
Back to LinkedIn, what strategies do you use to grow your network?
by Caroline Leach | Feb 12, 2017 | Careers, Social Media
What’s one action you can take today to kick-start your career?
Tell a bold story in your LinkedIn profile.
Here are powerful strategies from this month’s MAKERS Conference. LinkedIn career expert Catherine Fisher and Landit CEO Lisa Skeete Tatum led a standing-room-only session on managing your personal brand.
What is a personal brand? The presenters cited Jeff Bezos, who says “your brand is what people say about you when you leave the room.”
To define your brand they asked a key question: what do people want you in the room for? Put another way: what is the best of you?
How you answer these questions will shape the story you tell about yourself in social media and in real life. (And if you’re looking to reinvent your brand, there are great ideas from bestselling author Dorie Clark.)
While a brand – for a corporation, a product or a professional – is built over time, here are actions you can take today for a bolder LinkedIn profile.
They’re from the LinkedIn tip sheet above, along with how I’ve made them work for me. (Opinions expressed in this blog are my own.)
- Include a professional photo. According to LinkedIn, your profile is 14 times more likely to be viewed if you have a photo. Here’s how to take a great headshot. If you don’t have a high-quality recent headshot, get one done this month.
- Personalize your headline. Don’t use the default of your current job title. Show what you do and what makes you unique. Look at a variety of headlines for inspiration to see what catches your eye.
- Add visuals. There are 20 million pieces of content on member profiles. Is your content among those? Post videos and pictures of your best work. Upload relevant presentations that can be shared with the public.
- Post a compelling summary. Make it 40 words or more. Include keywords for your industry. Read others’ summaries to see what appeals to you. Writing in first person is stronger and bolder than third person.
- Cover your past work experience. Your profile is 12 times more likely to be viewed if you list more than one position. If you’ve been working for several years, though, you can omit earlier positions that don’t add to your story.
- Include volunteer experience and causes. This information increases profile views 6 times. If you’re looking for areas to engage, get involved with your company’s philanthropic causes and volunteer opportunities.
- Check out LinkedIn Learning. We all get to be lifelong learners, and this feature offers hundreds of online courses. It’s a great reason to become a premium subscriber, which I did a few years ago for the analytics.
- Share your contact information. Make it easy for people to get in touch with you. Include your email address, your blog, your Twitter handle and your company’s website. However, consider omitting your cellphone number.
- Customize your public URL. Here are easy instructions. For consistent branding, use your name in the URL the same way you use it in other social profiles. Put it on your resume, business card and email signature.
- Add skills and get endorsements. Be deliberate about skills you list. Your top 3 skill endorsements display in mobile search, so reorder them to show the ones that best tell your story. Give back to your network by endorsing others’ skills.
One of my goals for the MAKERS conference was to meet new people in every session. At the end of each day, I looked them up in LinkedIn. If I only had a first name and a company, I was able to search with that and find the right profile.
Then I sent personalized invitations (don’t send the default invitation!). Now we’re connected and can easily keep in touch as we build on the conference learnings.
How have you been bold in your LinkedIn profile?
by Caroline Leach | Feb 6, 2017 | Learning, Social Media
Do you have a social savvy strategy for the next conference you’re attending?
This is top of mind for me this week. I couldn’t be more excited to attend the The 2017 MAKERS Conference for women’s leadership, which starts tonight.
With the recent film Hidden Figures, I look forward to hearing from Academy Award-winning actress Octavia Spencer, pictured above, and the other luminary women and men who will be speaking.
My employer is a sponsor of the conference, and I could not be more proud. (This is where I remind readers that opinions expressed in this blog are my own.)
Here are some ideas about making the most of your conference experience in social media.
PROMOTE
How can you amplify awareness of the conference and its goals?
- Check out the social media plan for the conference. For MAKERS, this came in a series of pre-event emails with sample messages and great content to share.
- Know and use the relevant hashtag(s). #BEBOLD is the MAKERS hashtag. It’s perfect because it stands out in all caps and its brevity saves characters.
- Share pre-conference information in your social networks. In the weeks leading up to the conference, I’ve shared content in Twitter and LinkedIn.
CONNECT
How can you get to know new people you can learn from?
- Check out the attendance list in advance. If anyone already in your network is attending, you can reconnect as well as identify new people you want to meet.
- Be active in the event app – or in a social media group. Add your picture and key info to your app profile. Send messages to people you want to meet in person.
- Introduce yourself to 5 to 10 new people at each session. A goal to say hello to a focused number of people makes connections meaningful and manageable.
SHARE
How can you share valuable content with your social networks?
GROW
What can you do after a conference to share the learnings, increase the impact and grow the new network connections you made?
- Share with your colleagues. Post a summary for appropriate groups in your company’s social intranet or present it in a face-to-face meeting.
- Take one new action. Commit to doing one thing that will make a difference. My #BEBOLD action will be the subject of a future post.
How do you make the most of a conference experience in social media?
by Caroline Leach | Feb 5, 2017 | Social Media
Looking for a simple way to share great professional content in your social networks?
If your company offers an employee advocacy program, download the app and start sharing content that matches your professional goals for social media.
This can be a key part of your social media savvy strategy to personally brand and market yourself successfully in social media.
But first, what is employee advocacy?
It’s “brands empowering employees to support the goals of the brand, through employee-owned social media,” says Chris Boudreaux in Social Media Governance.
My employer makes it easy to share company-provided content with Social Circle, powered by Social Chorus. Nolan Carleton pioneered the approach, with much success.
(This is where I remind readers that opinions in this blog are my own.)
Here are 11 ways to make the most of your employee advocacy program, promoting your company while you build your own professional brand.
- Download the app. Make it easy to share content by putting the app on your mobile devices. You can use snippets of time during the week to review and share content.
- Choose content categories that support your professional goals. Align your own social media strategy with the available content categories. For example, you could focus on your company’s business strategy, the customer experience, the employee experience, career strategies or community engagement, just to name a few.
- Customize your feed for your content categories. Once you know what types of content you want to share, see if you can customize the content you see. This will make the process more efficient as you choose what to share.
- Select the social media platforms you want to post on. Assess how the available content lines up with the platforms where you’re most active for professional purposes. In my case, it’s LinkedIn and Twitter.
- Keep looking before you link. Just as you shouldn’t link to other social media content without reading it first, you should do the same with a company-provided message. Make sure it reflects well on your professional brand before sharing it.
- Tailor company-provided messages to your voice. You can use the company-provided messaging to share links, or you can edit it to be closer to your own voice. Just be sure that the edits you make reflect positively on your company.
- Share your pride in your company. Let your enthusiasm for your company shine through. Whether you love the employee experience, the products and services, or everything about your organization, share that sentiment.
- Follow your company’s social media guidelines. Make sure to follow the spirit and the letter of social media guidelines at your company. When in doubt, err on the conservative side. While you’re acting as a brand ambassador of your company, that holds you to a higher standard.
- Target 3 or more posts each week. Sprinkle your company’s posts among a broad variety of content you’re sharing. Don’t go overboard with excessive sharing. Since it’s company-related content, post it on weekdays. Your platform may enable you to schedule sharing in advance to post at a specific time.
- Share social content from colleagues. Keep an eye on content from colleagues who also engage in the advocacy program. Share their content if it fits with your overall goals. This promotes your colleagues, your company and you – a triple win.
- Experiment and refine your approach. Check the analytics for each of your social platforms to see how your community is engaging with content from your company. Make adjustments based on that, and keep fine-tuning as you go.
What if your employer doesn’t offer an employee advocacy program? Make a pitch to your Corporate Communications team.
Here’s a key data point. Consumers see recommendations from friends as the most credible form of advertising – as much as 83%, according to a Nielsen study.
And IABC Fellow Shel Holtz shares for corporate communicators that “employees are now your most credible spokespeople.” This is based on the 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer.
Also, check out the 2016 State of Employee Advocacy report from JEM Consulting and Advisory Services.
The study’s leader Jen McClure notes that, “Most employee and brand advocacy programs are still fairly new, and companies are still developing best practices.”
How are you using an employee advocacy program to promote your company’s brand along with your own?
by Caroline Leach | Jan 28, 2017 | Leadership, Social Media
It started innocently enough.
Someone mentioned me in a tweet about a business-related dispute.
I read the tweeter’s bio. I researched the issue. I realized there was nothing meaningful I could do in response.
Then the tweets came more frequently. Three, four and more times a day.
It became harder to ignore the notifications button on my Twitter app. I started to wonder if my non-response strategy was a good idea. In talking with some colleagues in the social space, we concluded that it was.
Still, it was painful being the subject of increasingly negative tweet after tweet. Generally I believe in responding.
This is especially true if it’s a customer, and it’s gratifying to help people solve issues. However, this particular case did not involve a customer.
The same as the schoolyard bully, the best response is often no response. Act indifferently for long enough, and the hater will eventually go away.
But the escalation of hate concerns me. With all of the positive energy surrounding this month’s Women’s Marches around the globe, I was disappointed by the level of vitriol in my Twitter feed.
It reminded me of Ashley Judd’s talk at the TEDWomen talk last fall. One of her tweets at a basketball game a few years ago incited a cyber mob of hate. Yet rather than responding to the haters themselves, she became an activist for a safe and free internet for everyone.
She had, from time to time, tried engaging people. She met with varying degrees of success. One person in particular had a refreshing response and actually apologized.
That made me think beyond the awful posts and comments themselves. What kind of pain must someone be in to post hateful and threatening material? What has happened to them to make them act that way? What are they most afraid of?
A Facebook friend posted recently that she was leaving the platform for a while. She was tired of the negativity and felt the best solution was to step back.
The outpouring of encouraging comments was heartening, including the advice to ignore the haters and focus on the connections with friends and family.
She still chose to take a break. But I hope she’ll be back.
Because we need positive voices. We need realistic optimism. We need civil dialogue.
And we need empathy. That was my takeaway from a bestselling book called Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. It’s an up close and personal look at rural America – the challenges, the issues, the highs and the lows.
Everyone is dealing with some kind of challenge, whether it’s visible on the outside or not. So be kind. Be caring. Be curious.
This is a strategy that has worked for Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia. Like Ashley Judd, he’s engaged haters with respect for their views. He asks questions to better understand the underlying issue.
That’s where your judgment comes in. Should you ignore or engage? Every situation is different, so what might work in one instance may not work in another.
Try seeing things from another point of view. And see where that takes you.
This is also about exercising control where you can. You can’t control the behavior of others, but you can control yourself. This includes your thoughts, your attitudes and your actions.
This concept of empowerment was beautifully expressed in the Academy Award nominated film Hidden Figures. It tells the story of three brilliant African-American women who worked as mathematicians and scientists at NASA in the early 1960s.
These inspiring and accomplished women continually had to decide whether to ignore the slights and snubs of daily life or to speak out and engage others in their struggles.
And thank goodness they did, time and time again, because they changed the course of history in the Space Race.
I couldn’t be more proud that my employer is offering free screenings of the film to students in major U.S. cities. (This is where I remind readers that opinions in this blog are my own.)
The positive actions that we take individually and collectively have the power to change the world.
What are you doing to make a difference?
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