The other night, Amelia finds me on Facebook and friends me. Cool enough. Of course, after accepting her invitation, one of the next things I do is head on over to twitter to try and find her there as well. I find her account, easily enough, but its a protected account, so I request to follow her. Last night, I get the following message from her on Facebook:

Hi Chris got your tweet invite but I don’t tweet just got onto facebook through brenda…..

At this point I’m going to pick on Amelia just a little bit here, and ask that she recognize that I’m absolutely NOT blasting her personally, its just that she’s convenient fodder for this situation that I’ve seen play out time and again. In fact I do recognize that she, along with a lot of other people, are just starting to figure out these tools and I commend them for at least playing around with them. I’d also like to point out at this point that since lots of people ARE figuring things out right now, that it has started to turn into a race to see who gets there first.

Anyway, after I had mustered up a good head of false indignation and misplaced ire, I got ready to answer her directly, when I realized two things:

• 1. it didn’t matter how she answered my next question, my responses would all be pretty similar
• 2. this would make a good post that could help more people than just her.

So, now its a blog post, and I’ll just send her and the other trainers a link to it.

So, anyway, my next question to her would have been this:

What is your competition doing on Twitter?

There are only 3 basic responses to that question; nothing, I don’t know, and something.

My responses to each of those are:

Nothing

You mean that there’s a space on the internet, the fastest growing in all of history, and NO ONE from your industry is there, and the first one in basically OWNS that space?”

I don’t know

“You mean that there’s a space on the internet, the fastest growing in all of history, and you have NO IDEA if your competition is there, what they’re doing, or how they are using it?”

Something

“You mean that there’s a space on the internet, the fastest growing in all of history, and whether they’re actually doing it right or not, you are letting your competition exist there UNCHALLENGED?”

Now, about her account being ‘protected’, my personal feelings on that are that you might as well not be on the network as far as branding and promotion go if your account is protected. Since she hasn’t really used Twitter, I understand that its kind of locked up until she gets there. Also, there are plenty of reasons to have a protected account, but a protected account shouldn’t be the account that you use to connect to your potential clients, your professional community and your fans. Keep the protected accounts for personal or ‘top secret’ uses only. If your account is open, you are FAR more likely to attract new followers, be indexed on Google, retweeted, and linked to than if your account is locked.

The best part of all of this is, that between all of the trainers, they already have a very solid foundation for a community. They are not a single person standing alone in the twittersphere, they are a ready-made network, able to share information freely among themselves about interesting topics in their industry, ready to set themselves up as leaders, poised to grow, and available to help and answer questions, even if their original followers are simply their students.

My advice to the trainers would be this. Each trainer opens their own Twitter account. Next, start a Twibe over on http://twibes.com, which basically creates a twitter community that allows someone to join their community and automatically linked to EVERYONE in that community. Also, people can come and go, and there’s no work on the part of any community member to keep track of who is where, since its all updated automatically. Third, set a schedule so that on busy days, they know someone will take the time to stop by and check on the twibe conversations, answer questions, greet new members, etc. The trainers are staggered through the globe, in Europe, the US, Australia and China. If everyone just logged in on their lunch break, they would have more than enough coverage in any given day. Finally, any of the trainers who blog (another topic altogether) should either manually tweet when a new post is published, or download a plugin for their blog that will do that automatically. I currently use WordTwit from Brave New Code.

Bob and I start talking about Twitter in episode 303 of Creative Independence which will drop this weekend. We cover setting up your account, branding, account options and the like. In episode 305 we’re going to go over some of the more interesting ways to leverage Twitter in your business. We also need to jump onto using Facebook soon, since it seems to be where everyone is starting.

I’m dying to let you know who these people are, but until I know who is where, and more importantly, whether or not their competition really is using these tools, I’d hate to tip off the competition that they can basically get in there unchallenged at this point.

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Marty’s Questions

Chris & Bob… just listened to PT 2 of your LinkedIn Podcast…. all good info, but I was wondering if you would be touching on how to find potential clients on LinkedIn, or even LinkedIn ettiquette. Anything planned ?

I know you guys answered how to find people, …. [but] I’ve tried to find people with specific job titles such as Art Director and sometimes that title doesn’t seem to be listed for certain companies. More importantly is [it] appropriate to contact companies through LinkedIn to ask for that specific information, as if I were making a cold call, or is that considered bad ettiquette ?
Thanks again.

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My Answers

So, getting back to Marty’s question…

A couple of things to understand about LinkedIn. First, just because a company is on LinkedIn, doesn’t mean that all of its employees are. Like any other social site, it’s up the individual to join if they’d like. In this way, LinkedIn may not prove to be the greatest tool if you’re building your own sales list. One way to perhaps find people you can contact would be to check the LinkedIn job boards for the type of work you’re looking to provide, then under each posting, there’s a link to click and see who you might know at that company.

Second, as far as etiquette goes, one of the great things about LinkedIn is that you can specify how or why you’d like to be contacted, so each user can set their own terms for why and how people can contact them. So, for instance, at the bottom of my profile, you’ll see that I’ve asked to be contacted for:

• career opportunities
• consulting offers
• new ventures
• expertise requests
• reference requests
• getting back in touch

I personally don’t want anyone asking me if I can hire them (I can’t) or sell me services, so those are not listed. However, some people are interested in those opportunities, and they’ll give permission on their profiles. In those cases, feel free to approach them with your resume or sales pitch. A possible work around that might be helpful is this; if you’re already contacting someone through another channel, you can use your LinkedIn profile to solidify your reputation by shooting them a quick note, inviting them to visit your profile for more information about you before you meet, which can be especially helpful if you’ve got good recommendations or know people friends in common. You can even invite your client to question any friends in common about you, your work and your reputation.

Also, as far as etiquette goes for contacting a company, if you know the company you wish to contact, and if they’ve got a profile page on LinkedIn with contact information, it is absolutely permissible to contact that company and ask how to get in touch with the person that you need to speak with. They may not give it to you, but that’s a different discussion entirely.

So, we’ve discussed that LinkedIn perhaps isn’t the best list-building search tool. It is, however, is a great network-building tool. Once you’ve done your best to spiff up your profile, link to it from everywhere. If you want to build your network, you need to let people know you have a profile; get THEM to find YOU and request a link. Put your link on your business cards, your website, your twitter account; anywhere. I put it on my email signatures, that way folks who I deal with in business or even socially that I might not be linked to might see it and reach out to me. The reason for building the network is to increase your own reach. For instance, I don’t know ANYBODY at Pixar, but because of the connections I’ve built over the past 5 or 6 years, I can contact dozens of folks there by reaching out through people that I know who can get me in touch with them. Again, there’s the whole etiquette thing, but even sitting down for a phone call just to feel a place out or conducting an informational interview with someone is often priceless.

LinkedIn is also a great promotional tool. LinkedIn has good Google juice, so any links you provide from your profile to your site can only help. Anyone, say a potential employer or client, who might be checking you out will most likely run across your LinkedIn profile at the top of any Google search, and your LinkedIn profile is likely to be much more professional than many of your other profiles they might run across. Participating in the Questions and Answers section will help to brand you as an expert in your industry when people come looking for a problem solver.

Finally, if you’re interested in getting hired either as an employee or as a consultant, LinkedIn is a great place to be, since hiring professionals are looking here all the time.

In my own experience, LinkedIn is more of a long-term relationship building tool than a quick-hit sales tool.