Social Media University, Global (SMUG)
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Today I am presenting the third in a monthly series of adult education social media workshops through Rochester Community and Technical College. The first was an introductory overview session, and in the second we took a deeper look at Twitter: Social Media’s Gateway Drug.
Here are my slides. Note that many of the slides contain links to the referenced Web sites.
About a month ago, John Nemo sent me a message in LinkedIn asking if I would like a review copy of his new book, Linkedin Riches: How I made $135,000 in just 90 Days using LinkedIn!”
I was wary at first because of the subtitle, which made it sound like the get-rich-quick stuff of infomercials, but I overcame that initial reaction and requested a Kindle copy.
I’m glad I did. And I’m glad that somewhere through the process, John decided to take his own advice in the naming of his book. More on that in a bit.
Because of the patient-oriented nature of my day job, I have focused much more on general consumer platforms like Facebook instead of LinkedIn. Our Human Resources department has used LinkedIn successfully for recruiting. But since the audiences I have been pursuing are mostly patients and consumers, as opposed to “B2B” as they say in the biz, I have had a profile, but haven’t spent much time personally in LinkedIn. So it was good to get perspective from someone who has.
One of the main points John makes is that your LinkedIn profile should be client-facing and framed in terms of what you can do for clients. It’s not about you. And he also gives some concrete suggestions for how to implement this philosophy.
So here’s how I used his advice on my own LinkedIn profile.
Before:
After:
Before:
After:
Those are three positive changes in my profile in just the first chapter. The combination of the client-facing mindset and some practical tips makes this a good resource.
As his book is now published, it was good to see that John retitled it to follow his own client-facing advice. You will remember that the previous subtitle was all about him: “How I made $135,000 in Just 90 Days Using LinkedIn!”
While that might appeal to some, the new title is much more oriented toward benefits for the reader.
And if you’re looking for a quick read with some helpful tips on using LinkedIn, I think you’ll find it worthwhile.
In the last week, I’ve needed to get in touch with a few people via email about a social media project. For a few of them, I was missing email addresses so needed to contact the participants first by some other means to ask them to send their email addresses.
For Contact #1, I knew we were connected on LinkedIn, so I decided to send him a message through that service on Friday, Dec. 30.
For the next three, I checked first to see whether they were following me on Twitter, and sent them direct tweets instead.
Finally, yesterday, after having not heard from #1, I sent a direct tweet.
Here is the table of my results:
I realize this isn’t a large enough sample to be statistically meaningful. I also realize that my LinkedIn message was sent on a Friday before a holiday weekend, so it probably wasn’t the fairest test. But I wasn’t exactly fair to Twitter, either. For participants 2-4, I sent the tweets in the mid-to-late evening, possibly after some had gone to bed (they were all an hour ahead of me in the Eastern time zone). Number 3 responded at 4 a.m. I sent a follow-up to Number 4 the next afternoon, and this time the response was less than 2 hours.
Still, these results do fit with what I perceive as my experience in the relative responsiveness of Twitter vs. LinkedIn.
I think it relates to the way most people interact with the platforms. I don’t have statistics to support this (if you have some, please put them in the comments), but it seems people tend to use LinkedIn through its Web site. When you send someone a message in LinkedIn, therefore, people see it when they visit the site, or possibly through an email notification.
On Twitter, people can get notifications of new messages in those ways, but also tend to use smart phone clients or get text message alerts. This makes it much more likely they will get the notice quickly, wherever they are.
I’m not hacking on LinkedIn; it obviously has capabilities Twitter doesn’t, and you need to use different tools depending on what you want to accomplish. For soliciting and organizing professional recommendations, for instance, LinkedIn is clearly superior.
I have the LinkedIn iPhone app (although I haven’t used it much) and it probably offers push notifications as the Twitter app does (again, I welcome confirmation in the comments). My point isn’t that people couldn’t respond as quickly on LinkedIn as they do on Twitter, it’s just that in my experience they don’t.
How about you?
When you need to reach someone quickly, and if you don’t have the old-school contact information such as email or cell phone (and yes, having grown up with a single land line and snail mail, I realize the irony of calling email and cell phone “old school”), what do you find is the best social platform to use?
At our Mayo Clinic Social Media Residency, fellow faculty member Meredith Gould (who is a great humanitarian, by the way), shamed several of us for linking our Twitter profiles to LinkedIn, and for having Twitter updates automatically posted to our LinkedIn profiles.
I think that for many of us for whom Twitter is our “mother tongue” among social platforms, having Twitter updates posted to LinkedIn is a way to keep our profiles updated without visiting the site.
Meredith said it is more important that you keep your LinkedIn profile professional than it is to update it frequently, and that many tweets about personal matters will be detrimental to that goal. (And since she has more than 47,000 lifetime tweets, I can definitely see that in her case.)
Having resolved to comply with the Meredith Mandate, I went to LinkedIn this morning. As I reviewed my settings, though, I noted that there is another option, as I have captured in this screen shot:
By checking the middle box, I could limit the Twitter updates going to LinkedIn to those in which I included the #in or #li hashtags.
This seems like a good solution to me. If I think of LinkedIn while I am doing an update, I can just add one of those hashtags and the post would go to LinkedIn.
If I forget about LinkedIn and don’t include those hashtags, I am essentially following the Meredith Mandate.
What do you think? Is that a good solution?
WWMD?
Ever since I posted the 35 Social Media Theses, 492 years after Martin Luther posted his 95, I have planned to put them in a one-page PDF, to make them more portable. Here is that document:
The Creative Commons license simply requires that you not change the original document as you pass it along and that you credit the source.
You will note that within the PDF I have included links to posts or news articles on SMUG or elsewhere that support or explain the various points.
I hope this can be a good discussion starter for you in your workplace or in other organizations you’re trying to get involved in social media.
Let me know how your conversation goes!