Free LinkedIn Infographic http://szeak.com/profile-infographic/
Contact Doug Brown doug@szeak.com
Doug’s 5 steps for LinkedIn contacts:
Profile Find Your “Perfect Customer”
Contact Requests
Contact follow-up
Message
Move Conversation Outside of LinkedIn
Nonprofit Chat with Doug Brown
The Interview Transcript
Hugh: Greetings. Russell Dennis and Hugh Ballou are back. As normal, we are interviewing someone that has really good content. Tonight, our guest is Doug Brown. Doug is an expert in a number of areas. I have known him for a few years. Every time that I have a conversation with him, I learn a lot of stuff. I want you to take notes. There will be some infographics and other things you will be able to take advantage of. Go to nonprofitchat.org if you want to see the notes and the transcript. Doug Brown, welcome to the Tuesday nonprofit chat.
Doug: Thanks, Hugh and Russell. It is a pleasure to be here tonight.
Hugh: Tell us a little bit about you. You run Newswire, and you have this really secret power with LinkedIn. Give us a sense of who you are and what your skills are.
Doug: Well, I have been in Internet marketing since there has been Internet. Our first project was in 1995, and that is about the start of Internet marketing. I have been around the Internet and trying to figure out how to capitalize on the resources there for a long time. I hate to date myself, but I wasn’t really young when I started doing that either.
At any rate, in 2003, we started a company—I was involved when it started—of Newswire Network. Newswire is a press release distribution program. It goes to Google News. It syndicates press releases on behalf of other people across the web and in the real world also. Newswire has been a fairly successful company. It has been around for a long time. We experienced some meatier growth in the last few years, and almost all of that is attributable to what we did in LinkedIn. You and I have been talking about that a little bit, and I appreciate the chance to share what we have learned about LinkedIn and connecting and social marketing. I think all those things are applicable to anyone who is trying to form relationships and trying to monetize their relationships, whether it’s in a for-profit setting, a nonprofit setting, or just about anywhere else. That is my background. I have been in journalism and Newswire almost exclusively for the last 13 years. But like I say, part of running any business is finding people to pay you to use your service. We figured something out about LinkedIn that may not be totally unique. I am sure other people have figured out similar ways to utilize the platform, but maybe what is unique is I am willing to sit here and talk about it.
Hugh: That’s awesome. I see a lot of people on all social media, and LinkedIn is no exception. It is social. Social means relationship. I get tired of people hammering me with stuff. The expertise that you bring to clients is how to build relationships and how to build your sphere of influence because in charities, we want to have donors, we want to have board members, we want to have volunteers, we want to have stakeholders who are participating. That ain’t going to happen if we haven’t built a relationship and understand what their passion is. Russell has spoken about that in previous sessions, about how do we connect with a passion of the people who really could serve us well. We are going to talk primarily about LinkedIn tonight…
Doug: Let me just pick up on that and emphasize that that is exactly true. When we started seeing some growth in our business is when we decided we are going to start forming relationships with people rather than just trying to present them with *audio issue* And that is what social networking and specifically LinkedIn is great for. We talk about some of the differences between LinkedIn and other social networks. It really is social first, and you have to remember that.
Hugh: It is. There are so many people who don’t understand that. We actually repel the people we are trying to attract. Before we get into this LinkedIn, I have some questions for you.
Doug, let me touch on Newswire for a minute before we go to LinkedIn. Newswire.net is the site. What problem are you solving for people with Newswire.net?
Doug: Newswire is a way to communicate your events, your news in your words to the media. Even more specifically, to your target audience. There has been a real change in the way media is consumed and distributed. Like a lot of people listening, I used to read two or three or four newspapers a day. Gee, reading three newspapers a day would take 15 minutes now because my local paper went from hundreds of pages down to maybe tens or fives of pages. News is different than it used to be. Even Google News has changed a lot in the 10 or 12 years it’s been out there. It used to be an idea that a press release was prepared and sent out to the local newspaper, the local TV station, the local whatever with the idea that it was going to be republished in the local paper. In a really few number of years, that has changed, almost because there is nobody home at the local newspaper. People consume their news online, and that is one of the great things about Newswire and Google News specifically. Newswire specializes in putting the news of our subscribers into Google News and places where they can communicate their story directly to consumers without having to hope and pray that somebody at the local paper picks it up and republishes it. We are just a publication service. We are a way for people to disseminate the news about their organizations out to the public directly.
Hugh: I would encourage people to look at it because it’s very cost-effective. Your reach is enormous. You can audit where it shows up online so people can see all the places it’s been published.
Doug: Through the last 15 years, Newswire has created its own weather system, so to speak. We have over 100,000 page views a day on Newswire. A typical release will get 1,000 or more views right on our site in addition to what it gets elsewhere. A lot of the views on our site come from Google News. We are indexed on Google News. People come searching for whatever keywords you happen to use, find it, come to our site, and read the post. We try to design our site in a way so that it’s sticky and people can see related stories. They may come to see someone else’s story and end up on yours. People read on average about four stories every time they visit Newswire. It’s a great way to get your information out there. Like you said, it’s very cost-effective.
Hugh: 100,000 views a day?
Doug: A day. Yeah.
Hugh: You slipped that in there. Newswire.net. We will put the link in the notes for today.
I’ve experienced your work with LinkedIn to be a refreshing change with some of these tools that people are using that says, “Hi, I’m so-and-so. Let’s have a conversation. I want to sell you something.” Let me ask you the same question with LinkedIn. This whole thing is creating your position of influence in connecting the people that matter. I reframe the stuff that you sent to me because that is what we are doing with charities. We don’t know how to get out of our own way and tell our message. There are lots of nonprofit leaders and business leaders. LinkedIn is a really good platform. What people are you solving for people with LinkedIn? Then we will go to why it’s different. Tell us what problem you’re solving for people with LinkedIn.
Doug: The rest of the resume, the thing that I didn’t really continue on, was we were so successful in building some tools and some ways to do things for LinkedIn that we have taken a few clients that we do this process for. You know a couple people I’ve done that for. Just to continue on there, the problem that we solve through LinkedIn is we help people make the right kind of connections. We help them connect with their target audience. We sometimes call it your ideal or perfect customer. We help them identify that perfect customer and help them create a relationship with that person that over time can be turned into a business relationship of some sort or another. That could be inviting someone to participate on a board or in an event, or identifying and creating a conversation with someone you may not otherwise have had an opportunity to get in touch with. Maybe they run in a different circle or live in a different city, state, or even country for heaven’s sakes. There is half a billion people almost on LinkedIn nowadays. It’s a very different place than the other social networks. You have big numbers on Facebook that LinkedIn will never match, but the difference is that LinkedIn is all about business and for business.
Let me throw a couple of statistics out off the top of the head. The people that live in the United States that are LinkedIn members have an average income of $110,000.
Hugh: Oh my word.
Doug: Yeah. Isn’t that amazing? It’s not a bunch of teenagers. It’s not people sharing kitty pictures. They are about business, and people are there to do business and to connect for business. Yes, the problem that we solve, and the mindset—without getting too far ahead of ourselves here—I’d almost venture to say that 90-some-odd percent of people who are listening to this, if you go back and look at your LinkedIn profile, it reads like a resume. Hugh, that might hit a little close to home. You and I worked on your profile a while ago.
Hugh: Yeah, that was a paradigm shift for me.
Doug: The first thing to recognize is that unless you are a job hunter, which is a legitimate thing to do on LinkedIn, but unless you are there to hunt for a job, your profile shouldn’t look like a resume. It shouldn’t be a resume. It should be like every other landing page. This has been something I have been doing for 20 years—like every other thing on the Internet. It ought to have benefits. What do I get out of connecting with Hugh Ballou? What’s in it for me? That’s what everybody at the end of the day wants to know: What’s in it for me? So that’s really where we start with all of the people that we deal with and where I will start with our free session tonight. Let’s make sure that your profile is something that invites the right kind of people to connect with you. Telling people that you are the CEO or Executive Director gives them no reason to want to connect with you. If you tell them what you can do for them or what you do for others, now you are starting down the right track. We can talk more specifics with that, but that is the first problem we solve. Trying to get people to use LinkedIn correctly and not as a spot to host their resumes.
Hugh: That is a paradigm shifter right there. This has brought out potential conflict in my mind. I have a Hugh Ballou profile on LinkedIn, and I have a SynerVision Leadership Foundation page. Should I have a separate profile for SynerVision? Or is a different page under Hugh Ballou okay? Is that wrong?
Doug: I think that’s the right way to do it. I would imagine that a lot of people on this call have connected with Hugh on LinkedIn, and if they haven’t, I invite people to go look at Hugh’s profile on LinkedIn. You will get a good idea of where to start because we spent some time thinking about that and working on it. We have an infographic we will share that gives you that information. It starts with your title. If you scroll through your friends on LinkedIn, you will see titles that say “Managing Partner, Accountant, Business Manager,” all those things. They are resume things. Those things don’t do anything for anyone. Unless they are looking to find an accountant, you better not have Accountant in your profile, even if you are the world’s greatest accountant. Even if you are an accountant and you are trying to make a profile, you probably should do something like, “I save people tax dollars,” or “I help people pay the right amount of taxes.” Give them a benefit. Don’t just give them your resume. Tell them why you are worth connecting to. Why are you worth knowing?
Hugh: Yeah. There are people commenting on Facebook about how good this is. Shannon Gronich was here a couple weeks ago talking about her piece on publicity. You are going to be back with us on this on the 25th of July.
Doug: I am going to shift hats and put on the PR hat.
Hugh: You will be back here with some good folks. You helped me fine-tune the Hugh Ballou piece. So I’m thinking that I haven’t even thought about the piece for my nonprofit. That would apply to that as well, wouldn’t it?
Doug: It kind of would. The thing you have to realize is that even if you are General Motors, your company page is not very well viewed on LinkedIn. People are on LinkedIn to find out about other people and not to find out about companies. Your company profile is in my opinion better served through your webpage, so link your profile to your webpage. If you do multiple things, link multiple web pages.
The bottom line is still Hugh Ballou is worth knowing because of the benefits you can bring to people, not because you went to MIT. I don’t know where you went to college, I’m sorry. But your resume and where you worked last year is not why they want to know you. They want to know you because of what they can learn from you or what they can get out of you. That is what we focused on. We took a quick run through your profile the other day. That is the way it is. That is what it’s all about.
That is what the profile is all about, letting people know the benefits, not the features. People don’t want to know the features. Nobody wants to know where you went to school, what your job title was at your last four jobs. Those are features. They are important to you and probably important to your wife, so I am not trying to take those things away from anyone. But me, Doug Brown, if I want to connect with you, I want to know what I get out of it. What do I get out of it? What are the benefits, not the features? Where you went to school, your last three job titles does not really interest me in connecting with you.
Hugh: We had David Corbin on brand slaughter last month and David Dunworth before that. Both of them talked about how we as leaders present the brand. If I am the executive director, or if I am the founder, like I am of SynerVision Leadership Foundation, I represent that brand because we are the nurturer organization for other charities. We help people build their skills, strategy, team, and income. I find that there is so many people. I am coming to Salt Lake City. But Russ has ben a presenter in Florida and in Denver at these one-day leadership empowerment events that I do. I find that leaders are overwhelmed. They have too much on their plate. They want to connect with other people, but they have trouble getting to events. The system you have developed is really brilliant because it helps people form relationships with people who have a similar passion or similar interest, or there is a chance to collaborate and bring people together in a reasonable conversation. You pointed out that Facebook is the social stuff, the kitty pictures, the family shots, and all of that. Twitter, which I like a lot, I have 200,000 people on Twitter, and I have made some significant connections on Twitter, but it is a distinctively different niche. LinkedIn, I have not mastered. If I am hearing you right, it stands out because it’s where business people do business.
Doug: That’s exactly right. Everything has its own spot. I have over a million followers on Twitter, but I use it really just to broadcast Newswire news. That is not the same as making connections with people. I put out news, legit news, through my Twitter feed. I don’t use Facebook at all. That is not to say there is not a spot for Facebook for lots of things, but there is not a spot for Facebook in what I think that I do. That is okay. I understand Facebook is well over a billion nowadays, so that would say that a lot of the people who are on LinkedIn are also on Facebook. I’m not trying to draw that kind of distinction and say there is no way to make meaningful relationships there. Obviously there is. But the distinction with LinkedIn is that people are there for business. If you start posting kitty pictures on LinkedIn, you will never hear the end of it. It’s not what it’s there for. It’s there about business. It’s there about being better at business, being a better business leader, finding resources. I could spew amazing statistics all day long, but 72% of business to business purchases right now are preceded by a LinkedIn search. If you are buying a copier, you are going to figure out who that is that you are buying a copier from, or you will find the copier guy. It’s about business to business. I wouldn’t take nonprofit out of that because that is still business to business with a different slant. But the principles are exactly the same. I wouldn’t draw a distinction there.
Hugh: We have been preaching that. It’s a business. We have more rigid rules with the IRS.
Doug: If you aren’t going to run it like a business, you won’t be around very much longer.
Hugh: Amen. As a matter of fact, I had an interview a while ago with somebody up in Michigan, and she had looked at my LinkedIn profile. Glad I fixed it before she looked at it.
Doug: Just to bring that home for you, whether you know it or not, 72% of the people who are going to do business with you have looked at your LinkedIn profile.
Hugh: 72%. If somebody is going to donate to my charity, they are going to check me out.
Doug: No question about it. And you hope they don’t check you out on LinkedIn and find your kitty pictures. You want to be a serious person that has something serious to offer, whatever your niche is. That is not the same as sharing your family fun on Facebook. Again, I’m not here to bash Facebook. There is a spot for it. If people are going to do business with you, 72% of the time they will precede that with looking at your LinkedIn profile, so it better be pretty good.
Hugh: A different mindset.
Doug: It fills a different purpose. To call them both social networks, while it’s true, is misleading because they are as different as night and day. Russell is agreeing with me there.
Hugh: Let’s bring Russell in. He is radically polite, but he has good stuff to say. Russell David Dennis, weigh in. You are very successful on LinkedIn. You write blog posts. What is your experience with LinkedIn?
Russell: I made a go at it because it was meant for business. I thought I should get serious with it. I bought some additional services with the profile so I could contact more people. I went north of 3,600 followers. They changed the look and feel, but according to the old look, they said I had what they call an All-Star profile. That is pretty good. But I connect. I have a lot of face-to-face meetings with people. I have even been in touch with people I have talked to lately. I dropped in here because I have a lot of people in here and I wanted to see how many of them fell under nonprofit. Probably about a quarter of them do. I did a company page, but it didn’t seem to have the look and feel I thought it would. It’s not like a typical web page. I managed to use Facebook to create a page and some roots, too. Everything has its place. Twitter drives traffic. The place where the rubber meets the road as far as face-to-face is LinkedIn.
Doug: That is my experience.
Hugh: Russell takes the edited video and puts it on his LinkedIn page. You have a following with these interviews. Give us a highlight of what that experience has been like.
Russell: Typically about 10% of my followers will watch an average post. Most of them are 1st connections, but that is typical. It depends. When we had Thyonne Gordon talk about boards, boards are something that people are very interested in. Those particular posts have had more traction. That was the one instance where a podcast had more people go to it than the video.
I am trying to look at putting some of our podcasts out there. I could probably go back and put some shows that we have had before because this content is evergreen. People like the podcast, and they like to download it. They can go see other podcasts. That is a habit I think I am going to get into: putting the podcast up so that people can have access to whit ile they are driving. I listen to audiobooks in the car and learn a lot in my car because I spend a lot more time than I thought about.
Doug: It’s a great place. I am an NPR guy, but podcasts and NPR…
Hugh: Russ, you publish articles. I want to have some dialogue with Doug. Doug, Russ is a very good writer, and he writes some very relevant stuff. He posts it on LinkedIn. He also posts on the SynerVision blog, and Doug, you are certainly invited to contribute to the magazine, Nonprofit Performance, and our blogroll on our SynerVision leadership site. Russ, you have created some articles. What do you think that does to help you connect with the tribe?
Russell: People get a sense of what I’m thinking. More importantly, I get a sense of what sort of things people are concerned about based on the response to those articles. Typically, I have a response rate of anywhere from 3% to the article that I had the largest percentage of my followers drew about 20%. I posted that, and I don’t think I posted that on LinkedIn. It was on another site. I shared it to my LinkedIn, and the question was who is responsible for fundraising? I had quite a few comments on that. I talked about boards there. There is a lot of interest around that. People want to know how to go about finding board members who can really add some juice to what they are doing, whether that is through skills or networks. The thing that LinkedIn has is you can talk about charitable opportunities and what matters to you in the platform and let people know that you are available to sit on boards. It is a good place to shop for board members. If you can take the time to reach out to a few people and see what is on their minds, you can find out what resonates with them.
Hugh: I want you to think about a hard question for our guest. I am going to go back to him and weigh in some of the stuff we talked about, and then we will come back and let you give him a zinger question.
Doug: I do have a couple things that I’d like to weigh in there. I do think that it is important for you to continue to publish on LinkedIn, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that is how you are creating contact. Your contact base will grow a little bit from those things, but the truth is, and I am probably going to say something that is a little unorthodox here, we like to use LinkedIn for contacting or identifying contacts, and then our goal is to take the conversation outside of LinkedIn. I’ll tell you why that is.
Most people, and probably including you guys and most people here, look at LinkedIn somewhat rarely. Maybe that is once a day, once a week, once a month, as opposed to your email. I finally have my telephone set to not giving emails between midnight and 5 am. Other than that, I am basically responding to emails 20+ hours a day. Most businesspeople are like that. One of our goals is to take the contacts we make on LinkedIn outside of it. I just sent you something privately in the chat, Hugh, but I have this six-step process we follow.
The steps to making it work is to work on your headline, work on your profile; use LinkedIn to identify your perfect customer; request contact them; do one or two follow-up messages on LinkedIn; and move the contact outside of the site. We found that far more effective. Whether that’s a phone call or an email or a text, however you normally communicate. If I were to ask you, Hugh, how often you message with someone on LinkedIn, the answer will probably be, “Seldom.” What we have found and what we recognize, and those steps I just gave, are we use it to identify, we use it to connect, we use it to start a conversation, but as soon as possible, we get it outside of LinkedIn and back into the way people are used to communicating.
Hugh: It does bring it front and center. You have shown me ways to find people in a geographic area or demographic or psychographic. You can sort people. Russ has far more advanced skills than I do. Go back to this how often I check it. Are you on LinkedIn every day? If so, how much?
Doug: Are you asking me?
Hugh: Outside of the work you do for other people, but personally, how long do you work it every day? Or do you work it every day?
Doug: The answer is we do this for our salespeople. It’s a great question to ask me, but I don’t get in there as a consumer but maybe once a week. I think I’m fairly typical. Part of what we do with LinkedIn involves some of our staff all day every day, but that is different. In terms of me checking up on my friends and randomly reading posts and reading what my friends have posted, not a lot. Some, but not a lot. In that respect, I think it’s very different from Facebook. I won’t name names, but I have adult kids that spend way too much of their life in my opinion on Facebook. People don’t do that on LinkedIn. It’s not the time-killer, or as sticky as Facebook. Is that a nice way to put it? We have found by far a lot better success in using it as a tool to identify, to start a conversation, but taking the conversation outside of LinkedIn has been much more successful for us.
Hugh: Scott Riches sends his greetings, saying, “Two of my favorites, Doug and Hugh.”
Doug: Scott lives across the street from me, and I see him about once a blue moon. Hi, Scott.
Hugh: He is on the webinar.
Doug: Or come across the street and we will say hi.
Hugh: You never know. It’s interesting, Doug. I’ll be speaking to a group, and they will point to me and say, “As you said on your podcast.” You were talking about how we influence people. It’s interesting how we impact other people with our thoughts and our comments and how it either connects to people or it doesn’t. We can have negative impact or positive impact on our social media.
Doug: That’s another great point I want to shove home in this conversation. Hugh and I are part of a training/connecting group that I go to every month, and sometimes I go to national things a few times a year. If you are really dogged, you might meet ten people a day. You have to be really at it. The chances of one of those ten people being the right person is whatever the chances are. You can do ten times that in an hour on LinkedIn. Just the odds of connecting with the right kind of people, you can put it in hyperdrive and still take those pre-qualified leads back into how you would connect otherwise and connect outside of LinkedIn. You can use it as a huge filter. You can filter through hundreds of people instead of the people you can run into at a social event.
Hugh: Some of the people that I know I referred to you and you started working with say they are amazed at the number of people who want to talk to them. You have done a good job of helping them present themselves in a way people want to talk to them. Those of us doing sales call them leads. But we are always, if we are running a charity- I like the word “charity” because “nonprofit” is such a stupid word even though that is the name of this thing. If we are running a charity/nonprofit, we should focus on profit, but we should focus always on cultivating relationships, maintaining the existing relationships, and continuing to build new relationships. Let me contrast the brand slaughter thing that I mentioned earlier. We can do and say anything we want as leaders, but there is negative impact. If you are in the wrong setting, that is a negative. You can post things that- like somebody we know in Washington tweets things that get in the news. That is not necessarily good for those of us running a charity. What are things we should not do on LinkedIn that have negative impact for us?
Doug: Right off the top of my head, and I have seen this happen a couple of times in fact, one of our mutual friends really blew his entire social network apart by taking a political stand.
Hugh: Oh yes. He told me he lost half his followers overnight.
Doug: That is a good example of what not to do. We can be Jews or Mormons or atheists or Muslims, but that is not relevant to our business situation. We can be Republicans or Democrats. We can be anarchists; we can be anything we want to be. It’s not relevant to your business setting. Keeping those kinds of things as far away from your social- Again, that is very different than what people do in a lot of social networking settings. People have Twitter followings based on a distinct and a niche point of view. Your Facebook friends are probably down with you on some niche point of view. That is not relevant to business. What not to do: Don’t do it. Talk about your benefits in terms of what you can bring to someone in business. Keep your political views, your religious views, your sexist views, your gun views, I don’t care what it is, it’s not relevant to your business. You have to realize that every time you express a view like that, you alienate some huge portion of your potential contacts. If you are a Trump guy and spout Trump, you have now limited yourself to 38% of the people in the United States. If you are a gun guy and spout guns, you eliminate half the people. If you are an anti-gun guy and spout anti-gun stuff, you have eliminated half the people.
Hugh: Russ spent some time working of the IRS. There are some pretty strict guidelines, unless they get changed under Trump, mentioning him, that you can’t really take a political position as a 501(c)3 because you can lose your tax exemption.
Doug: I’m not really talking about just your- I’m talking more about your posts on LinkedIn and your profile on LinkedIn, just in terms of inviting people to connect with you. You want to be as specific as you can be in terms of your benefits, what you can do for people. You want to be as obtuse as possible about whatever your views are, realizing that whatever your most heartfelt view is will alienate half the people you could potentially connect with if you express that, no matter how dear it is to you. Unless you are selling guns, maybe. I don’t know. I hope the point is understood.
Hugh: The point is well understood.
Doug: I’m being facetious to some extent, but I think you get it.
Hugh: You’re not. It’s a serious topic. We don’t take it seriously. I want to get to some tactical questions about identifying and connecting and messaging, and then I want to talk about this awesome infographic. But I want to see if Russell has come up with a really hard question for you. I want to see you sweat.
Russell: People find out that I worked for the IRS, and I’m not nearly as scary as people want me to be.
Hugh: He took this Colombo position in asking dumb questions, and I can picture him in that trench coat.
Russell: It really worked best on $500 an hour attorneys, but that is another story for offline. In terms of really getting connected with people on LinkedIn and creating a message, when I started, there were people out there that I just didn’t know. I looked for people in certain niches and went out there. That was a little scattershot. I got somebody to help do that. I learned the concepts of going into groups and engaging. Now I found myself in a lot of groups. How would you parse out your engagement on LinkedIn? I have probably 40 different groups. How would you go about dividing that and conquering it? It’s almost too much of a good thing in some ways. It’s hard to be engaged in that many places. How would you go about separating that?
Doug: I’m not a fan of groups. Maybe one or two groups if they are really specific to your niche and what you are doing. Let’s for example take the idea that you are trying to find some directors for your nonprofit. A group is not going to help you there at all. Like you said, it creates some noise that maybe you don’t need to deal with. I would unjoin every group that I was in if I were you that wasn’t specific to what you are trying to accomplish today.
In terms of your old connections, one of the other things that I am pretty careful about and ask our guys to be pretty careful about is not to mix- One of the things that a lot of people do when they start at LinkedIn is import their address book out of their mail processor or email app. LinkedIn encourages you to do that. That gets you Mom and sisters and nieces and aunts and uncles and neighbors down the street, and all sorts of stuff that is irrelevant. You probably can’t do anything about that if you have done that already, but don’t do it anymore.
Russell: I haven’t done that because there are too many that just don’t belong.
Doug: The challenge is that for people who have more than one business, that is tough because you mix stuff up. But most of us have one business and one thing we are trying to accomplish. When you get a LinkedIn request from someone, unless it is someone you think you would have sought out, don’t accept it.
There is a limit to how many LinkedIn connections you can have; it’s 30,000 right now. That may sound like a lot, but I went past that a long time ago. It’s not a lot. Over the course of a couple of years of using LinkedIn, you can easily suck up that many. Be selective about who you contact. Make sure they are people who fit your criteria. After that, they can follow you. That is when your strategy of posting comes more into play. 30,000 contacts is enough to make a lifetime out of, so use them carefully and wisely.
I heard a little saying the other day that I will pass on: Your net worth is now your network. Your net worth is your network. Use it carefully. Don’t just accept people for whatever. There is a code you will see in LinkedIn every now and then: LION. People will put that in their profile. Stay away from those people unless you are barely starting out. LION is a LinkedIn Open Networker. That is not a bad thing. Those are the people that will connect with anybody and the idea they are trying to make a huge network with no selectivity. If people have LION in their profile, you probably want to stay away from them, not that they are bad people. They are not specific. You only have 30,000 of them. Russ, you’re sitting there at 3,500, and Hugh, I remember you are at 5 or 6,000. 30,000 may seem like a long ways away, but it’s not. Use them carefully. Maybe someday LinkedIn will open that back up a little bit more.
Hugh: I didn’t realize that. I wondered if there was a cap. Before I go to the tactical questions, let’s talk about the kinds of relationships we want to cultivate. I could say we could create a peer-to-peer group with other nonprofit directors who are having the same problems that would be a support group, maybe a mastermind connection. I could see we could connect with businesspeople geographically that could be candidates for our boards. I could see that we could connect with marketing people in companies to start talking about how it would benefit their brand to be a sponsor for our nonprofit. Do you have any comments on those, or are there other kinds of connections people might want to make?
Doug: You might go directly for people that share your interests, whatever the interest is of your nonprofit. If you are in kitty rescue, out of half a billion people, you can find a lot of people that share your specific interest. If it’s macramé that is your interest, you will find thousands of people who love macramé. If you are doing great work in a niche, then you want to connect with other people who are interested in that niche and see where it goes. Some might be donors, some might be business partners, some might be board members. As long as someone shares your interest, that is a great place to start. It’d be hard to name another place that gives you another way to search for people that shares- Whatever esoteric interest you might have, you can find a list of people on LinkedIn that self-classify as sharing that interest.
Hugh: That’s a good segue. We have a quarter of our interview left here. How do we identify those connections, and how do we contact them? How do we use the messaging piece to stay in touch with them?
Doug: There are a bunch of questions there. Let’s talk about them one at a time. Let’s go fairly quickly. Let’s put up the infographic and talk about it in the barest details for a minute or two.
Hugh: There is a downloadable brilliant infographic.
Doug: This thing is about five times as tall as it is wide. You are only seeing a portion of it. This first portion has some important things. Russell, you used to pay for that background image, and now everyone gets that for free. You can put a background picture here in your profile. You need to put a good business picture in your profile. It is just astounding that people are four times as likely to connect with someone who has an image than with someone who doesn’t have an image.
Then the headline- that is the most important thing. This one is “I help B2B companies save money through outsourcing solutions.” That is a silly example, but the important things are there. You have identified who you help and how you help them. That is the important part of the headline. That will let people self-qualify as to whether or not they want to connect with you and whether or not you want to connect with them. If people know what you do and what you do it for and want to connect with you, then you are halfway home. They already know what you’re about, and if they want to connect with you after they know what you’re about, then you at least have a start. If you say you’re an accountant, you might get other people who want to connect with you because they want to be part of the brotherhood of accountants, but that is a long way from having someone who wants to do business with your nonprofit. I’m going to leave it at that and let everybody go through the download themselves. On the website, there is a post about doing headlines. I can’t think of anything more important than your headline. There is a place that calls them Snaps. Whatever you call a headline, an elevator pitch, whatever it is, you should be able to communicate what you do, who you do it for, and what they get out of it in a few words. You should put that as a bumper sticker, on your business card, tattoo it on your forehead, whatever. But they might be the most important 10-12 words you ever come up with in your life. For lots of different things, not just your LinkedIn profile. Feel free to download that infographic and play with it, and that website has more pieces that might be helpful to you.
Hugh: That is an interesting name. Szeak. How do you say that?
Doug: Szeak.
Hugh: This will all be in the show notes. Does that mean anything?
Doug: Nope. It’s a five-letter domain.
Hugh: Give us some tips on how to find people.
Doug: There are tools inside of LinkedIn. Russell, I think you were making a reference to this also, but if you are going to get serious about LinkedIn, you need to pay for one of their premium programs, which is called Sales Navigator. They may have changed the name on it now, but it’s a program inside of LinkedIn. It’s $80 a month. You can do most of the same stuff without paying for that, but LinkedIn will throttle you down. LinkedIn will only let you do so many contact requests. I don’t know what the number is. It’s probably a couple hundred a month, whereas if you pay them, they are more than willing to let you do as much as you want within some reason. This isn’t the time, and it’s not graphical enough for me to teach you how to do that right now, but there are lots of good tutorials on LinkedIn about searching.
There are actually 24 criteria in Sales Navigator that you can search on. One of them is Ebullient Search, which means you can use plus, minus, words, quote marks, all those things. You can do a lot more than just the 24 things. They are things like geography and job title and number of employees and those kinds of things, which are all great. But you can add Ebullient Search to that. If kitty rescue is your thing, you can find thousands of people who have that in their profile. Again, I’m not trying to be flippant. It doesn’t matter what your niche is. You can use LinkedIn searching to identify other people who have that same interest.
Hugh: That is a powerful tool.
Doug: It’s unbelievable.
Hugh: I got that navigator for a little while, but I couldn’t figure it out, so I stopped it. Now I have to go back and find some tutorials. If I heard you right, there are tutorials on LinkedIn on how to do this?
Doug: There are. We occasionally run webinars, too. You can put my email in the chat if you want. It’s doug@szeak.com. Reach out to me and I will let you know the next time we are having a webinar on the hands-on use of the tools there. Just through the search functions in regular LinkedIn, you can start to get a feel for it. There are half a dozen criteria that you get for free. You get an idea of what that search starts to look like. By the way, it’s free for a month. If you are getting semi-serious about it- You do put your credit card in, so you have to remember to cancel or else they will hit ya. But you can get in there and play with it for free and look at what it looks like.
The #1 thing is to fix your profile and make sure that you have your profile in a way, starting with your headline, that lets people self-qualify. If kitty rescue is your thing, put it right in there. You get the idea. That works to help people self-qualify. About half the people you send a request to that do connect with you will just say yes, but the other half will look at your profile. That turns your profile into a really important thing. You can get thousands of people looking at your profile. Start thinking about what that would cost you if you were in pay-per-click or that kind of business. Make that profile an engagement piece. Realize that literally about one out of three people that you send an invitation to- first of all, you qualified who you are, so you have a good idea they are the right kind of people. A third of those people are going to look at your profile page, and half of those people will connect with you and half of them won’t. At any rate, you could be paying ten dollars a click in a lot of niches to get people to come to your page, and you can get that for a lot less money, even with the $85 a month to LinkedIn. Headline, profile, then the search thing. Figure it out. One way or another, you can find some help on that. It’s fairly self-evident. Send your requests. Let me talk about that.
What we found is that the best contact request is a very generic one. Once you identify a prospect, you send them something that says- I need to back up again. You can only do these contact requests to second-level connections. In other words, I know Hugh and Hugh knows Russell so I can send Russell a contact request. From that point of view, it does make a lot of sense to have thousands of potential people because every time I connect with someone like Hugh who is in the right business, I get access to his hundreds or thousands of clients that hopefully are also in the right business, not just his grandma and his aunt. You can send out those requests to second-level people.
The wording for those things is generic. We call them by name. “Hey, Russell. We both know Hugh, or we have some mutual friends. I see we are both interested in kitty rescue. Would you be interested in connecting with me on LinkedIn?” We don’t say that we are selling them something. We don’t say we are looking for a board member. We don’t say we are looking for volunteers. We say we have mutual connections and mutual interests; would you like to connect? You will find that about 40% of the people you send that request to will connect with you. If you can get yourself in the habit of doing 100 of those a week, that is 40 new people. That is a lot of new people that you connect with every week that are now qualified. They are not random people. You searched for them by a criteria. You invited them based on a criteria. Most of them have come and looked at your profile page so they know what you’re about before they connect with you. Right there, you are halfway home. At least halfway home. You have people who know who you are, why you have asked them to connect. You have prequalified them with the search to get them in the right spot. We send that thing.
We follow it up with a next message that is very generic that says, “Thanks for connecting with me. Looking forward to staying in touch.” Just that simple so there is an acknowledgement they have connected. You say, “Hey, I would like to know more about what you do. Do you mind if we connect outside of LinkedIn?” You can download your list of people from your contacts. You can download their phone number. You have these people at this point. You have their phone number and their email, where they work, their job title. Whatever your connection funnel is. From that point on, there is a whole different conversation: how to take people from contacts and leads into customers. That is a topic for a different day. This is the start of your sales funnel or contact funnel. With a couple of hours a day or week, you could be adding 40-50 people a week to your top end of your contact list. Now you have to have a way to deal with those people. That is a lot of people. You have to have a way to take them from Point A to Point Z. But in terms of making connections and finding who you should be connecting with, there is nothing like LinkedIn.
Hugh: The Meyer Foundation did some research and found that 45% of nonprofit executive directors are facing burnout. 75% are looking at the door out. As you were talking, finding people with common interest, you could find people who are retired and looking for something meaningful to do who could be part of your solution. They could help manage your social media. They could take things off your plate. Putting on your weekly schedule some time to grow your sphere of influence on LinkedIn might be a good way to get your head around how to get out of this dungeon of being burned out and having too much to do. Let them help you. Ask them.
Doug: The thing I would caution everybody on on this is not to be too general and jump ship too many times. You need to know what you want and have a way to get it. If you get into LinkedIn and say, “I want to find an executive committee of 14 people who live within 100 miles,” go do that. That will be a different conversation and profile than, “I want to tap into other nonprofits that contribute in my niche.” Don’t try and do everything at the same time. That is just a general focus thing. My wife and I have a running joke. We have grandkids. A few years ago, we watched Up, the cartoon movie. I don’t know if you have ever seen it, but in Up, there is a talking dog. In the middle of the conversation, the dog turns its head and says, “Squirrel!”
Hugh: The dog is an entrepreneur, right?
Doug: That is a running joke around our house and one that you could take home with you. Don’t get squirreled. Have one thing you want to do. Do it until it’s done. Then move on to the next thing. That is true with everything, including LinkedIn. If I need 20 things and am looking for 20 kinds of people, that is a way to get zero done. If you say that I want this one thing and want to go find that person, and then once I find that person, I will move on, that will work. But if halfway through, you go, Squirrel! Don’t do that. Don’t get squirreled.
Hugh: Stay focused. That is good general advice. As far as what you are saying here, that is prudent. One of the reasons we may be burned out is we are doing the squirrel thing too much. Doug Brown, owner and manager of Newswire, which is a brilliant PR platform to get your releases out there, and this whole track with LinkedIn, you have given us amazingly useful information. Doug, if you do a webinar, let me send it to the group of people here.
Doug: I’d be happy to do that. Thanks for the chance to talk. Everybody loves the sound of their own voice, so thank you.
Hugh: I’m going to make you listen to it.
Doug: I don’t love it that much.
Hugh: Thank you so much.
Russell: I just had someone ask me about broadcasts I’m in. I do this. I do Nonprofit Culture Success broadcasts, which are going to become more frequent. They asked me if I listen to my own podcast. I said, “No,” and they said that I should probably start. Watch what you’re doing.
Doug: See how to make it better right.
Hugh: Last time somebody told me, “Hugh, you ought to be on television.” I said, “Really? Why?” “So then we could turn you off.” Thanks for this broadcast, Doug. Thanks, Russ, for co-hosting with me.
Doug: Thanks for having me guys.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Creating a Position of Influence on LinkedIn | The Nonprofit Exchange: Leadership Tools & Strategies podcast - Listen or read transcript on Metacast
