Don’t use a work email as the primary LinkedIn address

Click here for his entire blog posting, or read our excerpt here.

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With the surge in popularity in all things social media, many people are registering for services for the first time. Alternatively, people are discovering services they signed up for on the spur of the moment a while back are increasingly useful as more users come on board. Whether you signed up a while back or last week, here’s something to verify (or change) today to ensure your LinkedIn persona is with you for the long haul.

LinkedIn users who use their work email to log in to their LinkedIn account face a dilemma when they move on from one employer to another.  You need an active email address to log in. Forgotten accounts that aren’t accessed in months after moving to a new employer, passwords that are forgotten, or companies that go out of business are just some of the stories that people have about getting LockedOut of LinkedIn. And LinkedIn has no sympathy for you.

But LinkedIn does allow users to include other email addresses in addition to the one they use to log in to the service. I don’t know how many users bother with this; I suspect it is not many. I urge you to do that, but the most important thing is to use a personal email address as your primary, registered address in the system. At the top right of the LinkedIn site, you will see the Settings link. Clicking that will bring you to a screen where you should go ahead and dump in all the email addresses you think people might have for your contact address. Include your current work address, by all means — ­ just don’t make it the primary address. Need to switch it? Click the address you want as primary and select the big blue button on the bottom. Easy, huh?

I also put an old work email down that some people might have for me. Even though the confirmation email bounced, it’s still in the file, so searchable, I think.

Now that LinkedIn is taken care of – are the rest of your social media profiles portable?

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B. Todd Randolph, works with business and nonprofit clients to help them evaluate the evolving marketing landscape and incorporate appropriate shiny new (social media) tools into their marketing strategies.

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Here’s the secret: You wouldn’t start a new billboard campaign without careful planning, would you? Of course not. Yet many companies seem to jump right in to a social media campaign without giving this type of marketing the careful consideration that other types get. Why? It is a new medium to many, and we’re still learning the ropes. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and others can be very effective – if done with a little planning.

Here’s a 10 point road map to help you plan to make the most effective use of a social media campaign, taken from a recent webinar presented by Jamie Turner, Chief Content Officer of the 60 Second Marketer. Already using social media? Review to see if there’s a new idea for you.

1. Competitive Assessment: What are your competitors doing in this space already? What can you borrow from them?

2. Internal Situation Analysis: How much awareness is there of social media within your company? Is there an understanding that it can be measured and create a positive ROI?

3. Major Objectives: What are you trying to accomplish with your social media campaign?

4. Consumer Thought Process: What is the typical sales cycle for your product? How much trust do you need to build before you can make a sale? (Hint: The more expensive the product, the more trust needs to be built.)

5. Key Strategies: What approach are you going to take in order to have a successful program?

6. Brand Essence: What is your brand essence and how are you going to communicate that using social media?

7. Positioning: How is your brand currently positioned in the marketplace? Where do you want it to be positioned as a result of your social media campaign?

8. Essential Message: What is the essential take-away you want consumers and prospects to have after engaging with your brand via social media?

9. Tactical Plan Overview: Which social media platforms are you going to use for your program? Which tools are you going to use to measure the success of your program?

10. Executional Roadmap: What are your SMART Goals for this plan? How are you going to be held accountable for them?

Careful planning will make the time spent well worth it, and make you look like the whiz that you are. Just don’t forget to have fun and be creative with your campaign. You may be the next trend setter, with competitors following your example!

Linda has taken a deep dive into the social media world and wrote the following article for The 60 Second Marketer. Some of the information is so hot, we wanted to get it out to our growing community as quickly as possible.

Here’s Linda’s guest posting, hot off the press:

LinkedIn is the “Six Degrees of Separation” for the business world.  Its claim to fame is the “Triangle of Trust” networking principle:  People are more likely to do business from a referral by someone they know and trust. This is powerful stuff in today’s fast, buy-on-the-fly, e-commerce driven society.

Unfortunately, LinkedIn has the “now what?” effect.  Well-intentioned users sign up for an account, build their profile, network to a few people and then become lost, unsure of how to maximize the LinkedIn resources.  Here are 5 things you can do today to start using LinkedIn as a way to generate revenue:

1. Be the Face of Your Brand
LinkedIn announced new functionality for companies to create a profile for their company to provide basic information including your website, company description, industry, number of employees and more.  Check out your company profile or add it by visiting www.linkedin.com/companies.

There is a also great way to connect with customers and prospects through an individual in your company.  If you represent a small company, start a LinkedIn account for the owner.  Larger organizations should choose a representative that best represents their customer and prospect base.  For example, a technology company should use their CIO, a consumer company might choose their CMO, and a manufacturer should promote the president or COO.  Choose a spokesperson based on who can offer the best conversations about your brand.

Once you’ve chosen your spokesperson, build your profile with your specific company in mind, not the personal resume of your spokesperson except if your spokesperson’s professional experience is relevant in nature to their current role or gives clout to the spokesperson.

In the “Summary” section list a description of your company’s products and services and complete the “Specialties” section with keywords that encompass your company’s product, service, or value.

2. Think of LinkedIn as a part of your Loyalty Marketing Strategy
Loyalty Marketing is an approach to marketing in which a company focuses on growing and retaining existing customers through incentives. If you think of LinkedIn as a way to enhance your current customer relationships you can begin and maintain a dialog with people who are engaged in your products, services, or brand.

The first step in LinkedIn loyalty marketing is to start a Group.  In the group section you can give an overview of your company, start dialogs with your customers, share news and updates and begin to build a database of brand advocates.  Offer various incentives that best target your audience such as receiving first notification of any company news, new products or services, or upcoming promotions – you can even offer special deals or incentives only for LinkedIn Group members.  You can use your LinkedIn Group to advertise upcoming events, collect pre-show or post-event feedback, and conduct polls of focus groups to gather customer intelligence.

3. Use Offline Marketing Tactics to Drive Your Customers and Prospects to Join Your LinkedIn Group
Update all current marketing efforts with a tagline encouraging customers and prospects to join your LinkedIn Group: direct mail, email campaigns, employee email signatures, business cards, and, of course, provide a link on your website to the LinkedIn Group. LinkedIn is a great way to generate traffic to your website and support your search engine optimization efforts.  Be sure to ask your company employees to add your website to their personal LinkedIn page – this provides quality, relevant links which organically helps bump you up in search engine rankings.

4. Advertise on LinkedIn
LinkedIn also offers text-based advertising opportunities called “DirectAds” that run for 30 days a pop.  You can target your ad based on two of the following seven criteria: Company Size, Job Function, Industry, Seniority, Gender, Age, or Geography.  Ads start at $25 and guarantee a certain number of impressions (the number of times an ad is shown), but do not guarantee any results (or click-thrus) on your ad. LinkedIn offers a dashboard to track the ad activity including impressions, clickthrus and a calculation of your clickthru rate (CTR). Depending on your product or service, this can be a great way to reach your audience especially if you couple the offer with an incentive such as a free white paper, coupon or other value-add.

5. Get Connected to LinkedIn
LinkedIn is getting ready to launch some really cool functionality for B2B marketing.  Sign up for the RSS feed on the LinkedIn blog http://blog.linkedin.com/ so you can get this news first and be first to market.  This RSS feed only sends out an email if there is new content.  They promise, “No new content, no email for you.”

One final note: Your company may already have a profile on LinkedIn with content generated by LinkedIn.  This profile is populated by public data provided by Capital IQ, a sister company to BusinessWeek, and may include public information such as your company description, industry, type of company, headquarter address, size, founding date, and website. The differentiator for the LinkedIn company profile is that it uses its own member data to create new information about your company based on the people who have listed your company name in their profiles as current or former employees.  LinkedIn uses this information to determine the average age, gender, and title of employees at your company.  Of course it is skewed, but they make no apologies for the data. However, you can add or change information on these pages, but you must have a valid company email to do so.  In the FAQs, do a search for “Adding or Changing Company Profile Page.” Coming soon is the functionality to post jobs, recruitment videos, information about products and services, company images and more.