Have you gone to LinkedIn to search for someone you know
in business?
Networking is part of growing my business. I am very
active with it both online and offline.
When I meet people at live meetings, I
ask for their business card and if it would be ok for me to connect with them
on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. They usually tell me something
like, "Sure, that would be great!"
When I get to my office, first thing I do is pull out the
cards I have collected that day and type in each person's name to search for
them on LinkedIn. What a revelation! I cannot believe what I find!
Shock! Shock! Shock!
Many times I cannot even find them on LinkedIn. Other
times I find several people with the exact same name. When I try to decipher
which of the duplicate names is the one I am searching for, I check the
headlines.
Know what! More often than I would care to say, there is
not even a headline showing.
Now, if I was trying to find them to do business and
learn a bit about them before I called them, what kind of impression does that
leave with me?
The other day I had a new client in my office. We were
working on her profile to bring it up to "killer profile" status.
Part of that process is to start inviting all the people my clients know to
connect with them on LinkedIn. As we went through her Rolodex, we were
surprised to find that 1/3rd of the people we tried to reach out to were not
anywhere to be found on LinkedIn!
You spend many marketing dollars in an effort to appear like a center of influence and to elevate yourself as an expert in your field of business. Are you wasting those dollars by having an incomplete online presence?
Not to point fingers at anyone in particular, but I see
this a lot. People spend big bucks to be featured in professional magazines or
in a newspaper advertisement and do not have a LinkedIn presence.
What kind of an impression do you think that left with my
client? Who do you think she will be doing business with in the
future...or not?
It is a lot like building a million dollar home on a
street of old houses valued at 1/6th the price. All the low valued properties reduce
the value of the million dollar property. Mind you, the million dollar property
improves the value of the older homes a tiny bit, but not as much as they
devalue the expensive one.
I realize that life is busy and it takes time to learn
all the social media, but it is free to us to use. All we need is to take some
time to set up a profile with some information about our business and ourselves
and what inspired us to do what we do.
Further to your online presence, when you agree to be a
speaker in an online or offline venue, it is not up to the moderator to remind you.
As an entrepreneur, it is your responsibility to be on top of your calendar. It
reflects on everyone involved when a speaker does not show up.
It is all about presenting a uniform presence.
What is the impression you are leaving?
Christine
Till
The
Marketing Mentress
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