Mario Sundar

Ever so often, I find myself talking to a sales or biz dev person who’s a big fan of LinkedIn. While I’d rather not spend too much time extolling the virtues of a company I work for on this blog, I’d still like to share valuable tips and tricks that will be useful to folks in sales and bizdev – even if it’s about my company.

Here’s a great case study (via Smart Blog on Social Media) on how the Carlton group of hotels sourced new business worth $180K in 90 days. What’s even more useful for you (if you’re in sales) is how they did it:

• Build a closely held network. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Freesource (the consultancy that helped their client – Carlton group of hotels) recommends only connecting to people you really know and trust. Managing tightly held, individual communities on LinkedIn will maximize the value of the platform and the quality of in-bound/out-bound business opportunities for your representatives.
• Teach sales representatives how to benefit from search engine optimization. Encourage sales reps and staff to identify with the hotel’s offerings on LinkedIn and align their profiles to meet their goals. Have them incorporate strategic keywords into their job titles, summaries, specialties and job descriptions to benefit from increased Web hits.
• Learn about your prospects. Use LinkedIn for “social CRM” throughout the entire sales process, Freesource recommends. Active, daily use of LinkedIn will give employees a better understanding of their current and future clients — turning cold calls into warm handshakes, shortening sales cycles and giving you greater share of wallet through stronger relationship management.
• Create prospecting efficiencies. In-depth knowledge of Boolean strings, LinkedIn’s basic and advanced search capabilities, as well as its newly revamped ”Company Pages” will help a sales team find new, qualified leads faster. Lastly, use tools such as LinkedIn’s SlideShare application to provide virtual property tours so that the profile can bring in leads around the clock.

My $0.02:

Don’t do one-offs. Stay the course on LinkedIn.

We recommend many of these tips to our users (connect with people you know, SEO benefits, prospect management), but I think it’s worth reminding businesses that the key to success on LinkedIn is a consolidated strategy that spans your entire team that will bring you success both in the long term and the mid-term (see above story).

Be creative.

I’d also add, be creative about your usage of LinkedIn. There are a lot of untapped resources as well as new features on our site. A case in point: using our slideshare application to provide virtual property tours. Or, using our newly redesigned Company Pages, both of which can be put to best use in this situation. If you’d like to keep track of the latest product innovation, bookmark this.

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Filed under: Linkedin

I just read a great post on “Work Awesome” last week that asked the question: “How do you pick your friends on social networks?“. I thought I’d share some of my insight into five key business networking hubs  that professionals need to keep synced with their business rolodex. Feel free to bookmark this post and share with your colleagues who wonder how to get the most from social networking sites from a business angle.

How to pick business friends on social networking sites

Every professional should approach the art of friending strategically and with greater seriousness like your career and reputation depends on it. And, trust me – it does. I think “People you may know” is a great place to start on all three key social networking sites but the webmail importer is a far more strategic way to approach “friending”:

1. LinkedIn: Without doubt, this should be the CENTER of your business networking universe as it contains the most accurate information mass resume / rolodex / conversation ecosystem you could find. 75 million professionals, millions of companies and tons of opportunities for professionals from finding jobs to collaborating on business. You want to make sure your LinkedIn network is an accurate reflection of your real world professional connections.

The easiest way to do that – find your business connections from your email. LinkedIn has a feature called webmail importer that makes it trivial to find and add your business contacts in your email client to LinkedIn. Fact is, most of them are likely to be on LinkedIn already. Also, all the remaining tips in this post will work more effectively ONLY if your LinkedIn graph is maintained accurately.

LinkedIn's Webmail Importer

Once you’re done with that, try to check the “People You May Know” widget on the top right hand corner of your LinkedIn homepage on a daily basis and add 2 – 3 relevant business connections that are recommended. Click “See more” once every week, to do a more serious update and you’ll be surprised to see a faceted search module on the left that lets you zone in on the most valuable connections for you to add. Just adding folks from your current job alone is priceless!

Faceted Search in LinkedIn's PYMK

Most importantly, make it a habit, to add folks you work on projects with on LinkedIn right away. To me it’s a daily ritual at the end of the day or week to add folks I’m newly working with on projects to LinkedIn. And, the best place to find them would be LinkedIn’s advanced search.

2. Microsoft Outlook / Xobni:

Pulling your  business rolodex (in this case – from LinkedIn) into your email client of choice is equally important, because it’s a great way to enhance the value of your email client. Your LinkedIn graph of connections and conversations can be pulled into Microsoft Outlook through LinkedIn’s Outlook Connector. Download it here.

As soon as LinkedIn and Outlook are connected, Outlook will start bringing in information about your LinkedIn network.  You should then start seeing profile photos and LinkedIn activity for any connection that e-mails you.

Xobni does the same through their plugin that works on Outlook and even in mobile – Blackberry. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work with the iPhone, but chances are greater that your company has provided you a Blackberry at work. And, I’m guessing you’re also stuck with Outlook.

I haven’t tried it, but TechCrunch claims that the difference between Xobni and MS Outlook connector seems to be that “it does email search a lot better than Outlook and can resolve different identities to the same person in your contacts list.” If interested, check it out here.

LinkedIn information on Xobni tab

3. Google Contacts / Rapportive:

As a Google contacts user, I find myself increasingly syncing my gmail contacts to my iPhone and find it challenging that Google contacts doesn’t sync with constantly updated professional information on LinkedIn. Enter Rapportive, a browser extension, that pulls LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook information of individuals from the gmail address. It’s like Xobni, but for Gmail.

Rapportive features brings your LinkedIn Graph to Gmail

4. Twitter:

I’ve shared this before, but sync your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. Now, this allows you to do two things. One cross-post from LinkedIn to Twitter (harmless) and from Twitter to LinkedIn (careful, I’d only recommend bringing over the #in tweets).

Secondly, you can auto-create a constantly synced Twitter list of all your LinkedIn connections. Oh, yae! Read more about that here.

5. Facebook: Personally, I keep my social and business contacts separate. I love using Facebook to keep my friends and family up to date and there may be the one-off business peer who I know socially, but it’s the exception. That said, if you’re a consultant type who uses Facebook for everything I guess you could still try the same tactics I recommend above for LinkedIn. It’s your call, but beware.

Do location sites matter to professionals? I added this since Work Awesome mentioned Foursquare, but frankly sites like Foursquare don’t offer any value to professionals – today.

That said, I do see value in knowing the location of my business contacts. You can already see this on LinkedIn’s Tripit app (for e.g.). Feel free to leave a comment on how YOU sync your business contacts across multiple social networking sites?

Disclosure: I work at LinkedIn, blog here (subscribe) and tweet @mariosundar.

Filed under: Linkedin

How many of you believe that finding a job is not about overnight success but rather the culmination of building your online brand painstakingly over time? Kudos to those who raised their hands for yours are the jobs of the future. Readers of this blog are probably aware of the many posts I’ve written over the past years on the growing importance of your online brand.

Bank Intern loses job because of above Facebook picture. Click pic for more examples.

I’ve debated with my good friend, Tamar Weinberg, on what’s the easiest way to control your online reputation. How that can save you from a layoff or after one. And, why it’s important that you keep your social and professional brands separate (hint: see above pic).

So, it is with great interest that I read Fred Wilson’s blog post on owning your online brand, which resulted from a recent panel discussion that he was a part of. As always, he raises a bunch of great points, some of which I thought I’d reiterate in this post.

Has the time arrived for “blog as resume”? Are we there yet?

I agree with Fred that a career blog is one of the best ways to showcase a portfolio of your professional expertise in long form. Fred writes:

Chris Dixon and Charlie O’Donnell both advocate the value of the “blog as resume” and recommend starting one to everyone who asked for their career advice. I’ll join that chorus as well. We have hired all of our junior investment professionals largely on the basis of their blogs, not their resumes or linkedin profiles. You can learn so much more about a person by reading their blog.

That said, I’m not sure if a blog is ideal resume material, when viewed within the traditional meaning of the term as a succinct summary of one’s professional qualifications. But more importantly, I see a couple of adoption challenges for the “blog as resume” in today’s world.

Problem #1:

First off, I personally know how challenging and time consuming the art of blogging can be and also know how most professionals may not have the time to dedicate themselves an extra two to three hours a day to share ideas and collaborate online with fellow bloggers. But, I do believe those who choose to make that extra effort will be duly rewarded.

Problem #2:

Most 9-to-5 professionals these days are probably most concerned with three things: their day-to-day work, family responsibilities and hanging out with friends to relive or relieve the stress of the day. I’m not sure career blogging is top of mind for them today.

Problem #3:

Aren’t there easier ways to establish a succinct online presence that could double as a resume for busy professionals. Whether it be LinkedIn where you can set up your online brand in a matter of minutes or Twitter where you can tweet relevant professional interests whenever you find a minute or two in the middle of a busy day’s work. Moreover, a dead blog does more harm than good for your brand.

Now, I’m of course playing devil’s advocate here given my immense passion for blogging in general. And, the question is not whether professionals need to manage their online brands. But rather, is blogging the simplest online brand building platform for professionals? Or are mainstream professionals content with easier ways to get that job done?

What do you think? What sites do you use to build and maintain an online professional brand that’s both current and relevant?

Filed under: Linkedin

I’ve stopped carrying business cards to networking events and conferences cos I can connect with folks when I meet with them, thanks to LinkedIn’s iPhone app. The easiest way to do that was to find out their email and shoot them an invite through the app, but now we just launched v1.5 of the iPhone app that additionally allows you to navigate your Inbox (both messages and invites) on the iPhone when you’re on the go.

What’s New?

A far more robust Inbox pane that allows you to receive and send both invitations and messages. Here’s how it looks.

Clicking through a message is similarly gonna allow you to either reply to the individual, reply to all if it’s a group thread or archive the message. BTW, I scrubbed out the message contents in both the above and below screens for obvious reasons.

So, a quick summary of what you can do with LinkedIn’s iPhone app, besides the latest enhancement:

1. Browse Network Updates

2. Search the connections you have and search by keywords (associating the name to a picture definitely helps)

3. Update Status

Got iPhone? Here’s the download link for LinkedIn v1.5 on the iPhone.

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Filed under: Linkedin