denotes premium content | Sep 10 2010 
Feature
posted 22 Jun 2010 in Volume 12 Issue 12
Masterclass: Leveraging LinkedIn
four things YOU WILL learn from THIS MASTERCLASS
|
With online social networking becoming increasingly popular, many lawyers have set up LinkedIn accounts for business contacts. However, setting up an account is not enough. Maintaining an up-to-date and professional profile is a key factor in raising your visibility and opening doors for networking and business development opportunities. Clients searching for you in Google and other search engines will be directed to your LinkedIn profile often even before being directed to your firm’s website.
LinkedIn is very different from Facebook and other social networking sites in that its prime purpose is to enable businesspeople to share professional contacts. There is limited personal information and no photo album (although a headshot can be included if you choose). You build a profile (essentially your resumé) and then invite people you know into your online network, which in turn allows you to tap into the networks of the people with whom you are connected. There is no cost to join LinkedIn and for many professionals the free features are sufficient for networking and contact development.
The site is typically used to find an ‘in’ with a particular person or company, and can also be helpful for background and intelligence gathering regarding executives and companies. You can also use the ‘advanced people search’ feature to research individuals by title, geography, industry or keyword. However, to really make LinkedIn work for you, you should learn about the settings and strategies.
The basics
When adding content to your LinkedIn profile, it is vital to provide sufficient detail. Your profile should summarise your experience, but also highlight your professional and community activities. Use the ‘summary’ section of your profile to describe the types of clients with whom you work, the types of cases or matters you want to be referred to, cases you are currently handling, past matters, and so on. Including prior employment, as well as university and high school education, also helps LinkedIn users to connect the dots with respect to things you may have in common. Unlike your firm’s website bio, your LinkedIn profile gives you the opportunity to connect with affinity groups from your past. The ‘specialties’ area, which follows the summary section, is one attorneys should use with care, however, as this may violate attorney advertising rules, which is particularly relevant for US practices. The better option is to detail all your experience narrative under the summary section of your profile. Once your profile is completed, then familiarise yourself with LinkedIn’s ‘settings’ options, found in the upper right corner of your LinkedIn home page. Check to be sure that your ‘public profile’ setting is at ‘full view’. Making your profile private will keep it from being indexed by search engines, which means your profile will be invisible to internet or LinkedIn users, rendering your visibility and networking efforts useless. |
Build connections
The people in your LinkedIn network should be those with whom you have a real relationship, most notably clients, referral sources and other business colleagues. Ideally, these people know you and can say great things about you if contacted offline without your knowledge.
Furthermore, they should be able to make an introduction if you need one. Once a link or connection is established, you can see your contact’s connections and they can see yours. Be strategic in your efforts to link to people and when accepting invitations from others. Those who you do not want in your network would be direct competitors or anyone you don’t know very well. Also be careful of vendors, who can use your connections for their own sales processes.
When building your list of LinkedIn connections, do not select the feature that allows LinkedIn to send invitations to all of your Outlook contacts as there are probably a number of people you do not want to connect with for various reasons. Additionally, do not select the option to send an email blast to everyone in your network inviting them to connect. Inviting people into your network is best done one on one, with personalised emails to each recipient.
However, keep an eye on the ‘people you may know’ section of your profile home page. LinkedIn matches the data on your profile to other LinkedIn users with similar data. Some of those individuals may be people with whom you want to reconnect.
Leverage connections
Selecting individuals you want in your network should be a strategic decision. LinkedIn should not be viewed as a popularity contest, where he or she with the most connections wins. Rather, choose those with whom you want to connect carefully. Here are some tips on how to better leverage your connections to cultivate relationships. 1. Connection etiquette. Connection etiquette is important to understand when using LinkedIn. Take note of how individuals want to be contacted, which is found under the ‘contact’ heading of the person’s profile. If you see that someone is not open to ‘In Mail’ or email contact, you will need to use the second degree connection contact as an introduction point. 2. Client connections. What about clients in your network? There are a lot of advantages, the biggest being that you have access to your clients’ LinkedIn contacts. However, connecting with clients opens the door to other individuals connecting with your clients through your network and not necessarily with your knowledge. Clients who are arch rivals can also pose problems if they are in your LinkedIn network, which is why some lawyers opt to make their connections private. 3. Recommendations. Recommendations are very useful for enhancing your credibility and credentials. However, recommendations can create possible liabilities, including having perceived favourites among referral sources or clients. Recommendations may also present independence issues in client development situations, particularly when pursuing competitor companies. Additionally, be mindful that in the LinkedIn does let you edit recommendations, but the individual for whom you are providing the recommendation will have to approve the recommendation, as well as any subsequent edits, before it appears on their profile. You can withdraw a recommendation at any time and LinkedIn will not notify the individual, your recommendation will just disappear from their profile. Bottom line, pick those you recommend and who you want to recommend you very carefully. They should be individuals you know and trust. 4. LinkedIn group activity. LinkedIn groups are designed to be discussion forums for people who have similar interests. They are very useful for obtaining perspective on an industry or issue, or identifying someone who has particular expertise. Group discussion also present lawyers with an opportunity to demonstrate knowledge on a particular subject matter. However, keep in mind that even though the administrator of a group is the gatekeeper for entering the conversation, group discussion should be considered a public forum. To that end, be careful not to be providing what could be construed as legal advice. Reporters can also be members of groups and be following the conversation as background for a story, so take care with the questions you pose and the responses you give. 5. Manage connection requests. If you receive connection requests from individuals you are not interested in connecting with, it’s best to ignore the request. Take care when using the “I don’t know this person” response, as LinkedIn locks down users who get too many of these responses (think of it as being labelled a LinkedIn spammer). If you connect with someone and later decide to disconnect, you can do that from the ‘connections’ section of your profile. LinkedIn will not contact the person to let him or her know you disconnected them. |
Strategic privacy
Using the ‘settings’ feature of LinkedIn also lets you control certain privacy settings. One important feature to understand is the ‘browse connections’ setting. Given who you have invited into your network, you may prefer not to share your connections with others by turning off the connection view feature. There are good reasons for doing this.
If you have a large network of referring professionals (be they accountants, investment advisors, bankers, brokers or the like), you might not want all your referral sources to see how many other competitors of theirs you have as connections. Similarly, if you represent a number of clients that are highly competitive with each other (real estate, insurance, consumer products and food/beverage niches are good examples), you might not want to make that obvious by allowing your connections to view each other.
While this strategy may irk some LinkedIn users, it does protect your connections from being viewed by competitors, and also protects you from others trying to use your network to identify business opportunities without your involvement. Keep in mind that even though you may turn off the connection viewing feature, users of LinkedIn will still be able to see if you are a second or third connection to someone via the ‘how you’re connected’ window, so the networking value is not lost.
Another handy tool is the ‘profile view’ setting, which lets you select whether or not a LinkedIn user sees that you looked at their profile. If you are doing some intelligence gathering, you may want to be invisible to those you are checking out.
You also have control as to how your updates are communicated. While you cannot control the daily or weekly emails from LinkedIn telling you each time someone in your network updates his or her profile, you can turn off this functionality for your own profile. Use your ‘profile and status update’ settings to control this feature.
Lastly, the ‘email notifications’ controls allows you to manage how you are contacted by LinkedIn users. The ‘contact settings’ feature allows you to indicate what type of invitations you are seeking or not seeking. If you are inviting potential client or referral inquiries, make sure you have the ‘consulting offers’, ‘new ventures’, ‘business deals’ and ‘expertise requests’ boxes selected. The ‘receiving messages’ feature allows you to control how people contact you, with what frequency, and what types of messages you want to receive.
Go offline
The bottom line is that only you can decide how best to use LinkedIn for your networking and visibility goals. However, as great as online networking can be in playing the ‘who knows who’ game, it cannot take the place of face-to-face activities. It is essential to integrate interpersonal interaction with LinkedIn activities in order to build and enhance your name recognition, networking and client development efforts.
