Many of your CEO members still do not have a LinkedIn Profile or Account. Even if they have set up an account, it's probably bare bones and they've not yet uploaded all their contacts. How do you overcome this reluctance to jump in and start using LinkedIn?
One of the blogs I follow is Jan VerMeiren's Networking Coach's Opinion Blog. Jan posted a blog article that struck a chord since I've been having this discussion over and over with members of my Chair e-Course on Leveraging Social Media to Find Members. I keep hearing that many of your CEO members are not on LinkedIn. They don't get the value of it - or they are afraid of it for a variety of reasons. Let's start tackling a few of these fear factor reasons.
I promised the Chairs in my e-Course that I would put together some materials - studies, research, whitepapers, examples - to illustrate that a LinkedIn Profile can be of value to a CEO and that there is nothing to fear.
Jan made the following comments in his blog post:
Many CEO’s don’t have a Profile on LinkedIn. The main reason (next to fear of the unknown and not understanding the value of LinkedIn since nobody ever explained it to them)?
They don’t want to be stalked by sales people (or at least the annoying ones).
The good news is that LinkedIn has many ways to protect privacy and to limit the number of invitation requests, messages and emails.
You can find them in “settings” (click on the small arrow next to your name and it will pop up).
For CEO’s it might come in handy to use these settings (under Email Notifications):
- Contact Settings -> I’ll only accept Introductions.
- Invitation Filtering -> Only invitations from people who appear in my “Imported Contacts” list.In this way no pesky sales person can stalk you while enjoying the marketing and PR benefits of having a LinkedIn Profile.
What a great idea!
You might want to share this thought with your CEO members by either posting this blog article into your blog (I assume you've got a blog going as a Chair - this is one of the basic building blocks of networking communication we have as an action item in our Chair e-Course), or cut-and-paste the content into an email and send that to your members.
To read the full article that Jan posted on his blog regarding why CEOs are afraid to go onto LinkedIn, please click the link below:
Overcoming a CEOs reluctance to use LinkedIn
Barry Deutsch
