Lesson 8 is about convincing your Members that they should be on LinkedIn and why they should upload their address book of contacts.

Imagine having access to easily look at every single one of your members' connections on LinkedIn - as if they handed you their rolodex, and said "go through this and if anyone looks interesting, give me a call and I'll introduce you". Each of their CEOs/Trusted Advisers knows other CEOs/Trusted Advisers. Imagine that your network just increased by a scale of 3X-4X instantly.

Here are some thoughts and ideas on why CEOs (and all their executives/managers) should be using LinkedIn. These are a few blog articles I've collected that might give you the ammunition you need for your next group meeting or one-to-one when you're talking about LinkedIn as a useful tool for CEOs.

Justifying Why CEOs Should be Using LinkedIn

How LinkedIn Can Bring More Than Talent To Your Company

My Partner, Brad Remillard, published a blog post on the value/benefits that LinkedIn can bring to a company. One of the greatest values is the networking for potential talent to fill critical roles. However, that's not all LinkedIn is capable of doing for your company. Discover the other dimensions of using it with vendors, suppliers, affiliates, peers in other companies, and global partners.

3 Essential Social Media Tools for the CEO

Jeff Bullas, a well-known social media expert and blogger, wrote a blog post on why CEOs should be active in the primary social media sites. such as LinkedIn. Jeff describes the use of LinkedIn as a communication tool with customers or clients. I use personally use LinkedIn extensively to communicate with clients and candidates in my executive search business.

5 Ways Small Businesses Can Leverage LinkedIn’s New Features

The authority in social media, the Mashable website, describes a number of ways in which LinkedIn could benefit small businesses. Obviously, it goes without saying that if the CEO get behind the use of LinkedIn, others will follow and see the benefits the article mentions.

20 Case Studies and Examples of Using LinkedIn

Jump past the job search examples and you'll start to see the potential of LinkedIn as a tool for engaging with customers, enhancing lead generation in sales, conducting market research, developing relationships. The list is literally endless. If you have members that are Personal Service Providers, such as law firms or cpa firms, they're leaving a boat load of money sitting on the table by not using LinkedIn as a strategic marketing and sales tool.

Barry's Delicious List of Bookmarks on Leveraging LinkedIn

I have a collection of hundreds of these articles. Please take a few minutes and scan my archive of articles related to using LinkedIn on Delicious (Wait - did Barry just illustrate a practical example for using Delicious?) You might also want to check out my bookmarks on tab for B2B_social_media for how companies are using LinkedIn and other social media tools.

 

Real Time Example of Using LinkedIn

In the interest of transparency, let's take a look at how I use LinkedIn to build, engage, and nurture my connections - especially as it relates to engaging with the Chair community.

As many of you know, a large percentage of my executive search assignments come out of the Vistage/TEC community. A significant percentage of those assignments come to me because the member asked their Chair, should I work with Barry. You told your member that "Barry's one of the good guys. You should speak with him". Without that "good housekeeping" seal of approval, many of my assignments would never have been realized.

So it dawns on me - how can I be helpful and useful to my core constituency for leads and referrals - the Chair community?

Here's the sequence of how I leverage LinkedIn with the Chair Community. As you see these steps and examples, can you visualize how you might adapt this to your needs to find CEOs in your local communities, OR how your members might use LinkedIn for marketing, sales lead generation, customer engagement and education, thought-leadership, recruiting and sourcing of candidates, vendors, suppliers, and other partners.

• I search for Chairs on LinkedIn by entering the term "TEC Chair" or "Vistage Chair" as a keyword in the advanced people search screen.
• I Send a connection invite.
• I invite you to join my Chair Discussion Group on LinkedIn.
• I invite you to join my Chair Blog and Chair e-Course.
• I Provide tools, communication, ideas, courses, content that helps your community of Chairs be more successful in finding and acquiring CEO members.
• My communication to is to through the blog and then into the Discussion Group.
• I post discussion topics directly into the LinkedIn group for encouraging conversation and dialogue.
• My Communication can also be one-to-one OR to sub-sets of my Chair network (done through the tagging option under the profile organizer in the connections tab on LinkedIn) - such as those who've heard me speak, those who've not heard me speak, those who have not yet shared the link for the free download of our book with their members, and occasional references to the fact that I do executive search so that the idea/concept can stay top-of-mind.

What's the result from this "investment" of time and effort:

• Our relationship is stronger and you might trust me more due to the help I'm providing
• You'll refer other chairs through your chair groups and on Chairnet.
• You might be interested in personal coaching on finding members or perhaps you'll sign up in the future for one of my advanced courses.
• I can fire off a quick note next July to see if you would like to book me to speak to your group in 2012 since now I can track easily every chair I've presented to and what programs your group heard (again through the tagging feature of LinkedIn).
• You'll like this program so much, you'll refer my "Social Media for Sales Lead Generation" program to your members so that they can have all their sales reps OR anyone involved in marketing/biz dev/sales to learn how to apply social media on a practical level.

I probably have not touched one percent of the proverbial "tip of the iceberg" in how LinkedIn could be leveraged for marketing, branding, customer engagement, sales, and hiring.

Is there any doubt that your members would benefit from being on LinkedIn? How much more justification is necessary? Once we strip away the fear factors (see my blog post on why CEOs fear being on LinkedIn), what's left standing in the way?

Lesson 8 Action Items

Define 2 or 3 tactics that you will use over the next 30 days to encourage your members (and TAs) to set up an account on LinkedIn and upload their contacts.

Turn this into a project. Set dates of when you plan to do a specific activity. Track your success. How many members went onto LinkedIn. These tactics might range from personal encouragement in a one-to-one to sending out a series of emails with links to some of the articles I've shared with you. Sometimes, people need to read and absorb this stuff on their own without being "pushed." Or you could concurrently do 3 or 4 things coming at in the group, individually, and through sending information. The key here is to do SOMETHING to get your members to start using LinkedIn. Once they start using it and uploading their contacts, your leads and referrals will SOAR.

 

Lesson 8 Discussion Topics

How many of your members are currently using LinkedIn out of the total - please post this into the discussion group (such as 2 out of 16)?

How do you "feel" about encouraging your CEO members to go onto LinkedIn and start using it?

How many of your members are actively pursuing a social media strategy by having hired someone to oversee it, or investment funds with a consultant to implement it?

What is the number one "fear factor" you hear from your CEOs of why they have resisted setting up a LinkedIn Account and actively using it?