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So you’ve got your profile almost complete and you’ve started to connect with people in your network…now what? 

There’s so much more you can do with LinkedIn, but we’re going to start with what I think is the most important – engaging.  There are a few ways you can do this, including answering questions and joining and participating in groups, but today, we’re just going to focus on how you can engage with people through your home page and profile.

I recently suggested to some of our lawyers at our Annual Conference that they set LinkedIn to open when they log into their web browser, so that they can spend five minutes a day connecting to someone.  A number of them thought this wasn’t reasonable, but even five minutes a week can make a difference.Continue Reading LinkedIn Tutorials – You’re Connected…Now What?

Yesterday’s tutorial covered how to export your contacts from Outlook and upload them into LinkedIn.  But this is limiting – although it cuts down on the investment of time you need to make in order to connect with people, it doesn’t give you the flexibility of personalizing the invitations to make engaging more likely – and that’s the goal with social media: engagement!

So today, we’re going to go into more depth about adding contacts manually.  I’m the first to admit that manually adding contacts is a pain, and can be time consuming.  But if you take the time to send a personal note to those you add, they’ll be more willing to accept your invitation and subsequently engage with you.  You don’t have to take a whole afternoon to work on this – I know everyone is busy!  Instead, when you first come in to the office in the morning and are having your cup of coffee, log into LinkedIn and add five people.  It won’t take you very long at all, and soon you’ll have a nice list of connections built up.  Even if you do this once a week, it will make a difference.Continue Reading LinkedIn Tutorials – Let’s Get Connected! Part II

Now that you’ve created a complete profile, it’s time to start connecting and engaging with people you might know on LinkedIn.  Let’s start with the basics – connecting with people in your Outlook contacts.  

Start by logging in to your home page.  Since you’re a new member and still building your LinkedIn base, you will likely see this box:

 Continue Reading LinkedIn Tutorials – Let’s Get Connected! Part I

Yesterday, we went through the basics of setting up an account and profile on LinkedIn.  Today, we’re going to look much more in-depth at the LinkedIn profile and get ourselves to 100% profile completeness (or just about)!

You may be wondering why you need to bother with completing your profile – isn’t the bare minimum enough?

Well, according to LinkedIn, "Users with complete profiles are 40 times more likely to receive opportunities through LinkedIn."  Your profile becomes complete when you have:

  • Your current position
  • Two past positions
  • Your education
  • Your profile summary
  • A profile photo
  • Your specialties
  • At least three recommendations

Continue Reading LinkedIn Tutorials – How to Set up a Profile Part II

Here on Zen, I talk a lot about why I love social media, and how I think it can be useful to lawyers and law firms.  Now that I’ve got you all convinced, I realize that not everyone knows how or where to start.  I’ve talked about some of the basic principles of using these tools – engage, don’t broadcast; give yourself a small window of time to use them each day, etc – but not the how-to of using them.  So I’m going to be doing a series of social media tutorials over the next several weeks to get you started, and I’m beginning with LinkedIn.

To me, LinkedIn is the most useful social media platform for lawyers, if for no other reason than it’s considered the most professional.  Because of that, most of your clients will be there, so you should be too.  

Here’s a quick note – there is a LOT of information in this post, but don’t be alarmed. It will take you less time to complete your profile than it will to read through this post!

Continue Reading LinkedIn Tutorials – How to Set up a Profile Part I

This afternoon, I had the good fortune to sit in on Kevin O’Keefe’s webinar on "Beyond Blogging: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn." I’m already sold on the benefits of all three for law firms, but I love hearing Kevin’s stories which I can relate to our attorneys to win them over. The five most important things I heard Kevin say in his webinar were:

  1. Starting to use these tools isn’t a strategy – it’s a tactic. Saying that the strategy is to get on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook is like saying you’re going to have the lawyers drive red cars. It doesn’t make sense. Use them as relationship-building tools and tools that frame your identity.
     
  2. Because media is more social, and a shared experience, you need to be doing those things that will cause your information to be shared by others who have people trusting them. 
     
  3. Just because another law firm is doing something doesn’t mean you have to do it. 
     
  4. It doesn’t matter if your clients or perspective clients ever see your information being shared or if they read your blog – influencers and amplifiers are seeing it and connecting you to the right people. 
     
  5. Empower the lawyers at your firm to use social media to build relationships.

Continue Reading Beyond Blogging: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – A Re-Cap of LexBlog’s Webinar

I’ve spent the last two days talking about how to make improvements to your LinkedIn profile, and getting the most out of your LinkedIn home page.  Today, I want to cover LinkedIn Groups.

On LinkedIn, there are groups for everything, from business networking to animal lovers.  Groups are an excellent way to connect with people outside of your immediate network in areas where you share an interest.

I’m going to focus on the ILN’s group, because I’m the moderator and have the most familiarity with it, but most of this advice can be applicable to any business networking group for lawyers. During my presentation, I started with the "why" – why should the lawyers in the room have any interest in joining the ILN Group on LinkedIn? Continue Reading LinkedIn – Making the Most out of Groups

Yesterday, I talked about what improvements you  might want to make to your LinkedIn profile to get the best results from it.  Today, I’ll talk about the home page screen and why it’s useful to be logging in to LinkedIn periodically – I have LinkedIn set to open as one of the tabs on my browser, so every morning, I open Outlook and Chrome, go through my emails, and check on my browser tabs.  This includes taking a quick look (no more than five minutes) at my LinkedIn home page screen.  Lawyers, I know you’re busy, but if you make this part of your morning routine, you’ll only have to spend a few minutes looking at LinkedIn, you’ll stay up to date on what your network is doing, and you won’t have to try to remember to visit LinkedIn.

There are four things I find of particular importance on your home page screen (which looks like this):

Continue Reading “Hitting the (Other) Links to Develop Your Rainmaking Game – Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About LinkedIn” – Part II

If you read my posts regularly, you’ll know that I have a passion for social media.  I don’t think it’s the be all and end all of business development tools, of course, but I do have a fondness for it and an interest in sharing that fondness with my attorneys.

So I jumped at the chance to present a more in-depth look at LinkedIn to our group at the 2011 23rd ILN Annual Meeting on Saturday morning.  I wanted to stick to what I thought were the most relevant points about LinkedIn, and what would give our attorneys the greatest impact – and for me, there was no greater joy than sitting with one of our attorneys during the subsequent breakout session and helping him fill out his profile, as he repeated back to me snippets of what I’d said. 

Last week, I mentioned a few best practices for LinkedIn, but I’d like to add in a bit more about our session in Lisbon.

Continue Reading “Hitting the (Other) Links to Develop Your Rainmaking Game – Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About LinkedIn”

I’m just back from our 2011 23rd Annual Meeting in Lisbon, and I’ll have lots to share with you over the next week or so.  But what’s fresh in my mind this morning is our session on LinkedIn from Saturday morning – I’d like to share some best practices for LinkedIn, which can be particularly useful when you’re just returning from any conference:

  • Review the attendee list, or the stack of business cards you returned with and make note of the people you met and chatted to at the conference. Search for, and connect to, these people on LinkedIn, making sure to send a personal note with your invitation that refers to your conversations.
     
  • Set your browser to open to the LinkedIn home page when you start it up.  I use Chrome on my desktop, and have set it to open several tabs when I start it up each morning, including LinkedIn – that way I never have to remember to visit LinkedIn and check the latest status updates.  Then, each morning, I scroll through my news feed and comment on or like updates and news, or connect to anyone I might know.  It doesn’t take a lot of time, and it keeps me plugged into what my network is doing.

Continue Reading LinkedIn Best Practices