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2012-01-23-LinkedIn Part 2

Seminars@Hadley

Networking with LinkedIn Part 2

Presented by Tom Babinszki

Moderated by Larry Muffett

January 23, 2012

Larry MuffettWelcome to seminars at Hadley. My name is Larry Muffett. I am a member of the Curricular Affairs Team here at Hadley. Today’s topic, as you probably all know, is networking with LinkedIn. This is part two, a continuation of the one that we did January 10th.

Your presenter today is Tom Babinszki. Tom is the Director of the Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship here at Hadley. I think we all are seeing quite a bit of interest and a lot of talk and a lot of buzz about social networking. So we’re going to continue on looking at a particular social networking tool with a business and professional focus that is, of course, LinkedIn. So now, let me welcome today’s presenter, my friend and coworker here at Hadley, Tom Babinszki.

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind of 41


Tom BabinszkiGood afternoon everybody. I’m glad to be here again and talk about LinkedIn for the second time. Last time we discussed how to get started on LinkedIn, how to create your profile and what to put in there. But today, in particular, I would like to talk about how to leverage LinkedIn for your business.

Before that, there are a couple of things I would like to mention. Last time I heard some feedback that some people were trying to follow on LinkedIn what I was talking about, and it was a little confusing. I would like to mention today that this is more like a presentation or a lecture where you will have a chance to ask questions, but primarily I would like to ask you to listen and take the information.

This seminar will be recorded and then archived so you will have a chance to go back to it, download it, and listen to it – stop it wherever you want to – and follow along as you listen to it from the recording. Today, I think you will get the most out of this presentation if you just listen to it, or maybe take notes.

The other thing is we all have different habits of who we add as a connection and who we don’t. I’ve



noticed that some of you requested to be connected to me on LinkedIn. I have not added any of you as a connection. Please, no offense, I do not have any personal problems with anybody who I didn’t add, but my personal guideline is I usually add people who I know in person, who I have met in person, and have known better than just one or two encounters. So you can understand there is no personal problems here, this is just my preference. I have some exceptions, and I will talk a little bit about that, but primarily I encourage you to develop your structure on whom you are going to accept as a contact and whom you won’t. With that, let’s briefly review what we are going to talk about today.

We’ll talk about sharing information; we’ll talk about connecting with people; we’re going to talk about finding new contacts; establishing yourself as a professional; and leveraging your connections to grow your business.

Let’s talk a little bit about your profile. I hope you had a chance to start your LinkedIn account and set up a profile. I mentioned last time that the profile is something that you can just create with whatever in it because you will always have the chance to change the information. Your profile is a resume, a very extended resume. You see, the problem when you



print out a resume for an application is that they want you to be as brief as possible – two pages tops, sometimes one page – and you have to cram all of your information in there. With LinkedIn, we want you to be as detailed as possible; you want to share all of the information. People will read what they want to read, whether they want to know more about your education or about your business, about your previous employment, and so on and so forth.

I am going to share a trick with you. I would recommend that you update your profile on a regular basis. Here’s why: Whenever you update your profile, in your account there is going to be a note that you have updated your profile, and it will say which section. So, for example, if I had to update my education, it will say “Tom Babinszki has added a new field or new items to his education.” Whenever your contacts sign in to LinkedIn, it is going to show the recent updates from their connections; when you have recently updated your profile, it is going to show.

It achieves one thing: that you are going to be in front of people that you want to be connected with and if they are potential business partners or clients it’s a very easy way to put your name and company information in front of them. If they are actually interested in what you have updated, they can click



on it and read your profile again. It is just a great reminder that you exist; you’re still in town; you’re still doing business; you’re around. I would recommend that once a month you go back to your profile, review what you have said, and update it.

There are certain things that sounded great in 2008 when I put my profile together, but today I would say differently. Let’s say I have trained 50 people on a particular topic, but two years later I have continued that training and by now I have 500 people trained on the topic. I want to reflect that in my LinkedIn profile. Let’s say I started the Center for Entrepreneurship and I’m talking about what the plans for the center are, but a year later, when the center is in existence and we are offering courses, I may want to say that I have built the Center for Entrepreneurship, or certain aspects of the Center for Entrepreneurship. It was a team effort; I didn’t build anything.

You may just want to say things differently. Things may have different meanings to you. Or maybe there are some things that you were very proud of 20 years ago and at that point it was a great thing on your resume, but today that’s not all that important to you and you don’t want to talk about it because you don’t care about it, because you have something else that is different or better to say. That’s your chance to



review your profile, and I would recommend that you do it on a monthly basis, just so that you are staying in front of people.

Let’s assume you don’t have too much to say on a profile; you think it’s all good. You don’t want to change anything for a year or two. That’s entirely possible. If you still want to be in front of people, with your profile, just go in there and make irrelevant changes. Like, rewrite a sentence, add a couple of spaces. Essentially, the changes are not reflected in your profile but, yeah, it’s an update so it will be at the top of the list when somebody logs in.

Use relevant key words. Look into what your business is doing. Are you selling training? Are you selling coaching? Are you selling shoes? Anything that you are selling, how would people ask about it? How would people look for it? And, come up with a list of key words that you can integrate into your profile sporadically, not on one particular part but all over your profile, and also make sure that you don’t overuse these keywords. This way it will be easier for the people to find you based on the information or products and services you are providing.



Here is another interesting question. Whom should you add as a connection, or whom should you accept?

It’s a very, very personal choice. Let me just tell you what I am doing, that I already briefly mentioned. I like to know that contact personally. I don’t just add somebody because we had some kind of interaction. Maybe I actually did several years ago so now I am going through the people I thought I knew and some names just don’t ring a bell. Those contacts are not meaningful to me. I like to see people on my connection list that I know well; that I know about; I know what they are doing; I know I am interested in their business and their personal lives. But you may have a different preference.

There are pros and cons for having many or not too many connections. If you don’t have too many, it’s easier to keep up with them. It’s easier to stay in touch and see what they are up to. But when you have more connections, you are getting higher visibility. The other advantage of having more connections is that your network is larger and when you are doing searches, more results will come up. So, for example, in my case I have a little more than 300 connections and whenever I search within my network, I am able to view information about over 9



million people. But it also depends on a bunch of other things.

For example, if you don’t want to grow your network by having connections, you can grow your network by having groups. You are the only one who can decide what is going to be the criteria. The only thing I would recommend to you is make a decision and stick to it unless you have a good reason to change your approach to whom you are going to contact.

There is a scenario where there are people who are using LinkedIn to connect with as many people as possible. They are called the open networkers. LinkedIn says these people have 500 plus connections. LinkedIn actually doesn’t tell you how many connections they have after 500, but I know many people who have thousands or tens of thousands. I am actually connected to some people who have well over 30 thousand connections. It’s not terribly rare. They obviously don’t necessarily know the people they are connected with. They may have a reason why they connect. Definitely it gives them a really great visibility. These are actually people who post and publish lots of information on LinkedIn.

What I always tell people is that the Yellow Pages is not your Rolodex. Sure, you can take the Yellow



Pages and say “This is my contact list.” Of course, you can find anybody, any business – you can take the regular phone book and, yes, you have lots of people at your fingertips. But are they really useful connections? Are you going to get anything out of being connected with one another? My guess is no, unless your case is something very special. It’s not necessarily helping you just to have a huge number of connections that you can brag about. There are much more important things that you should consider.

Larry MuffettI’ve got a question for you Tom, just to give you a little break time here. I think you’re going to touch on this later, but what are some of the etiquette points, because I’ve seen where people will make a request to you – what’s the proper etiquette? Should you just ignore them, should you give them a formal rejection? And then, sometimes people have asked me to make recommendations. I’ve done that for them, wrote out a pretty elaborate one or two paragraph recommendation. I ask them to return the favor and I get one sentence. Could you answer, or talk a little bit about the idea of etiquette with LinkedIn?

Tom Babinszki



That’s a great question. I will cover recommendations a bit later, but let me tell you about connection invitations and requests.

You have three options when you get a request. You can accept it, that’s pretty obvious. You can archive it; this essentially means “I’m sorry, I don’t want to insult you, but no thanks.” And there is another one that says “I don’t know this person.” So for example if you want to make contact with someone and that person does not recognize you, this is what they are going to press. Or, maybe they just don’t want to be in touch with you, and they want you to know that, and they say “I don’t know this person.”

I remember I had a long conversation with somebody and the following day I added him, and that’s how he rejected my invitation, with “I don’t know this person.” I was pretty sure he did; maybe today he doesn’t. Certain people don’t care and others don’t feel good about it. Therefore, when you send a connection request, LinkedIn has an automated message that says “So and so, I would like to add you to my LinkedIn connections,” and then your signature.

All is well, but maybe if they are busy people and they meet with so many others, they may not remember you. It’s always a good idea to say that “Hey, we met



at the meeting of the Chamber of Commerce last night. It was great chatting with you. I would like to add you to my connections.” That’s just a nice thing to do. It’s very personal and that will actually give you a higher chance to be recognized and be added.

The other thing you can do, if you don’t want to be connected with somebody, just do the same thing that I did. Tell them that – send a response “Thank you very much. I appreciate your request. But I’m connecting with people that I’ve met in person,” or “I’m connecting with people with…” and set criteria that this particular person doesn’t belong too. That’s a very nice, polite rejection that people are not going to be insulted about.

Larry MuffettExcellent. Krista has got a question. Krista wants to know how you decide what kind of information to post for status updates? She’s a freelance writer interested in many topics. She’s a generalist so she doesn’t really have a niche and she’s not sure she wants to define herself with one.

Tom BabinszkiGreat question. I constantly struggle with this because it really depends on how much you would like to post. If you would like to post a lot, then you may risk losing



a bunch of people who won’t hear from you because you are posting about things that are not necessarily interesting to them. If you are not posting much, there is less of a risk, but you get less of an exposure. I would recommend if you are posting in a wide variety of topics, that you don’t necessarily post status updates, but rather post in different interest groups, go into mailing lists, or tag your posts; that helps a little bit.

It does certainly help to be in a niche, and follow a niche whenever it comes to social media. Many people do that, and it’s almost expected of you. Now, I also see many people who don’t necessarily follow a niche, but they definitely have a harder time connecting. A bit later, I am going to talk about LinkedIn updates as it relates to your niche.

Larry MuffettShe’s got a follow-up. Are group postings – I’m not sure if this is an actual verb or not – Google-able? Can you Google group postings?

Tom BabinszkiI am not sure. I think you can, but one thing that works is you can go to LinkedIn groups and you can search within the group content. It also depends on whether a group is open or closed, because some of



them require requesting a membership, and there are some groups who are open and anybody can join them. It just really depends what group you are talking about.

A couple more things about contacts that I would like to tell you. One way to connect with more people is uploading your address book from Yahoo or Google or Outlook that we discussed last time. There is an interesting thing. LinkedIn shows a section on the main page that says “People you may know.” It is trying to match you with people that you are somehow connected to and LinkedIn is using all kinds of information that is available about you – including your address book or address books of other people where your information is contained.

So, for example, if you add me to your address book and you upload your Outlook address book, then next time I may see a recommendation from LinkedIn that I should be connecting with you. The more information you provide on LinkedIn, the more recommendations you may get.

Another way of adding contacts is take your connections one by one – and I would highly recommend spending hours or even days when you have a good number of connections, to go through



their entire LinkedIn profile and see what they are up to. What is it that they are doing? Do you know enough about them? Did you just meet last night at the Chamber of Commerce? You have exchanged business cards, you added each other to LinkedIn, and then end of story? That’s definitely not a very useful contact; you can get much more out of it.

You can go and see if they go to school, what kind of business they are in, and most importantly, if they share those details, which most people do, you can look at who their connections are. And if anybody seems interesting, you can browse those connections’ profiles and that can lead you to some really great introductions.

Like, I met with Joe last night at the Chamber of Commerce and I know that Joe is connected with Frank and Frank is an insurance agent. I need a new insurance agent. I have two options. I can just go and look for an insurance agent online and I can type in “Chicago car insurance” or “health insurance” and something will come up. But what if I talk to Joe and say “I met you last night at the Chamber of Commerce. We just connected on LinkedIn and I see that you have a connection, Frank, who is an insurance agent. Currently I am in need of an insurance agent. Can you please introduce us?”



Here is what is going to happen. If Joe agrees to it and knows Frank well enough, he will say “Oh, sure. I will introduce you,” and will send a mutual introduction. All of a sudden Frank knows that I am Joe’s contact or acquaintance, and it will be just a better way to connect, that we have a mutual friend or acquaintance.

Now, obviously if you add anybody as your connection without even knowing the person, maybe Joe will come up to me and say “Hey Tom, I see that you know Frank because you are connected to him,” and then I have to disappoint Joe and tell him “You know, we are connected but I am connected to so many people that I don’t even know how to reach Frank,” or “Honestly, I don’t even know who Frank is.”

That’s the difference between having too many connections or not too many connections. I have landed many business deals by browsing people’s connections that I knew very well. We were friends, we served on the same committee, we worked for the same interest groups, and so on and so forth, and if I found anybody among their contacts who would be a good client for me, then I got some very nice introductions.



It also helps to check the updates of other people and respond to it, just to keep in touch. Let’s say, for example, someone has a new job and they are working somewhere else. It’s a great thing to send a response or send them an email saying “Hey, congratulations for your job. Hope you like it. What are your responsibilities?”

The other thing that you can do with the connections is, hoping that they frequently update their information and if they share their email address, you are able to know instantly if they have changed their email for whatever reason; you can stay in touch. From that point, it doesn’t matter if your address book is up to date. For that matter, you can download all your connections as a database and import it into your Outlook or any other address book that you are using.

Larry MuffettThere are some questions that people are posting. I think it would be a good opportunity to take it over. Kristy has the question “How blind-friendly is LinkedIn? What is the experience with JAWS access?

Tom BabinszkiGreat question. One of the reasons why I am talking about LinkedIn is because it is one of the most accessible networking sites. I wouldn’t call it 100%



accessible, and certain things are changing. However, I’m finding over the years that they do a very good job of accessibility and, at least, the most relevant parts of LinkedIn are accessible. I am using LinkedIn with a screen reader and I’ve never really had major problems with it.

Larry MuffettWe’ve had a couple of people ask the question about now when they get a connection or they want to make a connection with somebody, LinkedIn is asking them for an email address and they are sort of asking the question “What’s up with this?”



Tom BabinszkiYes. That’s correct. There are several ways that you can connect with somebody, and they want to make sure that you are not spamming LinkedIn. So when you connect with somebody you have to indicate where you know this person from; from previous employment, previous education, you have done business together, and so on and so forth. If it’s one of those options – for example, if I want to add you as a connection and I say we have done business together – I can indicate where we did business together; I worked at the Hadley School for the Blind.

Now, there is one option where you don’t have anything in common with this person; you didn’t go to school together, you didn’t do business together, nothing really matches all of the above but you for whatever reason would like to connect. You are not even friends, but you have a legitimate reason to connect. That’s when you indicate ‘Other’. When you indicate the method that you connected is ‘Other’, LinkedIn automatically asks you for an email address just for a security that you actually do know something about this person and you are not just trying to spam. Then you can put in the email address of the person, and if it is correct as one of the email addresses of that particular person, then the connection request will be received.



Larry MuffettAnother question here. Ray wants to know – he listened to part one – congratulations, thank you Ray – he tried going in and customizing his public profile URL but it doesn’t seem to let him change it. He’s clicking on customize URL and it doesn’t seem to be working for him. Any suggestions?

Tom BabinszkiI am not sure why it doesn’t work. When I tried it, I just clicked on it and there was an edit field. I had to type in the URL and I submitted it and from then on it was ok. If there is any way I can help you figure this out, I will be very happy to work with you. Please feel free to contact me after the seminar; give me a call or shoot me an email and we can look into that.

Ok then, let me talk about recommendations. This is a very interesting thing. In the good old days when you applied for a job or you submitted your information for a contract, they asked you to provide references. So you had to come up with three different references, at least; one is a business contact, a friend, or whatever you came up with. And maybe your new employer asks your references to write a letter of reference or any recommendations.



Now, LinkedIn has automated this. For that matter, you can write those references before people even ask for it. These are called recommendations. The way it works is you can request any of your connections to write a recommendation about you. I have not seen anything bad, so people don’t ever write or publish embarrassing recommendations. And if you do, whenever you receive a recommendation, you have an option of displaying it on your profile or not.

If you receive a recommendation you are not happy with, you can just hide it. This is why it doesn’t exactly function as a list of references. But think about it this way. If you have collected twenty great recommendations of your previous education and your previous work, even though you hid two or three bad ones, those twenty good ones speak a lot about your integrity and your great work. I have a reason to work with you if I am your future employer, because I had a chance to hear lots about you written by other people.

They actually say that people who have recommendations on their profile have a much higher likelihood of landing a job on LinkedIn. But we’re not only talking about employment; recommendations are also very useful for running your own business.



But how does it really work, or what do you put in there? These recommendations are not terribly long. They would be one to two paragraphs or several sentences. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. If I need more information then I can say “I see that this person recommended you, can you please put me in touch with this person because I would like to use him or her as a reference.” So I have ways around that, that’s why it doesn’t have to be too detailed.

But it is also not very nice to write a short recommendation. You don’t just want to say “Oh, he’s a nice guy,” or “He has high integrity,” or “He’s honest.” That could very well be true, but a recommendation should say a little more. It should be unique. I would also make sure that if I write a recommendation about somebody, I read the recommendations written about that person before so that I don’t just submit something that is similar to the previous ones, but I add something new that nobody said before. The deal is that when you write a recommendation about someone, you probably care about this person. You write this recommendation because you want this person to succeed in employment or in business.



Now, many people say that they request recommendations and most people just disregard the recommendation request. I would recommend if anybody requests a recommendation from you, you take the opportunity to speak highly of the person who requested it. It has the potential that this is going to be reciprocated, and then you can also feel more comfortable requesting a recommendation from somebody whom you recommended before.

The other way to go around it – I’ll share a trick with you on how I collected so many recommendations. What I did was, I went through my connections, and without them asking me for it, I wrote recommendations for them. One thing they see is, they check their email and all of a sudden it’s a surprise that somebody wrote a recommendation for them on LinkedIn. And they really appreciated it. The next thing I see, is that without asking, they reciprocated the favor and they wrote a recommendation for me. So me taking the initiative collected a bunch of great recommendations on my profile that now I am able to use.

Larry MuffettLet’s circle back to the earlier question that I had. What would you recommend for the etiquette in those situations? Obviously you don’t want to go character



for character, if somebody uses 275 characters recommending you, you don’t have to do exactly 275. But just sort of roughly, what is the proper etiquette on something like that?



Tom BabinszkiI would say if it’s a great recommendation, you should reciprocate it. If somebody went to the trouble of writing four paragraphs about you, then this recommendation is going to serve you well. So please take the time to sit down and figure out four paragraphs and give back as much as you get, or more.

If somebody wrote a very short recommendation about you, and you still decide to display it on you profile, that’s great. But I think you should have the courtesy of writing something back. And when you write back, it’s ok to give more than what you get. Feel free to write a couple of paragraphs even if it’s just a sentence that you received.

The other thing is, if there is a one sentence recommendation that looks bad in two places – on the profile of the person who received it and on the profile of the person who sent it. You don’t want to be the person looking bad with a one sentence recommendation. Even if for nothing else, I would recommend you either put one or two paragraphs together or nothing at all, and excuse yourself and say that as this point you don’t want to or cannot write a recommendation.



That brings me to another point that’s perfectly ok. If somebody requests that I recommend them, just because we are connected and I know the person well enough to be a connection – maybe we met at a couple of luncheons – I may not know the person well enough to write a recommendation whatsoever. I have turned down recommendation requests, and I say “Look, I would love to write something about you but for that we need to work more together, I need to know you better. At this point I don’t know enough about you that I can write a meaningful recommendation.” And that’s perfectly ok. Usually, when I work with a client we’ve worked enough together that I have an understanding of them and their business. Especially for clients, I always went out of my way to make sure that I put in a recommendation. And I have requested recommendations from clients, which I have always received.

Larry MuffettWhat sort of feedback are you getting from organizations or what sort of weight do they putting on those recommendations? If they see seven or eight really sterling recommendations on somebody’s LinkedIn page, how much weight do they put on that as far as the evaluation?



Tom BabinszkiThat’s a good question, and I don’t know the answer. It really doesn’t depend on the organization, it depends on the individual. I think there is a huge weight on that. It just helps you get to know the person before an actual interview, so I would say that just like everything else on LinkedIn, the more information you have the better. Recommendations do function as information. It’s certainly helpful.

Larry MuffettI want to jump back to one of the previous topics, or from one of the previous questions, where somebody asked about if they didn’t know somebody’s email. We had a question in the text box that LinkedIn proposed a connection with somebody that they knew previously but hadn’t seen for 30 years. They said that they wanted to connect with them under the category of ‘Other’. It asked for an email address but since they hadn’t talked to the person in 30 years they didn’t know the email address. Is there any way around that or is there another form of information that can be used to verify that it’s not a spam?

Tom BabinszkiSure. What I do is I just say something else. I say “We’ve done business together,” and if LinkedIn asks me “Where have you done business together?” – let’s



say that organization still exists where we have met – I just put that one down and if not, I just put down the oldest I’ve ever been to. Hopefully that person will recognize me and even though he or she will know that we haven’t done business together, if they really want to connect they are going to accept the connection request. I know it’s not the best way of indicating how you know each other, but connecting somehow is better than not connecting at all.

I would like to talk about another very interesting topic, and that is LinkedIn Answers. I just love it. Sometimes I love it over any kind of a search engine. What it does, is you can ask any questions whatsoever, as long as it is appropriate, and other LinkedIn members will respond to it.

LinkedIn, last I have checked, had hundreds of thousands of questions. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it was in the millions. People talk about everything. They talk about starting a new business, marketing, using LinkedIn, using social media, using computers, hiring people, you name it; as long as it has slightly to do with business, it’s there.

The reason why I like it is – well there are many reasons why I like it – but the main one is because it’s searchable. So, when I am looking for information on



LinkedIn, let’s say, how to do my taxes this year, if it’s in a search engine I am going to find so many irrelevant results, like agencies trying to advertise their services. Whereas, when I go into LinkedIn, and if I search the same phrase, I find very relevant answers because people on LinkedIn know that they don’t spam the forums or Questions and Answers in groups, with advertisements.

The way to stand out on LinkedIn, and I’ll talk more about it, is not by advertising yourself. It’s only by showing that you are an expert, you are a professional, and you have the answer immediately and the answer is useful. So when I’m curious about how to file my taxes this year, I go to LinkedIn and I can be confident that I’ll find more relevant information. And actually, when I have questions related to my business, I always go to LinkedIn first, and then to a search engine.

Now, there is much more than that to Questions and Answers; you can find answers but you can also ask questions if you can’t find the answer. Or, you can answer questions. The way it works, LinkedIn categorizes answers into two categories. When you search, you can search for all questions and answers, or you can search for open questions.



I believe a question is open for a week or so – definitely not for a long time, just several days – that’s when you get a chance to respond to any questions. Then, the person who has asked the question can select which one is the best answer. That gives you additional credibility when people look at your profile and they look at your answers, they can see what you are an expert in.

It does make sense to periodically browse the LinkedIn answers, I would say once a week if not more often, putting the key words that you feel you are an expert in – let that be teaching English, let that be woodwork, let that be accounting – and whatever specific key words you come up with, you’ll find open questions.

Try to answer those questions. Try to be more informative than anybody else, so that maybe you will be chosen as somebody who has the best answer. And follow up when you answer a question. Go back to the discussion after that and see if there were any follow up questions so that you don’t just abandon a Question and Answer forum once you have answered one question.

Larry Muffett



Krista has a question in that vein. She wants to know if you Google your name, will your LinkedIn questions and answers be displayed?

Tom BabinszkiGreat question. I don’t think so. When you Google your name, your LinkedIn profile will be more likely displayed, especially if you have an unusual name. Mine is unusual enough that I think in the entire United States, three more people spell their name the same way I do. Now five more because three are in my family, but that’s that – all three are not on LinkedIn, two of them cannot even read and write yet. But basically, when I type in my name my LinkedIn profile comes up on the first page.

When your name is John Smith, then chances are not that high that your name is going to come up on the first page. You can Google for LinkedIn Questions and Answers but Google doesn’t display them on the top of the list, for sure; if it displays them at all. So when you are looking for LinkedIn Answers your best bet is to use the LinkedIn search box.

Another thing I would like to talk about is ‘Groups’. LinkedIn has user groups which function somewhat similarly to any other social media groups. The only exception is that, at a time, you can only join 40



groups. You can find groups on the top of the LinkedIn page; there is a menu item that is called groups. LinkedIn will give you a couple of recommendations of which groups will be interesting for you. I kind of found it 50-50; some are and some aren’t. But you can always go and type into the search field and then look for groups of interest to you.

The other thing is you can check your connections’ profiles to see which groups they have joined. Let’s say somebody is your competitor and they have joined an interest group in your subject matter area; then probably that group is going to be interesting for you as well. I would highly recommend – before you get into groups – to kind of figure out what is going on, to monitor it a little bit, understand what the discussion is all about. All groups have their own rules, their habits, their traditions; some are new and some are old and the older ones are more used to certain things. So before you try to be very creative I would suggest you read about the groups, see what people are doing, and then join the conversation.

Same thing as Questions and Answers; try to add value, answer questions, post things which are relevant for your group, and try not to spam advertise. If you are professional and they know about it, they



will find you. When you answer a question in the LinkedIn Answers or on the group, don’t necessarily put out what you are doing. But when it is within your area of expertise, then be the one who answers the question. People will find out eventually that you are a professional. They are going to click on your profile, they will know more about you, and on your profile you can advertise all you want. Whoever clicks on it, that’s what they want to see; what you are doing. If they need an expert, like you are, they are going to find you for sure.

Larry MuffettBill has got an interesting question. Can LinkedIn be set for Canada only? So, can it be made country specific?

Tom BabinszkiI’m not aware of any way of making it country specific, because whenever you do any searches it is looking through your entire network, which will ultimately be around the world. I guess the only way to set it to Canada is whenever you do searches, you type in ‘Canada’. But then, you will limit your searches to results where the word ‘Canada’ actually appears, but you are going to exclude results which were written in Canada but don’t include the word ‘Canada’. So, I think it’s pretty difficult. I don’t think it’s very doable,



and probably it’s going to do much more wrong to you than good.

The other thing that I would like to briefly mention is ‘Companies’; that’s also a menu item on the top of LinkedIn. Companies can set up their profiles, so you can set up your own small business profile and put up information on the business that includes everything really; updates about your personnel, number of employees, and so on, so forth. What you can do, is you can follow companies. Anybody who is interesting to you – that you buy from, or anybody that is your competitor, anybody that is your potential business partner – you can go browse through their company and you can just activate ‘Follow’ and you will receive a notification when anything changes in the company’s status.

Another thing that I would like to briefly mention – we talked about it last time – is ‘Applications’. On your main page you are going to find something that says “Add a new application.” This is very tricky. This is one of the less accessible parts of LinkedIn. When I look at it with JAWS – I haven’t tried this one, but any other screen that we use – it doesn’t say it’s a link. But when you navigate on it with your cursor keys on any letter of the application and hit enter on it, it’s going to activate a list of different applications.



There are many, and the number of applications is growing. Feel free to explore many of them. There are only a couple that I would like to briefly talk about.

One would be ‘My Travel’. You can just go to this application, read about it and you’ll find a link which says “Install application”. My Travel allows you to display your travel plans, especially if you travel a lot, however there is another way to use it. If other people in your network share their travel plans, you can see where your network is traveling to. And if you find yourself being in the same town with somebody that you live far from, it’s always a good idea to connect with them and get together for lunch or coffee or whatever your preference is.

Another application would be ‘Events’. This is also a great one, and it’s also very accessible. You can list any event. For example, if you do a training session on something, you can create an event on LinkedIn and once you submit the event you will get a link that you can submit somewhere else; you can put it on Facebook, you can put it on Twitter, you can post it on your webpage, and so on and so forth, so you can attract a larger audience. The other thing is you can browse these events and you can see who in your network is attending the same events, and that might



just be another way to get together with people on an occasional basis.

Larry MuffettJohn has got a knock-it-out-of-the-ballpark kind of question here. He says “All this seems to take a lot of time. How long would you recommend spending on LinkedIn each week and is it really worth it in business terms?”

Tom BabinszkiThis is a very good question. As I mentioned last time, LinkedIn is not a lifestyle; don’t spend too much time on it. Definitely, in the beginning, it’s going to take you some time to set this up. I would say it’s going to take you several hours. Just like it would take you some time to put a resume together. A well-written resume will take you hours or days, but once you are done you will only have to tweak it; same thing with LinkedIn.

If you are serious about it, spend the time on it. LinkedIn takes some attention. I would say, spend an hour or two on it, at least, a week looking at the groups, answering questions, updating your profile, and so on and so forth. But you also have to decide for yourself if LinkedIn is for you. There are plenty of other ways of networking.



People were able to network before LinkedIn came into existence. You need to understand if you have enough benefits to spend the time on LinkedIn that it really deserves. I would recommend that if you don’t have enough things to do on LinkedIn, or if you’re not sure that you’re going to use it, don’t spend just a little time and create a half-finished profile. That just doesn’t look good. And it’s not going to create any good impressions with anybody that wants to do business with you. I would say either make it elaborate or don’t even open that LinkedIn account. Larry MuffettAnna has a question. Can you find people associated with a particular club or association? And she lists, for example, the Color Marketing Group.

Tom BabinszkiYes, absolutely. You can type in any associations into the search field, and if people have listed those associations on their profile, those people are going to show up. The other thing that you can do, different associations do have discussion groups, so you can go to the groups, put it into the search field, and see if you can find any related groups.



We only have very little time left, and there is one more thing that I would like to talk about and I think it is of everybody’s common interest. What to do with your status updates? And I left it to the end because you may or may not want to use it, and that’s ok, but it has certain etiquette to it.

One is keep it professional. LinkedIn is not the place where you can talk about what you had for lunch, what you are going to cook for dinner, and what your favorite football team did last weekend. It’s really not that kind of place. You can talk about dinner if you are going out for a business dinner tonight and maybe it’s a particular event and other people attend and even more people could be interested; then sure, talk about it. But keep it professional, keep it brief, straight to the point, and make sure that it is interesting to other people and not to you only.

One thing that is really interesting – and I just see different approaches to it – LinkedIn allows you to display your tweets in your LinkedIn profile. When you go to your profile, where you add your website, there you can also add your Twitter user name, your Twitter account ID. You can check a box if you want your tweets to appear on your LinkedIn profile.



There are a couple of things to it. If you don’t tweet too much and those tweets are relevant, it’s really great so you don’t have to post the same information twice. But it also has a drawback, and that is if I’m following you on LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook and maybe a few other places, after a while I’m going to see the same thing over and over because you are sharing the same information on different social media. That will get boring to me to an extent.

If you are posting a lot then I will just start un-following these people. So you really need to decide for yourself if what you are posting and publishing is useful. Is it adding value or is it becoming more annoying? If you ask me – but don’t take it for granted, different people do it differently – different social networks are for different reasons. For example, LinkedIn is to talk about your professional development, your professional activities. Twitter is the one to do half professional, half fun chit-chats; Twitter is the place to share lots of links and articles and interesting things. Facebook is the place to share more personal information, unless you are using Facebook to promote your business. So it’s always a good idea, even if it takes longer time, to have different information on different social media.



This is basically everything that I wanted to share with you today. It’s 3:00 pm Central time. We are going to stay here as long as you have any questions.

Larry MuffettOk, we have a few closing statements to make and after I do that I am going to turn the microphone back over to Tom for his closing comments. This was fantastic; I really enjoyed it. As a LinkedIn user I felt like I gained some things out of this today, so I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

I just want to let you know that this seminar, like all our Seminars at Hadley, is going to be archived on our website and will be available for you to listen to anytime, day or night. Several of you had said that you listened to part one either yesterday or today, which is fantastic.

Each Hadley seminar is now available as a podcast which you can download to your computer or mobile device, so we want to make you aware of that. Hopefully listening to today’s topic or part one has got you kind of interested in the informational offerings here at Hadley, and we certainly ask you to check out the Hadley course listing online and also the seminar archives for some of the other topics that may be of interest to you.



Tom and I really want to thank you for participating today. I really enjoyed this and I think Tom has too. I’ll let him speak for himself in a minute but I thought this went really well here today. Your questions were right on point; they were outstanding and I think they added a lot to everyone’s enjoyment of the seminar.

One of the things I want to point out to you – and I pointed this out in the beginning and I want to emphasize it – we really value your feedback. We need to know what you thought about today’s seminar and also give us some suggestions for future seminar topics. One of the ways you can do that is you can send us an email to [email protected]. That’s one of the ways that you can provide us some feedback; that’s always welcome.

Here in a little while though, I am also going to put up an online survey that you can fill out. We get that information and, believe me, we read it carefully and incorporate that into the things that we do. I am going to hand the microphone back over to Tom for some final comments, and then I am going to come back in and talk to you about that survey.

Tom Babinszki


mailto:[email protected]


Thank you so much for attending. I really enjoyed both LinkedIn seminars. I really enjoyed answering the great questions. Please stay tuned because we have many more to come. The announcements are coming soon. You can always read about our business offerings, our business courses, modules, seminars, and anything else that comes up – and believe me, there is a lot to come – you can go to Hadley.edu/fce; FCE stands for Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship. This is where you will find our business-related course listings as well. Thank you so much for attending and I am looking forward to the next seminar.

Larry MuffettI certainly want to echo those comments and thank you for attending. Thank you for your great participation and the wonderful questions. It certainly made it enjoyable for the two of us to do this for you today. We look forward to doing many more in the future. If you bear with me for just a minute, I am going to prepare the online survey for you and if you can take that on the way out, it would provide us some valuable feedback. I’m going to do that right now and, again, thank you very much.


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