eNetworking 101: The Blog

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Using LinkedIn

View Jill Hurst-Wahl's profile on LinkedInI have built up a good group of contacts in LinkedIn and have joined several groups. Recently, I've been trying to use LinkedIn to find local speakers for a series. You would think LinkedIn would surface speakers for me, but it hasn't. Why?
  • The search feature doesn't allow me to narrow my results in a way that is useful to me.
  • The type of business owners I've been looking for aren't using LinkedIn.
  • The people who have responded to my queries to several groups have not been located in Syracuse. ("I'd love to speak...I'm in California..." Didn't I say that I was looking for local speakers?!)
Exasperated, I finally hit on the idea of looking at specific people's contacts to see if that generated a list of possible speakers. After going through several local, well connected people's contacts, I again realized that the business people I'm looking aren't on LinkedIn. I did, however, come up with some great ideas for speakers, so the exercise was not a total waste!

So the bottom line is that LinkedIn is a wonderful tool, but it is not the "end all" or the only place you should be checking for possible partners, employees or employers.

If you are committed to using LinkedIn (and it is a tool you should use), then be sure that your profile is complete and contains lots of information. The more, the better. Others will need that information in order to know what you do. It will also make you pop up in more search results (and that is always a good thing).

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posted by Jill Hurst-Wahl at 1:05 PM

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3 Comments:

  • What topics are you looking for Jill from a speaker point of view? I have a few canned speaker presentations, and I can also present on other topics within my fields of expertise (managing small businesses, entrepreneurs, software development, web/social network, and computer technical subjects).

    By Blogger Lee Drake, At October 31, 2008 8:58 AM  

  • Lee, the idea behind the series is to have business owners talk about the lessons they have learned from being in business. Often these are lessons that cannot be learned from a book or a class.

    The March 2009 event is being held on the North Side, so I was looking for someone whom I thought would appeal to that business community. What I have decided to do is to have a panel of relatively new business owners talk about starting their businesses. Two of the businesses I'm contacting are located on the North Side (although one is really in the Hawley-Green). And they come from diverse backgrounds.

    For the February event, I have decided to focus on the economy and its impact on small and micro businesses. I hope this panel will have "financial" people (and those used to dealing with small/micro businesses) and business people.

    At any rate, I sent out emails to possible speakers yesterday and have one more to send out today.

    This has been a very interesting series. Every session is video recorded and the videos, etc., are online at http://www.SyracuseTalkingBusiness.com

    By Blogger Jill Hurst-Wahl, At October 31, 2008 9:46 AM  

  • It goes with my problems with LinkedIn. I've been trying to be a bit more active lately myself, trying to make some connections, but it's just now as interactive as I'd like it to be. That's problematic for a site that purports to be for business networking.

    By Blogger Mitch, At November 1, 2008 2:27 PM  

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