Top Shelf Reading Picks:

In 1999, Havey Mackay wrote the networking classic Dig Your Well before You’re Thirsty: The Only Networking Book You’ll Ever Need. As the author of two books on networking, clearly I don’t agree with his subtitle, yet I’ve always recommended the book because his basic advice stood the test of time . . . until now.

The internet and even our current economic crises have changed the way we network. This is why I chose to review the book Smart Networking: Attract a Following in Person and Online by Liz Lynch. If you’re still networking 1999 style, it’s time for an upgrade, and I liked Lynch’s approach.

The beginning of the book focuses on convincing people that they have to network.  Even if you don’t need convincing, there are a few good gems in there, such as:

“Your plan may be to stay right where you are, but that might not be your employer’s plan.  Job security is a thing of the past.  The only security we can count on now is our own ability to adapt quickly, and those who can’t will struggle.”

“More ways to communicate means that it’s easier to be left out of the conversation.”

Here are just a few of the tips that stood out to me. I just reviewed a book about online networking, and there are excellent sections on that in this book, but I’m going to focus on the in-person tips.

You don’t need a huge network if you have a responsive one. I wholly agree with this. Thanks to technology, we’re able to connect with thousands of people. But truthfully, we can only manage real relationships with a fraction of that number.  (For more on this topic, see the discussion in the comments after my last book review where we discuss “super connectors” on LinkedIn).

Just about everything you need to be successful with networking boils down to one question:  What kind of person would you need to be for someone to be willing to help you more than once?  When you think about only your immediate need, then you end up thinking only about yourself.  By thinking down the road a bit, you are forced to consider how you would have to treat that person in order to be able to make another “ask.”

Think about giving and receiving (help); not person by person, but within a whole system.  This is basically a “pay it forward” philosophy, but it’s helpful to remember so you don’t become a “networking scorekeeper.”

• It used to be:  It’s not what you know but whom you know.
• Then it became: It’s not whom you know, but who knows you.
• Now it’s: It’s not who knows you, but who’s willing to help you.

Lynch uses this to lead into a section where she quotes Tim Sanders of Yahoo! in The Likeability Factor: How to Boost Your L-Factor and Achieve Your Life’s Dreams, “The more likable you are, the more likely you are to be on the receiving end of a positive choice from which you can profit.”

Get a strong sense of people’s personality and potential likeability through what you can find out about them online.  While this is a small point that she makes, for me it marks a difference in how people view online networking.  In our 2006 and 2008 online networking surveys, when we asked women who didn’t network online why they didn’t, the top answer after “I don’t know how” was that it’s “too impersonal.”    If anything, online networking has put the “personal” back into networking.

If you want to pitch your business, the best way to do it is one-on-one during a conversation.  She gives a great example of how engage the other person by envisioning the conversation as a ball that you toss back and forth, learning something new about the other person as well as revealing something more about what you do.

If you want to build a networking relationship with someone, don’t respond to “what’s new?” with a “nothing much” answer.  Pick one project you’re currently working on that could be relevant to that person and work it into a short response.

Avoid networking burnout (revisiting the same people over and over again) by constantly expanding your network.  She gives some good examples of how to do this both in person and online.

I liked the section on Leading with Value in All your Interactions.  “Think of how you can add value to people’s lives when you plan to interact with them, and you’ll always be welcome.”  She then goes on to describe different ways you can do this:

Use Value for First Time Follow-up

1. Uncover value through conversation.
2. Set the mechanics in motion.
3. Make sure you’re remembered.
4. Ask for the meeting.
5. Orchestrate a successful meeting.

Offer Value in Ongoing Outreach

1. Forward helpful information.
2. Make a date for coffee.
3. Refer someone to them.
4. Launch a “help offered” campaign.
5. Invite them to an event.

Add Value by Making Connections.

1. Connect someone to a friend.
2. Connect someone to a vendor.
3. Connect someone to a customer.
4. Connect someone to a resource.
5. Connect someone to an organization.

Another section I really appreciated was her chapter on “Raising your profile to stand out from the crowd.”  In this section her two top tips were:

1. Take on leadership roles in a networking group.
2. Start your own networking group. 

I can clearly attest that every one of my best and favorite contacts can be related back to work I did on a committee and/or founding the Downtown Women’s Club.  In addition to the DWC, the other most useful  committee work for me has been the program committee for the local chamber of commerce, the marketing committee of a real estate industry association and an event committee at a local art museum.  I can trace almost every good networking result back to those groups in some manner.

The rest of the book includes helpful tips on how to build an online profile and leverage online communities.

Top Shelf Bottom Line.  This was a comprehensive networking book that has the right attitude (help first, ask later) and includes both online and in-person tips.  If you haven’t read a networking book lately, this is the one to pick up. In the final chapter Lynch even includes a networking plan, which helps you break down networking to make it more manageable on a daily basis.

When asked to review an updated version of a book, I would generally decline; but when it comes to a book on social networking, the world changes so quickly. This is why I thought I would take a second look at I’m on LinkedIn–Now What???  A Guide to Getting the Most OUT of LinkedIn by Jason Alba.

I never really used LinkedIn all that much, preferring both Twitter and Facebook. Then last month, when I was teaching a seminar on social media, I went back to take a look and was pleased to see that LinkedIn had made a bunch of improvements. Reviewing Alba’s books gave me a lot more ideas about how we all could use it more effectively.

Who’s on LinkedIn?
It used to be that LinkedIn was a place for job-seekers and recruiters. I recall meeting one person last year from a company that had banned its younger employees from being there for fear they would be recruited. Back then my response was: “Maybe try giving them reasons to stay rather than focus on making it harder for them to leave?”  Today I would echo what Alba says in his book: There are more than 28 million people on LinkedIn and most of them are NOT seeking jobs–they are networking, marketing their services and even launching businesses.

The rest of this review will look at the different tips Alba presents that caught my eye, as someone who is familiar with LinkedIn but not as active a user as I could be.

Pump up your profile – a few less obvious tips.

• Use both full names of companies, schools, associations and titles as well as the nickname or common abbreviation.  People may look for one or the other. For example, University of Virginia and UVA, Downtown Women’s Club and DWC, the Museum of Fine Arts and the MFA, vice president and VP.
• Write recommendations. Not only is this good networking form, but it puts your name (with a link back to your profile) on other people’s pages. This helps make your own profile more visible.
• Get a vanity URL. If you have a publicly searchable profile (which is recommended), put your name in the URL (search engines search through URLs first before site content). Go to the Profile Page, click on the link next to “Public Profile” that says “edit.” You can then edit the URL and put in your full name.
• Make your public profile complete. “How much info should you make public?” was a question that came up in a recent Downtown Women’s Club teleclass with career expert Lindsey Pollak. She echoed Alba’s position that this is your chance to have people see your professional expertise the way you want them to. So you should take the time to make it as complete as possible. To paraphrase Pollak: Giving people full and quick access to a complete a picture of your professional experience is the point of LinkedIn.  If you don’t want to play the game, then you probably shouldn’t be on LinkedIn.”

Communicating on LinkedIn
Alba gives a good overview on Message Settings. As with any social network, you can control how you receive messages. (This is why many of us prefer these to e-mail.) For example, you can choose to receive messages and invitations by e-mail immediately (recommended), but profile updates from your network can be sent via weekly e-mails. Other things, such as job notifications and service recommendations, can be items that you choose to see only when you log onto LinkedIn.

Make sure you have both (or all) of your e-mails listed on LinkedIn. This is how people find you, and if some people only have one of your e-mails and it’s not the one you used to create your LinkedIn account, you need to add them.  You can do this under the Account & Settings link in the upper right-hand corner.

One helpful bit in this section is that Alba tells you what his settings are. I’ve found that when I teach people about social media tools, it helps to actually show them what I do and how I do it.  Alba does this throughout and it makes this book, in particular, very user-friendly.

Searching for People on LinkedIn
This was a useful section because, as Alba mentions, sometimes searching on LinkedIn can be quirky.

• Increase the size of your network because your search results are based on your connections. In other words increasing the number of people you link to will expand the size of the search you can do and lead to better results.
• Connect with a few super-connectors. There are “open networkers” on LinkedIn who connect with thousands of people, even though they may only loosely know them.  Just connecting to one of these will expand your network drastically.

Searching for Jobs on LinkedIn
I confess that I had never clicked on the “jobs” tab since joining LinkedIn.  After reading Alba’s book, I took some time to mess around with it and this is truly a useful function. Not only are there exclusive jobs listed on LinkedIn, the tool that tells you who in your network has worked/is working at a company is perhaps the key to LinkedIn–finding a personal connection.  Alba has a whole section on how to effectively use the job search function.

Groups and Answers
Of all the functions of LinkedIn, these two are what I have always found the most useful.  We have a DWC+ LinkedIn Group (exclusive to our paid members), but since the addition of discussions, it’s become much more useful. Members can post business questions, make announcements, etc.

I’ve also been a big fan of Answers, where you can ask questions as well as answer others. I’ve used the Answers to do mini-focus groups for consulting clients and even made a few connections in doing so (one may even lead to a launch of DWC-London).  I’ve also responded to others’ questions and been picked as “best answer” twice.  This is another way to establish yourself as an expert.

Alba provides some good advice on forming a strategy as to how you use both Groups  and Answers effectively.

Top Shelf Bottom Line:  If you haven’t used LinkedIn or, like me, are not an active user, this is a good guidebook to pick up. It’s short, easy to read and full of actual examples of how Alba uses it. That for me was what made it easier to digest than a normal how-to book or surfing the FAQ sections. Most of all, I liked the autho’s view that: “LinkedIn is a powerful tool, not a silver bullet.” As with any networking platform, group or resource, you only get out of it what you put into it.  And it should be only one part of a marketing/networking strategy, not the whole thing.

*****

Since we’re on the subject, here are some of my other thoughts on LinkedIn:

The recent LinkedIn improvements have been tremendous. In fact, we were surprised to see that all our DWC+ teleclasses that we list on Eventbrite  were automatically picked up by LinkedIn (this was discovered after various calls and e-mails between DWC staff trying to figure out which one of us posted these  to LinkedIn). LinkedIn has also added the equivalent of Twitter/Facebook “status updates” called “What are you working on?” I could see this being useful and plan to test it out.

Some of the applications that have been added are also worth testing out–posting your PowerPoints from SlideShare and your blog listings are good ways to further demonstrate your expertise.  I also like the Company Buzz function, where you can track “tweets” from Twitter about your company.  The Typepad blog link, which pulls in blog posts from around your network, is another useful idea. You can click on a link and write a comment on a friend’s blog post (a really effective way to network).

The only thing on my wish list is that under Groups, I wish LinkedIn would add an announcements section, so we could separate that out from our discussions. And I really wish the site would let me stay signed in rather than make me resubmit my password repeatedly, sometimes during the same session.  Annoying.