How LInkedIn is taking centre stage in corporate communications

How LinkedIn is taking centre stage Chris Reed @chris_reed
Some of the company we keep Chris Reed @chris_reed
Mixcat329 on Flickr
Emilie Ogez on Flickr If Facebook is somewhere that people spend time
Emilie Ogez on Flickr If Facebook is somewhere that people spend time LinkedIn is where people invest it
LinkedIn is growing up
Six times as much time is now spent looking at content as looking for jobs
Dave Hanvey on Flickr The six best uses of LinkedIn Company pages Decent polling Active groups Establishing thought leadership Targeted advertising LinkedIn Today
As a trade publication for the C-suite LinkedIn Today screams ‘relevance’
To a highly targeted opted-in audience Company pages are pure content marketing
Polling can target niche audiences v effectively
Group activity is highly visible Eric Fischer on Flickr Search for similar groups
Group activity is highly visible Eric Fischer on Flickr Search for similar groups Identify active/spam groups
Group activity is highly visible Eric Fischer on Flickr Search for similar groups Identify active/spam groups Plan content/discussions
Branson is LinkedIn’s most followed ‘influencer’ 200 business leaders picked as thought leaders
The platform has now opened up for genuine leaders One of our clients: 10,000 followers and 5,000+ shares 60,000+ views, 500+ comments – in four months And LinkedIn has boosted blog traffic by 50%
Jamie 1290 on Flickr LinkedIn’s advertising Targeted, managed or self-serve
And all the numbers keep going up Mary Meeker’s 2013 Internet Trends deck
Eric Magnuson: flickr The API goes ‘live’ It becomes a business & professional reputation-tracker The non-intrusive business model thrives
How LinkedIn is taking centre stage Chris Reed @chris_reed

Editor's Notes

Inmaps.linkedinlabs.com
For too long LinkedIn has been the ugly duckling compared to the more consumer-facing social networks.
Used to be a repository for spam from recruiters. Not so any more. Acquired Slideshare Q4 2012 Allowing automatic twitter updates from within LI Bringing in the newsfeed Autumn 2012
Source: LinkedIn
It ’ s news that your peers and professional contacts interact with. So, almost by definition relevant for your business. A nice niche to be in. No-one else has managed it. Particulalry now that RSS feeds are on the way out. And Twitter moves pretty quickly (and may still be slightly daunting for some CEOs)
With more than 1000 followers you can tailor content to be seen by geography, job type, or any combination of the two. IBM have (in recent years) been very much a ‘ people ’ business so it ’ s no surprise that they ’ re the most followed business on LinkedIn If you have a company page, you should be generating relevant content for it, broken down/targeting followers by geography, seniority, job title or whatever you want. Like all good content marketing, this can be a time consuming process – you need good resouce to post content, and then monitor/respond
Polling is a great way of getting visibility among a target audience, that you care about that particular issue. And/or have a perspective. It also gives you an opportunity to start discussions with industry leaders, particularly if they participate in the poll But costs can be prohibitive for smaller organisations- £10K minimum
Most groups already exist, but not all are useful. Some are just full of spam. Ignore them. But you can also sponsor/set up groups LinkedIn offers standard, enhanced and managed options N.B. v International nature of groups There are arguments for Open V Closed groups, but as a starting point would suggest open. Again, don ’ t under-estimate the resources required: Content generation – content and style Monitoring content and agreeing escalation processes And the Opportunities/uses that an active group offers: Invitations to events Discussion of industry events Genuine place to demonstrate thought leadership where contributions are less likely to be seen out of context, but N.B. Don ’ t swamp a group with corporate voices. KPIs can included Membership, Content, Engagement (e.g. relevance and favourability) Invitations to groups offline, in-house and amongst existing stakeholder relationships. Mine them and invite them Also brilliant for recruiting. See who genuinely knows their stuff/contributes to group discussions and ask them to work for you…
Most groups already exist, but not all are useful. Some are just full of spam. Ignore them. But you can also sponsor/set up groups LinkedIn offers standard, enhanced and managed options N.B. v International nature of groups There are arguments for Open V Closed groups, but as a starting point would suggest open. Again, don’t under-estimate the resources required: Content generation – content and style Monitoring content and agreeing escalation processes And the Opportunities/uses that an active group offers: Invitations to events Discussion of industry events Genuine place to demonstrate thought leadership where contributions are less likely to be seen out of context, but N.B. Don’t swamp a group with corporate voices. KPIs can included Membership, Content, Engagement (e.g. relevance and favourability) Invitations to groups offline, in-house and amongst existing stakeholder relationships. Mine them and invite them Also brilliant for recruiting. See who genuinely knows their stuff/contributes to group discussions and ask them to work for you…
Most groups already exist, but not all are useful. Some are just full of spam. Ignore them. But you can also sponsor/set up groups LinkedIn offers standard, enhanced and managed options N.B. v International nature of groups There are arguments for Open V Closed groups, but as a starting point would suggest open. Again, don’t under-estimate the resources required: Content generation – content and style Monitoring content and agreeing escalation processes And the Opportunities/uses that an active group offers: Invitations to events Discussion of industry events Genuine place to demonstrate thought leadership where contributions are less likely to be seen out of context, but N.B. Don’t swamp a group with corporate voices. KPIs can included Membership, Content, Engagement (e.g. relevance and favourability) Invitations to groups offline, in-house and amongst existing stakeholder relationships. Mine them and invite them Also brilliant for recruiting. See who genuinely knows their stuff/contributes to group discussions and ask them to work for you…
LinkedIn started with 200 invited inlfuencers Of whom Branson is the most followed. It’s still going strong – Bill Gates joined today
LinkedIn started off with 200 opinion formers. We ’ ve convinced them to have a couple more, by suggesting some genuine thought leaders from amongst our clients. LinkedIn are very choosy about new joiners to this elite group. They need to already have a blog and decent visibility amongst their peers. They need to be genuinely out in front of their game. On other channels (e.g. Facebook) I’d never advocate fishing for ‘likebait’ but on LinkedIn, engagement amongst a key audience can be an explicit target. As a channel it’s more about quality than quanttiy of relationships – and very easy to analyse. For free. We established the Chairman of a multinational as an opinion-former on water and sustainability issues. Of his 10,000 followers (in just four months), just under half are C-suite execs or senior-level management. There is discussion and conversation on an issue he (and the business) are genuinely concerned about/offering leadership in If you ’ re already offering a leadership position on a relevant business subject, approach LinkedIn if you can regularly generate quality content, and are willing to host/contribute to discussions they may listen.
Citibank – professional women Cathay Pacific – professional travellers
More than 200 million members 2 new members a second 86% of FTSE100 have a LinkedIn presence 12% are using G+ LinkedIn is a more popular channel than Twitter Unilever has 225K [check] followers
They have a good mobile platform – 35% of traffic is now on mobile. It ’ s the ultimate responsive app: serving (by default) highly relevant business-information on a daily basis. Live events – a new direction. Expect more. LinkedIn will want to encourage people to participate to Live Events on their channel. Don ’ t be surprised to see a version of Google Wave (was it?) using the LInkedIn API so that at business conferences, backchannel discussions happen on LinkedIn. And have a permanence. Student-friendly approach – they ’ re already adapting the fields to make it less intimidating to people setting up accounts. Smart move. The join-up with Twitter (from within LinkedIn) is seamless now. Very clever – you can tag people/organisations across both channels at once. The ‘ recruiter ’ section of LinkedIn is phenomenal. It is the way people will be researched/offered jobs in future, make no mistake. We ’ ve got no excuses for not keeping our companies, and our own profiles upto date.

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How LInkedIn is taking centre stage in corporate communications

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