Employee! Do you see any value in being on LinkedIn?

I’m curious, if you are an employee, i.e. not a business owner, do you see any value in being on LinkedIn beyond it being just your CV (Resumé)? Have fun by looking up that word (Resumé), because the internet has no idea how to spell that and neither do I!

Since I’ve been training professionals in how to get the most from LinkedIn, I’ve noticed overwhelmingly that the largest disbelievers are those that are employed and not business owners. Business owners are totally different, they understand and appreciate the power of a professional network like LinkedIn, the need to grow it and leverage that network.

The only time an employee feels they need to improve their LinkedIn profile, grow their network and be more active on LinkedIn is when they are out of a job or they are looking to move careers.

Employees are not the only ones, employers don’t get it either. If they did understand LinkedIn’s potential power they would include LinkedIn as one of their employees’ roles and objectives. They make the mistake of believing too that LinkedIn is a CV (Resume) platform. I don’t blame them though, LinkedIn still makes over 60% of their revenue from talent solutions, the hidden recruitment engine only available to those that pay handsomely for the privilege.

Anyway, employers and it’s employees need to take LinkedIn seriously for two massively big and simple reasons.

Brand consistency and Customer loyalty.

When potential customers search out company employees your brand would benefit hugely from well crafted employee profiles, great personal and business stories and brand consistency. 

LinkedIn Company Icon (when no company page)

Some companies still don’t have a company page and those that do, its employees don’t know how to connect their job experience section to those company pages. Probably THE most basic of requirements on an employee LinkedIn profile. If you just see the grey building image on your profile, then you haven’t connected to your organisation’s company page, if there is one.

Job experience with logo pulled in from company page.

It’s a simple error to fix, the organisation has to create a company page and the employee needs to edit their profile to locate the company page and pull the logo into their job experience section.

Finally then, we’ve all come across the saying;

‘What gets measured, gets done’. Discussing your employee’s LinkedIn profile as part of their objectives will be a great way to ensure that everyone in the organisation improves their profile for the benefit of themselves, as well as the company’s brand. 

If the employee just spends 20-minutes per day developing their profile and being active on LinkedIn, it will make a massive difference to the organisation's brand reputation and overall recognition. 

In a previous article I suggested ways in which anyone can be active on LinkedIn in just 20-minutes per day. Take the 20-minute per day challenge now!

https://www.stayingaliveuk.com/blog/2016/5/is-linkedin-on-your-job-description

Employee! Help your employer and get your LinkedIn profile looking great.

Employer! Help your employees by adding LinkedIn to their roles and responsibilities and have it as part of their key quarterly objectives.

Wishing you massive success.

@stayingaliveuk

Is anyone in love with Your Brand yet?

via @LinkedIn & @gapingvoid

Shakespeare was way ahead of his time and he was maybe and probably THE best storyteller that ever lived. He didn't focus on his brand, maybe he didn't even know what his brand was. 

But he knew that people loved stories.

You may not even realise it, but you are the biggest story ever told. Everything about you, your journey, your experiences, your challenges, your failures, your successes and breakthroughs, your experience of love and of not love. All of it has made you who you are today. One BIG story. You are your own biggest brand.

I have a phrase that goes something like this. 

With the advent of Social Media you have now become a personal brand. You'd better take that responsibility seriously!

And why wouldn't you take that seriously? The way you show up on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. tells the viewer a story about you. One thing's for sure, they will judge you in an instant. Some positive and of course some negative.

It's no surprise therefore that every Social Network is focussing more and more on STORIES. 

Why?

Because they know that every single one of us crave stories. We search for them every single day and you don't even know you're doing it. We're literally hard-wired to look for stories. Not sure? Okay, this is what you might be doing every single day:

1. Wake up and pick up your smartphone. Look for any news, check-out Facebook, Twitter and maybe even LinkedIn. It's not that much will have happened overnight, it's the stories that are breaking first thing in the morning. And guess what, all the news media have been working the previous day and also through the night to make sure that fresh news is there for you to satisfy your daily appetite.
2. Some of you, although it's becoming less, will pick up a newspaper that the paper girl or boy left in your mailbox in the morning. Or you pick one up on your daily commute to the office.
3. Even before that, you may be eating breakfast or drinking your daily fix of caffeine whilst watching the news on your TV news channel of choice.

On average you are spending one hour per day on Social Networks. You may be sharing your stories through photos, videos, live transmissions and on top of that you are reading even more stories. Stories that inspire, stories that make you laugh, cry and feel disgust, stories that will make you unfriend someone, stories that will make you judge. 

And all because you LOVE stories.

To be a great storyteller you need a great canvas. Your canvas are the Social Networks that you are part of and appear on. To begin with you can do a quick self audit with these key areas and ensure some consistency across all of them:

1. Are your Social Network handles all the same?
2. Is your profile photo the same across all of them?
3. Is your strap-line or headline the same across all of them?
4. Is your long description broadly similar, I know they all have different allowable character counts.
5. Is your header or banner image the same across all channels, I know they all need different sizing, but the same is always best.

Whether you run your own business or whether you work for a great organisation, developing yourself as a great personal brand is the best story you can create for yourself. Success!

LinkedIn created a brilliant eBook with my favourite illustrator. @gapingvoid (Hugh Macleod) creates the most amazing messages through his illustrations. Read more about him and @gapingvoid here: http://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/team-members/hugh-macleod/

Regularly I will share one of the articles and illustrations from the eBook and give you my opinion, interpretation, insight and meaning of the words and illustrations.

@stayingaliveuk

Is Your Brand Loyal?

Whenever I hear ’business’ folks talk about ROI - (Return on Investment) in connection with Social Media, I laugh. Not because I don't respect their point or their need to see proof and sales results, but because we don't demand ROI on our relationships with our friends do we?

When you have a loyal buyer, they do become a loyal friend, you share knowledge and insights with them in order build that loyalty and after all it’s easier to keep a buyer rather than having to continually find new ones.

Therefore I believe that our opinion and execution of Social Media has to improve. 

Firstly we should rename it ‘Social Loyalty’.

‘Social’ has many meanings depending on whether you’re a Marxist or not.  Wikipedia definition, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social.

For me, very simply, it’s when individuals or groups of individuals co-exist together for their joint benefit. When we co-exist together with our buyers we are being ‘Social’. That co-existence can take place in person or nowadays to a large extend online, cue ‘Social Media’.

‘Loyalty’ has even more meanings, go and have a look, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalty.

And generally speaking most of us understand it to be that our buyers will repeat buy from us or at least give us the opportunity to bid first for a piece of work or consider buying from our website before looking at the competition. 

Usually loyal buyers will be prepared to wait for our products, e.g. Apple, or may even pay more for our products compared to cheaper alternatives, because their loyalty means more to them compared to price.

I call those folks ‘raving fans’. If you’re in business your objective should be to collect ‘raving fans’. 

In addition those loyal ‘Raving Fans' will shout about your products and services. They will tell their friends, business associates and connections. You better be amazing, because when things are not going so well, they will shout about it too.

Once we develop ‘Social Loyalty’ with our buyers, we will develop a predictable sales model. All of us have stats available somewhere that will indicate to us whether the sale was from a loyal buyer or a brand new one.

It’s possible therefore to create a ‘Loyal Buyer’ vs ‘New Buyer’ ratio to indicate the amount of sales we’re getting from those ‘Raving Fans’. I’m sure someone somewhere is already doing this and if you’re not, why not?

When we have this data only then we can understand ‘Social Media’ much better. Then there won’t be any need for ROI, just ‘ROL’ = ‘Return on Loyalty’.

Therefore when you witness your staff being active on ‘Social Media’ developing ‘Raving Fans’ you will realise that they are building loyalty amongst the ’Social’ community, which in turn will deliver repeat sales from the same buyers.

Now it’s your turn, share with us what you or your organisation is doing to create ‘Raving Fans’.

@stayingaliveuk - ‘Share Your Story’

Quick message from Staying Alive UK’s chief storyteller...