LinkedIn - Prospecting No - Conversation Yes

I recently did a presentation in Los Angeles on Web 2.0 for Professional Services for the Institute of Management Consultants. The focus was on the two main things that management consultants do with their time: Reaching Prospects and Serving Clients.

Serving Clients

In terms of serving clients, I covered parts of Tool Set, specifically Work Skills Keeping Up, Better Memory, Information Radar, Processing Pages with Links, Networks and Learning Communities, Collaborate, and Twitter as Personal Work and Learning Tool.

I didn't really have time to go into, but wish I could have covered: Search and Browser Short Cuts.

The reality is that management consultants are very much concept workers and as such have to shift how they perform their work and how they serve their customers.

I went through examples similar to LinkedIn for Finding Expertise and Searching for Expertise - LinkedIn Answers to show the basics of how LinkedIn works. This was more about getting help with questions. I also discussed being more or less open as a LinkedIn Networker: My LinkedIn Open Connection Approach.

Reaching Prospects

By far, the more interesting topic to the audience was how to reach prospects. The earlier presenter had talked about LinkedIn and someone in the audience asked for a show of hands for people who have got business through LinkedIn. Mine was the only hand raised. Great set up for my presentation.

Prospecting vs. Conversations

Here was the fun part – I asked:

If I could put you into a networking event where there were 100 people who fit the profile of your prospects and they had their resumes taped to their chests so that you could pause at any time to read the resume, what would you do?

One of the participants said that they would ask questions of the person about how they are dealing with issues that relate to their services. Ask interesting questions and get them to talk.

That's what I think of as the right answer and fits with what I learned about effective networking 20 years ago. Other people would suggest more social conversation, but that's not my style nor the style of the person who answered. I don't think anyone would suggest trying to hard sell at a networking event.

People are interested in interesting conversations not in prospecting.

Engaging in Interesting Conversations

Let's get back to the room full of prospects who you are trying to engage in interesting conversations. Well, first that never actually happens. Even if it did, it would be really tough because you often don't get past the resume level in a networking event. You also have to weed out people who are not prospects. Live networking is incredibly inefficient. The good news about the networking event is that by being there, participants have signaled a willingness to network according to the cultural norms of the networking event.

Let's compare that to LinkedIn. It does contain many more than 100 prospects. Most people on LinkedIn have signaled their willingness to network according to the cultural norms of LinkedIn. And you have their resume right there. You can pause the action to read it. It's much more efficient than live networking. Think of it as the biggest networking cocktail party in the world.

But the challenge is that there are subtle differences in the networking culture. I personally find that people on LinkedIn are Hungry to Connect around interesting topics just like the rest of us. But you have to make sure that you are engaging in an interesting (to them) conversation.

Ask them for help on something that's challenging you with a client. Are you running into X? How are you handling it?

When I was thinking about this during the presentation, I realized that I've almost completely stopped prospecting. I don't think about the person that I talk to in terms of whether they are a future prospect. I think of them in terms of their ability to engage in an interesting conversation. The natural byproduct: I meet and talk to interesting people about interesting things.

Business has and will continue to result from this over the long-term.

Oh, and this provides high value to my clients who are getting the benefit of these conversations.

For more discussions on networking and LinkedIn see Networking Events in Los Angeles and Southern California, Secret for Networking at Events – Prenetworking, Pre-network with LinkedIn, Local Event Organizers Need to Adopt Social Media.

With a focus on service professionals such as accountants, attorneys, consultants, take a look at Social Media for Service Professionals and Social Media to Build Reputation and Reach Prospects – More Ideas.

Hungry to Connect

Nancy Devine has been really helping me recently with comments on my blog on posts Topic Hubs, Good Writing, Search, Corporate Training.  But it was a twitter comment (side note: Twitter Forces us to Transmit the Big Idea) that really made me pause and go – wow, I need to think about that:

@tonykarrer people are hungry to connect w/others, to talk about things that matter to them, to learn.

This is so very true.  Look at the speakers in SharePoint Update who came and willingly pitched in and helped.  And most thanked me for the opportunity to spend 3 hours plus preparation and time in discussions.  Why – because it's a topic that matters to them and they could connect with others to learn.  Nancy nailed it!

As Learning Professionals, we should be constantly thinking about creating opportunities for people to connect and learn. 

When I think about the SharePoint Micro Virtual Conference, that's what it was all about.  Creating connection points for myself.  Inviting others to join.  It was really a set of conversations that I wanted to have on my own.  I just included others.  And they wanted to have that same discussion.

I'm hoping I can get the total effort down a bit to continue to put these things on.  It was a huge help to have Kim Caise, Steve Tuffill and Scott Skibell.  If we get this figured out, I think we are onto something.

Give them opportunities to connect – as Nancy says – they are Hungry to Connect.

eLearning Host List February

Using various social signals we came up with the following as being the hot items during February 2009 via eLearning Learning. You can find a bit more on this capability in the post Hot List. Enjoy.

Top Posts and other Items

• The ‘Least Assistance’ Principle
• eLearning is not the answer
• Multi-Generational Learning in the Workplace
• Here’s How I Built That PowerPoint E-Learning Template
• Informal learning - what is it?
• What Goes in the LMS?
• Blogging in a Walled Garden
• Sacred Training Cows
• What is Informal Learning
• Design elements - a graphics style manual
• Mathemagenic " PhD conclusions in a thousand words: blogging practices of knowledge workers
• Why Doing Things Half Right Gives You the Best Results
• Pedagogy – MoodleDocs
• How to Find the Right Wiki for Your Project or Organization

Hot Keywords During February -

• Social Media
• Business
• Conversation
• Twitter
• MindTouch
• Scuttle
• CourseMill
• Tools
• Sample
• Pinnacle
• Adobe
• TechSmith
• Atlassian
• Apple

MyAllTop and Topic Hubs

I had just finished posting about Networks and Topic Hubs when I saw the announcements around the launch of MyAllTop (1, 2, 3).  The reviews are somewhat mixed, and I'm certainly sitting here scratching my head.

I always perceived Alltop as a way to build Topic Hubs.  This is a similar, but limited, form of what we are doing around sites like eLearning Learning, Mobile Learning, Informal Learning Flow, Communities and Networks Connection.  The goal of a topic hub is to bring quality content together around particular topics to make it more accessible to people who are not familiar with the bloggers and other information sources in the space.  If you look at AllTop itself, that's the value proposition they talk about as well – but using the magazine rack – casual browsing – metaphor.

But why MyAlltop?

What's confusing to me is the value of providing a means for person oriented topic hubs and the limitation to only feeds that already exist?

Are people going to adopt this as their new start page?  Doubtful – there are much better tools for this.  And MyAlltop forces everything to be public.

Instead, this is definitely a way for you to broadcast your interests.  But, there are also lots of other ways to do this.

I really don't get this.

It must be on a trajectory towards something more like what's happening with Topic Hubs.

Thoughts?

Networks and Topic Hubs

I recently read a very interesting post by Terry Anderson, Edublogers as a Network of Practice.

Network of Practice - a distributed aggregation of members who share some common interests and values, but their correspondence and especially face to face meetings occur much less often or not at all. Leadership and activities in a NoP are emergent and usually informal. NoP members interact sporadically and develop their network in an informal and spontaneous manner that is occasioned through blogs, social software based communities, perhaps a face-to-face or online conference, newsgroup, mailing list or other shared social networking interactions. Membership in a NoP is voluntary, usually open, often transitory and likely many of the NOP members are strangers to each other.

There are some good discussion in the comments about whether or not you would consider Edubloggers to be a Network of Practice (NoP). I must say that I don't know enough to really comment on whether it is or isn't.

The realization I had as I read it is how complex networks become. They are incredibly rich and often there is no clear boundary. Is someone or something like a blog part of the network – often it's not at all clear.

This is both a good thing and a challenge for Topic Hubs. I think it's good because for many people, they cannot easily understand this complex network. As I say in that post –

It's hard to understand a single blog. It's even harder when you try to understand a network of bloggers.

The discussion that goes on in Terry's post really points out how it's so hard to that you can't look at an individual blogger and neatly put them into a network and especially not a Network of Practice. Scott Leslie says -

there is no singular “network of edubloggers,” indeed what I find constantly amazing is when I come across another self-styled edublogger with whom I share absolutely NO points of connection.

Of course, that's the claim of Terry in his response to Scott Leslie -

edubloggers do have ONE thing in common - they all are interested in education - else they wouldn’t describe themselves as EduBloggers. Now it could be that their conception of education and likely the larger ideas of learning are very different from yours, but I still argue they do NOT “share absolutely NO points of connection” with yourself.

My personal experience is really someone who tries to define Topic Hubs. Topic Hubs are based on networks and require a defined topic with a particular lexicon or way to make sense of what's being discussed. There's a real challenge to find the edges and define who should be consider inside or outside the network. The reality is that the complexity of networks don't really work that way. When I looked at creating a Topic Hub around edubloggers, I gave up because the network and topics are so big, diverse and messy. There likely are many good Topic Hubs within the space, but most edublogs blog about all sorts of topics. If you try to define a more narrow topic, it doesn't seem to work.