Greetings!
This is Dave Larson President of Sales & Marketing Technologies. I have been hearing for a while now the power of the social networking sites. I have seen my sons using MySpace. I heard of the guy being offered $1 billion for FaceBook and turning it down. Then one of my friends asked me to connect to him using LinkedIn. I had heard of LinkedIn, however, I didn’t know anything about it. Since he was a friend, it was free, I thought… Why not? I signed up. I looked around a bit and left. My account sat there for a couple of weeks. It didn’t seem important. Though I was still curious what everyone was seeing in these things.
Then another friend emailed me to connect. I said “okay.” I looked at his info it says he had 75 connections. I looked and I could see all 75 people he knew. I could see their info… where they went to school, what they do, who they work for, etc. On the list, were a few people I wanted to know. Then it hit me. This could be an unbelievable source of warm referrals. Instead of asking my friend to look in his address book and give me some referrals, I could look who he knows and ask to be introduced. It doesn’t get any better than that. What is in it for my friend? Since we are connected, he can see my contacts too. He does an outstanding job providing us wth connectivity. If he needs an introduction, I would gladly open some doors for him.
I decided I was going to test LinkedIn to see if I could build a powerful network and use it to benefit our company. I told some of the Internet Marketing folks at our company what I was thinking of doing and they put the pressure on me to blog about it. I said it would never come to this, but here I am. I will do my best to keep you up to date on the progress. Here we go…
Tags: LinkedIn, Social Networking, Business Development, getting started