Judging by the number of requests I have received in the last few days, people are starting to learn about the social networking site LinkedIn and are starting to sign up for their (free) account. If you haven't done so already, perhaps it is something you should investigate - according to their internal reports they have 30 Million users out there now.
If you are not familiar with LinkedIn, basically it is a network of users who "connect" to one another to help build referral bases, find professionals, and join groups of people associated with specific activities or causes. It is often called "facebook for the working class" becasue it associates you mainly by your profession, not by your high school, your hobbies or your college fraternity (although all of these can be referenced in there too). LinkedIn was started by some of the best minds in the Web 2.0 space, and their business model is one that will most likely last for a long time to come.
The truth of the matter is that LinkedIn is supposed to bring online the basics of that game we used to play called "six degrees of seperation" (or it's related game "six degrees of Kevin Bacon"). By knowing 10 people who know 10 people you are immediately connected to 100 people, who are connected to 10 people, and ten more....you get the idea. I just checked and my network on LinkedIn can connect me to close to a million people!
What is important to me at this point, however, is what all of you who are "Linking-In" (the verb for using the service) are going to do once your account is live. From what I can tell, so far the only thing you are doing is linking to one another in the office (I always know who joined, because I am one of your first connections).
Sorry to tell you, but that is not going to be overly productive - most of those folks already know a good Realtor or two. If the purpose of LinkedIn is to help professionals find other professionals, linking with the rest of the Realtor community just muddies the waters and makes the service less useful. That doesn't mean you can't connect with a Realtor, just that you should not make them the majority of your contacts.
I just checked, and of the 20 or so CBH people in my contacts, the one with the largest number of contacts has 54. In LinkedIn, that is a pretty trivial number - made even worse when you consider that 20 of them are probably other Realtors.
Before I tell you how to get more contacts, a reminder that LinkedIn (like all social networking sites) has space for you to write about yourself....sort of like a profile page. This is where you can highlight your achivements and expand on your skills, so that someone who comes across your name in the middle of the night can learn about you before they make that connection. Please be sure you take full advantage of this tool and put in everything you can.
Now you have to get connected. Here is the easiest way I know - search for the clients you worked with this year. Take 20 minutes and search out (using the LinkedIn Connection finder) all the people you had positive real estate dealings with (even if they didn't close the deal, they still want to recommend you, right?). Once you find them, CONNECT with them. But don't just spam them with a request to be contacts....actually use the tool for what it is worth and talk to them about providing referrals! Once they are connected to you, ask them for a recommendation (one of the key tools in LinkedIn is the chance to get recommendations from others).
There are 1,000 things you can do with LinkedIn - this is a good start. Look for more from Stef and me over the next few months.
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