3. Start a user group.
In the good old days, user groups took a huge investment of time and effort to launch. Now it can be a matter of exploring for interested people, reaching out to them to determine whether they are a current user of your product or service, and inviting them to join a user community formed by you, with a logo and a name. People list the groups they belong to in their profile and the groups become a way to build their contacts. This is a win-win since a user group also creates a way to organize and coordinate interested people to help spur market adoption and improve your offering. Note this listing of a few of the Oracle user groups that one member includes in their profile:
There are many other Oracle user groups, some general, some specialized. Your company may not be as large or omnipresent, but a quick search can uncover a core group to tap on to get your own group started.
4. Start a company group.
LinkedIn provides ready-made functionality to create a private company group to help you expand your network and share information. You can use your company group to help coordinate the LinkedIn activities of your employees. For instance, you can ask people in your company if they are connected to people in key organizations. Participation in my company group is particularly high. Over half the active workforce has joined:
5. Recruit
This is a well-proven capability inside LinkedIn, so I won’t go into extensive detail here. What I will say is, unless you are using the InMail feature (and in some cases, even if you are), don’t expect immediate results. Some people respond rather quickly, but some of the best candidates are incredibly busy already. This holds true for other types of contacts as well. I’m still getting response to InMails I sent over one and a half years ago. While delayed responses can be a positive for building a candidate pipeline, LinkedIn isn’t the best option if you need to fill a position immediately. You can use it to identify potential candidates, but be prepared to pick up the phone to get a live person on the line.
Conclusion
Professional communities provide a way for like-minded people with similar motivations to converge and derive value from each other. Keep in mind that providing value for value -- value exchange -- is the key to catalyzing community members to achieve your objectives. Once you determine the value you can provide in order to achieve your objectives, you are ready to go. You just need to give a little to get a lot.
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Chet Geschickter is Director of Strategy for Molecular.
