Communication
As a marketer, your network of contacts is a valuable source of ideas and feedback. Build up your contacts, and then communicate with them. Look, it doesn't do you any good to have 500 contacts and then ignore them. You need to communicate with them. And I mean communicate, not pester. One of the things that scare people away from LinkedIn is the thought of someone inviting them into their network and then harassing them for business or to make an introduction to a contact.
Use LinkedIn to engage and inspire. Let me give you an example: Last year I moderated a panel at the Bandwidth Conference in San Francisco, where I asked a group of young people how they consumed media (music, TV, movies, video games). I could have sat down and written out a handful of questions, but I thought to myself, "Why not crowd-source questions by asking my LinkedIn connections?" I picked out 500 people I knew would understand my topic and asked them what they would ask a young person. Within a week, 100 people fed me more than 200 questions. Yes, I just helped myself out tremendously. But more importantly, I communicated with my network.
Follow-up is equally important. In the case of the above example, I wrote every individual person a thank you note, and I promised to get them an answer to their question. After the panel, I wrote a guest blog post for Ypulse summarizing the panel. I sent a note to everyone telling them to take a look at that post. A week after that, I transcribed a recording of the panel, posted the entire document on my blog, and sent a note to all of my contacts to check it out. Add to that the countless emails that I answered as a result of this one particular event, and you can see how I maximized this opportunity to engage with my network. Plus, I did it in a non-intrusive manner with relevant and trusted content -- the best kind!
