With Neil Godin (Connect with Neil on LinkedIn at: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/neilgodin )
What? The quest continues. As you know, we’re trying to help a Marketing Dangerously member (Specialty Bulb Products Inc., of Vancouver, Canada) find a new star for their technical sales team – using social media, of course. In our last installment, I sent a message to a group of my direct connections on LinkedIn – which produced two leads, according to SBPI president, Peter Janzen. This time, we throw the LinkedIn net wider. Read on.
Why? Because I believe that LinkedIn is ‘the’ social media platform for business, I have been systematically growing my LinkedIn network, and here are my stats as of today:
Direct connections: 286
Two degrees away: 102,100
Three degrees away: 4,844,500
Total members I can contact through an introduction: 4,946,900
New members added to my network in the last two days: 7,267
How? In my next post I will spell out how I’m (exponentially) growing my LinkedIn network, step by step. Today, let’s look at how I can get the word out to all or part of this huge number of people. Knowing that Peter has placed a paid ad on LinkedIn, I logged in and did a search for the ad (I chose “jobs” and searched for “specialty bulb.”) Then I copied the URL for that page with the listing – and then pasted it in to a window at www.snipurl.com – a service that snips long url’s into short ones that look like this:
Then I forwarded the listing to 50 of my direct contacts (which appears to be the limit, at least at one time). And then I went to my own home page and wrote a post to all 286 of my direct connections, including the snipped URL for the job posting page on LinkedIn. This means that if you want to look at this job posting you don’t even have to sign in – you simply paste the short URL into your browser, and you are taken directly to that page. (Why not try it just to check it out?)
Tipzntrix: The key point about sending a “link” to the posting – instead of forwarding from the job posting page itself – is that I’m no longer limited to just 50 recipients. By sending a message with a link to the job posting page, everyone in my direct connection list of 286 gets the message. Peter’s next move will be to post his opening on the SBPI website – so he can send messages with a link to the posting page on his website – and not have to spend $190 on a paid LinkedIn ad – which actually seems to limit the number of people his contacts can forward it to. (I know, this is counter-intuitive, so I’ll do some more homework).
Meanwhile, it seems like a winning way to save money, while getting the word out further and faster. Hmm.
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