The back story: Ever since it rolled out in 2003, LinkedIn has stood apart from other social media sites by providing a strictly business atmosphere for its users. After the company’s five founders invited 300 contacts to join up, LinkedIn acquired 4,500 members in the first month — and now has more than 40 million registered users spanning nearly 170 industries in 200 countries. Many are attracted by the service’s “gated-access approach,” where contact with any other professional on the service requires you have either a preexisting relationship with him or her, or know a mutual acquaintance on LinkedIn, who acts as a go-between to make any introductions.
How it works: LinkedIn lets you create a Web page with a résumé-like profile of your current and past jobs, education, and projects you’re working on, as well as a summary paragraph that acts as a kind of professional elevator pitch. But more than a glorified résumé, LinkedIn also allows you to list your professional contacts and then socially network with them.
A kind of online Rolodex, the site lets you add people to your contact list by sending them e-mail invitations, which they must accept before you can add them. For example, if you want to add Jane Doe from the Massive Dynamic Corp. as a contact, you need to invite her to join your network. If she accepts your invitation, both of you are automatically added to each other’s list of connections.
You can also create a group based on your profession or interests and invite others to join. By the same token, you can search for groups who share your professional interests — e.g. recruiting, sales, marketing — and immediately become part of them by clicking “Join this group.”
How exhibitors are using it: To connect with potential clients at EXHIBITOR2009, the annual educational conference and exhibition for exhibit and event marketers, Dave Hibel decided to get personal. Starting about two months before the show, the senior account executive at Elk Grove Village, IL-based 3D Exhibits Inc., who was a standing member of the “Exhibitor Conferences Group” on LinkedIn, sorted through its roster and sent personalized e-mails to every person that fit within his company’s target audience. As a member of the group, he could contact them directly and didn’t have to locate their individual e-mail or postal addresses.
Tying the e-mail’s verbiage to his booth’s promotional tagline — “Perspective Matters” — Hibel inquired in his communiqués if recipients would be interested in a simple conversation related to their “perspective” on exhibition marketing while at the show. Of the 100 individual e-mails he sent, Hibel received approximately 30 responses. While his approach may have lacked the ultra-hip factor of Twitter or the “everywhereness” of a Facebook-YouTube-Flickr mix, Hibel tapped into something just as powerful — credibility and authenticity.
In fact, according to Joseph Pine and James Gilmore in their book “Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want,” the rampant virtualization of friends and acquaintances on the Web (how many online contacts do we actually meet in the flesh, much less know?) has triggered an inverse need to connect with people that share a history and/or have an abiding social connection with us.
With an initial agenda of simply seeing how many recipients were going to the show — and therefore getting a hunch how 3D might fare there — 18 of the 30 who responded came to the booth to chat. Of that group, two signed on for what could be as much as $250,000 in business for the company. For exhibitors like 3D, LinkedIn proved it might be the missing link between a show experience that’s middling — and one that’s moneymaking.
The takeaway: Search for people you’ve worked with or are affiliated with and add them to your contact list, going for quality over quantity by adding only people you’ve had contact with in some manner. Join LinkedIn groups relevant to your industry. Promote your exhibit by sending customized e-mails to carefully selected prospects from those groups. Ask your connections to let their connections know about your upcoming shows, products, and events. Then, following each trade show, invite individuals you met there to join your LinkedIn network, and use LinkedIn to keep the dialogue going until your next show.
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