Our Approach
Our People
Our Rules
Our Clients
Our Partners
Our LinkedIn Group
FAQ

Clarrus Colleagues

Join the Clarrus Colleagues LinkedIn Group now!

One of the things we do quite often is to make connections between two people we know, from job opportunities to simply getting two people together with similar interests. As a benefit to our colleagues throughout the industry, we have collaborated with LinkedIn to form a special group to provide some additional features that will facilitate the growth of your network.

We will be managing the group actively and closely, and working to ensure that the privileges are respected - just let us know if you believe the group is not being used for its stated intent.

LinkedIn Group Member Benefits Include:

• Accelerate your career through referrals from fellow group members - for jobs, deals, partnerships, clients, service providers, employees and business opportunities
• Know more than a name - view rich professional profiles from fellow group members
• Let other members of the group know what you have to offer to fellow group members and their contacts
• Conduct searches across the entire LinkedIn network, or limited to other members of the Clarrus Colleagues group
• Use special contact settings to reach other group members either directly or via referral

A Quick LinkedIn Primer

If you haven't heard about LinkedIn yet, here's a quick primer. It’s an excellent implementation for supporting business-level social networks, and it is moving well. Over 3,000,000 subscribed and growing quickly (it was only 40,000 in November 2003), it has a couple of key elements over the competition:

• All the people in the network have been invited in, giving a first level of trust.
• As your network grows, only you have visibility into who’s in your network (you have the option of changing this setting) – so you can keep your little black book private.
• When you make requests to meet someone, that request is passed along the network by the links – referrals all the way, giving another level of trust beyond a cold-call,
• The notion of endorsements adds still further trust (this is a very much underutilized feature, and can become a personal advantage!).
• Most functionality continues to be free, but new premium services have recently been added as well.

As background, 'Linked: The New Science of Networks' by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi is highly recommended. It is a book written for the popular press that describes the current state of network theory – viruses, the internet, terrorist groups, and social networks. At times, working with LinkedIn feels like being immersed in the book…you’ll certainly understand if you read it.

Making LinkedIn Work for You

Here are some of my thoughts on the effort needed to make LinkedIn work for you. It is a potentially powerful tool, but it requires investment to make it work…

Administrative details:

• Fill in your profile, trace back through at least a couple of previous positions – you will need a compelling story to attract others, or to entice others to accept your request.
• Allowing all to contact you directly will give you visibility to more people, if you are comfortable with that.
• Decide the degree of closeness you would need to invite someone into the network: while some people only invite those that they have worked closely with and can directly endorse, others believe you need to be comfortable with referring them to others and vice versa, but don’t have to be at a level where you have worked with them and can personally vouch for them. As you send referrals along, all you need to do is be able to confirm that it looks reasonable for them to meet, not that it will be a match made in heaven.
• Invite all your peers that would be interested in business-level networking – those that meet the criteria you are comfortable with.
• Pull in your Outlook contact list to see if there’s already people signed up - you are likely to find at least a few. You can then link to them directly, and your network can grow by leaps and bounds.
• Invite a couple of people to provide endorsements about one of your positions, and do the same for them – essentially 3rd party references that add credibility to your message (sending them an endorsement unsolicited is a great way to get them to return the favour).

Getting value out of the network (to this point in the monologue, it’s just been an interesting academic exercise – and that is where the majority of users remain – with only a few contacts, and little value received):

• It would be naïve to think that this tool will generate business directly – it is more reasonable to use it to find interesting people you would like to meet (as clients or peers), then leverage the managed introductions to get to a point where you are face to face and can really understand if there is value in the relationship.
• Being found: one of the key things here is to maximize your number of direct connections and endorsements, as these are the primary sort methods. After that, have a compelling story. With more connections (especially those already well connected), you will also gain access to a broader group of people, and have shorter paths to connect with them.
• Finding people: drill down in the searches for precisely what you are looking for. You will find that there are a couple of people that end up being the ‘usual suspects’ that are the first link in the path to those of interest – these are the hubs in your network. Be sure those links are strong (keep in touch with them regularly, foster the relationships), to increase the likelihood of a strong endorsement along the way. If they are merely casual acquaintances, buy them a lunch.

We hope you find this tool to be as powerful for building your network as we have. Thus far, it has been very positive, though as with everything, this is a function of the effort applied to working with the tool. Several new hubs quickly materialized, and were leveraged to meet others. As our networks continue to grow, let's work together to see if this Clarrus Colleagues LinkedIn group can make the tool that much stronger...

Please contact us at any time if you have any questions about LinkedIn or this group.

Home | Up | Contact | Privacy Policy

Send comments about this web site to webmaster@clarrus.com
Copyright © 2002-2008 Clarrus Consulting Group Inc
Page last modified 02 Sep 2007