I received the following question today:
There is a group on LinkedIn that I would like to “take over” It is an Alumni group in San Diego. I am the current President and we want to use to promote alumni events. The person who set it up has not posted in over a year and they probably won’t care.
Is there a way I can find out who set it up or who is the admin and contact them?
Can they add me as an admin like you can on FB?
Or, can they just give me ownership of the group so I can post, grow it, etc?

The answer to all three questions is YES, YES & YES.
This video shows you how to do it.

Updating your status on LinkedIn can both help and hurt you on LinkedIn. Used properly, they can be a very powerful component of your LinkedIn strategy. On this post I’ll focus on how they can help you.

Your updates should be used to increase your and/or your network’s Visibility / Credibility. You can also use the updates to promote – as long as they are subtle! Remember that people on LinkedIn want primarily relevant information and connections. They don’t want to be sold!

I recently posted that I had booked a presentation while traveling abroad to the U.K. (I live in San Diego, CA.) My main purspose with this update was to increase my credibility as an International Speaker. However, I also got an unexpected bonus – see below:

I had recently connected with this person on LinkedIn and thanks to my post we started a conversation and we are now likely to meet face-to-face in a few weeks.

This is the magic of integrating online and offline networking

There are several reasons why you want to add a 2nd email address to your LinkedIn profile. Please watch the short video that tells you why you want to do it and how to do it.

One of my LinkedIn contacts recently sent me a message about a free presentation he was offering to help people save money on insurance. I’ve met this fellow a couple of times and from our conversations, he seems to be quite knowledgeable about the subject of insurance. Seeing an opportunity to earn some Social Capital by helping him and possibly others in my network, I proceeded to send a Tweet inviting people to check out his presentation.

Subsequently I received another email from a different contact asking me how well I knew the person who was doing the presentation. I replied stating the above and also directing him to another member of my network who knew this person better and could give him a better idea about the presenter.

A few days later I received another email from the same person and he was rather upset because he felt that even though the content of the presentation was valuable, the way it was presented was disparaging of independent insurance brokers.

This got me thinking: how much responsibility should I bear for what happened here? And what should I do about it?

The way I see it, there is a big difference between recommending and informing. A recommendation is much more powerful than an announcement. And because it is more powerful, it carries with it more responsibility.

In this case, I was willing to make an announcement but I certainly wasn’t willing to make a recommendation. The reason I wasn’t willing to recommend was because I had no experience with the product and I also don’t yet know the person well enough to put my reputation behind him.

One thing I learned from this is that people may treat announcements as endorsements and I better make the difference clear. It also reinforced my perspective that there are always risks when you are connecting people. And that these risks come with the territory. If I want to position myself as a connector, then I have to deal with these situations.

I welcome your thoughts and opinions on this.

I received an email earlier this week asking for my help to bring some visibility to the short video I’ve embedded below. When the video gets 1 million hits, Medline will be making a huge contribution to the St. Vincent Medical Center, as well as offering free mammograms. All of this is part of a campaign to promote breast cancer awareness.

So after reading the rest of this post, please take 3 minutes to watch the video. You’ll both make a difference and have some fun at the same time. Feel free to use the ReTweet button here as well.

As far as Social Networking goes, this is a great example of it’s power. One of the things I love about Social Networking is experiencing the way networks work. A contact who lives in Minnesota whom I originally met on LinkedIn sent me the email. Our relationship has been growing and we’re at the stage where we are both helping each other. I’ve built enough trust with her that I’m willing to help her with this project. In the process I’m also able to indirectly help a whole bunch of others as well.

The skeptic out there will be saying – “that’s all great, but how does it help you generate more business?” The answer is a combination of facts and faith.

The fact is that I’m building Social Capital. Social Capital is a new kind of currency that you earn when you help others achieve their goals. When you do that, it is the equivalent of putting money into a savings account to be spent at a later date. By helping my contact, she is now much more likely to want to help me in return. Why? This is human nature. Do this hundreds or thousands of times with enough people and you can be building huge reserves of Social Capital. With these kind of reserves you can easily have people helping you earn more money.

The faith part is connected to the law of reciprocity. You get back what you put out there. Some people call it Karma. Whatever it’s name, you must have faith that it will work. Interestingly enough, this is a circular rather than a linear process. What I mean by this is that sometimes the reciprocity doesn’t come directly from the person(s) you originally helped. It comes from seemingly “out of nowhere.” Personally I have experienced many instances where help has come my way “out of nowhere.” Some people call it luck. I choose to attribute this to the law of reciprocity. That’s where faith comes in.

So please enjoy the video and earn a bit of Social Capital in the process.

In my previous post, I discussed the process of getting introductions via your LinkedIn connections.  LinkedIn offers three levels of connections. There is my direct contacts. Those contacts’ contacts. And then there are the contacts’ contacts’ contacts.

Let’s say I wanted to connect with Steve Griffin. I  did a search and found out that five people in my network are connected to him (see below.)  I can then send any (or all) of those folks a request to introduce me to Steve. I would then write my introduction message to Steve and send it to Scott Cunningham. Scott would then forward my message to Steve by adding something that would make Steve more likely to accept my message.

Alternatively, let’s say I wanted to connect with Steve Shapiro. As you can see, he is three degrees away from me. The process is the same though the route is a little more circuitous.

In this situation I would send a message to Douglas Castle  (or any of the other contacts who have a connection with SOMEONE who knows Steve) and ask that he look for who in his network is connected to Steve.  You see, I can’t see who in Douglas’ network is connected to Steve. So I have to ask Douglas to do this for me. Douglas can then ask his contact if he would connect me to Steve. In this situation, my message to Steve would go through Douglas, Douglas’ contact and finally Steve.

I will cover the proper etiquette on how to do these requests in another post.

LinkedIn is a wonderful engine for building relationships and networking. One of the best tools LinkedIn offers is the ability to search for particular individuals in your network and to be referred to them by your network. Say you are wating to connect with me. You could do a search for Rick Itzkowich and then you would see if any of the people in your network are connected to me. If they are, you could send me an introduction via one of them. They would then forward the introduction to me.

This path is less linnear than if you were to contact me directly, but it is much more effective.

I will be discussing some do’s and dont’s in future posts.

Larry Weintraub does a fabulous job of explaining some do’s and don’ts for LinkedIn.  You can read his article “How to be a LinkedIn superstar” and gain valuable tips on the following topics:

• Your LinkedIn profile
• Communicating with your network
• LinkedIn Groups
• Using the Q&A feature in LinkedIn

In addition to his information I would add that LinkedIn is a great resource to connect people to each other. My goal is to become the “go to” guy in my network so that people come to me first whenever they need something. LinkedIn allows me to build my network of experts that I can use to refer these requests.

There is a good chance that if you are reading this blog, you are already subscribed to LinkedIn. The question I have for you is: how are you using LinkedIn?

Most people see LinkedIn as a community to look for connections to jobs or to hiring people. While that is certainly a use for LinkedIn, I personally think that the most powerful way to use the site is to put people together.

I like being the “go to” guy when someone in my life has a need for something. So I often get calls or emails asking me if I know of someone who does something that they need. By having a vast network of people, I can more readily find that someone and refer them. LinkedIn makes it very easy to do so with it’s introduce feature.

So start thinking of LinkedIn as a marketplace where you can connect buyers and sellers. The more you connect people with each other, the more influence you will gain with the people in your network. And the more influence you gain, the more you will be able to capitalize on it at a future date.

Are you choosy with whom you connect with in LinkedIn?

This question was posted by someone on the Q&A section of LinkedIn and I thought it was relevant to people who are just staring to network online. My answer will be based on LinkedIn only. Since my criteria is different in different sites I will write about this subject in a future post.

I originally started out being very choosy.  This was before I actually had a strategy for Social Networking. However once I came up with a strategy and I came up with a new premise that I wrote about on an article called “Your Only One Person Away” , I relaxed my criteria for accepting connections.

My purpose for using LinkedIn is to be a “matchmaker.” I would love to be the guy who people call me and ask: “who do you know that ….?” and then refer them to someone who does that. To do this, I need to have a rather large and diverse network. The more people I add to my network, the more people I can connect.

If someone invites me to connect and I’ve never met them, I will first look at their profile and see how many people are endorsing them and what those people are saying. If I like what I see, I respond with a message asking them why they want to connect with me. The depth of their answer will determine whether I accept the connection or not.

Once I have an interaction with someone,  i.e. they comment on one of my articles, answer one of my questions, etc. then I’m much more likely to seek a connection.

What’s your criteria?