In the past few weeks, we learned that we are sitting on a gold mine here at Elevate, and we’ve learned that the most important aspect of our gold mine comes in the form of our fellow gold miners, both members and visitors.
This week I want to return to the actual gold by talking about how we can use LinkedIn to generate more genuine contacts and then referrals.
Please get your pens ready to write, because you have some action items.
First, if you are not LinkedIn with all of your fellow members, please make that a priority this weekend.
Second, make sure all of your details are up to date, and include a nice photo of yourself.
Next, I get a lot of connection requests on LinkedIn, but if I don’t know them my standard response for New York City based people is ….
Thanks for reaching out. I only connect with people that I know, so let’s take this opportunity to get to know one another. I’m extremely busy, but I’ll be at a breakfast event next Wednesday near Union Square. I would be happy to meet you there and learn more about you. And by the way, since there will be about 100 other professionals attending, I would also be happy to make some additional introductions to other people that will be there. Let me know if you’d like to come, and I’ll send the details.
If you use this template effectively, you, your new LinkedIn contact and everyone in this room will benefit greatly by building real relationships that start out in the virtual world.
Next week after we all have our LinkedIn profiles updated, In Part 2 I’m going to discuss effective tactics on using LinkedIn to get more referrals.
