5on5 Expert Blog Series: Lena West on Social Networking
I had the honor of interviewing Lena West who is an award-winning social media consultant, blogger, speaker, journalist and technologist. She is also the CEO and Chief Strategist at xynoMedia, a social media consulting, implementation and development firm that helps women-owned and led companies profit from the power of Social Media and the Internet.
Let’s get started, how long have you been on LinkedIn and how do you use it?
I’ve been on LinkedIn for several years now. At the very least 6/7 years. I’m a lot more active now with my LinkedIn account than I used to be and plan to be even more active in the future – especially now that LinkedIn has added applications to their overall functionality. Now you can pull in your blog posts from WordPress and presentations from Slideshare. I definitely use LinkedIn to connect with people, to stay in touch and for general networking. I also use LinkedIn to write recommendations for people who I think are great or people that I’ve worked with who I think do really good work. I use it to snoop, too. Kind of as an intelligence tool. I poke around and look at company pages, hiring trends and that sort of thing. I also use it to prepare for meetings with potential clients. By checking out their company page or seeing who works for them, I am able to get an edge. It’s a good way to get a clue about a company’s culture.
How much time do you spend on LinkedIn and how do you utilize your time?
I would say maybe an hour a week, if that. Obviously, that is going to increase with our plans to use some of the additional features going into 2010.
If I’m speaking at a conference, I will have my assistant send out LinkedIn connection requests and she’ll approve connection requests as they come in. I know the LinkedIn platform well, so I know exactly where to go for what I need. As a result, I don’t spend a lot of time trying to find the information I need. It’s probably that way because I use these tools for a living and we teach our clients about these tools. It’s a bit like going into my closet, and saying, “Oh where are those brown shoes? Ok, that’s where they are”, because it’s my closet I’m familiar with it. Because of what I do, I’m able to go right to the information. So when I want to do some competitive intelligence or collect some intelligence about a potential client, I am able to go right to the information. I’m also, to toot my own horn, a really good searcher. If it’s in there, I’m going to find it. My searching skills are honed and plus, I know where everything is so that helps a lot.
What are some of the tools you use on LinkedIn? And why?
I like Slideshare, because it allows me to showcase both my intellectual capital and my thought leadership. It also lets people know that I’m giving presentations i.e., I am available for hire as a speaker. It also showcases that while there are certain themes that I cover most often in my presentations, there are customizations to my ideas. This gives me a higher level of credibility and it also lets people know that if I’m speaking so often, chances are I have my finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the industry and with potential client needs. Also using the WordPress application allows me to import my blog posts and that let’s people know that I’m blogging and I do have fresh ideas and information. I also leverage recommendations. When I want to really thank someone who I feel as gone above and beyond, I will write a recommendation for them on LinkedIn. People have, for some reason, the mistaken thought that in order to write a recommendation for someone they have to have worked for you in some capacity. That’s not true. You can write a recommendation based on someone’s character or your experience with them. There are different recommendations that can be written other than the employer/employee type recommendations. I also use the company area and the company pages.
How do you strategically work with your connections?
That’s what we are going to be doing more of coming into the New Year. Let’s say I meet you and I think you’re great and I’ll say you need to meet Tara, so instead of sending an email introduction, I will forward your LinkedIn profile to her and vice versa. And say, “hey, you need to meet.” We’ll definitely be more active in LinkedIn groups. I was just named by Forbes as one of the Top 30 Women Entrepreneurs to Follow on Twitter. I’ll talk about that – not in a self-aggrandizing way – but in a causal way.
You’ve just gone through a rebranding of your company how are you going to promote the change on LinkedIn?
We’re definitely going to make better use of some of the features like LinkedIn polls, LinkedIn questions and answers. After the rebrand we will have our own blog to import; up until now I’ve been a blogger for Entrepreneur Magazine and Fast Company Magazine. I’ll be continuing my work with both of those publications, but adding some of our own content to it. So, we’ll definitely be promoting our own blog content as well. We have some stuff coming down the pike that’s going to be really, really interesting in terms of ways to leverage LinkedIn.
It was a real pleasure interviewing Lena West and learning from her how she uses LinkedIn.
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