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Goodbye LinkedIn Answers

by Yannis |March 24th, 2011

For the past 30 days, I have been subscribing to the “Marketing and Sales” RSS feed from LinkedIn’s Answers section. Until the end of February I had been a casual visitor, occasionally dipping in and out to see what’s been discussed. Then I decided to add the RSS feed to Google Reader hoping to first, get a better understanding of the nature of the discussions and the contributors and second, to assess the relevance of this whole affair to Skyron and to our clients.

30 days and 1,140 RSS updates later I am unsubscribing for five reasons:

  • Too much repetition: I can’t take any more questions like “How do I use LinkedIn?”
  • Little insight: More often than not, Answers is used by lazy people who can’t be asked to make a simple Google search to find the information they need
  • Little relevance: There are plenty of new business opportunities but the majority would benefit consultants, freelancers and small suppliers of marketing services, none of which is directly relevant to Skyron or the majority of our clients
  • Tsunami of posts: The relentless posting suffocated my other feeds, resulting in me reading only a fraction of my daily intake
  • Groups are better: Group discussions are more focused and the participants behave more like a community, creating more valuable content

I actually did manage to introduce a London agency I know well to an American company looking for specialists of a certain kind, but this pretty much sums up all the excitement for the month.

If you are a marketing, or comms director at a large B2B organisation you are better off joining a relevant LinkedIn Group (or setting one up!) than shooting blind in LinkedIn Answers.

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Finally! LinkedIn adds more functionality to Company pages

by Yannis |November 11th, 2010
LinkedIn screen

LinkedIn Products & Services form

Company pages have been the weakest LinkedIn feature, until now. LinkedIn has finally added more functionality to the Company pages making them a far more powerful feature. The brand new Products & Services section allows every company to add a very detailed and comprehensive portfolio of their offering onto their LinkedIn Company profile. This is a fantastic opportunity for a number of reasons:

  • It is a fantastic showcase tool
  • It is a great opportunity for every company to fine-tune the description and details of their offering
  • Allows YouTube video imports and linking
  • The Company page can finally add real value and become a landing page (emails, business cards, etc.)
  • Allows promotion of the product/service on LinkedIn
  • Hopefully the products/services listed will be searchable, to bring buyers and sellers closer than ever

The only drawback is that companies have one more thing to keep up-to-date.

We are now working to update our LinkedIn Company pages.


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Using LinkedIn for new business – A guide for Hunters and Farmers

by Yannis |September 29th, 2010

What’s your approach to sales? Are you a hunter or a farmer? Do you play the numbers game and go for the shortest and straightest line to a close, or would you rather build a strong network of long term relationships and pick up new business along the way? LinkedIn enjoys global recognition as a networker’s heaven, but it can equally cater for both approaches to generating new business, as this article investigates.

To make the insights below practical and easy to understand, let’s start with a real search and then explore ways in which both hunters and farmers can use the results to generate sales:

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