Is it better to be LinkedIn than LinkedOut?

Is it better to be LinkedIn than LinkedOut?

As Björk used to say when singing in her own unique style “it’s so quiet” – currently everything seems to have a real mid-air sensation to business activities whereby local businesses don’t really seem to be doing much in way of anything productive. When we say productive what we actually mean is obtaining a result.

Either those businesses you need to talk to are not there, or the person you need to speak to is on holiday, the decision on the order you were promised a few weeks back all of a sudden seems to have gone skywards with still no real confirmation on whether it’s a yes or a no.

If you look out your windows, or even whilst you’re out and about, driving to work in the mornings, driving home in the evenings you’ll notice that there are hardly any cars on the roads.

The fact there are no cars has a knock-on effect meaning there are no people! Where are they? Have they all gone to an all-inclusive 14-day break in Greece? Take advantage of the incredible holiday deals out there at the moment!

One thing is for sure if you look online towards social media and see how the action is there - you’ll see that it’s very busy, extremely busy indeed. This of course means that wherever all these missing people are at least they still have their mobile phones and/or laptops with them.

Could the real truth behind the seemingly physical quietness be that both business and business people have resulted to hibernating in the confines of their office or home to tweet and post rather than do any face to face stuff, well not until there’s the guarantee of an order or something real positive?

The problem when communicating with people online is it’s hard not to come to a more or less immediate opinion or conclusion on whether you think the business person you’re talking to carries any future potential.

We all know from experience of networking that when attending meetings at least we have the opportunity to look right into the eyes of the person we’re talking to, establish in our own head that they perhaps think a little more of themselves than they perhaps should, or that they’re talking complete utter rubbish. Or that although they may not look the part, what they’re actually saying makes sense and carries some validity and is well worth following up contact and conversations.

The problems with just solely being online are unless you know the person in the first place, the harder it’s going to be to make positive inroads in the short term, hence for those who are now turning to purely online networking to perhaps think again and recalculate their marketing plans.

Often without knowing the person it’s hard to know if what your read on a person’s profile or work experience is tongue in cheek, humour or whether they think so much of themselves that there is no way on earth that they could love anyone else but themselves.

Like with anything there are good and bad social media outlets the most common talked about is Facebook, which many will say is the future for business, personally, we’re not too sure as it may be just a case if people say it enough people will start to believe it. Also perhaps it mixes business with pleasure too much and that causes confusion or the wrong impression.

For example, is that on Facebook personal pages you will get members saying things like “went out on the lash on Friday night got rat arsed and ended up shoving a kebab down my mate’s shirt”. Then you’ll see their company page try and portray a wonderful business-like image, but it’s hard not to let the evidence on the personal page encroach on what you really think about their business irrespective if it is a great business.

One of the better social media outlets for businesses is LinkedIn, although it’s been around for a while its usage and awareness are now picking up speed at a rapid rate. The way in which it’s structured and worked in our open currently supersedes others out there in their current form.

As ever with such things everything is reliant on people and members using it in its correct and intended way, sure you will get spammers, sure you will get people who will use it to build solely numbers of members and/or contacts. But LinkedIn has tools and parameters which you can set to help combat many issues faced.

For instance to stop people from knowing who your contact is you can block all members from view and those who connect to you will be only to see any mutually shared contacts.

For those that don’t know about it, LinkedIn is well worth a look at, for those that do know about it and are already members it may pay you to look deeper into what it has to offer and the possible potential it may have, a word of warning though is do not drop everything to spend countless hours on it.