LinkedIN: What B2B Marketers Should Do About the New Billion Dollar Baby

Communities are hot right now.  Membership is growing fast and valuations are skyrocketing.  Today’s announcement that LinkedIN received a $53 million capital infusion continues a trend of rich valuations (last year Facebook received funding at a valuation of $15 billion).  What are the implications for B2B marketers?  And importantly, what, if anything, should you do about it?  Here’s my take on answers to these questions.

Let’s take a closer look at LinkedIN which has 23 million members and 1.2 million new members signing up each month.  Although LinkedIN is now accepting display ads as part of its effort to “monetize” its user base, in my estimation, the real opportunity, power, and risks for marketers is in the interaction between members – how they interact with each other – not whether, they see or interact with an ad unit.  I’ll use a comment that an interview subject made during a recent Internet strategy project to illustrate my point.

The project was for a provider of complex business services and the area we were probing was how they selected service providers to work with.  The person responded that current performance - the experience of clients working with the provider at the time of selection - was a key determining factor.  This surprised me.  The comment pointed to a closer, higher velocity industry network than I ever imagined.   How does this relate to online communities?  LinkedIN enables dynamic connections between industry professionals, effectively hitting the overdrive switch on word of mouth referrals.  This is both an opportunity and a risk.  Evangelists can tilt the balance in your favor, or even get you on the consideration list.  Detractors can cause your next deal to cave in at the 11^th hour, or turn prospects that you’ll never see away from you. 

Here are three recommendations for how to make the most of your presence on LinkedIN for your B2B marketing objectives:

1. Analyze the chatter about your products or services in the questions and answers section.  People may ask about your company, its products, or express needs that your product or service solves.  Search on your company or product names and see what comes up.  Are people bashing your product or recommending it?  Try to connect with bashers to build a personal connection, understand their issues, and where possible, take corrective action.  Contact your evangelizers to engage them in a dialog about how to elevate their profile in the industry, and even to get referrals.  No chatter?  Start some by asking a question about your products or service offerings.  People love to weigh in on new product ideas or service enhancements. 
2. Activate your customers online by connecting with them.  Scan their networks.  Who are they connected to?  Are some of their connections prospects?  Will they make an introduction for you? 
3. Start a user group.  There are many types of groups on LinkedIN.  Why not start a group of people that use your product or service, or are experts in the area that you work in.  Acting as a network hub is a great way to generate value from the network.  You can generate a dialog on your product and open up a new stream of referrals and the like.  Many companies have spent tidy sums and lots of time creating user groups.  Now you can create user groups in a “guerilla” fashion using LinkedIN’s infrastructure. 

Over time, you may decide to create a dedicated community of your own.  If and when you do, who better to invite to join than the people that you are already connected with via a professional networking community like LinkedIN?  So get started and build your network today.  Send me a LinkedIN request and I’ll be happy to connect ;-).