Windmill Networking: Understanding, Leveraging & Maximizing LinkedIn. Neal Schaffer

Niguel Connectors friends Hank Blank and Randy Miller, for teaching me much about networking; Cindy Pickens, for her support and that of her tremendous CafeNet group; Kathy Simmons of Netshare, for giving me the confidence that I could write a great book; my awesome and inspiring Orange County Twitter friends Paul Tran, Ted Nguyen, Rochelle Veturis, and Diana Wei; networking friends like Sven Johnston (We are Orange County!), Raymond Wah, Paul Andrew, and Jeff Gaul; Mr. Pay It Forward himself Check Hester; all of my So Cal Sushi and Izakaya Club friends; Bob Fine from Cool Twitter Conferences; Tim Tyrell-Smith; along with way too many others to list. The above are only a few of the many people that I had the chance to physically meet. There were many, many more who I exchanged emails and sometimes phone calls with (including you, Mr. Gnarly Young Entrepreneur, Bradley Will!); I can only hope that when you read this you realize that it is you that I am also thanking.

      PART I:CREATING YOUR LINKEDIN BRAND

      Your LinkedIn strategy and brand can only be properly formulated after understanding LinkedIn and the role it plays in social networking in the 21^st century. I introduce the concept of Windmill Networking to help you “cross the chasm” and embrace LinkedIn, social networking, and social media. This section of the book will give you the framework through which you can begin thinking about what you want to achieve on LinkedIn, including examples of popular user scenarios. At the end of this section, assuming you have already registered as a user at www.linkedin.com, we will go through the creation of your user profile and help you begin to develop your own LinkedIn Brand .

      Chapter 1: Introducing Windmill Networking

      •A Personal Introduction

      •A Social Networking Primer

      •Utilizing Windmill Networking to Understand Social Networking and LinkedIn

      •Where Does Windmill Networking Fit In?

      A Personal Introduction

      My LinkedIn Credentials

      If you are reading this book, you may be standing where I stood a little more than a year ago—before putting pen to paper. Starting out on LinkedIn, you want to get to the next level, to understand what you might be missing, to make some sense of what you should be doing on LinkedIn. I don’t intend this book to be a simple user’s manual about LinkedIn. During the last year I have lived the “LinkedIn Life,” starting out with a close network, slowly expanding it, and then becoming a LION, or a LinkedIn Open Networker. Along the way I created a filter, Windmill Networking, through which you can look to separate yourself from LinkedIn; using Windmill Networking, you can look at LinkedIn from a completely different, yet invaluable angle. The reader will find this experience, combined with this pre-requisite manual of LinkedIn’s features, most valuable. He or she will then be able to reflect upon and implement their own LinkedIn Brand.

      According to my own research, I currently now have the more LinkedIn connections than anyone else where I reside in Orange County, California. At my current level of nearly 17,000 connections in early August, I am almost in the top 50 of all LinkedIn users worldwide. But more importantly, while becoming connected to so many people, I have utilized LinkedIn to search for and apply to jobs, to research potential customers, to find sales channels, to learn a great deal about many subjects, and to create my own groups to find like-minded professionals. I have also reestablished contact with old colleagues while helping people in various ways. I have most importantly made acquaintances with many people who are willing to spend a lot of time helping others. It has been a magical adventure I hope you all have a chance to experience on your own. That is really the motivation for me to write this book, to share as others have shared with me, and to give back to the wonderful LinkedIn community. As I will mention in the concluding chapter of this book, the more we connect with each other and become better LinkedIn users and better networkers, the positive effects and increased value will be passed on to everyone within our networks.

      Like many of you, I received my first LinkedIn invitation a few years ago from someone whom I cannot remember. I signed up one day in 2004 (turns out that I am member number 235,001, as indicated by the key code in my URL), but I really didn't do anything with the site aside from accepting invitations from people that I knew. I remember having a long email conversation with one person who invited me that I did not know. I remember feeling that somehow my privacy had been violated—a feeling that I have not forgotten.

      That all changed in 2008. After building my career in Asia and looking for a job for the first time in the US—without an established network—I took the plunge and decided to use LinkedIn as my primary networking tool. I couldn’t attack the “hidden job market,” a market where some people say 70% of the jobs are “found” or “created,” without becoming a better “networker.” Thus, my LinkedIn journey began, and I soon became a heavy user and increased my connections from 100+ to the now 17,000+.

      As I started becoming a heavy user, I began connecting to people beyond my immediate group of friends and co-workers while actively reaching out to recruiters. I started to become the “go to” person for LinkedIn in my close physical network of family and friends. Many acquaintances had never heard of or did not understand LinkedIn to the same degree that I did. I could look at the official LinkedIn Q&A sections and begin answering questions about how to use LinkedIn. Finally, as I built out my network to encompass thousands of direct connections, I would offer to help anyone if they had a question about LinkedIn by saying so in an email. Whenever I invited someone to connect or accepted their invitation, I addressed them personally. Many people seemed to find value in what I had to say. I decided to begin a LinkedIn blog to provide a consistent place to publish my knowledge and tips. That blog now resides at www.WindmillNetworking.com.

      Through this book, I hope to share all of this information with everyone to pay back the community for what it has given me. When I started my blog, a friend recommended that I write a book. At the time, I scoffed at his suggestion, yet here I am, a year later, putting the final edits to my work.

      Am I uniquely qualified to be writing a book on a site that has 40 million users? Hey, I always believed that anyone has enough unique and valuable life experiences to write a good book. Is there information you can gain from me that you can’t find on the official LinkedIn site? Most definitely, because any information is based on personal experience. Will reading this book help you become a better networker, find a job or candidate quicker, sell more effectively, and deepen your understanding of LinkedIn? I am confident that it will.

      Most importantly, I hope to fill the “information vacuum” that exists around LinkedIn. This really is the missing manual that I couldn’t find, and thus decided to create. When I first began my LinkedIn journey, I was surprised at the limited amount of “useful” information there was about LinkedIn on the site itself. It seemed that the people utilizing LinkedIn were either not sharing the “insider” information or didn’t know for themselves. At that time there was only one “real” LinkedIn book available. As time progressed, I started receiving many questions; I also began seeing many other questions appear within the official LinkedIn “Answers” section. I realized the timing was right and the audience was there; I was now ready to communicate my approach to using LinkedIn. Since I began writing this book, a few new publications about LinkedIn have appeared. This book, however, provides more than strategic and useful information for the beginner and the expert to use throughout the process: it also creates a framework through which you can better understand and more effectively utilize LinkedIn. For me, the mechanics of LinkedIn are a prerequisite, but you need to look at LinkedIn through the eyes of Windmill Networking and create your own LinkedIn Brand to really fully harness its value.

      As a brief introduction to how I’ve organized this book, I begin with an attempt to help you better understand social networking, Windmill Networking, and what potential value LinkedIn has for you. I also go through potential user scenarios and provide you with a hands-on guide to create your own LinkedIn Brand. I follow this map throughout the “meat” of the book, which details the different sections of interest