There is so much more to social networking on LinkedIn than what the current discourse allows for. So much more benefit from building professional customer networks.

Whenever I speak on a platform or am part of a panel discussion in the media, all the Social Networking examples from my industry colleagues are drawn from one of the following:

1. About Not-for-Profits (NFPs) – typically more sexy or at least more interesting than the most boring topic of all – how to be a better accountant! Jokes aside from this former accountant, professional customer networks for accountants are really important, and LinkedIn can deliver great ones
2. About launching a new product
3. About a natural disaster and how people used the tools to communicate
4. About a ‘viral’ campaign like the wonderful Old Spice (Dark man. White horse. Very sexy!) which isn’t even social networking (see below)

Basically, they are usually about causes or issues that allow people to gather and get excited– because it’s much easier to get inspired about helping change the lives of orphans than it is to build a network of Sales Directors.

So the first problem is that those who work as managers and professionals cannot see their story, or how they can build powerful professional customer networks on LinkedIn.

The second and related problem is that the media and ‘expert’ commentators also confuse Social Networking with its cousin, Social Media. The ridiculous and ridiculously funny Old Spice example is the example most commonly used today. I had great fun debunking this on Sky TV (see Old Spice Sucks).

But as marketers selling our services, it’s a big opportunity for us when so many ‘experts’ focus on the colorful and the obvious. And confuse Social Media with the far more important Social Networking. It leaves the field clear for a company like ours, one with the vision of attacking the way more difficult task of professional customer network building. A task that helps in the day-to-day grind of being a lawyer, accountant, CIO or sales director, facilitating the interactions that all professionals need if they are to be great in their professions.

So it’s not as engaging as a network built around a cause like saving whales. But it’s way more important to the world of business.

There are 5 key elements of powerful LinkedIn Groups – what we may also call ‘Tribes’. Thanks to Seth Godin for this great summary:

1. The group must have a purpose – it must have a manifesto about what it stands for and what it believes in.
2. It must be easy to connect members and then keep them – this is why using LinkedIn is an ideal solution.
3. The group must be easy for members to connect and converse with each other. Throughout history, members of a group have always been able to converse. It is only recently in the ‘pre-social networking’ era where the communication flows were primarily top down, with some limited flows upwards. For example, in organizations like churches, industry associations and major companies, the costs of enabling members to communicate with each other were prohibitive. They would have spent all their time travelling! But in traditional networks or ‘tribes’ (such as villages) that existed for thousands of years, communication was obviously horizontal.

4. Money or profit is not the point of the group. This is hard for marketers and sales people who grew up in the mass media world to grasp. Groups exist for their own reasons. People join them for their own purposes – not to be sold to and not to make profit for somebody else (though they don’t mind if it is a by-product and if it doesn’t affect their overall experience).
5. Members must have the ability to track progress, as well as the benefits and advantages that belonging to a group brings. Enabling benchmarks to measure improvements is a powerful way to keep people engaged in the network.

Our role as professional customer network builders is about providing content and engagement. It is about helping members solve problems by positioning our clients as experts – experts who don’t sell and experts who are ‘omnipresent in service’.

There are principles that underpin powerful communities, particularly those with a business purpose:

1. Transparency – the purpose and the actions of the group must be transparent to all members. For example, the fact that we have clients who work in the background and provide resources to our ‘tribes’ is transparent. We don’t try to hide it. It is simply a part of being a member of our professional community and does not detract from their experience.
2. A group must grow carefully and slowly – it needs to be built on solid foundations for it to thrive. With solid foundations, connections will multiply, which will lead to more knowledge sharing and then eventually the network itself becomes self-sustaining.
3. It is important for the network to be different to other groups. The ones that we build are currently different to nearly all existing customer networks because we don’t allow spam. We are not attacking other groups- just highlighting the difference and showing that there is a better way.
4. Groups must exclude outsiders in some way, not nastily, but in a way that defines the difference. For example, the exclusion in our own ‘tribes’ of what we call spam (e.g. “Come to my free seminar!”) makes us very different.

Professional customer networks with all these elements will thrive.

Personal Branding for professionals on LinkedIn: Capture the space for your name in your field. It DOES matter. People believe that those they see regularly online are likely to have more expertise than those they don’t see. What else could they possibly think?

Unless of course your LinkedIn profile  is self-serving, and all you do is spam by putting out updates and comments on your business specifically aimed at selling your services. If it’s all about an incessent sales pitch, people will just turn you off. Disconnect. Unfollow.

With just one click.

LinkedIn will get you there, especially if it’s connected to a blog. And of course Facebook if you are in the B2C world.

And now is the best time to act because so few of your colleagues have, it’s easy to capture the high ground. Stake a claim on the best land. Build a business with a defendable advantage – but watch for the next big change that will be coming shortly. (And it looks like it’s Google+ – update as of July 2011). And sooner than the last Social Media Tsunami that swept through.

Think of Social Networking on LinkedIn as like owning your own electronic newspaper. Your own electronic niche ‘newspaper’. A paper where you do all the jobs.

As the Distribution Manager, you decide who you want to receive your newspaper. You also control which distribution media you choose to get your paper to it’s readers—but it’s all the same words, just on different media (with social networking the media is endless: LinkedIn, Twitter, blogging, YouTube, Spoke, Plaxo, and another page full of names!). As the Editor, you have the final say in what your audience gets to read, listen to or watch. As the Journalist, you do the research and decide what stories you will write. And the Editor can of course hire other journalists (writers).

And as the Finance Director you decide how much time and money you should spend to make your newspaper profitable. How much to spend to generate leads and raise the profile of your business.

Now our work is all about lead generation for businessess. With our clients we don’t care about the social aspects of ‘Social’ Networking. Care zilch about getting more friends and spending hours ‘chatting’ online—if you need more friends, the bookshops are stuffed with books on how to find them!

Our whole approach in my book on B2B marketing is about first defining your niche. Your gold clients. The ones you want more of. It’s all about business networking.

Well, knowing your niche is absolutely fundamental to Social Networking. How else can you create a ‘newspaper’ of value? Can you write content for everybody? If you did, would they be interested? No! More importantly, how can you select who to send it to? How can you build a circulation list?

If you don’t have a niche, you might as well stand on 5th Avenue in the Big Apple or George St in Sydney with a loud hailer, calling people to gather around you. And then try and collect all their business cards.

Utterly useless.

Networking on LinkedIn is about bringing people together and it has many business applications. Particularly in generating leads for business—it is just one more form of internet marketing, and increasingly becoming the most important.

By creating a profile on LinkedIn, or other major social networking sites, adding people and having them add you, you can use this media as a way of staying in contact with existing clients and also to generate leads. It’s also great for optimising your website so you rank more highly on Google and become more visible online.

Most importantly: All businesses can build a high profile in this new media at an affordable price. Particularly the early adopters as there is currently so little competition from other businesses as nearly all see it as new and scary.

Advertising businesses is what we do for a living, we’re damn good at it and I don’t just say so myself—click here to see what other business owners say.

Using my own experiences with business marketing and advertising, my team and I have written an extensive book available on Amazon – click on business marketing solutions.

One of the things that drives me up the wall with Social Networking on Linkedin  is people connecting with people they have nothing in common with, just to get raw numbers of followers up. Unless you’re a Social Networking counsultant, open ended connections won’t do anything for you. Conversion rates are almost zero.

Too many people are connecting for connections sake and this shows that they don’t know what they’re doing.

Larry Brauner recently posted a Facebook event geared around open ended connections and I think it’s a brilliant idea, for him. Why? Because his business is all about Social Networking. This event has gone viral and the popularity of it has really benefited him because it shows he has a huge network of social connections. Or course, it rightly positions him as an expert in this field, but that would not be of benefit to the 99.99% of businesses or professionals that are not consultants in social networking.

So how would open ended connection benefit a random business like an accountancy firm?

It wouldn’t. So don’t even worry about.

Worry about making effective connections, which is what we at LeadCreation will do for you.

Which is why I’m not as active on Facebook as on LinkedIn.

With LinkedIn, I create specific groups and pages which give free advice to people and showcase my own expertise when it comes to small business marketing. These groups connect me with people looking for my services and so far has been my most successful venture.