The original culture of LinkedIn has a distinctly corporate atmosphere. There’s a lot in it about connecting with fellow workers, and even more about finding a job. The LinkedIn profile is often treated as a kind of standing resume — a mating call to headhunters.
That’s all well and fine, but what about the serial entrepreneur — the owner of a small or mid-market company? There’s a growing population of us on the networking site that wouldn’t take a job if you paid us.
We’re really a different breed with different needs. How are we to make use of the networking opportunities provided by LinkedIn? There are no groups, equivalent to Facebook’s — only online adjuncts of pre-existing professional organizations, mostly quite stuffy. Nor is there the equivalent of the exciting new Facebook Pages, which allows you to profile your business.
Clearly there needs to be a way to segue from the personal story to the business story. That, to my mind, is the purpose of social branding. It’s not so much about how you turn yourself into a brand (good if you plan to be a movie star). It’s more about how you build a personal brand that points towards your business brand.
The first step in the process is going to be: master your business brand. Then review your personal story under that searching light. If you hold to that perspective, you can turn the apparently corporate world of LinkedIn to your entrepreneurial advantage.
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Jon, based on my recent experience, your observations about LinkedIn seem so accurate. I ventured there for the first time earlier today and felt I had to adapt and adjust and tweak and twiddle just to take my first tentative steps to getting my business profile up there. However, it does appear to be an awesome tool if a network (such as this one) commits to it. Is a group such as ours capable of infusing our own adaptations to a site like this by agreeing on some common protocols? In other words, do you think that there’s much benefit in trying to co-opt their categories and distinctions to reflect the realities of the entrepreneur?