Before I begin explaining how companies and professionals can leverage LinkedIn for business purposes, I believe there is a certain mindset you should have in order to take advantage of the functionality and opportunities LinkedIn offers. Allow me to provide some personal experiences and insight that will hopefully put you in the right mindset to maximize LinkedIn.

      Your Brand Is Your Online Persona

      Whether you plan to use this book as an individual or to represent a business, you will be interacting with and be seen by others without having a chance to meet them. While corporate websites give us complete control over how we depict our brands, products, and personnel, LinkedIn levels the playing field by stripping away the design elements and simply presenting every user in basically the same way. Let me take this one step further and tell you that others may make decisions on whether or not they want to do business with you based on how you’ve utilized your LinkedIn profile.

      An analogy that helps explain this has to do with business interactions I’ve had in Japan. I lived in Japan for 15 years, often representing foreign companies with little or no brand recognition in the market. When I went on a customer visit, therefore, everything I did represented not only my personal brand but also the brand aligned with my company. Did I take a meishi (business card) with two hands or one? At what angle did I bow when I was introduced? What was my body language when I presented to them? How quickly did I respond to their emails, and did I strive to use Japanese or fall back on my native English? All of these little activities added up to create a larger picture of who I was and how I did business, which then shaped how they viewed me as a person and eventually how they saw the company I represented.

      This is exactly why social media, including LinkedIn, requires a strategic approach. Regardless of how much “branding” you try to include on your professional profile or company’s page, your actions and words online speak much louder about you and your company than anything else.

      You Are What You “Tweet”

      In addition to your actions and words affecting your brand, you are what you tweet—a direct reference to posting a maximum 140-character message on the real-time social networking platform Twitter. If you are trying to generate business from other professionals, you need to stick to appropriate topics. There may be a time and place to talk about sports or family when you meet people in person, but on LinkedIn, these types of conversations are out of place and awkward. A professional’s goal when using any form of social media should be to share content that his target customers find useful, allowing him to become the expert “channel” for that type of information. If you post useful and engaging comments that are aligned with your sales and marketing objectives, people will perceive you and your business as being skilled and experienced. However, if you clutter your message with off-topic comments, you run the risk of losing your credibility.

      This concept holds true for status updates (or tweets, for those of you who have integrated them into your LinkedIn profile), discussions in LinkedIn Groups, and all other public avenues for communication that exist on LinkedIn. For instance, it might be tempting to chime in on a controversial subject that has been brought up in a LinkedIn Group or a disputed question on LinkedIn Answers, but due to the fact that anyone on LinkedIn—and, for answers and open groups, anyone on the Internet—can view your responses, you need to remember to communicate on brand.

      When you create and display your profile, you must make public-facing decisions that communicate who you are as a person. Embedding a video and using a link that automatically plays when someone visits your profile may be a savvy Internet marketing tactic, but it may be perceived as a punch in the face to someone who just wants to check out your profile in order to potentially engage you in new business.

      Treat LinkedIn with the same amount of respect you would treat a professional association meeting or industry convention and you will be on your way to building and enhancing your LinkedIn brand, which will be optimized for business success.

      Creating a Public Persona

      When you see the value of communicating on brand or in a way that is aligned with your professional objectives for being on LinkedIn, you’ll likely sense the need to create a “public persona” of yourself. In other words, avoid posting your private information on LinkedIn, and all social media in general. Did you know there are tools, such as a plugin for Gmail called Rapportive1 and the social CRM platform Nimble,2 which can be used to publicly display available information for every email address with a registered social media profile?

      If you’re not careful with your Facebook profile, for example, your private information could cost you potential business.

      The fascinating thing about social media, of which LinkedIn is definitely a part, is the social component. It is what draws some people into having conversations and posting things on various social media channels that they might later regret. It is very possible for this to happen on LinkedIn. Consider the fact that LinkedIn allows you to input information about your hobbies and interests in your public profile. Including this information may help make a connection with a potential customer, but it may also turn off potential customers who perceive you in an unintended manner.

      The overarching problem is that everyone sees and uses social media from a different perspective. A statement that is considered harmless by some may be perceived differently by others. When Kenneth Cole tweeted in the midst of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, “Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online . . . ,”3 some of his fans didn’t think twice about the message. However, because of the public nature of Twitter,