My Secret Weapon: Using LinkedIn’s Advanced Search Function to Find New Clients

[Rich Rubasch]

Not Larry Lujack?

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production, Post, Studio Sound Stage
Founder/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
https://www.tiltmedia.com

[Jeff Markgraf]

Well, I know Lujack was a legend and all that. Deservedly so. But there was something unpredictable and off-kilter about Fried – er, Fred – Winston that appealed to me more.

[Mark Suszko]

John “Records” Landecker, Bob Sirrot, and Fred Winston were my favorite air personalities. I followed Fred all around the dial as we both aged. He’s currently the station ID/production voice on a local Springfield, IL station, a gig I’m sure he just FTP’s in, but my wife and I always brighten up, hearing his voice.

[Mike Cohen]

I use LinkedIn for the following purposes:

Participate in some forums. However most forums are for people in the same industry. Kind of like I don’t expect Mark or Todd or Nick to hire me for production work just because they interact on this forum. But it’s kinda fun. Sure I’ve hired some fellow Cows as sub contractors but that is again not what the original post is about.

I accept most but not all link requests. Excluding people I already do business with, family and college friends, that leaves about 60% people I have no direct connection with.

I reach out occasionally to say hello and reintroduce myself. I get the impression a lot of people really don’t use the service since manu of my messages are unreturned or are replied to weeks later or longer.

Then I get the random contacts from people in unrelated fields (ie, not production and not medical related) and often from the ends of the Earth. Not sure how this happens.

I see why one might pay for the pro service. You can use Linkedin to identity prospects (ie, show me VP of sales at widget companies) because they usually are a 2nd or 3rd connection and you cannot direct message with the free account. So you take your chances of annoying a stranger with a spammy linkedin message on the 5% chance they reply.

I might have to experiment with this myself.

It is obviously working for some people.

Another interesting feature is the “who viewed your profile in last 30 days”. I clicked today and with the free account I got:

HR director at XYZ firm
A former co-worker whom I have no contact with ever
A video editor at a tv station in Oklahoma
An unnamed executive at an unnamed company.
Next is the pitch to pay money to see these people and more. Reminds me of Classmates.com.

There is also a news feed, which seems to contain the same viral links that also populate my FB feed, Twitter feed, Reddit and Digg. I suppose the point here is to engage in conversations with tge OPs but most are bland links (that is the OP does not add their own insight).

Back to the forums. I participate in the video editors forum. Fun but not for prospecting as far as I can tell.
Other forums seem to be a combination of:

Introduce yourself – problem here is in a marketing forum you have 50 people who all do essentially the same job pitching their services to one another.

Links to viral articles or blog posts

Work from home spam

Other job postings or recruiting firms

Occasionally an actual thread but there is a lot of pollution in the forums.

Then there is the Profile Building activities. You log in and are asked to update your profile. I do it and have a pretty good rating. Then it asks you to endorse others for skills.
I get endorsed for video related skills by people I have never worked with. Very nice gesture but kind of meaningless. But this is what Linkedin does, creates busywork masked as productivity.

Now if you are looking for a job Linkedin seems like a good place to look. I get numerous suggestions for jobs which I am not remotely qualified for. I wonder how that function works.

Anyway, Linkedin serves some purposes. I call it Facebook for grownups. Although since the exodus of kids, Facebook is now Facebook for grownups and Linked in is in most peoples’ opinion kind of useless. But lots of people have an account.

As an experiment I tries to connect with people sharing my name. I have two other Mike Cohens as connections, but I don’t think they got the joke!

Can you get business from LinkedIn? For many of us it remains to be seen.
I hope so.

Mike Cohen