Member Requests and Offerings

• Gary White wants a top-notch boutique SEO (Search Engine Optimization) organization for his sales and marketing consulting firm “so he can do it once and for all.” Not someone to teach him how to do his SEO, but someone to do it for him.
• Phil Lane is advising a PR management business that started at zero, built up, and is back to zero. He needs guidance on exit strategies.
  • Melinda Velasquez asks whether he can help them increase their capacity so they can do it themselves.
• Mike Van Horn knows people are agonizing over applying Web 2.0 and social media to their businesses. There’s a group that meets once a month with room for one or two more people who are serious about doing this—they have to have started already. If you’re interested, contact Mike.
• Steven Tulsky saw an article on our LinkedIn group about whether LinkedIn connections should be people you know personally or just people you’ve encountered who know your name. He wants to know what we feel about whether people you’ve met here at BACN should automatically become connections on LinkedIn. 
  • Diane Parente thinks you should know the person. It’s a referral—you need to know they’re credible, the type of work they’re doing. I’m not going to collect to people unless I know them.
  • Sallie Goetsch outlines her LinkedIn policy: “I won’t accept an invitation from someone I don’t know well enough to make an introduction for. It would be really embarrassing if someone asked me for an introduction to Nora and I had to say ‘Nora who?’ We’re all connected through the BACN LinkedIn group and you can contact people through the group, so I don’t think you need to feel obligated to accept invitations from another BACN member until you’ve gotten to know them better. If somebody invites me and I don’t know them, I give them my e-mail address and offer to get to know them.”
  • Patrick Cronin is a LION (LinkedIn Open Networker) and has gotten a lot of referrals and networking done with people he didn’t know until they became LinkedIn connections. By closing off your network you’re tightening your scope of influence. If you’re open, you have more control.
  • John Reese has two profiles, one that connects to family, one that’s more professional. He filters the professional connections but is more open with the personal profile.
  • Brenda Stine was an early adopter of LI and the original purpose was to connect people you know, but her experience is that most people don’t use LinkedIn that way. People don’t ask her for introductions or referrals. She’s not an open networker, but she doesn’t feel she has to have done business with someone to accept an invitation. She believes in the power of status updates as a way to help people getting to know you. LinkedIn is more than a referral network.
  • Mike Van Horn has been using LinkedIn for two years. He asks and answers questions and looks at the other people who do that. He invites those who seem like kindred spirits from their questions and answers to become connections.

The Forum Question: What Mistake Have You Made That You’ve Learned From That You Want To Pass On?

• Joy Hermsen was determined to get the new website right, but was driven by two wrong assumptions: 1) need to educate up front and 2) everything has to be within 1 or 2 clicks. It was an expensive lesson.
• Nora Wolfson was working with a client that kept getting behind on their schedule and squeezing her time frame from a full day down to a couple of hours. Naturally she got terrible evaluations of what she did, and the client wouldn’t pay. She learned that it’s critical to be clear about conditions for success. If they don’t meet those, you fire the client.
• Deborah Myers thought she could do it all herself without a coach. Using said coach (Judy Baker) has expanded her business a hundredfold.
• Diane Parente: When you’re starting out, you take all clients. Wrong! You inevitably have a disappointing experience. Diane did a satellite media tour where she was stuck in a tiny room speaking through a tiny hole where she couldn’t see her audience, and had no water…horrible.
• Marla Rosner has made mistakes in the area of Scope Creep. It’s easy to feel that in order to keep a client, you have to give them more or let them get away with not delivering their part of the bargain. Call them on it immediately! “FYI: This goes beyond what we originally talked about as part of the project. Here’s what I think it will cost. You okay with that?”
• Brenda Stine wants to add Nora’s “Conditions for Success” to the acronym BANT (Budget Authority Need and Timeframe). No BANT, no proposal. She failed on that one many times. Now she’s going to use “BACNT”: Budget, Authority, Conditions for Success, Need, and Timeframe.
• One of Tom Ucko’s first clients had just bought a manufacturing operation in Portland and sent Tom up to do an assessment. It turned out that the client was part of the problem. Tom started to give him feedback and the client found a way to stop the meeting. Tom tried phoning to reschedule and even sent a telegram. No response. While he finally got paid, he learned that you have to raise the potential of negative feedback at the beginning, during the contracting stage. Now he always asks “How do you like to hear negative feedback?”