Moving to a foreign country is a deep change of life; not only because you’re leaving your relatives and friends (skype and social media are good tools to maintain such relationships) but also because you have planned to set your entire social and professional life in an “unknown” environment where you don’t know people and people don’t know you. As in any situation where you’re going to reinvent yourself, you have to analyze you starting point and, hereby, to develop your “strategy”. When I moved to Turkey, I had no real job opportunity or contracts. Also, in the private sphere, I had just few connections with just a couple of my wife’s friends. Here there are some lessons I learned from my experience Attend a language school To know the language of the country where you live, obviously, It’s the first step to improve the possibility to establish personal and professional relations. Attending a language school (even if you already know the language, it wasn’t my situation :)) is for sure the first step to do. Going to the school language was my first opportunity to start to networking. The main advantage is that many foreign people like you don’t know the language, so if you know at least English (that is the most common language worldwide) you can start to make your connections. During the four months I attended at the school I met a lot of persons, even others Italian that temporary or permanently moved to Turkey. I met my firends “Paolos” (yes, it was the most common name among Italians :)) and German, American, English, and other persons from different nationalities. In the very first month I got a network of 20-30 local connections composed by foreign people living in Izmir. Most of them were married with turkish people so, my “second degree” connection reached about 40-60 people. How to get value from these connections? People moving abroad have almost the same problems: how to get resident permit and how to find a job are the most popular and urgent questions. So, if you are able to help them they will help you. Try to be valuable in giving the information they need. Be open and listen to their problem and always try to help to solve. When you’ll need, they will help you back. Connect with institutions of your Country If you live in a main city, probably there is at least a Consulate. Usually Consulate’s employees are both “diplomatic” (sent to the country from the Foreign Ministry) and “administrative”, usually local people employed. So Consulate has a deep knowledge of the local environment and can help you in understanding how to approach a business or…
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Linkedin’s skill endorsement is a powerful tool. It lets you have people saying: “hey, this guy is very fond in this. I know!”. Your network becomes a reference of your expertise and attitudes. Unfortunately, this is true only if your network’s members are all or almost people you have worked with or people knowing you in real life. Becoming Linkedin a more and more open networking tool, people searching to be endorsed, following the reciprocity rule, endorses you for skills suggested by LinkedIN also if you’ve never worked on that topic. So, for example, it happens to me to be endorsed by connections as skilled in “Startups”. I’ve no real experience on startups but this skill has been suggested from LinkedIN because I’ve shared some links about StartUps. Result: I’m “certified” in a skill that I don’t really know and my profile is giving misleading informations. But you can help me to keep my profile “clean” and “trustful”. If you don’t know me, if we never worked together, if you’ve never read what I wrote… Please, don’t endorse me. You’ll preserve your reputation too. What if I’ll be contacted by a prospect or employer because, according to my LinkedIN profile, I’m skilled in Startups and I’ll tell them that it’s not true? Your face is there, and you’ll appear as the the one that has endorsed me on that skill. How much you’ll be trusted by that employer/prospect in the future?
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Even if Linkedin is still missing a true and useful data insight for our network, it seems it’s moving on the road of offering more and more functionalities able to find out your potential contacts. The new WHO’S VIEWED YOUR PROFILE WHO’S VIEWED YOUR PROFILE is the useful feature helping to discover new potential contacts. Originally the features gave you a list in reverse chronological order of latest visits your profile received, the frequency of visits and appearing in search. Premium accounts could also see aggregated data about industry and location (if available). Since some weeks, a new layout with new insights has been released. The enhancements bring a interactive graph of the previous data. The main section gives you an instant pic of what’s happened in last 3 months: the number of total views, shown with a weekly graph and a weekly change expressed as percentage. Each point in the graph shows you how many people looked at you profile and, clicking on it, you can gain the list of people seeing your profile on that day. Previously the same information was available but not in an interactive way. The section “Viewers who searched for first name” shows people who reached your profile by a your name direct search through the search box and gives you the amount and the list of people reached you with that tool. Drilling down into this function, we can discover all the sources used by “viewers” to reach our profile. Those sources are classified as: Linkedin Search. The query made through the search box at the top of the page or the search tool within Linkedin app. Groups. Who reached you from a group you are member of. Homepage. People who reached you from a post you publish and they saw on their linkedin home page. People similar to you. Viewers who reached you from the “People similar to <name>” list suggested by linkedin when you are visiting a profile. Others. As other source, Linkedin aggregates searches coming from Yahoo, People you may know list and general “unknown” and “other” categories. In the same tab, type of searches and keywords are shown: search by first name search by second name search by summary or job description “Unknown” keywords, telling you how many people reached you without a specific search. Last two tabs give you specific insights about the professional profile of viewers. The third one offers you information about contact’s industry and title. The last one, instead, an aggregated view of companies they’re working for. As early mentioned, each graph is interactive and clicking on a single element you can obtain a list of users included in the aggregated data. How to use the Who’s viewed your…
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Linkedin is still today the number one business networking site and counts about 260 million users worldwide. In last years the company made a lot of investments tin order to improve corporate offering, focusing on empowering the corporate pages and introducing a lot of marketing tools such as the targeted updates, targeted contents, company page and group insights. From a personal use perspective, I mean the professional profile management, except the restyling of profiles and the introduction of some rich media enforcement, the efforts were not so big. Also if you subscribe a premium account, the features enabled by subscription are very limited. You can see a more detailed list of people visiting your profile (according to their privacy policy) and you have some insights about how they’ve reached you and the most visiting industries. What it is still missing today is a tool able to analyze the network. Many years ago, Linkedin offered you some insights about your 1st degree connections telling the trending industries, the trending role and something like that. Those data had been removed and now, also if you are a Premium member, aren’t available. More: if you download your connection list, you can’t gain any useful data set more than the email address, company and descriptive (not by category – department and level) roles. In a business networking strategy such information are as important as the breath and it could be an added reason why to, eventually, subscribe a premium account. Also if you look for a third-party application for linkedin profile insights the offering si very limited and not so complete. 3 Applications you can use to manage your networking 1. INMAPS Linkedin InMaps is a network visualization tool able to show the structure of your network. Pros easy to understand the structure of the network clustering Cons No given insights Manual coding color Difficult to decode for large and dense network 2. Can We Network Can We Network is an application for Apple and Android based devices able to profile the most interesting contacts (actual or potential) near you. It analyzes your profile and search the linkedin network those contacts matching your profile better. Pros Act as a decision support system to identify new prospects Gives you a radial graph to understand the suggestion Profiles can be visualized directly within the app Add people directly from the app Cons No insights about your network Based only on your profile. I.e.: if you are a Social Media Manager in UK, the app shall suggests other social media manager in UK 3. ProInsights ProInsights is the only application I found that responds to the need to have some insights about your network. The app goes through your…
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In last days I’m receiving a lot of connection requests within Facebook and LinkedIN. 100% of these are unqulified ones: from people I’ve never met before or I’ve never interact with and without any introduction. Because the easiness to click “Send connection request” and “Add as a Friend” button, It makes people lazy in giving you any kind of introduction about themself. This is a common and unfair behaviour on online networking. Doesn’t matter if you are trying to contact an Open Networker or Not. Even if your target contact is an open networker, it doesn’t mean that you can avoid to introduce yourself. Because your target contact is an open networker, she/he receives hundreds of contact requests and you probably will be just one of them, just a new stamp in her/his contact list, a new email address to “spam” to. After 5 minutes you’ve been added, probably she/he will have forgotten your name and your face. Ok, you have a connection more and probably you can access to her/his friends/contacts list and so what? Which is the goal you are reaching? Networking online is just the same as networking face-to-face. Would you ever approach to a person during an event without introducing yourself and asking her/him for their business card and address list? I suppose you wouldn’t. If you act like that, in the best scenario the person probably will give you her/his business card but she/he will forget you one second later. In the worst case she/he will completely ignore you even if he is an open networker. The politeness isn’t an option. Here is some advatages you can gain introducing yourself: You’ll be noticeable. Being a contact used to receive unqualified connection request, just because you’ve introduced yourself, you will be noticed by her/him. When you’ll send a new message, she/he will recognize you. You’ll be intersting. If in your introduction you’ll give a reason-why and you’ll show that you payed attention to the contact’s profile, you’ll drive your target contact to “study” your profile too. You’ll establish a relationship. Seeing a personalized message, a target contact will be impelled to write you back. You’ll get her/his attention and you shall establish a contact since the beginning. Paying attention to a small detail, such as writing 2 lines in your contact request, you are already helping your business. Is it a so big effort, comparing to the benefits?
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