Practical Networked Leadership Skills

Curated by Beth Kanter

http://www.bethkanter.org

Networked Nonprofit professionals now how to leverage their personal professional networks for their organizations.   LinkedIn is a great for this but it requires smart networking.  Here's some tips.

Make smart, right connections. Only the serious apply here. This is where the professional community engages, interacts, connects and refers. Start your process on LinkedIn if you want to get a company or person to notice you. Develop your profile, put up a professional head shot, link your blog, and post good content as often as you can and respond to other people’s posts.

Who do you want to meet? Make a target list of who you want to meet-companies and people. Make LinkedIn a prospecting, research and engagement tool. Use the information you gather to send thoughtful, smart messages.

Who do you want to meet you? This is where “mutual magnetism” works both ways. There are people we all want to meet for the value they bring to us, but there is value in what you bring to others too. Use your connections, wisdom, experience and personality to both meet people and initiate people meeting you. Develop your profile and keep it up to date!

Link up on LinkedIn: Identify people in your sphere and community that would be great to meet each other and make introductions. When you want to be connected, those connections you made can come in very handy!

The Rules of Engagement: There is an etiquette on all the social platforms, but especially LinkedIn. Just because we connect doesn’t give anyone permission to start sending frequent, non-permission based sales emails. Spend some time interacting with people, supporting their content, causes and company before launching into salesy stuff.

You + new media = smart connections: Your strategic, consistent and value driven communications used in a thoughtful way on LinkedIn can and will open doors. LinkedIn is a great place to start, it makes it easy to add Twitter, your blog and other sites that all work together to professionally present you in a single page snapshot.