How and why to grow your LinkedIn network

By Christine Kent
chrisk@ckeditorial. com
Bragging to your friends about the dozens of connections you’ve amassed on LinkedIn? Chuck Hester kicks your butt

With 6,000 LinkedIn connections and counting, Chuck Hester, corporate communications director for iContact, has built a massive network of colleagues, business associates and friends that he can call on for anything from prospective hires to the name of a good seafood restaurant in San Francisco.

But, as he’ll hasten to tell you, this is not just a numbers game. Hester views his network on LinkedIn as a valuable resource and actively works to stay in touch (and even meet in person) a healthy number of his 6,000 connections.

If you’ve doubted the merits of adding new names to your network, or you haven’t seen the logic of joining LinkedIn at all, Hester is here to tell you to that LinkedIn can change your life. For one thing, Hester got his current job through LinkedIn. He searched out the CEO of iContact, got another connection to introduce him, and sounded out the exec on a position with the company. Voila—a new gig.

Hester points out that LinkedIn has become the default location for CVs and resumes, to the point where recruiters, partners or clients may search LinkedIn for your credentials and stop there. (And if you’re not there, you won’t look like a player.)

“I consider LinkedIn to be an online portfolio,” Hester says. “When I first met the CEO at my current job, the only thing he had in front of him was a printout of my LinkedIn profile—no resume, nothing else.”

Hester counts about 150 journalists as part of his LinkedIn network, and these connections have recently helped him land ink for his company in The Wall Street Journal, Inc., and Fast Company. The Fast Company coverage came about because Hester works hard to build LinkedIn relationships in the real world, as well as the virtual world.

“Whenever I go to a city, I’ll try to meet personally with some of my contacts,” Hester explains. One of these recent meetings was in San Francisco with Rusty Weston, who writes Fast Company’s “Job World” blog. In the course of chatting about social networking and technology, Hester told Weston about iContact—and got a prominent blog mention.

In May, Hester won some personal ink in a New York Times article about networking via LinkedIn. Times reporter Stephanie Rosenbloom found Hester via a Google search and, for a story about job-hunting via social networks, Hester told her about his own experience with iContact. Hester was featured prominently in the finished piece, “Status: Looking for Work on Facebook.”

(For the record, Hester doesn’t think much of Facebook as a vehicle for business networking. “I don’t like to talk about business in the same place where I’m talking about where I had dinner last night,” he says.)

Last year Hester began organizing “LinkedIn Live” meetings around the country, inviting recruiters, job seekers and consultants to get together in person. These meetings typically draw 50 people, although he’s had as many as 200 show up.

While the chance to do some face-to-face bonding is a bonus, Hester hopes the meetings also remind people that they need to apply “old-fashioned rules of business” to their online interactions. Says Hester, “Always treat your LinkedIn connections as though they were right in front of you.”

LinkedIn do’s and don’ts
Struggling to break a hundred with your LinkedIn network? And what do you do with your connections once you start getting them? Here’s Hester’s advice for becoming a LinkedIn superstar:

1. Search LinkedIn for the top people in your industry area or region; that is, the people with the most connections. Find the connections that you have in common, even if they’re via “2nd level” or “3rd level” connections, and ask these connections to introduce you to the big players.

2. Always be on the lookout for new connections. Whenever you meet or talk to a new business or media contact, search for the name on LinkedIn and send out an invitation right away.

3. Don’t send out the generic invitation template provided by LinkedIn. Customize the invitation with some information about yourself and explain what you can do for the invitee.

4. Follow up the accepted invitation with a personal e-mail that offers more information about what you do, and how you can help out the other person. This is how you build strong LinkedIn relationships—not by simply making the connection and then fading away.

5. Don’t start asking favors right after you’ve made a connection. “I’ve had people ask me for a recommendation right after we connected,” Hester says. (LinkedIn members can post recommendations about their connections’ services.) “I don’t know them well enough to do that. It’s like going to a cocktail party—you don’t walk right up to someone and say, ‘Hey, buy my products.’ The old-fashioned rules of business still apply.”

6. Boost your LinkedIn cred by answering questions that members of your network post to the community. The numbers of questions you’ve asked and answered appears on your profile, and other LinkedIn users can rate the quality of your responses. (Tip: Journalists often post questions for story sources.)