Narcissus famously fell in love with his own reflection in a pool. We’re all a little guilty of this in the online world. I thought this could be used to help create awareness of our product.
HR managers are our target market. Like most people, they don’t particularly like being cold called. In fact, they really don’t like it. Cold calling is often demeaning for both sides. We’ve all wanted to hang up on somebody pestering us. On the other side, doing the cold calling is an experience everybody should do once in their life. It’s very humbling.
The traditional method is to purchase a long list of qualified names and numbers. Next create a script and start dialling. Many people have done this but few do it more than once.
One of the benefits of Linkedin is that it allows you to access this previously expensive list for free (almost). With a premium account on Linkedin I was easily able to search for “hr manager london” and get over twenty three thousand results back. That’s a pretty good starting point for a focused sales and marketing campaign.
To start emailing or contacting these people randomly would likely annoy a lot of them and result in a breach of Linkedin’s User Agreement and Privacy Policy.
So I tried a more discreet approach. Each day for five days we clicked on 100 profiles of HR managers. If they are experienced Linkedin users they will use the “Who’s Viewed Your Profile” function which is now quite prominent on the home page.
My Linkedin profile is set to show that it’s me who viewed a profile, as opposed to an “Anonymous LinkedIn User or “Someone in the something industry”.
Each of the profiles we visited would show my profile as one of the people who recently visited theirs. I figured that many of them would then visit my profile which would open the door for me to send them a message.
It was an interesting experiment but the results were not too encouraging. Of the 500 that I visited only 11 visited my profile. Maybe I need to change my profile picture, or maybe HR managers just don’t view people who viewed their profiles.
Some, no doubt, will see this as the Web equivalent of dropping leaflets in a letterbox. At least it’s a soft touch approach where etiquette dictates that you don’t contact anybody until they’ve expressed some interest in you by visiting your profile. And, no trees get pulped in the process.
There are now 80 million people on LinkedIn. If you’re reading this you’re almost certainly one of them. What you can be sure of is that your profile is already in the sights of marketing managers and not just future employers or clients.
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