Sometimes you can follow the basic tenets of social media and still be doing it wrong. To help yourself or your business, you want to reach out to the community, build connections, start conversations and offer to help others. Using LinkedIn is especially a good way to do that if you're trying to build your business. But, if you don't do it right, your efforts can have the opposite effect that you intended. Such was the case with a recent message I got from one of my LinkedIn connections.
Now, one thing you should know about me is that I'm a pretty open connector on LinkedIn. If someone sends me a request to connect, I pretty much accept it. I figure we're all there to do business and you never know what connection may turn into the perfect one somewhere down the road. Therefore, I have 1900 LinkedIn connections. All this is to say, that I don't personally know everyone I'm connected to.
Last week I got a LinkedIn message from someone asking me if I would endorse them on LinkedIn. They said that in return for my endorsement they would create a free QR code for my company's url or any other internet property I might want it to connect to. There is nothing wrong with asking your connections to give you a recommendation. Except, in this case, I didn't recognize the person's name.
However, since I've been in the business a long time and probably have killed off a key brain cell or two during that time, I gave the guy the benefit of the doubt. So, I replied asking him if we'd ever done any work together. His response was "Not sure if we have." – which, to me, confirmed that we hadn't. He went on to say, "But we seem be on a similar network" and he offered me that free QR code anyway. And then he said, once I got a QR code from him, you could say we worked together.
To be fair, he did say not to worry about the recommendation. But it was too late. I may have been able to use his services (not for QR codes) but I was already turned off by his approach. By this point I was curious to see what my bribed endorsement was worth. I sent him back a note asking him if this was some kind of special custom QR code or one I could easily have made myself. It turned out, it wasn't anything special.
Where did he go wrong? First off, never ask someone to write an endorsement who hasn't worked with you and doesn't know you. It comes off as disingenuous in the least and dishonest at most. And to offer something as incentive to make that recommendation feels like bribery. If that's how you portray yourself doing business, I don't want to do business with you – especially in this new transparent business world we live in.
Secondly, if you're going to offer to do something for someone, make sure it's something they will perceive as having value. In this socially connected world, you make friends first before doing business. Helping others out is a good way to do that. I think offering a free QR code to a business that doesn't understand how to create one is actually a good idea (as long as it's not a bribe, but given freely). However, you need to do your research. It wouldn't have taken much checking to figure out that we create QR codes for clients. We've written about it in this blog. Just reading my LinkedIn profile would have given him a pretty good idea that it was something I knew how to do.
So, not only did I feel negatively about the company due to how I was approached, I felt insulted that the offer to do something I felt was shady was to give me something I could easily do myself in less than a minute. Yes, you should reach out to others. You should make connections. You should offer to do helpful things for people. Just make sure you're doing it in a way that gets the results you want.
We all make mistakes. I've certainly made my share. But, a little research and common sense can help you avoid situations like this. What about you? What have you seen someone doing that just makes you shake your head? Or conversely, what lessons have you learned the hard way?
Mike McClure, Yaffe Social Media Guy
A work mate linked me to this website. Thank you
for the resources.