4. 4
We are embarking on a new age.
A Networked Age driven by Relationship Economics.
Information Age
Media & Technology
Knowledge Economy
Linear
Networked Age
Social & Mobile
Relationship Economy
Interactive
Industrial Age
Machinery
Market Economy
Analog
6. 6
Socially engaged companies are already winning
• 58% more likely to attract top talent
• 20% more likely to retain talent
• 57% more likely to get increased sales leads
• 40% more likely to be perceived as competitive
* Altimeter Group 2014
7. 7
LinkedIn is the place for meaningful social engagements
100,000Posts per week
more engagement with
content vs. jobs
1.5 MMLinkedIn publishers
10. 10
Win new business by influencing marketing decision makers
where they are already active
5.1million
marketers
11. 11
Build client relations by gaining exposure for expertise across
client departments and geographies
12. 12
Attract and retain top talent
Regular employees are most
trusted source of credible
information about a company.
Your next hire is probably your
current employee’s connection.
*Source: Edelman Trust Barometer 2014
163,034 “planner”
65,976 “creative” 105,337 “media”
78,734 “strategist”
15. Establish identity, company
A company page is the central
hub of your brand presence on
LinkedIn.
It’s where prospective clients and
employees go to find information about
your brand.
Gaining followers allows you to push
this content to the right audiences
organically.
nearly 9 out of 10
members believe a
Company should maintain
an up-to-date Company
Page on LinkedIn
9/10
17. Establish identity, employees
Empowering employees
to become brand
ambassadors extends
your brand’s voice.
On average, employee networks are
10x larger
than a company’s follower base.
20. Create content, publishing platform
Publishing platform now open to all
members. Original content from
agency leadership and employees
builds credibility.
21. Amplify voice, sponsored updates
Reach influential marketers
and media stakeholders that
aren’t (yet!) following your
page with Sponsored Updates.
Agencies should consider a
nominal, initial launch budget
to amplify the company
updates even further through
Sponsored Updates.
22. Amplify voice, best practices
• Leverage a content calendar
• Cross-promote your content
between all entities (company,
employees, leadership)
• Ensure that employees share
content across their social media
channels
• Post content to relevant LinkedIn
groups
• Follow @LinkedInPulse on
Twitter – share & tweet posts to
this
Thank you everyone for joining us today for our webinar – Winning in the Relationship Economy: How agencies can take advantage of the LinkedIn ecosystem.
So… In the past, better machinery or better information technology were what provided competitive advantage to companies and served as the springboard for economic development. Today, networks and relationships are at the core of the current wave of progress.
Our identities, our voices, and our connections to others have always mattered, but the key difference today is that their reach is amplified, their substance and structure are more visible to ourselves and others, and their economic and personal impact can be quantified more than ever before.
At LinkedIn, we think about relationship economics in terms of how genuine communication and engagement in social media helps businesses improve relationships with employees and customers, and also improves bottom line.
In order to prove out our theory on relationship economics, we partnered with Altimeter Group and looked at quantitative and qualitative survey results from employees at the 100 most socially engaged companies as defined by proprietary LinkedIn metrics vs. a control group. What we found was that the socially engaged firms were:
READ BULLETS.
Top 25 most socially engaged companies on LinkedIn
Target and control groups (target from those companies). Target group employees of top 100 most socialy engaged companies according ot proprietary linkedin metrics across hiring, marketing, sales)
Gallup – 2013 only 13% workers feel engaged by their jobs (int’l)
And LinkedIn is the place where these meaningful social engagements are happening.
Some still may think of us as only as site for finding jobs, but the metrics will tell you otherwise. We are seeing 7x more engagement with content pages than jobs pages.
Over 100,000 original long form content pieces are coming through the open publishing platform.
And we have over 1.5 MM LinkedIn publishers.
To give you an idea of the type of substantive conversations that are happening on LinkedIn, let me tell you about a personal experience I recently had on the platform. I was grappling with an interesting professional question about content marketing and that was: Can a TV commercial be a piece of content marketing?
I decided to pose this question to my network and the response was astounding. Thoughtful responses from people of various titles and geographies. Michael Brenner who is the Chief Strategy Officer at Newscred weighed in, followed by Eric Tsytsylin at WPP and Han Ma at Taylor Strategy. People played off of each other and people weighed in all the way from New Zealand. It was truly an enlightening digital conversation. If you’re curious to know more, I wrote a long form post about it that you can weigh on my profile.
Hopefully, from my shameless plug about my post you can at least start to get an idea of the meaningful conversations about marketing and branding happening on the platform. So as agencies you want to be leading these conversations as thought leaders.
Being a socially engaged agency can lead to new business wins, building client relations, attracting and retaining top talent as well as establishing your brand and subject matter expertise over time.
This is a fish where the fish are slide. Moreso than any other social network, senior business leaders are actively finding value and using the LinkedIn platform. A recent survey conducted by Weber Shandwick indicated that LinkedIn is the site used most often by CEO’s.
Here you’ll see luminaries like Howard Schultz and Beth Comstock contributing to the platform. Interestingly, when Howard Schultz was first open to talking to the press about his controversial Race Together campaign he reached out to LinkedIn’s executive editor, Dan Roth, first. Dan then did a video interview with Howard and also wrote this piece about it. Both of which achieved very high engagement on LinkedIn.
Beth Comstock is an example of a CMO who is extremely active on LinekdIn. She is an Influencer and writes original content often (1-2x a month). Here is an example of the reach and engagement she gets with these posts.
Agencies want to be having and leading these dialogues with key marketing decision makers.
In a similar fashion, you can start to influence other stakeholders at your current client’s companies by becoming more socially active on LinkedIn.
Let’s take the agency Wunderman as an example. And this is a completely made up example by the way. But let’s say Wunderman works very closely with Lee Anne Forbes who works out of Microsofts New York office. Lee Anne is connected to some of the agency account executives that she works directly with and follows the Wunderman company page, but Carlo her counterpart in Rome currently has no exposure to Wunderman content. Once Lee Anne interacts with any piece of content coming from her agency connections or the Wunderman company page, that content now shows up on all of her first degree connections newsfeed so Carlo starts to see more and more great content from Wunderman and in theory they are now top of mind as Carlo considers agencies to RFP the various product lines and campaigns he works on.
Finally, becoming a more socially engaged company benefits your current and prospective employees. The more you can empower your employees as brand ambassadors by giving them access to industry and company information and enable them to share it out to their networks, the more invested they will feel in working at your agency.
Not to mention, we all know what a small world the agency world is. It is most likely that your next hire is one of your current employees connections. The more they can see what a cool and rewarding place to work your agency is through the eyes of their most trusted sources, their friends and connections, the more likely they will think about your agency when they are looking for a new job.
So hopefully now you are convinced that LinkedIn can benefit you through building new and existing client relations and attracting and retaining top talent. My colleague Carra will now take you through some of the more tactical strategies for how to activate.
How can you make sure you have a best in class presence on LinkedIn?
4 key actions agencies can take to increase their influence on LinkedIn to generate opportunity:
Establish identity
Curate content
Create content
Amplify voice
Something to call out are that these things are one-offs, it’s a learning experience and you’ll be able to tweak and optimize as you go along.
First and foremost, your agency should create a Company Page if you don’t have one yet. Your destination to establish your company's identity and build relationships with the world's professionals.
Professionals are signing up to join LinkedIn at a rate of more than two new members per second.
Members added their current employer and this displays on their Company Page. I research companies on LinkedIn, especially when I have a new connection – want to see where they work.
Getting started:
Complete page
Acquire followers (ask your employees and clients to follow your page)
Agency leaders and marketing influencers also help activate brand’s across LinkedIn.
They are viewed as representatives of their company and build their personal brand by creating content on LinkedIn.
Getting started:
Up to date profile – picture, rich media, summary
Connect with your clients and employees
In addition to a company presence, employees profiles are also representative of your brand.
In the example here, we have two leaders at Edelman. Their profiles are complete, they’re well connected with over 500 connections each, and they’re leveraging the publish platform to build their personal brand.
Moreover, a person 3x more likely to trust a post from a company’s employee than from the company.
Getting started:
Up to date profile – picture, rich media, summary
Connect with your clients and coworkers
Endorse skills
Another way agencies can leverage LinkedIn is by taking advantage of LinkedIn Pulse. When you log in to LinkedIn, you can click Interests, and from the dropdown select Pulse.
From there you can access an entire archive of content. You can follow specific topic channels which will then appear under “Your News” and if you click Discover, the app will suggest key influencers for you to follow. Once you start following channels and members, you’ll see content in the feed.
Here we have BBDO sharing content that’s relevant for their audience on their Company Page – which leads into the next part of our activation strategy.
Getting started:
Determine your key content curators
Follow the “topic channels” that interest you
Follow industry leaders to see what they are talking about
Follow media companies in your industry
Creating content and sharing it.
You can do this from 2 places – your company and your profile
For your CP you can either post organically to your followers or put paid behind your updates and leverage Sponsored Updates
Great way to further optimize your updates is by leveraging targeted updates
You’ll get notifications when members engage with your updates and for Company Page updates you can access metrics on your Analytics Page and Notification Center.
If you’re creating content, you should also take advantage of the publishing platform which is now open to all LinkedIn members.
A ton of agency leaders and marketing influencers are currently posting and sharing their content on LinkedIn.
We currently have 500 influencers, 130K+ posts a week, and 3M posts to date.
Traffic per post is currently up 150% as they’re getting such high engagement so if you haven’t yet, now is definitely the time.
Posts on LinkedIn see 6x the views from people outside of your immediate network. That can translate to huge opportunity.
We recommend:
Write about what you know and do it authentically – build your personal brand and be an expert in what you know
Add imagery and multi-media to make your update stand out
All members who follow your profile/you’re connected with receive a notification
New post analytics give you insight into how each of your posts are performing
you can see who’s interacting with your posts and where your traffic is coming from, these posts are also displayed on your profile
who read, shared, or commented on your post, plus important insights on the industries and regions your readers come from, their level of seniority, and how they found you.
For tips I’d recommend joining the “Writing on LinkedIn” LinkedIn Group which is managed by our internal content and consumer tema.
Once you’ve created or curated content you’d like to share. You can then amplify it by putting some paid behind your company updates.
Sponsored updates are a great way to further amplify your agency’s presence on LinkedIn.
While your updates will display to those that follow your Company Page, Sponsored updates allow you to target beyond those followers and show your updates directly in members feeds.
The targeting available makes it possible for you to get very granular- thus
The self-service platform is easy to use and SU can be purchased on a CPM or CPC basis.
While Sponsored updates are a great way to amplify your voice on LinkedIn, there are a few other best practices you should be aware of.
Content Cal - Create groundswell of organic activity around key subject matter – that way, you don’t find yourself scrambling for content. This can be done numerous ways, you can do something high level where you focus all of your content around a theme ever month or week, or you can get more granular. Where you have a calendar containing what will be shared on your LinkedIn page or profile every day.
Employee Amplification Tools – GaggleAMP, Social Chorus, Everyone Social- allows you to further amplify curated content, some even allow you to post messaging
Groups – Also great way to share your content to a relevant audience. Great targeting tool since members opt into groups, posting your content in relevant group is an easy way to drive engagement for your brand
As a summary, you want to invest in relationship economics on LinkedIn by first:
Establish identity
Curate content
Create content
Amplify voice
Ultimately, these actions will allow your agency to establish thought leadership and effectively win new business, build client relations and retain and attract top talent.
Questions