Guest blog written by Steffen Hedebrandt, who is passionate about entreneurship, networking, personal and professionel development, which he is trying to grasp through on Ambidextrous. He currently works as a COO at VintageandRare.com
I have previously posted ‘LinkedIn – Your New Best Friend’ on Mindjumpers Blog, and would like to elaborate on some of the experiences I have had since then using this social network as a professional tool.
Having recently assumed a new position as Chief of Operations (COO) in a small company, I have in the recent weeks been faced with many new challenges, all of them in areas where I have no prior experience. This can be both overwhelming and give a feeling of solitude, as I have no immediate peers to turn to for help. But actually, it opened my eyes for a new understanding of the connected world we live in.
Some months ago, I read “Crush it” by Gary Vaynerchuk with the subtitle: “Why now is the time to cash in on your passion”. In this book, he explains how social media revolutionizes the way we live our lives and do business. One of the advices that seemed to stick with me was that he said “join as many groups and communities relating to your passion as you can possibly find”. So I logged in to LinkedIn and started searching for the kind of groups that fitted my passions and areas of work. With no seemingly result from this I sort of let the advice slip a bit into the dark.
Now, back to my current situation being faced with all these new challenges, I initially got a bit frustrated as my highly competent, but also highly demanding boss started requiring results and answers to questions that I did not know how to answer. This got me thinking “I need advice from someone, who knows something about this”. The first idea that came to me was to turn to domestic consultants and hire them to provide the answers to me. But, in a tight-budget small company this is more a utopia than a profound sustainable solution. My second idea was “Ok, maybe I know a friend, who can help with this”. Turns out, I do not have friends in all kind of tiny business niches, with exact knowledge on the challenge at hand. So, while I was killing a bit of time on LinkedIn, while trying to figure out how to start moving forward on this, I found myself reviewing the groups I had earlier joined. One of them had 150.000 members, another had 50.000 and several of the very specialized groups had a few thousands in each of them. Having run out of alternatives I, just for the fun of it, posted a discussion on one of the challenges that I faced.
Coming back to work the next morning, I had forgotten all about the discussion I had started in the group with 150.000 members. In my email inbox there were 5 new messages from LinkedIn with the topic “New comment on…”. It turned out that during the Danish evening, the American day, people with experience within the same areas as me started answering the question I had raised in the discussion. Suddenly I had consultants, COO’s, key account managers, engineers and actually one of my own friends (that I did not know had knowledge on this topic) were all trying to help me solve my challenge. As I mentioned earlier, my experience within my new working area, was initially limited, so the question I had posed was not precisely what I was actually looking for. So, I answered back to the discussion inputs that had been made, now with a wider and more precise understanding of my problem. Before the day had passed everybody who answered the first time, had replied to my second question, and in the process more had joined the discussion, because as long as the discussion is active, it keeps being featured in the group where it is posted.
I have now done this several times, everytime with a surprisingly positive result. I advice you to try the same, as it can really relieve you of your day-to-day trouble by providing answers to your professional challenges, but also by letting you know that there is thousands of people out there in the same position ready to help you, for free.
And by the way I am also making some great connections along the way. Who knows what we can use each other for in the future!?
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- How To Set Up a Presence on LinkedIn
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