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Viveka: …as long you like them, and as long as they are good business partners. Your Aunt Sally, maybe not so much, and connect to people you should know. Either because they are in the same profession for you to get a sector partner, or because they are in an industry that their connections would be the perfect, because on Linked In, it’s a friend of a friend of a friend and a friend that friends a friend, so, that probably might rule some out for now, but I do say you understand me on just people you know because LinkedIn is only useful in the society network, but you know that’s too small which is actually usually the case in your particular industry. People are only connected to 20, 30, 40 people, well then we can render it completely useless. Because, you know, oh! you wanna see this person, great, upgrade. You wanna see this person profile? No, you are not allowed, you know, there is this huge freeze there.

Blair: ok, ok, great read by the way, we recommend everybody again over the Amazon right now and either get the print version or the Kindle version. Great read and I do see that you get some online training as well on the website, great website. Viveka, so, if after listening to this podcast episode 15, for those view that would like to dig in a little bit deeper with Viveka, you could hire her. I think you can still…you have a few spot left for private consultations, for businesses and such…but the course on line is probably a great thing to checkout as well. But, Viveka, would you suggest if everybody get upward sort of 500 plus? And the second question would be, do you recommend people share their contacts with others or is it better to keep those private for our engineering growth?

Viveka: Yea you know, it’s…there is no classic made rule or something so I will answer your question as I can. For, anyone in sales and marketing 500 plus, and for the engineering crowd, you know you probably play thing a little bit constitutional to them, some of you will be the habit of how they get the network because you know finding vendors, finding connections, finding government…you know for staying connected with, so need to be a little more visible, you need to have a bigger network. Some of you are using it…you know for job seeking place frankly, and some of you are a little bit more protective of your connections and your network, its fine to keep it, and your 500…somewhere between 300 and 3000 it’s what is generally say…barely what you want is on the home page, on the right side would show you how many connections you have and then how big your network is. So, the numbers of connections that people you’ve invited or who have invited you that you’ve accepted back again and work for 300 to 3000…

Blair: okay

Viveka: …over that we just stop the break, but the number of […] that is your total connection. That is your visibility, but you could have just 300 for a connection cos they all have the network visible to plus 15 million people, and that’s a pretty comfortable number. So, that’s what I would say about that. And as far as visibility, there is no damn side to hiding your contacts, strictly enough the marketing in field world. In the marketing world, we want to be as visible as possible, the field world, we hide our contact […] contact list and we don’t want anyone who has being on our contact and our clients…

Blair: I see…

Viveka: …again, as…right, as an engineer, its where you are comfortable with, we don’t to hide anything from you as you hide your connections, so there is no damn side hiding your contacts if you are more comfortable doing so.

Blair: Okay, so…and they fold around with groups before but they’ve never started their own group, what would you suggest…would be first of all the good rule of farmers first. How many groups? I think it’s a top total of 50, but what’s your recommendation for our listeners on…how many groups should they join? What kind of group should they join? And also if they wanna start their own group, do you have any prowess of wisdom of best practices for consulting engineering forum so that they wanna set up their first ever group on LinkedIn?

Viveka: Sure, so…yeah, you can join…it’s kind of just talk about this cos I’m actually a member of 54 groups, different types of groups […] and that’s generally the number. You may usually well wanna join […] I usually join about 45, I leave 5 […] incase I want to add a new group for the leader group […]. The reason you join that many group is not so that you can engage in all of them, that is way too noisy, and you don’t have real jobs, you don’t…[laughing…] you don’t need spending all your time doing that. But it makes you more visible, so the visibility on LinkedIn is just connecting to people and the second when just go on LinkedIn, is to join the group. So the type of group you are going to join are the group…you know there is a job group on LinkedIn that has over a million people, there is a social media marketing group on LinkedIn that has ove…almost a million people in it, there are HR group on LinkedIn that has like 800,000 people. So, if you join those group out […] your network […] you are not visible to that many people as they are visible to you. Groups like that, that you join just because they are big, you probably wanna turn off all your notifications, so when you join the group, you have the opportunity of clicking and setting or if you are already a member of the group, you can just study the group and even get your settings section and going to the groups and notification. And so, for those, the groups, I don’t get any notification from them. I’m not in them to interract, I’m not in them to engage, I’m in them solely to be visible to other members of that group…

Blair: Okay…

Viveka: …now other group you might…yea so that’s the big group…

Blair: …sorry for interrupting Viveka, but I’ve just looking at seeing tables in the back of the book and its like you’ve got the check list fridge there the […] if you are checking in as you say in your book, with the top groups, what would you suggest people engage with? There are top groups where it will be like 2 or 3 for our engineers…

Viveka: Yea…

Blair: …Okay

Viveka: …exactly, so, you can…and the other technical groups you’d wanna join are your industry group, so other engineers…other engineer group, of course like DOT, road engineers not necessarily software engineers. But other group…I can may have the group, right, so grouping your own industry where you can kind of engage with your peer, you can join…it may be 5-10 of those groups, may be 5 of those groups, and again you’d probably find that people only engage in 1 or 2, that’s fine, just some of them won’t be very active. And then the main type of group that you wanna join of course is groups that your industry works with them, so, I’m sorry where your clients are…

Blair: Okay

Viveka: …so they are not necessarily all your clients and they are not necessarily a member of your industry group, but there might be you know…there might be a government group, there might be a cooperate group, there might be an interest group, there might be some kind of group […]. But there will be other group there that you can join that you are either planning for it and again you cannot be too active in them. You are really joining them to be able to engage and visible to those people and again in about 10%, 1 or 2 of those groups that you joined that are in your clients industry, you might be active then. And what’s nice about the new group interphase that LinkedIn just really singled you […], you could kind of be this entire inception, the CEO of the group in one place…

Blair: …right, I liked that a lot…

Viveka: …yea it is nice. You could scroll down all top interactions on your top group and if you see something, you see a question can answer or you see a comment you have an opinion on, send 1 or 2 minutes, you know going through your top groups, maybe there is only 4 or 5 of those top groups that you really wanna act in…interact in, go to those groups, interact with them, you are in, you are out, you are done, but you reason that top there might be awareness cos anytime you communicate on LinkedIn, make sure your picture which by the way everyone should upload their picture…

Blair: …great advice…

Viveka: …put your name and its finished…yeah it […] you know what’s wrong you?…

Blair: …Yeah, yeah, yeah…

Viveka: …having uploaded your image, what’s wrong with you…

Blair: …you have an amazing profile but I don’t know who you are [laughing]…

Viveka: …yeah I know such as who you are, I can find you […] enough on Google but I don’t wanna take that up, but you know there is no such thing as privacy anymore, let’s just get passed that. So, after you would wanna add your image up there, if you can, but I’m…anytime you interact with the group, it’s your name, it’s your picture and it’s your professional headline and it still that half of mind awareness that […] all things being equal, people do business with the other people, with people they don’t like to trust and I think of it as […] it’s not steady anyway, say you have that 7 touches but for people think that they know you well enough to engage with you. So, this is just one of those, you know if you are active in the group and they see you a couple of times a week, just go and feel like they know you, just like we feel like we know celebrities the house wives in Orange County, we feel like we know them as we see them. you know what, we are trying to avoid them, I’ve not actually watched the show but you know we still know their name cos they are everywhere…

Blair: …[laughing…] sure, well Viveka, we are both creative, we have spend our days creating stuff as suppose to watch it but you’ve got this great point. I mean, all be it, I don’t watch T.V, I know who the housewives are from the bill boards and everything I see, so it’s crazy how that works, it’s so sublime. Let’s…so let’s take a little bit deeper and by the way I’ll print the PDF stuff and I suggest if you have the kinder version of Viveka’s book, then I would go ahead and print the PDF soft, so you can do this check list, I mean this will keep me untouched. Viveka, this is a great idea in your book. But, let’s talk a little bit about is it swam (S.W.A.M), like if you do too much in groups, they kind off kick you out for a week or something, but let’s talk about that.

Viveka: Longer than a week, yes, so LinkedIn is something called Swam […] and it’s to limit spammers. About a year ago, you know […] so most group were just get in for trading with people who were selling fake […] and fake Rolex watches… you know and some realistic doing all kind of stuffs in groups that has nothing to do with that, so it’s a little bit of the baby with […] I will tell you. If I would touch the […] button, but then again, ok let’s make a life’s switch, so they introduced something called plague right auto moderation and what that really is, is if you go online and you start selling your products to your services […] you know use a cement…use the ceiling. If you starting calling […] and just patching your world, and…Again I can’t remember, somewhere between 3 and 5 group member […]. But not only are you gonna get blocked, not only the articles are gonna get closed and deleted, but now you get in what’s known as moderate, auto-moderation, which means anything you post in any group, not just the group that you are pinged as a spammer but any post in any group have to stay in a moderation queue and the group’s moderator would have to go through, read it and approve it, and I will tell you right now group moderators have better things to do, and so pretty much now you can’t communicate in a group, now you can no longer interact and post things in a group. You need to be very, very careful when you are engaging in a group, it’s perfectly okay to share your opinion, it’s perfectly okay to share honestly things you think is interesting but tell people why you think it’s interesting. It’s perfectly okay to ask question, but don’t get on there to share your products, that is gonna get you spammed and then you blocked all of the benefits of the group.

More to come next week, thank you for reading!

Blair

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