By Eric Butow and Kathleen Taylor
Book Review
Reviewed by Gary W. Silverman,
CFP®
Gary Silverman owns Personal Money Planning, a fee-only financial planning firm in Wichita Falls, Texas. He is the editor of the financial newsletter Personal Money Planning, writes the newspaper columns Your Money and Biz2Biz, and hosts the cable talk show, Money Cent$. You can comment to him at www.PersonalMoneyPlanning.com
With literally millions of users, LinkedIn is the hands-down winner
when it comes to business networking sites. No doubt you are either
on it or you're steadily bombarded by friends, family, colleagues,
and clients to link up with them. How to Succeed in Business
Using LinkedIn: Making Connections and Capturing Opportunities on
the World's #1 Business Networking Site is an extensive work
delving into the nooks and crannies of LinkedIn. It also talks
through many ways that businesses can use its networking
capabilities.
Using LinkedIn assumes you have no knowledge of the site and only a vague idea of what online social networking is all about. The authors-one the owner of a Web design firm and the other a recruiter-both use the site extensively for their own businesses, and thus bring a real-world business person viewpoint to bear.
As the book is written to business professionals and owners of all types, it does not deal with the many compliance issues that can come up online. Therefore, financial professionals should definitely seek out the guidance of their compliance departments before blindly following the authors' suggestions. That warning does not mean that LinkedIn and other networking sites should be avoided. After all, most all of your communications are potentially under compliance scrutiny, yet you still do communicate.
Since Using LinkedIn is so broad in scope, I will not try to summarize it. Instead, I'll simply say that the book will help you get started with LinkedIn, build your profile (homepage), and guide you in how to link to other people. It does a good job giving examples of how you can leverage he site to find employees, clients, and vendors.
While the book is most useful for someone just getting started with LinkedIn, its breadth may give even the most seasoned veteran a few new ideas to mull over. While I'm not sure it shows you how to succeed in business, it does show you ways to use LinkedIn to help your business become better and yourself better linked.
AMACOM (2008)
$19.95
