Blogs and LinkedIn are natural support sites for each other.
One gives you voice. The other gives you audience.
With social media, more is better. It’s the reason blogging is now done so frequently in conjunction with LinkedIn. They are two different tools that complement each other.
Officially, LinkedIn is a social networking tool connecting people with common interests. Blogging is a social communications tool, allowing for the expressionyou’re your personal voice on a topic. If your topic matches the interests of your LinkedIn Group, you have a natural place to immediately market your blog post.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that if you do it too often, your networking group will consider you a self-promotional spammer.
For the past two weeks, I’ve written posts on TheMarketingPlaza blog about newspaper web sites. I was previously a marketing director at a large, regional newspaper, and belong to a LinkedIn Group of newspaper professionals. I then created a discussion on the LinkedIn Group and asked the group about their thoughts.
The downfall of newspapers is a topic close to my heart. It’s a reason I can blog about it. I don’t believe it had to happen, and part of the spiraling downward is due to a complete misunderstanding of the social media world – blogging included. To just promote my post on the LinkedIn discussion board would be self-serving, but I’m also doing research on the topic of digital newspapers and I really do want the feedback.
Since this bulletin is part of a LinkedIn group, it’s a safe assumption that readers here are already on LinkedIn. The question, however, is: Are you also on groups related to your blog topic? If yes, are you creating discussions and links back to your posts? If not, why?
Rhona,
I’ll bite.
Until now (and even “now” is still suspect), groups and blogs on Linked-In, IMHO, have been cream-puff societies.
Many Linked-In members are signed-up because they want to be in the mixing pot if somebody else is searching to hire somebody like themselves.
For them, this may be a dubious place to declare a position on anything other than softballs and creampuffs — and, oh yes, here-I-am-won’t-somebody-gimme-a-better-job?
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It just doesn’t inspire the vigorous interchange of ideas and information.
But then there’s this crack, thebloggersbulletin, which allows you to deal with the format of blogging while keeping safe distance from content, issues, and positions one may have occasion to regret later.
So maybe that’s why. What do you think?
Peter