LinkedIn & Relationship Marketing

To me, LinkedIn is the best social/business networking site out on the market. And not just because of its Internet marketing potential, but for many reasons, including its business model, its products and monetization scheme, its security and privacy measures, the genuine usefulness of its apps, to name a few. To me, along with Facebook and Wikipedia, LI epitomizes an excellently conceived and operated social media site.

One of the reasons I think LinkedIn is superior is its ability to be a catalyst to relationship marketing. The structure and purpose of LinkedIn really lends itself to participation from serious business owners, professionals, freelancers and the like, and not just "kids" who want to "play around" online. Among social media sites, we have found that LinkedIn - more than any other - creates a space for genuinely fruitful business relationships to blossom.

* What Is Relationship Marketing?
I suppose there are a lot of definitions, but I see relationship marketing as creating meaningful business related relationships for the purpose of marketing goods and services. RM involves taking the time to nurture a relationship to build trust.

* LinkedIn's Advanced Search Features
We regularly uncover new marketing uses for LinkedIn. We are discovering that LI can be a good tool to really foster face to face relationships with other business owners and executives. LI is able to do this by virtue of its advanced search features. These features allow you to locate individuals in your geographic location and sphere of influence.

For example, I found perhaps the best PR consultant with whom I've ever worked on LinkedIn. I hired her last year and she has been an extraordinarily valuable asset to our firm.

In addition, we have garnered a few clients for small projects, directly from LinkedIn participation. Two of those clients wrote us very nice recommendations, thereby enhancing the credibilty and worthiness of our brand.

Our development team has also utilized LinkedIn to create a new product offering that has generated some revenue.

And through LinkedIn, we established a key business partnership with another business which has resulted directly in the growth of one of our prospect acquisition services.

This type of interaction - you can't put a price on it in terms of conventional ROI metrics. However, most anyone can agree that a site that can make all this possible is of significant value to a business operation. Linkedin is a superb resource for those who really want to get serious about relationship marketing.