LinkedIn book: 'How to REALLY use LinkedIn,' by Jan Vermeiren

LinkedIn — the online community centered around business connections and networking &mdash has been getting a lot of attention in the business media over the last year or so.

How to use LinkedIn once you join it, though, may not be immediately apparent to everyone. If you're like me, you create a cursory LinkedIn profile, connect with a few people you know from work who are also on LinkedIn, and then gradually forget all about LinkedIn over time because nothing magical seems to come from it.

Especially here in reticent Racine, Wisconsin, business people are still not sure whether it's even professional to "connect" with others online at all.

Still, it seemed to me there must be something behind all the LinkedIn hype, so I bought How to REALLY use LinkedIn from Amazon.com and read it with my wife Amy, a natural-born networker who has connected with actual business people for a living, while I have mostly been home working on websites.

The first thing to acknowledge about this tutorial is that it's a bit quirky and slightly foreign. Author Jan Vermeiren is a networking coach in Belgium, as well as the Netherlands and the rest of Europe. This means that he's not shy about promoting his work (especially his previous book, Let's Connect!). Also, his English has strong European flavor, and his grammar is sometimes broken.

Plus, there is a percentage of filler. Certain passages are repeated word-for-word, and the book begins with no less than 50 enthusiastic endorsement blurbs. For kicks, I read those all aloud with an enthusiastic accent.

These peculiarities aside, How to REALLY use LinkedIn is a very helpful guide to this online community. That's because Vermeiren simply takes his expertise in business networking and applies it to the specific setting of LinkedIn.

None of his principles is, by itself, a revelatory lightning bolt. It's all basic Golden Rule stuff — giving, sharing, helping others, not expecting anything in return, saying thank you, etc.

However, through repeated examples of how to do these things both inside and outside of LinkedIn, Vermeiren's approach gradually gathers weight. As I read on, I found myself coaxed away from the center of my own universe to begin looking at goals and potential from the point of view of other people.

Now that I think about it, Amy's been telling me similar things for years.

Vermeiren has a talent for turning obstacles around to make them opportunities, and for showing how to chart a solution backwards from people you may or may not know, to yourself, via your connections and their connections. One of the more interesting things he points out is how important diversity is to your network — how diversity can make for a much more resilient matrix than would an exclusive roster of influential people in just your own industry.

After first outlining these concepts, and then reinforcing them while guiding the reader through the various sections and functions of LinkedIn, Vermeiren assigns a "G.A.I.N. exercise" to actively engage you in the process he has described. It seems like the sort of homework you'd rather skip, and he concedes this, but he convinced me to do it anyway and it revealed some possibilities I had not considered.

Following that, he details specific examples of how someone could use LinkedIn, such as:

• How to find a new customer
• How to find a new employee or candidate
• How to find a new job or internship
• How to find a new supplier or partnership
• How to find internal or external expertise
• How to use LinkedIn for members of a referral or network club
• How to use LinkedIn for organizations or group managers

The book winds up with chapters on some of the more hotly debated aspects of using LinkedIn, plus several of the little-known features and behaviors of LinkedIn, and a few helpful tools and websites.

So far, after just reading this book, I am still not ready to declare myself a LinkedIn guru. I have improved my LinkedIn profile so that it's getting more views, and I have created a group: Kenosha-Racine Small Business, a "Networking group for small business owners and managers in Wisconsin's Racine and Kenosha counties."

(At this writing, I am the lone member. If the group's description fits you, please join. I think Kenosha and Racine counties share a number of special situations, and that our small businesses can benefit from discussion and working together — especially when it comes to new technologies.)

At the same time, I have gained a new appreciation for the power of connection.

You see, as your own LinkedIn network grows, LinkedIn's search engine shows you more and more people who are a degree or two away from you, and you find out more about the training and experience of these connections. You see them changing jobs, observe new business ventures being created, and read recommendations being given and received.

You begin to understand how LinkedIn can be a staggering tool for tackling any of the tasks listed above.

I have no doubt whatsoever that How to REALLY use LinkedIn will return many times its price as I apply its lessons in the months ahead. Jan Vermeiren's unique viewpoint and insights alone make it worth your time if your work involves connecting with people.

Hey — there's another enthusiastic blurb!