The Power of LinkedIn

Are you using the power of LinkedIn to promote your professional career or your business? LinkedIn has the highest lead generation potential of any of the social media platforms.

According to research conducted by HubSpot, the MIT based inbound marketing company, LinkedIn is 277% better than Facebook or Twitter for lead generation. So, are you’re not using LinkedIn, what are you waiting for?

Not all industries are fully bought-in to the power of LinkedIn. But frankly, I can’t think of a single industry where ignoring LinkedIn is a smart idea. Whether you’re looking for a job, looking for a promotion, or looking to increase your business, LinkedIn is one of the best resources around. And for networking, there’s really no better tool for professionals than a well-prepared LinkedIn profile.

You really can’t afford miss the potential of LinkedIn. If nothing else, make sure to complete your profile and create your vanity URL (that’s the LinkedIn.com/IN/yourname internet address rather than using the useless string of numbers and letters you get as a default). Getting the most out of LinkedIn means tweaking your profile to include your keywords, joining and participating in groups, and getting recommendations and endorsements. If you aren’t doing these basic things, you’re leaving money on the table, so to speak.

If you're on LinkedIn, connect with me. Tell me you saw my blog. You can find me here:  http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisgattis/

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Great Stories Sell

We’ve had a little fun with Super Bowl ads this week. All the water cooler talk has been “Did you like the Clydesdale?”

While no ad will ever please every viewer, I think there are at least 5 things we can take away from this year’s crop of Super Bowl ads.

1. Puppies and Clydesdales still pull at our heart-strings.

2. Even though we pull for the underdog, a sloppy wet kiss with sound affects is just too much information, even if the nerd IS kissing a supermodel.

3. Goats, should be limited to 3 bags of Dorito’s a day.

4. Old people getting tatts and having midnight munchies is pretty funny. And

5. Telling an authentic American story will win us over every time.

While there’s a little post-game blow back from Black’s and Latino’s for their lack of inclusion in the imagery, you have to admit, if your demographic is middle-aged white men, Paul Harvey reading his essay “So God Made A Farmer” captured the resilience and determination of the American spirit. Dodge tried to pull the same rabbit out of a hat twice with the Oprah voice-over. But there’s just no connection between American Heroes and Oprah. She spent her glory years telling soccer moms what to read and how to think. And middle-aged soccer mom’s aren’t Jeep’s demographic. 

But Ram was careful not to sell trucks. In fact, you barely knew it was a vehicle ad until the end. What they did, was remind us a lost heritage. For 2 whole minutes, we relived the values of the Greatest Generation. And in a time of high unemployment, fiscal instability, and disintegrating families, Paul Harvey selling us Americana to the tune of Yankee Doodle, was pure genius. 


If you need help telling your story, contact me at 256-425-8787 or chris@ad4group.com.

Success Consciousness

We talk about making plans and setting goals frequently here on my blog. That’s all very important for achieving success.

For many entrepreneurs, the real key to their success is not making a plan or hiring good people. They’ve already made a great plan. It’s not hiring good people, they’ve got highly motivated people with exceptional skills. The real key to success is mastering their own minds.

It’s easy for entrepreneurs to get caught up in the creation zone. People are throwing great ideas at you all day long. We love to build new products, new teams, new organizations. So, you have to have a system in place to allow you to quickly evaluate new ideas and determine their value in relation to the current project you’re building. Sometimes these ideas have to be put on the back burner, or filed away for another time.

It’s really easy to get caught up in the Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. That’s where we spend our days chasing shiny objects down rabbit holes. Someone sends you an email or gives you a call about an interesting idea and next thing you know you’ve spent four hours researching and evaluating an idea that has nothing to do with what you had planned to spend your day doing. You’ve wasted all your high-level energy doing what amounts to non-productive work.

It’s not that you can’t consider new opportunities. If your organization is going to grow and thrive, you have to consider new ideas and learn new things.

However, I think the real key to success is having a success consciousness with a singularity of focus. We create a success consciousness by having a team of positive people who have the same values as us, and who will constantly support each other and encourage each other to do exceptional work. We hold a singularity of focus by having a plan that we work every day. We have higher aspirations that cause us to continually reach for those things just beyond our grasp. You don’t accomplish great things by reaching for things in front of your nose. Everyone can do that. You achieve greatness by continually trying to work a little harder and to reach a little farther.

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Brand

We kicked off our first week of Ad4! Radio: Communication That Counts last week. We’re going to talk a lot about BRAND on the show. It’s the foundation of your company’s reputation and how the world views you.

If you don’t know how to market your company, brand is a great place to start. If you think you know how, but aren’t sure about your brand, perhaps you should take a step back.

Your brand represents your promise to your customers and your market.

What are your customers saying about your brand? …about your promises?  Think they aren’t talking about your brand? Yelp! is filled with bad reviews of restaurants that don’t know Yelp! exists. And Twitter is filled with bad reviews of local businesses that don’t think social media is important to their business.

You see, it doesn’t matter if you’re Joe’s Car Wash or Bank of America; your customers are talking about you. That talk will affect your brand. Left alone, that talk may become your brand.

If you’re not sure what to do about all this talk, then join us each Thursday on Ad4! Radio. We’ll explain how our secret sauce works. We’ll have some guests who can bring special expertise to small businesses marketing and we’ll highlight some cool stuff our clients are doing.

We’d love to hear your feedback and your questions. Email me at chris@ad4group.com. If you have a question that’s of interest to a wide audience, we’ll even talk about it on the show.

WTKI Huntsville 1450 AM / 94.9 FM
WEKI Decatur 1490 AM / 94.7 FM
Listen Live www.wtkiradio.com

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