From Concept to Execution: LinkedIn tips to small business owners
[Ed. note: This is part of our success story series where users share their tips and tricks on using LinkedIn more effectively. Today's user experience comes from Dan Gellert, a Grammy award winning audio mixer, engineer and producer. He's also the co-founder of Jitterbug.tv that he started with his partner recently, a venture that LinkedIn helped them greatly with]
The more I have enabled LinkedIn to infiltrate my online movements, the more it has shown itself to be a tool with great power and reach. My partner and I recently launched a website for kids music, Jitterbug.tv, a place for parents and young kids to listen to great, independent, hand-picked kids music and videos (that won't irritate adults!). Well, every step of the way, LinkedIn was a resource that kept giving.
Building the technical backbone of the site, I asked the LinkedIn community to comment on best practices for streaming media, advantages of different media players, budgeting bandwidth costs, etc. Taking advantage of the eyeballs and expertise on LinkedIn, the answers enabled me to understand the average mode of operation; and more importantly, gave me the vocabulary and right questions to ask moving forward on a variety of topics.
Moving to logo and brand design, through launching and especially now, marketing and spreading the word - LinkedIn has helped me waste less time on areas I am not an expert in. Finding people who are influencing the kids music niche has been fairly easy using LinkedIn. Scanning peoples profiles, what and how they write quickly gives me a sense of their direction, expertise, involvement and relevance to me - now that is useful!
As we started defining the navigation of jitterbug, LinkedIn was one of a few sites I referenced - noticing how it made potentially messy navigation simple and clear gave me understanding... and a bit of hope! Adding my profile link on outgoing emails to people who I am trying to woo into action - I found this adds some credibility for those who need some prodding.
The fact that LinkedIn has a huge user base and that you can cross reference users answers with their profile - for me, this makes the experience transparent and helpful.
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