Leveraging LinkedIn

Originally published on Tumblr.

This post was originally published on LinkedIn.

I’m lucky, for a lot of reasons. One of them is that a company I started went through Techstars in London. This gives me lifetime membership to a network of awesome people. Once a year, a group of many hundreds of those people get together for FounderCon where we catch up, meet new people, and learn things.

This year I met someone new, John Hill. Until very recently John was the Higher Education Evangelist at LinkedIn. A month before FounderCon 2014 he was hired by Techstars as their “Network Catalyst”. Cool title. A big part of John’s job is teaching us how to use our network, so he gave a talk called “Leveraging the Power of the Network”.

The talk was great. He showed us features of LinkedIn that most of us had no idea existed. He could find anyone connected to anyone. It was clear within 5 minutes of his introduction that I’d been shooting rubber bands while sitting on a giant gun turret.

Amusingly though, it wasn’t anything John said that had the most impact on me that day, it was something another founder brought up. I don’t remember the context, but he told us that his company had recently launched a new consumer application, and that everyone in his company had written to all their LinkedIn contacts to tell them about it. He told us that it was a terrifying experience because he considered his contacts sacred, people with whom he had a valuable connection. He was worried that writing them a “marketing” message would make them angry, but he did it anyway, and held his breath.

The response he got floored him. No one reported his mail as spam, and a lot of people responded with positive feedback. His colleagues had the same experience.

This got me thinking about my contacts. I have a lot. Most I haven’t communicated with in years. What would happen if I did? What if I sent everyone a note telling them what I’d been up to for the past 10 years? Would anyone care? Would people get upset? Would people re-engage?

As it turns out, my company, Clarify, had recently launched our platform into production. It was a big deal for us. Is this something my network would want to know about? I didn’t know. I didn’t want to write to people I hadn’t spoken to in 10 years to tell them about my latest professional triumph. But would it be wrong in the context of a 10 year update? I decided to find out.

I logged into LinkedIn, clicked on Connections, clicked on Advanced Settings (a gear symbol…not so obvious!), and then chose Export LinkedIn Connections. Easy. I then imported the generated CSV into MailChimp and wrote to hundreds of long-lost connections.

I started with 9/11, told them about moving to London, then Argentina, then New York, then London again (I realize now I forgot to mention Switzerland!), and finally ended up in Austin where my current company is based. I met people in all those places, so they all fit into my story, somewhere. I could have written a novel, but I didn’t. I condensed 10+ years into about 2 pages. I also gave them a link to my personal newsletter and told them to sign up if they wanted monthly updates of my company’s progress. I figured that if anyone wanted to reconnect and know more, they would.

And reconnect people did.

My open rate was 65%. Of those, 7% responded personally. Without exception they were happy to have heard from me. In the coming month I’ll be traveling to San Francisco, New York, and London. In each place I will be meeting at least one person with whom I’d previously lost touch. Two of my contacts from other places now live in Austin, and we’re planning to catch up. One of favorite lawyers now lives in San Francisco and comes to Austin often. I knew him in London. Three contacts told me that they’d heard what I was working on and were excited to hear that we’d launched. Two are already working on an integration.

A lot of people responded directly. Even more signed up for my monthly newsletter, so they clearly weren’t upset to hear from me!

I may have an unusually generous group of LinkedIn contacts, but I doubt it. Fact is, it’s great to catch up with people, and we’re all too busy to stay in touch on a one to one basis. I’ve always liked LinkedIn, but I’m not a sales guy, so I never thought I’d ever get a lot out of it. I’ve now changed my mind. I’m going to start paying a lot more attention to my network there.

From now on, all my contacts can expect a yearly update from me. If they don’t like it, they can unsubscribe. I won’t be upset. And now I just need to figure out how to convince all of them to let me know what they’ve been up to.