Safety Consulting Corner

Lock In Your LinkedIn Contacts

I love LinkedIn. I use it all the time and I encourage other safety consultants to use it too. I have over 300 contacts in my LinkedIn account whom I actually know. LinkedIn gives you a great way to stay in touch with people regardless of how many times they change jobs or move houses. While I have written about LinkedIn before (click here) I want to talk about the security of those contacts that you have worked so hard to get but first I'd like to tell you about a personal experience. When you are on LinkedIn, you might see a link that encourages you to invite everyone in your AOL or Gmail or other address book to link to you on LinkedIn. I did this one time and while it did help me to reconnect with many old friends and acquaintances, it also got me temporarily locked out of LinkedIn all together. Why did this happen? Because a significant number of the people that received this invitation from me via LinkedIn's own program, responded that they didn't know me. If enough people report this (I think the threshold is 5) then LinkedIn locks you out. What I didn't realize was that LinkedIn sends the invite email to everyone in your address book and that may include everyone that you ever sent an email to or received one from and I will be the first to tell you that I don't know all of these people. While the batch invitation option that LinkedIn encourages is tempting, it can also be dangerous. I would suggest to most people that they stick with building their LinkedIn contact list one by one. On the other hand, if you are like me and are afraid of getting locked out again (I still have 200+ invitations outstanding) then I would suggest that you export your LinkedIn contacts to a secondary contact manager. I just discovered an easy way to do this. (Click Here).
Although this will not solve all of my problems if it happens again, I have a little more comfort knowing that I do have most of my LinkedIn contact information somewhere else.

PS - If you want to link to me, click below.

Technical Presentations with a bonus

After attending many presentations at the ASSE conference and the AIHce conferece, both held this past June, I saw that many safety consultants still don't understand how to properly create and use a PowerPoint presentation. Too many people try to cram as much information on the slide as possible - either because they are not confident remembering their content or because they hope everyone will read the slides instead of focusing on them. Fortunately, I just found a great post over at The Public Speaking blog (highly recommended by the way) that tells you how to put together a great technical presentation. Check it out here.  This post provides a bonus as well since the topic the author chose to use as a demonstration is social networking and I know many consultants are still confused about what this is as well. So  - kill two birds with one stone and check it out.

Stalking

I must admit, I was somewhat of a stalker yesterday....but all in the name of good networking. Most safety consultants believe they are pretty good networkers but there are just as many that believe that networking is just attending an event and handing out business cards. I attended a Human Resources conference yesterday (why you ask? I'll tell you below) and I'll tell you how I "worked" this conference.

First, when I arrived, all attendees were given a list of attendees  - awesome! It made my job much easier. The first thing I did was go through the list and mark the people I definitely wanted to meet.  The list included about 8 people which is pretty ambitious for a 6 hour conference. The list included the HR person from a pharmaceutical company since that is one of my target markets, the HR person from one of my clients (whom I did not know), the HR people from an industrial supply company, the HR person from a local (but very large) company where my husband had a significant project, an HR consultant I hadn't seen in about 8 years (I actually forgot what she looked like) and a variety of other people. So, what did I do next after I dentified my targets? I made a conscious effort to read names and companies on nametags to try to find these people and strike up a conversation. I was about 50% successful. I have to admit though that I did pretty much "stalk" one guy I had wanted to meet. I finally saw him at lunch but his table was already full so I figured I would try to talk to him after lunch. When he got up to leave, I followed him but only to find out he was headed to the bathroom (where he stayed for some time!) I gave up (temporarily) and moved on. I finally saw him again sitting alone in the auditorium where our next session was to be held. I went and sat two seats from him, hoping he would look up so I could introduce myself but no such luck. He stayed buried in his notes until the speaker started. (Obviously he wasn't a very good networker himself). So, after all of this tracking and stalking, I was unsuccessful in ever meeting him. The good thing about all of this name badge reading was that I did get to also identify other people whom I wanted t'to meet but did not originally identify from the start because they were not on the pre-registered list. I knew from the start that I was not attending this conference to learn about HR, although a few of the sessions were interesting. I was there for focused networking and to me,that's like a game. Yes, I was a stalker but all for a good cause.