Not long ago, I wrote a post here on Agent Genius about the social networking sites that are actually producing income for me. One that I mentioned is LinkedIn, which is quickly becoming my social networking for business site of choice.
I joined LinkedIn back when they first launched and tried to get a couple of friends to sign up. A few did, just to humor me, but my interest wained because, quite frankly, there was no one to link with. Now, fast forward a few years, and I am seeing old friends. colleagues and classmates sign up daily. It’s fun to reestablish old connections!
And its fun to get referrals from people I don’t even know after they read my profile. You gotta like that.
A few weeks ago I had a ‘real estate crisis,’ and I turned to LinkedIn for a solution. I have a client who is a well known celebrity (don’t laugh, we really do have some famous people here in Metro Detroit. . .) and his electricity was turned off in his house due to a mistake at the power company. This happens fairly often here, and they usually take about 3 days to come out to switch the power back on. And that was the answer that DTE (our electric company) gave. It would be a couple of days before they could send anyone out. No power = unhappy client who needs to buy an expensive house from me this summer.
I set out to save the day by checking my LinkedIn contacts to see who I knew that knew someone “high up” at DTE. I came up with a couple of options and after a few calls I had access to a senior marketing executive. Certainly the marketing department would understand my crisis, right?
Well, it all worked out. We got the power on that day. Thank you LinkedIn.
If you haven’t linked with me, here is my profile. I just might be able to help you someday.
