bloggers :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

This post appeared originally on Des Walsh dot Com One reason for sharing here on Thinking Home Business is that it is about a resource that could be particularly helpful for professionals working from home.

What do I mean, the LinkedIn Bloggers group has moved to LinkedIn? With that name, wouldn’t it have been there already?

Short answer: Yes

And No

The story so far

It’s now just over five and a half years ago, in May 2005, since I teamed up with the most prolific creator of online groups I know, Vincent Wright, to help build the LinkedIn Bloggers group he had established on the Yahoo! Groups platform. Several months later we established a group of the same name on what was then known as LinkedIn for Groups and is now just LinkedIn Groups (a literally significant change in nomenclature which is almost certainly of more interest to students of history like me than to most of the millions of LinkedIn members!)

We had some great discussions on the Yahoo group, but things quietened down some time ago and, not to put too fine a point on it, conversation on the group just fizzled out.

So if the conversation has fizzled out, why move to LinkedIn Groups?

Some of us believe there is scope still to have useful discussions around blogging, plus other new/social media, and networking, especially on LinkedIn, and think the new LinkedIn Groups platform (as distinct from the old LinkedIn for Groups directory) seems to provide more scope for re-starting the conversation.

So we have now moved the focus of attention to the LinkedIn group and away from the Yahoo group (effectively mothballing the Yahoo group) .

People and topics

In a post back in 2005, only a few days after I had joined the Yahoo group, I wrote about the people we hoped to attract to LinkedIn Bloggers and how we saw the group operating:

The aim is for LinkedIn Bloggers to attract LinkedIn members who are already experienced and even expert bloggers … and also – and very importantly from my point of view – LinkedIn members who are not yet blogging and want to find out more about it, how they would go about it etc, in a friendly, professional and non-hyped setting.

I think that still lines up pretty much with how we see the group operating on the LinkedIn platform.

OK, I can’t resist sharing a bit of history but I’ll keep it brief

Just harking back for a moment to the “LinkedIn for Groups/LinkedIn Groups” distinction I made above, and promising no extended history lesson, there was no opportunity in 2005 to have a group conversation on LinkedIn. The groups then were, as far as I can recall, mainly alumni groups from colleges and companies and the LinkedIn for Groups directory gave people in those groups better intra-group networking opportunity.

The relatively new look “LinkedIn Groups” is set up for moderated discussions, has real names not the often uncommunicative Yahoo username setup. There are also, helpfully, a Promotions section (so the discussion stream does not have to be muddied) and a Jobs section (ditto re discussion).

But what if we’re giving a party and nobody comes?

That’s possible. On the other hand, we have 127 members in the group on LinkedIn and while many of the members of the Yahoo group may not migrate there are already new members in the group on LinkedIn who were not members of the Yahoo group.

I’m sure there are many LinkedIn members around the world who do not yet even know of the existence of the LinkedIn Bloggers group. Especially given that, as I discovered a day or so ago, we were not listed on the LinkedIn Groups directory. That was probably a hangover from the old days when you had to pay an annual fee to LinkedIn to have your group listed: as we had no actual activity going on there at the time we did not avail ourselves of the privilege. I’ve changed the setting there so I would expect more people will now become aware of the group’s existence and be attracted to join us.

We are definitely open for business

At this stage the group is technically a “closed” group while we arrange the furniture, so to speak. But membership for any LinkedIn member should normally be approved immediately. And one of the great advantages of the LinkedIn Groups setup is that people who apply to join the group will already be LinkedIn members (basic membership is free) which has always been a pre-requisite for membership of the group, but very difficult and sometimes impossible to establish from the Yahoo group membership application process.

We have a group of managers standing ready to serve

I am delighted that Dennis McDonald and Robyn Tippins, who each has great knowledge, experience, wisdom and good old common sense and were both such stalwarts as co-moderators on the Yahoo group, have stepped up to be managers of the LinkedIn group.

We have rules, but not too many

A draft document with rules for the group has been posted on the site. There are at present two rules (with explanations of how each applies):

Rule 1: Respect the discussion space, in terms of topic, content and tone

Rule 2: Respect your colleagues in the group

Acknowledgements

It’s appropriate to acknowledge here the great support for the group over the years from the founder, Vincent Wright, original co-moderator Dave Taylor, Dennis and Robyn as above, and co-moderator on the Yahoo group Sarah Lewis.

We are still using the logo which was donated with typical generosity by Paul Dube and approved by LinkedIn, back in the mists of LinkedIn Bloggers time.

And thanks to all the wonderful people who have contributed through sharing, discussing and debating, to what has been a truly dynamic group and will hopefully continue to provide service and enjoyment in its new place of operation.

I hope if you are not a LinkedIn Bloggers member yet you will come and check us out.

Image credits: Original image Moving House, mikecogh via Flickr, Creative Commons a-sa

The SOBCon “Blog It, Earn It” Discount

This blog displays proudly the SOB (Successful and Outstanding Bloggers) badge.

SOBCon is the annual “Biz School for Bloggers” to be held once again in Chicago, May 1-3. What has always impressed me about SOBCon is the complete focus on helping participants develop viable business plans. It is also a manageable size – maximum 250 participants – with a faculty of very knowledgeable, very practical, business-focused blogging stars.

This year, as part of the preparation, SOBCon founder Liz Strauss and her colleagues have come up with an interesting challenge and a discount for those who join in.

The challenge is called “Blog It, Earn It” – i.e. earn a discount on the price of admission. And at $200 off the $795 full price, that is a very substantial discount indeed.

What do you have to do to play? You have to post something on what relationships mean to you, in business parlance the “ROI of Relationships”.

I’m going to join in, even though, regretfully, I am not planning to do the long trek to Chicago. I’ll apparently be able to pass my discount on to someone else, which is nice (see the note at the end of this post for what I propose to do about passing it on) .

I could write at length about how important relationships have been and are to me: relationships with my parents, my brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, nieces, nephews, teachers, and my wonderful partner of twenty years and co-author on this blog, Suzie Cheel.

But for the purpose of this exercise I am going to concentrate on relationships in business.

And especially on why one of my key operating principles is “relationships first, then business”.

So here goes:

What Relationships Mean to Me in Business

Thinking now about what relationships mean to me in business I feel quite moved, with deep feelings of gratitude especially.

Because it seems to me that all or most of the good business I have done over the past twenty years has stemmed from and has been sustained by relationships. And I can say with confidence that where the business has been good there have been good relationships and where it has not been good there has been a problematic or sour relationship involved. Not always at the beginning, but at some point.

When I speak of business as being “good” or “bad” I am not thinking of whether it paid well or not. In fact I have sometimes been quite well paid for business that with hindsight I could well have done without.

One example of a business deal that was bad is the time, early in my consulting career, that I was consulting to a government agency and with every draft of the report we submitted we were asked to make changes. I kept thinking that with one more lot of amendments we could be done, and indeed that eventually came to pass. But in the meantime, I had developed a twinge in my back – it only bothered me when I sat down to type. It was very painful. When the report was done and handed in, the pain went away! Weird, but true.

A well paid project, but bad business. Why? My pretty confident assessment is that, although I had a reasonable relationship with the person commissioning the report, there were others behind the scenes “monitoring” the project from the viewpoint of a particular political agenda. So what had looked like a project initiated on the basis of a reasonable relationship foundered because there were other, hidden and – from my point of view – unreasonable relationships at work which turned the exercise into such a bad project that my body actually revolted.

Of course, I’ve endeavored at times like that to buck myself up with the old “it’s just business” comment. But what sort of a life is it to have to “put up” with things, not enjoy what you do? No thanks.

Fortunately, I have many examples of business projects, past and current, which have been based on and sustained by good relationships.

I think for example of one client where I had an ongoing consulting role and who used to turn to me and my company when specific projects came up that might otherwise have gone elsewhere. He knew that with some of these projects I would not be doing the detailed work personally, but he trusted me to put together an appropriate team or outsource the details responsibly. Financially this was very worthwhile. It was also enjoyable work because of the frank, mutually trusting relationship I had with the client.

Other work has come to me “out of the blue” because someone I knew was in a conversation with others about a project that needed my skills and knowledge, which led to my being contacted and subsequently hired.

Yes, I did tender for projects and spent hours writing submissions, but because the projects I was good at were often the ones that did not fit neatly into regular categories of consultancy, much of that submission writing was, with hindsight, a waste of time. Maybe all of it – I don’t like to dwell on that too much!

In more recent years, as a coach, author, workshop leader and speaker, business has typically, and perhaps universally, come to me via a relationship, whether a long-standing, professional network relationship or via the blogging or social media community, or from something more immediate such as someone observing me and speaking with me at an event and then talking to me about business possibilities.

These experiences, the bad ones as well as the good ones, have taught me that doing business based on (positive) relationships – and by that I mean open, honest, trusting, constructive relationships – is now the only way I want to do business.

That works for me, not only financially, but in peace of mind, mind-body health and sense of contribution, and in terms of my picture of how things should be when life goes well.

In short, Relationships First, then Business, is a principle that serves me well, first as a filter to keep out the toxic experiences before they start and then as a basis and framework for doing business happily, productively and with mutual respect.

To qualify for the discount, I need now to provide a link to this site on Twitter with the hashtag #blogiearnit. Then I propose to pass the discount on to one of our readers here. If you would like to qualify, just leave a comment, perhaps share your own story and say you would like to go in a random draw to qualify. If you are doing your own blog post to qualify for the discount, note that the offer from SOBCon ends a couple of days from now, on March 7.