15 Ways To Facilitate A LinkedIn Discussion

15 Ways To Facilitate A LinkedIn Discussion 

1) Don’t Post And Run: By far one of the quickest ways to look like a tool. Call me
crazy but I actually have this as one of our rules in my LinkedIn group. Aside from bad
manners, your discussion has a greater chance of dying and dropping off of page one
which doesn't do much for your visibility huh?

2) Facilitate Your Discussion: You facilitate a discussion by:

- Expanding on someone’s thought with a new one of your own.

- Asking them to expand on their thought.

- Asking them to give you an example.

- Asking follow up questions

3) Hold Off On Your Opinion: A great facilitator remains neutral for as long as
possible in order to bring out the best in others. There’s nothing wrong with expressing
your opinion, my suggestion would be to do it in a way that inspires additional
discussion. Perhaps it could be phrased as a follow up question?

4) Make Sure You Give Your Discussion “Wings”: In other words, give it
someplace to go by making sure it won’t just be answered by a simple “Yes” or “No” If
that’s the case, then instruct everyone (in the question) to explain why they feel that way
and/or provide an example.

5) Circle This One Please: Everyone Has A Story And Wants To Be Heard: So make
sure you acknowledge the thoughts of the participants. Want to know a secret? People
like to feel good by being acknowledged publicly. That’s how you get more and more
people hunting down your discussions because they get to feel good all over again.
How cool is that? Answer: Way cool!


6) Enhance In Your Network: Think
about people in your network that have a particular area of expertise that can be invited.
In some cases I would even talk them up before they get there. Do this (sincerely
please) and you have a network of people who will jump into your discussions at the
drop of a hat! Oh, before I forget, we should be doing this on any discussion we come
across where we know someone who could add value . . . not just our discussions!

7) When You Disagree . . . Do It Politely. A simple “Thank you for your input” is a
nice neutral way of “not going there girlfriend”. But that's common sense and everyone
understands that in the groups. Right? Common sense is always commonly practiced!

8) Don’t Let Others Diminish Your Real Estate: I've had only a few situations where
I thought someone was going out of there way to be an A Hole. In those cases I brought
it to the group manager’s attention so I didn't have to play “Craig Seaton Online
Vigilante” .

9) Thank People: Online and offline. Who doesn't like a little gratitude in front of
thousands of their closest friends?

10) Don’t Grade The Responses: In my coaching practice I always remind people to
never grade the question when handling Q & A. Grading in this context would be if I tell
Mary that her answer rocks and meanwhile I go silent on the other 12 responses. Way
to tell everyone else they suck! Oh, and can we all stop with the “(fill in the name) nailed
it” comments. Do this and you shut a discussion down real quick.

11) Keep The Discussion On Point: When someone misses your question entirely
or takes a long winded trip to the land of “tangent” bring them back to planet earth by
asking them a direct, and yet polite question. If they persist, shoot them an offline email
suggesting they start a new discussion with their thoughts.

12) Don’t Disguise A Sales Pitch As A Discussion: I despise this one. If you want a
discussion, start a discussion but don’t mislead the participants. And those reply
privately messages with the sales pitch is equally annoying. Why would someone come
back to participate in your next discussion if you just conditioned them to have their
guard up? Think Forrest. Think!

13) Don’t Start A Discussion To Blatantly Posture Yourself: I see this one a lot. The
problem with posting a question and then going in to “coach” mode is that most people
don’t like it because they didn’t ask for it. Certainly not in front of thousands. Nuff said!

14) Don’t Over Post: It spreads you out way too thin (especially if you do this over
multiple groups). Give your discussions a chance to breathe. I would keep it between 1-
2 discussions each week depending on the volume of comments you get. To that end,
only post one at a time!


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15) Understand That Discussion Ideas Come To You At The Oddest Times: Don’t
ever commit them to memory. You can use the handy dandy voice recorder on your
phone to make a “note to self” when you are on the go or even just call your voice mail
and leave the thought there.

Tip: Create a word doc with a list of discussions as you think of them. One way to get
ideas is to think about the responses you get during a discussion. You might find a great
opportunity for a follow up discussion.

So there you have it, 15 ways for you to create and facilitate an effective LinkedIn
discussion!



For more information on my training programs, coaching services or to have me speak
at your event . . . click here

Wishing you continued success!

 TheTCAGuy@gmail.com
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Six Principles Great Content Brands.

 Six Principles Great Content Brands.

1. Be the buyer

Everything starts with the buyer's challenges, needs, prejudices, and concerns.

Perhaps that has become something of a truism in content marketing, but it's way too important to let that fact kick it off the top of the six principles list.

Great content brands are always built around the challenges and interests of their target audiences. That appraoch isn't just a veneer of empathy pasted into your brochure.socialmediacoachingsite.com it's a real understanding of the things your prospects actually care about—not just what you wish they cared about.

Understanding your prospect's world takes a bit of work. But no effort will ever deliver a higher return. If you have doubts about your own company's understanding of your prospects, do this work first.

Take a few buyers to lunch. (I recommend sushi, but a decent southern barbecue works, too.) (Or risotto.)

Do it. Really.

2. Be authoritative

Stay in your sweet spot, where the things you understand better than anyone else intersect with the things your prospects really care about.

You know how you read one e-book and come away thinking "Meh"? Then you read another and come away thinking, "Wow!"? (Speaking of which, might I suggest Velocity's B2B Marketing Manifesto?)

The difference is almost always a matter of authority. When you write from a position of authority, you write useful, interesting content. When you bluff, you write hollow, obvious content that may sound good but convinces no one.

And authority is all about writing from your sweet spot (we talk about this in our Content Marketing Strategy Checklist, and we're really big believers in it).

Basically, you can screw up three ways:

Pandering. You write about things your prospects care a lot about, but you have no special authority or perspective regarding those topics. You might get their attention, but you will not have reward that attention with something in return. And people hate giving their attention to things that don't deserve it.
Navel-gazing. You drill deep down into your company's expertise, but if your prospects don't yet care... you'll only embarrass yourself.
Blathering. If you create content that neither speaks to your prospects' concerns nor offers expertise, you're really cranking out the crap.
If you stay in your sweet spot, your content will be 100 times more likely to get consumed, shared, liked, and tweeted.

So, spend time getting your team to agree on where your sweet spot is, then build your content strategy and editorial calendar around it. And that leads us nicely into...

3. Be strategic

One-off content campaigns don't add up to a content strategy.

"Fire and forget" content marketing is so last year. If you're like most marketers, you've at least dipped your toes into content marketing—and it felt great (as great as a toe can feel).

Now it's time for a proper content strategy. Why? Because your resources are limited and your competitors are getting good at this, too.

A content strategy sounds intensive and expensive, but it needn't be. It's just a summary of who you want to reach, what you need them to do, what content you'll create to encourage them to do it, how you'll get the content under their noses, and how you'll measure success.

The checklist mentioned above can help, but it's not rocket science. The important thing is to aim before you fire—and build consensus around where you're aiming.

If you don't have a content strategy yet, write one tonight on the train home. Fifty Shades of Gray (Kindle edition) can wait.

4. Be prolific

Content marketing is a marathon, not a shotput toss.

Each new piece of content has a shorter and shorter "golden period," when the most people want to get it and share it. The "Crap" slide deck itself is hot as I write this, but views will be down to a trickle by the time you read it.

So we all need to build efficient content machines that can keep the frequency up without sacrificing quality.

That means a good mix of content types, from quick blog posts to short videos to 80-page e-books, and everything in between. To do that well, you need...

Good writers who understand what you do
Good designers who know how to sell a story
You can't go hunting for those people every time you need to create something. You need to have them on staff or on tap inside a friendly agency that you keep close.

Find the best talent that you can afford. Reward it. Stroke it every Tuesday. Do whatever it takes to keep it happy.

5. Be passionate

If you don't care about this stuff, why should anybody else?

Passion is the secret ingredient of content marketing, so it's a shame it sounds like the latest CD series from a "personal improvement coach" ("Order now and get my 'Slam Dunk Your Soul' video!").

Passionate doesn't mean fake enthusiasm or free-form extroversion. It means finding the things you really are interested in (with any luck, they are somewhere in your sweet spot), then using content to discover and explore the things that make it so interesting.

That kind of passion is contagious. It's really hard to resist.

Here's the hard part: if you're just not really that interested in your company's sweet spot topics, you need to find something in there to interest you or... get another job.

You set the ceiling on how much your readers can care about any given topic. Aim for nothing less than Sistine.

6. Be tough on yourself

You know whether you're being lazy. Don't be lazy.

It's OK to fire off a blog post in half an hour—as long as you signal to the reader that's what you're doing.

But the bulk of your content marketing program will come from putting in the time to make each piece as good as it can be.

That means lots of rewriting—which most people hate. It also means sharing your earlier drafts with people you respect and asking their opinion. You don't want to waste their time, so a lot of your work needs to happen before you ask. Then you need to take their views into account... and rewrite again.

If that isn't your idea of fun, find someone whose idea of fun it is. You can find them in places like chess clubs or under rocks. Also LinkedIn groups

Social Media Coaching Site

Make Content Creation a Top Priority

Make Content Creation a Top Priority

 See our new video taring on SEO and Social Media Video Training A to Z      

If you want to grow your business it’s necessary to have an online marketing presence today. If you want to succeed in online marketing it’s necessary to create quality content on a regular basis. Content is really at the foundation of an online marketing strategy. Without good content you really can’t execute an SEO campaign, a social media campaign, a PPC campaign, an email newsletter campaign, etc. While content is such a necessary component to marketing success, many businesses still struggle with it. Common complaints are that there is no time to dedicate to content creation and that there is nothing to write about. It’s time to make time for content creation and stop using “there’s nothing to write about” as a lame excuse. There’s always something to write about, no matter what industry you are in.



Here are some content marketing tips to keep you on track:
Create an editorial calendar and stick to it
When it comes to content creation, organization is key. At the beginning of each month, determine what days/times will be dedicated to creating content. It could be 20 minutes one day, an hour the next, etc. It’s just important to schedule it into your daily routine. When something is scheduled it’s harder to ignore it or put it off until another day.

Keep a running tab of ideas
Some days your “creative brain” may be more active than others. Inspiration for content topics can really strike at any time so it’s important to keep some kind of journal or notebook of topic ideas. That way, when you sit down to write you can easily reference the notebook if you can’t think of a good topic that day. You should always have content marketing on the brain. If you are in a meeting, on the phone with a client, or working on a project an idea might come to you. Don’t think that you will remember what it was in the future. You probably won’t! Write it down then and there.

Speak to others within the company
Marketing content is typically created by the marketing team, but that doesn’t mean that other departments shouldn’t have a say. Speak to employees in other departments about their duties and what they do on an average day. It’s likely that there are some great topics in there that would be of interest to target audience members. The customer service team is always a great resource since they are working directly with customers on a daily basis and hearing what their questions/concerns are.

Minimize the approval process (as much as possible)

 This is an over view

Content is only valuable if it’s being published. Many companies require content to be approved by multiple departments, managers, etc. before it ever is seen by target audience members. While it’s a good idea to be thorough like that, it can take a long time. If possible, leave the content approval to one or two trusted team members.

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