Tag Archives: influence

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What’s Your LinkedIn SSI Score?

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Since its launch in 2003, LinkedIn has become the go-to social media platform for professionals, hosting 900 million members worldwide as of 2024, about half of whom log on at least once a month. Joining and being active on LinkedIn is now a commonplace strategy, used by Freelance and traditionally employed professionals to enhance personal brand and advance business or career ambitions. Establishing connections with peers, potential mentors, prospective clients, or possible employers whom you’ve had the savvy and good fortune to meet and interact with, is the primary benefit of the LinkedIn experience.

Connections are not the only factor that pay dividends to those who actively participate on the platform. Nearly as powerful is the content posted, that usually consists of articles or blog posts you’ve written, announcement of awards you’ve won or professional development seminars you’ve attended, and/or insights you’ve shared when commenting on content posted by others. Content posted on LinkedIn contributes to establishing, and often enhancing, your professional and personal brand and expands your credibility beyond the orbit of first degree and other connections and into the broader LinkedIn community.

So, if you’re not active on LinkedIn, you may risk leaving brand-building and business or career growth opportunities on the table. But beyond receiving likes, the social media equivalent of air kisses, how do you know if your target audience feels your posts and comments are meaningful? Moreover, how do you stack up against industry peers and other connections in your network? Those questions can be answered in a LinkedIn user metric you may not know exists—the Social Selling Index (SSI) Score.

The SSI Score defined

The LinkedIn Social Selling Index Score was developed in 2014, after LinkedIn honchos decided to identify members who seemed to be killing it on the platform and figuring out how they did it. In 2015, SSI became part of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, a paid feature, but SSI is now available to all with a LinkedIn account. The SSI is a formula that evaluates social selling performance and measures mastery of what LinkedIn considers the core competencies of social selling on the platform.

The SSI gauges member success in demonstrating four social selling core competencies: establishing a professional brand, initiating communication with prospective connections and collaborators, engaging in valuable conversations and building high-quality relationships. For each competency, members are awarded between 0 and 25 points; the SSI Score is the sum of the individual scores from each core competency. The sum total of the core competency scores is also compared to the scores of others in your industry—and LinkedIn always assumes you’re in sales. That said, the higher your SSI Score, the more influential your LinkedIn profile becomes.

  • Establishing professional brand. This competency consists of two elements—the completeness of your LinkedIn profile and the quality of your posted content. The more detailed your profile and the more valuable your content, the higher your SSI Score.
    • LinkedIn confirms the presence of a profile photo, detailed job history and educational background, plus the number of recommendations you’ve made and received.
    • LinkedIn calculates the number of posts you publish and how many likes and comments your posts receive.
  • Connecting with the right people. This metric is connected to Sales Navigator and it may be challenging for members of free LinkedIn to obtain a good score in this component. It’s no surprise that LinkedIn prefers members to use the paid tools when searching for new connections.
    • When members connect with or contact the right person—for example, someone with a C-Suite job title that usually indicates a decision-maker—it is assumed that the member is now better positioned to make a sale, win a client, or otherwise make a tangible improvement to one’s business or career.
  • Engaging by sharing insights. Sharing valuable content increases the SSI Score awarded in this category. The more valuable content that’s posted and the more comments and likes that shared content receives, the better the score awarded and the closer a member becomes to earning Thought Leader status.
  • Building relationships. This metric evaluates a member’s motivation to stay in touch with connections. It reflects how often members reach out to connections and other contacts and measures how effective that outreach is—meaning, if the message does not receive a reply, the LinkedIn SSI Score will be negatively impacted.

Benefits of a high SSI Score

The SSI Score is considered to be a comprehensive measure of social selling prowess, meaning that a high score is considered demonstration of a member’s understanding and optimal utilization of the platform. LinkedIn views a high SSI Score in the way airlines view frequent flier miles, as a gateway to desirable perks. A high SSI Score can enhance your online reputation with the gift of increased visibility, a powerful benefit that drives name recognition and brand awareness as it promotes trust and credibility. The halo of credibility can lead to more positive responses to your networking inquiries and, theoretically, result in more and higher-quality opportunities for collaborations or exploring business ventures.

But does the SSI Score actually translate into tangible business results? Maybe—you’d expect LinkedIn to claim that a high SSI Score correlates with business success. LinkedIn reports that the higher your SSI Score, the more likely you are to achieve your sales targets, for example. LinkedIn says that an analysis of platform members who’ve received a high SSI Score will on average receive 45% more sales opportunities than those with lower scores and they’ll win 78% more sales deals than peers who are not active on social media. According to a joint study by LinkedIn and Richard Edelman, CEO of the global communications firm Edelman, 58% of business leaders are willing to buy from an industry expert and/or thought leader and they are willing to pay more, as they feel they’ll receive premium service.

  1. Lead generation. Allegedly, those who’ve earned a high SSI Score are 45% more likely to exceed their sales quota because they are adept at identifying and engaging with, the right contacts. The strategy is known to result in more productive leadgen.
  2. Sales. According to LinkedIn, those with an SSI Score above 70 outperform their peers and achieve 45% more sales opportunities than those with low scores.
  3. Brand awareness. A high SSI Score typically results in the reward of increased visibility for your content, leading to increased brand awareness and recognition in your industry.
  4. Trust-building. A high SSI Score enhances credibility, a trust-building factor that can make a difference for B2B professionals, where relationships and reputations play a significant role in decision-making.
  5. Optimized visibility. LinkedIn’s algorithm favors those who utilize its platform effectively. A higher SSI Score usually results in enhanced visibility for your posted content, opening the door to increased engagement with your connections and other contacts.

Monitoring your SSI Score is likely to motivate you to make the most of platform benefits—seeking strategically savvy connection requests as a way to maximize leadgen or business collaborations, positioning yourself as an industry Thought Leader and building your brand and credibility and working to increase your exposure by verifying that your content is relevant to your target audience. To learn your SSI Score, log onto LinkedIn and then click on this link. If you’re part of Sales Navigator, go to “Admin“ and click “User Report.”

While you’re logged onto LinkedIn, review your profile and consider what you might add—do you have a profile picture? Have you earned a professional certificate, or taken a skills-building course, that you never acknowledged in your profile? If so, add that accomplishment to the Licenses & Certifications section of your profile; if you received a certificate, scan and upload. Oh, and if you serve on a board or participate in other volunteer work, include your philanthropic and social responsibility commitments as well. Whether or not boosting your SSI Score is meaningful to you, remember that the purpose of joining LinkedIn is to display your professional bona fides.

Also, when’s the last time you made or received a recommendation? You can get the ball rolling by making a recommendation for a colleague and asking for the favor to be returned with a recommendation for yourself. While we’re on the subject of colleagues, take a tour through the extensive list of LinkedIn groups and figure out if there’s a new one you might join; if you’re already listed in a group or two, scroll through the content to get an update on the threads and see where you might be able to make a relevant comment, or ask a question. Giving a boost to your SSI Score is not labor intensive, but it does require some strategic thinking. It’s time to get busy!

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: © Susan Walsh/Associated Press. The co-champions of the 2019 Scripps National Spelling Bee.

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Marketing Enters the Echoverse

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In the 21st century, savvy business owners and leaders must be aware of developing trends and determine which behave like a passing fad and which seem capable of delivering value that make it worthwhile to get on board. One such trend— that looks more like an inflection point than a trend—was documented in 2016 by researchers from the University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business, the University of Tennessee and the University of New Zealand and it’s a must-do. It’s been impacting your business for five years or more, but you may not have figured out the big picture and didn’t know that it has a name.

Introducing the echoverse, a communications phenomenon that describes where digital communication is now and will be for the yet-to-be-determined future. The echoverse was born of cross-channel marketing messages that are initiated by brands, customers, influencers, media outlets, investors and anyone else with a keyboard and bounce and reverberate in feedback loops. These simultaneously independent and co-dependent parties continually add their responses to posted content, chattering on as they follow and listen to each other across all available digital platforms. The outcome of the call and response is the echoverse, a communications environment that enables content to circulate, amplify, morph and echo.

Understanding the echoverse

As you continue adjusting to early 21st century marketing communication practices, keep in mind that the echoverse is controlled by a hyperconnected, 24/7 environment that’s touched by many players—brands, customers, media, AI-powered artificial agents—who contribute to and echo each other’s messages, as summarized below:

  • Communication is omnidirectional. Messages flow in all directions, they may originate from any source and they are subject to reinterpretation through interaction with multiple participants.
  • Influence is communal. Traditional roles of message sender and receiver are waning. Any interested party may initiate conversations and modify, contradict, or reinforce whatever messages are sent in response. Every participant is both a creator and a consumer of content and empowered to impact, contradict, or verify fellow participants.
  • Messages evolve. Messages are impacted, influenced, or amplified by feedback loops and participants whose participation is continually and simultaneously changing.
  • Value creation is shared. What is considered valuable is not necessarily created by a single, all-powerful taste-making source. What’s accepted as worthwhile is co-created and co-owned by all participants, with each one adding unique context, interpretation and/or resources.

Marketing in the echoverse

In traditional marketing communication, the brand drove the bus—defined marketing goals, created all content and chose how messages were sent to customers and prospects. Echoverse marketing has introduced a new playbook. The influence once held by brands has diminished because that entity is now just one agent in a cast of characters who develop and disseminate their own spin as they follow, listen and act upon the official brand messages. Meaning, successful navigation of the echoverse requires brands to pivot from leading to guiding, persuading and encouraging self-appointed and vocal stakeholders through (ideally) well thought-out and presented opportunities to contribute to a process of value co-creation and strategies for promotional communications.

  • Echoverse marketing for Freelancers and SMB

No doubt you understand that both challenges and opportunities are associated with the echoverse. To develop effective and responsive marketing strategies and tactics, marketing managers in companies of every size must embrace its omnidirectional, feedback loop reverberations and prepare for the possible influence of self-appointed stakeholders who thrive in the echoverse.

Like their counterparts in enterprise companies, Freelancers and SMB owners must adopt big-picture thinking and manage all marketing communication channels as an integrated, holistic, interdependent system—a compartmentalized, silo approach will not achieve goals. A cohesive strategy that considers the interactions between various media is essential—an integration of traditional media outlets, social media, your company website, email marketing and other brand promotional activities to create a unified brand message that is consistent and compelling at every touch point.

  • Proactive Customer Engagement

Social media is ideal for allowing brands to engage with customers and curious prospects in a personal and immediate manner. Engaging with customers on social media allows you to hear and quickly respond to compliments, comments, suggestions and complaints. It is the best defense against negative talk that may be expressed by competitors and haters whose agenda is to attack and subject your brand to reverberating echoverse slander.  Brands should focus on consistent, authentic communication that addresses customer concerns and other feedback promptly and effectively.

  • Leveraging Predictive Analytics

If you can budget the expense, investing in social media listening can provide valuable insights into emerging trends and potential problem (or helpful) issues or developments. Being proactive enables brands to anticipate and respond to changes in customer priorities, preferences, or concerns before things get ugly. Tools that analyze data generated by various platforms can help brands identify patterns and adjust their marketing /branding strategies accordingly.

  • Utilizing AI and Internet Technologies

AI tools and other internet based technologies are transforming marketing communications within our complex, interactive communication landscape. In this environment, a diverse network of human and nonhuman participants—including customers, brands, AI agents, traditional and digital media outlets and platforms—continually interact, influence and reshape messages across platforms. Traditional one-way and two-way communication models have given way to omnidirectional communication for the foreseeable future.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: © Swiss Yodeling Association. Alpshorn players create echoes in the Swiss Alps.

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Know the Stakeholders, Close the Deal

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Freelance consultants,  business owners and sales professionals rise,  fall and are measured on our ability to make sales and form strategic alliances that supply vital revenue to the businesses we represent.  To get those deals done,  we rely on stakeholders within the prospective client’s organization to advocate for us.  While there is but one signature on the proposal contract,  there are always powerful influencers whom the decision-maker is inclined to consult.  To successfully close an important deal,  you must identify the three types of stakeholders who powerfully influence important buying decisions: champions,  decision-makers and blockers.  Learn the motivations of these stakeholders and figure out what is on the line for them if the deal goes through,  or is allowed to fade away.

Step 1 is getting your foot in the door,  the first hurdle of the deal.  Step 1 requires that you enlist a project champion,  for it is s/he who invites you to pursue the deal and helps you achieve Step 2,  learning the identities of whom you must convince or outwit.  Your champion knows the decision-maker for the deal and will facilitate your access.  The champion influences the decision,  but s/he is not the decision-maker.  Some champions have relatively little power within the organization.  What they do have is the respect and the ear of the decision-maker.

Paul Weinstein,  an investor and adviser to technology,  media and entertainment companies,  notes that   “Champions understand the personalities and processes on a granular level and can navigate the culture in an organization.”  Weinstein also points out that the primary motivation of the champion is often status.  Champions want their colleagues and superiors to know that they not only can recognize an innovative opportunity when it appears,  they also have the ingenuity and power to build support and get approval.

The champion is typically at a point in his/her career where risks can be taken.  S/he is deeply invested in getting the deal signed.  The key to working effectively with the champion is to collaborate on a strategy and convince the decision-maker to green-light the proposal.

While champions are comfortable with risk,  decision-makers are invariably risk-averse.  They are C-suite executives who have the power to say yes or no to big deals and they will be held accountable for the final outcome.  Their name would be on the contract and if the deal goes sour,  it would be their reputation  (or possibly their job)  on the line. Because this individual has a lot to lose,  the anxiety level associated with the decision to give thumbs up or down will be in exact proportion to the level of expected scrutiny  (and embarrassment)  should they pass on a deal that subsequently brings big profits to a competitor,   or sign off on a deal that proves to be unfortunate.

Be aware that the decision-maker is unlikely to actually use whatever it is you’re selling,  or even know much about it.  Decision-makers focus on macro issues.  They rely on others to help them reach decisions,  because they don’t have time to immerse themselves in the details of anything other than big picture issues.  They will understand a strategic alliance,  however.

Win over your decision-maker by working with your champion to supply credible evidence that portrays the deal as a winner that will make him/her look good.   Help your champion to help the decision-maker perform due diligence by providing third-party validation,  analyses and other data that refutes all naysayers,  meaning the blockers.

We perceive blockers as haters and sometimes that is true.  Blockers seldom have the power to say yes,  but they do have the power to persuade decision-makers to say no.  Like champions,  blockers are also motivated by status.  They use the power of their relationship with and access to the decision-maker in a negative way and pour on the doubt to undermine and discredit you and your proposal.  Be advised that your blocker may be a sworn enemy of your champion and that s/he may be most willing to play dirty.  Your blocker may have a competing proposal for which s/he is champion,  his/her own bid to impress the higher-ups.

Paul Weinstein urges that you take blockers very seriously and strive to either win them over to your way of thinking or devise with your champion a method to neutralize their complaints.  If there is no personal enmity between your champion and the blocker,  then relevant and credible third-party support should rectify the problem.

In summary,  Weinstein says  “the secret to closing deals lies in mastering this balance.  If you can support your champion,  coax your blocker and  convince your decision-maker,  you’re golden.  Each of the three stakeholders brings a unique set of motivations to the table.  Your job is to understand them in order to align their interests and get the deal done.”

Thanks for reading,

Kim

 

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Influence Peddling, the Path to Success

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The successful Freelance solopreneur is a highly respected,  usually well-liked,  professional.  He/she is regarded as uniquely qualified and able to consistently deliver results.  For these reasons,  the successful Freelancer is considered the go-to person by clients and colleagues.  The successful Freelancer has Influence  and that influence has been leveraged to build a lucrative client list.  If one aspires to become a successful Freelance solopreneur,  one must acquire Influence  and apply it skillfully.

Robert Cialdini, PhD,   Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University,  president of the consulting firm Influence at Work and author of Influence (2001),  is considered the leading social scientist in the field of influence.   Dr. Cialdini,  who himself possesses significant influence,  has identified six elements of persuasion that help ordinary citizens to become influential:

!.    Liking   If people like you,  either because they sense that you like them or because of things you have in common,  they’re inclined to say yes to you and help you to advance your goals.

II.   Reciprocity   People tend to return favors.  If you help people, they’ll help you  (sometimes!).  If you behave in a cooperative way,  they are likely to respond in kind.

III.   Social Proof    People will do what they see others doing, especially if those people seem similar to them.

IV.   Consistency   People like to be consistent, or appear to be so.

V.     Authority   People defer to experts and those in positions of authority.

VI.    Scarcity   People value what is rare and not perceived as a commodity.

I thought about the elements of persuasion that Dr. Cialdini shared and wondered which are most applicable to the needs of Freelancers? My feeling is that Authority,  Consistency,  Liking and Social Proof  are within our control to varying degrees and attainable.

Freelancers are hired guns and we must be perceived as experts.  Blogging,  writing a newsletter,  case studies on our website,  presenting webinars and working with prestige clients are some of the ways we demonstrate our Authority,  our expertise,  to colleagues and prospective clients.  Our reputation,  the brand,  must telegraph that we Consistently  resolve challenges,  overcome obstacles and produce desired outcomes for our clients every time.

People do business with those that they know and Like  and they do more business with those they Like  and trust and the successful Freelancer is well-liked.  Dr. Cialdini noted that we usually like people who we think like us,  people with whom we have something in common and people who help us by doing favors.  While remaining authentic and avoiding manipulative behavior,  the Freelance solopreneur can create conditions that will make people like him/her,  which is the essence of relationship and influence building.

On the most elementary level,  the Freelancer should be pleasant and respectful,  always ready to greet old friends and new with a smile and a handshake.  When in conversation,  listen and be interested in what others have to say,  another way of letting people know you like and value them.

Find commonalities with those whom you expect to meet  (or those whom you’d like to know better)  by turning to social media.  Read Facebook and LinkedIn profiles to find out where people went to school and what their interests are.  Without divulging the source of your information,  look for ways to casually drop these references into the conversation and take steps to strengthen the connection.

Should the opportunity arise,  do favors large and small for colleagues and clients,  always creating a sense that there exists a network of partners who are willing to help one another.  You will increase the likelihood of ROI and set the stage for Reciprocity  by characterizing your assistance as a two-way street.  Those known to be able to dispense valuable favors always attain Influence.

Finally,  clients are risk-averse.  No one wants to make a mistake and allow either superiors or subordinates to see them lose face.  They make decisions that favor the familiar,  the  “known quantity”,  because it is the safe choice.  The goal of Freelancers is to obtain that Social Proof,  the ultimate endorsement,  because it is the recipe for building a robust client list.  To become successful Freelancers,  we must persuade clients and colleagues that we are eligible and deserve the right to become the  “known quantity”  go-to expert because we have attained Influence  and they look smart when they hire or recommend us.

Thanks for reading,

Kim