Go eat the World! The 1st step to Establish your Online Presence

So, now you (we) have your (our) Start Up ready to run, with an amazing product (service) and the first important connections you made during Fairs, Events, meeting friends of friends etc. But, what is your next step? Well, get out there in the Online world, where you can reach those people that can really make the difference in your business – clients, partners, retailers, investors etc. – wherever they are.

A Company Page on Linkedin could be the answer you are looking for. Furthermore, in a seeding phase where you and your team may experience a lack of time, this may be a temporary valid substitute for both your Website and your business card (“I run out of card Sir, I’m afraid. But look for me on Linkedin, you’ll find everything there. And please, feel free to add me as your Connection.”).

BUILT YOUR PAGE

1) Who can do it.

Before you considering to create a Company Page, make sure that you can meet all of LinkedIn’s requirements:

• You’re a current company employee.
• Your position is listed in the Experience section on your profile.
• You have a company email address added and confirmed on your LinkedIn account.
• Your company’s email domain is unique to the company. (Note: A domain cannot be used more than once to create a company page.)
• Your profile strength must be listed as intermediate or all star.
• You must have at least 50 connections on your personal profile.

2) Get started!

1. Choose “Companies” Under the “Interests” section on the main page (your profile is the starting point).
2. Choose “Add a Company” from the right-hand side of the page button.
3. Fill in your company information (company name and your email address).
4. After receiving an email from LinkedIn confirming your page, you can go to your company page and start building it properly.

3) The Overview Section.

The information you need to include are company language, name, type, size, website, industry, operating status, year founded and locations. Remember, the company description is critical! Google scans company pages, so make sure you choose the right Keywords to rank high in organic search results. The results will also display the first 156 characters of your company description, so be sure to put the most important information there.

Then add a banner image and your logo. Make sure it’s appealing and consistent with your brand values and identity. Here are the image requirements, which must be either jpg, png or gif formats:  Image – Minimum 646 x 220 pixels, maximum 2 MB. Logo – 100 x 60 pixels, maximum 2 MB.

4) Products and Services Page

Since many people don’t bother to fill out this section you may have an advantage over competitors and  don’t forget to include keywords in the description, images and video if you have any.

1. Go to your Main Company page and choose “products.”
2. Click on “edit page” and choose “add product or service” from the drop-down menu, and you’ll get to this page.

In the same drop-down menu you can also find the space to include a Call to Action.
If someone is spending the time to visit your page and have a look at your product you don’t want him or her to leave without (hopefully) providing contact information, right? You can even provide a download link with free ebooks or white papers.

And remember to ask for recommendations to those who have already benefited from your product!

MANAGE YOUR PAGE

1) Establish presence

• Put someone in charge.
• Involve all the team members in proposing topic and write specific and consistent content for your page feed.
• Set a Calendar, to define when to publish your posts. It will be easier to follow for your Followers (couldn’t find a different word).
• Share other people and pages posts.

 2) Analyse

Check regularly the views on your page and analyse trends and followers profile. You will be able to better refine your communication style this way.

There would be much more to say about Linkedin, but so far is a good start.
And, if you are wondering, flI. doesn’t have a Company Page yet… but we are working on it.

 

Nothing is lost, Everything is transformed

This is Monday morning but feels like Saturday.
Unfortunately it is not.
Do you want to know why?

DEtour has been on a tour-de-force from Friday to Sunday and the week never really ended. But it was surprisingly good and I would say that going through this weekend a lot has changed.

From the Captain’s log:
Day 1 – Friday night

The Bright Ideas weekend started from here, and so we all showed up at the Brooks Lodge to shake hands wondering around with our name in capital letters sticked on our chests. Networking is not for everyone. I love people and I am always curious about lives different from mine, but I’m not really into smiling and nodding as I am not good at promoting my self at all. But I kept in mind the advice of one of the speaker at the ICA, Rob O’Connor ‘When comes to speak about yourself just imagine you are talking about someone else you know and trust’.

Day 2 – Saturday

We split to cover all the ‘events’ of the weekend. Olga, Sam and Michelle came back to the Bright Ideas Weekend, whereas Felix and I went to Destinations. We step into this huge Travel Fair in Kensington Olympia with our backpacks, notepad and prototype; no business card or pre-arranged plans, just the Exhibitors list. We targeted Airlines and Travel Magazines and went hunting.
‘Hi, we are students from the Kingston University and founders of a StartUp. We came up with an amazing idea to solve one of the worst nightmare for all travellers….’

We gathered interesting feedbacks from experts in the travel sector and tons of business cards: travel magazine (The Times), Wanderlust, National Geographic, Singapore Airlines etc. What if just one of those reply? What if they write about us, just a small article? Just the possibility itself amazed us.

flI. at the National Geographic Stall

After that we called the rest of the team to get an update about what was going on in Kingston. And this was the moment when the change became more and more clear in my mind: they were amazed exactly like us. Excited about the feedback and drunk with adrenaline, tired for all the hard work they did during the day, calling themselves “fighters”. I couldn’t help my self, a wave of pride for my team struck my whole body.

Day 3 – Sunday

Alarm: 7am. Good morning freezing Sunday!
We have been told a real entrepreneur is restless. Well, I could write a book about restlessness.
Back to the Bright Ideas and the Kingston Business School working on our flI. and the network, getting and giving feedbacks (because you can’t ask anyone to give if you are not willing to give something back), increasing the pile of contacts and business cards and pitching pitching pitching and pitching again.

At 6.30pm, the end of the day, we got:

– A Product Designer willing to help us with good connection at the Roehampton Vale Campus (we need to get into their Engineering Lab to shoot our Advert… are you curious?)

– An amazing actor and writer for our advert! Check Mike out 🙂

– A mentor willing to help us with the production in Asia.

– Contact details of a pilot with a long experience in the Airlines sector at many levels and the endorsement of one of the mentor.

Furthermore, and this was my favourite part, we got the other teams’ enthusiasm to support us. Being among the 5 ‘winners’ of the weekend was just a small drop compared to the sea of energy and optimism we received, and it came with a clearer view on the future, the horizon we aim for (just to keep the ‘Captain-ship’ metaphor a bit longer).

There is still a lot of work to do, now more than ever, and the Final is just this Wednesday, but we are all more aware of our potential and our possibilities. And you can feel it in the air.
Everything has changed, we discover something new about ourselves and about each other.
Change is there all the time, in the eyes of the observer, in a new context or experience, in saying Yes instead of No. Taking risks and believing.

By the way, thanks to Antoine Lavoisier for the Post title, hope he wouldn’t mind that I skipped the ‘Nothing is created’ part. As a Creative Thinker I could’ve written a whole post just about that. Maybe next time.