My Top 10 LinkedIn Articles

I joined LinkedIn on June 2nd, 2003 and was the 6,221st person to sign up for the service, and have been a huge fan of the platform ever since. It wasn’t until April 10th, 2014 that I published my first article to the platform (Tapping the Advantages of Social), but since then I’ve published a total of 64 articles (as of today). You’ll see me occasionally pushing a link out to one of these articles via various social channels, or I might reference one of them in another article somewhere, but today I thought I’d surface a few more of them through a Top 10 list.

Here are my Top 10 most-viewed articles on LinkedIn, with a sentence or two pulled from each to give you an idea of their contents:

10. Overcome the Fear of Change Through Overcommunication

People don’t handle change very well. Understanding that truth is the first step, and over-communicating your strategy is the best way to manage any kind of change.

9. Office 365, Change Management, and the Impact of Evergreen Services

The only constant in life is change – and if you are a customer of Office 365, then you know all about change, and have likely had to adjust some internal practices to handle the almost constant stream of enhancements, UX tweaks, and adjustments within the platform.

8. Building Your Brand

A common mistake is thinking that your corporate branding – your logo, tagline, and chosen color palette – constitutes your brand. Sure, these things play a role in your branding, but they are just one small facet of your overall brand.

7. Above the Line Marketing

One of the first lessons in marketing — and which I had experienced in real-time during my door-to-door sales experience — is to constantly review and adjust your “marketing mix,” a concept which was popularized in the early 1960’s by Michigan State University marketing professor E. Jerome McCarthy as the Four P’s of marketing: Product, Price, Placement, and Promotion.

6. The ESN is Dead, Welcome to the Digital Workplace

With Facebook officially launching Workplace this week, and Microsoft continuing to fold Yammer into the broader Office 365 platform, I’ve been asked by a number of people about my thoughts on all of this news, and whether I see a new dawn for the enterprise social network.

5. Ignore that Pie in the Sky: Understanding Your Real Market Potential

A question often asked of entrepreneurs is ‘How big is your market?’ Whether you are trying to raise capital through equity investment, or building a business plan and sales strategy for an already established company, this question is one of the most important you can ask yourself – and the answer is one of the most difficult to base in reality.

4. The Evolution of the Social Network

As social networking becomes more pervasive within both personal and working relationships online, our need to manage these networks will only increase. All connections are not equal. As my networks grow, I foresee the need for more automated and detailed filters and management tools for different personal and professional connections.

3. Solving the Productivity Problem

Fifteen to twenty years ago, most organizations battled daily with the ongoing task of integrating disparate systems and data to provide end users with a federated (complete) view across all of them. Tools that manage and automate content collaboration and social interactions are becoming more integrated and seamless within the workplace, and their rich features are being included within both enterprise applications and cloud-based solutions. The enterprise platforms we use at work are increasingly looking at not just solving core workloads, but in ensuring productivity when moving *between* workloads.

2. Five Things Your CIO Wants To Get Out Of Your Collaboration Platform

For independent software vendors (ISVs) and strategic integrators (SIs or consultants) who are struggling with the move to a cloud-based model, you should not think about your customer footprint today as shrinking due to Microsoft’s expansion into SaaS and services, but as a growth opportunity outside of their traditional product or service boundaries

1.  How Well Do You Capitalize on Your Talent Pool?

A few years back while working at Microsoft, I was able to attend a briefing with one of my favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell, who opened his presentation by sharing with the audience a topic that had been on his mind since writing his newest book at the time, Outliers. His idea surrounded the capitalization of innovation, or, more specifically, our ability to capitalize on talent. In fact, he shared that the topic was so pervasive in his mind, had he been able to go back and amend his book, he would have included this new insight as a chapter.

Thanks for reading through this list, and hopefully you were able to find one or two articles that prove interesting in some way. I will continue to publish to the LinkedIn platform, and actually have a goal this year to increase my footprint there. If you’re reading this and we are not connected on LinkedIn, please send me an invite and reference this post. Always happy to connect with actual members of the community!