Peter Strid, VP of Sales at PeopleLinx

@PeterStrid
@PeopleLinx
PeopleLinx.com

Peter Strid has a hunch we are all pretty bad at using LinkedIn. When he asks the 75-person crowd who uses it, almost every hand goes up. “OK, now who considers themselves effective, or has gotten a sale from it?” All hands, save one, go down.

His latest venture, PeopleLinx, harnesses the power of social networks to help large organizations manage their branding, content, and relationships. “ If I’ve got two sales reps, one of them using social, and the other not, I’m going to bet on the guy who’s using it. The numbers shake out.”

As immersed in startup life as he is today, he would counsel you against leaping into a startup first thing. “If I was kid out of college, I wouldn’t go work for a startup. I’d find out how a big company works, and translate that to startups.”

It is this path that has led him to success with PeopleLinx.

His Non-startup Startup Life
“Taking a risk to get into a startup is made much easier by understanding how big companies work.”

Peter found inspiration in former GE chairman Jack Welsh’s book, Jack: Straight From The Gut. “I thought it was such an amazing organization.” He got a job in GE healthcare as part of their imaging division. “Here I was selling 5,000 pound nuclear imaging devices. My business card said ‘Nuclear Specialist.’ My friends loved that.”

“Understanding how GE works, the politics, how a deal is structured, what the contracts look like, has prepared me to make PeopleLinx a success.”

On Hiring Interns
“It’s wrong to hire an intern to run your social media.”

Part of Peter’s job often includes educating potential clients. “People used to think it was a good idea to hire an intern to run their social media. Wrong! Taking a big, established brand identity like KPMG and giving it to someone inexperienced is a bad idea. People have realized that.”

He describes social as a “three-legged stool for enterprises: It’s what you look like (your profile), what content you post, and who is in your network. If any of those three ‘legs’ are missing, then the stool falls over. The top of the stool is measurement, ROI.”

“If you have 100,000 followers on LinkedIn, it’s one thing. But what if you have 5,000 employees, each with 300-400 connections? Your reach is huge. When you recruit for new jobs, you want to hire the people connected to your network. They stay longer, they’re happier, and there is a lower cost of acquisition for the enterprise.”

On Getting the Most out of Your Content
“We are going to repurpose the shit out of that thing.”

Peter and his team recently wrote a white paper based on a survey they conducted through Survey Monkey. “It took a little bit of time, but it created massive SEO for us. We packed it with data and statistics, and we are going to repurpose the shit out of that thing. We’ll use the individual pieces from it in all our social media blasts to drive traffic back to that one document.”

“If no one knows about your idea, that thing will sit on a shelf and wither away. Tying social media into your idea is a component of success.”