© 2008-2009 The Art Therapy Alliance
JOINING THE ART THERAPY ALLIANCE
What is LinkedIn? (From About LinkedIn)
LinkedIn’s simple philosophy: Relationships Matter.
Your professional relationships are key to your professional success.
LinkedIn's mission is to help you be more effective in your daily work and open doors to opportunities using the professional relationships you already have.
When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional accomplishments.
Your profile helps you find and be found by former colleagues, clients, and partners. You can add more connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you.
Your network consists of your connections, your connections’ connections, and the people they know, linking you to thousands of qualified professionals.
Through your network you can:
- Find potential clients, service providers, subject experts, and partners who come recommended
- Be found for business opportunities
- Search for great jobs
- Discover inside connections that can help you land jobs and close deals
- Post and distribute job listings
- Get introduced to other professionals through the people you know
Why join the Art Therapy Alliance on LinkedIn? What's the benefit?
The Art Therapy Alliance is an on-line professional group for art therapists on LinkedIn. The Art Therapy Alliance embraces social media and connection on-line to promote art therapy, the work of art therapists, and build community. This site features resources, groups, blogs, and more related to the field of art therapy worldwide and these tools are *free*.
Some considerations from Guy Kawasaki's blog "Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn"
- People with more than 20 connections are 34 times more likley to be approached with a job opportunity than people with less than 5 connections.
- It is a great utility given the global network of more than 8.5 Million professionals representing 130 industries.
- 100% or ALL 500 of the Fortune 500 are representative in LinkedIn, and 499 of those companies are represented by director level and above connections.
- 11-12 of the practical business problems you can regularly solve with Linked In.
Also consider this from from LinkedIn HFCN Group:
After you have invited everyone you know however, How do you manage and increase your visibility? For me the answer came in from Linked In Groups. From these groups I started to learn some of the secret benefits of Linked In that allowed me to make better use of the tool. Groups extended my knowledge, let me help others, while I learned from others, and created a solid platform from which I could extend my connections to people that can help solve the problems that I or my clients need to have solved.
Linked In Groups offer a fun way to connect with others. However when industry luminaries such as Forbes create a few of these groups that allow organizers who host the group to stay in touch with their customer, their networking needs, imagine the competitive value. It is good for the host of such groups in driving brand recognition. It is good for the members who can extend and accelerate their professional reach through association, introduction and referrals.
How can I become part of the Art Therapy Alliance?
Join LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com and then visit here to make a request to join The Art Therapy Alliance. The Art Therapy Alliance also has a fan page on Facebook and on Twitter.
