MILWAUKEE – Mike Mallwitz is a no-nonsense executive who for years swore by an old-school communications method: picking up the phone and calling.
Now, however, Mallwitz is increasingly relying on a different approach: LinkedIn.
As president of Busch Precision Inc., a nearly 110-year-old Milwaukee machine shop and rebuilder, Mallwitz says he's particularly interested in congratulating people for their accomplishments. Maybe he sees a customer featured in a news story, or hears about a former employee who got hired for a new job.
LinkedIn, he says, is a great way to give someone a pat on the back.
"I was hesitant, there's no question," Mallwitz said. But in 2009, after taking a class about how to do it, Mallwitz says he slowly became a convert.
Mallwitz is one of 414 million people in the world, by LinkedIn's count, using the online social media platform for business professionals.
The company went public in 2011, and its shares traded above $250 as recently as last fall. But a bad revenue forecast, along with concerns over its decision to scrap a business-to-business ad network, sent the stock plummeting more than 40 percent on Feb. 5 to close at $108.
Different from Facebook, Twitter, Slack and other social media networks, LinkedIn is mainly used by businesspeople to find new customers, employers and employees, and to maintain business connections.
"Don't think of LinkedIn as a social media tool; think of it as the best database of business professionals you ever had," said Wayne Breitbarth, a Milwaukee-based LinkedIn trainer, speaker and consultant.
In the past, companies had to buy databases, and by the time they arrived they were often outdated, Breitbarth said. Not only that, the information was unreliable.
With LinkedIn, which was founded in Mountain View, Calif., in 2002, users keep their own information up-to-date, and are typically very motivated to do so.
"Purchasing managers are on it not because they want to be bothered by sales guys who call on them," Breitbarth said. "They realize that in order to get called by recruiters who specialize in purchasing managers, they've got to be on it."
Dena Wortzel, director of the Wisconsin Humanities Council, a history and culture nonprofit, was hesitant about LinkedIn because she says she didn't understand how she could use it. But recently, she discovered how she could use it to research candidates for a grant program director job and was pleasantly surprised to realize people in the fields of culture and education were using it too.
Software engineer Nick Gartmann says that, as with Facebook and other social media platforms, there's social pressure to have a LinkedIn account. For businesspeople it's "kind of weird" not to have a LinkedIn account, Gartmann said.
"Like any social media platform," he said, "you have to participate heavily in it to get big value from it."
