LinkedIn is the New Competitive Moat that Nobody is Talking About

Investors love moats. Business strategists love moats.

Moats are what keep your competitors at bay. No moat, or a weak moat, and you’re susceptible to being overrun by the competition at any time.

With a strong enough moat, or several moats, you’ve got a huge (and potentially insurmountable) competitive advantage.

There’s lots of talk, and lots of great writing, about moats but I’ve yet to see anyone talk about LinkedIn this way.  

This Isn’t About LinkedIn’s Moat. It’s About YOUR Moat, Built on LinkedIn

And to be clear, I’m not talking about LinkedIn’s own moats. They have several. Network effects and switching costs most obviously. A powerful brand too.

I’m talking about how other companies can use LinkedIn very differently from what they do now and create an extremely powerful competitive moat of their own.

A Quick Review of Some Common Moats

• Network Effects – More users make it more valuable for every user. Think telephones and social networks.
• Switching Costs – Costs incurred when moving from one product or supplier to another. These costs may be financial (cancellation fees, new equipment purchase) as well as operational (training people on new tools, enduring business disruption, risks of data relocation etc.)
• Intellectual Property – Patents and copyrights provide all sorts of competitive moats.
• Market Entry Costs – Some industries are capital-intensive and very expensive to enter (energy, airlines, automotive manufacturing etc.) while others are much less expensive (software development, ecommerce, etc.)
• Regulatory Hurdles – Licensing and regulations can hinder market entry by directly forbidding entry (try opening a new casino in most places for example) or by making cost, complexity and time horizons unworkable for all but established players (the pharmaceutical industry comes to mind).

There are many other types of competitive moats as well, and far better overviews than this. 

My objective here is just to get us all on the same page about what a competitive moat is, and why moats are powerful drivers of business value. 

The Critical Importance of Trust in B2B Sales

Trust is critical in B2B. Make the wrong purchase decision and you might endure months, even years, of painful frustration.

You might burn your reputation. You might get fired.

Do you really want to be the one who chooses or champions the unknown solution? 

Choose a trusted solution and if things go wrong, they take the blame. Choose the unknown provider and all eyes will be on you if it turns into a painful and expensive mess.

Trust Lives at the Edge of the Organization

Trust lives at the edge of the organization. It lives in the people who market, sell, implement, and serve current and future clients.

Trust lives in the way every client-facing employee demonstrates their expertise, passion, integrity, and commitment to doing the right things every day.

This trust is absolutely critical to building and sustaining business success.

A lot of that trust is built in day-to-day interactions. Clients absolutely know when people, and companies, view them as nothing but a source of revenue. They know when you don’t really care.  

Hopefully you’re doing the 1:1 trust building well. If you’re not, you can probably skip the rest of this and focus on that instead.

But if you are earning trust 1:1, you’re very likely missing a huge opportunity to amplify it in a way that can build a powerful competitive moat.

A Transformational Value Creator

Those firms that empower and enable their people to show up and speak up on social media, and on LinkedIn in particular, are activating an incredibly powerful trust multiplier.

It’s transformational when people share high-quality content and authentically add value, and when they engage in conversations that demonstrate that critical expertise, passion, integrity and commitment that builds trust.

And it’s a much deeper, far more authentic, and longer lasting trust than any centralized brand-building campaign could dream of delivering.

While They Hunt, You Become a Magnet

While your competitors hunt, you empower and enable your people to become authentic, respected, trusted magnets.

While your competitors spray and pray, you give and nurture.

While your competitors drive people away with their relentless self-serving outreach, you pull the market toward you by freely providing value.

While your competitors measure success in near-term transactional outcomes, you’re building a much greater, longer-term, far more sustainable success.

And while your competitors’ commission breath is destroying trust, your people are building a massive competitive advantage.  

Your Employees Doing LinkedIn RIGHT is the New Moat

Not just having good LinkedIn profiles. Being findable and demonstrating that they’re credible professionals is table stakes.

Not just blasting your corporate content. LinkedIn is so much more than a broadcast channel. If all your people do is share your own content you’re going to look pretty selfish and tone deaf.

You build your moat when your people truly engage.

When they share current, relevant, interesting and valuable content from a wide range of sources. 

When they leave value-adding comments on other people’s posts and engage in actual conversations in comment threads.

When they share some of the learnings, insights, challenges and opportunities they’re experiencing as they problem-solve with prospects, serve clients, develop their skills, progress through their careers, and grow the business.

This, done at scale with confidence and purpose, is how forward-thinking companies are going to build a moat that will be extremely difficult for competitors to overcome. 

LinkedIn is the Greatest Ongoing Business Conversation the World Has Ever Seen  

LinkedIn is the greatest ongoing business conversation the world has ever seen. And far too many people, and companies, are sitting it out.  

Do you want to find yourself in a position where your competitors have hundreds or perhaps thousands of highly engaged, highly credible, highly trusted participants in countless industry and professional conversations and you don’t?

That’s a scary moat to let them build.