LinkedIn Tip #1: Review Your Profile Regularly

March 30, 2009 By

This is the first in a series of weekly posts in which I’ll be sharing some tips on how to use LinkedIn to good effect. This week’s tip is about having a well-crafted, up to date profile. And that includes paying close attention to keywords.

The idea of a series of LinkedIn tips has been prompted by my experience, over the past couple of weeks, of getting requests for advice and suggestions on how best to use LinkedIn to help grow your business or network. In each instance found myself writing more in reply than I think was expected.

Then I reminded myself that I have spent a lot of time studying and writing about LinkedIn. In fact it’s not long ago that my colleague Bill Vick and I were working on the second edition, now available, of our book LinkedIn for Recruiting (update June 2010: as LinkedIn has since gone through more changes, the printed book is no longer sale, but the e-book version is available free of charge for research purposes). So it stands to reason there are things about LinkedIn that I may take as given, but which could well be news to a lot of people.

LinkedIn for Recruiting book cover

The book is based on interviews with top gun recruiters, sourcers and other industry specialists. And while the interviews and the book focus on the recruiting industry, a great proportion of the insights and advice is more generally applicable.

When we started the review I wondered whether what had been written a couple of years ago might be out of date. In fact it became pretty clear to me in the review process that the fundamental principles for smart use of LinkedIn that we drew from those interviews still provide a sound basis for getting value from the platform and network. While a lot has changed with LinkedIn and how it operates since we first researched and wrote that book, some basic principles have endured.

One of the principles that has endured is the importance of having a well-crafted, polished profile. And part of that exercise is to make sure to include the key words which describe or point to our talents and specialties, thus increasing the likelihood that we will be found by people searching on LinkedIn.

Joe Pelayo, one of the top Executive Recruiters in the United States, said in being interviewed for LinkedIn for Recruiting:

“The most important thing people neglect is their LinkedIn profile.” (p 74)

Just over a year ago I posted here, recommending a LinkedIn profile makeover and linking to Guy Kawasaki’s benchmark post, from early in 2007, on the subject.

Re-reading those posts now, I notice that neither of them mentions explicitly the importance of keywords.

In LinkedIn for Recruiting, leading Internet research expert Suzi Tonini explained the importance of keywords in your LinkedIn profile:

“List your strengths and accomplishments. And use keywords. Keywords are important anywhere on the Internet. As many keywords as apply to your industry, background, accomplishments, whatever you’ve done – put them in there. Then anybody who wants to network with you will be able to find you easier.” (p 14)

As well as helping with your findability on LinkedIn via general search engines such as Google, choosing and using good keywords will give you a big advantage in terms of searches from directly within the LinkedIn platform.

Remember also to review your profile regularly, especially when you change jobs or roles.

And a simple but important part of the editing process should be to customize your profile link (essentially the Web address of your profile) from the standard issue format to the more user-friendly format http://www.linkedin.com/in/yourname. Then put that in the signature block for your email and in other places online or offline where you have the opportunity to share your link. Clarence Klopfstein provides a simple, clear explanation of how to customize your profile link.

For anyone unfamiliar with how to edit their LinkedIn profile, the LinkedIn help section provides some basic instructions.

If you have a LinkedIn success story to share, I hope you will do so here, with a comment and if appropriate a link in the comment. And if you have a question about how you can best improve your LinkedIn profile page, I will do my best to answer or find someone else who will do so.

Other tips in this series:

Tip # 2: Take Time to Link Strategically

Tip # 3: Give Useful Recommendations

Filed Under: Business, Resources, Social Media, Social networking Tagged With: , , , , ,

Social Media Resources: Alltop Travel Page

January 7, 2009 By

I’ve been a fan of Alltop – “We’ve got all the top stories covered all the time” – from early on and I admit that having this site listed on the social media page there has helped. Alltop describes itself as an “online magazine rack” of popular topics. It’s an amazing resource for finding blogs from a great range of topics.

I had an example just today of how helpful Alltop can be in that regard.

I was responding to a friend who is thinking of setting up a travel blog. I wanted to send her some examples of quality travel blogs and – this is not an area of specialization for me – the only one I could think of, off the top of my head, was Sheila Scarborough’s excellent Family Travel Logue.

Then the penny dropped. Alltop, of course! Assuming they had a travel section, which I quickly discovered that indeed they did. I counted 56 sites listed on the Alltop travel page. Authors included kitchen expose guy Anthony Bourdain who writes about travel and food, Lonely Planet co-founder Tony Wheeler, the FareCompare guy Rick Seaney, the dynamic Travelling Mamas and the inimitable Sheila Scarborough as previously mentioned.

Back in November last year there were, according to Alltop co-founder Guy Kawasaki, some 350 topics on the site overall. There are no doubt plenty more now. And there is an email update system so that fans like me or the just plain interested can receive direct notification of new topics when they are launched.

Filed Under: Resources, Social Media Tagged With: , , , ,

Why I Find Alltop Social Media Useful

March 21, 2008 By

Yesterday on Thinking Home Business I wrote about the new web content aggregator site Alltop and observed that it is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to get a quick, interesting overview of current online coverage of their favorite topic. That post was focused on the Small Business category on Alltop.

This deswalsh.com site is listed in the Social Media section of Alltop.

Alltop Social Media

One commenter on my post yesterday asked why I would not just use a feed reader. My reply was that it was a case of complementarity, not either/or.

The feeds on my reader (or rather, readers) are chosen by me. That’s an advantage, in that I can avoid having information coming in that is of no interest, or an unproductive distraction. It’s also a drawback, because I know that:

  • there are lots of sites I don’t know about, or don’t know enough about, to automatically include them in my feed reader
  • life would be truly dull if there were no surprises

The selection of sites featured on Alltop is made by others. So I get to be better informed than if I were left to my own reader-stuffing devices and I get to be more entertained than if I had to be solely responsible for surprising myself.

To be honest, initially I had been a bit wary of the site after reading Jeremiah Owyang’s contentious – and contested – post, in which he labeled the Alltop project a “gimmick site with marketing flair”.

And Community Guy Jake McKee has an interesting point when he argues that Alltop, with its lack of login, RSS and commenting, could be called an “anti-social media site“.

Jake also says that Alltop is “fast, focused and useful”. I agree. And, also like Jake, I am happy to have my site included. Thanks Guy.

Filed Under: Social Media, Web 2.0 Tagged With: , , ,

Spring Clean Your LinkedIn Profile, Part One: Basic Makeover

March 8, 2008 By

Spring Blossom by Steve Knight

(Photograph: Spring Blossom by Steve Knight)

It’s not actually Spring for me, it’s Autumn here, but for most of the people who read this blog it is Spring, traditionally a time to clean house. This post is about applying that thinking to updating our profiles on the social networking site LinkedIn.

The thought was prompted when I was travelling the other day and took advantage of what would otherwise have been airport terminal downtime to re-read, for the first time in a while, the book LinkedIn for Recruiting, which I co-authored with Bill Vick.

We are planning an update soon, so I thought it would be good to see how much work was needed! I was not surprised to discover that there are some web links and a few other points of detail to be updated. Overall, however, and in my humble opinion, the book still stands up well.

The exercise was also a good refresher in some things I could do to make LinkedIn work better for me – and ways I could be using it to help others better.

Importance of an up to date profile

In particular, I was reminded that more than one of the people interviewed for the book emphasized the importance of having a well-constructed, up to date profile. I recall at least one interviewee saying that the one thing people most neglect with LinkedIn is to set up their profile properly. A corollary is that some of us neglect to update our profiles regularly. Yes, some of us. Even though I wrote the book I have been remiss in this – as the old saying goes, the plumber’s house leaks and the cobbler’s children go barefoot. But one of the beauties of your LinkedIn profile is that you can edit it any time, 24/7/365 and as often as you like.

The Guy Kawasaki LinkedIn Profile Extreme Makeover

For a good overview of what is involved in setting up or refreshing your LinkedIn profile, no one, as far as I know, has yet improved, for immediacy and clarity, on Guy Kawasaki’s January 2007 blog post LinkedIn Profile Extreme Makeover. This shares, with a detailed screenshot, the advice Guy had received from some very knowledgeable LinkedIn staffers, Kay Luo and Mike Lin, on how to make his LinkedIn profile more useful.

Given that a year has passed, I found it very interesting to compare Guy’s pre-makeover profile with his profile as it is now. It occurred to me that Guy has done us all a huge favor by sharing his profile as it was previously, so we can compare the “before” and “after” versions: I don’t know of anywhere else we could see a comparison like that. The changes might not seem significant to anyone who has not worked on their profile, but the difference is that the profile is now better tuned to do its job of letting people know, more clearly and more immediately, the things Guy wants potential clients, business partners and industry peers to be aware of about him, what he does and his style.

One of the most significant changes is with the Summary. The old version was fairly uninformative (items in bubbles are Kay Luo’s suggestions for improvement):

Guy Kawasaki's profile summary - old vesion

The new version tells us something in an engaging way and could prompt a prospective client or other interested party to contact Guy.

Big difference. The old summary wasn’t wrong: but it was just a few phrases and didn’t tell us much about the man. The current version tells a story. It has content, it shows accomplishment and authority. Importantly, it also has a dash of humor: for me, too many LinkedIn profiles read like an obituary, rather than as depicting a real live person, the sort of person you would be interested to meet and maybe work with or have work for you.

“Do people actually read your LinkedIn profile?”

Recently, I mentioned to a colleague that his LinkedIn profile did not really do him justice and was out of date, and suggested it would be in his interest to update it. “Do people read those things?” he asked. Well, yes, they do. Not everyone of course. But a lot of people do. For example, if I’m speaking at a conference I usually try to find the LinkedIn profile of the other speakers beforehand. If someone contacts me about a business proposal, I will typically search for their profile on LinkedIn. More than once I’ve found that people have joined but done nothing with their profile page, so they have missed an opportunity to promote themselves, their brand.

And I know that people check me out on LinkedIn. This past week, for instance.

Only five, and I don’t know if any of those visits will produce any business for me, but if there had been some potential and they had not found what they were looking for, just because I had not updated my profile, I know I’d be kicking myself.

my LinkedIn profileActually, writing that previous paragraph reminded me that I have some new information that I need to add to my profile. So that will be the next port of call after I post this. A bit different from the days when you had a printed brochure and had to wait till you were ready for the next printing!

Help is only a click away

How’s your LinkedIn profile looking? Time for an update? If you are not sure of your way around the LinkedIn site, there is a great step-by-step post at LinkedIn Life, an “insider’s guide to using LinkedIn”.

See also expert-on-all-things-LinkedIn Scott Allen’s riff on Guy Kawasaki’s extreme makeover post, with lots of good bullet points to help you leverage your LinkedIn membership to the max.

Watch for the next post in this short (probably two part, but let’s wait and see) series on spring cleaning your LinkedIn profile.

(Note: March 30, 2009. I realize I did not get to do a Part Two of this, but a year on I have started a series of tips on using LinkedIn)
RSS stuff

You can make sure you see that and future posts by getting the RSS feed for this blog (if “RSS feed” doesn’t mean anything or is confusing, this 3 minute video from master explainer Lee LeFever should do the trick).

Filed Under: Business, General, Social networking Tagged With: , , , , ,