Image via Wikipedia As you get more comfortable with using LinkedIn, the day may come when you start connecting with other professionals that you may not know very well. I am not referring to becoming a LinkedIn LION or open networker, but connecting with people that you may have had a chance to meet at a networking event and added to your LinkedIn network yet do not personally know very well. Soon after connecting with this new acquaintance on LinkedIn, you may all of the sudden receive the following type of request: It was a pleasure meeting you recently at …
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Image by annapmagistra via Flickr LinkedIn is a very interesting social networking site. Many users say they only want to connect with people in their closed network, but unless that network is big enough, the benefits of using LinkedIn to find and be found become minimal. On the other hand, I find many users who don’t care about acquiring LinkedIn connections often talk about how many they have as an indication of how active they are on the site. So how many LinkedIn connections should you have? I recently shot a video at a keynote speech on social media in …
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How often do you look at your LinkedIn Network Statistics? You can access them directly from navigating over to “Contacts” and then selecting Network Statistics. Everybody loves to look at these statistics as this is where you start to see the power of your network. If you were curious as to what the numbers of a LinkedIn power user like myself are, these are the latest statistics for my network: This post is not about my network, though: It’s about the whole mechanism of these statistics. I have seen my total numbers drop on occasion. In fact, I distinctly remember …
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If you looked at 10 different LinkedIn profiles, you might see 10 different ways in which people have entered their details. For a social networking platform that is trying to standardize the way people depict themselves with their “xxx% profile completeness” status that appears when you edit your profile, the results have been surprisingly across the board. I am still amazed when I find professionals, and even active job seekers, without “complete” profiles. Remember, LinkedIn profile completeness is not just about increasing chances that your business will get new leads from LinkedIn or that you will find a job on …
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LinkedIn is slowly evolving their functionality to become more like a true Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software package. While it will be hard for LinkedIn to compete with SalesForce.com, the recent addition of the Profile Organizer as well as the more recent My Connections (also called Connections Beta) have made it significantly easier for businesses and professionals to organize their social networks on LinkedIn. Have you started using the new LinkedIn Tags feature to start organizing your network?
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The inspiration for this blog post comes from someone I consider to be a true thought leader in social media, someone who I had a chance to finally meet in person recently: Jeremiah Owyang. He wrote a blog post back in 2008 entitled “Stop Fondling the Hammer, and Focus on the House,” and I didn’t even read this obscure post until my friend who has taught me a great deal about social media, Roderick (@Fogfish), recently mentioned in a Twitter Direct Message that he “was fondling the hammer too much” and followed that with a link to Jeremiah’s blog post. …
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I am amazed by how many small businesses do not utilize social media to the maximum. Think about it: social media, like the internet two decades ago, allows any business to compete with larger, more established entities. Come on, what are you waiting for? What further amazes me is how few small businesses maximize their presence on LinkedIn and instead just follow the trend of Facebook and Twitter. Why would a niche B2B company establish a Facebook Fan Page when their potential customers may not be social on Facebook yet are already used to networking on LinkedIn? I’m confused. That’s …
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LinkedIn has been around for many years now, and maybe some of you created an account in the early days of 2004 like I did and just forgot about it, including the password. Then, later on you created a second account. Or maybe you used your business email as your primary email address and no longer work at that company. Either way, I am always hearing stories of people desperate to merge two LinkedIn accounts into one for various reasons, the most common being that they just can’t access one of their accounts anymore. How can you merge two accounts …
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If it hasn’t happened to you yet, it will soon: the dreaded request for a LinkedIn Recommendation from a former co-worker or employee that you may not want to give one to. Why? Well, every time you make a recommendation, it appears on your profile and becomes part of your LinkedIn Brand. Perhaps you don’t want to be associated in any way with this person. What to do?
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I will start out this post by letting you know that I am not in any way nor have ever been a recruiter or a headhunter. While I have been a hiring manager for previous companies, my experience in being able to write this post comes from helping out many recruiters looking for candidates on or off LinkedIn. Because I am a Windmill Networker, I see great value in establishing relationships with recruiters and helping them out when I can. In fact, my LinkedIn Profile Contact Settings explicitly state: I also enjoy speaking with recruiters and providing introductions whenever possible …
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