I had dinner last night with a publicly elected official from a large American city. I was impressed with his understanding of Social Media, and he had already created and implemented a strategy to utilize Facebook for political purposes. But what about LinkedIn? LinkedIn is still seen as being a boring, static medium when compared, as it often is, to Twitter and Facebook. This is because LinkedIn is pretty much a closed world, with only a few LinkedIn applications available that you can use to make your profile more interactive. What a lot of people are missing is the interactivity …
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LinkedIn recently updated their blog with a post entitled 5 Ways to Get More from Your LinkedIn Groups. But, as with information that LinkedIn is beginning to religiously blog and tweet about, I find it is too little and too late. After all, I was first in providing LinkedIn advice for College Students before the LinkedIn introduction of their Grads Group (at least to my knowledge, if I am incorrect in the timing please correct me!), and I find the best practices information that has recently provided on Groups can be further enriched by this blog. After all, this blog …
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Your LinkedIn Status Update – What Should You Use it For? Do you ever notice that “What are your working on now?” question on your LinkedIn Home Page? The one that appears under your Inbox and at the top of your Network Updates section? Anything you enter here, which I will refer to as a “Status Update”, will not only get broadcasted on your profile right underneath your Profile Headline but will also appear on the Network Updates on the Home Page of all of your connections should you have allowed your updates to be sent and your connections are …
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I once answered this on this blog when I answered the question “Why Do So Many People Keep Their Connections Private?”, but since it has been awhile, and since this question was asked from a different perspective, I think it is important to revisit the topic. First of all, in order to even potentially be able to browse anyone’s connections, you first have to be directly connected to that person. I realize that in other platforms like Facebook the option exists to allow everyone to browse your friends, whether or not they are connected with you. Remember, LinkedIn is different …
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I recently received this question and realized that there weren’t a lot of resources out there for soon-to-be-professionals to look for in terms of creating an optimal LinkedIn profile. I also believe that any college student that is on LinkedIn is to be commended for staying “ahead of the curve”, so here is my advice to you all:
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It is amazing how often I not only get asked this question of how to disconnect from someone and remove LinkedIn connections from my own personal network but also how frequently it appears on LinkedIn Answers. If you think of connecting to someone as their joining your virtual world, if the relationship does not work out because you feel you are being spammed or for another reason, you do have the option of disconnecting from them and removing them as a connection. Connecting with someone is not a marriage by any means! Hopefully this gives those who want to build …
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This will be the fourth and last look at the recent changes made by LinkedIn in the Groups and Inbox functionality. Now that Inbox is positioned, literally, in the top center of your Home Page and as the central location for your online communications on the professional networking site, it raises the question of how do you actually utilize the Inbox. I actually created a question on Answers to ask others how they utilize Inbox in comparison to all of the other email, web, and social media applications that exist. You can see all of the answers here: http://budurl.com/neal6.
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If you are on LinkedIn for a specific objective, start a LinkedIn Group. Period. There is no better way to start your own community and add your own brand to the LinkedIn community. I have already posted information on how to promote your LinkedIn Group, and am working on new material as to why you should have a Group and how to best utilize it, but if you have not started your own LinkedIn Group or have not joined and participated in many of the communities that exist, you may be missing out on one of LinkedIn’s greatest features. It …
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This is going to be the first part of a few blog posts analyzing the new LinkedIn Group functionality as well as changes to the LinkedIn Inbox and the Groups that were enacted last week. There are some LinkedIn Groups that I know that are actually thinking of accelerating activity OFF of LinkedIn and instead creating their own Ning.com platform. The changes are that fundamental that they warrant multiple blog posts.
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I hope I got your attention with this title, but I believe we are entering a new era of social networking where people with large networks are now attempting to monetize their LinkedIn connections. And the events of today will certainly accelerate this. As you probably know from my other posts, I am a LION (LinkedIn Open Networker) and I have almost 13,000 direct connections on LinkedIn, which ranked me about #150 worldwide the last time I could confirm this on LinkedIn (since they changed the search application several weeks ago it is now impossible to check this easily). However, …
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