If you’re a professional or business person, you know you need to be using LinkedIn wisely, right? And, college students, that goes for you, too. If you don’t know why it matters or know deep-down in the pit of your stomach, you know that you’re really not all that sure what to do with LinkedIn, then this is for you……

I’m excited to be partnering with O’Reilly Media to present a free webinar on using the more advanced features of LinkedIn on April 20. Here’s the deal…this webinar is for people who have already customized and optimized their LinkedIn profiles. If you start actively using LinkedIn’s more interactive features without having done the critical work on your profile first, you won’t get nearly the value out of your efforts as you would have otherwise. In fact, this can work against you.

To bridge this gap and make sure to catch everyone up so you are ready to get the most out of the O’Reilly webinar, I am offering another webinar before then to cover all the customization tips and details which are often overlooked.

Be sure to register and mark your calendars for:

• April 20, 10:00 am (Pacific) LinkedIn Beyond the Basics – In partnership with O’Reilly. This is FREE
• April 23, 10:00 am (Pacific) LinkedIn Basics Webinar – Regular price $39 (a great deal!) 50% Discount code to be shared during O’Reilly session

What questions or tips would you like to have covered in the sessions? While I probably won’t be able to cover everything, your input is most helpful as I prepare the best presentation to meet your needs.

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Related articles which may interest you:

• LinkedIn Lets You Show Off Your Best Assets
• Happy Holidays! Please Enjoy This Spam
• Dear Ex-Facebook Friend…
• Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me a Match
• LinkedIn Tip – Got Street Cred?

We all want to be found more easily online when our friends, potential clients and employers Google us. We’ve set up our LinkedIn profiles, started blogging, created websites, invited others to be our friends on Facebook and tweeted like crazy on Twitter. With all of these fragmented presences online, wouldn’t it be nice to have a directory of all the places we can be found, plus the option to include our email address, phone number and tags which help the right people find us and get in touch? That way, we could direct people to just one place to be referred to the various ways to contact us and find out what we’re up to. It’s sort of like a virtual phone book; you remember the phone book, don’t you? They used to be useful way back when, before we found contact information online and started using them only as doorstops and booster seats for kids not tall enough to reach the dining table.

There are plenty of easy ways to do this now. Each offers their own features and options for customization and discoverability. Among the options are:

• .me
• hi.im
• Google Profile
• .tel

Today, I am focusing on registering a .tel domain (you may be more familiar with other domains, such as .com, .net and .org). To help me understand the benefits of owning my .tel domain, I met with Vincent Largilliere of Digitrad, who was kind enough to walk me through the set-up. First, it is important to understand that registering a .tel domain is similar to registering any domain – it is not free, unlike the other sites I’ve listed above. For that fee, though, you have more control of your information because it is a completely different site, rather than just a page on someone else’s site. I encourage you to look at the features of each type of directory listing. There is no reason you can’t use more than one of the options above.

What is .tel?

From the Digitrad website:

(click image to enlarge)

The .tel allows you to store, publish and update online all your contact information and keywords under your unique domain name, without the need for a website

> For individuals, .tel is a business card fully secure and customizable.

> For companies, .tel is both a limited public directory open to customers, and a internal directory, complete and secure for you and your co-workers .

All the extensions are identical, .tel is different: classical extensions link a website to an address, .tel links an address to an identity. This is its specificity and main strength.

.tel will allow you to increase your visibility on the Internet, to optimize your referencing, but also and more importantly to manage your personal digital identity as you see it, with the flexibility and the security that you need

More information can be found on the Digitrad website here.

Want to register .tel for free?

Vincent has offered free registration of a .tel account for AlmostSavvy readers. If you’d like to grab a year’s free registration of your very own .tel account, take a look at the video and keep reading.

In the video, Vincent answers a few questions about the value of .tel and walks me through the set-up process. You’ll note that I had to do quite a bit of editing (it seems we both talk too much!).

Following our session, I continued the set-up process. Take a peek at IreneKoehler.tel now.

To get a code for free registration of your own .tel account, simply add a comment below sharing why you’d like to try it out. Be sure to add a valid email address in the appropriate field (that’s how I’ll get the code to you).

Many thanks to Vincent and Digitrad for offering free registration to AlmostSavvy readers to allow you to see for yourself how you might use it to your own best advantage to manage your online reputation and visibility.

Thanks also to the kind folks at the Skoll Foundation who loaned us their conference room to tape the interview above, and thanks to Adin Miller for connecting me with the Skoll Foundation.

Also, in the name of full disclosure, Vincent did buy me a crepe while I was in Paris attending LeWeb. The crepe was not in exchange for this blog post, but I understand that perception is everything. Frankly, if anyone ever wanted to compensate me for a blog post, I’d hope the going rate would be something greater than one crepe and an offer to give blog readers a discount code. Evidence of said crepe.

Related articles which may interest you:

• URGENT: Facebook Rush Tonight – Claim Your Name
• The Re-Branding of Me: Website Under Construction
• Blogs: I’ll Show You Mine if You’ll Show Me Yours
• Social Media Stats – It’s Raining Content!
• Social Networking Friends vs. Real Life Friends

So you think LinkedIn isn’t as sexy as Twitter, Facebook or other networking sites? I encourage you to think again. If providing the most powerful professional networking and job search platform around is sexy, then I’d say it’s pretty sexy.

And, it just got a little sexier in that you can now show off your best assets more prominently. No, I’m not talking about push-up bras; the change I’m talking about allows you to bring more attention to your professional assets.

Until now, the LinkedIn profile was very structured and inflexible in its design:

1. Summary and Specialties
2. Applications (i.e., Blog, SlideShare, etc.)
3. Experience
4. Education
5. Recommendations

These sections were listed in this order and there was nothing you could do to change things around. If you wanted potential employers to know that you’d just received a PhD in Astrophysics from Harvard, you had to hope they had the patience to read through all of your part-time jobs as a paper-boy and as a cashier 7-11 to find your education way down at the bottom.

Enter drag-and-drop. You can now rearrange these sections and move the most important information to the top. Have you worked with Bill Gates and want everyone to see his recommendation praising your role in building Microsoft? Move your recommendations to the top. Have you increased sales for your company over 500% in the last year? Upload a slide showing the results to SlideShare and move it where it will best show off your talents.

Kudos to LinkedIn for allowing us to take more control over the look and feel of our profiles. In the future, I’d like to see the ability to drag and drop pieces of these sections, rather than the entire section. For example, when you move recommendations to the top to highlight the feedback from Bill Gates, all of your other recommendations move, too, which might make it difficult for someone to scroll down to find your skills and experience. Still, this is a fabulous step in the right direction.

Take a peek at the LinkedIn video and let me know in the comments what you think of this new feature.

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Related articles which may interest you:

• LinkedIn-apalooza! Ready to rev-up your profile?
• LinkedIn Tip – Got Street Cred?
• LinkedIn Tip – Mom Was Right, Manners Matter
• LinkedIn Tip – “Hey, Baby. What’s Your URL?”
• LinkedIn Tip – Does Your Profile Miss You?

The theme of LeWeb ’09 was “The Real-time Web,” but what exactly “is” real-time? And, at what point, do real-time tools stop being new toys which only truly-geeky people use and start becoming so embedded into our everyday lives that we don’t really think about them, but can’t imagine living without them?

While most of the conversation at LeWeb was fairly technical and focused on what’s ahead, such as exciting new applications and tech start-ups, I wondered what tools these uber-geeky folks are using day-to-day in their real lives which are simple enough for the rest of us non-geeks to use.

I invite you to hear from some of the attendees as they share a few of their favorite tools. Let me know in the comments which tool is your favorite and why you’re a fan.

Related articles which may interest you:

• Social Media Stats – It’s Raining Content!
• Social Networking Friends vs. Real Life Friends
• Ready for Yet Another Social Platform? Here Comes Google Buzz
• Getting Ready for LeWeb, Need Your Ideas
• Blogging Between Hot Flashes

As they stumbled across Las Vegas Blvd., I marveled at how they were able to stay atop those five-inch stiletto heels, despite the

obvious challenges in pay. Loudly, and repeatedly, the members of the bachelorette party proclaimed, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” as they lifted their drinks aloft. Armed with the knowledge that “no one will ever know,” they embraced the opportunity to party in public with gusto and enthusiasm.

While I imagine that this attitude makes the local board of tourism very happy, is there really any place where we can do whatever we want and be assured that no one will know about it?

For these scantily-clad partiers, there are photos to think about, lots of photos. I know; I took some of them using their cameras and cell phones so they could all get into the group shots. There is no doubt in my mind that many of those photos were already uploaded to Facebook and shared with friends. While I don’t know these young women, I’m guessing this may not turn out to be their proudest moment or one they’d like to have shared with Dad or their boss. The photos been posted, tagged and emailed. Do they really have any control over what happens with those photos now?

Am I saying that only those who end up drunk in Las Vegas are the only ones who need to be concerned about their online content? Absolutely not.

Have you ever:

• Written an email (or left a voicemail) to a co-worker, customer or (gosh, I hope not) your boss after having a few drinks?
• Attended a party or other gathering when someone starts taking photos and then suddenly find that they’ve been posted and tagged on Facebook. (Yes, you can un-tag yourself, but that doesn’t really solve the problem.)
• Complained online anywhere about another person or share any news which might reflect poorly on you?
• Posted anything online while feeling hurt or angry?

There is no “Las Vegas” online. There is no place where we can behave or act in a way we normally wouldn’t and be assured that no one will know.

Regardless of your privacy settings or your own practice of sharing certain thing with friends only, there are no guarantees. Friends have been known to misjudge what we think is funny or appropriate. Friends have also been known to stop being friends, and at that point, all bets are off.

To manage our online reputation, we must ask ourselves one question before we click that button: “Am I OK with my mom, my boss, my professors and CNN seeing this?” If the answer isn’t a resounding Yes!, stop. Don’t send, update, share, tweet or publish.

Online content can be easily found and shared. Deleting – not so easy.

Heading out to explore Las Vegas for the day. I will do my best to behave myself and not publicly post any momentary indiscretions.

Have you ever regretted something you’ve shared online?
Seen anyone else share something which gave you that “uh-oh” feeling?

________________________
This is my first post using the WordPress app on my BlackBerry, so I am not able to see the post as you see it. All feedback is appreciated. FYI-Typing a post of the tiny keyboard hurts after while!

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Related articles which may interest you:

• Social Networking Friends vs. Real Life Friends
• Hey, Facebook, It?s Me ? Really! (Just Ask the Goat)
• The Art of Saying Thank-You on Facebook
• Dear Ex-Facebook Friend…
• Is Generation Y Killing Radio?

There was a time when a recommendation from your mother that you were a real catch was enough of an objective opinion to satisfy others’ due diligence to determine if you were all you claimed to be. Following the time when Mom’s praise was enough and prior to today, there was also a time,when customer testimonials printed on marketing brochures were all the evidence we needed to know you were the bee’s knees. Thanks to the internet, those days are but a distant memory, and it’s a good thing (I’m not terribly sure what my mother would say about me). With our hyperconnectedness online today, it is extremely easy to effectively assess someone’s street cred, their credibility, their reputation, from first-hand sources.

LinkedIn has come to be a relied-upon source of professional recommendations due to the level of transparency it provides. Gone is the generic praise and the quotes from sources we were unable to contact. LinkedIn recommendations from current or prior co-workers, partners, customers or bosses are easily tracked back to their author to verify credibility and veracity. When reading recommendations on a profile, you may want to consider a few things:

• Are all or most of the recommendations from people for whom this individual has also provided recommendations? It is not uncommon for people to take a quid-pro-quo approach, meaning that I’ll write one for you if you write one for me.
• Do the authors of the recommendation seem to have solid backgrounds themselves, perhaps with a good network of people and having been recommended by others?
• Do any of the recommendations appear to have been written by family members? (Hey, I’ve seen it – and not just once or twice.)
• Do the recommendations highlight specific accomplishments or areas of particular strength, or do they include vague statements, such as “Sophie is a wonderful worker. I hope to work with her again sometime”?

If your profile is complete and ready for prime-time, one of the next areas in need of attention is adding a few recommendations to round out your profile. Only ask those who have real first-hand experience with whatever it is that you do. You don’t want a recommendation from someone you met at a conference who thought you were really nice, only to find yourself unable to back it up when asked about it by a potential customer or employer.

I’m often asked if there is an opportunity to see recommendations before they are posted to your profile. The answer is yes, absolutely. After a recommendation is written, you will be notified and have the opportunity to approve it to be posted or to contact the author to suggest a change or give other feedback.

All this talk of recommendations reminds me that I have to get to work on my street cred in a hurry. I only recently added Almost Savvy to my own LinkedIn profile and I need to add recommendations myself. If you’ve enjoyed my blog, I’d love to add your comments to my LinkedIn profile. Time to get rolling!

What are your thoughts of these suggestions? Anything else you look for or want to avoid in a LinkedIn recommendation?

If you’d like to learn more about kicking your efforts on LinkedIn into high gear, be sure to subscribe to Almost Savvy through RSS or email. These tips are just that – tips. While very helpful, they don’t delve into the bigger picture of why LinkedIn matters and how to get the most out of it depending on your own personal goals. To get the most out of LinkedIn, consider registering for an upcoming webinar where we’ll walk through the features step-by-step to help you leverage your efforts and maximize the benefits of LinkedIn’s features.

But wait, there’s more…Those who RT my tweet (on Twitter) about the tip of the day will be entered in a drawing each day for seats in an upcoming LinkedIn webinar at 50% off (to be used by you or given to a friend). Those who comment (a “real” comment) on the LinkedIn tip of the day on this blog will also be entered. Anyone doing both in the same day will be entered in the drawing twice. Let the fun begin!

Related articles which may interest you:

• LinkedIn-apalooza! Ready to rev-up your profile?
• LinkedIn Lets You Show Off Your Best Assets
• Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me a Match
• LinkedIn Tip – Mom Was Right, Manners Matter
• LinkedIn Tip – “Hey, Baby. What’s Your URL?”