Almost Savvy » LinkedIn

Social Media Stats – It’s Raining Content!

Irene Koehler — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 22:55:55 +0000

Does it ever feel that there is a non-stop downpour of Facebook posts, YouTube videos, Twitter tweets, LinkedIn connections and blog posts? Do you ever feel like you’re drowning in content?

If so and you spend any amount of time online, it isn’t just your imagination. The larger our networks of contacts, the more information we see pushed in our direction every time one of our friends shares a link to a news article, their latest blog post and a funny video of a cat dressed as Lady Gaga.

How frequently is new content added online, you may ask? It can take an awful lot of leg work and number crunching to figure that out. Luckily, Gary Hayes from Personalizemedia has put together a nifty tool which easily allows us to get a snapshot overview of the flow of uploaded content. Take a closer look and you’ll see that you can customize the data you see by selecting a timeframe and type of information (social media, mobile or games).

If you’re interested in digging deeper into the source data used here, you can find all the relevant links on Gary’s blog.

I’ll keep this blog post short because I just found out that I’ve got several hundred thousand YouTube videos to catch up on and that’s going to take some serious time.

Image courtesy of Tiago Ribeiro.

Just Because We’re Social Networking “Friends” Doesn’t Mean I’ll Go To 3rd Base With You

Irene Koehler — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 00:34:16 +0000

You Don’t Bring Me Flowers Anymore

Where did the romance go? When did we stop asking, “Tell me about yourself,” “Do you like to take long walks on the beach?” or even the tired old line, “What’s your sign?” Suddenly, upon meeting someone new, they immediately try to score and ask me to go over to their place to seal the deal.

Am I talking about my dating life? Hardly. I’m talking about my relationships with people where I spend much more of my time – online.

Talk (And Listen) To Me

We’ve all read the advice that the most effective ways to leverage the opportunities to build relationships with new people online is to be engaging and interested in them, by having a conversation that includes both listening and responding. Why then are people and businesses promoting themselves and trying to get me to buy their stuff as soon as I connect with them? It feels like I’ve just walked over with my hand extended intending to introduce myself and I get propositioned. Uh…ewww. All I can say is this doesn’t work with me – not in the real world and not online. If this happened at a live networking event, the conversation would go something like this:

“Hi. My name is Irene. It is nice to meet you.”

“Well (pretend you heard your name here), I’ll bet it is nice to meet me. You’re lucky you met me just in time because, boy do I have the answers to all of the problems you have or may have one day in the future. I know you’ll love my product/service/website so much that you’ll want to run out and spontaneously tell everyone you know about it, so here are some extra cards to pass out to all of your friends. Hey, you’re awesome, hope to talk with you again soon. Bye now.”

“Uh, what did you say your name was?”

Have you had this experience? When this happens online, it takes the form of email, newsletters, Facebook mail or direct messages on Twitter. As soon as you’ve “friended” someone on Facebook or followed someone on Twitter, you immediately receive newsletters or messages telling you to “click here” to do something – which benefits the other person. I’ve seen this on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

(click to enlarge images)

You Lost Me At “Click Here”

I connected with you because I wanted to get to know you. Consider it a first date, or the possibility of a first date. I don’t want you to kiss me, tell me what I need or invite me over to your place. If you do, you’re out. On Twitter, this is one of many reasons I will immediately unfollow you. On Facebook, I’ll unfriend you. On LinkedIn, I’ll disconnect. Through our connection, you have additional access to contact me directly. This access is a privilege, not an opportunity take our relationship where I’m not ready to go. No, I don’t want to come over to see your etchings or listen to your stereo (yes, someone really did ask me to do this when I was in college). I most certainly do not want to click on your link to buy something or find out more about you. It’s rude and presumptuous. It’s spam and, most importantly, it’s all about you.

When you want to talk, let me know. I’ll be here. In the meantime, stop groping my email address and trying to get to 3rd base. It ain’t gonna happen.

How to: Turn On/Off LinkedIn Notifications

Irene Koehler — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 16:51:46 +0000

From the AlmostSavvy mailbag:

David asks, “How do I stop receiving an email each time someone connects with me on LinkedIn?”

Great question, David!

LinkedIn can be a real workhorse when it comes to our networking efforts. The potential benefits are huge, but filtering content can become a challenge. The good news is, like most networking sites, we have the ability to customize how we’d like to receive information from our connections.

I’ve recorded a short video demonstrating how to change how you receive these notifications from LinkedIn. Let me know in the comments if this was helpful to you and if you’ve got other questions.

LinkedIn-apalooza! Ready to rev-up your profile?

Irene Koehler — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:00:04 +0000

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.

LinkedIn Lets You Show Off Your Best Assets

Irene Koehler — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:08:35 +0000

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:

Summary and Specialties
Applications (i.e., Blog, SlideShare, etc.)
Experience
Education
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.

Happy Holidays! Please Enjoy This Spam

Irene Koehler — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:25:23 +0000

Over the last few weeks, I have been inundated with holiday cards and greetings of all types. While this is typical at this time of year, this is the first time I received so many automated cards and emails, most of them from people I don’t really know.

On Facebook, there are applications which allow you to post a greeting card to the “wall” of all of your Facebook friends. Once I started receiving a lot of these, I deleted them from my wall as it made it difficult for someone to find my “real” content, the stuff I wanted to have on my wall. On LinkedIn, I received email from many of my connections wishing me well, but these were broadcast messages, not sent to me specifically. And, most of them included information about the sender’s product or service or request for help in a job search. “Happy holidays. Click here to find out more about me.” Makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.

While I know most people had good intentions, being on the receiving end of these impersonal messages began to feel like I was being spammed. I felt that they were taking advantage of technology which made things easier on their end without regard for those on the receiving end. Yeah, I know that receiving those long holiday letters about what extraordinary things your neighbor, Bertha, and her kids have been up to over the last year can be seen as impersonal also, but at least these came from “real” friends and family and were specifically addressed to us.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for taking the green high-road and saving trees along the way, but you can keep your spam. And, furthermore, don’t send me any more spam disguised as holiday fruitcake personal greetings.

Image courtesy of pandemia

Help Me Help You – When You Have Questions

Irene Koehler — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:34:28 +0000

The Context

If you are online using any sort of social media, you know that it has been a wild roller-coaster ride lately. The primary networking platforms which many of us use – Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – have all undergone huge changes, seemingly at a breakneck pace. Some have been well communicated in advance, many weren’t. Some have been well-received, many have led to frustration. A few have worked well immediately upon launch, most seem full of bugs and perform inconsistently.

It’s no wonder that so many of you are frustrated and confused. You’ve been through it all. With an array of buttons to click here and there to manage privacy, sync updates with other sites, and manage spam – how is a person supposed to keep up? All this, in addition to having your account hacked. It can be a challenge. Not doubt about it.

What’s Happening Now

I’ve forged relationships with many of you. I cherish each one of those relationships and deeply appreciate your trust. What has happened, though, is that every day I receive emails, DMs (private tweets) or other requests for help. Since these are all out of the public view, I’m sure you don’t realize how much of my time is spent answering questions.

I have three concerns about this:

I have to be perfectly candid and acknowledge that it takes a huge amount of time to manage each interaction, as most involve several back and forth messages. While I enjoy doing this and want you to continue to ask for help, I have to be practical also.
Chances are very high that if you have the problem or question, you are not the only one who would like to know the solution. Since these interactions are private, no one else gets the benefit of hearing the advice or solution.
I don’t always know the answer. But, we’ve got some brilliant folks in our community who may know the answer or have advice to share.

.

My Request and Solution

Whenever possible, I invite you to post your question to the AlmostSavvy Facebook fan page. This addresses all three issues above. Trust me, you aren’t the only one with that question. And, if you have an answer or suggestion for someone else’s question, by all means, add your input – please!

Most importantly, keep those questions coming. This just gives us a home for the interaction to take place within our community.

If you haven’t already joined AlmostSavvy on Facebook, doing so only requires visiting the page and clicking the “Become A Fan” button at the top of the page. If you are reading this on my blog, just click the button (top, right – under my picture) and you’re in! Of course, you’ll need to have already set up a Facebook account, but with well over 300 million people on Facebook, it could be just the place for you to (re)connect with your favorite people.

Your Thoughts

How does this sound to you?

Got LinkedIn?

Irene Koehler — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:22:37 +0000

Do you hear that sound? It’s your future knocking. Have you done everything you can to show that you’re ready? You’ve worked extremely hard in school, took all the right classes, grew as a person and a budding professional. With just a bit of work, you can now look as impressive online as you are in real life.

If you are a college student or graduate, there is no better time to get started on LinkedIn.

What’s that you say: LinkedIn is really just Facebook for old people? Not at all. Yes, there are many experience professionals on the site and, yes, many of them are older than you, but you would be limiting your own opportunities to allow this perception to keep you away. LinkedIn is the place to be for current and aspiring professionals.

What’s that you say: You heard that there is no reason to set-up a profile on LinkedIn until you are ready to look for a job? Hmm…Following this line of reasoning would be the same as waiting until you are hungry to think about stocking your entirely empty kitchen. (OK, maybe that isn’t the best example, especially for college students, but you know what I mean.) Your future has already begun; why would you not pull out all the stops to prepare for it seriously?

During the course of your college career, you will be making connections and building that all-important network which will support you for years to come as your career blossoms. The inspiring professors, the quirky grad student teaching assistants and that really smart kid whose only downside seems to be that she consistently and inexplicably gets the highest grade in the class – all of these are people you should consider connecting with on LinkedIn. Once out of school, you never know who might be able to connect you to your next great opportunity and who you will be able to support in kind. Your network is growing daily, even without you knowing it. Just think what might be possible if you actually had a plan to manage and grow it intentionally.

Your LinkedIn profile will become your professional presence online, making it easy to find information about your background, skills, who you know and who has recommended you. Not only is this of critical importance once you graduate, but imagine the advantage it might afford you as you apply for internships and scholarships while you’re still on school.

Time to get on it. I know you take your future seriously, but looking like you take it seriously is every bit as important. It is just one more way to stand out in the crowd. Knowing this, why would you not get started on LinkedIn right now?

Other helpful LinkedIn resources which may be of interest…

More great LinkedIn tips from Almost Savvy

Tips from the LinkedIn blog for graduates

Back it Up – Own Your LinkedIn Information

Irene Koehler — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 23:22:44 +0000

Contact information for all of your connections

You’ve taken great care in building your LinkedIn network of connections because these are the folks you’ve known throughout your career, those friends from school with whom you’ve recently reconnected and professionals who are just plain helpful and wise because they might be excellent resources in the future.?Are you comfortable with all of that information residing on a website over which you have no control? What if you need to access contact information for one of your connections and the LinkedIn site is down temporarily? For many reasons, I strongly sugggest periodically exporting and saving your connections. How frequently you should do this depends on how often you add new people to your network.

Exporting your connections is easy. Let me walk you through this very simple process.

Sign into your LinkedIn account
From the menu on the top, left of the page, click on “Contacts”
This will take you to a list of your Connections (see image).
At the bottom of this list is a link to “Export Connections” (indicated by the red arrow).
Click here and select the file type in which you’d like to save this information.
Create the file and save it to your own computer. (Note: I have experienced occasional problems opening this file and then saving it, so I suggest saving it immediately.)
From here, you may choose to upload your contacts’ information into another program such as Outlook, gmail contacts, yahoo mail or another CRM database.

Profile and recommendations

While you are in a housekeeping mood, let’s take it one step further. Trust me, this step is even easier, but equally important. The same care and time you’ve applied to building your network on LinkedIn?as been spent on painstakingly crafting?your profile, inclucing just the right blend of bullet point accomplishments and skills, with information about why you do what you do and what makes you unique. This is information you’ll want to save and be able to access at all times. If you others have recommended your work, this step becomes even more critical as you certainly want to retain a record of their complimentary endorsement. (Click here for more information about LinkedIn recommendations.)

To save a .pdf copy of your profile, visit your profile page and look for the .pdf icon, as indicated above by the red arrow. Clicking on the icon will create a nice page including your profile information, along with a clean copy of your recommendations.? Save this document to your computer and, voila, you can sleep well knowing you’ve got a copy of all of your hard work.

One additional tip for those seeking new employment, consulting or sales opportunities: The ability the print and share recommendations?when meeting?with a potential employer or client may prove useful as LinkedIn recommendations typically carry a great degree of credibility due to the ease with which one can learn more about?its author.

So, what are you waiting for? Head on over to LinkedIn, save your information and mark your calendar?to remind yourself?to do it on a regular basis.??This will take only about five minutes total; time well spent in managing your critical online information.

But, before you go, let me know your thoughts, won’t you? Was this tip helpful to you? What other questions do you have about LinkedIn or other social networking sites which you’d like me to address? The better I understand your networking interests and goals, the better I’ll be able to provide valuable help.

More tips to maximize your use of LinkedIn can be found here.

For one-on-one coaching to immediately turbo-charge your online presence, see the information here and here to contact me directly.

Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me a Match

Irene Koehler — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 22:38:08 +0000

“Matchmaker, Matchmaker, make me a match. Find me a find. Catch me a catch.” Feel free to sing along; come on, you know you know the lyrics.

Did we suddenly fall into the middle of a Fiddler On The Roof performance? No, you needn’t change the channel. We’re still here talking about networking. How though, does being a matchmaker relate to networking, if at all?

Building a strong network of connections is good for business, right? Won’t this will allow me easier access to more people who may be potential clients, customers or employers? Being a savvy businessperson, I already know the answer to that question, so let me get started right away by making sure my connections know about my products, website, skills, services, unique pricing structure,? and list of highly-placed references. Gosh, I wonder how long it will take before the results and profits comes rolling in.

Obviously, I’m being facetious here, but don’t we all know people who seem to take this approach?? The “me first” approach isn’t successful in winning friends and gaining trust in any aspect of life, so why would we expect different results when it comes to our business networking efforts? A network of people who don’t know and trust us is nothing more than a collection of business cards which are destined to collect dust in the corner of our desk; completely useless.

Earning the trust of those in your network only begins to happen when thinking of their needs before our own and offering assistance where possible to help them more easily succeed in meeting their own goals. One of the many ingredients in a successful networking strategy is to facilitate introductions among and between people? in your network.? You know that Joe, one of your LinkedIn connections, is very interested in learning how his company might be able to use Second Life as an innovative platform for training its employees worldwide. You also know that Maria, with whom you recently connected, has a great deal of experience working with companies interested in using Second Life for training and advertising purposes. Why not offer to introduce them to one another – even if they haven’t asked you to do so? Imagine how you might feel if one of your contacts reached out to connect you with someone who might be a valuable resource to you for no other reason than to help you succeed. Would you appreciate such a gesture? Would you remember it?

On LinkedIn, our network is clear. We are either connected to someone or we’re not. LinkedIn has a well defined process for facilitating introductions. On Twitter, the connections are less clear because it isn’t necessary for both parties to mutually agree to the connection. How then do we tell others about about a Twitterer we feel would be worthy of the attention of our network (a.k.a. followers, in Twitter-speak)?? One way to do this would be to post a message (a.k.a. tweet) including the name of the person we feel is consistently bringing valuable content, along with the reason for your endorsement. If we all tag our tweets with #favpeep, it will be easy to track these recommendations and find wonderful, new people to add to our own network. An important side note would be that this should never be used for increasing numbers of followers or connections. Doing so only serves to dilute the intended purpose and does not reflect well upon the person making the introduction or endorsement.

Which of your connections would benefit from knowing others in your network? Are you prepared to share why you feel the connection would be to their benefit, rather than your own?

So, what do you think? Are you ready to be a networking matchmaker?

Almost Savvy » LinkedIn

Social Media Stats – It’s Raining Content!

Related articles which may interest you:

Just Because We’re Social Networking “Friends” Doesn’t Mean I’ll Go To 3rd Base With You

You Don’t Bring Me Flowers Anymore

Talk (And Listen) To Me

You Lost Me At “Click Here”

Related articles which may interest you:

How to: Turn On/Off LinkedIn Notifications

From the AlmostSavvy mailbag:

From the AlmostSavvy mailbag:

Related articles which may interest you:

LinkedIn-apalooza! Ready to rev-up your profile?

Related articles which may interest you:

LinkedIn Lets You Show Off Your Best Assets

Related articles which may interest you:

Happy Holidays! Please Enjoy This Spam

Related articles which may interest you:

Help Me Help You – When You Have Questions

The Context

What’s Happening Now

.

My Request and Solution

Your Thoughts

Related articles which may interest you:

Got LinkedIn?

Related articles which may interest you:

Back it Up – Own Your LinkedIn Information

Contact information for all of your connections

Profile and recommendations

Related articles which may interest you:

Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me a Match

Related articles which may interest you: