UPDATE: LinkedIn changed the design of their social ads and posted a clarification to their policy. See below for the updated details.

Oh, how I love LinkedIn! I often speak and write about LinkedIn, as well as provide a great deal of training to help others get the most out of the most powerful professional networking site online. As much as I also adore Twitter and Facebook, LinkedIn is still the one place to get started building your brand and career online. While some say Google+ may steal some of the professional spotlight away from LinkedIn, it is much too early to know if this will ever come to pass. For now, my statement stands: LinkedIn is the place to start when you’re ready to tell your branding story the way you want it to be told.

All that said, I’ve got to say that LinkedIn was wrong in this latest move. Sadly, those of us who live our lives online have become accustomed to hearing that we’ve been opted-in to sharing information we had no intention of making available to our friends, to applications or to advertisers. Facebook has a track record of irking its members in this area on a seemingly regular basis. But, LinkedIn? Surely they didn’t do this? Or did they?

Spoiler Alert: They did.

Solution Alert: Here’s how to fix it in 5 clicks. I can hear you thinking that 5 is a lot of clicks to opt-out of anything regarding privacy. You’re right, but here’s exactly what to do, step-by-step.

1. Hover your cursor over your name. You will see a drop-down menu. From here, click on Settings.
2. Click on Account.
3. Click on Manage Social Advertising.
4. You will then see a small box enabling Social Advertising. Click to uncheck that box.
5. Click Save.

You’re done.

This change was announced via a blog post on LinkedIn on June 23 of this year. How do you feel about how this change was implemented? Would you like to see future privacy changes on LinkedIn communicated differently?

UPDATE (8/11/2011): LinkedIn just announced a new approach to social ads today. I’m very happy with this new design and applaud them for their quick response to member confusion and frustration. 

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The secret to networking is to actually stay in touch with many of your connections. If we don’t occasionally connect, those connections might as well be a stack of business cards gathering dust in a dark corner of our office. Out of sight, out of mind. There are many reasons to stay in touch, but here’s a big one – People tend to remember people who remember them. Networking isn’t about us; it’s about them and anything that helps remind us of who we know or how we know them is a good thing. If it’s fun, even better. Enter three new applications which do just that.

DropIn

Oh, how I was addicted to playing Tetris. I tried to keep up with the increasingly fast pace at which those shapes dropped, hoping to fit them into the puzzle. How would you like to play Tetris with the faces of your LinkedIn connections? My only challenge with DropIn was deciding whether to focus on the game or wondering why I hadn’t talk with George in so long as I tried to maneuver his face into just the right spot. I’ll have to send him a note – right after I finish this game.

Year In Review

Which of your friends started a new job last year? It turns out 257 of my LinkedIn connections started a new position in 2010. That’s exciting. I would certainly have missed this information otherwise. After being shown the faces of those with a new gig, it would be great to send them a note offering congratulations or asking how they’re enjoying the new job. What an easy way to let them know you’re thinking of them!

Connection Timeline

The idea behind this application is cool, but it didn’t seem to work well for me. It displays your career as a dynamic timeline and highlights which of your connections you worked with at various points in your career. My timeline only displayed positions through 2007.

Have you used any of these new applications? Let me know what you think and which seems most useful to you in the comments below.

Image courtesy of luvi.

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1. How you can get valuable feedback on the photo you’ve chosen for your profile As my friend, Hjortur Smarason says, we should think of this photo as our own personal logo.
2. How you can support others by offering helpful feedback.
3. Why doing #1 and #2 above would be helpful to me personally.
4. Why this post is so short and the video isn’t edited at all.

Click here if you aren’t able to view the video above.

As mentioned in the video:

• If you missed it earlier, read the tips here: 8 Tips: How to Select the Right Profile Photos
• Post your photo and share feedback on others’ photos here: Almost Savvy Page on Facebook

I look forward to seeing your photos and feedback!

If you enjoyed this post, sign up to receive free updates by email here to be sure you don’t miss any future AlmostSavvy news. You are also invited to connect with others interested in social media on the friendly folks on the Almost Savvy page on Facebook where we share news and tips.

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Hey, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for puppies. I’m pretty keen on babies, too, but not in our profile pictures. There was a time when we framed and displayed those photos at home or, perhaps, on our desk at the office. Things are no longer as simple. Today, our workplace is not limited to just one desk in just one office. To some extent, we’re all connected to others online and we still want to express ourselves by decorating our online office with our favorite photos. For those of us who have businesses or careers, the version of ourselves we put online matters. It can and will be seen by anyone interested in learning more about us.

One of the often overlooked elements of our online presence is our profile photo. The photo is important for a couple of reasons:

• It makes it easier to recognize you. If I’m meeting you in person for the first time, having seen your photo will put me at ease knowing who I should be looking for. Similarly, if we’ve met in person and you send me an invitation to connect online, seeing your photo will help me remember you.
• Simply put, it humanizes you. I don’t want to connect with an anonymous account. I want to connect with a person. And, yes, this means that it’s time to finally add a photo to your LinkedIn profile if you haven’t yet taken the plunge.

Choosing the Right Photo

1. Head shot – Probably your head, neck and a bit of your shoulders, but no more. It should be the real you, not a cartoon or Mad Men version of you. And, by real you, I also mean current you. It may feel like you were in high school only yesterday, but if you did the lindy hop at your prom, your old yearbook photo won’t do.
2. Logo – Unless your business is a well known brand (think Ford or Macy’s), it is probably best to use your photo rather than a logo. In general, we like and want to connect with people, not businesses. It’s important to note that using a logo instead of a photo on LinkedIn would violate the User Agreement. Skip the logo and stick with your own head shot.
3. Keep it simple - This means we want to see you. Lose the baseball hat, those awesome sunglasses or anything else that competes for our attention in the photo. Same goes for busy backgrounds.
4. You and only you – Getting back to puppies…your primary profile photo is probably not the best use of your puppy photos. Ditto for you and a group of your best friends or you riding your bike.
5. Nudity – If I can see your shoulders in your head shot, I want to see clothing. While you may be wearing a strapless dress, it’s all about perception. Don’t take the time to create a great profile only to leave people wondering if you’re actually naked. Eww. There is no difference between being naked and appearing to be naked in a profile photo. There is a time and a place for nudity, but your profile photo is neither of these.
6. Consistency – A great way to help your own branding is to use the same photo for all of your online profiles. Use the same photo on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube channel, your blog, etc. It will make it much easier for people to recognize you right away.
7. Smile – Don’t overthink your pose. Attempts to look too serious can come off as intimidating. And none of those here-I-am-looking-busy-by-pretending-to-talk-on-the-phone photos. You’re not that busy. Put the phone down for a second so you can smile and have your picture taken.
8. Doesn’t need to be fancy – You don’t need to rush out and schedule a session with a professional portrait photographer. Having a friend take a photo of you in front of a solid background should be fine as long as the lighting is sufficient. Word of warning – Whatever you do, have someone else take your picture. Do not, under any circumstances, let me see you taking your own photo in the bathroom mirror with your phone.

Exceptions

I can hear you all the way across the internet, “But I use the different social networking platforms differently and that’s why I have puppies on Facebook and am wearing a suit and tie on LinkedIn.” You are in good company. If you must have a profile photo with your puppy/baby/surfboard/bottle of wine/cigar/goat, keep it on Facebook and only on Facebook. As long as you understand what can be seen when a potential client or employer Googles your name and you’re OK with it, that’s all that matters.

Are your profile photos dressed to impress? What profile photo best or worst practices have I missed?

If you enjoyed this post, sign up to receive free updates by email here to be sure you don’t miss any future Almost Savvy news. You are also invited to connect with others interested in social media on the friendly folks on the Almost Savvy page on Facebook where we share news and tips.

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Would you like to have access to the email addresses of your friends and connections outside of Facebook and LinkedIn? Would you like to add them to your own contact list in Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo or wherever else you stash this information? If so, you’re going to be very happy because you’re about to find out how to do just that.

Why Bother?

If you’re wondering why you’d want to bother going through the hassle of getting this information out of Facebook and LinkedIn, consider the following:

Downtime – All websites, including Facebook and LinkedIn, go down from time to time. During these times, you will not have access to this information.

Access Denied – There are many instances of people getting locked out of their accounts for a variety of reasons. Many ended up regaining access, but how frustrating it would be to lose all of that information!

Limited Email Options – What if you’d like to send an email to several people, including some of your Facebook friends and some of your LinkedIn connections? The options are very limited if you aren’t able to use your own favorite email program

Convinced yet that it might be a good thing to take control of your information? Great, let’s get started…

LinkedIn

Fortunately, LinkedIn allows contact information for your connections to be exported directly from the site. I recommend doing this on a regular basis, depending on how frequently you usually add new connections. All of the how-to information about exporting your LinkedIn connections can be found here.

Facebook

Unfortunately, Facebook does not provide a similar feature allowing for a simple way of exporting your friends’ email addresses. It is possible, though, if you take the following steps:

You’ll need a Yahoo email account. If you don’t already have one, it is very easy to set up one up.

1. Log into your Yahoo email account and go to this page, where you will see this image (or something very similar):
2. 
3. Click on the Facebook logo. When asked to authorize the connection between Yahoo and Facebook, click ‘Okay’
4. 
5. Watch in amazement as Yahoo goes to work, busily importing all of the email addresses from your Facebook friends.
6. When the process is complete, Yahoo will tell you how many new contacts were imported. Chances are this will not be equal to the number of friends you have on Facebook. Don’t worry; there’s no need to panic. It is very likely that not all of your friends have included an email address on their Facebook profile.
7. From here, you will be able to export the list from Yahoo and then import it into any other email program.
8. Rejoice. Do a little happy dance. You now have your friends’ email addresses tucked away in a safe place.

If you enjoyed this post, sign up to receive free updates by email here to be sure you don’t miss any future AlmostSavvy news. You are also invited to connect with others interested in social media on the friendly folks on the AlmostSavvy page on Facebook where we share news and tips.

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That said, bring on the controversy. Let’s get ready to rumble!

Just over a year ago, LinkedIn introduced a feature allowing users to post all of their Twitter updates, also known as tweets, to LinkedIn. Not surprisingly, many people have since added the feature, causing my LinkedIn homepage to no longer be a place of value and interest to me. Sound a little melodramatic? Maybe. But the updates from my LinkedIn connections telling their network about a new job, an interesting project or sharing news and requests for assistance were an easy way to stay up-to-date and support others where I could.

Now, before you start to school me on how I don’t get Twitter or LinkedIn, you may want to look here and here to see that I am a huge fan of both. It’s just that I see Twitter and LinkedIn (and Facebook, for that matter) as different places with their own culture, pace and etiquette. Just because it’s easy for me to push every single tweet to LinkedIn doesn’t mean it aligns with the type of presence I want to have on LinkedIn and, more importantly, doesn’t mean that it is best for my connections.

I find myself hiding updates from my connections who post their tweets to LinkedIn more and more frequently because it makes it nearly impossible to see the content I really want to see. Unfortunately, it is not an option to hide just their tweets. Once that person is hidden from my stream, I don’t see any of their updates, which means I may be missing something important.

I was curious if others were also struggling with this same issue and if they were actually spending time weeding through the status updates on LinkedIn to find the ones most interesting so I posted this question as my own status update:

With so many people pushing posts from Twitter to LinkedIn, I wonder if anyone is really reading these updates anymore. Will you like or comment if you see this message?

Rather than summarize huge amount of feedback and suggestions for best practices I received, here is a small sampling of the comments:

Clearly, I hit a nerve and many people have very strong feelings about:

• How they’d like their friends to consider them when deciding how to use the different networking sites
• How they’d like to use tools that make posting to multiple places simultaneously easier

The problem is that it seems most people place a much higher priority on one of the items above, leaving them at odds with those who place a high priority on the other. So, simple question – if you are posting Twitter updates to LinkedIn, have you considered asking your LinkedIn connections how they feel about this? Does it enhance their experience because you share wonderful content or does it only add noise to their stream?

A couple of years ago, I started posting my tweets to Facebook. It made sense to me because it was easy. After a few months, I began to rethink that practice and disconnected the two. All of a sudden, my Facebook friends came forward to tell me how much they hated seeing my tweets. Often the content wasn’t relevant and context was missing. Unbeknownst to me, I was irritating the hell out of them, yet no one told me. Since then, I’ve decided to put my audience – my Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections and Facebook friends – first.

Just because we can doesn’t mean we should. Just because there’s an app for that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.

Many thanks to the 50+ people who took the time to add their thoughts to this conversation on LinkedIn. I learned from each of you. I also came across a similar discussion started by Karla Porter and a blog post by Jorgen Sundberg entitled Dear Tweeters, Stop Cluttering My LinkedIn Homefeed, which is a perfect complement to this post as it includes important screenshots and detailed information - check them out.

If you enjoyed this post, sign up to receive free updates by email here to be sure you don’t miss any future AlmostSavvy news. You are also invited to connect with others interested in social media on the friendly folks on the AlmostSavvy page on Facebook where we share news and tips.

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Most of the more popular social networking platforms now allow us to connect our profiles with cool applications which make it a snap to share photos, find new people, simultaneously post to multiple sites and so on. Most of these applications were designed by third parties, which means that even though we use them on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, they were created by people outside these companies. When we use these applications, we also give them permission to view our accounts. This often means that the people who created these applications have access to our personal information, such as our email, phone, list of our friends, etc.

As long as we’re careful about which apps we connect to our accounts, we should be in good shape. What often happens, though, is that we hear about a new app, decide to try it out and then we forget about it. All of those apps that we’ve tried, but don’t continue to use still have access to all of our data. Can you remember all of the apps you’ve added to each of your accounts? No? Me neither. The good news is that, with just a few short minutes of your time, you can delete all of those old apps that you tried on and decided that they didn’t fit.

To find the apps you’ve added and delete those you no longer use, go here:

Twitter – Click ‘Revoke Access’ below each app you’d like to delete.

Facebook – To remove an app, click the X to the right. To see what information the app is accessing from your profile, click on ‘Edit Settings’

LinkedIn – To delete an app, check the box next to its name and click ‘Remove’ at the bottom of the page. You’ll also be able to see which apps you’ve added from within LinkedIn and which were added while you were on another website.

A word of caution before you begin deleting…be sure that you are indeed no longer using that particular application. Is it possible that you actually are using it? All I’m suggesting is to pause for a moment, then delete to your heart’s content.

How many apps did you find on each account? I tend to try out a lot of apps and actually continue to use many of them. Still, I was surprised to find 75 on my own Facebook account. Anyone beat that?

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Is it a problem that we’re using the same terms as others? No, not necessarily. The problem with these terms is that they are vague. They are like smoke and mirrors; intended to create a positive impression, yet they actually tell us nothing specific.

Take a look at the list of words. Are these words anywhere on your own LinkedIn profile? Which words would you suggest using instead?

1. Extensive experience

2. Innovative

3. Motivated

4. Results-oriented

5. Dynamic

6. Proven track record

7. Team player

8. Fast-paced

9. Problem solver

10. Entrepreneurial

If you enjoyed this post, sign up to receive free updates by email here to be sure you don’t miss any future AlmostSavvy news. You are also invited to connect with others interested in social media on the friendly folks on the AlmostSavvy page on Facebook where we share news and tips.

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Rod asks: “I’ve noticed that I’m able to see some people’s full LinkedIn profiles when clicking on their link, but when clicking on the link to my own profile, I see very little information. Do I need to have a paid membership to have everything visible”

Excellent question, Rod! The good news is that this is easy to fix and it will cost you only a few minutes of your time (and that includes viewing the video below). How’s that for a great deal!

When you share the link to your profile on LinkedIn with potential employers or clients, do you know what they’ll be able to view when they click? If they aren’t a LinkedIn member or aren’t currently signed in, they may not be able to see your complete profile. This is bad news – bad, bad news. I mean, you wouldn’t have shared the link with them if you were secretly hoping it would be really hard for them to see your information, right? Of course not.

Here’s how to find out what they can see and, if there’s a problem, how to fix it right away:

While this seems like a small tweak, this can make all the difference. We feel more comfortable doing business with people who have put in the time to make a good impression and who are savvy enough to make it dead easy to learn about them.

If you enjoyed this post, sign up to receive free updates by email here to be sure you don’t miss any future AlmostSavvy news. You are also invited to connect with others interested in social media on the friendly folks on the AlmostSavvy page on Facebook where we share news and tips.

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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.

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