This is the 3rd of the series of articles which cover LinkedIn. The first 2 articles covered building a your presence on LinkedIn & making effective use of your LinkedIn profile.
This article covers how you can add value to yourself & others with the time spent by you on LinkedIn. Since we have already covered 14 points in the previous 2 articles, this article starts from point no. 15.
15. Recommendations
If you have been working for some number of years, there are bound to be folks within your current & previous organisation who can write a recommendation for you. A LinkedIn profile without recommendations is indicative of either of the 4 things
1) Your work was so bad that no one is willing to recommend you
2) You do not maintain good relations with current/former colleagues/managers
3) You do not put in the effort to ask for recommendations
4) You do not care.
I’m sure that you would not like to be categorised in either of these categories.
The simple trick for recommendations is to “ask”, You would be surprised to see that if you reach out to people you trust & have confidence in, most will revert with recommendations (unless they are not regular users of LinkedIn). Another method is to write recommendations for people whose work or professional approach has been commendable. Most folks will respond back with a recommendation as this option is offered by LinkedIn when they accept your recommendation. Remember that you should always give more than what you receive. If someone has taken the effort to write a recommendation for you, thank them & reciprocate the gesture. Else one lands up creating an impression about being a self-centred person as you are only willing to receive, but not to give.
When writing recommendations, it is better to put in info about some specific quality or trait which you admire or about some exceptional work done by them, which ensures that the recommendation is more personalised. Writing clichéd & bland recommendations will neither benefit you nor the receiver. You could also put in some information about the context in which you have known or worked with the person to add to the personalisation aspect. After all when someone reads a recommendation, it speaks volumes about you as much as about the person. So when you take the appropriate effort on your part, you benefit much more than the person receiving the recommendation.
16. Groups
LinkedIn gives you an opportunity to join 50 groups, which is more than sufficient to ensure that you join groups which are alumni, industry or skill-specific. The benefit of alumni groups is very obvious as it helps you to connect with students & colleagues whom you have lost touch over the intervening years. You are able to do so in an environment which is professional & therefore you can add value to each other without the need of getting into each other’s personal space. Industry groups provide you with an opportunity to connect with other professionals within your industry. Such groups provide platforms to discuss industry specific issues, take inputs from other senior folks in the industry & also help build relationships with like-minded professionals. Similarly skill-specific groups provide similar advantages, but with specific focus on skill-sets. Here one could discuss ways to learn & build skills, obtain certifications etc.
An obvious way to identify the right groups is to run a search with specific details like the name of your school, college or previous organisations. Similarly one could also run a search for industry or skill-specific groups. Another great way is to identify individuals who are well networked & check the groups which they are a part of. You always have the option of joining & then leaving a particular group if you feel that the group is not adding value to you. One definite advantage of joining groups is that it is one of the easiest ways of extending your network. If you are the member of a group, you can extend an invite to another person (not known to you) who is also a part of the group. This way you get a rational reason to extend invite to folks you would like to connect with without running the risk of IDK (I don’t know this person), which impacts your ability to extend invitations in future.
17. Applications
This part of the article has been updated by me in March 2013 as per changes implemented by LinkedIn. Reproduced below is some content from the Help pages which will prove useful to users;
"LinkedIn Applications have been replaced with a preview of a new feature that lets former LinkedIn Application users add media links to images, presentations, videos, and documents to their profiles.
Any SlideShare content you’ve uploaded using the SlideShare Presentations application were automatically migrated to the Summary section of your profile once you were upgraded to the newly redesigned LinkedIn profile."
Besides this if you were using the 'My Travel" application from Tripit, you can now link your LinkedIn profile to your Tripit account. This helps to share info about the travel undertaken by you & it is a great way for you to identify the folks in your network who might be based in that particular location & might be travelling at the same time as you. This helps you to deepen your relationships by providing an opportunity to add a face-to-face aspect to an online relationship.
But if you were using the "My Books" application from Amazon, you do not have the earlier option anymore. Only option for you now is to import info about all the books read & reviewed by you into 'Shelfari' and link these with your Facebook & Twitter profiles.
18. Updates
Updates are a good way to share some current information about yourself with the larger LinkedIn network. This might encompass some relevant professional achievement, non-confidential info about business success or generic information which will add value to others. I find this a great medium to share interesting articles read by me which might also benefit others in my network. This way you are adding to their professional & personal development too.
I will be publishing the 4th article in this series in early-April 2013 which will focus on how to use LinkedIn for marketing your product / services.
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