Adding value thru your presence on LinkedIn

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.

Building your presence on Linkedin

Facebook’s impending IPO has obviously raised awareness of the value of social media & the potential future which lies in this industry. This is obviously a case study in itself at the macro-economic level, but there are many critical aspects which all of us as individuals miss out in the benefits of Social Media. As in any other field of knowledge, social media has its share of “Haves”, “Have-nots” & “Clueless”.

The first category “Haves” are the folks who are big fans of social media, have a invested time & effort in crafting an online presence, are very frequent users & make the best use of the available resources. The “Have-nots” on the other hand are folks who have vaguely understood that there is something called social media & have made feeble attempts to at drive a stake in the ground, by creating some sort of presence on the various social media available, but do not have enough reasons to go back to the scanty profiles created by them & do not invest the time required to build a presence in this new world. The “Clueless” on the other hand are folks who are true to the name of the category & do not have an idea of how they can tap into these new frontiers. This article is to encourage the “Haves” to share some of their tips & success stories, to help the “Have-nots” fill in the gaps & put in the right efforts & to ensure that the “Clueless” have a perspective on what they are missing out & take the first steps in that direction.

The composition of folks in each of these 3 categories obviously varies in terms of geography, industry as well as age profiles. If we examine this from the context of India, it is definitely one of the fastest growing countries on various social media, the slant is obviously more urban & leans towards technology & services related industries. The age profile is also more skewed towards the younger generation especially when it comes to Facebook.

When I look at the multiple folks connected with me on Linkedin, I am sometimes saddened to see the cursory effort put in by the “Have-nots” on their profile & wonder if they realize the amount of professional damage they are doing to themselves in this process. If I have a scheduled meeting with someone, the first thing I do is to check on their Linkedin profile & the same is being done every day by scores of people who are interacting with you. If you have only driven a stake in the ground, then it might be a good start, but at the other end exposes you as a “Have-not” as you have not even bothered to put in additional efforts.

We will examine the benefits & use of social media in the various prevalent forms, but to start let’s take a quick look at Linkedin & some of the essential points which one needs to internalize whilst using this social media tool for professionals. People tend to underestimate the value of a good profile on Linkedin & assume that it is just another form of a resume. Most folks do not realize that a good Linkedin profile is a far richer source of information which one can provide to the world & can tend to high-light many more aspects of your professional career & individual strengths. It is therefore imperative that one invests the appropriate amount of time to build the “brand” which is you & ensure that this personal brand establishes the “USP – Unique Selling Proposition” which you as a brand possess. Let’s run through some basic elements which are essential for this process;

1. Full name – Many people tend to use their full name professionally, but are rather coy when putting this up on Linkedin. The first piece of advice is to ensure that you use the name which people know you professionally. Ultimately your aim is to make it easier for others to locate you & truncating your first name of surname is obviously not going to help the process. After all who would want to wade through 110 profiles of “Rajesh Shah” before locating the person known to you? Converting this to “R. Shah” or “Rajesh S.” will only make the process tougher.
2. Headline – This is something which appears immediately under your name & is a short summary of your professional identity. Most folks just land up putting in their current designation & name of the company in this. All of us are unique & cannot be limited by the narrow boundaries of our current titles or organizations. Chances are that you have contributed to the success of multiple organizations across different industries. Even if you have worked for the same company for a long time, you have might have managed a myriad of different roles in the same company. Therefore putting in more qualitative descriptors about you & helps you to help other see the broader canvas of your work. Try replacing “Regional Sales Manager at XYZ Ltd” with “Successful sales professional & leader with proven track record in the ABC industry” as a start.
3. Location & Industry – This information is not some “state secret” which needs to be camouflaged, but information which should be readily shared. It ensures that people are able to locate you easily & beyond this it might help customers contact sales people & job offers in your town/industry to be made available to you.
4. Summary & Specialties – This is the best place to put in an “Elevator pitch” about yourself. Basically a quick summary which covers essential points of information about you & your specialties. Try not to only put in generic statements, but also cover some specifics which highlight your “USP’s”
5. Complete info on Education & Experience – I see a lot of profiles which only specify the current organisation in Experience & do not cover previous roles & organizations. Similarly education is also covered as some acronym which some people might understand as they might be in the same country or industry, but might leave others guessing. The simpler approach here is to ensure that you put in basic info from your resume, but also enumerate acronyms & elucidate info on your role/organisation. Include links to the website of your previous organisation & education institutions so that someone can get more info from the same.

With this we finish the first stage of ensuring that your profile is complete & serves the purpose that it was created for. We will discuss other areas of making effective use of your profile in future articles. Do let me know if this was a good starting point for your own Linkedin profile & if you have managed to improve your profile in any way with these basic tips.