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First 8 Things to Do with LinkedIn

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While helping a colleague out with LinkedIn today and I created this short list of immediate things to do with LinkedIn to start getting the most from it right away.

  • Clean Up old profiles: You should only have one profile on LI, If you have more than one, invite people from your old profiles to re-link on your new profile. Then Contact LinkedIn support to delete your old profiles. In the future, as you change jobs, emails, etc., just update your profile, don’t create a new profile.
  • Flush out your profile with quick info about past positions. This helps you connect with others who you might have worked with there who are on linked in and helps them find you. How far back you want to go is your choice. Just be honest! This is the backbone of networking. If you totally lie about a position, someone will find it and it will hurt you.
  • Add all your current active emails addresses Under Account & Settings > Email Addresses. This allows others to send you linkedin requests and for LinkedIn to find you in the network based on any of your email address. Choose one as your primary address, this is where LI will send all notifications to (like when someone wants to connect)
  • Set Your Privacy Settings (IMPORTANT)
    • Account & Settings > Advertising: I set this to no, there is enough blind info about me being passed around already. No reason to make the advertising companies jobs easier (Kuddo’s to LI for giving you this option!)
    • Account & Settings > Connection Browsing: Set to no. Your network is your asset, no need to share it openly with everyone. People can still search and find people in your network through you, but they can’t go to your profile and see a list of everyone you know.
    • Account & Settings > Profile Views: this controls a new feature of LI that shows you who has looked at your profile. This setting controls how LI shows you when you look at someone’s profile. I choose “anonymous profile characteristics”. (Another Kuddo for the LI team!)
  • Install the LI Toolbar on all systems you use (both work and personal). Most importantly, this will put an icon in the upper right hand corner of all your emails telling you if the sender (or others on the email list) are members of LI and are in your network. Secondarily, it will scan your mail to create a list of people you might want to send LI invites to based on your email correspondence.
  • Start sending out invites to those you want to link with
    • Decide how you will use LI. There is one school of thought to link with anyone and everyone to build as big a network as possible. Another is to link with those who you have actually worked with and know you in some fashion. I choose the later, as I feel it’s important when requests to make introductions come along that I actually know one of the two parties involved. Otherwise I feel it starts to erode your networking value…
    • Always personalize the LI Invite text to increase the likely hood of a link (and it’s just polite)
  • Under My Contacts check out “Colleagues” and “Classmates”, to have LI search for other LI member who you may know through companies you were at or where you went to school. Even if you don’t know there email addresses, you can send a LI invite to them and re-establish some old connections.
  • Consider upgrading to a Paid account. This will give you more access to the LI network for searching as well as more ways to reach people (introductions and InMails), as well as greater reference search capabilities. (I upgraded to a Business account back when hiring for a position so I could do more searches based on companies and key words and could then contact them directly. This is essentially what most of the no-value add recruiters today do…and the business account costs were much less. (Disclosure: I’m not affiliated with LI in any way other than being a happy and enthusiastic user!)

Hope this helps others as well!

Stop Me – Something Cool from Microsoft?

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When you think about the “cool companies” in the technology space that are working on “cool things”, Microsoft is usually not the name that first jumps to everyone’s mind. And yet, yesterday I learned about something Microsoft is working on that made me say “Wow, that’s cool”.

My colleague William Henry mentioned Microsoft Surface in a recent blog posting; I hadn’t heard of Surface before and checked it out based on William’s recommendation. The concept behind it was quite impressive and I agree with William that this is the type of thing that I would expect ot see from Apple, not Microsoft.

Image an entire table top (about the size of a coffee table) that is a touch sensitive computer screen. What ever gets displayed on the screen can be interacted with in a iPhone sort of way. If there are photos on the screen, they look like a bunch of photos just tossed on a table. Grab one and it moves to the top of the stack; drag your fingers at opposite corners and resize the photo; grab a corner drag in a half circle to rotate the photo to show to your friend sitting on the oppose side of the table; touching the photo and flicking your finger tosses the photo aside.

Now take that same table and integrate it via bluetooth with you cell phone, iPod (of course on the Surface website they use that Microsoft music player…), camera, or other portable device of choice. Lay the device on the table, and the table now displays options for interfacing with the device and accessing data on the device. If it’s a camera, the photos display as in the example above. If its an iPod…er…music player, songs are displayed from your collection as well as from the phone. Dragging the songs from your collection to the music player transfers the songs.

The other example Microsoft gives is in a restaurant where your menu is displayed on the table. After you order via Surface, the table changes into some hip night club psychedelic screen savers. Or, as more apt to happen in our modern age, it might start displaying advertisements.

The concept of Surface is intriguing and has a lot of potential behind it, some that aren’t even imagined yet. It completely removes the interface device aspect of working with a computer. The interaction has the potential to be much more humanistic and nature. Has the potential. There are some aspects about Surface that are a bit ahead of their time. Like how quickly photos could be transfered from a phone to the Surface via wireless connection (it takes me many minutes to transfer my photos to my computer today via a high speed USB port). Not to mention the interoperability issues with all the different phone, camera manufacturers.

If Surface ever becomes a reality, the key to it’s success will depend on the development community. The iPhone has been out for just about two weeks now, and there are already a rush of new software applications coming out for it. Someone was smart enough to have a iPhone developer boot camp the weekend after the phone was released (sad thing is that it appears that Apple wasn’t smart enough to sponsor or get involved in it). This type of network around Surface would be sure to generate some really amazing things. Of course, when it is actually released.

To really appreciate Surface, you gotta check out the demo movies on the Surface website. Regardless of how real the technology is right now, the concept is killer. After the last movie, I got bit by the sci-fi aspect that Surface could have. How about placing a stack of documents on it, having them get absorbed into the surface and digitized. Then send those documents to another Surface user half way around the world only to have the stack emerge from that Surface so the receiver can pick them up and walk away. Might be a bit too Star Trek for now, but we’re getting there.

Side Box: Actually two really cool things from Microsoft. The other that has recently come out of Microsoft in conjunction with some research conducted at University of Washington is Photosynth. This is an amazing fast and unique way to interact with photos and view associated photos as they relate to the real world. You are given a 3-D view of something and can zoom in and out of photos of that thing taken from different angles. The killer aspect is that those photos could all be from a public archive like Flickr and taken by different people. The best way to understand Photosynth is to watch a killer demo of this from TED2007 and play around with a demo from Microsoft Labs.

Revolution Agains Our Always-On Economy?

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Ever had one of those days where separate conversations from the day collide into a similar theme? Today was one of those days for me.

A co-worker and I were talking about the trials and tribulations of working remotely as part of a larger technology team. We were sharing horror stories of the disconnection from your co-workers because everyone relies on email. Where if you didn’t block off Noon to 1pm on your calendar you were likely to have a co-worker schedule an important call during that time (like I have to block off my lunch hour?). And to boot, they scheduled the meeting at 11:50am via the shared calendar system and then get upset when your ten minutes late (yeah, like I just sit in front of my computer waiting for email all day). If you can’t tell, this is a pet peeve of mine…email is not instantaneous, guaranteed communication method. If it’s urgent, pick up the phone and call me!

My co-worker was describing how his last job had him working from 6am till midnight due to the fact that there were people all over the world and they were all work-a-holics (or the company culture/expectation was that everyone was). Sure, it’s nice to have the flexibility of your work schedule to go to the gym in the middle of the day to blow off some steam or run an errand or two, but not at the cost of not being able to step away from work.

Then, this afternoon, I heard a story on NPR’s All Things Considered that talked about a home recorders dream, playing with pros online. It was a story about a guy who’s passion was playing the guitar and recording his music in the evenings. With a laptop and about $1000 he was able to build a home recording studio. The kicker was that there are numerous services available online where he could send an MP3 of his recording to someone, do a short call with them, and then for a flat rate they would record background tracks for his song (drummer, beat track, background horns, etc.). A few more MP3s would be passed back and forth and in the end the home musician had high quality tracks he would download for his song and mix it himself at home.

To those of us long time technology people, you’re probably yawning saying “so what, that’s not new”. But it is for the music industry. When you look at how music is made, all these musicians are usually in separate rooms, just listening to the other tracks when they record their own. Technology and the internet has enabled the studio musicians and singers to go independent, live geographically where every they want, and work on their own schedule. Everyone is happy, right?

Again, all of this isn’t new to those who have been doing this in high tech, but I look at this in a different way. How many of these people have the self-control and discipline to work in this fashion? More importantly, as we have the next wave of employees coming out of school, how many of them are being prepared for the challenges of balancing your life in an always-on economy?

If you can work in that situation, great for you! But, I have heard rumblings about the always-on economy from many people from all different areas of business. The difficulty of having family time because you work retail and have to be in the story during the holiday sale. The difficulty of taking a vacation and having to check your email or blackberry constantly. The difficulty of getting work done becuase of the constant interruptions from IM, Email, or the phone. Regardless of whether a worker can work in this type of environment, is it efficient and healthy?

My co-worker is expecting to see more of a revolt toward the remote working situations. We might see a new wave of self-help gurus who will help you learn how to work remotely and still have a balanced life.

Here’s my advice from what I try to do regularly to balance out my work/life and deal with the always-on economy…and it won’t cost you a four easy payments of $49.99…

  • Take time each day for thinking. No phones, no email, no IM. Those are tools, learn to turn them off. Just take some quite time to review and focus on topics from the day (for me, I follow this with time for writing).
  • Set aside focus time to accomplish more detailed or creative work. Turn off the communication tools. Give yourself time to concentrate and work.
  • Take a real vacation at least once a year. No cell phones, no email, no connection with work. If you can’t leave your business to let it run on it’s own, then it’s not a real business. (or if your boss won’t let you take a vacation where you can’t be reached, then they’re not a real boss.)

I think there is a frustration level simmering beneath the surface of the working world that we have created. For our own and the greater good, we can’t ignore it.