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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!

Jott Your Thoughts and Reminders

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It’s not too often that I find a really useful and free service that I can see myself using almost daily. Today I found one. Even with the wide spread use of mobile email, at times it still not practical, safe, or possible to take down a quick note on your smart phone and email it out. Wouldn’t it be great if we all had a personal secretary that we could call to transcribe our note and then email it out? But who could afford that…right? Now we all can!

Jott is a essentially a note taking service that allows you to call a toll free phone number, record up to a 30 second note, reminder, idea, or whatever and then have it emailed to your inbox…fully transcribed! Even better, set up other people in your account and have the note emailed to them instead (or sent as a text message to their phone). Group people together and send a note to the entire group. And if you can’t wait the few minutes for the message to be transcribed, send it as an audio attachment! Jott even makes it easy to pull in your contacts from other services.

Jott is so simple, it’s brilliant!

I also love how the “Jott in Action” section on the website simply explains how the system works. If you know how to use a phone, email, and web browser…you can use this service.

Jott has been around for about a year now, and have a great service up and running in that time. The current restriction is that it’s available only in the United States. But I assume that this restriction won’t be there for too much longer.

I will definitely be using this service almost daily!

Google Analytics Gets an Update

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I have been using Google Analytics for almost a year now to track the visitors to this blog and a few other sites I have. Tonight, I was slightly surprised when I logged on to my account and saw a whole new set of graphs. Google Analytics underwent an update today:


If your a user of Google Analytics, then you’ll notice the changes right away. The changes give the Analytics’ graphs a fresher look and feel. The dashboard (the first screen you see when you choose an account) has been redesigned as well. What is nice about the new dashboard is that it shows a historic line graph of your visitors for more than just the last 7 days (like the old versions). The menu options seem to be nearly the same as before, but I haven’t fully explored the new version yet (nor fully explored the old version). The only thing that I have found that I don’t like about the new analytics is that loss of granularity. Before, I could look at the stats for a single day and see when visits to my site occurred (valuable to understand what time of day vitis happened or how shortly after a blog posting that visitors arrived). This new version seems to have lost that level of granularity, now the finest grained detail I can view is a single day’s worth of traffic.

If you don’t mind sharing your site’s traffic with Google and you have a mechanism for installing the required javascript widget on all your pages, Google Analytics is a great tool for viewing and exploring your traffic. Especially if you use Google Adwords, since they are integrated. But, once you reach a certain volume of traffic you will need to sign up for the commercial version of analytics. Until then, try it out and see what you think.

Oh, and it’s not really clear if Google use this data for any other purposes…but they don’t specifically guarantee that they don’t… (see their Terms of Services, Section 6)