Grow My Company

LinkedIn: 5 things you can do right now to make your profile more effective

There is no doubt that your LinkedIn profile is a critical component your professional identity. It ranks at or near the top of search rankings, and it can create interest from potential employers, clients, and customers.

On the other hand, a poor LinkedIn profile can work against you when your competitors make an effort to build complete profiles that truly demonstrate the benefits of hiring them instead of you. 

So what can you do to make yourself attractive on LinkedIn right now?

1. List your inherent professional benefit rather than your job title in your personal branding box under your name:
   This is one of the most common mistakes I see on LinkedIn. Simply listing your job title doesn't help you at all. Okay, you're a Lawyer, Compliance Officer, VP of Lending, Business Analyst, Looking for Full Time Employment, etc. So what? What can you do for me? What is the inherent benefit of hiring you? Tell me what you can do to help my business thrive. This is precious personal branding space. Don't squander it by listing a boring job title.
2. Get 3 recommendations:
   I wrote a blog post that explains why and how recommendations help you on LinkedIn. In a nutshell, since so few people bother to obtain any, they are a point of distinction. You can toot your own horn all day long, but when someone else describes your professional abilities and skills, it substantiates your claims.
3. Update your status:
   When you update your LinkedIn status, a story is posted in the newsfeed of all your connections, so this reminds them of you. Don't use this space for anything that isn't exclusively professional. Use it to educate your connections about the great things that you do an a daily basis, for example, if you're a divorce lawyer, you may write something like, "Just avoided a nasty custody battle by reminding both parties that the kids' best interests are their primary concern."
4. Add sections:
   Most people don't bother adding special sections. This is where you can appropriately list community and charitable involvement, which are not jobs. You can also use sections to add publications, presentations, awards, certifications, etc. And there are special sections designed to help students and recent grads, who have little relevant career experience, to promote courses and projects that are related to the job that they seek.
5. Complete your profile to 100%:
   You must add a photo, 3 past jobs, and receive 3 recommendations to achieve a 100% complete LinkedIn profile. This is achievable for most people, so take the time, make the effort, and complete your profile to display your strongest professional presence. 

Realize that LinkedIn is a double edged sword. While it is a tremendous resource to demonstrate your capabilities, it also provides a venue that makes it easy for prospective employers, clients, and customers to evaluate your competition and compare you against them. Make sure that you're the most attractive option, or your competitors might just edge you out before you have an opportunity to get your foot in the door.

 

 - Christine Pilch Mancini

 

 

Are you a social media connector or a collector?

Social media is a set of communications techniques. It helps you to reconnect, strengthen, and establish relationships. To some, however, social media seems to be one big competition for who can establish the most connections.

Let's be clear though, in most cases, volume and quality are not necessarily congruent.

Connecting without engagement has little value. How many collectors are you connected to? You know the ones; they sent an invitation and then ignored your attempts to engage with them. They may or may not post content on their Facebook or Twitter accounts, but they certainly aren't interested in communicating with you. They're silent or they're preachers.

Social media is one of the most powerful networking tools at your disposal today. It allows you to meet people virtually that would have likely never crossed your path just 5 years ago. It can help you to educate your friends and family about what you do professionally. It provides venues for online collaboration that can speed up business processes. It helps you find a job or qualified people to fill an opening within your organization.

Collectors don't seem to care about this though. They just want more connections than the next guy. Or they just want to snoop on their old friends and acquaintances.

Don't be a collector, be a connector. Make an effort, and it will pay off with enhanced social media relationships that can help you fulfil your goals. Here are a few tips about how to be a connector rather than a collector:

1. Personal invitation:
   Personalize your LinkedIn invitation. Sending the stock invitation says that you're lazy and you don't care enough about the person to bother taking the time to address them personally. Facebook used to allow personalized invitations, but, sadly, they removed that ability, preventing you from reminding an old friend about who you are.
2. Follow up:
   Message the person after connecting. Thank them for the invitation or for accepting yours. 
3. Start a conversation:
   Or at least make an effort to get to know your new connection. Even it it's someone you've known all your life, the new social media connection may add an entirely new dimension and lead to opportunities down the road for each of you.
4. Read updates:
   Keep up to date on your connections' promotions, job changes, and new company affiliations. That IT specialist whose trust you earned with one company could be your next big account in his new capacity as IT manager at another company.
5. Respond:
   When someone takes the time to post or comment on your profile, Tweet @ or message you, respond. Unless you're a celebrity, there is no excuse for not responding. It's just plain rude.
6. Read about them:
   Read the information that people put in their About sections. When you connect with someone new on LinkedIn, they know if you've looked at their profile or not. Show some interest and possibly learn something new about that person on Facebook too. This prevents you from messaging someone from your past with the stock, "So what have you been up to for the last 20 years?," when it's all right there for you to read, had you only taken the time. This helps to demonstrate that you actually respected them enough to read their info and allows you to comment on something substantive that may open a meaningful dialog.

People who have accounts on social media, but don't bother engaging, miss opportunities. Don't be a collector, be a connector and start being a more valuable member of your social media circles.

 

 - Christine Pilch Mancini

Image credit: Public-Domain-Image.com

LinkedIn privacy threat and Facebook notifications: changes you should make

 

 

LinkedIn recently opted you into letting them use your name and photo in advertising, but you can change that. This video will show you how. In addition, Facebook recently changed their account settings infrastructure. In this video you'll hear a few tips about key settings you should pay attention to. Christine Pilch, Grow My Company, 413.537.2474, Christine@GrowMyCo.com

© 2011, Christine Pilch, Grow My Company. This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

 

Friday Favorites

Here are 5 of my favorite or most helpful things I read on the web this week:

1. Understanding the Social Media ROI Cycle - I like this because it helps establish realistic expectations. No, you won't see instant returns from your social media investment. It takes time, consistence, perseverance, and diligence. There is no cutting corners.
2. Facebook Promotions: What You Need to Know - Many people run unsanctioned contests on Facebook and get away with it, but what it you're the one who gets caught? Are you willing to risk loosing your Fan Page?
3. 4 Innovative Ways to Use Web Video for Small Business - Video is one of the hottest marketing tactics available these days, and here are 4 solid tips for integrating video into your marketing. 
4. The Reputation Economy is Coming - Are You Prepared? - "The reputation economy is an environment where brands are built based on how they are perceived online and the promise they deliver offline." So, are you ready for this?
5. How Well Is Social Media Fitting into the Marketing Mix? - There are some great statistics here.

Well, that's it for this week.

- Christine Pilch

 

10 ways to insult, irritate and get dumped by your social media connections fast

Here are a few things I've learned during my last few years in social media. If you want to keep your friends, I suggest you avoid the following:

1. Spend all your time pitching your own product or service. Very few companies are successful directly selling in social media. Use this space to communicate and build relationships. 
2. Be rude and use foul language. If you don’t speak that way face-to-face, don’t do it here. 
3. Pick fights. Openly challenging peoples’ opinions, insulting, & antagonizing them puts people off.
4. Be selfish. Using social media as your personal pulpit to preach your message without answering questions, helping, or engaging doesn’t work. 
5. Retweet or repost others’ links without crediting them. It is proper social media etiquette to credit the source when you share something from a friend’s Facebook page or retweet a link.
6. Forget to thank people. Remember your basic manners. 
7. Stalk people you barely know. When you Tweet @ people incessantly and comment on every photo, status update, and link they post on Facebook, and you’re just a casual acquaintance, that’s creepy. 
8. Drunk post. If you must jump on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter when you’ve got a few drinks in you, you would be wise to refrain from communicating. 
9. Insist that you’re right and everyone who disagrees is wrong. Speaking vehemently about your religious or political beliefs, parenting style, or favorite sports team, then arguing with, belittling, or insulting anyone who expresses a contradictory opinion, turns people off. 
10. Post information that should remain private. Betraying confidences and airing dirty laundry proves that you can’t be trusted.

What can you add to this list?

- Christine Pilch

 Image Credit: Microsoft

Social media friend or foe? The danger of mixing personal & professional

Social media is a communications channel and a means to build relationships. Gone are the days when there was a solid line dividing your personal and professional life. Social media blurred the line, and now it’s fairly common for family, friends, co-workers, subordinates, and superiors to coexist in one’s social media world. But is this smart? 

Revealing too Much 

One of the hardest things about social media is figuring out how much personal information to share. Your social media identity is an extension of your off-line brand, so if you over-share, you run the risk of being perceived as irritating and unappealing. You can also compromise your safety by telling your circle that you’re out of town, and therefore, that your home is empty. You may also be caught in a little white lie if, for example, you called in sick to work, and the next day your boss sees photos from the beach excursion you enjoyed instead. 

No Do-Overs 

Yes, you can delete a status update or post, but with the huge popularity of social media, search engines catalog everything almost instantly. If you post something and want to take it back even 30 seconds later because you’re worried about your professional reputation, it may just come back to haunt you. Think twice before you post. 

Complaining About Your Job 

Even if you’re careful about who you friend on Facebook, or you think you’ve mastered the art of blocking certain status updates from particular friends and lists, it’s just not smart to complain on social media about your job. Twitter is public and Facebook changes privacy setting so often that you risk the information getting to the exact person that you don’t want to see it. 

You Could Get Fired 

Consider what happened to a waitress in North Carolina who complained about a tip she received. Despite the fact that she thought her updates were private, her boss saw the post and fired her. Most people are At Will employees who can be fired at any time for any reason, so don’t provide any ammunition.

- Christine Pilch

 Image Credit: Microsoft

Facebook Places: How & why to adjust your settings

Facebook launched their own geo-tracking service today, called Places. This video explains this new functionality and shows you how to adjust your own Facebook privacy settings to take advantage or disable this service. Christine Pilch, 413.537.2474, Christine@GrowMyCo.com

This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Logo follies: how taking liberties with your logo damages your brand

Although your logo itself is not your brand, since it is one of the most instantly recognizable elements of it, your logo is very important. Despite this, sometimes companies disrespect their logo, taking liberties with it that damage their brand by presenting an inconsistent delivery among mediums.

When your logo was developed, if the work was done by a someone who has experience with corporate identity development, you likely received an accompanying identity guide or manual. The degree of detail contained in this document varies among companies. For example, the ID manual for the Boy Scouts of America is 45 pages. But the guide provided for your small business is likely just a few pages, usually containing such information as acceptable fonts, stationery design, colors, and appropriate logo versions. This document structures the delivery of your graphic presentation so it remains consistent across various media, and its compliance is typically mandated by the president or CEO within the document.

Unfortunately, sometimes companies don't receive an identity guide, or perhaps the person handling marketing doesn't understand it. Such a breakdown of understanding, or of missing information, often leads to graphic mistakes like the following.

Logos are typically designed with specific colors. 4-color is expensive to print, so 1 or 2-color logos are most popular for small businesses. Your ID guide should contain all acceptable renditions, including black, reverse (white on black,) a 1-color version for each color of a 2-color logo, solid versions and shaded versions, and a reduced version with all elements clearly visible down to 1 inch size. Without guidance, sometimes a logo is recolored inappropriately:

 

Sometimes a logo doesn't perfectly fit a space, and inexperienced marketers may opt to stretch or squish it to fit the space without regard to maintaining proportions. For example, it may be tempting to squish a logo when creating today's avatars for social media, which are typically square. It is also tempting to stretch a logo to better fit the space of a sign or banner:

  

It is also inappropriate to rotate your logo or flip it:

 

And you should be careful to respect the white space requirements stated in your ID guide and not put anything too close to it or place it on a field:

Your logo is often one of the most prominent graphic elements of your brand, and people get used to seeing it consistently displayed, but it's easy to misuse it. Since consistency is one of the most important components of a brand, you would be wise to respect the integrity of your logo and refer to your ID guide whenever you create any graphic marketing messages.

- Christine Pilch 

Avoiding inappropriateness to safeguard your brand

A Facebook friend recently updated her status, "Anyone else think it's improper to reply to a business email "always at your service, mylady?" Yes, I thought so." She was a bit shocked and offended to be treated so unprofessionally by someone who obviously had a different sense of humor than she did. He crossed a line and likely forever damaged his reputation in her eyes.

Of course, the comments rolled in rapidly as people expressed their enthusiastic agreement. One male friend hit the nail on the head when he responded, "Sounds a bit sexist and patronizing, even if not intended."

In another example, a media representative friend of mine called me a while back all in a tizzy because he had received and email from an advertising agency owner who had requested media coverage of a client and signed the email, "Love, Lisa, (not her real name.)" He was stunned by the inappropriateness of this signature and wanted to justify that he wasn't over-reacting. Although it seemed she thought it was a cute way of sweet-talking him into getting what she wanted, she acted unprofessionally and misinterpreted the level of their relationship.

Both of the above examples were likely innocent mistakes, however they illustrate how easy it is to damage your reputation by simply crossing a line. Your reputation is very closely intertwined with your brand, which is a reflection of your constituency's perception of you. To illustrate my point, consider how BP's reputation over the past 3-months has affected their brand.

Your brand is critical, so be careful to avoid any inappropriateness that could potentially damage it. Resist the temptation to be cute because it might not be perceived that way on the other end.

- Christine Pilch

 Image Credit: Microsoft

Hazards of Social Media, Part 2: Online reputation management - protecting yourself when someone puts you in a awkward position

You have likely worked hard your whole life to be perceived a certain way, and this has likely transferred from your offline to online life. You're probably careful about how you speak to people and the things that you say, so they are not misconstrued. You likely have your own personally acceptable code of conduct.

But what if somebody else threatens the reputation that you so carefully guard? What if someone asks you to do something that makes you uncomfortable and could possibly threaten your reputation?

I recently encountered a situation on LinkedIn where a connection of mine wanted to be connected to an author who was connected to someone that I am connected to. So the request had to follow this track:

My friend > Me > My connection > His connection

This is a relatively common request on LinkedIn, and in the spirit of the community, I didn't think twice about forwarding it to my connection, who was a LION (LinkedIn Open Networker.) Such people connect to as many people as possible on LinkedIn for the purported reason of being a resource to the LinkedIn community.

But it quickly became clear to me that this particular LION wasn't interested in doing a good deed without payment. He asked that I write a recommendation on his LinkedIn profile commending his willingness to forward the introduction request.

Huh? This guy wanted me to commend him for doing something that probably happens 10s of thousands of times daily on LinkedIn by people who are just acting in a decent human fashion, doing a favor? After all, this only requires the click of a button, not much effort.

I was uncomfortable with this request because if I recommend someone who treats others this way, then my reputation is tarnished by association.

I tweeted about his request, and once reinforced that indeed, this was an unreasonable request, I messaged him via the LinkedIn network that I only recommend people that I have worked with extensively and know well. But he wouldn't let go without two return emails.

In the first he mentioned that he has 2,500 recommendations from people like me that he has helped. And he's very busy running his own business, yet he still makes time to help others. "Okay," I'm thinking, "Just like all the rest of the LinkedIn community." And I didn't bother to respond.

A couple days went by, and a received a follow up email from him, stating that I must have misunderstood his request. "I was not asking you to recommend me as a person you know or trust, but "my service" as pay-it-forward advocate who helps others."

I still didn't respond. He apparently has a different view of courtesy than I do, and there was noting to be gained by pointing that out.

In another circumstance, one of my clients had one of his LinkedIn connections request that he pass along a introduction to one of my client's connections. His connection was in the professional services field and he wanted to position himself as a resource. The problem was that my client didn't think very highly of this person's skills, and he didn't want to forward the introduction, thereby associating himself as an inferred reference. I told my client that his instincts were probably right, and he should trust them.

In both of these scenarios above, requests were made that could have potentially damaged someone's reputation simply by association. The people making the requests didn't seem to have a problem doing so, and they obviously had the confidence to do so, but they had not successfully impressed those to whom they made their requests.

The message here is to not allow anyone to bully you into doing something that makes you uncomfortable online any more than you would allow it to happen face-to-face. Like it or not, your reputation is affected by those you associate with, and a false recommendation can certainly come back to bite you.

by: Christine Pilch
Christine@GrowMyCo.com
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 Image Credit: Microsoft