LinkedIn Endorsements

Posted on January 2, 2013 by DeeReinhardt

I am sure by now that you have seen the “Endorsements” on your LinkedIn profile. This is a relatively new feature from LinkedIn that allows you to perform a quick click and let your connections and the other person’s connections see that you feel your connection exhibits those skills.

The YouTube how-to video below explains:

Endorsement Monday’s – similar to Twitter’s #FollowFriday or #FF, take a few moments every Monday to endorse some of your connections.
Endorse someone from your home page - Something similiar to the image above will appear on your home page in LinkedIn so it becomes quite simple perform the “endorsement” action.
Endorsing someone from their profile – you can also go directly to a connections profile, find the “Skills and Expertise”, and then choose to endorse one or a number of skills they have listed.
Managing Endorsements – not everyone wants to show the endorsements for the skills they have listed OR they prefer not to have a particular person listed as having endorsed them. I show you how to manage those endorsements.

Thanks for reading, and if you would like to endorse me for any skills, here is the link – Dee Reinhardt

Share this post with your connections to help them understand the Endorsement process.

Tag your LinkedIn Connections

Posted on December 21, 2012 by DeeReinhardt

I was ecstatic when I found the option to tag my LinkedIn connections. This feature wasn’t available until after I had over 300 connections and I didn’t take advantage of the feature until I had over 500 connections. If you start early in your connecting career, you will have a robust search pattern available to help you find your contacts quickly and easily.

Tagging helps you sort and organize your contacts with labels that you create to help you remember where or why you might know someone. Personally I remember faces forever, but names tend to elude my memory. Once I have someone tagged, I can search by industry or geographic area to try to find the face. (Another reason why photos on your profile are so important)

With the new profiles that LinkedIn has been rolling out, it is an extra step from how you could tag profiles in the old profile view. I thought I would share a quick how-to in this blog post. If you have questions, reach out to me. If you need to optimize your profile, I can help with that as well.

Happy Tagging!

LinkedIn – Top 5 Tips – Connections

Posted on September 18, 2012 by DeeReinhardt

Number 3 in the series of Top 5 LinkedIn Tips dealing with your personal profile is Connections

Connections – to be effective in LinkedIn you need a minimum of 150 connections 1st degree connections. Briefly – if you are directly connected, they are 1st degree connections, those peoples connections are your 2nd degree connections (if you aren’t connected to them), and the 2nd degree person’s connections are your 3rd degree. Sally Smith may be your next door neighbor but if she isn’t connected to someone in your sphere of connections, she could be Out of Network.

In the classes and one-on-one sessions I offer, my mantra is “It’s not about who you know, but about who they know.” Social networking is all about growing your network of people you know, building relationships, and IMHO paying it forward (instead of working on the philosophy of what’s in it for me). While I always advocate face-to-face networking, developing relationships is important, and in some cases, getting to know someone on-line is just as valuable as meeting someone in person.

Once you are a 1st degree connection with someone, you have access to their list of connections. This is useful if you are trying to reach someone specifically. Connecting with people who are well connected broadens your reach and potential network connections.

Less than 10% of my connections are considered an “on-line only” connection. I know that because I have “tagged” all of my connections through a function in LinkedIn that allows me to categorize my connections for later reference. One of my other blog posts is about tagging connections with a link to a how-to video. Tagging your connections makes your efforts to communicate with them “categorically” much easier down the road.

One more little tool related to connections can be found in LinkedIn Labs. It is a visualization of how my network is a network. You can check out the full size version here. It is called an inmap. I think it is pretty and truly reflects how your network is just that, interconnected and cloud-like.

You can read the other articles in the series by clicking on the links – Photos, Complete. Coming up is: Invitations & Participate.

Let me know if I can help you build your LinkedIn profile.

One of my Favorite Things

Posted on August 1, 2012 by DeeReinhardt

If the song from the Sound of Music - Favorite Things

could be rewritten to my thinking social media and LinkedIn would be included as one of the items in the list. LinkedIn is one of my favorite social media tools. Whenever I see an article on LinkedIn, I take a peek. Often the titles are the X number of tools or things you don’t know about LinkedIn.

I have found that there seem to be two types of users:

The person that collects connections and updates their resume
The person who participates in groups, answers questions and shares status updates.

The more often you participate in LinkedIn by sharing via groups, status updates or showing

Image representing LinkedIn as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

your expertise when answering questions, the more frequently your name appears in your connections updates stream.

This article about announcements raises some good points about direct communication to group members, but unsolicited emails could cause frustration, which we do not want to do when trying to generate leads.

Remember that by participating regularly, your connections will see your name and will be reminded each time they do of what you do or where you work. As much as we would like things to be simple, they aren’t always easy. Networking face-to-face and building relationships is often the way to increasing the on-line relationships that you have established.

LinkedIn adds a “Classmates” feature

Posted on October 22, 2011 by DeeReinhardt

LinkedIn added a new feature to help you find the classmates from your college or university. I couldn’t find the feature in LinkedIn. I had to click on this link www.linkedin.com/classmates from the LinkedIn blog article I read. (http://blog.linkedin.com/2011/10/19/linkedin-classmates/)

I logged out and logged back in and still cannot find where LinkedIn has updated the menu bar to include this feature.

The feature runs by the college(s) in your profile and the years you enter. Once the scan is complete, you get a listing of where they work, what they do and the towns where they reside. A list of the contacts shows up and shows you what degree of connection they are.

I can see this being useful if you went to a school where you might remember some of your classmates, or graduated in the near recent past so that you might still be in touch with some of them. For me, I went to a university that served a large commuter population so many years ago that it doesn’t appear to be a significant benefit to me. I might change my mind as I investigate the connections further.