LINKEDIN BEST PRACTICES: BASICS

This is going to be my first article in a series of a few that will talk about becoming the better business tech geek in the 2013. I will try to distil some of the advices out there by aggregating and summarizing them.

WHAT YOU WANT

First of all, if you haven’t got a LinkedIn profile, it is certainly a good idea to have one as many recruiters use it to find talent and many people use it to keep in touch when it comes to business relationships. Then you should fill the profile out so that it summarizes your professional profile. Think of it as a resume kept online.

This is a great start, now you have some online presence, which means that people can find you online. And that’s the key of this service really is to have that presence and a neat little point of introduction to you. People usually come across profiles by doing searches for either name or other key words, like particular skills or companies.

Now that you know what’s the purpose of this profile, let’s look at how you can keep track on how well this profile is doing. 

-       Your search appearances and profile views, which are on located on the right column of your home page. You can also view the industry that these views are from.

-       The incoming messages and Connect requests from people that you may not know directly. This is a good thing, but be aware of the mass connectors out there that may not use LinkedIn to create meaningful relationships. I’d accept an invitation from someone that I had at least a couple of messages long conversation usually, but I would likely deny the request of some random person. Good article on this is here: http://www.careerealism.com/dont-linkedin-collector-user/

This information is sourced from here http://www.careerealism.com/linkedin-strategy-clues/

HOW TO GET IT

If you want to get more views, then there are a few things you can do:

-       Update your profile and keep it current as things are happening. For example, got a new certification, great time to update that field on LinkedIn. This will push out this change as an update to your network; some may click on your profile and Voila! You got the view, or they can click like on the update and it would be pushed out to their network as well. 

-       Sign up and participate in groups, you can join group of interest and the ones that are relevant to your field. This can expose you to other people in your field and not only get views but also connections from these groups. (Hint: if you really want to network online look into LION – LinkedIn Open Networking groups).

-       Ask for recommendations. It’s great to say all these things about yourself but it’s a much bigger deal if someone else vouches for you.  Also you can get your skills endorsed, I find that with these people usually reciprocate once you have endorsed some of their skills, so take a gander at your list and see what you can vouch for, it’s actually pretty fun.

Some points are taken from this link http://socialmediatoday.com/monica-romeri/1016676/6-linkedin-best-practices

Growing your professional blog. Step 1: Starting

I would like to share some ideas on how to grow your professional blog. I currently somewhere along these steps, but I believe that I can contribute some information on what worked for me when I was writing a blog.

Ok so you have a want to post your thoughts about something in your field online. I’ve had that thought for a couple of years before I actually started writing this blog.

First of all, you should act. Don’t second-guess yourself and think about serious commitment yet, just go to a free blogging site either blogger or wordpress and just create a blog and post your first article. It’s really painless to do and you will feel better about yourself right after you do it.

Second - don’t expect any kind of hits on your blog right after you post. That’s the reality of it; your blog is not going to get any views for some time other than your friends and family if you tell them in person or on facebook. Frankly speaking I am still convinced that my blog is in the same boat, although the stats claim that I have over 2000 views in the last 2 years.

Third – try to educate yourself on how social engines work. Boolean search logic specifically is key to understanding how your page gets discovered, so you need to figure out how to tag your pages.

Fourth – keep posting. Like anything online it’s all content driven. Before you get any kind of exposure from your blog there needs to be enough content there to attract people. Which means that you are going to be filling your blog with posts and for a long while you will not see the kind of result you may have hoped for, other than for the odd mention every once in a while.

Fifth - don't be afraid to change gears. Personally I've had 3 blogs before I settled on this blog that you are reading. I've tried different hosting options and different topics. I decided that I would rather have a place to record my thoughts with a varying degree of relevance to human resources than to try to maintain different kinds of blogs. It's just a matter of committing to maintenance of the blog on some kind of reoccurring basis. Right now I try to do a post every week or two. And if I want to start writing more in the future, it will not be starting from scratch again, which is great. I could always adjust the topic of the blog and start delivering more content. I think that, since blogs are living websites, change is good for them.

Why do I write a Blog

I have recently read this book Rework that talks about the importance of writing in the business, as a main tool of communication which is clearly essential. Good writers have plenty of transferable skills like omission of irrelevant information, larger vocabulary and clear understanding of ideas that help them write well. These are great skills that I should try to improve in myself and hence it gives me the reason to write on my blog. Hopefully with time i will become interesting to read, but for now I keep on practicing.

Blogging is a great medium for this kind of sparring, as it opens your work up to the world and allow for people to discover your writing. The better you become at writing the more people you will attract It's really that simple, so all you should do is start writing an with time you shall see results.
I came across this little video that talks about blogging today and it highlights some of the benefits of blogging, specifically the process of explaining yourself.

@safinr updates about #competitive use of #socialmedia

In my article about competitive use of social media I have mentioned Second Cup, which drew some traffic from a service called Sysomos Map. Apparently someone was searching for Second Cup customer satisfaction from that service, this is derived based on the keywords that I saw them search. Looks like either Second Cup is monitoring their social media presence through this service or perhaps their competitors are engaging in some competitive use of social media. And I am leaning more toward the latter because when you look at this company's website it lists their notable clients and Second Cup is not listed there, however McDonald's is listed. Now this is pure speculation on my part but it is entirely possible that they are doing some research on their competitors. This is exciting stuff and I just wanted to provide a quick update to my possible readers and if the guys from Sysomos Map see this, I see you looking at my site, thanks for that ;).

Competitive use of social media

Competition, survival of the fittest, that’s the essence of business. It inevitably spreads to everything that is associated with business, and with social media being new, it’s about to start appearing there. I would love to see that happen and you should be excited too. Imagine a world where your complaints that are made in the “privacy” of your phone are heard and answered. Imagine writing a quick restaurant review and being invited to a competitor down the street to dine for half-price.
There is an abundance of advocates of social media in business and they are a resilient bunch. As an example,  a few months back I was expecting a delivery from Purolator during the Canada Post strike and I needed to contact customer service. I was dreading the call to the service centre and having to deal with the automated machine and waiting on hold. On their website I have noticed the option to contact their customer service on twitter and I tried it. It was pretty great, I got the answer that I was looking for without using the phone. Here’s the transcript of the interaction  
          

                safinr: @purolatorhelp Can you please tell me where is Toronto (North) depot located?  
                PurolatorHelp: @safinr This is Vincent. To avoid making a mistake, can you email me your tracking number and I will verify? customer.care@purolator.com          
               safinr:  @PurolatorHelp Hey Vincent, it's been awhile what's the status on the Toronto North Location?  I received the needed response shortly after.

Customer service is awesome, but marketing is another area that is great with social media. One of the ways that you can use it competitively is by contacting the dissatisfied customers of the competing business. For example, if you are Second Cup, and you want to offer product to the angry Starbucks customers. What you do is jump on twitter search (I recommend using Hootsuite.com) and look for someone mentioning Starbucks and one other word (damn, messed up, ruined, pissed of, fuck). There’s a good chance that someone will post this disgruntled tweet right after negative experience happened so emotional words are very likely don’t be afraid to search for it.
Here’s an screenshot of the search that I did.

Take a look at the tweet circled in blue, she seems like a great candidate for a competitive marketing campaign. Why not contact her and give her a free drink coupon to Second Cup? She might end up switching to Second Cup for coffee, or will tweet about this positive experience, or will come to Second Cup with other paying customers.

Now take a look at the tweet circled in red, she is talking about intention to switch, why not give her an extra incentive to switch to Second Cup instead? Send her free coffee too, and good things will happen.

I personally don’t have a preference for any coffee dealer, mainly because I make a mean coffee at home.

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Get your resume graded

I came across this web tool today that automatically grades your resume. This is an interesting service as it appears to be based on an algorithm that is developed with the input from hiring managers. The great thing about this tool is that after you put your resume through the algorithm it gives you 1 tip to improve your resume. That's great for people that have been searching for a job and want to give a touch up to their resume before sending out another batch. It's a free service and it doesn't ask you for any information (you are already giving them a wealth of it), yet it is asking you if you want to be contacted. Overall a fun little tool that I would recommend people.

http://rezscore.com/

Daily Wave, April 4th

Rant
There is an abundance of useful information online, but the fascination with Search Engine Optimization may be viewed as a short cut to creating traffic for your website. For example, you may search for Human Resource blog posts and come across this incoherent exploitation of the SEO system. http://articlesmax.com/why-you-need-human-resource-training.html. That article is not meant to inform, it's meant to show up on the top of the search results because they used Human Resources and related terms around 20 times in 500 word article (if you can call that an article). This is the evolution of those annoying pop-ups that have been really popular a few years back. This is actually related to the post I made about outsourcing and ODesk.The jobs posted on that site mentioned the requirement to write 1 article per day for 1 dollar per article (obviously outsourced to the developing economy country). To avoid this we should learn the Boolean search language (http://www.internettutorials.net/boolean.asp) and use that to really narrow down what you want.