LinkedIn Labs – Year in Review

LinkedIn encourages its employees to be creative and think of tools that might enhance LinkedIn or that might benefit its users.

One of the ways they do this is by organizing Hackdays. Some of the projects that are shown on those Hackdays make it to LinkedIn Labs. And some make it even to the actual website.

This is the explanation of what LinkedIn Labs are (from their website):

“LinkedIn Labs hosts a small set of projects and experimental features built by the employees of LinkedIn. We share them here as demonstrations and to solicit feedback, but please remember that they are intended to be low-maintenance experiments, and may be added and removed over time based on popularity and support.”

By now there are already a few interesting “products” available on the LinkedIn Labs website, but not on the main website. As a consequence many people won’t have heard of them or will ever hear of them.

So I thought it was a good idea to put some of these “products” in the picture in the next couple months.

The first one is “Year in Review”.

You might recognize this one since you would normally have gotten an email in the beginning of the year with an overview of (some of the) people in your network who changed careers.

The “Year in Review” tool works the same way. In a (visual) overview of pictures from people from your network you see who has changed positions, organisations or started their own company.

You can access it any time: http://yir.linkedinlabs.com

To your success !

Jan

PS: get your free light version and free updates (50 pages in the meanwhile!) of the book How to REALLY use LinkedIn (or in Dutch: het boek Hoe LinkedIn nu ECHT gebruiken)

Where To Find The People Whose LinkedIn Updates You Have Hidden?

In last week’s post about “How To Remove LinkedIn Home Page Spammers?” I explained how to “hide” people’s updates on your LinkedIn Home Page.

Sometimes you want to give people a second chance in life, so also on LinkedIn 🙂

But where to find the people you have hidden from your Home Page?

These are the steps to take:
1) On the top right hand side of any page on LinkedIn, click on the arrow next to your name and click on “Settings”
2) Sign in to your account (this is a security check by LinkedIn)
3) On the left hand side, click on “Account”
4) Click on “Customize the updates you see on your home page”
5) On top of the pop up window click on “Hidden”
6) Click on “Show Updates” of the person whose posts, updates and other messages you want to show again on your LinkedIn Home Page

To your success !

Jan

PS: get your free light version and free updates (50 pages in the meanwhile!) of the book How to REALLY use LinkedIn (or in Dutch: het boek Hoe LinkedIn nu ECHT gebruiken)

How To Remove LinkedIn Home Page Spammers?

A question we get more and more in our presentations and training courses is: “How do I get rid of the people who are littering my LinkedIn Home Page with their spam messages or silly tweets? I don’t want them to mess up my professional network place!”

Actually it is quite simple: when you move your mouse pointer over a status update or other post on your LinkedIn Home Page, on the right hand side the word “hide” appears.

When you click on the word “hide”, the post disappears and instead this message appears: “You will no longer receive updates from this user” (you also have the option to “undo” this action).

(By the way, they are not notified of this action.)

It is important to know that you won’t see ANY updates anymore from this user.
So if you are interested in knowing when someone changes their profile, but not in their (automatically forwarded) tweets, it might be a hard choice.

However, it might be a good idea to contact them first before “hiding” them. Maybe they have set up their Twitter accounts (using other tools) to automatically forward their tweets, without knowing what the effect on LinkedIn is. When you make them aware of it, they might apologize and thank you for educating them! In other words, not every “spammer” is a bad guy/woman 🙂

To prevent other people “hiding” YOU, it makes sense to think about what you want to share with your LinkedIn contacts.

A major tip: don’t automatically forward your Twitter messages to LinkedIn.

Use a tool like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck instead. These tools allow you to post updates to several social networks at once. In this way they help you to save time and be aware of to which websites you send what message.

See also previous blog posts HootSuite Makes Your Professional and Social Networking Life Easier and Track The Response To Your Tweets and Status Updates in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo and other Social Media

To your success !

Jan

PS: get your free light version and free updates (50 pages in the meanwhile!) of the book How to REALLY use LinkedIn (or in Dutch: het boek Hoe LinkedIn nu ECHT gebruiken)