How To Change The Order Of Applications in Your LinkedIn Profile?

After using LinkedIn for a while, you might want to change the order of the Applications you use.

For example you might want to show your SlideShare presentations first and then your blog, Google Presentation, Box.net, LinkedIn Events and so on.

But how to do that?

There is no option to change the order like for example in Groups.

This is how to do it:
1) Go to More (main menu on top) and click “Get More Applications”. You will get an overview of all available Applications whether you have added them to your Profile or not.
2) Click on an Application you have installed on your Profile.
3) Scroll down to the bottom of the page and tick off “Display on my Profile”. Your data will be stored, but it won’t be visible anymore on your Profile.
4) Repeat steps 2 and 3 for all Applications on your Profile.
5) Click on the Application you want to be the first in your Profile.
6) Tick on the box “Display on my Profile”.
7) Repeat steps 5 and 6 in the order you want the Applications to show up in your Profile.

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 People From a LinkedIn Company’s Page?

Once in a while someone from our audiences ask: “There are some people connected to our Company Profile, but they don’t work for our organization. How can we remove them?”

The first step to take is of course to contact those people and ask them to change it on their Profiles themselves.

If that doesn’t work, use these steps (from the Help Center of LinkedIn, at the bottom left of every page on LinkedIn):

You can ask us to remove someone from your Company Page if they don’t work at your company or have never worked at your company.

To file this request, you must have a confirmed company email address registered to your LinkedIn account.

Provide the following information when you contact us:

– The full name of the person.
– A screenshot of your Company Page where that person appears.
– An explanation of why they should be removed.

We’ll review your request and let you know when the person has been removed, or if we need more information.

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)

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)

Nielsen Study confirms the Power of Recommendations

Last week I wrote about the Forrester Research Study confirming the power of the Magic Mail.

In the same email from Bill Cates there were also some numbers from Nielsen that I would like to share with you.

The Nielsen study measured the level of trust people have in certain “forms of advertising”.

At the bottom? “Text ads on mobile phones” at 24%. “Online banner ads” rated 37%.
“Emails signed up for” rated 54%.
“Consumer opinions posted online” was a strong second at 70%.
At the top? “Recommendations from people known” at 90%. AKA – a referral.

Of course we all know this, but is nice to have some rational study confim it, doesn’t it? 🙂

Now, if we combine the results from both the Forrester Research Study (emails from people you know are the most trustworthy source) and the Nielsen study (recommendations from people known is the best “form of advertising”), then you understand the power of the Magic Mail.

When you use LinkedIn to prepare yourself to find out who can write the Magic Mail for you, then you understand that doing business almost becomes a no-brainer.

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)

Forrester Research Study confirms the Power of the Magic Mail

In our presentations, training courses and in “How to REALLY use LinkedIn” we talk a lot about the power of what we call “The Magic Mail“.

In that email you are introduced by a common contact to the person you want to get in touch with.

We already knew from experience that this approach works like magic (hence the name :-)).

Now I’m glad that a research by Forrester confirms what we have been speaking about the whole time.

This is the conclusion of the study sent to me by Bill Cates, President of Referral Coach International (sign up for his referral tips, they are great!)

The Forrester Research Study measured the level of trust people place in different sources of information.

At the bottom of their trust scale was a “company blog” – receiving a trust rating of 16%.
In the middle were such things as “radio” – at 39% – and “social networking site profiles from people you know” – at 43%.
At the top of the list was “email from people you know” at 70%.

70% is already a great number (especially when compared with the other sources!), but it can be higher if the right words are used. More about that in a future blog post.

To your success !

Jan

LinkedIn Tip: How to Add Your Blog in Your LinkedIn Profile

The last weeks I have been writing about the leverage factor of blogs when combining them with LinkedIn.

As a consequence the question we have received the most recently is: how do I add a blog to my LinkedIn Profile?

There are two Applications you can use: the WordPress application and the Bloglink application.

WordPress Application (use this one if you have a WordPress blog):
1) Add the WordPress Application to your personal LinkedIn Profile
2) In the WordPress Application: add the URL of your blog.

Bloglink Application (use this one for all blogs but WordPress):
1) Add your blog to “Websites” in your personal LinkedIn Profile
2) Add the Bloglink Application to your personal LinkedIn Profile (it will automatically look for your blog in “websites” in your Profile)

How does it work?

Every time a blog post appears on the original blog, your LinkedIn Profile is automatically updated.

Remark: if you have a personal blog and also want to show the company blog, you might want to use the WordPress application for one blog and the Bloglink application for the other one. In this way both are shown on your personal Profile.

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)

Why Blogging is so Interesting for Organisations in the LinkedIn Era

Two weeks ago I wrote a blog post about the pros and contras of blogging.

Blogging might benefit companies and organizations even more when they empower their employees to use LinkedIn (and other social media).

Like I wrote last week it starts for companies with rethinking the relationships with their employees first.

But let’s assume that there is enough trust, then LinkedIn might be a gigantic lever for a company when they blog.

Let’s look at some numbers:

1. The larger the organization, the more people can contribute once in a while. If you have only 50 people writing 1 blog post a year, you already have enough content for a whole year.
1. Remark: in reality you will see that there is a small group of people who are already writing and would love to contribute on a very regular basis. Just ask around who is interested.
2. When you link your blog to your personal LinkedIn profile and your Company Profile it is automatically updated.
1. If you are the only person working in your organization, the “leverage factor” is not so big: 1 blog post is shown on 1 LinkedIn Profile and on 1 Company Profile (if you don’t have one read the benefits of setting up a Company Profile). Let’s assume a person has on average 50 connections on LinkedIn and a small business has 30 followers via their Company Profile. Then the potential readership via LinkedIn is 80.
2. But if you are working for an organization with 1.000 colleagues then the “leverage factor” increases to 52.000.
1. 1.000 colleagues times 50 connections = 50.000
2. 2.000 people following the Company Profile = 2.000

Of course, this is just the potential. Not everybody reads the blog posts on their connections’ profiles.

But you can increase the chances:

• Ask everybody to mention the blog post in a Status Update.
• Ask people who have a Twitter account to mention it there as well.
• Ask (a select group of) people to post it as a Discussion in the Groups.

Big remark: people will only take these proactive steps if the blog posts are interesting and helping other people. So they need to contain free tips and they can’t be sales pitches.

In this way the potential readership can be increased even more.

Let’s assume that:

1. 200 people share it via a LinkedIn Status Update times 50 connections: 10.000 extra potential views.
2. 100 people share it via their Twitter account times 50 followers: 5.000 extra potential views.
3. 50 people share it via a post in a LinkedIn Discussion with a membership of 1.000 people per Group: 50.000 extra potential views.

Result: in total we have 112.000 potential views.

Even if only 1% of the potential readers actually reads it, then your blog post still has 1.120 readers.

An extra benefit is that this blog post will end up higher in Google. Why? Google takes traffic to a webpage into account. As a result many more people will discover this blog post when searching for information on the web.

Not bad for 30 minutes work per year (assuming that you have a pool of contributors who write one blog post per year).

To your success !

Jan

LinkedIn and other Social Media invite Organizations to Think about Human Relationships

Many companies are realizing: LinkedIn and other social media are here to stay, but how can they benefit us as an organization (versus as individuals)?

The answer is: by tapping into the power of the second degree!

In this case the first degree is the management team of an organization (or other central departments like marketing or recruiting).

The second degree: all the employees of the organization.

The task at hand for the “central” unit is to help the rest of the organization by OFFERING them good content for their individual LinkedIn Profiles. When all employees put this content on their Profile their network (and people who visit their Profile) will see this. Do you see the exponential power?

If you want to be successful with this, it’s important to remember that it’s about OFFERING them content, not FORCING it upon them. The latter will create more resistance than gratitude for help.

This is how LinkedIn for example can be beneficial, but this is only the end of a process, not the beginning. And that’s where many organizations drop the ball.

Being successful with social media starts with creating a great working environment in which people are empowered and trusted. Only then organizations will really benefit from the tremendous power of LinkedIn and other social media.

Employees have always been the ambassadors of an organization. In the past it was at parties with friends, in the gym and in the pub. Now it is also on the Internet, which makes it more visible. The latter makes organizations that are more hierarchical or “dictatorial” nervous. They are loosing control over their “slaves”.

LinkedIn and other social media invite organizations to look inside again and work on human relationships first. They invite organizations to rethink why these people are working together and how the talents of each individual can be recognized and allowed to show and grow for the greater good of the organization.

In other words the “new” media invite us to connect with each other again as the wonderful, talented and inspired human beings we are and to invite each other to live up to our potential.

And isn’t that what it has always been and always will be about?

To your success !

Jan