Marc : Welcome to LinkedIn Live. This is Marc Freedman your LinkedIn Daddy and the LinkedIn Anti-prophet. I want to welcome our callers and listeners today as well as the folks chatting on Now Live.com’s Player for our show.
Our co host Heidi Heyns the voice of milk and honey will be joining us shortly she wasn’t able to join us at the beginning. Hope every one had a terrific holiday over thanksgiving and we’re going to be starting shortly.
First I want to give a few shout outs. This thing you see that you see at the top of the show and we occasionally play during the show is from Michael Dawson of Dawson’s New Rage. He plays Latin rock fusion and we appreciate his support and his music. Our transcripts are provided by Futuregen. They do business process outsourcing including transcriptions so thank you Wilson at Futuregen!
I want to remind everybody that we have a mailing list. And if you go to Dallasblue.com or even better go to our web site at WhosYourDaddyShow.com. You can sign up for our mailing list to learn about upcoming speakers. In addition we have a new Yahoo! Group which you can learn about through our website and we could talk about anything having to do with the show.
We’ll announce speakers you can talk about past speakers, upcoming shows. We’re going to talk about new segments and it’s really an opportunity for you to talk back. And to talk with the host of the show myself as well as Heidi Heyns and the guest. And we look forward on developing a vibrant community there.
And last but not least we have a new Yahoo! Group for general discussion of LinkedIn called Top LinkedIn – that’s the Mylink500 top LinkedIn discussion group and we hope you’ll join us there. With a little fun news at the top of the show here, I want to talk about virtual gifts and I read an interesting article in Silicon Valley, the hot new treat for girls and boys are these virtual gifts.
And they actually have them for Facebook where you can send somebody a gift, a (tree) and so on it’s pretty amusing – the virtual economy being formed with apparently some of these gifts they may cost $1.00 or $2.00, $3.00 part of the money goes to charity. And so what about LinkedIn Gifts?
We’ll be inviting your call. Let me now if you have any ideas there. Not quite sure how we can customize the LinkedIn performance. Maybe we can allow someone to share Customize your logo on your LinkedIn profile that ten pixel photo or graphics or image that they call a logo.
You know, there are web links that you can customize on your profile or maybe we just create a custom LinkedIn group for you with full logo and everything. So a lot of – A few opportunities but not too much interesting. LinkedIn ain’t like Facebook.
Since Heidi isn’t here. I am just going to skip to our next piece. Let me just queue up a little music here….(music)
One of the features of our show is our LinkedIn sermon for our Church of the Cosmic Void here. And my title here is when you are not working or in other words the bad but not too bad. One of the questions and issues that I’ve seen on an ongoing basis over at the LinkedIn forums the past few years is – continues to be the lack of Wade to comment on the other link in members.
And sure if somebody’s good you can publish a recommendation for them but it’s a very limited way of commenting on other members and providing the community where- that not only is honest, but also provides incentives for people not to act badly.
And in particular in the open network community, one of those issues has to do with IDKs. IDK stands for “I don’t Know!” And when somebody sends you an invitation, LinkedIn rather perniciously remove the simple act of saying “No”.
So now when you receive a LinkedIn invitation, your only choice is to say yes or to say “I don’t know” or to report it as spam or last to archive it. And one of the things that we feel very strongly about in the open networker community is if you are going to be open and you are going to be inviting people to your community- to invite them to send you a LinkedIn invitation – that you don’t report them with an IDK.
You get enough of- if the sender gets enough of those. They can have their accounts suspended. And nobody wants that. If you are not interested in accepting it that’s certainly you’re right. But at least be kind and archive.
And- but there is no way to know who is abusing the community. So we’ve come up with a solution for that through Mylink500 at Mylink500.com which is our top networker directory database.
And we now have our solution where if you see bad behavior such as people, open networkers who are submitting an IDK if you see illegitimate profiles, if people are using old addresses and you’re just wasting your indications and they’re not even- they’re bouncing – if you see people acting in a way that is abusive or bullying to other members we want to know about it.
And we will maintain a log of who these bad actors are. And we would ensure –the flip side of this is we’re going to ensure that they are not included on our open networker list that you can download or send emails to- to send invitations to LinkedIn members.
And to our knowledge that’s really the only solution out there. So we hope you’ll participate with our Mylink500 reporting service. And what I want to do right now is we’re going to open up to your calls and first let me put on the line here.
We have a caller. Jason are you there?
Jason: Hey Marc how’s it going?
Marc: Good. Thank you Jason. Well before I introduce Jason I just want to welcome our listeners as well as our chatters online. And this is a call in show. So we’ll have a few points during the show like right now where you can call in with your questions and myself and our guest Jason Alba we’ll try to help you out.
If you have questions about networking problems with LinkedIn this is the place to turn. You also can submit your questions if you are chatting online and we look forward to hearing from you. If you’re new to our platform here with NowLive! And you want to call the show; you notice that right in the middle at the top of the NowLive! Browser that pops up there’s a little button there.
That says “Call the Show” and if you click that on the right part of the screen and I know it can be a little confusing, a panel will display and roll up that says Links. It’ll display phone numbers where you can call the show. Or you can even call using internet software. They support Google talk or Gizmo project or you can just use the chat here to submit your questions on line.
And we will be happy to take them at the appointed times. So again we’re looking forward to your calls and we don’t have anyone calling in right now. So let me introduce Jason Alba. Are the CEO of JibberJobber and the author of “I’m on LinkedIn … Now what?”
Jason so how did you get involved with LinkedIn and how long have you been a member?
Jason: I first heard about LinkedIn during a job search early last year in 2006. I went to a job network meeting weekly and there was a guy there that came in one week. And said: “Hey I landed! I just wanted to let everyone know the system works…” blah blah blah.
And as I walked out with him and he said you know you really need to get on LinkedIn. I was kind of hesitant at first but I thought I’d you know, I mean it came highly recommended from him. I looked up to him a lot and I gave it a shot. I think that was – I want to guess it was sometime between February and April of ’06.
Marc: well that makes you are rather young in the scheme of things. So you’ve only been on LinkedIn for maybe a year and half.
Jason: Yeah that’s right.
Marc: now how many LinkedIn connections do you have?
Jason: I don’t know somewhere around 450?
Marc: Alright well super! So you know you don’t have to have 20,000.
Jason: Do you think less of me now?
Marc: Well you don’t have to have 20,000 connections like Christian Mayaud did last week he was here- he was our visitor on the show, or myself. In fact our show here is to support networkers of all sizes and shapes whether you’re starting or an old veteran. And whether you have five connections or 5 million.
So again welcome Jason.
Now you are CEO of JibberJobber and how long has JibberJobber been around and you know, we are happy to give you a minute so you can tell the folks about your site and your service. You seem to have you know, an interesting product there for people who are looking to manage their job search.
Jason: Yeah, so JibberJobber and I’ll just take a minute. JibberJobber was launch on May 15th of 2006 and basically what I see as kind of a sales force for an individual to manage everything around their career including their relationships, target companies, whether they’re interviewing and posting jobs, Interview preparation responses, all the stuff that goes around managing your career or a job transition.
Just the same way you would use Salesforce for sales; you would use JibberJobber for your career management. Does that make sense?
Marc: Well absolutely. And how does – tell us a little bit about how JibberJobber and LinkedIn and how they work together.
Jason: So I know you know a ton. You know, way more than me I’m sure about LinkedIn. Some of the things about LinkedIn unfortunately some people consider it their contact management system and while for contact relationship CRM, a lot of people can use certain things of LinkedIn to help them manage their relationships like keeping up to date on email addresses and job titles and all the stuff that users will put in about themselves.
But on LinkedIn I can’t do things like – I can’t say “I talked to Marc today, we talked about these things and I need to call him next week”. That’s where a CRM system would come in. So there are certain things like that.
Another thing – another difference between a LinkedIn system and a CRM system like JibberJobber is if you and I are connected and I decided to not be a connection anymore, you don’t have any control over that.
Whereas in a CRM system like JibberJobber you have complete control over everybody that’s in your system. When you are in a job search or nurturing relationships, you want to make sure you have complete control over that.
The way they interface is – on LinkedIn if you go to the connections tab, at the very bottom of list that shows you know, where you can scroll through all your connections, there’s a link that allows you to export. And I always encourage people to export their contacts.
I export mine once a month. Because I send out a newsletter once a month. So I export them and import them into JibberJobber. You can also import them into Outlook or GoldMiner Aftersales force or something like that.
Marc: Well very good and Jason gave one of our top LinkedIn tips and that is to make sure you know about how to export you’re connections. And to reiterate what Jason said, click on your MyContacts tab in LinkedIn and the first screen that comes up is your list of connections and LinkedIn has a little Easter egg for you.
They certainly don’t make it easy for you to find. There’s a little tiny link at the bottom of the page where you can export your connections and then you know, import that whether you want to use them for Microsoft Outlook or your own CRM or mailing list package.
That’s always a great tip. Well excellent Jason, so you know, for a number of our listeners here, am new on LinkedIn, I put my profile on it, now what?
Jason: So I think it’s pretty important at a high level what LinkedIn is all about. And what I see is that LinkedIn is a place to find and be found. You’re mentioning giving gifts on Facebook. It’s not a place to give gifts and it’s not a place to write on people’s walls.
And Myspace and Facebook both have that in common where any old joke can come and write something on you know your page which in Facebook they call it your “Wall”.
It’s a really good place to find and be found. But there’s not a lot more going on aside from that. So having that in perspective I think is really helpful. The Now Webpart is – if you looked at what you’re doing to be found. I strongly encourage you to make sure that your profile is fleshed out to the point where computers – the search engines will find it.
So let me give you an example. If you’re a project manager and you’re looking for a job in Boston, you want to make sure that you’ll have some of the following words in your profile – Boston, obviously, Project manager, obviously, but then you are going to want to do things like project management professional AND PMP which is the acronym for that. PMI and project management institute.
So all of these are things that people might search on. Someone might go in and search PMI Boston, right? So you want to make sure that you have all of these keywords peppered throughout your profile.
The other thing that complements that aside from being you know, good for the search engine, you want to make sure that it’s good for humans to read. So even though you are putting in a lot of keywords and word that – terms that people search on, make sure that you’re writing your profile in a way that when someone reads through it, they don’t get a headache and feel like they need to go take an aspirin because it’s just too much and it didn’t make sense.
So anyways, those are two – fleshing out your profile I think is one of the most important things that you can do so that you can make it easy to be found.
Marc: Well Jason thank you. That is certainly one of the tips I share with my classes all the time. You know, what I will add is that for the first few years, and I was rather shocked that LinkedIn did not make its profile available over the internet where they could be found by Google and Yahoo and the other search engines. And it’s actually only relatively recently that they opened it up.
And so do make sure that you look at your settings when you’re displaying your profile on LinkedIn, you have the choice of first off, creating a custom URL with your own name or your company name in it.
And secondly you can specify how much of your profile to make available to the public. And my recommendation to all the students at our classes is look it’s just like giving a business card out. I mean are there situations where you don’t want to have you’re business card handed out to people? Probably not.
You want to have business. You want to make it easy for people to find you. So on those settings, you know, I highly recommend making your entire profile available over the internet and the second stage of that is as Jason says is to make it searchable both on LinkedIn as well as search engines by having all the keywords. And you know, those keywords can be talents, skills, companies…
Jason: Interests.
Marc: … exactly, interests, professional groups. Again anything that anyone can search on. You want to make sure that you have on your profile. A good way to look at those keywords, and again this again is just basic search engine optimization – is to – if you have a website, you can look at you’re webpage logs, or have your webmaster do it.
And you can literally find what search words people are using to search for you on the internet that bring up your website. And you know, a lot of people may not have access to that. But if you do have that, that will tell you exactly what people are searching from and finding you.
And LinkedIn now has a similar search engine and search heuristics so again make sure that you have all those keywords on your list. And it’s just not keywords, but it is also keyword density. The default sort on LinkedIn is by keyword relevance. And part of the relevance is A, having the word, but it’s also having those keywords multiple times in your profile.
And I like to tell my students, and I want to reinforce what Jason said. You want to make your resume readable. You don’t want to make it artificial. LinkedIn provides so many different areas where you can have these keywords – in qualifications, in individual jobs, and so on, where if for example, you’re an expert in Java programming; it’s pretty likely that the word JAVA is going to be repeated multiple times in your profile.
So again it’s having the keywords, it’s also the keyword density and making sure those keywords are there multiple times.
So good Jason, what other tips do you provide in your book on “Now What?” now that you’re on LinkedIn?
Jason: So let me just finish a couple of thoughts on this profile, you mentioned making all of your profile available publicly. I totally agree. If, you know, people are going to have different comfort levels. But I think that if you’re going to put something and have it not public, it’s kind of – you’re tricking yourself into thinking that you know, you’re protecting something.
Because all people have to do is to go login to LinkedIn. It’s not going to be that hard to find your entire profile. The other thing that I want to point out and I’m on your profile right now aside from the keywords and stuff like that , you mentioned the public profile URL, and reap – what I call claiming that URL as your own.
So yours is LinkedIn.com/in/MarcFreedman, mine is (LinkedIn)/in/JasonAlba. The default is something that’s pretty nasty. And it’s really easy to go in and change that. There’s an edit link right next to there on the page.
The other thing though that I really like to recommend doing and you’ve done this is on your website. You get three websites. And by default they call them Myblog, Mywebsite, MyRSS, MyCompany. You know things like that.
They are very generic terms. The last option is ‘Other’. And if you choose ‘Other’ it gives you the ability to put a label other than Mywebsite. So I am looking on yours right now and the first one says “DallasBlue Business Network” which could very easily have been MyCompany or MyWebsite. But you went in and customized it. By the way you have a title on there.
Marc: Alright.
Jason: But anyways, I recommend doing those two very simple changes because it makes it look more customized and it shows that you’ve taken a little more care. And for the reader coming in to read the name of your company as opposed to a link that says “Mycompany”, I think that provides that little extra value to them. So …
Marc: Jason, great, great tips and I fully agree.
Jason: Okay so lets – one of the things that I like about LinkedIn and having your profile is that – and you’ve got to remember, my perspective is coming from a job seeker (Unintelligible) right?
Marc: Jason. Jason just one second, we have a someone with a question from our chat session here. And maybe we can just insert that into the conversation and he says “You always emphasis the importance of having a relationship building approach to networking. How do you feel that combines with having thousands of LinkedIn contacts?“
Jason: (Jeroen) (Jeroen) I hope I’m pronouncing your name right. If you’re the (Jeroen) that I’m thinking of…he’s overseas and one of my favorite contacts. And you know, this is a very interesting topic and this goes towards open networking and conservative networking and you know, how many people are you going to actually connect with and obviously Marc, you’re open and you’ll connect with anybody. You have over 20,000 connections right?
Marc: Yes I do.
Jason: Christian from last week had – he has over 20,000 doesn’t he?
Marc: Almost yes.
Jason: It was interesting last week on the radio show that Christian was talking about the actual relationships that he has with those people. If I am remembering correctly and the takeaway I got from that is that he didn’t really have a relationship with those people.
I don’t think that it’s necessarily bad to have thousands of contacts. But let me just say that right up. But many people that do have thousands and thousands of contacts and I think I even saw an email from you Marc, that indicated something like this: “These people don’t necessarily have the relationships” right?
So It’s not like I can go look at your network of 20,000 people and say “Oh I really want to talk to this person and Marc’s connected to them. So I know that Marc is going to be able to hook me up”.
I know that you’ll be happy to pass a recommendation or the connection through. But to have any kind of strong enough relationship that’s actually going to have that person you know, make sure that person’s called me back or something like that, I would not be as confident as if it were somebody that I knew that had a real relationship.
So let me just kind of untangle what I’m talking about. On the one side (Jeroen) is talking about being relationship centric as a networking strategy. I’m all about nurturing relationships. And I think that you need to make sure that as you go through your career, you are nurturing relationships.
On the other side though, having the thousands of contacts does put you in touch with people that you may not be in touch with otherwise. I always say that – you know, that the people that tend to be more open connectors or people who are recruiters or in business development or in someway in their professional capacity – they need to have reach to a lot of people.
And there’s a lot of benefit in them having a lot of connections. I’m not going to say that one is you know, having less or having more is better or worse. However, I do think that if you – if all you’re out to do is just get a lot of connections and not be concerned about the relationships, you know, I would recommend that you would change you’re focus.-If you’re not concerned about relationships.
Marc: I’d follow up with that I – you know, that question goes back to the old controversy on quality versus quantity. And people are – make a false dichotomy there which I think is unfair. And being in one perspective, at the top end of the quantity scale, I think it’s very easy for the quality guys to bash it.
And on the other end, there certainly are quantity oriented people who you know, pursue the maximization of contacts, you know, without a business objective and sometimes can be neglectful and abusive to their networks. And so that’s not doing anyone any good either.
But I say that’s a false dichotomy because I don’t care whether they have five contacts or 5000. You’re still going to practice both quality and quantity in some form. You know, we’re always going to have contacts that with a degree of relationships. And some people we may know casually, and other people we know better. And other people may be very good friends.
And that’s irrespective of the number of LinkedIn connections that you may have. And you know, as a networker, it’s critical A, to have reach which is a concept that Jason mentioned. Because it’s only better and it’s easier and it’s quicker and more effective for you to contact people and for them to contact you.
And at the same time it’s also critical to develop those relationships and to meet people in person such as at our DallasBlue networking and Live events as well as to do business. So …
Jason: You know, Marc, let me take that one step further. When I first started with LinkedIn I had about six connections for I think the first three months. And it was horrible. I mean my LinkedIn experience was less than stellar and I wasn’t jazzed about LinkedIn.
I saw very little value in it. As I remember seeing once that somebody said that you are going to start getting value out of the LinkedIn system meaning all the different things you can do. Find and be found, all that stuff when you have around 65 connections. Right?
I would encourage people that are – okay let’s say you’re a job seeker. You’re a job seeker and you’re just starting on LinkedIn. You know, obviously you’re not going to get 20,000 connections right away. Because it’s taken Marc quite a while to get there. But one of the things you might want to do is look for connections that are local. For example if you’re in Boston, or if you want to be in Boston, look for connections in Boston because being connected to those people are going to help you network in that geography.
Or look for connections that are within your professions or industry or something like that. So it – the coolest thing about getting these connections even if you have a very nascent relationship at the beginning, there’s ways that you can take that relationship to the next level.
And I’ve gotten to know a lot of people on – let me rephrase that. I’ve gotten to know a lot of people, because we connected on LinkedIn but since then I’ve sent them my newsletters. I’ve asked questions on the Answers. I have shouted out to them and they’ve replied back.
So it’s been a good stepping point for our relationships. You know, so anyways, I’m not saying that it’s good or bad. I think that you really have to think about what your strategy is going to be and what you hope to achieve out of it.
But I do agree that you need to have a certain number of connections before you know, LinkedIn can become exciting for you.
Marc: Well well done. One question from our live chatting audience (Jeroen) said “Marc with so many connections, can you keep an interview of which people in your network you have relationship.“
And the answer to that is absolutely NOT. And that’s whether you have 20,000 connections or whether you have five. It’s a huge weakness of LinkedIn that you’re not able to manage your contacts and your connections. And of course Jason’s service at JibberJobber.com is a perfect example of a solution to that.
Specifically if you’re looking for a job. Enabling you to both look at you’re contacts but also to maintain and annotate your relationship with that so that you have something to refer to. So you definitely identified a huge limitation in LinkedIn and you know, that certainly as well is something that we’re looking at in Mylink500.com and I talked earlier in the show about – what I said? – when you’re not worthy and how you can be bad, but not too bad.
If you do see people behaving badly on LinkedIn who are part of the Mylink500.com community we do now have ways to report them and you know, we will certainly look at providing annotation and comments on that.
And part of that we have a service through Diigo.com I don’t know if that pronunciation is correct. It’s D-I-I-G-O.com. And they are an interesting Web2.0 service where you can join for example a group like the LinkedIn Group and annotate and provide comments directly on the webpage.
The only problem with that kind of an approach, and we have tried that, is that LinkedIn uses session IDs in their URLs and so when you have a service like Diigo that’s working with the URL for example of a specific LinkedIn member, from their perspective, every time you look at a person, even if its the same person, it’s a different page and they are not able to determine that it’s the same person. So that it’s an easy and effective way to record comments and to view comments.
So those are a few technologies and I think Jason’s JibberJobber is the only robust solution I’ve seen for maintaining an overview of the quality of the relationships that you have with your LinkedIn connections.
And with that let me welcome on the line Heidi Heyns, the voice of milk and honey. Heidi are you there? Well, it looks like she’s connecting on the call but I don’t hear you Heidi, maybe you have to check your voice recorder and make sure we could hear you.
Back to Jason.
Jason so we’ve talked about a few different aspects of what to do on LinkedIn once you get on it to improve how you’re found. What other areas does your book focus on?
Jason: Let me bring up something that I think is really cool and once again, I apologize for going in to the job search mode again, but I think that a lot of people whether they are actually actively looking or hiding that they are looking from their employer.
One of the really cool things about a LinkedIn profile is even though a lot of people view it as a resume; it doesn’t have a negative stigma that a resume might have. So for example if I come to one of your LinkedIn Live meetings and you and I hook up and I give you my resume, what I’m saying is, I’m looking for a job. Help me out right?
However if I send you my LinkedIn profile, I’m not necessarily saying that. And sending can be you know, if you want to know more about me, here’s my LinkedIn profile or it can be just something in my email signature.
So in other words giving or sharing your LinkedIn profile with other people doesn’t carry all that negative stuff that giving a resume might – and that’s great for people that are employed or unemployed.
It’s like – It just has like less of a sting associated with it. So with that in mind I strongly recommended that people would share, as appropriate, their LinkedIn profile. You can obviously do that on your website or on your blog and email signatures are great.
Here’s a place that a lot of people don’t think about doing it. I’m really big into blogging. I’ve been blogging daily since June of last year except for weekends. And I do a lot of blog commenting. So I go to other people’s blog and I leave comments.
And so I encourage people to incorporate some kind of strategy that includes blogs into their job search. If they are not going to blog on their own, then go find some industry or association or professional blog that by commenting on, they can raise their visibility in their profile.
Most people aren’t going to have like I said, a blog or a website, so what I recommend is to take your LinkedIn URL and leave that as your website. And I think a lot of people don’t think about it but it’s an excellent way for people to think “oh that’s a cool comment I want to learn more about this person.” And then bam right there they can see your LinkedIn profile which is another reason to make sure that your public profile has a lot of information that is showing.
Because the last thing people want when they want to learn about you is to just see a few lines right? So I think that using your LinkedIn profile and in that way and sharing it with others on blog comments and email signatures and stuff like that is a great way to raise your own visibility as a professional.
Marc: Good advice! One of the interesting things about LinkedIn that I think is very positive for the job seeker is that LinkedIn is so large and so popular and so well accepted now that it’s you know, it’s accepted for most employers, for you, for anybody to have their full profile up which looks like a resume.
And so the reality is that while you may be looking for a job just because you have a profile up on LinkedIn, you have a profile up, just like everybody and therefore you’re a player…
Jason: Probably your boss and your peers have it too.
Marc: Exactly. Exactly. So it’s a safe way to be publicly accessible for recruiters and job hiring executives. So that they can find you. Now what I have seen in a few cases, and you know, I would have to say that it’s probably one or two percent, is that some people for example, may turn off the category, the message category that says they are open to learning about new jobs.
And so if that’s something you’re concerned about that’s a very safe way of presenting your profile. But essentially signaling to your employer that you’re not looking for a new job. Of course the reality is does that stop anybody? No.
If you’re a smart recruiter, you’re not even going to use “career opportunity” as your inquiry into someone. You’re going to contact an executive or professional and say we have an open position, you’re in this industry, do you know anyone that you can refer who might be interested?
And of course the subtext there is , if you personally are interested, let me know and we’ll maintain a direct dialogue. Another tip that I want to …
Jason:To piggyback on that Marc, once again, go look at your bosses or other management in your company and go look for them on LinkedIn and I bet you nine times out of ten, they will have interest in career opportunities left on their profile.
Marc:That is absolutely true. The other aspect is as a job seeker and indeed as any networker – that was terrific advice from Jason of course to put your public profile url, put it in your signature, put it on your web site along with, you know, your other, you know, qualifications and your company and so on.
As a marketer, I want to challenge our listeners and our chatters to think about branding yourself. It used to be four years ago when there was just a million people on there that you can use some funky LinkedIn url and a button and just say, you know, find me here. And that was sufficient.
But with 15 million people on LinkedIn, it’s really critical I think that you stand out and so when recruiters are running searches, they’re going to find lots of candidates. So the challenge to you is how do you make yourself stand out, how do you ensure that you’re the one that they remember. And there’s a few ways to do that.
Certainly one is to write an effective profile which is similar to writing your resume. Another is appearing professional and part of that is using a custom domain. I have hundreds but for example if you go to mylinkdaddy.com, that takes you to my LinkedIn profile and it’s a more effective url than just something that’s just linkedin.com/whatever.
And it brands you as someone who’s going to be different and stand out. And you don’t see that a lot today in LinkedIn and a shortcut of that is using a URL redirector like TinyURL but again that – those really aren’t branding.
So, think about getting a domain. You can buy a domain for as little as $10 a year from a registrar like godaddy.com and you know, you can be NumberOneSalespro.com or you know whatever you want to be known as. And just point that at your LinkedIn profile.
Marc:Heidi, our ….
Jason: We can talk forever about personal branding. Another thing – let me just say on the profile – a few other – three other things, I think, that are going to make me think that you know, you’re serious about this is one, having some connections. I mean really if you have two connections, I’m going to think that you’ve come in, poked around then you left.
Two, having – either having recommendations that others do for you or that you do for others is going to show me that there’s a higher level of professionalism here. And then the third one is having either answered questions or posted questions on the answer section.
Those are three things that I’m going to look at and say okay, this person, you know, understands and is using LinkedIn. You don’t have to be a power user but just having a little bit of that activity is going to show me something interesting about you.
Marc:Very good.
Heidi, are you on the line? Let’s see if she cleared up her computer problems. Apparently not. Well, in any case, good.
Again, you are listening to LinkedIn Live: Who’s your daddy? And I’m your daddy. I’m Marc Freedman with the Dallas Blue Network and we have a family of LinkedIn support and information web site.
You can get links to all of them at mylinkfamily.com and they include LinkedIn – Mylink500 are top LinkedIn directory. They include our new Yahoo! Group for discussion. It includes Mylinkgroups which – we’re now over 400 groups that you can join on LinkedIn which makes us by far the top LinkedIn public group directory and so we invite you to check out mylinkfamily.com.
Feel free to call in with your questions or to submit them through our chat.
We’re talking with Jason Alba, CEO of JIbberJobber, a job seeker resource which allows you to read in your contacts and manage your job search and maintain notes on all of your content, to do, to have a successful job search and manage your employers. And he’s also the author of “I’m on LinkedIn – Now What???”
Jason, what other major tips do you have for our listeners about getting more visibility and more effectively using LinkedIn?
Jason:Let me go back to (Jeroen’s) question because (Jeroen) and I have actually been talking about this for about a year, you know, real relationship development and stuff like that. One of my favorite features in LinkedIn, and I think one of the most powerful things they have to offer as far as helping develop relationships is the answers section.
And let me walk through a few reasons why I think it’s so powerful, okay? So, before January when Answers wasn’t a part of LinkedIn, really what you did here was you found and it was a place to find and be found. Once LinkedIn introduced answers, it was an opportunity for you to actually interact with other LinkedIn people.
The cool thing is – with Answers, it gives you an opportunity to go out and touch your contacts again. So, for example, a few days ago, on Friday, I posted a question. It says, how can we get more people concerned about their career management? And when I went through the posting process, at the very end, it said, you know, you can email this out to 200 of your contacts. You want to choose some.
And so, I always choose the maximum amount which is either 199 plus myself or 200. What happens is, most of those people — as long as they haven’t changed their preferences and most people don’t change their preferences, I don’t think — most of these people are going to go in and get an email from me and they’re going to come back and respond.
Well, it’s only been a few days but I’ve had 21 people answer that question already. Now, what does this do? It gave me an opportunity to reach out to my network contacts and to have some kind of dialogue with them which I think is really powerful because that gives us an opportunity to learn more about one another and to nurture a relationship.
The other thing it does though as far as visibility and branding, whether you’re doing the branding for your business or for your career, aka, job search, it puts that question out for all of LinkedIn. And so, of the 21 answers I have, some of them are connected to me to a first degree and they got my email but many of them are just people who went out to the answers and saw an interesting question and wanted to participate.
So, I think that one of the most important things to do, you know, once you got your profile done and stuff like that, one of the most important things to do is to participate in this effort at having a community which is answering questions and asking questions. The only caution is, be careful on either of those – either answering or asking because it could be that you’ll get flagged as a spammer or something like that. And that’s not necessarily something that you want to – that you want to do.
Marc, have you used the answers much?
Marc:I have and I have been blocked and banned and suspended there as well. It – well…
Jason: That’s funny. I mean there’s some people out there that are very – they’re ultra conservative and it’s frustrating when you’re trying to have a real discussion and people come in and flag you as spam or something like that.
I think that I’ve had one or two or at least I’ve been called on a carpet at least by one or two people. But if you do it in a fashion that’s not going to get you spammed, it’s an excellent way to have some communication with your contacts.
Marc:Yeah. It – there is no doubt that it can be very effective and those are certainly great tips in terms of finding the right LinkedIn community for you whether it’s a Yahoo! Group, whether it’s a show like ours or whether it’s participating and submitting and answering questions, that can be a very effective way of getting visibility for yourself as well as being recognized in LinkedIn community.
And right, I mean there is a certain amount of risks, as Jason says. Some people there take a very strict view of proprietary and I think that’s a shame and it’s really a case frankly in my opinion where the system was poorly engineered.
It started out with good intentions and, you know, it’s one thing to allow people to perhaps give a negative rating to a question but when they can block you, when they can suspend your account, you know, that’s just way too much power in the hands of individual users in the community. And some people, in my opinion, abuse that.
So, you know, be careful and – but it is certainly a great resource and I’ve used it successfully myself. It’s also a way to reach out outside of your direct connections because it’s publicly accessible and visible on LinkedIn. So, LinkedIn Answers the …
Jason: Yeah, so you get the benefit out of reaching out to your network contacts and getting some visibility with people outside of your network.
Marc:Exactly. Well, Heidi, are you on voice with us yet?
Heidi:I am. I’m indeed here. Can you hear me this time?
Marc:Hi, Heidi. Better late than never. This is my co-host, Heidi Heyns, the voice of milk and honey and she had a prior (inaudible) as well as technical difficulty. So, welcome.
Let me (inaudible) this. Let me do this. Jason, I want to thank you for your time and for – again for all of our listeners and our chatters. If you go to our website at whosyourdaddyshow.com, sign up for our mailing list, you’ll also see links to Jason’s profile as well as his JibberJobber service where you could learn more about our guest today, Jason Alba, CEO of JibberJobber and author of “I’m on LinkedIn, now what?”
And I’m sure Jason would love to hear from you. Make a – send him a LinkedIn introduction, connect with Jason and of course you’re always welcome to connect to me, your Link Daddy and so, Jason, thank you very much and best of luck with JibberJobber.
Jason:Thanks for having me, Marc. And nice chatting with you, Heidi.
Heidi:Good to have you, Jason. And a lot of great information. I think the listeners are very pleased to have been able to hear a lot of what you had to say. So, very big thank you.
Jason: Thank you.
Marc:Well super! Thanks again to Jason and just for our last piece today, my high priestess, Heidi, this is actually a little bit timely to have you here. What we’d like to announce on our show is really an open call for speakers.
And, you know, we want to have you on as our guest as well as people that you recommend. You know, this is really your show, about LinkedIn and networking and we’re just getting started. We’ve had a lot of terrific and high profile LinkedIn celebrities if you will, but we’re also interested in having a wide range of people so we can learn from everybody and make LinkedIn more successful and to make you a better and more successful networker and LinkedIn member. So…
Heidi:Actually it was really – can I say something in here, Marc?
Marc:Heidi, it’s all yours, darling.
Heidi:This – if somebody has really impressed with their connections or with their relationship they’ve forged with you, well, why not have them on as a guest and they can talk about how they go about approaching people and how they connect with people and what they look for in a new connection and that kind of thing.
Let’s bring in some – a lot of different guests and all kinds of different perspectives on how LinkedIn worked for us.
Marc:Terrific. So, just to throw out some ideas of types of people that we might be looking for – you know, one thing that we’re interested in are the local hubs. So, for example, here in Dallas, I’m number one in Dallas but there are a number of other people who are very active. You know, your local hubs may be people who are at the top of the list for your metropolitan area. It may be the people who run LinkedIn and networking groups that are integrated into LinkedIn.
And that’s a way for us to bring LinkedIn Live to you and to your community and to get you and your networking group in your area publicity. So, if you are – consider yourself a hub or you can recommend someone in your local area, we’d love to learn about them and invite them and talk to them on our show.
Other categories of people you find interesting that we – you think we should have, Heidi?
Heidi: Yeah, I certainly do. I think there’s lots of industries, you know, there are – I think the most – the majority of or the largest majority of people on LinkedIn who seem to be the most active are of course recruiters and I think that we could probably have a very interesting show if we had some of the top recruiters who happen to be on LinkedIn, the show, to call in and chat about how it has defined their role as a recruiter. And whether or not LinkedIn has truly worked for them as it certainly looks like it does from the outside.
So, recruiters would be very interesting and IT professionals of course. And I see a lot of – because it’s of particular interest to me, people from the film media profession. There are a lot of producers and a lot of people involved in the making of films who are now becoming very active on LinkedIn and I would love to speak with them and find out whether it’s helpful to them to be a member of LinkedIn. And how…?
Marc: Oh, super. Let me add a final category to that and those are people involved with non-profits and charities. I think there are a lot of people on LinkedIn who are doing good for their community and for society at large. And you know, this – LinkedIn Live can be a platform where you can grab a few minutes, tell us about how you’re using LinkedIn and the causes that you support.
And so again, I’m calling – we’re going to have a segment at the end of our show called LinkedIn Heroes which is really your opportunity to be profiled and featured on LinkedIn Live. So, if you’d like to participate – if you want to nominate yourself or someone else, give us – send us an email. I’m at marc@mylinkdaddy.com or of course just go to our web site, whosyourdaddyshow.com where you can sign up for our mailing list as well as find all our email addresses to contact us and to provide your suggestions for LinkedIn Heroes whether they’re local hubs, non-profit, volunteers, or just people who are – you know, who’ve done outstanding programs either for or through LinkedIn.
I had a program a year ago called LinkedIn for Kids. And the irony is that it was a program specifically for my LinkedIn connections to raise money for the Texas Scottish Rite Hospital here in Dallas and we were very successful in raising $2,500 for them, I’m happy to say, was – I synchronized it with the CEO auction that we had.
And of course, you know, with LinkedIn there’s never a happy ending as a result of my promotion. It led to my, I think, my account terminated on LinkedIn. But as I mentioned on a previous show, like a phoenix, I have been reborn and thus I’m the anti-prophet.
So, you know, LinkedIn may not recognize all the good that you do for the LinkedIn community and for society at large. But that’s why we’re here. And so we want to have those kinds of interesting stories.
Heidi: You (unintelligible) already, Marc.
Marc: Actually, I know Bill, we – yeah, Jack writes it about (Bovic). I know Bill very well and Bill is here in Dallas with me and has spoken at a number of our live LinkedIn events. And speaking of which, just as a final plug, if you’re in or happen to – can come to Dallas tomorrow, we have our Dallas Blue holiday party and I will be speaking on how NOT to be a successful networker to get your next job or to land that next million dollar deal for your company.
So, it’s going to be a great party. We have some fun, lighthearted presentations and I hope our Dallas members can join us and Heidi, how did those New Orleans Saints do on Sunday?
Heidi: Well, they had the game until the last 51 seconds in which time they sort of really just gone down on the knee and let the clock run out. But the coach decided to pull a trick play and the – basically it was trick or treat and the trick was on us and we lost the game. But within an hour, we got the news that our LSU Fighting Tigers are going to be playing in the BCS championship bowl. So, all was not lost.
Marc: Well, super. So, Heidi’s from New Orleans and Heidi may be you can find and bring to us the dean of LinkedIn – the networking hub for New Orleans and he or she can come on the show and you know, talk about how LinkedIn is working in New Orleans.
You can do the same for your own city. Again, that’s part of our LinkedIn Hero segment that we’re going to be profiling here. So, let us know who you recommend in your community and it looks like our time is up for this show.
So, you’ve been listening to LinkedIn Live: Who’s your daddy? And I’m your daddy, Marc Freedman and I have my lovely co-host here, Heidi Heyns, the voice of milk and honey and …
Heidi: Thank you, Marc.
Marc: So, any final words, Heidi?
Heidi: I just came across an email today that came to my attention. And I just wanted to make a little bit of announcement. They’re looking for a state-wide representative for social entrepreneurship in Louisiana and they’re taking suggestions, nominations and applications. And it’s an amazing statewide position. And I think it’s valuable enough that I mentioned it here so people can spread the word.
But I – thank you so much for putting up (inaudible) Marc and all my technical difficulties. I’m glad that I was able to come on for the last 15 minutes or so. But I was there the whole time, scrambling, trying to figure out what was going on technically. I’m glad I’m going to get through the bramble.
Marc: We’ll, you know, have you on for more of this show, next time. Last week, our guest, Christian Mayaud. Christian is a venture capitalist who’s been very successful and also I believe number nine on LinkedIn with over 19,000 connections. You can hear his – you can hear the podcasted download of our show through our web site at whosyourdaddyshow.com.
Next week, we have Dave Taylor. Dave is in Denver. Dave is a self-professed tech geek, management consultant and he’s a blogger who writes the web site – askdavetaylor. And Dave has long wrote on LinkedIn and has a whole slew of articles on LinkedIn to help you use LinkedIn more effectively.
So, we hope to see you next week.
That will be the last show of this year where we’ll take the holidays off and come back at you in January with new shows and new guests. So, again if you want to be on our show or you could recommend someone do come to our web site, send us an email and I want to thank Jason Alba as well as my co-host, Heidi, and you know, network but don’t network too much because of course you don’t want to get in trouble with LinkedIn and be suspended like I have been.
So, we’ll look forward to talking to you next week. Thank you so much.
Heidi: Thank you everybody.
The above is a transcript provided by futuregen to the WhosYourDaddyshow.com interview with Jason Alba with 12 hours turnaround time, 98.5% accuracy and in a format suitable for blog posting.