LinkedIn for Personal Branding – Part 1

The WIT Sales & Marketing and Technology SIGs hosted a special member workshop last week on “Supersizing Your LinkedIn Profile: Using LinkedIn for Personal and Corporate Branding.”  Catherine Read  led the highly interactive, sold-out workshop where attendees were encouraged to bring their laptop so everyone could make real-time profile enhancements.

Catherine is a true-believer in LinkedIn, and apparently she’s not the only one. In October, LinkedIn announced that they’d hit the 50M mark. 

Her best ideas are below.  If available, I’ve linked to instructions for each of these tips.

1.     Confirm that you have only one profile and delete any duplicate accounts.  Apparently, this is quite common if you’re invited to connect using an email address that LinkedIn doesn’t recognize (one of my contacts has four accounts).  Next make sure all your email accounts are associated with your LinkedIn profile.

2.     Update your personal profile.  Consider a “vanity URL,” (mine is http://www.linkedin.com/in/katiehanusik)

and add the name of your Website and blogs. 

3.     Use the status updates to remind your contacts what you do for a living.  This is increasingly easy as LinkedIn recently announced a partnership with Twitter.

4.     Invite people to connect but never use the standard invitation.  Explain how you met and why you’re interested in connecting – or consider a more creative approach.  Offset the chance of rejection with some of these tips.

 

5.     Don’t accept an invitation without looking at the profile and sending a follow up email.    Presumably, the person that sent you the invitation is interested in connecting, not just adding your name to their giant rolodex of contacts.

6.     Build your recommendations. If you have hundreds of contacts, shouldn’t you be able to find at least one person that can say something nice about you?  And the best way to get recommendations?  Give them (especially to your boss).

We covered so much that it’s too much for one post.  Part II will be coming shortly and will cover Groups, Events and Applications.

-  Katie Hanusik

* Photo: Catherine Read (center) and from left Marge Niedzwicz (GWU), Krista Curtiss (HP), Debbie Moore and Janet Sifers (IBM).