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if you are a linkedin user, you have seen it. profile after profile with the websites section listing

“my company”
“my blog”
“my lack of imagination”

why, lord, why? I can understand typical users doing this, but the putative experts?

trust me, I’m a professional

I searched linkedin for the keywords “linkedin” and “expert.” jeez, there are a TON of you guys out there! then I started going through profiles. about four or five down from the top, I found this guy:

this is one of the legion of folks on linkedin claiming they can tell you how to use it better. but look at those web links! I see that and I say, “gee, there is absolutely nothing there I want to see.” but who cares what I think?

what does google think? that get your attention?

joe linkedin expert (above) is throwing away an easy way to boost searchability for his company and his blog.

quick – what is one of the most important elements in google’s evaluation of a website? who else is linking to it, that’s what! if other people think the content on your site is valuable, they will link to it. the more people who link to your site, the better you do. this is known as link-building.

but wait. your company site or blog or whatever has a hundred links to it. your competitor across town has only ten. why are they ranked higher? two words – link quality. your links are mostly from fellow members of the tom, dick and harry link-building club of america. meanwhile, your competition’s links are from highly trafficked, highly credible leaders in your industry. a large number of crap links is trumped by a smaller quantity of high value links.

linkedin has a lot of people linking to it. it gets tons of traffic. translation: it is a credible source. therefore, if you have a link to your site in your linkedin profile, it is a good thing. if you provide anchor text – that is, the words that are hyperlinked – it is a very good thing. the search engines look at anchor text to determine whether they should care about the link. it’s also good if the content on your site doesn’t suck, but that is for another post.

linkedin offers another bonus for links to your content. you get to tell your own story. good, descriptive anchor text dramatically improves your links’ effectiveness. most places, you can ask for good anchor text, but you pretty much take what you can get. on linkedin, you get to write it yourself. see what I mean:

ideally, I’d get my company name in there. however, by saying “my blog,” “my blog,” “my blog,” I’m telling visitors (and search engines) what my links are about.

how does it happen? see the edit link in brackets after each item? clicking it brings you here:

filling in your precious links here will net you the same results as our hapless expert above. however, note the dropdown. if you pop that sucker open and select “other,” look what happens!

choosing “other” puts you in control of your anchor text. enter the text you want in the middle box. keep it short. to the point. you get the idea. and that is what will show up for the link.

what is your expert advice for using linkedin?

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a new angel came down from web 2.0 heaven this week. a new social crm plugin for gmail provides a 360 view of people with whom you correspond. but is the full monty treatment appropriate for all your contacts? and what are people seeing about you? never heard of rapportive? well, they’ve heard of you, and they’re sharing that info with all your gmail contacts.

rapportive, a service that integrates with gmail, got fabulous writeups. the next web was among the first to trumpet the news: “ gmail gets a slick social crm tool. you’re going to like this.” “stop what you are doing and install this plugin,” gushed readwriteweb.com. and so on.

what’s social crm? in this case, it’s the ability to see what social channels one’s correspondents are using, along with information collected from those social channels. rapportive adds a widget to the gmail interface (click on image to see larger):

naked to the world

cool beans, yes? well, kind of. let’s take a closer look. rapportive found a pretty good picture of me on my linkedin profile. it found my birthdate somewhere or other and did the math – I don’t much care if people know how old I am, but the placement is a little prominent. I think the work history comes from linkedin, as well. trouble is, it’s not very current. to look at this, one would think I was still fighting the good fight to make a mortgage company look pretty. um, not since 2008.

the twitter handle? not me. the myspace account? not mine. hmm.

how do they know?

I tweeted my curiousity about where rapportive was getting its info and, more importantly, how I could correct it. I was impressed by how quickly rapportive’s founders got back to me through twitter and by email. the information, they told me, came primarily from a site called rapleaf.com. rapleaf appears to be some kind of scraper site on steroids. it searches up and down the lonely corridors of the interwebs looking for email address. my yahoo address was in my google profile, so apparently it looked for that, too. I secured btodd@yahoo.com early on (a college nickname), and have been plagued since then by mail intended for every idiot in the universe with last name todd, first name starting with b, and an inability to correctly enter their email address. thus the bogus twitter and myspace. but I digress

there is no way to edit information in one’s rapleaf profile. cup half full? it offers a preview of what the private eye will turn up for your divorce trial. but overall, not a good situation. the guys at rapportive tell me they are working to bring editing to profiles. that’s good.

don’t use gmail or rapportive? you’re still in the crosshairs

the profile at right is for a professional contact. I was very surprised to see her age – she looks and acts far younger. I’m not going to visit her bebo profile or myspace page. but I could, and so could anyone who receives correspondence from her. what if the information is erroneous or incomplete, as on my profile? the millions of people who don’t use gmail or keep up with social networking stuff are unknowingly providing access to personal information.

what about those who are part of the social media set? skillful personal branders and the like? how will they deal with a social profile outside their control? is this how chris brogan wants to appear? no smoking guns, to be sure, but the new media labs twitter handle is at odds with his formidable personal brand. or jeff cutler? it’s no secret jeff drinks a bit, but surely he’s more than just a billboard for a brewery?

could be the best rapportive profile is no profile at all – here’s my dad’s and another friend’s (way to fly under the radar!)

especially after the recent furor over google’s buzz service, the absence of any contrary opinion about a service I see as far more intrusive and arbitrary is surprising.

what do you think? are you using rapportive?

note: research for this post was gathered by my amazing girlfriend and sleuth extraordinare alice hanes. if you want to find out about something (or someone), hire her.

some more good news for privacy-loving facebook users. facebook announced new privacy controls for content shared through applications. the interface is the same as the one introduced that allows users to determine who sees status updates and the like:

don’t forget, you can use the friend lists you’ve created to share with a subset of friends. what – you aren’t using friend lists? climb into the wayback machine and read these posts about using friend lists to improve your facebook experience and customizing privacy settings in facebook (note – the privacy post is an updated one from allfacebook.com rather than the one I wrote which has since become pretty obsolete).

you can set a default sharing policy in facebook’s privacy controls:

my facebook friend list includes a number of people who are professional contacts, non-immediate family and the like. with the growth of facebook’s popularity, you probably have several of these on your list, too – an aunt or coworker who would be offended if you didn’t friend them back and so on. by creating a friend list for this category, the problem is solved:

voila. a friend list with benefits. sorry, couldn’t resist.

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the marketing bus these days runs on content. useful, relevant, frequently updated content. great in theory, but the reality of generating that kind of wordpower on a regular basis can be and commonly is a challenge. even michaelangelos and tom edisons need occasional inspiration, right?

dan ronken and his buddies at pullnotpush marketing shared some ideas on getting the creative juices flowing by using delicious bookmarks as a “holding tank” for topics they might want to write about. I thought I’d share a similar system I use that keeps track of potential blog ideas, keeps them in front of me, and provides short-form content creation.

at the core of the system is google reader. I have written about how to set up google reader or a similar rss client in the past – this post builds on that one, so if you are not familiar with newsreaders and rss, I suggest you start there. I subscribe to around 50 different feeds that produce around 200 or so posts each day. all of these are collected in one place, making it relatively simple to skim through the headlines. I star those items that interest me.

stars make the magic happen

when I star an item, the magic starts. I have created an rss feed with my starred items (instructions below). feedburner, which I use to manage subscriptions for this blog, offers the ability to deliver rss feeds via email, so I use that for the starred item feed I’ve created. the result is a daily email containing all the items I starred the previous day.

I might have a particular use in mind for some of the starred items. I email those items to myself to highlight them.

gmail offers a labs feature called multiple inboxes. I use this feature to keep my inbox empty-ish without losing track of items I need:

note the arrows to the daily summaries, the circled items are individual articles that I email to myself while reviewing the summaries.

presto! you’re in twitter

I use twitterfeed to push my starred items out to my twitter stream. the result? a steady flow of links to articles I find interesting hitting my twitter stream. the distribution is automated, but the content is curated – the only things hitting are ones that I care about.

if you are a google reader user, you probably know that the service includes an rss feed to your “shared items.” I could have used that, but especially now with the advent of google buzz, item sharing in google is kind of a different animal. besides, I’m used to starring and I find it easier to star than to share (whoa, pre-school flashback). luckily, a search turned up a how to stream starred items to twitter post that is much easier to follow than the one I was writing!

how do you stay inspired? share in the comments!

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newborn google buzz has experienced significant growing pains in its first few days. surprisingly, most of the criticism of the new service has focused on the service’s auto-follow feature. I’m less concerned who google thinks I should be following and even follows on my behalf. I’m more concerned about the other side of the coin – the absence of good controls over who follows me. happy day: there’s good news to report.

something I noticed when I started using buzz was the relative anonymity of the people following me. sure, I could click on the list. but if someone new got on the btrandolph bus, there was no way to know. combine this with the knowledge that any frequent correspondent (my ex, my parole officer, etc) got access to any information I was sharing through my google profile as soon as they joined the party. not exactly an invitation to share.

to make matters worse, there was no way to proactively prevent people from following. google buzz  magnifies facebook’s privacy issues. in facebook, one is still able to define who sees what to a large extent. when it launched, google buzz was like a facebook where anyone at all could friend any other user without asking permission.

I am happy to report that along with the more publicized changes to the auto-follow feature and linking other google services, google buzz has made it easier to manage followers. unfortunately, other buzz users can still follow without a by-your-leave. the same is true of twitter; the difference is that following someone on twitter gives access to a pretty limited amount of information.

the good news is that when they do, the followed person now gets this notification:

clicking the options link provides the following:

users have the chance to see recent activity from new followers, see who’s following them and who they in turn are following, and if appropriate, block the new follower. here’s a shot of the recent activity screen:

users can access the same information with a click or two – the changes just make it more convenient. finally, if you decide to block someone, you can do it without making a big deal:

if they have a public list of folks they follow, you won’t be on it. your stuff won’t show up in their stuff, and they won’t be able to chime in on your stuff. best of all, your persona non grata doesn’t get an email telling them they’ve been dissed.

it’s not perfect. as far as I can tell, there is no way to prevent specific people from following you before they actually are.

have you discovered any other gbuzz improvements that float your boat? do share!

buzzer image: cc2.0 cryptonaut

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credit nbii.gov

with the surge in popularity in all things social media, many people are registering for services for the first time. alternatively, people are discovering services they signed up for on the spur of the moment a while back are increasingly useful as more users come on board. whether you signed up a while back or last week, here’s something to verify (or change) today to ensure your social media persona (at least the linkedin piece of it) is with you for the long haul.

don’t use a work email as the primary linkedin address.

a client faced a problem when he came to me last year. he had signed up for linkedin a year or so before using his work email account. the account lay dormant for a while and the client moved on to another employer. worse, he forgot his password for the account. linkedin offers the following helpful tip for those who no longer have access to the primary email account: bummer, dude. we did tell you to register more than one address. basically, game over, hit the reset button.

I was reading another blog when I came across another example. the author told of a call he received from a client asking for a recommendation on linkedin. he recalled having done so already and asked why the second request. the sheepish client admitted that his account was set up through his work address, the company had gone out of business, he had no access to his account, boo hoo. the exchange was part of an interesting discussion of ownership of one’s linkedin profile. I have some strong opinions on that topic, but you’ll have to read those in the comments on neal’s post (note my ironic link to neal’s linkedin profile).

linkedin allows users to include email addresses in addition to the one they use to log in to the service. I don’t know how many users bother with this; I suspect it is not many. I urge you to do that, but the most important thing is to use a personal email address as your primary, registered address in the system. at the top right of the linkedin site, you will see a link for settings. licking that will bring you to this screen:

email addresses are easy to find.

go ahead and dump in all the email addresses you think people might have for your contact address. Include your current work address by all means – just don’t make it the primary address. need to switch it? click the address you want as primary and the big blue button on the bottom. easy, huh?

I also put an old work email down that some people might have for me. even though the confirmation email bounced, it’s still in the file, so searchable…I think.

is your social media portable?

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Posted via web from smbar

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In yesterday’s post about linkedin’s new look, I made a reference to a group of linkedin users known as ‘lions’ (linkedin open networkers). here’s some of the wikipedia writeup:

“LinkedIn networking philosophy is based on a simple rule that says that a person should not invite to connect people with whom they have no prior relationship to join their network

However, this limitation is viewed by some members of the LinkedIn community as overly restrictive. So some of them have adopted a policy of accepting invitations even from strangers. They circumvent some LinkedIn requirements (e.g. having to know a person’s email address in order to send a linking invitation to them) by publicly posting their email addresses in their profiles, and stating that they openly accept invitations, thus becoming LinkedIn Open Networkers, or simply LIONs.”

my point in mentioning lion in yesterday’s post was the way in which the new linkedin site design made room for an improved search function. improved searching makes life easier when you have thousands of linkedin contacts you barely know. in thinking about it, I compared users whose primary focus was in amassing connections, with their counterparts on twitter, obsessed with follower counts. what’s the difference?

you say potato

the difference is in the medium. twitter is not inherently credible, but it enables and facilitates the interaction that leads to credibility. a conversation does not confer good faith by its existence. it is the first step toward the shared experience that validates trust. linkedin, on the other hand, presumes relationships between connections. this is the foundation for credible referrals – “I can vouch for him or her.” the linkedin connection does (or should) confer good faith from the moment the invitation is accepted.

I was startled when the issue arose again today in a webinar sponsored by awareness, inc.  david alston of measurement firm radian6 was the speaker and the conversation (there’s that word again!) turned to linkedin and connections. david announced that he was posting a link to his linkedin profile on the side window in the presentation, and invited everyone participating on the call to connect with him. he posted mike lewis’ information as well. a number of participants went ahead and posted links to their profile, too. it reminded me of an est training I attended in the nineties (don’t ask). david’s position was that shared passions (in this case for social media marketing) was the connecting bond that enabled our group’s linkedin-ness.*

an epistolary interlude

bleating happily, I sent my connect requests, although I did wonder aloud in the twitter stream if  linkedin was really the best place to perform this experiment. david accepted my invitation, and noted in a reply to me that around 100 people had connected. mike also accepted my invitation, which is important for reasons you’ll see below. I wrote back to david:

As I commented, I am unsure if LinkedIn is the best outlet to connect with people based on shared passion, but in the absence of shared experience. An important selling point for LI since the early days has been the value of referrals and recommendations.

Since I was on LI after adding you and Mike, I took a look at recent job postings. I saw one that looked interesting, and that I had a second degree connection to the head of marketing. I clicked through to see that my connection…was Mike Lewis! I’ve been following Mike and Awareness on Twitter for a while, but I don’t think I’ve actually met him and we certainly have not had any business dealings.

If someone wrote to me on LI asking for an introduction/referral, I would be reluctant to do so unless I knew that person. If I was a hiring manager and an LI connection made an introduction, I would want to know how well he or she knew the person. If it was not a ‘real’ connection, my response would be very different – and I would have some concerns about the judgment of my connection.

I am no Luddite. As a marketing professional with two decades of old school experience, I love the ways in which social media is changing the discipline and the ways in which people interact on a personal and professional level. My point relates to the medium, not the message.

There is a plethora of ways in which people can build networks and interact around shared passions, including work-related ones. Twitter, Facebook, various forums, even listservs are all hosts to thriving communities. LinkedIn’s competitive advantage is its status as a place for credible, experience-based relationships. Connecting on LI purely on the basis of shared interest or, even worse, just because someone requests it (the LION contingent), lessens the value of each member of that network as a potential contact.

I connected with you and Mike this afternoon because I hope to have experience-based relationships with you at some point. I followed a bunch of people at the webinar on Twitter because we share a passion for social media. Some of those folks may turn out to be valuable LI contacts, as well. Right now, though, they are just digital silhouettes – only further interaction will show their true dimensions, and show mine to them.

That said, thanks again for a solid presentation. I look forward to having the opportunity to be a Radian6 client!

in many, one

maybe I am being a stick in the mud. I remember feeling a similar discomfort last summer when a business-type contact pinged me on twitter to say he couldn’t find my facebook profile. I replied that I restricted my facebook interactions to family and a few friends and didn’t consider it part of my public persona. he replied, “but that’s how I get to know people.” that set off a chain of thought that led to an epiphanetic**, come-to-social-media-jesus style post on the power of affinity. but I don’t think I’m wrong this time. the experience last summer demonstrated the importance of presenting oneself through a variety of media, hopefully with the sum coming out greater than the parts. I believe the move toward more tenuous connections on linkedin is motivated by the opposite – the desire to have a single medium serve the functions of several.

ok, so now to you. do you agree that lowering the bar for linkedin connections is justified by the larger, if weaker, network that results? do you think I need to drink less coffee? do tell.

*    no,  I don’t think it is a word
**  nor this

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although its flashier social media cousins have been getting all the press lately, linkedin has had a little work done, too. the latest was today’s announcement about some tweaks to linkedin’s contacts list , but the fun started last fall with more substantive changes to the overall linkedin interface. so what’s up with the suit and tie member of the social media posse?

linkedin is comfortably established as the most business-friendly of the social networks. an initial conversation always goes easier if the participants have something in common. this is particularly true of business relationships. every salesperson knows a referral is the ticket to an easier pitch, and every job seeker knows that a mutual acquaintance is the quickest way to get in front of the decision-maker. linkedin helps out by tracing users’ personal networks and identifying points of intersection (credit engineroomblog).

launched in 2003, the site has attracted over 40 million members. since its inception, linkedin has been dedicated to business users, and has added features gradually over time. the evolution has included several features to make linkedin more social, from profile pictures and crowdsourced answers (2007) to status updates and groups formed around specific interests (2008) and the ability to cross-post status updates to twitter (2009). the primary user screens looked like this until last fall:

note the side navigation (sorry for blurriness, these are thumbnails from the linkedin site). starting in october, the new design was rolled out gradually, leading to excited calls across the blogosphere, “are you seeing the new design yet?”

and here’s what users see now:

the relocated menu features drop down submenus for a cleaner look. want the answers area? here you go:

ok, but does any of the shiny new design translate to a better experience or increased functionality for users? early feedback was mixed – users liked the new design okay, but as one commenter opined, “they answered a request that hadn’t been made,” and other users complained about having to learn new locations for features. nothing compared to the firestorms that hit facebook, though.

moving the menu allows dropdowns and a cleaner look, but was certainly not a must-have. the real benefit to users was in making room for linkedin’s vastly improved people search function. “faceted” search allows user to drill down and get more granular in the way they find potential contacts. for example, identifying all linkedin users within a specific geographic area – or narrowing down the list of “tom smiths” to the one you met at the networking reception last night. the new contacts design extends the faceted approach to existing connections:

tags are new to the list of delimiters – the categories by which users can sort their contact list. the default tags are the categories that you define when inviting someone to connect (colleague, friend, etc) but users can add additional tags to get more precise than the categories allow (networking contacts, for example). the enhancements to search within contacts will be most valuable for users with very large lists of contacts. for example, linkedin’s guidelines for invitations specify that you know or have some connection to the person. a subset of linked users, however, known as lions (linkedin open networkers), will accept any invitation to connect. faceted search of contacts will be very helpful for users like this whose ties to connections is more tenuous.

how are you using linkedin? just as a job search tool? for other marketing?
have you noticed the design changes? thumbs up?

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