linked101.com

If you would like to grade your linkedIn profile the following tool will do that for you.  Go to http://linked101.com/review.html and see how you score relative to the average LinkedIn user.

I was just looking at my connections and noticed a new link that appears below each connections name…”View and Edit Details”.  This is currently in beta, but it appears that you can add details such as phone number, address, email and notes to your contacts.  Sounds great, right?

First let me say that I like that LinkedIn is adding functionality.  The notes option could be interesting and a great way to track information to particular contacts.  Now for the downside.

First, anything you add can be deleted if the person removes you as a connection.  That may not be important since if the person removes you, you probably will not be contacting them in the future.  This is a minor issue.

The real downside is that I already have all of my connections contact information in Cardscan, outlook and my Blackberry. (Because I usually have their business card before I send out an invitation.)  I’m really not going to take the time to renter 250+ connection contact data into another application.

A better solution would be for LinkedIn to allow me to add this information to my profile and choose whether or not my connections can view this information.  This is what Plaxo does and it’s one of the features I like about it.  I still don’t really use Plaxo, but they at least have laid out the groundwork for a better way to handle this.

Another option (that Plaxo has) that I would like to see is the ability for me to classify my connections as a friend, business colleague, client, etc.

This is currently in beta so there is still the potential that this feature will be improved.  For now it is a step in the positive direction.

A week or so ago my wife and I woke up at 1AM to the sound of a seal coming from my son’s room.  For those of you with children, you may have experienced the joy of Croup.  Croup is simply a virus that causes swelling in the throat, making it hard to breathe.  My wife, the more detail oriented spouse, took my son to the emergency room and I stayed home with my two daughters.

Since I didn’t want to go back to sleep until they were home and I knew all was fine, I decided to catch up on adding some blog posts.  Writing at 2 AM in the morning is not something I necessarily recommend. 

Today I finally made it back to re-read the posts and I can’t say that they were the clearest posts I have written.  And grammatically they were somewhat below par.  The moral of the story is what you publish online, in emails, in letters, etc. is a reflection on who you are as a business professional.

I highly recommend that you read what you have written before sending or posting and that you spell check your work.  So in this case do as I say not as I did.  When you update your LinkedIn profile or make changes, copy what you have written and paste it in Word and run the spell check.  Make any corrections and then copy and paste back into LinkedIn.

After all it’s your brand and if you don’t care enough to get it right, why will anyone else care.
(Spell checking this before posting found 4 errors)

LinkedIn has seen significant growth over the last year and the numbers keep climbing.  As of last week there were over 25 million members.  That’s an impressive number even if it does trail Facebook (50 million plus) and MySpace (65 million plus).  Being a business networking site, it’s likely to not reach the saturation of the other two.  That’s ok, since from a business perspective it has the ability to be more productive to your average professional.

Where LinkedIn struggles is in the ability of members to monetize their presence.  Sure there are people who have made money as a direct result of being on LinkedIn.  I have.  But given the fact that there are over 2 million people in my network, there is room for improvement.

If I were to assign a grade to LinkedIn’s ability to help me

• Enhance my network:  10
• Expand my Network:  8
• Identify Prospects:  4
• Identify Potential Partners:  7
• Research:  7
• Build Online Brand:  10
• Secure Introductions:  8

The biggest hurdle is the ability to conduct a blind search to identify prospects.  Part of this is because LinkedIn doesn’t really want the site to be a tool to identify prospects that you you don’t know.  The downside is that even though you have an extended network, there is no effective way to search beyond your first degree connections.

I would like to see LinkedIn come up with a solution that allows me to drill down throughout my entire network providing more opportunity to identify potential partners and clients.

For now LinkedIn may have a lot of members, but until those members find value in interacting, it will lag behind it’s potential.  And members will continue to think more in terms of the number of connections they have and not the monetization of their connections.

LinkedIn has four main featured sections on the site.  Up until recently it was People, Jobs, Answers and Service Providers.  In a recent update LinkedIn Service Providers was replaced by Companies.  The Service Providers content is now within the Companies section.

Service Providers was probably the least utilized of the four main sections and if one had to give way for a new section I guess this was the smart choice.  Still, other than the People section I personally believed the Service Providers sections provided me the most relevant value.

The section consists of a group of job categories that list the top recommended members based on client recommendations.  I would have liked LinkedIn to do a lot more to promote the section.  Recommendations from your client’s are a great way to build your online brand.  It’s a powerful statement to be one of the top people in your job category within your geographic location.

The Companies page is focussed more on researching companies.  The section is still considered in beta testing and should evolve over time.  For now it’s interesting, but if they put in the functionality to search by more variables than just company name it maybe a really useful tool.

This is almost a case of the self-employed verses small to large businesses.  The Service Providers section allows the self employed person to gain notice by placing high in the rankings, while the Companies section allows companies to gain notice from being in search results.  Being a self-employed person, I admit I’m more partial to Service Providers.  But since I target small businesses I may grow to like the Companies section.

For now, just be aware that each may serve a useful function to help you grow your business.