Archive for April, 2009

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Dianne Gubin is President, Tech Exec Partners Inc.

What was your introduction to LinkedIn?

I’ve been using LinkedIn, an online business networking tool, for about two years.  LinkedIn allows me to stay connected to other professionals in a highly interactive way.  I receive regular updates when anyone changes their profile.  This means that people in my network are constantly at the forefront of my mind.  And, should I update my information, my 500 plus contacts receive notice of this on a network email update blast.

What is your goal for using LinkedIn?

As the president of an executive search agency, I use LinkedIn all day long for business development and recruiting.  It’s easy to expand my network and access both corporate decision makers and candidates.  LinkedIn makes my work faster and easier.

What are some of the activities you used to build your network/success?

The best way to use LinkedIn is to join as many groups as are of interest to you.  You will immediately expand your network of contacts both locally, nationally and internationally.  LinkedIn is a great way to join conversations, find answers to questions posted on the group boards, and it’s not unusual for many of the groups to take their meetings off-line and meet in person.

Considering your success, how can you leverage the power of LinkedIn in future endeavors?

LinkedIn is a great way to find people or find a job.  If you’re working on a project and need a resource, LinkedIn is an excellent tool.  Most important, it’s a great way to stay in touch with people you wouldn’t normally see on a regular basis, or bump into at an event.

What are your top 3 tips to help someone else build their success on LinkedIn?

1. If you’re looking for a job, LinkedIn is being used by more and more recruiters.  Fill in as much of your resume as appropriate using as many key words as possible.  Recruiters will find you.

2. To maximize LinkedIn, join as many groups as you can and watch the updates.  Joining groups allows you to connect to larger pools of people.

3. Use it.  Invite people to join and when you’re invited, just say yes.  You’ll quickly expand your connections which will allow you greater access to people one or two removed from you in your network.

Dianne Gubin is an executive who knows the dynamics of creating success. Her commitment is to help others make well-informed, educated choices that power their career and business development from ordinary to extraordinary.

As president of Tech Exec Partners, Inc., a corporate staffing and consulting firm, Dianne Gubin has accelerated thousands of career successes by opening doorways to life-changing opportunities within Fortune 500 corporations including Amgen, Countrywide, Disney, AIG Sun America, Qualcomm, and 20th Century Fox, as well as fast-growth companies.

Dianne engages industry leaders in conversations on hot-button business issues and gives you power tools for success on Dianne Gubin Talks Business her Internet radio show. Definitely not business as usual.

Dianne is an excellent public speaker and a member of the National Speakers Association. View her demo reel here

A graduate of the University of Connecticut, Dianne lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their three children.

Visit Dianne on LinkedIn here

LinkedIn is a fantastic service where you can connect with your old friends, colleagues, former officemates, and meet new professionals as well with the various tools available free and paid users.  Because of its professional vision and rapidly expanding network, LinkedIn has become a major source for advertising too and people are finding success in getting quality leads from the network because most people registered usually want to either offer jobs or look for opportunities or simply assist others.

There are millions currently registered with LinkedIn and the number continues to grow. Therefore, it is important to start now and try to get these people to your website. Even getting a small fraction of the millions registered is considered a lot of fresh leads to your website. Here are some very easy ways to get you started.

Complete Your Profile

Some people are very skeptical in viewing your website if they don’t get a full picture about you as a professional and promoter. Many people that advertise around the internet are scammers in disguise so people want to make sure that you are for real. Completing your profile to the fullest takes some time to do, but once you are all done, it is worth it and should give plenty of information for visitors to digest. The best thing that can happen is people wanting to connect to you already in addition to visiting your site. Double-check your website address as well to see if it is correct.

Expand Your Network

Nobody will go near you unless they really know you if your network is small. Try to add everybody that you know personally as a start and grow from there by adding 2nd degree and 3rd degree contacts slowly. You can further expand your network by joining groups and participating in discussions that you can relate to.

Stay Updated

The ones that are most active are the ones that people will be comfortable in working with. A blog helps greatly and fortunately, LinkedIn has the necessary applications to link your blog to LinkedIn. This way you can start blogging and post all kinds of updates that are synchronized to your LinkedIn profile. All visitors will see this information and be further convinced that your website link is active and worth a closer look.

Be Supportive

LinkedIn has a messaging system and people use that to ask basic questions about yourself or the website that you are promoting. Make sure that you reply right away and be direct in answering. Any delays can lose you some quality leads so keep checking your e-mail and LinkedIn account for updates. Try to make your replies as intelligent as possible too since LinkedIn is a professional networking site so people will expect nothing less than professional responses.

Get into the Direct Ads

There is a Direct Ads feature in LinkedIn that allows you to post direct advertisements to a certain target or group. Use it to your advantage to reach people that are outside your network.

Like other methods in getting leads, this can take time to develop, but if you actively work on your profile, you should be getting more leads from LinkedIn. LinkedIn continues to be a great place for getting fresh leads.

People join social networking sites for their own personal reasons. Some join them because they want to make new friends while a majority wish to stay connected with their current friends and look for all their long lost friends. Others may simply want to look for long lost friends and try as much as possible to make themselves found. The reason behind joining can affect on how important it is for them to fill up their profile.

LinkedIn is one of those more direct social networking sites that encourage people to fill up their profiles so they can be well connected with others professionally. But before you start looking for the connections you want to hook up with, you should make yourself known and searchable. When you add somebody, you won’t be connected until that person approves you and the person approving you will probably look at your profile first.

It is essential in building your LinkedIn profile so you won’t have much to worry about when you are job searching or finding new connections that you may partner up with in the future. You can start with these basic tips regarding LinkedIn profiles.

Make your Profile Completeness 100%

You can find this in the “Edit My Profile” section. This is fairly easy to do since LinkedIn guides you through the process and tells you which fields need filling. Adding a picture is among the elements that are needed to make the profile complete. When adding a picture, make sure you use a decent or professional photo where your face is emphasized so people can notice you just by looking at the thumbnail.

View and Check Your Profile

Put yourself in another person’s position and be on the lookout for any mistakes or missing information. Spelling errors are indecent and can reflect your personality, which some people can be really cautious of.

Make Sure Your Profile is Updated

When filling other fields, try not to make it exactly like your resume because resumes tend to highlight past information. Be sure to include information like what you are planning to do and what you are looking for to expand your career and major milestones that you accomplished.

Improve Your Profile

One of the ways in improving your profile is inserting keywords that best describe you. This can even include common misspellings of your last name so that people can find you even if they don’t know the exact spelling. Add common answers to questions about yourself too so you can make your profile really stand out in front of others. Remember you want people to find you and connect with you professionally.

Make Use of the Applications

You can also further improve your profile by starting a blog and linking it to LinkedIn using the applications. Other applications are there to allow you to update your LinkedIn profile while working on these other services.

The best thing about filling up your profile is that you only need to do it once and then keep it updated with occasional editing which shouldn’t be very hard. The results are very rewarding and could give you more connections with others.

LinkedIn is a social networking site that was specifically made to bring professionals together and help develop careers among individuals worldwide. This isn’t their rule, but it is their vision so this doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to strictly use their service for whatever is described in their services. Since it still falls into the social networking category, you can still use its services in any legal way that benefits you. This includes finding friends and relatives that you lost communication with.

Sure, there are many places to find people these days including various people directories and other social networking sites that people are swarming all over. But these social networking sites and other services do not emphasize in completing their profile fields and filling in truthful data. This makes the people that you are looking for a bit harder to find although they may be there anyway.

But LinkedIn is rapidly growing and more professionals and other individuals with jobs are aware of the popular social networking site for professionals and are filling up their profiles with real information because they want to be found. This is a great opportunity for you to find these people by using the different search tools available. One search method may not work, but don’t forget to try the other methods too before you give up.

Full Name Search

This is most probably the first thing that should come to your mind so it is worth trying this first. Depending on the name, you might see plenty of results so filtering the list at least by adding a location should lead you fewer results that you can compare. Try to avoid filling too many fields as that can be used for other methods.

Company Search

A large number of employees are joining LinkedIn and taking their companies with them so you should use the search feature and fill in the company information only and see what turns up. A small or medium company should definitely give you results to work with. Don’t forget to try other variations as well in case you come out with nothing.

School Search

If you and your friend studied in the same school or was a faculty member in that particular school, consider this option. People who really want to be found will post complete information about their alma mater and other educational information.

If you don’t see any results, you can always try another day because new people join every day. Once you found the profile, you can add the person as a connection right away. Some people have some of their contact information post for the public so that they can be found easier. Common fields include e-mail and phone number. It is generally better to use the phone number as a means of contact in case the person does not go online very often. Once you are finally in touch you can get all the information and other social networking sites that he or she is registered in so have a professional and personal lines of communication.

Social networking is all about connecting with people that you know and expanding your connections from there based on the connections of your connected contacts. As you continue using the many social networking services available, your network should expand making it a great way to keep in touch with people from now on.

Of course, you won’t end up connecting with every possible person including the ones that you don’t know because that would defeat the point. But this doesn’t mean that the people that you are not connected with shouldn’t have any channel of interaction. This is where the idea of groups came in and many social networking sites including LinkedIn implemented it as a standard feature.

Groups are there to gather people based on the name, theme, or description of the group. For instance, it can bring people with similar interests together or people coming from the same country or area. This gives new opportunities for people to establish new connections and learn new things.

While it is highly encouraged to add people that you know and trust in LinkedIn, joining LinkedIn groups can benefit you in a lot of ways. Here are some ways on how LinkedIn groups can be beneficial to you.

Engage in Rich and Professional Discussions with Others

“Others” can refer to people who have the same interests with you or have the similar careers with you. You can share experiences in that group for others to learn and you can read what the other members have to say. If you are working abroad in a place that you are not so familiar with, you can always find a group where there are professionals nearby that you can connect with in the future.

Find Good Opportunities for Partnerships

Forging partnerships with the right people or companies can yield fantastic benefits for both sides. They can also bring considerable damage to both sides if the wrong partners are chosen. Joining a group that has professionals that are in the same field can reduce the likelihood of partnering with the wrong people especially if you and the other group members have their profiles filled up. The more groups you join, the more options you can weigh in so you can find the perfect business partner.

Great Place to Post or Look for Job Openings

There are plenty places that allow you to post job openings or give you leads on where you can find good ones. But among the ones you are exactly looking for are many jobs that might not appeal to you. Groups help sort these out by restricting job postings according to the group standards so all of the members can find something useful. If you post a job opening in an active group, you are sure to get more interested people since they are most probably waiting for updates in that group. Any other people that share job openings will likely attract you as well.

There are many groups in LinkedIn right now and you can even make your own so you can gather your connections to come up with something interesting. Joining LinkedIn groups greatly brings you deeper into the network.

Every day, LinkedIn’s number of registered users grows because they are all interested in the free services they offer and concept of professional social networking. Although there are people actively using LinkedIn’s service every day, people still enjoy logging in other websites that offer different services that LinkedIn does not cover.

The interesting thing is that these people do not use these services because LinkedIn doesn’t offer them. Instead, they use them because they complement well with LinkedIn in terms of productivity and getting their goals accomplished. Here are some other online services that you may find to be useful to work with alongside using your LinkedIn account.

Other Social Networking Sites

Nobody ever said that you should stick to a single social networking site whether it is LinkedIn or another network. Although many of the social networking sites are out to compete, signing up to others can be good in bringing people together. Some social networking sites like Facebook have applications and widgets that connect with the LinkedIn service like this one particular application that allows sharing of LinkedIn contacts. This is a great way to find other professionals who haven’t discovered LinkedIn.

Blogging Service

LinkedIn recently launched several applications including ones that will benefit bloggers. Those that manage blogs particularly the ones signed up with WordPress or SixApart can easily utilize the applications and incorporate them to their LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn continues to find new ways to connect these blogging services so LinkedIn doesn’t need a blogging service of its own. Getting a blog is a great way to freshen up your LinkedIn profile.

Online Storage Service

E-mailing services are quite limited when it comes to file sharing because the space is solely dedicated for e-mails and the attachment sizes and file type coverage have their boundaries. This is where online storage services take the primary role and LinkedIn is leaning towards that direction since professionals always need to share documents, applications, presentations, and other needed files. One of LinkedIn’s applications supports Box.net, a popular and affording online storage service.

Personalized Start Page

Web applications are so popular that they are taking over their browser homepages because of the amount of information it can display and flexible customization options given. Netvibes is one of the leading services that offers a free personalized start page and it has widgets that can fetch information from LinkedIn so that you have some quick updates without even visiting the LinkedIn website.

Online Travel Planners

There are a lot of professionals that are frequently on the go and most of them plan their trips using online travel planners to become better organized. LinkedIn saw the connection and developed an application that fetches updates from one of the popular online travel planners – TripIt. This is a great add-on to see where the people you are connected to are going and if they are heading your direction so you can set an appointment.

There are plenty of other services that will expand LinkedIn’s functionality and give users more ways to connect with people and interact with them. What is most important is that professionals are making good use of LinkedIn and any other service that makes LinkedIn even better.