Six Silly Things to (not) do on LinkedIn

There's plenty of ways your Social Media presence can work against you, and your LinkedIn profile is no exception. Remember that LinkedIn is the social network for professionals, and you're probably there either to sell your services and abilities, or those of your company. Here's some things to avoid.

1. Send Default Connection Request Messages

Chances are, whenever you send a connect request on LinkedIn, it's either to someone you've known for a long time, or someone you met a few days ago. In which case, not having the time to replace the default message with one which says "hi", or which has a reminder of where you met, can make it look like you can't be bothered.

2. Send Generic "Hello and Thanks for Connecting" Messages

These can look needy and clingy, and are also particularly silly if you've accepted the request rather than sending it out. Got something specific to say - then say it, but if you haven't, save your efforts for another day when you can have more impact.

3. Use the Wrong Photo

As I've mentioned in previous articles, using the wrong photo, or no photo at all, can count against you. People are more likely to look at your profile if you have a photo, and if it's a decent one, they'll take you seriously, which is what you want of course. So, skip the drunk ones, the wedding ones, the sideways ones and the artistically cropped ones.

4. Confuse your Social Networks

Your exact whereabouts, mental state and the food you're eating are all things for Facebook and Twitter, but they're not things for LinkedIn. A continuous stream of irrelevant toot will have your connections clicking the "hide" link for your updates faster than you can know.

5. Break LinkedIn Terms and Conditions

Remember that although LinkedIn is a free service, by signing up, you agree to abide by their terms and conditions. And if these say that you can't put your phone number in the title field on your profile (and they do), then don't do that.

6. Don't keep your Headline and Current Positions in Step

At some point in the past, you may have put your current job into your headline, or LinkedIn may  have put it there for you as a default, and you accepted it. If you subsequently change jobs, make sure you change your headline as well, people may only look once, and you want them to get the facts as they currently stand without any confusion.

Read more for further ideas for your LinkedIn profile.

photo credit: cellar_door_films via photopin (cc).

Did you Mean to Mention me on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn recently added the new Mentions feature with the usual blaze of publicity, but like a lot of recent changes it's taken a while to propagate to all users, and in this case, to all browsers.

This is a great way to increase social interaction with those within and outside your immediate network. However, there have been some interesting side effects, and it's worth spending a moment looking at how Mentions work in LinkedIn.

You can try it for yourself by starting to type a status update. If at any point  you enter an "@" symbol, Mentions will kick in:

It also triggers if you enter the name of a person or company, but only if you've started it with a capital letter:

You can autocomplete the typing of a name at any time by pressing the Enter key. A Mention will be shown with the text against a grey background.

So what's the catch? Well, I've seen a few LinkedIn status updates inadvertently Mentioning companies because their names are based on words used in everyday language which could start a sentence, and hence be capitalised when typed. I took a screenshot of this great example which I saw soon after Mentions was rolled out:

This was a comment on a piece of good news announced by a company, and my connection simply wanted to say "Congratulations" - but inadvertently interacted with a French company of the same name.

As always, you should check anything you say on LinkedIn, and other social networks, as carefully as you can, whether it's a status update or your profile text.

LinkedIn Rolls Out Roll Over Changes

LinkedIn has changed the appearance of the pop-up windows which appear when you hover your mouse pointer over the profile of another user of the professional networking platform.

This is another change to bring elements into line with LinkedIn's new styling, and like other changes it sees the component taking up more space on your screen, but unfortunately showing less information at the same time.

By chance, this change started appearing just after I'd run a training session for a client, so we can do a quick comparison here. Previously, the pop-up looked like this:

It showed your entire professional headline, which is the first thing that people see about you when they look at the popup. Now, it looks like this:

Although the headline is still there, it is truncated, so you should bear this in mind when wording it, to make sure that the truncation doesn't create anything unfortunate (a topic I've covered before). All is not lost, however, as hovering your mouse over the headline will result in a further bubble (or "tool tip") appearing, which contains the complete text. I've shown this in the example above.

My verdict on the change? Overall this shows less information that the previous version, so I'd say it's a bad move - the extra roll over option helps, but you do have to know it exists.

3 Things to Never Spell Wrong on LinkedIn

Photo credit: Cubosh on Flickr

I've seen several comments over the past few weeks about spelling, grammar and general accuracy in LinkedIn profiles, CVs, and other important professional documents. Some of these comments have contained errors themselves. The irony of it all.

Spell check can help you with this of course, but there's a limit to the number of scrapes it can get you out of. There's no substitute for checking. Having said that, certain parts of your profile will always get more attention than others, so you should give them (even) more attention yourself.

Here are 3 Things to Never get Wrong

Your Job Title

You might think I'm making this up, but a quick trawl through LinkedIn for those working in "apllication" development will show otherwise. Even as I type, the bad spelling has been flagged up, so there's really no excuse here. Another favourite is confusion of "principal" with "principle". Spell check won't help you here, but if this word is in your job title, you're probably quite high up the food chain, and it'll be on your business card, so check it there.

Your Employer

Contain your incredulity, and search LinkedIn for "AXA Insuranec". You're unlikely to get head hunted by a large corporation if you can't spell the name of the one you're currently working for correctly.

Your Mega Client

Last year I saw a LinkedIn status update from someone in my network proudly announcing a major report he had been commissioned to write for his client, "Erst & Young". One has to hope the client was correctly referred to as Ernst & Young in the final version of the report.

Why this Matters

In an increasingly complex world, accuracy is everything. Mistakes such as these will demonstrate that you: either don't know about, or don't use, tools which are there to assist you; don't check your work; don't care about your current job, employer, or client. As employers and potential clients make increased use of LinkedIn, presentation skills (or a lack of them) will be one of the factors used when deciding who should be on the short list.

How to Spot Fake Social Media Profiles

Fake profiles on Twitter are nothing new, and in the world of online dating they're quite common as well. You might think LinkedIn has escaped all this, but it hasn't. Help is at hand, however, because some of the tools used for other social networks work just as well on LinkedIn.

Stock Photos

Recently I was intrigued by a profile thrown up by LinkedIn's "people you may know" feature. Something looked a bit off about the photo, which had me looking at the rest:

I've hidden the company names, as they are all apparently legitimate. We'll come back to the photo, but notice the lack of details supplied for the three roles listed under experience, the 500+ connections, and the fact that she's a 2nd level connection - i.e. people I know apparently know her. Or not, based on my checks.

Back to that photo. It looks a bit like a stock photo, and that's because it is. You can click here to see it listed on a stock photo web site. So, if we come across a photo, suspicious or otherwise, and we want to check it out, how can we do this? Google Image Search is a good option, but there's another useful search tool called TinEye which comes in really handy for this. It's a reverse image search, so you give it an image, and it finds instances of it on the web.

Give it a try now, the URL of the stock photo is
http://www1.imagedirekt.com/idIdpremid/000043000/43354.jpg
- just copy this and paste it into the box on the TinEye home page, and you'll get over 600 results.

Magazine Photos

This second LinkedIn profile is a public one, so you don't need to be logged in to LinkedIn to view it, here's the link: http://ca.linkedin.com/pub/bonny-andrew/15/a34/646/

Let's put TinEye to work straight away. The URL for the image is
https://m1-s.licdn.com/media/p/3/000/066/3bf/23ddce7.jpg
and TinEye will find 7 hits for this, and from looking at them you'll discover that this is, in fact, Indian film actress and model Trisha Krishnan. You can view the original cover of Maxim which featured this photo by clicking here.

Summary

I've mentioned before that it's important to use a photo, and to use the right photo, on your LinkedIn profile, so I should add that the "right photo" should NOT be of someone else, as it makes you look suspicious. Equally if you're approached by someone with a dubious looking photo, tools like TinEye are a quick and easy way to check. Incidentally, there are browser plugins available which you can use to cut out the copy and paste effort, and they are well worth adding to your browser.

LinkedIn's Big Data Endorsement Game - Why You Might Want to Play

LinkedIn has received mixed reviews of its Endorsements functionality since it was introduced last year. Many don't like the influx of emails (though these can be turned off); or the fact that they can be endorsed for skills by those in their network who have no direct knowledge of their ability in that area (though these inappropriate endorsements can be hidden albeit with some effort); or that it's too easy to endorse someone which increases the problem. How many endorsements are legitimate? How can LinkedIn judge which ones are "weak" and which are "strong"?

Note that I have no connection with LinkedIn, and no knowledge of how LinkedIn actually processes our data. These are some speculative ideas about what LinkedIn might do, and why.

Weak and Strong

MarginHound's paper last year about the way in which LinkedIn might use the data acquired from members endorsements [1] got me thinking about the ways in which LinkedIn might start to treat endorsement data like Google treats page rank data in searches.

Consider what might happen when you search LinkedIn for a person with a particular skill set. Your search will return a number of people, and LinkedIn can now order these by the number of endorsements, which means that the ones at the top stand a good chance of being the most relevant, and most highly skilled.

The Problem

The "weak endorsements" problem, which has been widely reported [2][3], seems to be in danger of breaking this process.

However, help may be at hand, from endorsements themselves. First of all, you need to be familiar with LinkedIn endorsements and how they work [4]. You also need to know that you can hide endorsements [5] from your profile if you feel they are inappropriate, perhaps you've only met that person once at a networking event so they can't possibly endorse you for widget repairs.

Endorsement hiding allows LinkedIn to do two things:

1. Detect "endorsement managers" who take time to hide inappropriate endorsements.
2. Detect "compulsive endorsers" who endorse others, only for those endorsements to be hidden.

Using in Search

How can this be used during a LinkedIn search to improve the quality of search results? Well, having ranked search results in order of endorsements received, we could look at the endorsers and see how many of them are "compulsive endorsers" - and if they are, remove their endorsements from the ranking calculation.

In addition, we could also look at the endorsers and see which are "endorsement managers". We could make their endorsements "count double" (or use some other weighting) as we know they understand endorsements because they actively take time to manage the ones they receive.

Suppose Alice and Bob are "compulsive endorsers", whilst Andrew and Beverley are "endorsement managers". Claire and Charles both have "Social Media" in their skills on LinkedIn, and have received two endorsements for it as follows:

Claire from Alice and Bob
Charles from Andrew and Beverley

Since LinkedIn knows about the endorsers and their approach to endorsements, Claire's endorsements may be viewed less favourably by LinkedIn because it knows that Alice and Bob endorse pretty much anyone they can. Charles, however, may have his endorsements weighted more heavily because LinkedIn knows Andrew and Beverley manage their own endorsements, and additionally have very few of the endorsements they give out hidden by the recipients.

So, in this example, Charles will rank higher for endorsements for the "Social Media" skill than Claire.

Let's now suppose that Charles receives an endorsement from Diana. Diana herself has 150 endorsements for "Social Media" and LinkedIn analyses those and determines that 90% of them are "strong" endorsements. This allows LinkedIn to add extra weight to the new endorsement from Diana, because she has so many "strong" endorsements herself, indicating she is likely to be an expert in the field.

Remember, LinkedIn "Knows"

LinkedIn knows a lot about your network. All the time you've been on LinkedIn, it's been accumulating information about you. You have access to a lot of it, of course, but there's more that LinkedIn knows. A good example is how long you've been connected to someone on LinkedIn. You can find this out for yourself if you've kept the invitation and connection emails, but it would take a while to piece it together for your entire network.

LinkedIn on the other hand, just knows. It knows when the connection records were created. So one thing LinkedIn can do for assessing "strong" endorsements is look how long you've been connected to your endorser. Length of time isn't enough on it's own of course, you might get a "weak" endorsement from someone you've known for a long time, and a "strong" one from someone you've done some work for last week. It's just one parameter that can be used.

LinkedIn also knows who in your network is a former or current colleague, and what employers you had in common. This can also be used as a guide in determining whether an endorsement is "weak" or "strong".

Summary

As stated, I have no relationship with LinkedIn, and so don't know whether this is what is already going on, or if it's in the pipeline, however this is what I do know:

• Criticism of Endorsements has been widespread and LinkedIn will have seen it
• There are some very clever people working at LinkedIn
• LinkedIn won't reveal the secrets of Endorsements in the same way Google don't reveal the secrets of search
• Such a "socially determined" level of expertise could be used in areas other than search

 Further Reading

• [1] Linkedin Endorsements: How Might They Affect Linkedin’s Search Algorithm? (MarginHound)
• [2] When your squash partner 'endorses' your coding skills on LinkedIn... (The Register)
• [3] LinkedIn's Endorsements Have Become Meaningless (Mashable)
• [4] Introducing Endorsements: Give Kudos with Just One Click (LinkedIn)
• [5] Hiding and Unhiding a Skill Endorsement (LinkedIn)

LinkedIn Endorsements: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

I've received a few emails recently about LinkedIn Endorsements, a new feature on the professional social networking site. Like many such features, they were added with a specific reason in mind, but there have been some side effects which are, I suspect, unintentional.

So first of all, what are they? Well, you can read the LinkedIn announcement describing them here. Basically the feature builds on the existing "Skills" facility, allowing connections viewing your profile to click on a skill to indicate that they can confirm that you have that skill. This is very similar to LinkedIn Recommendations, but there are some differences, which are crucial.

The Good

The problem with Recommendations is that they're time consuming to write (properly) and also need a level of (necessary) interaction between the two parties before being published against a profile, nobody wants a Recommendation to say negative things, so each one must be approved by the recipient. Endorsements, however, are quick and precise - you can select the skills you've seen your contact demonstrate and endorse each with a single click.

Also, Endorsements are connected to Skills, and everyone should have Skills listed on their LinkedIn profile, because having a formalised skills list makes it easier to be found on LinkedIn searches. I've seen numerous LinkedIn profiles which have not been updated to include Skills, and the Endorsements feature will encourage those people to add Skills, so that they can then be endorsed.

The Bad

As mentioned above, Recommendations take a little while to sort out, but they can be very specific, and allow your connections to go into a bit more detail about the particular business or technical projects you've worked on, and how significant your contribution was. All of that is lost in a single-click Endorsement.

The other major issue with Endorsements is the amount of noise they can generate. You will receive emails from LinkedIn whenever someone endorses your skills, but you can switch these off (go to Settings -> Email Preferences -> Set the frequency of emails -> Endorsements). Also, whenever someone in your network receives or issues an Endorsement, that activity will show up on as an update on your LinkedIn home page - although LinkedIn will roll these up into single updates for multiple connections from time to time.

The Ugly

The speed advantage offered by Endorsements can work against you, however. If one of your connections gets click happy, you may find them endorsing you for skills that they have no knowledge of. Your network will consist of people you have, and have not, worked with before, so it's worth keeping track of those Endorsements - if any are not appropriate, you can hide them (click the "see all endorsers" icon, and use the "Hide endorsement" buttons as required).

And if you are a "click happy endorser", remember that your Endorsements will show up as a LinkedIn activity, so if people in your network see that you're endorsing pretty much everyone for pretty much everything, your Endorsements will carry less weight in the future.

LinkedIn Usage Trends

Over the past month, my LinkedIn network has grown by about 5% so I thought I'd run a quick query over the data I've accumulated to see if there's much in the way of change in habits since last time.

The short answer is no, but looking a bit deeper, a slightly higher percentage of the network creating shares does indicate some increased activity, so it'll be interesting to see if this trend continues over the coming months.

In the meantime you can find out more about the chart above here.

Are you making the most of LinkedIn?

Earlier this year I started extracting network data from LinkedIn via the LinkedIn API. There are some earlier posts about how this can be done, and a couple more looking at the data over the first couple of months for which I was able to compile a proper data set.

Since then I've been compiling more data and now seems a good time to look at how my network has grown, and the extent to which my connections make use of LinkedIn.

My network has grown by around 10% since I first started accumulating data, and one of the consequences of accumulating that data (as there is a limit to what you can retrieve in any one request) is the inevitable lack of historical data for new connections.

However, this effect can be lessened by only reporting activities within the last calendar month, which is the report I'm currently producing. That data can then be accumulated itself, to give a month by month overview:

What's interesting is that over the 4 months shown, my network has grown, but the percentage of it making use of LinkedIn features has fallen - which would imply that the new connections are not, on average, increasing the usage figures.

This suggests that LinkedIn is being used fully only by a small core group of my connections, while the remainder use it for making new connections and building their own networks, or in a lot of cases, not at all - consider the final set of bars, over a third are consistently not using LinkedIn at all in a way that can be measured.

I'll be continuing to accumulate this data over the coming months. In the meantime you can find out more about the chart above here.

Fix for Upload Image bug on LinkedIn Company Pages

I've been playing recently with LinkedIn's Company Pages feature, and discovered a frustrating issue with the upload process for logo images and also products and services showcase images.

For some reason, these images simply don't upload, and after some playing, I got some help from Firefox:

This had me off looking at the HTML for the page, which revealed the problem. Some time ago, LinkedIn implemented HTTPS on all its pages, advising users, quite correctly, to switch over to this as soon as possible. This means that the URL for the "edit company overview" page will look like this:

https://www.linkedin.com/company/myco-ltd/edit

However, within that page, the form to upload images has the following action URL:

http://www.linkedin.com/mupld/upload

It is this mismatch between secure and not-secure that gives rise to the message from Firefox, and it turns out that this interferes with the image upload process.

Therefore the workaround for this is to switch off the option to use HTTPS when possible (Settings -> Account -> Manage Security Settings). The dialogue looks like this:

Untick the box, save, and then navigate back to your company page, making sure you are now using HTTP and not HTTPS, and you should find that the images now upload correctly. When you have completed your work, you should of course return to the security settings and switch HTTPS back on.

Useful Reading on the LinkedIn Password Problem

Photo credit: Mario Sundar on Flickr

There's a lot been published on this over the last day or so, which means that there's not much point repeating it all, but I have seen some useful articles and blog posts which are worth sharing.

First up is to say that LinkedIn are providing updates on this, as they should, the latest one is here. This does mention "hashing" and "salting", and you can find out more about these terms in this short post by Peter Vidani.

You can get some advice on finding out if your password was compromised over at Avinash, this post includes a link to a tool that you can use, but as this involves typing in your password, make sure this isn't a password you're still using anywhere. You've changed your LinkedIn password anyway, haven't you? Haven't you?

Finally, Troy Hunt has some useful advice on managing your passwords generally, as well as dealing with this specific incident.

Use Buffer to Retweet into LinkedIn

In May, the team at Buffer announced some updates to their browser extension components which allow you to schedule Tweets from within twitter.com, and also to schedule retweets.

However, because of the way that the Buffer extensions work, this opens up a solution to the problem of Tweets piped into LinkedIn status updates becoming un-shareable on LinkedIn.

This is a problem I wrote about recently over on Social Mii so I won't cover it again in detail here, except to repeat one of the screenshots which describes the problem (click on all the images in this post to enlarge them):

The issue here is a lack of a LinkedIn "share" link when Tweets are piped directly into LinkedIn from Twitter.

The ability to schedule retweets using Buffer allows you to also share the update with other social media networks, including LinkedIn. Here's an example of the process in action.

We start with the Tweet we wish to retweet. As we have the Buffer extension installed, the twitter.com page now includes the "Buffer" link, along with the Buffer icon:

Click on the Buffer link, and the normal Buffer extension dialogue appears, with the original Tweet shown with the "RT @user:" retweet prefix. In this example, the addition of this prefix pushes the text to over 140 characters, which is too much for Twitter, so it does need to be edited down slightly.

Note that the Buffer accounts list include my Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, which means that this update will go to both social networks. Click "Add to Buffer", and the post will be added.

We now check the Buffer schedule and find both the Twitter and LinkedIn updates are in place:

One other thing to add is that the LinkedIn share allows for additional information to be displayed from any link included in the Tweet, and although Buffer supports this, it isn't included here. However, all is not lost, as we can now edit the LinkedIn item by using the "edit this post" button in Buffer. We only need to make a minor change to the text (such as adding a space) and Buffer will go off and fetch the additional information, and update the post:

So now we can effectively and quickly retweet from Twitter into other social networks, including LinkedIn, and once in LinkedIn, our updates can be easily shared by others in our network:

LinkedIn Usage Patterns Emerge

There are virtually no changes to the usage pattern for connections in my LinkedIn network during April 2012, on a network which grew only very slightly over the month.

I'm expecting this to settle into a regular pattern, showing that the majority still use LinkedIn for growing their networks rather than interacting with them, although I would also expect this to change over longer timescales as more people learn how to make better use of LinkedIn.

Click on the link below the summary chart to see the full page, with charts created in HTML5 using RGraph.

Click to view full size

Friday Round-Up

Photo credit: PhillipC on Flickr

The Friday Round-Up has moved! And improved, with the standard Twitter Javascript interface replaced by a static page - so no more waiting for it to load. But, it's still on Friday and it's a still a Round-Up of web bits, and it's here: http://bit.ly/IVvJWX

Monthly LinkedIn Data Analysis

Previously I have described how to extract data from your network using the LinkedIn API, and how I am now storing that data in order to be able to analyse it more fully.

Now that I have another month's worth of data, I've expanded the summary page to include charts for last month as well as this, and for both I've added a new chart which represents any activity on LinkedIn, be it new connections or a profile update.

During March, the shares situation is almost unchanged from February, but more than half made new connections, while the total activity increased very slightly. My network grew by approximately 10% during the month, so there will be some inaccuracy due to the fact that full data will not be available for newer connections.

Click on the link below the summary chart to see the full page:

Click to view full size

How NOT to Reply to Job Posts on LinkedIn

Photo credit: Nan Palmero

With a little effort, you can lose that dream job with a carefully crafted comment on LinkedIn.

Last week I saw a recruitment post on a LinkedIn group. If I'm honest, I have to say that it might well have been spam, certainly the organisation the poster works for has a less than stellar reputation in some parts, but that's neither here nor there. For this discussion, the poster gets the benefit of the doubt.

The message ended with "I am recruiting now" and "Message me if you are interested". There are five public comments from interested parties:

• What is it that you do?
• What's the business about? I'm really interested.
• Hello, I am interested in hearing about your business. :)
• Interested, too. What's it about?
• Can you please send further information (****@gmail.com)

Now, I know quite a bit about the job, because I opened the poster's LinkedIn profile, had a quick read and clicked through to the web site. At this point put yourself in the position of the recruiter. Having posted your vacancy information, you get two sets of replies:

• Those who read your LinkedIn profile and web site and contacted you directly with a message indicating they had done some research and were interested in what you were doing and what the job might involve.
• Those who posted a follow-up asking what it was all about, with no hint that they were prepared to spend even a small amount of time researching your business.

Which set will you use as a basis for your shortlist?

More LinkedIn Data Analysis

Looking deeper into the data available from the LinkedIn API reveals more about how it is used by the connections in my network.

Previously I described how I had used the LinkedIn API to extract data from my network, and the results of some basic analysis. Since then, I've made enhancements in order to:

• Extract network events of other types, not just Shares
• Store the event data in a MySQL database
• Query the database to analyse usage
• Present summary results using RGraph

This month I am concentrating on what is probably the most commonly used aspect of LinkedIn, namely expanding a network of connections. For January, I had already established that only around 10% of my network were sharing updates or article links, so for February I was interested to see whether it would be the same sort of figure for establishing new connections.

I suspected that it would be higher, and I was correct: nearly half in fact as the charts show. Note that clicking on the chart below will take you to a web page created solely for this purpose:

Why Checking your Profile is Important

Don't let poor spelling, grammar or unexpected text truncation damage your social media presence.

"Dave and I worked together on implementing a new system, Dave on the customer tea...". This turned out to be an unfortunate summary, as Dave actually worked on the "customer team and was hugely instrumental in the success of the project".

I saw this recently on LinkedIn. We use our web sites, blogs and profiles on social media sites to promote ourselves, our businesses and the things we do. Yet the number one problem I see in all these things - poor accuracy of textual information - can be both the most damaging and the easiest to fix.

Spelling seems to be a problem, which is hugely surprising as pretty much all the content entered on the web is via a browser, and spell checking should be pretty much the norm. I'm typing this using Firefox, and anything with dubious spelling is underlined in red, as it would be if I were typing a letter in Word. So there really is no excuse for poor spelling on your LinkedIn profile, or that latest marketing Tweet.

Grammar can be dealt with similarly, but there is of course a much harder issue of using the wrong words in the wrong places - my favourites being "there" and "their" and of course "your" and "you're". You can only get round these by taking the time after you've completed your typing to review what you've entered, and make sure it's correct. If you've any doubts, or the content is really important, perhaps a new product launch page on your web site, get it proofread, either by a professional or by a colleague with a keen eye.

Reviewing your work is important for another reason, it gives you a chance to put yourself in the position of the reader and make sure that the message appears in the way that you intended. This is especially important for those sites which take long pieces of text and truncate them to create a summary, with a hyperlink to "click for more". That truncation can appear in exactly the wrong place, not only reducing the impact of the text, but sometimes reversing it completely, as in the example above.

Here are some other examples I've seen recently:

A profile of a marketing professional where the summary stressed their focus on brand management, consistency and attention to detail, before ending with "you're cup is always full".

There was also the profile written by the "apllication developer".

I also recently saw a competition web site where the names of two brand products - which were the prizes - were spelt incorrectly.

Why is this important? Well, our presence on the web shows our potential clients what we can do for them, and the precision with which we can do it. They will expect us to produce work which represents their brand and business objectives accurately and consistently. If we can't do that for our own brand, then why will they trust us with theirs?

Extract Data from your LinkedIn Network

Some data extraction experiments with LinkedIn reveal the vast majority of my network is not very active.

As part of this investigation, I wrote some code to retrieve and process network updates from the LinkedIn database, which can be retrieved in totality or by type. I concentrated on "shares" as these are a good indicator of someone's activity - the other options I'll investigate later.

I chose to write the results to CSV files - but an obvious improvement is to write them to a database - and then imported into OpenOffice.org to produce the following summary graphic:

Only 9% of my network shared an update in January 2012, something which we might regard as "active", as opposed to adding new connections, which we might regard as "passive". A breakdown of those 9% shows that as ever, there are a small number of "leaders" who are regularly active, and quite a large "tail" who update very infrequently.

Which of these approaches stands more chance of reaching out to your existing and potential customers within your network?

Technical Notes

The LinkedIn API restricts the volume of information returned and the number of calls which can be made for performance reasons. The next step is to read more data, but more frequently, and accumulate it for further analysis.

I used LinkedIn-J, a Java library for accessing the LinkedIn API, to extract data from my LinkedIn network. I won't cover the specifics of using the API, as these are covered much better elsewhere but the basic steps are as follows:

• Register your application with LinkedIn, and get your API keys
• Log in to LinkedIn and obtain authentication tokens for your application to allow it to access your data
• Write some Java code to call the API, read and process the results

Privacy Options

Note you will be unable to retrieve full details for any of your connections who have elected not to share  their data with third party applications.

Get More from LinkedIn Connections with LinkedIn Maps

What is it?

InMaps is a tool provided by the team at LinkedIn Analytics which produces a map of your connections on LinkedIn - see here for more detailed information on what it is and how to use it.

How do you use it?

Just follow the instructions provided - you'll need to login to LinkedIn and give access to the InMaps application to access your LinkedIn data. Once the map has been built, you can zoom and pan to inspect your connections, and also assign labels to the colour coded groups. Click on any connection to highlight your shared connections.

Note that if you have a secure scripting environment, you'll need to allow scripts from both linkedinlabs.com and yahooapis.com

Why is it Useful?

Suppose you are looking for connections which might allow you to reach out to a company as a potential client. You can use LinkedIn to show you people within that company who are second or third level connections, which is very useful. However, if you have the fortunate situation where there are several routes in, it pays to know who is connected to who.

For example, looking at AliceCo, you see that there are two employees there who are second level connections, Bob and Claire. You are connected to Bob through David, and to Claire through Ellie and Frank.

Hence you might try to approach Bob via David, or Claire via Ellie or Frank. However, if you know that Ellie and Frank used to work together, that would be your preferred route in, as it has more "weight".

Mapping out your connections allows you to see these useful interconnections, most of which you'll know about, some of which you won't and these are the ones which can be useful. Looking at my map, three of the interconnections are surprises - I had no idea that the people concerned knew each other.

Caveats

LinkedIn has an option to disallow access to your data from third party applications, however so far as I am aware, InMaps does not count as a third party application and so this setting should not cause any problems.

LinkedIn will always show shared connections, so setting your account to not show connections to anyone other than yourself also should not cause a problem.

The InMaps FAQ points out that the data used to prepare maps is only updated on Sundays, so you'll need to wait to see your new connections appear, I normally look at mine on Mondays to catch up.