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.

How to Banish those Reply-All Email Explosions

Photo by Gregg O'Connell on flickr

In a previous blog post Keeping Control of your Inbox I mentioned that using the Reply-All button can actually add to your own inbox jam. It's the easy option to select, and indeed the laziest - why think about who the email needs to go to, when you can reach everyone with one click? Besides, who cares if the others aren't interested?

Of course this backfires when others then use the Reply-All button after you do, and it's not long before you get the "explosion".

So here's a great way to limit the Reply-All Email Explosions, but like all things you do have to do a bit of work yourself. The trick is to use a targeted recipient list and then subsequently forward a separate copy of your message to a secondary list of people who "also need to know". If a member of either list uses Reply-All, they'll only hit other members of their own list, and not the other one.

As an example, suppose your report has to go to Alice, Bob and Claire for review and update, but you also need to copy in Dave, Ella and Frank so that they know that the report has been submitted. You could email all 6, but in the event of a Reply-All button hit by any of them, others will be spammed. Also, it might be better for Dave, Ella and Frank to not see the report until after the update phase, and comments at this time might be unhelpful.

Instead, you email Alice, Bob and Claire, attaching the report. Next, you go to your Sent Items folder, and forward a copy of the email you've just sent, to Dave, Ella and Frank, optionally removing the report if appropriate. Both groups now have the information they need, and any use of the Reply-All button will be limited to the groups themselves.

Of course, there's nothing to stop, for example, Ella emailing Alice, Bob and Claire and copying you in, but that's a process which requires a deliberate thought process rather than an automatic response to click a button.

Try it for yourself and see how well it works for you.

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.

A Powerpoint Gaffe: Changing font mid-word

Photo by Paul Hudson on Flickr

Last year I attended a professional presentation that was reasonably engaging but, if I'm honest, not the most interesting I've been to. There was, however, something truly exceptional in the Power Point slides, which I hadn't seen before.

I'm sure we've all been to presentations where the skills of the presenter have been undermined (or reinforced) by poorly produced visual materials. Having spent some time as a technical person working for a design company, a few things did rub off on me. I know about keeping text styles and number of words used consistent, using the right colours, and keeping in line with corporate branding.

These things may all seem over the top, but there's one important thing to remember on every slide that you produce. You want your audience, as soon as they see the slide, to take in the words in the middle, the message you're trying to get across, the key benefits of buying your product. If they have to hunt around the slide to find that, because the text isn't in the same position or font or colour as on the previous slide, you'll lose their engagement. Don't make them work to find the message.

This presentation had all these things: bright and changing colours, multiple fonts, and text blocks which moved around the screen from slide to slide, and which contained a lot of words. It's not the first time, and it won't be the last, that I see something like this. However, there was a first in this presentation.

It had slides with more than one font on them. I've seen this before. I've seen font changes mid-paragraph. I've seen font changes mid-line. Until this day though, I'd never seen a font change mid-word. Don't believe me? Take a look at this screen grab from the PDF:

Whilst I don't want to get into the use of Comic Sans and when, if ever, you should use it, there is one place where you shouldn't, and that's halfway through a word.

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.

IT Recruitment Industry Resorts to Sexist Crap?

A colleague received the following email yesterday (February 14th):

Hi Sarah-Jane,

Hope your well.

I hope Valentines Day is not to cringe for you and although you may have that special someone special in your life, my PHP Developer is more special to you and your business.

He is available immediately.

If you are looking or are interested in finding out more please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Regards
Andrew

Wow. Given the poor sentence construction and grammar, this might be unintentional, but it's still crap.

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.