LinkedIn just added a feature that allows you to “hide” status updates from people who post every time they add a new condiment to their sandwich.

Twitter users – you probably don’t want to send all of your status updates from Twitter to LinkedIn, or people are likely to hide your status updates forever.

Details:

The 60 second version:

LinkedIn made two significant changes to status updates in the last couple of weeks.  Previously, only one status update would show per person on a status page.  Now, LinkedIn will show multiple status updates for a single person.  If you post a lot of back-to-back statuses, you will dominate the pages of your connections, and will probably annoy them.

The second significant change is that people now have the capability to “hide” your status updates, and if they do, they will never see your status updates, and you will never know it.

Action item – don’t  send all of your status updates from Twitter to LinkedIn, or people are likely to hide your status updates forever.

More details, if you have more than 60 seconds:

LinkedIn has made multiple changes to status updates since the beginning of the year.

• Last year, you would only see the last status update from each person, so you never saw more than one from each person.
• You can now have Twitter automatically send status updates to LinkedIn also by using the #in tag, whose implications I talked about in http://www.the-linkedin-speaker.com/blog/2009/11/11/linkedin-and-twitter-now-cross-post-status-updates/

The new changes this month are:

• LinkedIn will now show multiple status updates for one person
• Users can now click a “hide” button to forever eliminates status updates from one of their connections (that updates them on every new type of coffee or sandwich they try)

Here is the unexpected part for most LinkedIn/Twitter users.

In the world of Twitter, its understood that some people post a lot, sometimes 10-20 times or more a day.  I personally think that is a high number, (unless you have 10-20 really useful pieces of content),  but the culture of Twitter accepts it.  In LinkedIn and Facebook, no one wants to see a screenful of updates from just one of their connections, especially if they are mundane.

If you want to hide all status updates from one of these people, here is how you do it, and its bizarre.

If you “hover” your mouse in the upper right hand corner of a status update, the word “Hide” appears.  Yes, ironically, they hid it, copying the same dumb idea that  Facebook used (which I blogged about at http://www.the-linkedin-speaker.com/blog/2009/06/16/facebook-training-tip-remove-annoying-status-updates-hidden-hide-button/).  If you click Hide, you won’t see any more status updates from those people.  If you want to change the list in the future, scroll down near the bottom where it says

Show hidden updates (1) · Manage hidden updates

in small blue letters, and make the appropriate changes.

For active Twitter users, don’t  send all of your status updates from Twitter to LinkedIn, either from

• ping.fm
• Hootsuite
• Tweetdeck
• by using the Twitter #in feature
• or by any other tool

or you may be forever hidden by your connections.

Good luck out there.

Sometimes, you search for someone in LinkedIn, but it says “out of network” because they aren’t a 1^st, 2^nd, or 3^rd level connection, and LinkedIn won’t give you the person’s name.   You assume you have to pay LinkedIn $25 in order to see their name.  Not true, because you know me.

Details:

Here’s my real life example

I was talking to a potential client (for social media consulting) at Connecticut Plastics, and she mentioned to me that the owner would be calling me.  I didn’t hear his name clearly, and it would be awkward if I didn’t know him by name when he called.

I did an advanced search on LinkedIn for

Connecticut Plastics owner

and it showed that he had a LinkedIn profile, but he was “out of network”, so LinkedIn wouldn’t give his name.

Cough up 25 bucks?  Not yet.

Look in Google using a fancy trick

Realize that Google has most LinkedIn profiles, so the trick is to somehow find them on Google for free.  If you pick some unique string from the info that LinkedIn does show you, and use a special feature of Google called the “site:” feature, (which allows you to just search one site on the Internet), you may find the name and full profile through Google.

I saw the string

Engineer at Alinabal

in his profile and figured that very few other people would have that string in their profile.  Therefore, I put it into Google, along with the word owner, using the following magic search string

Engineer at Alinabal owner site:www.linkedin.com

and found the profile in the Google results.  I clicked on the link, and LinkedIn showed me the LinkedIn profile page, with name and all.

See a 2 minute sample video

If you want to see a 2 minute video that shows exactly how to do it, go to my web site at

http://www.patrickomalley.com/linkedin-find-out-of-network-profiles-free.html

This technique doesn’t work in every case, but it works in a lot of cases.  If it works for you, please send me $25 each time.

Pretty cool, huh?   Pass it on…

Shameless self-promotion

My email subscribers got this months ago – If you want these before I make them public, sign up for my email newsletter at http://www.patrickomalley.com

Speeches and seminars – I’ve been giving this tip in speeches and seminars for years.  Hire me and get WAY ahead of the curve.  And your friends will think you’re cool.

A subtle beta feature was added to LinkedIn that will save sales people time.  If you “Search Companies”, it will now tell you who you know someone “through”.

Details:

If you’re a sales person, you will want to research target companies through LinkedIn.  One way to do this is to use the “Search Companies” option, which is actually a drop down option from the “Search People” function in the upper right hand corner of your home page.

If you look in the results, LinkedIn’s new beta feature will now tell you the names of the people who connect you to employees in that company.  This can save you a tremendous amount of time, because instead of clicking through to each profile, then scrolling down to see who you know someone “through”, LinkedIn puts it all on that page.

See the picture below for an example:

I did the following:

• Went to my LinkedIn home page
• Used the drop down menu to change Search People to Search Companies
• Searched for the company BG Medicine
• Clicked through to the company

Under “Current Employees”, I now see that I have a 2^nd level connection to the Chairman and founder, Noubar Afeyan, through my friend Dave Gowel and through J Mark (a LinkedIn connection who I do not know well), and can see connections to other employees without having to click through to each one.

If I wanted an introduction to the Chairman, Dave Gowel has just become my new best friend

Cool, huh?

Put the name of your city (in text form) somewhere in your LinkedIn profile.  Otherwise, you may not be found in searches.

Details:

LinkedIn training tip – put the name of your city in text somewhere in your profile

That’s right.  As unnecessary as it sounds, make sure you put the name of your city in the Summary field or in some other part of your profile.

Why is the tip important?

If someone goes to LinkedIn and uses the Search People function (in the upper right hand corner) to look for

accountant boston

because they are looking for an accountant, it won’t find most accountants in boston.  Why?  Because LinkedIn remembers your location based on your zip code (sort of).  It does not put it in text format.  Regardless, the search won’t find your profile unless you have the word boston somewhere in your profile.

Therefore, if you want potential customers or potential hiring managers to be able to find you, this tip should give you an edge over your competition if they are looking for someone in your city to help them in their business.

The proof, if you care

To test and prove this, do a search for

patrick o’malley boston

You will probably see 4 profiles in the results, and all have the word Boston in their profile.  Oddly, the other 3 aren’t from Boston (but went to Boston schools).  However, each has the word Boston in text somewhere in their profile

If you repeat the search and remove the word boston, just searching for patrick o’malley, you will see over a hundred matches.

Now click “Greater Boston Area” on the right hand side, it will filter those who actually live in Boston (based on zip code), and there are 11 of them.   However, none of them have the word Boston in their profile, so they wouldn’t be found in the search above when the word boston is added to the search.  LinkedIn only knows that they are from the “Greater Boston area” because it internally remembers their zip code, but won’t match that when you do a search for the actual word boston.

The important thing for you to know is that you should put the name of your city in the Summary field of your profile (or somewhere else) so that you appear in search results for your name and city, or more importantly, for your occupation and city.  Try it for your name and city.

Cool, huh?

If you want to see me talking about this as one of my “hot undocumented tips” in a keynote speech, see the video below.  Its not a funny clip, but it is a 60 second version that I gave one of my audiences:

Notes:

• I used to be the #1 match for Patrick O’Malley, and now I’m not in the first 10 pages.  If you want to see a funny blog entry on it, click http://www.the-linkedin-speaker.com/blog/2009/08/27/linkedin-search-people-function-changed-sort-order/
• One of the matches in the above search is a woman, but she worked for an organization with “Pat” in the name

• http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/091111-011039
• http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/10/BU911AI6K0.DTL&type=tech
• http://blog.linkedin.com/2009/11/09/allen-blue-twitter-and-linkedin-go-together-like-peanut-butter-and-chocolate/

Essentially, LinkedIn allows you to cross-post status updates to Twitter.  This capability has been available for a long time through some free online utilities like ping.fm, so it isn’t really earth shattering.

There are a few problems in the way LinkedIn does status updates that many people don’t realize:

• It will only remember the LAST update by each person
• It will only show 3 updates from your connections, and then if you click to “Show more…”, it will only show the last 10 updates
• There is no way to see other previous updates

LinkedIn could really give you a powerful feature if you could rate other people’s updates.  That way, each day you could just see the highest rated updates from your connections, and just see the most useful comments of the day, week, or month, as voted by your connections, who really are your peers.

They could expand the feature to allow you to also see

• highly rated status updates from 2^nd and 3^rd level connections
• highest rated status updates from anyone on LinkedIn, regardless of whether they are in your network

This isn’t that complicated to implement, and I promise you that someday LinkedIn and Twitter (or someone else) will have this feature.  Then they’ll really have a time saving, powerful feature to brag about.

What other features would you like to see?

God Bless the country that allows me to freely speak my mind about this.  Freedom wasn’t free.  Thank you, Veterans.

What happened?  I used to be #1 in the search results for Patrick O’Malley in LinkedIn, and now I’m not even in the top 90!  Did you check to see what happened to you?

This is basically a pointless rant.

Details:

I’m not very good looking, I can’t sing, and I couldn’t hit the curve ball.  However, I was always the #1 match in LinkedIn in a search for my own name, Patrick O’Malley, so my life was full.

That all changed recently, when I found out (during a Boston Globe interview with Scott Kirsner) that I was no longer #1, and dropped so far that it took 5 minutes and a silicon valley microscope to find my profile.

Here are the current attributes for top 3 search results for Patrick O’Malley:

Patrick O’Malley #1

• 22 connections
• Lives in Boston
• Has no picture, which is a good thing, because if I saw him on the streets of Boston he’d be in trouble
• No recommendations, and he certainly isn’t getting one from me
• Works for a company called BigBad.  Is LinkedIn afraid of the BigBad Patrick O’Malley?

Patrick O’Malley #2

• 20 connections
• Has a picture, but he isn’t even as good looking as me

Patrick OMalley #3

• Can’t spell his own name.  He put it in without the apostrophe.  He would have lost 200 points on the SATs because he didn’t remember how he’s supposed to spell it.  Or in his words, he didnt remember how hes supposed to …
• ZERO connections.  That’s right.  Zero.  He has no friends, no business associates, he knows no one, except maybe the search engineers at LinkedIn who put him in 3^rd place.  However, even they wouldn’t connect with him.

I show up on page 10, which means I am actually the 91^st Patrick O’Malley out of 109 results.  Just to add insult to injury, page 9 actually has people named Pat Hawes and Pat Masterson that rank before me in a search for the name Patrick O’Malley.

For years, I had been the #1 match for my name out of more than 100 Patrick O’Malley’s, so students in my LinkedIn seminars occasionally asked how I got there.  More importantly, they wanted to know how they could rank higher for their own name.  I never knew for sure, but I had always assumed that the LinkedIn Search People function would order its search results based on some combination of

• the age of the account
• the number of connections
• completeness of the profile (picture, recommendations, etc)
• whether you are the first to get the Public Profile URL for your name

The values for my profile showed credibility and longevity, so I thought that was the reason I ranked #1.  I would advise them to increase their connections, add recommendations, add a picture, et cetera.  However, LinkedIn changed the order of the search results completely at some point in the last couple of months, and now there are 90 people that rank before me.  Now I have no idea what criteria they use.

Ironically, my new enemies have the same name as me.

I am now going to use the LinkedIn Search People function to find a lawyer, a senator and a mafia hitman to fight this travesty from every angle.

I am not the only victim.  My friend Mike O’Neil, with 24,000 connections, doesn’t even rank in the top 100 matches for his own name.  Misery loves company, so somehow this makes me feel better, although we both wish misery didn’t love our companies so much.

I can’t resolve why LinkedIn reshuffled the search results, just like I couldn’t resolve how to hit the curve ball.

Now I have to get better looking, or learn how to sing.

Are you the #1 match for your name?

Here are 3 tips for job hunters – change your professional headline, answer questions, and put the words “seeking” and “looking” in your profile.

“I hope it’s gonna make you notice, someone like me” – Kings Of Leon

Details:

If you are looking for a job, these tips should help, and you probably haven’t seen them before:

1) Put the words “seeking” and “looking” in your Professional Headline

Smart and savvy HR people, hiring managers, and recruiters are starting to look for these keywords in LinkedIn profiles, since it allows them to whittle down a list of potential employees.  If someone in Human Resources is looking for a Sales Professional within 50 miles of Boston, there are over 13,700 matches.  If you do the same search and include the word “seeking”, there are 572 matches.

Therefore, instead of “Sales Professional”, consider “Sales Professional seeking Software Sales position in Boston”

2) Make your Professional Headline a marketing phrase

Most people think this should be your current or previous title, like “Accounting Professional”, but it can be so much more.  Use it as a marketing slogan that makes you intriguing to hiring companies and also indicates your employment situation.   Better options might be

• Accountant (formerly at Yahoo) looking for employment nationally
• Accounting Professional seeking opportunity at software startup
• Accounting Professional who loves expense reports, seeking job in Boston
• Former Accounting Consultant to Bernie Madoff seeking position in Alcatraz

Ok, maybe not the last one.

However, make your Professional Headline sexier, attention-grabbing, and clearer, and you’re more likely to get your message out to someone who needs you.   You have to determine what suits your personality, but some people would put words and phrases like “Passionate”, “Creative”, or even “Rock Star” and  “Ninja” in their headlines.  These probably aren’t good for Accounting Professionals, but for other positions, a creative or unique phrase may set you apart.

Look through your LinkedIn connections and get some ideas.

3) Answer questions in the Q & A section

People ask questions in LinkedIn because they need problems solved.  If you are a Graphic Designer, and you give great answers to questions in the Marketing section of LinkedIn’s Q & A, you are more likely to get attention when those readers need to hire someone.  The questions and answers are public and searchable, so others may see your answers and may consider you an expert for hire.

Also, the person who asks the question can also vote your answer as a “Good answer” or the “Best answer”.  Each time you answer a question, your number of “Best answers” is shown, so people can see that you are a proven expert.  LinkedIn’s Q&A is a great way to publically showcase your knowledge, creativity, and expertise.

Note that your Professional Headline shows up on the left hand side of your answer, right below your name.  If your headline “seeking employment”, as discussed in #2 above, anyone who reads and likes your answer also knows that you are looking for work.  If they have a need, you are more likely to get contacted.  At the very least, they may send you a LinkedIn connection request just to help keep you in mind.

I have gotten multiple contracts as a result of answers that I have given in the Q & A section about LinkedIn, Social Media, and Google SEO and PPC.

I’ll do more tips in an upcoming blog post.  Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/617patrick

Hope this helps.

“You know that I could use somebody, someone like you” – Kings Of Leon

If you are having a local business event, and you want to send an email to your LinkedIn connections in Boston, how do you do it?  It ain’t easy…

Details:

Chris Brogan, social media rock star (and cool Boston guy), posted a question on his blog asking how he could send an email to his LinkedIn connections in Boston, since he is hosting a local event.  Here’s my answer to Chris, which was too long to fit in a blog comment reply:

Its ugly, but there is a way to do some of what you want if

• you don’t mind having to send the mail through LinkedIn itself, which has a primitive email interface
• you are sending it to less than 50 people at a time
• your people fit into one of LinkedIn ’s location categories. Yours do, but they are alphabetically sorted under “Greater Boston Area” and not “Boston, MA”

That said, here’s what you do:

• go to your home page
• under Inbox in the navigation on the left, click Compose Message
• to the right of the “To:” box, click the blue “in”
• in the upper left, click “By location”
  • as I said above, not all cities are sorted in alphabetical order
  • i.e. Boston isn’t under B, it’s under G for Greater Boston
  • (gee, that user interface isn’t greater)
• make sure you click “Send me a copy” in the lower left hand corner so that it also goes to your real email file. That way, you can search on it later on if necessary

Even then, you can only send 50 emails at a time, so if you have more than that, you have to

• send multiple emails
• do a few letters of the alphabet at a time
• keep track of which ones you’ve sent the email to already

All of this, of course, is what a computer was made for, so they certainly made it more difficult than it should be.  It makes you wonder if you should just get a typewriter and do it Amish-style.

Obviously, LinkedIn should just allow you to export more of the fields that they have in the database to your CSV file.  They have the information, and even pass empty fields (with headers) into the CSV file, which is just a cruel tease.

Its ironic that as a leader in social media, LinkedIn doesn’t seem to pay much attention to the users that give them ideas in the “Using LinkedIn” Q&A forum.

Hope this helps.

You can hide your LinkedIn connections, even from your other connections, with a simple switch.  Here is how you do it, but it does have a set of implications.

Details:

One of the cool things about LinkedIn is that you can migrate your business cards into an “online rolodex”.  However, that rolodex is now visible to all of your other “connections”, and that visibility may be abused by some of them.  For instance, let’s say you have a business acquaintance named Harry Krishnah, and he is a particularly intrusive personality, always testing the limits of what’s cool.  He sends you a LinkedIn connection request, and it’s easier to say yes than to discuss it the next time you see him in public.

He can now look through your connections, and even though he can’t get their email addresses, he may call them and mention your name, even though you haven’t approved of this approach.  The LinkedIn Q&A forums are full of stories like this, and someday it might happen to you.

If your rolodex is a critical asset, and you don’t want your more obnoxious connections looking through your rolodex, you can stop them.  Here’s how you protect your connections from being browsed by your other connections (especially connections who happen to be competitors).

• Go to your LinkedIn home page
• In the upper right area, click Accounts & Settings
• On the right, about 1 screen down, under Privacy Settings, click Connections Browse
• Click No

Its pretty simple, but there are a bunch of implications.

1. This is a single switch that affects all of your connections. I’m sure you would love to see some way to prevent abusive connections like Harry from browsing your other connections, but you’d like to allow everyone else to see them.  There is currently no way to do this, although it is a feature LinkedIn obviously needs.
2. Harry can still see that you know that connection if he does a search by the person’s name or title. If Harry does a search for someone, and they happen to be your LinkedIn connection, Harry can still see that you are connected to this person.  The option above just prevents him from browsing through your whole list of connections.
3. Some LinkedIn users will get mad at you. In the LinkedIn Q&A forums, people get very angry about people that prevent others from looking through their connections, because they think this somehow limits free networking.  I’ve never really believed in this argument, so I fully understand anyone who wants to protect their online rolodex.  Those people may threaten to remove you as a connection.  You can point them to a blog entry that I wrote about How to remove a LinkedIn connection, or how women dump me.
4. Don’t connect with your competition. This part may be obvious, but there may be people who are partners more than competitors, and they may try to leverage your connections to promote their business.  This is an awkward position to be in, and you have to decide what’s best for your business, but if you do connect with the competition, you probably should restrict the browsing as described above.
5. Don’t put your most prized connections into LinkedIn. Some people take this approach to make sure that none of the above mentioned problems occur.

Conclusion

Ultimately, choose what’s best for your business, and realize that it’s easy to change.  Someday, LinkedIn will hopefully improve the power and scope of this protection.

Good luck!

You can export information about all of your LinkedIn 1st level connections to a file.  LinkedIn doesn’t give you very much of the information that it has, but it will give you all of their email addresses.  Therefore, there is a way to send your connections a mass email.  However, please don’t be a spammer.

Details:

Here is how you export the information from all of your LinkedIn connections to a file:

• Go to your LinkedIn home page
• In the left navigation area, click the box to the right of the word Contacts to expand that area
• Now click Connections just below Contacts
• At the bottom on the left, click Export Connections
• Export to Microsoft Outlook (.CSV)
• Put in the text for the security image if requested (it only asks the first time during a session)
• Click Export

LinkedIn will create a CSV file, and the email address will be in the 6^th column.  However, for some annoying reason, LinkedIn does not put many of the other important fields into the file.  As of May 12, 2009, it only writes out the following values

• First name
• Last name
• Email Address
• Company
• Job title

even though it has a lot of the other information and could easily export it for you.

If you wanted to send a bulk email (mass email) to your connections, you could now

• extract all of the email addresses from the CSV file
• send them an email through the email program of your choice

Please be cool, and don’t spam them.

It’s a good idea to periodically do this as a backup just in case LinkedIn goes out of business, or decides to remove this functionality.  There are a LOT of limitations to this feature, and I will address them in a future blog post.

Good luck!